Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [290]
Tracy and Dunne knew each other casually—they were godparents to Pat O’Brien’s adopted son, Terry—but they had never before worked together. For her part, Dunne said that she admired Tracy’s work and was looking forward to the assignment. Tracy, who by now was rarely talking to the press, said nothing. Filming began on February 15 with Victor Fleming directing a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo. It was the fifth picture together for Tracy and Fleming—sixth counting the aborted Yearling—and the two men were typically chummy while Dunne, who had never before worked at M-G-M, sat quietly off to one side, knitting as the crew bustled around her. She was now forty-four years of age—old by Hollywood standards—and would soon slip into character parts. Fleming, she recalled, was not well, and nobody seemed terribly happy. It didn’t help that he scheduled an angry exchange between Dunne and Tracy as the very first scene to be shot. “It was winter,” she said, “it was dark and raining and the whole set was gloomy.”
Tracy’s relationship with Hepburn was common knowledge, and Dunne began work on A Guy Named Joe convinced he had wanted Kate for the picture, not her. Having started taking Dexedrine—in part to counter the dopey effects of the Nembutal he was now routinely gulping at bedtime—Tracy’s mood on the set was uncharacteristically buoyant. Dunne plainly thought him obnoxious: “The first few days, Spence was VERY difficult, testing me out. He badgered the director, Vic Fleming, and behaved badly until I told him to settle down.”
Tracy’s inclination to joke about his age put her on the defensive, given she was seventeen months his senior and acutely conscious of it. When he went up—blew a line—he said, “I guess I’m just getting too old. I might as well play character parts and stop kidding myself.” Similarly, Dalton Trumbo could remember watching some early rushes in the company of Fleming, Everett Riskin, and Eddie Mannix: “As the star appeared on the screen with his leading lady, a voice rumbled back from the darkness of the front row: ‘Look at that pair of overage destroyers!’ It was, of course, the incomparable Tracy in a moment of discontent.”
Dunne was also thrown by Tracy’s refusal to rehearse. “I don’t particularly like to rehearse a lot,” she said, “but I don’t like not rehearsing at all.” Fleming wasn’t terribly sympathetic, making it difficult for her to get her bearings. “We had trouble understanding each other,” she said of Tracy. “He was my hero. Then, when we started working, he got the idea that I thought he wasn’t a hero anymore. Which was not true. But he had this big mental thing, and there was even talk of taking me off the film. That’s one thing I’ll always say about L. B. Mayer. I knew they were going to be looking at some film, and I made up my mind I was going to be my best—my best, my best, my very best. So they came out of the projection room and Mayer said, ‘If we’re going to replace anybody, let’s replace Tracy.’ Which they never would have done, of course. But I’ll always remember that. And we ironed everything out, Tracy and I.”
Said Emily Torchia, “Victor Fleming was always boss on the set and Tracy was macho. It didn’t take a week before both of them were bringing tea for Irene and waiting on her. She’s a perfect example of the soft-spoken woman who turns men on more than sexpots.” Dunne would later recall the picture as her “most difficult,” not simply because of Tracy, but also because of the almost constant shifts in personnel. “I enjoyed working with Tracy,” she said in retrospect, “but physically we had a lot of problems like changing hairdressers and different makeup people. Cameramen. We had to change cameramen. All those things tend to make the thing not run smoothly.”
At first glance Fleming was as unlike Tracy as any man could be. Tall and spare with nervous gray eyes, he was, Eddie Lawrence remembered, a great cook, a real gourmet with fifty or sixty different recipes for bouillabaisse alone. “He’d taken a walking trip around the Mediterranean and up through France and every place he got