Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [218]
The director, Josef von Sternberg, had been engaged to give Lamarr the same glistening treatment he had given Marlene Dietrich a decade earlier. (Algiers, in fact, looked like a Sternberg picture, due in large part to the work of cinematographer James Wong Howe.) On the first day of filming, Sternberg attempted his first take at 10:20 in the morning, and wasn’t satisfied until 4:30 in the afternoon. Lamarr photographed well, but she had no energy and precious little personality. The story had her chasing Tracy’s character, a selfless doctor, but the material, in Sternberg’s judgment, was “silly.” He tried fixing the script but found he could do nothing with it. “Each detail of this film, on which I worked not more than a week, was predetermined by a dozen others,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Other directors were better fitted to participate in this kind of nonsense, although this may well be beyond the ability of anyone.”
The atmosphere on Sternberg’s set was tense. “He wouldn’t stand for any noise on the set,” said actress Laraine Day, who was playing a minor part in the picture, “and if you wanted to talk to him, you had to write your name on a blackboard and then he would deign to talk to you if he wanted to.” Tracy notched six months on the wagon, loafed, and played tennis—a new passion for which he was taking lessons. They started up again on November 14 with Frank Borzage directing, then again pulled the plug at the end of the same day. A week later, after further rewrites, they started the picture yet a third time with the title I Take This Woman. Soon, it was being referred to around town as I Re-Take This Woman.
Borzage was as friendly and easygoing as Sternberg was aloof. (“There’s no mistaking the easing of tension since Borzage took over the picture,” a visitor observed.) Disgusted with the script by Jim McGuinness, who, unsuited to women’s pictures, had turned in a lifeless assemblage of clichés, Tracy indulged in a brief flirtation with Hedy Lamarr, who, according to Billy Grady, was the subject of a one-night stand. Tracy was living at the Beverly Hills Hotel, prompting rumors of another separation. In addition to his usual habit of moving out for a picture, his wing of the house was under renovation, adding a bathroom and a dressing area. The rumors, he told Harrison Carroll, were “never more untrue.”
Indeed, he was back at home by mid-December, despite the fact that the picture was still very much in production. An exhibitors’ poll released on the twenty-third named him fifth in a list of the biggest moneymaking stars of the year, placing him ahead of such luminaries as Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, and Errol Flynn. Christmas was with family, Aunt Emma Brown visiting from Freeport, Carrie, Carroll and Dorothy, Weeze and the kids.
Spence and Louise at one of the infrequent premieres they attended as a couple. (SUSIE TRACY)
“I Take This Woman, starring Hedy Lamarr and Spencer Tracy, has been shooting for 60 days and nobody has been able to think of an ending for it,” Sheilah Graham reported in her column of December 26. “The great problem is whether or not to bring Hedy and Spencer together at the end. Oh, please let them have each other. I’m so tired of finales where the heroine goes off into a dark fadeout, wistfully followed by the eyes of the hero …” The seemingly interminable picture finished—to no one’s particular satisfaction—on January 19, 1939. A week later, Tracy was advised by Eddie Mannix that it had been “shelved indefinitely.”
“Just imagine,” Tracy said. “Hedy had to chase me all during the picture—and I had to run away!