Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [267]
Louise was all for it, but Spence, as it turned out, could manage only four weeks between the finish of Edison, the Man, and the start of Boom Town and had to settle for a short trip to Phoenix instead. In September 1940 Steinbeck had Tracy to the house he had built at the Biddle Ranch, Los Gatos, where he was preparing the narration for a documentary that had been shot in Mexico over the spring. Codirected by Herbert Klein and Alexander Hammid, The Forgotten Village told the story of a cholera outbreak in the rural village of Santiago and the clash that takes place between the healing traditions of the village elders and modern medical science. Steinbeck asked Tracy if he would narrate the completed film and was delighted when he said that he would. “He has a great heart,” Steinbeck wrote his friend, actor Max Wagner. “I knew he would want to do it.”
Tracy had just started Jekyll and Hyde when he saw a rough cut of The Forgotten Village in a screening room at M-G-M. He professed to like the film but was guarded and, Steinbeck thought, “a little afraid” of Herbert Klein’s direction. Steinbeck came down to Los Angeles, but by the time he arrived, Klein was ill and in the hospital and Tracy had been told he couldn’t do the narration, suggesting to him that the studio had played along just long enough to get Jekyll and Hyde under way. Steinbeck blamed Eddie Mannix for the double cross and briefly plotted revenge, intending to “blast” Metro’s forthcoming production of Tortilla Flat and wondering in a letter to his agent if they couldn’t make trouble over the similarities between The Red Pony and The Yearling, which extended to the name of the boys (which in both cases was Jody). “If we don’t want money we might easily get a court order,” Steinbeck suggested. “And I want to plague them as much as I can.”
The flap over Forgotten Village was allowed to die down—Burgess Meredith replaced Tracy as the film’s narrator—and an olive branch was extended in the form of an offer to adapt Tortilla Flat to the screen. “I had a letter yesterday from your charming bosses asking whether I would like to collaborate on Tortilla Flat, in which, it was said, you were to be,” Steinbeck wrote Tracy in mid-June. “I replied that I would like to very much if I could be happy doing it—my happiness requiring control of the script, a lot of money, and the right to work somewhere but Hollywood.”
Steinbeck couldn’t see how anything more than a series of blackouts could be made from his tales of idyllic poverty in the hills above the California coast. He had already seen one failed attempt at dramatization—a Broadway play that lasted all of five performances—and doubted anything better could come from a film version. When he sold the screen rights to Paramount in 1935 he needed the money, and he wasn’t kidding when he offered Metro, which acquired the rights in 1940, $10,000 to simply take it off the market. Producer Sam Zimbalist put John Lee Mahin on the script, and the two men were in Monterey, soaking up the local atmosphere, when they encountered Steinbeck at a local bar where the fishermen and soldiers drank.
“What are you doing to my story?” the author demanded.
“We’ve butched it up plenty,” came the reply.
What they had done, other than to remove a lot of the sex, petty theft, and drunkenness of the book, was to change the ending, focusing on the “poison of possessions” and letting Steinbeck’s romantic hero, Danny, live only to have him married off—another form of death among the paisanos of the novel. Much to everyone’s surprise, Steinbeck asked to see the script and actually liked it, telling Mahin that he’d made the story “a hell of a lot more fun” by taking all the