Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [294]
At the Hollywood Canteen. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
The meetings of the so-called Boys’ Club had become less frequent, though no less important to its individual members, who shifted from time to time. “When Spence was off the sauce, he was kind of a sour guy,” James Cagney recalled. “He would shun company, so I would have dinner with him alone. I think he was a very sad man. I made no demands on him. It was just small talk mostly.” The experience of public dining soured considerably for the group after Tracy’s 1942 binge, when retakes for Tortilla Flat had been held up several weeks. “It was never announced where we would have dinner,” Frank McHugh remembered. “It was a guarded secret. However, we could never elude ‘Square Deal’ [Billy] Grady. He would invariably show up and sit at another table alone. Keeping an eye on Spence, no doubt, [while he was working].”
Whenever they wanted privacy, the boys would meet at the home of one of the members. “All the wives,” said Dorothy McHugh, “were perfectly willing to arrange it and disappear, but whoever you had for a cook, it got to be this terrible rivalry. You know, who had the best dinner. Somebody would come home and say, ‘You should get that pie at the Cagneys! The best I ever tasted!’ ” When it came Spence’s turn, the group assembled at Kate’s rented house in Beverly Hills, “and she would be there with Ethel Barrymore and people like that. But, of course, the wives never went! She would maybe not have it be the Boys’ Club night, but would invite them to a dinner party.”
Van Johnson’s recovery was speedier than anyone expected, and work on A Guy Named Joe resumed in early July 1943. He still suffered from frequent headaches and fatigue and was left with facial scars that required heavy makeup and careful lighting to hide, but the effect was remarkably subtle, and the rushes betrayed no hint of the trauma he had been through. Irene Dunne was in a tougher spot, because Johnson’s return put her in the unenviable position of having to shoot two pictures simultaneously, portraying Dorinda the seasoned pilot on some days, the misty-eyed Susan Dunn on others. “I’ve always lived the characters I played,” she said, “and to be these two entirely different women at the same time was unbearable.”
Tracy’s Pete Sandidge1 was one of his richest creations, a cocky hotdogger of a pilot who lent himself to endless colorations, unseen and unheard as he was by the earthly members of the cast. “He brought the art of reacting to a new height,” Barry Nelson observed. “I would get to see the dailies, and what I didn’t learn sitting on the set … because it’s very hard to see the expressions … you could see them in the close-ups and two-shots in the dailies. You saw how much he had added in his thought process of what that character was thinking when someone else was speaking … He was always right on the button; there was never a wasted movement, a wasted thought, never an extraneous one, great economy in his playing.”
In Sandidge, Louise could see Spence as he was at home, the sparkle in his eyes, the puckish Irish humor, the natural intensity of a man always up on his game. “I have seldom lost myself in a picture when he was on,” she once commented. “I was always watching him.” However, in A Guy Named Joe she could immerse herself, revel in it, forget, for a change, that it was a movie. “You can just see him as he was,” she said of it. “It was just so real. He had some of the