Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [250]
The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ tale of a boy’s life in inland Florida, was an immediate sensation when it was published by Scribner in March 1938. Sixty thousand copies were sold in the first month alone. M-G-M snapped up the picture rights for $30,000, and by September all the particulars were in place: Tracy would play Penny Baxter under Victor Fleming’s direction, with Gene Reynolds taking the role of Penny’s son, Jody. John Lee Mahin, who fell in love with the book and urged the studio to buy it, was at first to write the screenplay, but then Mahin clashed with producer Sidney Franklin, who said Mahin “didn’t realize the sensitivity of it” and had him put off the project.
Franklin, who was producing the film version of Paul Osborn’s Broadway success On Borrowed Time, induced the playwright, who was new to screenwriting, to tackle The Yearling. Osborn, as it turned out, was an inspired choice, sensitive and knowing, and his script, completed in July 1940, was a masterful job. Second-unit work began the following January, as a full Technicolor crew, battling bugs and humidity, struggled to get shots on film that matched the fanciful compositions of California-based sketch artists.3 By the time Tracy arrived on May 2 at Ocala, where the company had leased a farm, some members of the dispirited crew had been on site nearly four months. Tracy and Fleming were worn out as well; having just finished Jekyll and Hyde, neither man had as much as a week’s vacation before nature mandated the start of The Yearling.
Tempers were short from the beginning. The principal problem was the yearling itself. Since most deer are born within a narrow May–June window and grow quickly, the studio’s animal handler, a former elephant trainer named George Emerson, conspired to have a small fleet of does timed to give birth in successive weeks so that Fleming and company would always have a newborn available. Breeding began in October 1940; Emerson presided over a small zoo on Lot 4 and gathered a veritable menagerie of trained animals for use in the film. When it came time for shooting to begin, they were all loaded into a pair of rail cars especially designed for the movement of livestock and transported to the central Florida location.
In the two years since the film’s announcement, fifteen-year-old Gene Reynolds had grown too old to play Jody, and a hectic search was launched to find a replacement. Billy Grady hit nine cities in twelve days and shot tests of maybe thirty kids. It was, however, the first boy on his first stop in Atlanta who bore the most uncanny resemblance to the author’s conception of what Jody should look like, and twelve-year-old Gene Eckman was ultimately given the part. Imported to Culver City for training, Eckman was enrolled at the studio schoolhouse with instructions to spend as much time as possible with the deer being raised by Emerson on Lot 4. The boy was allowed to read the script but told not to memorize the dialogue. Josephine Dillon, Clark Gable’s first wife, was given the task of coaching him and moderating his thick Georgia accent.
“We will not be able to take tests of clothes with Spencer Tracy and the boy until this coming Monday,” Sidney Franklin advised his brother Chet, who was directing the second-unit work in Florida, “which is unfortunate, but there is nothing we can do about it. He has been playing Mr. Hyde to such an extent that we’re afraid to put him with the