Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [249]
By agreeing to play Hyde with makeup, Tracy surrendered his actor’s instinct to Fleming’s conception of the role, and it was never a satisfactory fit. Still, he managed Jekyll without the ramrod stiffness of Fredric March nor the matinee posings of John Barrymore. What he brought to the part was a profound normality that could be distorted and amplified as Hyde took control; the connection between the two sides of the character had never been as blatant. When first in the grip of his dark side, Jekyll examines himself in the mirror as a medical doctor might examine a patient. At once astonished and yet altogether fascinated, he says, “Can this be evil, then?” and bursts into a nervous laugh.
Taut and unblinking, Hyde takes unrestrained glee in the languid terror of Bergman’s Ivy, all breathless and slow as if snared in a trap from which she can’t possibly escape. The design of the makeup wasn’t as outlandish as for previous incarnations, more an exaggeration of Tracy’s own familiar features, in keeping with the notion that it was Jekyll’s soul that turned black. The most obvious embellishment was a grotesque set of false teeth. Said Victor Saville, “We had to make six sets of teeth as the fangs fully developed—booming voice of Tracy from the stage, ‘Bring on the choppers!’ ”
What Fleming and Mahin ultimately produced was a deft exercise in sadomasochism, something very different from the exploration Tracy had first imagined, a sort of tour of the psyche of an addict, the emotional need, the physical intolerance, the divide between the security of home and the debauchery of the street, the shame and self-loathing that withered the spirit, the mortal sin that, in the judgment of the church, killed the soul. Finding the intersection between actor and character—characters, in this instance, for he took to referring to himself as “we” around the set—was an abnormally draining process, fluid and imprecise and inordinately dependent upon Fleming’s oblique direction. “It isn’t often,” said Tracy, “that an actor is actually emotionally upset by a role. Mr. Hyde is one of the few I have played that took everything out of me.”
The transformation scenes remained a problem, and as of April 7 they were yet to shoot the first time Jekyll takes the “dope” (as Saville, in a nod to Tracy’s concept, always referred to Jekyll’s mysterious potion). The final days were in some ways the toughest, as Hyde’s zeal begins to leave him, and all that is left is an unconstrained fury, bottled lightning in a corroded shell of a man. Tracy spent his days on the set barely speaking to others, his only respite his evenings alone with Bergman. It rained constantly during the course of the shoot, and his mood could not have been lifted by the release of Men of Boys Town, which came just days before the finish of the picture.
Katherine Brown, Selznick’s story editor, came west with Bergman’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Pia, and Spence had all three to the ranch for a weekend. One night they went to King Vidor’s place for dinner and then, as Tracy later noted, “ditched the guests.” Their time together was rapidly drawing to a close: Bergman was preparing to do Anna Christie in Santa Barbara under John Houseman’s direction, while Tracy would be going east for the start of The Yearling. On his last day in town, a Monday, they played tennis in the morning, were apart in the afternoon, but together again for dinner, the tenth such occasion in the space of two weeks. The following day, Tracy boarded the Super Chief for Chicago, expecting to be gone for at least eight weeks.
In mid-February Tracy lunched with Nicholas Schenck, the diminutive “general” of the Loew’s empire, and accepted the terms of a new deal that would expressly limit the number of pictures he could be required to make in a given year.