Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [333]
“Tracy,” said Ella Winter, “had refused to make a Judge-Meets-Girl picture with Lana Turner, and his refusal had been accepted as final by [the] producer and studio.” Getting back to the “Wargate matter”—the ethical dilemma that confronts Judge Timberlane as his marriage is crumbling—was no easy thing, as about a quarter of the picture had already been shot. Filming resumed with a greater sense of mission, if not necessarily the wherewithal to accomplish it, and Stewart’s changes, such as they were, came in the form of retakes about halfway through the course of production. “In the book,” said George Sidney, “the judge is supposed to be 41 but he acts 65. We’ve tried to straighten that out. The story is really about two people who haven’t sat down and thought out what their marriage means to them. Each has a different idea about it. The judge wants honesty, integrity, a marriage on his own terms. The girl wants freedom. She wants to go to New York, maybe to a cocktail party in the Waldorf Towers, all the things a small town girl dreams about.”
The son of an M-G-M executive, Sidney, thirty, had been around the studio all of his adult life, initially as a director of Our Gang comedies. “I’d played polo with Spence and he called me ‘Kid.’ He came to my office for the first conference, full of his usual doubts, and asked, ‘Kid, can you handle me?’ Getting the fix on a character was agony for him … But once we started, and he had found the motivation, he was marvelous.”
As with the previous picture, Tracy was surrounded by a cast of seasoned character people, among them Mary Astor, Albert Dekker, Margaret Lindsay, Rose Hobart, John Litel, Mona Barrie, Josephine Hutchinson, and John Alexander (who was known to both stage and screen audiences as the boisterous Teddy Brewster of Arsenic and Old Lace). From a publicity standpoint, the most fuss was made over Selena Royle, who had signed a term contract with M-G-M in 1943. Tracy had created a stir by coming onto the set of her first picture on the lot, Mrs. Parkington, and telling Sidney Skolsky she was “one of the few people, when I was in stock, who thought I might someday amount to something on the stage.” Apart from running into him at the studio, however, or into Louise at a premiere, Selena never saw either of them. Not knowing their situation at home, she was plainly bewildered by their seeming aloofness.
“I had pushed their baby’s perambulator along the streets of Brooklyn while we both were playing there,” she said. “We had worked together for months at a time, year after year. I had dined with them, they with me. We had shared a small amount of success together, and we always had been there to console when the going got tough for any one of us … I was never asked to their house, nor was my presence in Hollywood acknowledged in any way.”
Selena was in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, playing Phyllis Thaxter’s mother in the final minutes of the picture, and she was considered part of the M-G-M stock company when she was selected to play Louise Wargate in Cass Timberlane. It wasn’t a big part, and she wasn’t even sure at first if Spence knew she was in it.
“A huge cast of actors and extras were sitting around during one of the customary long waits while electricians work on the lights. Suddenly there occurred one of those complete silences which inexplicably descends on a large group of people … out of which Spence’s voice boomed over a microphone, ‘This is all your fault, Selena. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be driving a truck in Milwaukee and happy.’
“I replied that he might have been driving a truck, but he wouldn’t have been happy.”
Just four days into the run of The Rugged Path, another hotly anticipated show made