Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [227]
Tracy’s character was a colonial frontiersman and Indian fighter, a man as lean and rugged as the times and the terrain could make him. Yet he had ballooned to 189 pounds—the heaviest he had ever been—and hardly looked the part. He vowed that he would lose ten pounds in time for the picture, but as far as Louise could tell, the day he left for location he had lost just two of them. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “The food is going to be terrible, and between that and the heat and the ticks and getting up at five-thirty in order to start shooting at seven, I’ll be thin enough when we reach the trek back from St. Francis. And there won’t be a drug store or a sundae anywhere within miles.” When she saw him off at the station, she noticed a large box of chocolates tucked under the coat he had draped over one arm. “Just a little present mother gave me,” he said airily.
To make the trip he recruited Pat Elsey, his trainer and masseur, to come with him and help get him into shape. Elsey would be in addition to his stand-in, Jerry Schumacher, and his new dresser, Larry Keethe. Louise would come to visit at some point during the ordeal, and although the studio would have a doctor on site, he persuaded Howard Dennis to be there for at least the first week. Director King Vidor, while amused at the posse Tracy gathered, had to admit the picture depended on him, and were he to fall ill or somehow injure himself, the entire mechanism would grind to a halt. “He was well taken care of,” Vidor said. “I guess in the long run it was more important that he remain well than anyone else.”
Tracy, who had been attached to the film for nearly two years, thought Kenneth Roberts’ best-selling novel a great read but was increasingly dubious about filming the entire story, which could rival the anticipated running time of Gone With the Wind. Book I of Roberts’ novel covered Major Robert Rogers’ daring incursion deep into enemy territory during the French and Indian War, culminating in his raid on the Abenaki Indian village of St. Francis, where the village and fully a quarter of its population were destroyed. Book II—the second half—followed Rogers’ later years, his life as a profligate, his descent into alcoholism and financial ruin. It was the same trajectory Tracy observed in the play Oscar Wilde, and he feared that Rogers’ fate would obscure his performance, as Wilde’s downfall, in his judgment, had obscured Morley’s. “I’ll play him up to the point where he has achieved his objective,” Tracy declared, “but I’ll be darned if I’ll play him when he becomes a drunkard. Audiences won’t want to see him in that stage of his life.”
Roberts’ 709-page book was published in June 1937 and was already in its eighth printing when M-G-M bought the picture rights in September of that year, planning to make Northwest Passage its first feature in the radiant new Technicolor process. Woody Van Dyke was the first director assigned to the film, and it was Van Dyke who spent two weeks scouting locations in British Columbia. Tracy was the studio’s “immediate choice” to play Major Rogers; the sunburn he got in Hawaii in May 1938 had been requested specifically for the purpose of making Technicolor costume tests. Van Dyke fell away from the project over delays and a scheduling conflict, and King Vidor, whose direction of The Citadel the previous year had brought him an Academy Award nomination, was selected to replace him. Vidor brought Laurence Stallings, one of his favorite writers, to the project, and the two men quickly figured out a way to incorporate both halves of Roberts’ novel into a single coherent screenplay. “Hunt Stromberg, the producer, didn’t go for it,” Vidor remembered, “so he had a writer named Talbot Jennings come in and begin work.”
Vidor memoed Eddie Mannix: “As yet there is no complete story line upon which Mr. Stromberg and I have agreed … The trek to St. Francis and the return within the next few days will be in good shape … But I want to go