Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [237]
He learned that day that Edison had been postponed in favor of yet another version of I Take This Woman, and his mood blackened accordingly. Bernie Hyman, the original producer, had thrown out the first sixty pages of Charlie MacArthur’s original story and turned it, in the words of MacArthur’s longtime collaborator, Ben Hecht, “from a civilized comedy into a Darkest-Metro soap opera.” Tracy was glad when the picture was shelved. “It was so bad,” he told Gable, “we had to make retakes before we could even put it on the shelf. And when we put it on the shelf, we had to promise the other pictures there that it was only for one night.”
He officially got the word the following Monday, and spent the entire day in conference with the new producer, Larry Weingarten. No one was deluded as to the artistic merits of the film, but Metro had close to $1 million tied up in it thus far, and the goal was to get the thing into releasable shape. There was also Mayer’s championing of the project, Lamarr being for him the equivalent of Goldwyn’s Anna Sten, a personal obsession whose appeal was always somewhat lost on the public. Lamarr’s first M-G-M release, Lady of the Tropics, had flopped at the box office. “They didn’t want me to make I Take This Woman,” the Old Man told the actress defiantly. “Well, now we will make it.”
On the set of I Take This Woman with Louise and Susie. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Whole sequences would be salvaged from the earlier version, while enough new material would be shot to substantially reshape the story. Tracy returned to the studio on December 1 to fight with Eddie Mannix over the requirement that he make the new scenes, but it was a losing battle considering there was no possible way to remove him from the picture without completely reshooting it from scratch. The only consolation was that the new material would be directed by Woody Van Dyke, who was sure to finish the thing as quickly and cheaply as possible. (“There’s nothing wrong with it that $200,000 or $300,000 can’t fix,” Van Dyke had reportedly said.) Tracy returned to Encino, where a nervous stomach plagued him all weekend. Filming resumed on Monday, December 4. “Worse than ever,” he wrote in his book.
Van Dyke was in rare form. “[Y]ou did one rehearsal, you shot it, and you printed it,” said Laraine Day, who had been with the picture all along. “That was it. There was no fooling around with anything. You just knew your lines. You could blow your lines, you could change them all over, and he wouldn’t change printing it. As long as you hit your marks, Woody Van Dyke would say ‘Print it’ and he would finish the picture in 23 days.”
Weingarten, who had already done a picture with “One-Take Woody,” knew his routine all too well. “Now Mr. Van Dyke was an alcoholic,” he once explained to a roomful of film students, “but he was right there all the time. But you could set your watch the moment he left the studio. At five o’clock he was out the door and went for the alcohol. And we used to run out of sets. We’d have five for the day, and the art department would call screaming, ‘He’s going to be through!’ What are they going to shoot next? And if another set wasn’t ready, out he went.”
As Tracy announced to Sheilah Graham when she walked on the set one day, “This is where I came in—a year ago!”
He saw a rough cut of Northwest Passage on September 22 and, despite all the misgivings, thought it a “great adventure.” Stromberg still had a lot of tinkering to do, and Tracy would spend a total of thirty-two days on retakes. The prospect of a second film grew remote when Germany’s invasion of Poland closed off much of the European market. Even so, the studio had a backlog of other pictures in the queue for him—one after another—and as he looped the last strands of dialogue in early January 1940, he put Leo Morrison to work seeking a substantially