Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [222]
They were three weeks into production when the academy dinner took place, and both Tracy and Walter Brennan came away with awards. (Brennan was Best Supporting Actor for his work in Kentucky, his second win in three years.) The following morning, both men were applauded by several hundred extras when they stepped onto the set. Although the shoot went smoothly enough, Tracy fretted over the line “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” and argued against its inclusion in the script. A perennial punch line—the quote may even have been apocryphal—he could think of it only in the context of a joke and was convinced that audiences would laugh.
“He came to me one day,” recalled King,
and said, “You don’t mean to tell me that you’re going to do that old chestnut about Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” And I said, “We have to do it. We couldn’t do the picture without it.” He said, “I can’t say it, I can’t say it.” Well, this worried him to death, but he had neglected to think [about it]…I said, “Spence, did you ever stop to think that this man has had that fever, that swamp fever, just a few days before this? You’ve carried him through all this, and now when he comes into Dr. Livingstone’s place he can hardly walk. And he sees this man. He says, ‘Doctor … Livingstone …’ ” Spence says, “I could kill you, I could murder you. You played the scene for me and I didn’t have sense enough to think about it.”
When the time came, Tracy got the line out, but it took several takes, he said, because he couldn’t say it without laughing.3 He bet Zanuck’s associate producer, Kenneth Macgowan, the preview audience would laugh as well, and—to take the curse off—told the old joke about the drunk who wanders into a bar to whoever visited the set. Having weathered the making of Marie Gallante, King was understandably wary of Tracy. “In vino veritas,” he would later say. “Get someone drunk and you find out what they really are like. They’re either sweet and lovable or ugly and hateful. Spencer was an ugly drunk.” Tracy, however, was good-natured and cooperative on Stanley and Livingstone, and when King had to stop a scene between Tracy and Cedric Hardwicke because of airplane noise outside, Tracy ran his tongue up the side of his mouth and casually remarked, “Over at M-G-M we have soundproof stages.”
He later said:
I’m slowly improving. I don’t go through the agony I did when I was making four or five pictures a year. Boy, it’s awfully hard to be good four times a year. Nowadays, I’m making three. And I take time out to try to get laughs on the set. If an airplane flies overhead and action has to stop till the sound dies away, I don’t go higher than a kite. I take things more calmly now. But—I haven’t reached the ultimate in calmness yet. The sitting, waiting, still gets me. It’s the only thing that gives me a hankering for the stage. I’d like to go back—not to stay, but once every two or three years—just to get a performance out of my system in one evening.
However much trouble the “I presume” line gave him, Tracy’s most impressive moment in the film came with his impassioned address before the Society of British Geographers, a speech totaling nearly four hundred words. King wanted to capture the scene in a single take, Stanley barely suppressing his rage at the society’s skeptical membership. “Dr. Livingstone is out there!” he insists, building to a crescendo. “He is old and he is sick and he needs your help to carry on the great work he has undertaken—the work that is indicated, however inadequately, upon those maps. Reject those maps, withhold your aid, and you destroy him. Reject those maps and you close Africa for a generation to come. Reject those maps, gentlemen, and you break faith with the greatest geographer and one of the greatest men of our times!”
Covered by two cameras, the stirring speech was unlike anything Tracy had yet attempted, three and a half minutes of uninterrupted