Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [212]
Flanagan responded by inviting Considine, screenwriter John Meehan, director Norman Taurog—Jack Ruben having fallen ill—and Tracy to Omaha for a conference over the script, but Tracy, eager to make the fiasco of the New York trip up to Louise, elected instead to take her on a quick cruise to Hawaii, vowing to return in time for the start of Boys Town on June 2. Their two weeks in Honolulu came off without incident; on their way home he was able to note in his book: “One month sober—Wonderful!!!” With the script unfinished, the picture didn’t actually start until the sixth, new pages coming daily from Meehan and Jack Mintz, a writer and gag man brought onto the picture by Taurog.
Tracy had previously appeared in two pictures with Mickey Rooney, but there was no interaction between the two of them on Riffraff and very little on Captains Courageous. Since finishing the latter, Rooney had appeared in nine features, two in the newly inaugurated Andy Hardy series with Lewis Stone and Fay Holden. On Boys Town, the seventeen-year-old Rooney would share over-the-title billing with Tracy, a remarkable rise in prominence since joining M-G-M (at $150 a week) in August 1934. “Mickey Rooney,” said Joe Mankiewicz, “was a pretty cocky little fellow … When Tracy and Rooney met on the set of Boys Town, Rooney started playing games … While Spencer was talking, Rooney would sort of play with his handkerchief in his pocket, or adjust his tie, or the stale sort of scene-stealing bits, and Tracy turned to him the very first day and said, ‘I understand you claim to be the world’s greatest scene stealer. Let me tell you something, you little snot. The moment I catch you trying to louse up a scene I’m in, I’ll send you to Purgatory. You’ll wish you’d never been born, because I can do it.’ And he made Rooney believe that.”
After a week shooting the early scenes between Father Flanagan and the incorrigible Whitey Marsh, Rooney went off to complete Love Finds Andy Hardy and Tracy moved on to the founding of Flanagan’s first home for boys in 1917, solid, largely factual material that paired him with actors Leslie Fenton and Henry Hull. With his weight down to 170, Tracy was able to play two slow chukkers of polo on June 8, his first in nearly seven months. It was like being back at the beginning again, having to nerve himself into taking the field, the adrenaline high all but forgotten, the fear almost insurmountable. “I darn near died,” he said, recalling the occasion. “I can’t enjoy the game anymore. It’s a worry now. I get to thinking, ‘Maybe nothing will happen, but I might take a spill. Then the picture stops. And people get thrown out of work.’ ”
On June 22 unit manager Joe Cooke wired Boys Town from Salt Lake City:
ARRIVE OMAHA THURSDAY MORNING. COMPANY WILL ARRIVE SATURDAY. WOULD RATHER YOU NOT MENTION ARRIVAL SO AS TO KEEP CROWDS AWAY.
Of course the company of fifty-eight was the biggest, by far, ever to hit Nebraska. When they arrived early in the evening of the twenty-fifth, several thousand jammed Omaha’s Union Station to catch glimpses of Tracy and particularly Mickey Rooney, who had become just about the hottest thing in pictures. Henry Hull was along, as were actors Gene Reynolds, Frank Thomas, Bobs Watson (and his mother), Jimmy Butler, Sidney Miller, Donald Haines, and Tommy Noonan. All others—director Taurog, his first and second assistants, the script girl, two sound engineers, first and second cameramen and assistant, second-unit cameraman and assistant, wardrobe man, makeup man, cashier, two prop men, three grips, a stills man, a welfare worker, five electricians, a camera car driver, writers Meehan and Mintz, associate producer O. O. “Bunny” Dull and a secretary, and a publicity trailer unit headed by Frank Whitbeck (with cameraman, assistant cameraman, and grip)