Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [291]
Actor Van Johnson joined the company in early March, playing Ted Randall, the young airman who becomes Irene Dunne’s love interest in the wake of Tracy’s death. At twenty-six, Johnson found himself cast in the awkward role of swain to a woman old enough to be his mother. It took Fleming’s sensitive but no-nonsense direction to put their relationship across in a way that wasn’t jarring—nor even particularly noticeable—to the audience. “I finished the first take,” Johnson remembered, “and Mr. Fleming said, ‘Print that.’ I looked to Tracy for approval. He said, ‘Is that the way you’re going to play it?’ Well, I shriveled. He was joking, of course.”
Director Victor Fleming (right, with his back to the camera) looks on as Tracy and Irene Dunne dance to the strains of “Wonderful One” for A Guy Named Joe. Note the makeshift corral that keeps the two stars in focus. (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy recalled that Johnson had once asked for his autograph outside Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills, and he was naturally disposed to taking younger actors under his wing. “He liked young actors,” said Barry Nelson, who was playing a featured role in the picture, “and he tried to help them—not so much in telling you how to read anything, but he certainly was a role model. He came on always perfectly prepared—long speeches, whatever. You would think he’d been out carousing all night or something, and he had that way about him on the set as if nothing mattered too much, but you knew that he’d worked very hard the night before. He was not only letter perfect but interpretation prefect.”
Production moved at Fleming’s usual deliberate pace until the night of March 31, 1943, when Van Johnson was critically injured while driving a group of friends to the studio to run off a print of Keeper of the Flame. Broadsided at the intersection of Venice and Clarington, just a block north of the main gate, he was thrown from the car and ended up with his head braced by the curb. “My face was wet,” he said, “and I thought it was raining, but it was blood … My nose was up against my eyes, and my scalp had come unstuck. They lifted it up like a flap and poured in handfuls of sulfa.”
At the hospital Johnson overheard a doctor say, “He’ll never work in pictures again, even if he does live.” Down three quarts of blood, he was only able to survive, it was theorized, because regular donations at the Red Cross had conditioned his system. Reportedly, Tracy was the first person from the studio permitted to see him. “Van Johnson is so sick from that automobile accident,” Sheilah Graham reported in her column of April 7, “that his doctors are afraid to operate.”
Fleming shut down the picture because Johnson, playing a young recruit under Tracy’s ghostly tutelage, was in almost every scene. As discussions centered on whom they’d get to replace him, Tracy went to Irene Dunne and urged a show of solidarity. “I was in the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, all packed in ice, and the eye was closed, and they put a plate in my head,” said Johnson, “and that was when Irene Dunne and Spencer Tracy went to Mr. Mayer and said, ‘Let us wait for Van.’ That gave me a goal, it gave me sunlight at the end of the tunnel, because everybody said, ‘He won’t photograph …’ ” Eddie Lawrence remembered the gesture as a measure of the regard Tracy had for a young actor who considered him a mentor. “Now that was really something to do,” he said, “because that was a [matter] of time commitments. And Spence went down there to see Van