Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [205]
It was while Tracy was staying with him that Mankiewicz got a glimpse of the preparation that went into a Tracy performance. “I would come home at night and pass his bedroom door and he’d be working. He’d be working extremely hard…[H]e’d come to the set the next day and say to the continuity girl, ‘What are we shooting today, kid?’ and she’d [think], ‘Oh my God, he doesn’t know his lines.’ But in fact he’d worked all night long. He was fully prepared.” It was, perhaps, the legacy of the boy magician, the instinct that compelled him to hide all the work, to keep the secrets to himself, leaving the impression that it all came out of thin air, effortless and magical, a thing of mystery and wonder.
Part of Tracy’s calculation for Test Pilot was the game of one-upmanship he and Gable liked to play. “I came home and Spence was in the guest room,” said Mankiewicz.
I heard the sound of cracking nuts. Now I opened his door and he was sitting there and he was cracking walnuts. I said, “What’s that all about?” He says, “I’m just thinking up a little something here.”…And I went to bed. Well, when the film came out, apparently what happened was that he’d suggested to Victor Fleming, “Look, Vic, while this is going on … give me something to do with my hands at least. I mean, I got a bowl of nuts or something that I can crack while this scene is being played.” Well, Fleming thought that was a marvelous idea. The prop man came up with a bowl of walnuts, and to everybody’s surprise Spence cracked these walnuts in between lines from Gable to Loy and Loy to Gable … The soundtrack was completely laced with cracking walnuts, and you had to cut to Spence repeatedly in order to justify this sound.6 Now that’s not an instinctive bit; that’s a man who takes his work very seriously.
Joe was also fond of Louise, enjoyed being with her. “Louise was a very attractive woman. Lovely dark hair, clear complexion, soft eyes. We went dancing, and I could always make her laugh. Very literate. Intelligent. Spence never said anything the least derogatory about her, never any of those asides that let you know he was trapped.”
A dozen times Joe was on the verge of asking his friend “what the hell went wrong” between the two of them. “But fortunately, and unfortunately, I’d done enough work in psychiatry to know, to figure it out for myself what it was.” Tracy spent Christmas morning with the kids, the afternoon with Louise at Santa Anita, then returned home to the beach in the evening. Johnny’s deafness, Louise’s forbearance were things he could no longer face on a daily basis. He beat an emotional retreat, born of a need to function, a need to survive.
“He didn’t leave Louise,” Mankiewicz said. “He left the scene of his guilt.”
Just after the first of the new year, Louise returned to Honolulu, intent on spending the entire month of January away from home. Spence was working most days, plagued by headaches and the insomnia that had always afflicted him, fueled as it was by the countless cups of tea and coffee he consumed as part of his daily ritual. Crawling out of the black hole of depression was impossible in the middle of the night, when his thoughts ran wild and he endured the torment of his sins. Desperate for sleep, he arrived on the set more worn out than ever, cranky and nervous and sometimes at wit’s end. Someone suggested a massage, and he found a rubdown eased the pain in his head and helped him to relax. He took to noting the sleep he got each night in his book: 3:30 a.m. to 6:50 a.m. without a massage, 12:30 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. with one.
He met Joseph P. Kennedy one night at dinner with Mannix and M-G-M’s Billy Grady and took note of the fact that the current chair of the U.S. Maritime Commission was soon to become America’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Mannequin opened in New