Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [241]
Production was moving along beautifully when, on April 25, Gable was injured in the staging of a fight. Toward the end of the picture, Square John tries to knock some sense into Big John, who has gone off with the exotic Karen Vanmeer. (“In between the rough stuff,” said Tracy, “I had to sit around while the King played love scenes with Hedy Lamarr.”) Tracy later described the mishap to his friend Stewart Granger:
One evening we tried to finish off a fight sequence, but there was one shot left over for the following morning, Gable taking a punch on the chin from me, off camera. I told them that I’d be goddamned if I was going to get up at the crack of dawn just to stand off camera and have my fist pass in front of Gable’s chin and told them to get someone else. They got a fighter, a real boxer. They stood him next to the camera and told him to throw a punch as Gable approached, but to “pull” it an inch away from Gable’s chin. Did he understand? Sure. Did he need a rehearsal? Hell, no. Okay. Camera, action, and the boxer let one go, forgot to pull it, and knocked Gable down. There was a stunned silence as Gable lay on the floor spitting out teeth. The boxer looked in horror at the movies’ most valuable human being whom he’d just disfigured. He took off out of the studio, out of L.A., and some think out of the country. He was never seen again. Gable accused me of fixing the whole thing. I just told him he needed a new set of teeth anyway.
Gable famously wore dentures; he would occasionally pull them out to shock people, particularly women who seemed just a tad too admiring. The blow damaged his upper plate and split his lip, which required four stitches. Tracy had nine days off, time he passed swimming, playing tennis, and doing a retake in old-age makeup for Edison, the Man. On May 1 he marked two full years on the wagon, and the following day tipped the scales at 192 ½ pounds—his heaviest ever.
He thought Edison a “good little picture—not great” but didn’t think it stood much of a chance commercially. So when plans were finalized for the world premiere in Orange, New Jersey, he made the unusual decision to go east to support it. The schedule on Boom Town was arranged to create a seven-day window in which he wouldn’t be needed, and on May 12 he and Louise left on the Super Chief in the company of Howard Strickling and his wife.
The Edison premiere, the centerpiece of a three-day celebration, was spread over six theaters and was practically a replay of the Boys Town event in Omaha. A crowd of twenty thousand movie-mad fans flooded the Oranges, forcing Tracy to creep into the gala ball at the local armory through a back door. The crowd on the outside began to chant “We want Tracy! We want Tracy!” And with the mob pounding on the walls and hanging from the windows, Tracy became aware that he had lost his collar button—either to a fan or to the commotion itself—and was having a tough time holding his neckpiece together. Most of the four thousand dancers on the floor of the ballroom joined in a hunt for the button before photos could be taken with the Edisons, Governor A. Harry Moore, and other distinguished guests. When the crowd outside refused to disperse, it was arranged for Tracy and his leading lady, actress Rita Johnson, to wave to the throng through an upper window, an appearance that triggered fifteen minutes of wild cheering.
There was scarcely time to see anything in New York, but Spence and Louise caught a performance of There Shall Be No Light—with Lunt and Fontanne—on their last night in town. Back in California, Tracy settled into the final days of production on Boom Town while giving interviews in support of Edison. Significantly, he talked to author-educator John Erskine, who challenged him on notions of art and artifice and “whether the ideas of experience furnished by our pictures are complete and true; whether the ideals are high enough or