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at the ranch playing tennis with Louise, lunching on the patio and sometimes meeting friends for tea. He saw Cagney, O’Brien, and the others on Wednesday nights, and celebrated nineteen months of sobriety on the first day of December. He had a wonderful Christmas that year, playing polo at Riviera on the twenty-fourth and visiting the newly married Gables, who had settled in Encino, later that same evening. On Christmas Day he went to Mass as usual, then spent the balance of the day loafing at home. Dinner was with the children, Louise, his mother, Carroll and Dorothy. “Beautiful weather,” he wrote in his book. “Much to be thankful for.”

* * *

1 In addition to cinematographer Sid Wagner’s regular crew, a complete Technicolor crew of sixteen headed by William V. Skall was part of the company.

2 “He had a very good eye with quick movements,” Louise said. “Could have played a good game of tennis if he had started early enough. But he never cared about doing anything like that. The theatre, yes. You gave your best, but he played games for fun. He never cared who won.”

CHAPTER 16

Someone’s Idea of Reality

* * *

The triumph of Boys Town enabled John Considine to get approval for a project he had long wanted to do, a biography of Thomas Edison split into two movies—one his boyhood, the other his years at Menlo Park. To play the Great Man, Considine had at his disposal the nation’s top male stars—Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy. He assigned Dore Schary, who had shared an Academy Award with Eleanore Griffin for his work on Boys Town, to develop both pictures in collaboration with Hugo Butler.

As subsequently rewritten by Talbot Jennings and Bradbury Foote, the screenplay for Edison, the Man, bore no greater resemblance to Edison’s life than Boys Town had to Father Flanagan’s, but it afforded Tracy the kind of inspirational role he was now actively seeking, and he embraced it with rare ebullience. On October 24, 1939, he and Howard Strickling boarded a train for Chicago at the invitation of Henry Ford, who had been Edison’s neighbor at Fort Myers and who had reconstructed Edison’s original laboratory complex on the grounds of his Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. From there the men traveled to New York and West Orange, where they spent the day with Edison’s widow and his son Charles, now assistant secretary of the navy.

Tracy was particularly cheered by nine reels of film provided by General Electric, pictures made in the twenties of Edison reenacting experiments, relaxing at his estate in Florida, being interviewed before a radio microphone by E. W. Rice, Jr., the late president of General Electric. Hearing Edison’s voice as an old man was of less use to Tracy than seeing his walk, his smile, his expressions when conversing with others. Tracy was taller by a couple of inches, but in overall appearance remarkably similar to the man shown in photographs from the 1870s. “We will make these changes,” Jack Dawn, the head of the M-G-M makeup department, decided. “Tracy’s hair will be parted on the right instead of the left and will be combed downward across the head instead of upward. We will make his eyebrows a little more bushy and his forehead slightly larger. There’s practically nothing to it.”

Dawn’s conception of Edison at age eighty-two was similarly spare; the first test was shot on November 20, and Tracy, when he saw the results, thought them “pretty good.” After the nerves and privations of the previous year, he was embarking on a job he genuinely found enjoyable, and his mood around the studio as well as at home was uncharacteristically buoyant and relaxed. With Louise resting in Santa Barbara, he had the kids to himself. He swam, lunched on the patio, played tennis with John, and dined with his mother.

It couldn’t last.

On Friday, November 24, he made the forty-minute drive to the studio for lunch, a habit he picked up when he wasn’t working to keep abreast of developments. “If I were to believe everything I read about myself and the roles I’m supposed to be lined up for,” he said, “I’d go crazy.