Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [206]
On February 2, to celebrate Gable’s thirty-seventh birthday, a corner of Stage 12 was done up coronation style, and Tracy had Gable’s stand-in wheel in a huge cake topped with a candy crown. “I wear this Irish costume, King Gable, to remind you of Parnell,” the man announced. “Always remember it, Kingey, because the theater owners will never forget it.” Eddie Mannix came down to the set and placed the crown on Gable’s head as Tracy egged him on. Then Judy Garland sang a specially written song on the subject of the King’s worst film ever. Gable sought his revenge a few days later when he had the hot fudge sundae that always appeared at the finish of Tracy’s lunch made with a perfectly formed scoop of mashed potatoes. Tracy dug into the thing and devoured it down to the last spoonful without ever changing expression.
Tracy always credited his first Academy Award nomination to an extraordinary run of pictures, going as he did from stark drama to screwball comedy in the space of five months. He talked about the “sudden break” of both Fury and San Francisco and how two in a row had been “something to shout about” when Libeled Lady came along and took him in an entirely different direction. “This business of achieving dramatic effect on the stage or screen is principally a matter of contrast,” he said at the time. “A thing is dramatic only when it is presented in contrast with something else …”
The awards were going through a metamorphosis, and where there were scarcely seven hundred academy members selecting the winners for 1936, an agreement with the Screen Actors Guild placed the nomination process in the hands of the guild’s senior members for the year 1937. The winners, in fact, would be selected by both the senior and junior memberships of SAG, as well as the member bodies of the Directors and Writers guilds, a total of some fifteen thousand workers. The nominations were announced on the night of February 6, 1938, and although Tracy thought he had a weaker overall résumé for the year—They Gave Him a Gun, Big City, and Mannequin flanking Captains Courageous—he was again included among the nominees, as were Charles Boyer (for Conquest), Fredric March (A Star Is Born), Robert Montgomery (Night Must Fall), and Paul Muni (The Life of Emile Zola).
With the awards now sanctioned by the guilds, Tracy seemed only slightly more at ease with the accolade, even as he conspired to avoid the March 3 banquet at the Biltmore Bowl. With Test Pilot due to wrap in a week, he was granted a three-week suspension to have his hernia operation, thus ensuring he would be in the hospital the night of the dinner. “He couldn’t handle open approbation,” Joe Mankiewicz said, “and he couldn’t handle being rejected. He was embarrassed when people told him he was a good actor, but he was terrified by the idea of people not telling each other he was a good actor.”
When Tracy entered Good Samaritan on Monday, February 21, there wasn’t any widespread speculation he would win the Oscar, Muni again being the odds-on favorite with Montgomery a close second. However, due to heavy rains and flooding, the ceremony was postponed a week, somewhat endangering his plans to be completely unavailable. Then an infection set in, lengthening his stay in the hospital an equal number of days, and he was still safely laid up when Louise came to visit on the afternoon of March 10.
“I kept feeling that I had to get home, that I should be there in case,” she remembered. “He said, ‘No, don’t go.’ Until finally his mother called and said, ‘You’ll have to come home right away. They say he’s going to get it.’ And I was still at the hospital!” Caught off guard, Louise had to wear what she had on hand, a full black dress, very sheer, embroidered with pink flowers. “I’ll never forget trying to dress. Poor Mother Tracy was frantic: ‘You’ll be late!’ ” (Her lateness was chronic; Spence