Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [217]
At first he was under watch, his reputation at Fox having preceded him. “We actors are like the children of very wealthy parents who keep a very close watch on us, have guards and spies set over us,” he observed not long after coming to Metro. “The studio is the mama and papa of the actor. The whole world, the press, the public are the guards and spies. We can’t really be ourselves much of the time.” Eddie Mannix and Billy Grady were his confidants, more or less responsible for keeping an eye on him. After New York and the Lambs Club, he was placed on a shorter leash, someone from the studio being omnipresent whenever he found himself out among the public. “It was a world unto itself,” Maureen O’Sullivan said, “and I would think that if M-G-M had a fault, they over-protected us. If there was bad publicity or something coming up, you took it up with Howard Strickling. Life was taken care of, and this spoiled us.”
Strickling had people who handled the distribution of photographs, others who coordinated special events—premieres, banquets, important visitors. Unit men responsible for individual pictures worked for Strickling, as did the people who arranged transportation and answered fan mail. “In Howard’s book,” said Ann Straus, one of his longtime employees, “M-G-M girls didn’t drink, they didn’t smoke, they didn’t even have babies. But he was a hard taskmaster. He wanted perfection, and he got it.” There were limits to Strickling’s reach, and his stuttering betrayed the constant pressure he was under—“It made it difficult to take dictation from him,” said Eddie Mannix’s secretary, June Caldwell—but he was on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and there was no aspect to the business of being a movie star that escaped his oversight.
It was not in Howard Strickling’s interest to make Tracy available to the press in October 1938. Just before Boys Town had its world premiere, Tracy learned he had been assigned a picture titled A New York Cinderella and he wasn’t at all happy about it. The story and script were designed to showcase an actress who had just six pictures to her credit, the most notorious of which was a Czechoslovakian feature in which she appeared nude and simulated orgasm. It was the sort of thing he thought he was finally past, and the problem ate at him as he trained eastward in the company of Bishop Ryan and Father Flanagan.
Hedy Lamarr was L. B. Mayer’s project, a dark, radiant beauty the old man first encountered in London. She was Hedwig Kiesler at the time, on the run from a bad marriage and a featured player in a handful of European movies. Like Luise Rainer, Kiesler had been with Max Reinhardt, who reportedly called her “the most beautiful woman in Europe.” Unlike Rainer, Kiesler was genuinely Viennese at a time when such a distinction was becoming increasingly important. Brought to this country, she was renamed “Lamarr” after the 1920s beauty queen Barbara La Marr, with Mayer taking personal charge of her career. He loaned her to producer Walter Wanger for her American debut in a stylish independent called Algiers. Tracy had seen the film, liked Charles Boyer’s work and thought the girl photogenic but had no interest in propping her up, particularly in a picture as vapid as New York Cinderella promised to be.
“I have often wondered,” Flanagan wrote Tracy on November 1, “how you came