Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [214]
The filming attracted huge crowds of spectators—as many as five thousand a day—and Father Flanagan had to spend most of the money he was paid by M-G-M on repairs to the property. Tracy, who disliked location work under the best of circumstances, ducked under an umbrella whenever he wasn’t needed, Schumacher bringing him water and the makeup man running cubes of ice across his forehead. “The crew had a great time,” said Gene Reynolds. “The women of Omaha just rolled for them. Any kind of connection with Hollywood, I guess. Even the prop boys were getting laid.”
The company worked eleven straight days in Omaha, finishing on the afternoon of July 7, 1938. Tracy slipped out of town on a Union Pacific Streamliner the next morning at two, riding up front with the engineer and having himself a grand time. Back at Culver City, the cast and crew of Boys Town settled in for another four weeks of interiors.
Between shots, Tracy went about the business of breaking in a new secretary, having lost Yvonne Beaudry to an auto accident. With a sprained back and a pronounced limp, Yvonne went home to New England after finding him a replacement, a red-headed Irish girl in her mid-twenties named Peggy Gough. Unlike Beaudry, Peggy had no ambitions to be a journalist or a world traveler and was an experienced secretary. She wasn’t terribly busy, especially when her boss was out of town, so she was assigned to help Johnny by typing the stencils for a weekly newspaper he had started publishing.
At the age of eleven, Johnny took up pencil and paper and declared he was going to draw a comic strip, slipping his earliest efforts under his mother’s door. “Certainly the ‘drawings’ were the worst I ever had seen,” she said. “We were in hysterics—behind his back. It was his first effort of any kind to do anything, to make something, entirely by himself, and no first efforts, I am sure, ever have met with greater acclaim. And we had to admit that every few days brought marked improvement.”
One day he asked how Walt Disney got Mickey Mouse into the paper, and his mother had to explain, somewhat carefully, how Walt Disney had been an adult when he broke into print, and that Johnny might well be able to do so once he had grown into adulthood himself. That, however, wasn’t the sort of answer he wanted to hear, and he decided he would start his own newspaper to hasten the process. What he wanted, it turned out, was extra copies of his drawings to send his grandmother and others, and Louise told him that when he got his paper together they would find a way of getting it printed. It took a year and a half and a lot of help from his private tutor to get out the first issue, a weekly he called The News. Soon its production took the place of what had come to pass for an education.
“The schooling was insufficient,” Johnny later wrote. “It seems to me I spent too much time on the newspaper and fooling around … I didn’t have the vocabulary to study and think. A dictionary was quite handy all the time, but I didn’t use it much. [My tutor] didn’t understand the needs of a deaf child. Of course, obviously too, I was lazy and not curious intellectually. I was thinking of the newspaper, every issue of which I was very anxious to send out, and of ‘Jack Smith,’ a comic strip which I had just created to be drawn for the paper.”
They bought him a secondhand duplicating machine and some stencils. Most of the “news” in the News concerned the Tracys—new movies, polo triumphs, comings and goings. The cover of the first issue carried a drawing of Mickey Mouse, courtesy of Walt Disney. It said: “Good luck to Johnny Tracy!”
Boys Town finished on August 6, 1938, and had its first sneak in Inglewood on the fourteenth. Tracy was unimpressed.