Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [224]
(PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
The weather was beautiful, the seas calm. They reached Cherbourg on the morning of the twenty-sixth, Southampton later that afternoon. Tracy had heard the British crowds were fierce, but he was completely unprepared for the near riot that greeted him as the boat train pulled into Waterloo Station. The place was mobbed, mostly by fur-clad women eager to get a glimpse of the star of Boys Town. “The crowd that charged him on the platform must have been at least a thousand strong and at times looked nasty,” the British film critic Caroline Lejeune reported. “It was a case of get out or get under.” A porter and six women were trampled in the melee; Arturo Toscanini, famed conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, was swept off his feet and flung against a baggage truck.
The railway police closed in around the Tracys, and since they couldn’t slip them down the milk chute as they had Robert Taylor, they drew all the near-side blinds on the train and then moved them through the off-side doors into an empty down-train, which they then ran back along the tracks to the last wayside station. Police told the throng, “Your hero has left,” but the women milled for hours, bouquets and orchids in hand, meeting all the trains as they arrived. “The crowd was still whooping and waiting at Waterloo,” Lejeune’s dispatch concluded, “when Mr. and Mrs. Tracy, rather white about the gills and a good deal shaken, slipped out unseen at Vauxhall onto a bare platform under the cold April stars.”
They shook up the staff at Claridge’s by rising at six the next morning, strolling the empty streets of London, Spence toting his 16mm movie camera, returning in time for a nine o’clock breakfast. They saw the changing of the guard, then took off for Windsor Castle. “What am I doing in London?” he said in answer to a reporter’s question. “Nothing. Just let London look after me. I have been trying to get here for two years. It was hardly worthwhile coming for such a short time, but I was determined to make this trip.” The studio arranged a formal news conference—his first ever—and he fielded questions while sipping a glass of Vichy. What did he think of London? What struck him most about it? “I’ve got to think fast,” he said. “People will try and make me pronounce on politics. Those questions have to be answered guardedly.” No, he said, he’d never had a proposal in the post. “An Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood? No, that’s something I’ve never heard of.”
He was asked about his newest picture. “I haven’t seen a finished version of Stanley and Livingstone,” he lied. “I don’t know—maybe it’s all right. You could take that subject fifty ways. I am sure that when I say ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume’ it’ll be one almighty laugh in every hall.” He said his next picture would be Northwest Passage with Wallace Beery and Robert Taylor, and then probably The Yearling. “I think that’s one of the finest books I’ve ever read. I’m hoping we’ll get round to it this summer.”
It rained almost every day. They saw Joe Kennedy, played tennis with his daughters Pat and Eunice, lunched with the Kennedy family. (“All the Kennedys,” Tracy once said, “remind me of my father.”) In Paris he discovered Maxim’s, with its crocks of thick yellow cream, and spent an evening in the company of actor Jean Gabin, the stocky Parisian “Everyman” whose career had, in many ways, paralleled his own. Gabin, he said, wanted him to remain in Paris and make a picture. “I will tell you what we do,” Gabin said. “We will make one picture here and then we will forget all about movies and go fishing—for a year.” Tracy suggested that Gabin come to Hollywood and make a picture there. “I can hardly talk French,” the actor responded. “How could I learn to talk English?”
Tracy enjoyed every minute of his time in France. In London the autograph hunters pursued him on bicycles. In Paris he was never once asked for his signature. “You’d go in