Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [207]
In most ways, it was a typical academy event. It started far past the hour set, and, as hosted by radio comedian Bob Burns, ran so late that someone suggested it should first have been previewed in Glendale. The crowd of 1,400—well over the room’s stated capacity—was packed in to the point of immobility. The new spirit of cooperation with the Guilds was evident in the prominence on the program of Robert Montgomery, the president of SAG, King Vidor, president of the Directors Guild, and Charles Brackett, vice president of the Writers Guild. James Francis Crow of the Hollywood Citizen News hailed it as “an Academy renaissance,” considering the precarious condition the organization had been in just twelve months earlier. “[S]ome,” Crow reported, “thought it would not survive.”
The awarding of the Oscar for Captains Courageous, March 10, 1938. Left to right: Louis B. Mayer, Luise Rainer, Louise Tracy, and director Frank Capra. (HERALD EXAMINER COLLECTION, LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY)
Presenters, including Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Irving Berlin, and W. C. Fields, had handed out a total of twenty-two statuettes, including another to Luise Rainer, when it came time to reveal the winner for Best Actor. Tracy’s name was announced, and the room exploded at the news of a genuinely popular win. Mayer escorted Louise to the podium, and academy president Frank Capra handed the Oscar to him. “It’s a great privilege,” said Mayer, “to be a stand-in for so great an artist and, great as he is as an artist, he’s still a greater man. I think the right one to receive this is his fine wife, Mrs. Tracy.” Mayer turned to Louise and handed her the award, and she stepped to the microphone. “Thank you for Spencer,” she said, “and for Johnny, and for Susie, and for me.”
The line had been Spence’s idea in those last frantic moments at the hospital. (“If you have to go up, why don’t you say this?”) And like the hat he always wore cocked over his left eye, it was a sly tribute to his mentor Cohan, whose famous curtain speech from the days of the Four Cohans was always, “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you.”
Crow, of the Citizen News, called it the “most gracious” moment of the evening, and when Louise later phoned Spence at the hospital, after appearing before newsreel cameras and repeating the line, he wept.
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1 “He saw you in the picture,” said Gable sardonically. “He wants to get you out in the Atlantic alone.”
2 When they entertained, which was rare, Louise always served the same thing—baked pork chop with a particular kind of baked apple. It was her signature dish.
3 Luise Rainer was German, but to deflect growing anti-German sentiment the studio said she was Viennese.
4 Tracy began smoking Luckies in the navy, but was never a heavy smoker.
5 Tracy and Gable always shared the same table in the M-G-M commissary. “It was called the Directors’ Table,” said Howard Strickling. “Gable and Pidgeon and Bob Taylor, Tracy, and Cedric Gibbons, and all the writers. It was a big table, because there were 30 or 40 of them. They had this dice box, and low man paid for the lunch. If you had a three on the dice, it might cost you $35 or $40. Again, you might go along and eat for nothing for three weeks.”
6 Another bit of business worked out between Tracy and Fleming was Gunner’s practice of sticking a wad of chewing gum on the surface of Gable’s plane before a flight. A good luck ritual, it’s an ominous sign when he neglects it on the altitude run that ends his life.
CHAPTER 14
Enough