Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [229]
Tracy was no happier than Brennan, and there were exchanges between King Vidor and Hunt Stromberg about the possibility of bringing the entire company home. “Young, Brennan and I wore out our Rogers’ uniforms in two days,” Tracy said. “Pine branches, boulders, underbrush, swamp, mud, river rocks and things …” Robert Young, playing the fictional Langdon Towne, could remember having to strip outside his cabin each night—as did all cast members—and throw his clothes onto a sheet to more clearly see the ticks crawl off. “We weren’t wearing buckskin, we were wearing suede, or something like that, to approximate buckskin. We grew our beards. We weren’t allowed to wash our clothes, and we went through mud and slime and … oh, unbelievable. It kept getting worse, and then we’d hang those things out at night and they would turn sour. If you got on the downwind side you couldn’t stand it; you’d faint. [It would] make you throw up, it was so bad.”
Even with Pat Elsey on hand, Tracy had to be bullied into the routine of a daily rubdown and dry clothes. “He becomes so thoroughly the character that he is portraying that he forgets to take the sort of precautions which he needs as a star,” Elsey said at the time. “He depends on me to take those precautions for him.” King Vidor thought Tracy a bit of a pill, even as, in Vidor’s estimate, he made up for it. “As long as somebody’s giving you a marvelous performance, you just don’t worry about the little things.” Tracy, he said, wasn’t difficult to handle or direct, but he did have his days.
He kept threatening that he was going home from location. I tried and tried to think up something to do. Finally, I told my assistant director to go over to Boise, find a good-looking woman and put her on salary secretly, buy her some nice-looking clothes, and employ her to just come and sit and watch the shooting. You know, as a tourist. And so we did this. It gave Spencer someone to play up to, you know? To perform for. He’d go over and talk to her between takes. But one day, after about four days of this, she came over to me and said, “It’s a nice easy job, Mr. Vidor, a pleasant job. But do I have to ride around in his automobile and listen to his problems?” Well, we told her she’d have to handle that herself. But that’s all she was employed to do—just be there, sit and watch like a tourist. And it worked! All of a sudden, he stopped talking about rushing home.
Stromberg, in Culver City, was sending new pages up nearly every day, convinced that Talbot Jennings was investing his scenes with “more strength and emotional warmth” than Stallings had managed. Tracy hated shooting with revised dialogue, which reminded him of the old days in stock where part of the job was forgetting old material while absorbing the new. On July 20 he cabled Eddie Mannix:
SERIOUS CHANGES IN DIALOGUE JUST BEFORE SHOOTING ARE BAD ENOUGH IN THE STUDIO, BUT HERE THEY ARE IMPOSSIBLE ON TOP OF PHYSICAL HANDICAPS. SOME DECISION MUST BE MADE AS TO WHAT WE ARE GOING TO SHOOT. I HAVE STUDIED AND BELIEVE IN NEW JENNINGS SCRIPT AND THOUGHT WE WERE GOING TO SHOOT IT. I ALSO UNDERSTAND VIDOR’S POSITION IN WANTING TO COMBINE [THE] TWO, BUT I CANNOT ASSUME RESPONSIBILITY FOR PERFORMANCE WHEN THIS IS DONE ON THE SET.
Stromberg promptly made the decision to send Talbot Jennings to Payette Lake. Vidor and his crew were shooting the burning of St. Francis, an extraordinarily brutal sequence for its time, involving