Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [251]
Fleming made some tests, simple process shots on a treadmill in which Tracy and Eckman were seen ambling down a forest pathway. Said Eckman, “I remember Victor Fleming told me, ‘Gene, stop looking at Spencer Tracy like a star. He’s your father.’ It was one of the first scenes I made with Tracy and he was very nice. I remember he sat down at that point to help me get over this awe of him … We worked it out so that we could carry on a conversation and I wouldn’t feel so out of place.”
Though author Rawlings had sent him a warmly inscribed copy of The Yearling when he was first confirmed for the role, Tracy was physically wrong for the part of Penny Baxter and he knew it. In the book, Penny is described as having “grown to maturity no bigger than a boy. His feet were small, his shoulders narrow, his ribs and hips joined together in a continuous fragile framework.” Tracy, on the other hand, was broad and solid and weighed nearly two hundred pounds. Publicist Eddie Lawrence was assigned to accompany him to Ocala, and Lawrence caught up with him just as he was emerging from a projection room after running the tests. “Spence,” Lawrence began, “what a pleasure to do this journey with you—” Tracy cast a burning eye in Lawrence’s direction and, in a voice dripping with disgust, said, “Looks like I ATE the boy!” and stalked off.
Casting for the part of Ma Baxter was contentious, Fleming being dead set against the popular favorite, British stage and film actress Flora Robson, who had the long, plain look the story demanded. “Fleming was violently pro-Nazi,” said Anne Revere, the New York–born actress who was instead given the part. “This was ’41, we hadn’t entered the war … and he was violently opposed to the English and anyone who was interfering with the boys over there. So he wouldn’t have her, he was against all English.” Revere had played a one-day bit as an aggrieved mother in Men of Boys Town and gained Tracy’s endorsement. Fleming initially told her she had the “wrong bony structure” for the role but tested her anyway. “When they put Spence in the part,” she said, “they tried to make him look small by getting everything else very big … They took me and duped me up; they put great platform shoes and a big bosom on me, and tried to make me look very large.”
For Tracy, the experience was a replay of Northwest Passage, but in a climate not nearly as agreeable, the palmetto and scrub holding in the heat like a damp blanket. “He is, with the possible exception of Mr. Fleming, the hardest-working man on the 79,000-acre lot,” Sidney Whipple observed during a visit to the set for the New York World-Telegram. “He routs himself out of bed at 6 o’clock in the morning and thereafter is in the field. He worries and frets and deprecates his own talent. He rehearses his lines and practices for constant improvement in his action. He squats in the sun-baked cornfield for interminable conferences with director Fleming. He completely submerges himself in the character. When he disappears after a 12- or 14-hour workday, it is either to engage in further conferences with Mr. Fleming over the script and tomorrow’s shooting or, more rarely, to engage in a little fishing in nearby Lake George. This is his only recreation.”
Fleming, even with the deliberate pace of production, wasn’t getting what he wanted. “I was only on the set twice,” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings said in a letter to a friend,
and I could tell Fleming wasn’t satisfied with Anne Revere or the boy. He was very nervous, taking sleeping tablets, etc., and felt he could handle things much better on the Hollywood sets. The wind registered on the sound track, not sounding like wind at all, etc. The boy, Gene Eckman, in looks and personality seemed quite all right, but the sound man had me listen in, and it was true, as he complained, that the boy was not enunciating and his lines were not registering. Tracy