Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [233]
I realize your great problems in regard to production, and I want to be fair. That is why I want you to know immediately how I feel, and I also would like to have the matter settled as I probably have eight more weeks of hard work on this picture, and I would like to do it with as much peace of mind as possible.
You may not be in sympathy with some of the foregoing, and you may even think it self-indulgence—I hope that it is not. Some of us have strange problems—all of us different ones—and no one rule can be set to govern any, or all, of us. At any rate, what I have said here has been written after many sleepless nights of thought, and it is honest. After all, I have little to gain by all this except, I hope, some peace of mind.
Tracy was still in bed on the twenty-eighth, running a fever of 102 degrees, when Mannix and the M-G-M legal department started grappling with the question of how to respond. An oral statement of the company’s attitude was recommended unless there was a definite refusal on Tracy’s part to render services at the start of his next picture. Nobody wanted to antagonize him while Northwest Passage was still in production, and so the studio interiors and the film’s early scenes in the village of Portsmouth were made in an atmosphere of affable silence. “He was very intuitive,” Robert Young said of Tracy, “and whatever he did, he just always came out right. [Vidor] never talked to him. I mean, what’s the point in talking to him? Tracy, sort of, almost unconsciously, knew more about how that scene should be played than the director did.”
Vidor finished the first half of the picture on September 15, 1939, and the cast was retained on salary while Stromberg and Talbot Jennings polished the second half of the script. The standoff that Mannix had feared would come with the completion of Northwest Passage never took place. Tracy’s constant fretting over expenses—John’s care and education, Louise and Susie, Carroll, their mother, his aunt Mame’s medical bills, his aunt Jenny and her daughter—would only intensify were his income suddenly to cease. (“He worked so hard and had such a big tow line,” as his cousin Jane put it.) He’d never be able to relax, and if he did take six months off, he could never be sure they’d still want him when he came back. “I couldn’t do that,” he finally said to Louise. “I couldn’t stay away like that and wonder. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it.”
One of the steadying mechanisms in Tracy’s life was a weekly dinner with a few pals to talk shop and swap stories. It started with actor Frank McHugh’s wife, whose stepfather was a minister in West Hartford, Connecticut. They were trying to raise money for a Sunday school program, and someone got the idea of sending a blank autograph book out to Frank, who was at Warner Bros. with Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney. “Now Frank NEVER asked anybody for autographs,” said Mrs. McHugh, the actress Dorothy Spencer, “but he said, ‘Well, for Katherine [Dorothy’s mother] I’ll do it.’ ” Four loose pages from the book were dispatched, with the request that Frank sign one and have the other three signed by O’Brien, Cagney, and Spencer Tracy.
“Spence was at M-G-M,” Frank McHugh recalled, “and I did not know his home address or phone. So I sent a letter and the blank page to him [at the studio] and asked him to sign. He did, and enclosed a letter in the return [envelope] to the effect that he thought it was rather sad that old friends, living in the same town, had to communicate by mail, and suggested that the four of us get together for dinner. In the meantime, Jim and Spence had dinner together and talked it over and decided that the four of us should get together regularly and talk and dine. That is: Spence, Jim, Pat, and myself. Which we did.”
The meetings began in February 1939. O’Brien drank scotch, but McHugh was on the wagon and Cagney didn’t drink at all, save for an occasional glass of wine. They’d go out for dinner and end up at the Trocadero