Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [342]
In May, word went around town that Dick Mook had died of a stroke in Memphis at the age of fifty-three. Five days later, Father Flanagan suffered a fatal heart attack while in Europe on a tour of Austria and Germany. Tracy was hit hard by the sudden death of a man so closely aligned with him in the public mind, furiously pacing the floor and craving a drink as at no other time in the three years since his last. “I watched my father walk the floor and bite his lips until they bled to keep from drinking,” he had told his cousin Jane, “and I know what he went through.” And now, alone with his aunt Jenny, he paced and he chewed, he paced and he chewed. “I’m not going to be like my father,” he said with his voice cracking, tears welling in his eyes, blood trickling down his chin. “I’m not. I’m going to lick it!”
A wire went out to Patrick Norton, Monsignor Flanagan’s assistant, who was in the process of returning to Boys Town the body of its founder:
THERE IS NOT MUCH I CAN SAY, OTHER THAN TO EXTEND MY DEEP DEEP SYMPATHY TO THE BOYS IN THEIR GREAT LOSS. THE MEMORY OF A MAN AS GREAT AS HE WAS WILL HELP SUSTAIN THEM IN THEIR SORROW FOR HE WAS TRULY A FINE A[ND] GOOD MAN.
Mercifully, Tracy was set to leave town again within a few days. M-G-M had revived a plan to make pictures at the former Amalgamated Studios, Borehamwood, under a new Anglo-U.S. films agreement that would enable American producers to use unremittable sterling for quota-qualifying productions.1 For Edward, My Son, the scheme meant that Tracy would be surrounded by an all-British cast, headed by the Scottish-born actress Deborah Kerr. Of the Americans involved, there would be only himself, Knopf, Cukor, and Donald Ogden Stewart. He and Kerr left for London aboard the H.M.S. Queen Mary on May 22, Howard Strickling and his wife Gail accompanying them at Tracy’s request.
“I’ve come to work,” he told a dockside reporter upon his arrival, dispensing with the usual how-nice-it-is-to-be-here routine. “My new picture, Edward, My Son, should take ten or twelve weeks to make. If they get it over in eight weeks, I’ll be glad. The idea is to get in and get out fast. There should be no hanging around.” Asked the dreaded question about acting and his approach to it, he creased his brow, brick-red from the sun, and ran his tongue along his teeth, jutting his lower lip out in an expression of near pain. “You should know all about acting,” he replied. “Britain has that side of the business sewn up. In America we have no actors to touch Olivier, Richardson, and Donat. Olivier is way out in front of anything we can produce. That is the tragedy of Hollywood. We are out of touch with the theatre and we have no real actors now. Our young boys lack theatre training.”
He dismissed his alleged naturalness as an “instinct for the stage” and said that he had never really had to struggle to get on. “If you really want to know, it is just that I try no tricks. No profile. No ‘great lover’ act. I could never get by with things like that. I just project myself as I am—plain, trying to be honest. I am a guy who likes reading and an old man’s game of tennis. I leave the frills to the youngsters.”
Metro had poured £1 million into capital improvements at Elstree (as the studios were now known), making it the largest and most modern production facility in all of Great Britain. Portions were still under construction when Tracy arrived on the scene, and war-era Romney huts still dotted the property.