Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [240]
When Gable attended the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind, Tracy shot off a congratulatory wire:
“GONE WITH THE WIND” MAY BE THIS YEAR’S GREATEST PICTURE BUT I STILL REMEMBER “PARNELL.”
The principal screenwriter on Boom Town was John Lee Mahin, who had as his source a novelette from Cosmopolitan magazine called “A Lady Comes to Burkburnett.” With Myrna Loy unavailable for the part of the lady, producer Sam Zimbalist took the extraordinary step of borrowing Claudette Colbert from Paramount, thus reuniting the two Academy Award–winning stars of It Happened One Night. Hedy Lamarr campaigned for the fourth role, a seductress who didn’t appear until the top of the third act, and the picture suddenly took on a size that made it one of the most anticipated of the season. Early on, the Metro sales team decided to showcase Boom Town as a solo attraction at premium prices, the rationale being its stellar cast made it “like four pictures in one.”
For Tracy, it wasn’t a particularly difficult shoot. Many of the exteriors were done in process, and the only real location work was a two-day stretch at the Taft oilfields near Bakersfield. Wardrobe, contractually the responsibility of the actor on a modern-dress picture, became a matter of swapping out clothes with genuine laborers. “Larry Keethe, our wardrobe man, thought I was crazy when we bought a bunch of new work clothes and went down to a building project around here, looking for a couple of workmen about my size. We traded the new outfits for those a couple of guys were wearing. They thought I was crazy, too. But you can’t look like a worker in the oil fields, walking into a picture in brand-new dungarees. They must be baggy and faded from sweat and dirt and many washings.”
Tracy amused himself bantering with Gable, who usually gave as good as he got. When the King stalked onto the set during an early rehearsal, he delivered his first line but went up on the second. “Can you imagine that?” Tracy moaned with an exaggerated sigh. “The guy’s memory is down to one line now!”
Later, Gable took a shot at Tracy while chatting with Harry Evans of Family Circle magazine. “Say,” he said, pretending not to notice his costar was within earshot, “did you hear that Tracy is going to do Ninotchka on the air with Rosalind Russell?” Evans, playing along, said that he had heard such a rumor but doubted his ears.
“Well,” said Gable, hoisting his left eyebrow quizzically, “that should be a new experience for radio listeners. That Russell is smart, you know. Let him try to underplay her, and you know what will happen? He’ll drop his voice a little, and she’ll drop hers. He’ll take his next speech a little softer, she’ll whisper a little lower. He’ll mutter his next line, and she’ll murmur. The listeners will be twisting the knobs off their dials trying to hear what’s going on. And suddenly they’ll hear nothing, not a sound.” He paused a moment to observe Tracy. “And that,” he concluded, “will be the first time on record that two radio performers will have voluntarily gone off the air!”
Claudette Colbert thought the back-and-forth between Gable and Tracy “better than a circus” but acknowledged that Tracy’s technique—what Louise called “that natural thing”—took some getting used to. “Here’s how it goes,” she said of her heaviest scene opposite him.
I’ve tried to commit suicide, and I’m half hysterical and trying to explain my action to Spencer. After weeping and carrying on and just about knocking myself out, with him just standing there, I declare that he can never understand. “You could never know what it means to love anyone so much!” I scream. And after I stop on this high melodramatic note, he nods that big head of his a few times, sticks his chin out, looks up and away, and murmurs, “Yeah, yeah. I wouldn’t know about that.” And steals