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being devoted to him in newspapers—particularly by the syndicated columnists—and the yearly number of articles in the fan magazines had more than quadrupled since 1935. He naturally withdrew from such heightened interest, preferring to talk with Dick Mook and Gladys Hall and Ed Sullivan and, sometimes, to Louella Parsons, who always invoked their Freeport connections. (Parsons was born in Freeport in 1881 but had moved to Dixon, thirty miles south, by the time of Tracy’s birth in 1900.) Journalists were always hanging around the sets at Metro, but they were all carefully supervised and prohibited from talking to the stars without an okay from Howard Strickling.

Tracy did talk to journalists when he traveled, particularly in New York, where he figured he might one day return to the stage. “I had wires from Sam Behrman and Guthrie McClintic last season asking me if I were available for a play,” he told William Boehnel of the World-Telegram, “but when I replied that I thought I might be able to arrange it I never heard from them again. Maybe I’d better stick to Hollywood.” The more he worked with “some of the big directors,” he told his pal Mook, the more he realized what “really fine things” could be done in pictures. “I still hope to do more plays on the stage, but I’m still not big enough in pictures to dictate the terms of my contract. And the mounting quality of pictures compensates for not being able to do worthwhile stage plays—if I were lucky enough to find them.”

Emboldened by Tracy’s public comments, Theresa Helburn of the Theatre Guild approached him in the spring of 1939 with the idea of his starring in a revival of Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. He couldn’t argue with the quality of the material, and the play hadn’t been seen on Broadway since 1923, when a young Basil Sydney played the rebel Dudgeon. There was a whole generation of playgoers who had never seen it, Helburn argued, and another that had probably forgotten it. “And it occurred to me that now that Shaw has at last yielded to the movies [with Gabriel Pascal’s production of Pygmalion], this one will be bound to come along soon and perhaps you and Metro might have ideas about it similar to mine.”

Louise thought it would be good for him to get out of Hollywood and the deadening routine of making movies, if only for a short while. “The motion picture business is a very demanding one in some ways,” she said.

Very. And it was very difficult [to adjust to it]…[Spence] was going to come out [to Hollywood] anyhow—the money and everything else was interesting—but I think he felt that this was something he could do in the daytime and then [he] would be free … Of course, that was not true. His nights were taken: he read scripts and then he studied for the next day. And although he didn’t do much studying, he thought a great deal about it. He even worked over weekends … He took it very, very seriously, and … he thought about so many little things. People say he’s so natural, [that] he just gets up and talks. He used to laugh about people saying things like that. If they but knew the time you take to just give that little bit, that particular line you throw away, its own thing. It wasn’t anything you just got up and did—that natural thing—and he did a great deal of that at night.

Tracy thought he might make a quick trip to New York to meet with Theresa Helburn, but then the decision was made to go ahead with Northwest Passage—despite the fact there was only half a script—and by July 4 he was in McCall, Idaho, for the start of production. It wasn’t a picture he particularly wanted to make anymore, and although he kicked about going, the whole project had been designed around him and there was no getting out of it. His location work so far had been limited to Riverside, Catalina, La Jolla—day trips. Boys Town meant twelve days in Nebraska, but apart from the heat they weren’t exactly roughing it. Northwest Passage would be an altogether different experience—six weeks on the banks of Payette Lake, a hundred miles north of Boise near the Oregon border.