Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [344]
Tracy was at the River Club into September, Hepburn alternately in Hartford and nearby on Forty-ninth Street. Metro had a new production chief in Dore Schary, the onetime actor and screenwriter who was being talked up around town as the “new” Thalberg—a dangerous appellation. Schary had played a minor part in The Last Mile and seemed a bit fixated on Tracy. Their first meeting in Schary’s new suite of offices took on the tone of an amateur theatrical as Tracy, rubbing his hands in a dry wash, assumed the groveling posture of Uriah Heep. “I don’t know if you remember me,” he said in his very best Roland Young. “My name is Tracy … Well sir, you may remember that I was in a play with you called The Last Mile…Well, believe me, Mr. Schary, you can ask anyone in that play—I told all of them—just keep your eye on that young fella who plays the reporter—one day he’s going to be head of M-G-M.” Then, dropping the character, he added: “And so you are—you son of a bitch.” Tracy told Schary he had no gripes, no complaints, that he was on the wagon and that he felt pretty good. “Just send me the stuff you want me to do. If I like it, I’ll do it. If not, I’ll tell you to get another player.”
Schary’s first production for M-G-M was to be William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, and it had already been announced that Tracy would play lawyer John Gavin Stevens with Claude Jarman, Jr., the eventual Jody of The Yearling, as his nephew. Within a month Intruder had been supplanted by Robinson Crusoe, a story that had been in and out of the columns for at least three years. Tracy disliked the prospect of traveling to Jamaica, where the exteriors were to be shot, and began making noises once again of wanting out of his M-G-M contract. In New York, Lawrence Langner pressed for word on Touch of the Poet and suggested to Kate that she arrange for Captains Courageous to be shown in Salem so that O’Neill and his wife Carlotta could see it.
By the first of the year, Tracy was set to do a different picture for Schary, the somewhat true story of how an itinerant newspaperman working for the American government partnered with a convicted smuggler to get much-needed rubber out of the Jap-infested territories of Southeast Asia. Called Operation Malaya, it had been set for Schary to do at RKO, where he had planned to star Robert Mitchum and Merle Oberon. When Howard Hughes, more interested in the growing Communist threat than wartime Axis enemies, pulled the plug on it, Schary arranged to have the material, which included a full screenplay by novelist Frank Fenton, brought to M-G-M. As his inaugural project for the studio, Operation Malaya was fast-tracked on the production schedule, a start date aggressively set for mid-February 1949. Tracy had just read Fenton’s script, filled with the florid dialogue typical of Fenton’s B-picture output, when he learned, over dinner at Romanoff’s, that Victor Fleming had died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine.
Tracy had not seen much of Fleming in the four years that had passed since the completion of A Guy Named Joe, the last of their five pictures together. In the interim, Vic had directed just two additional films—Clark Gable’s ill-fated return to the screen, Adventure, and a top-heavy version of the Maxwell Anderson play Joan of Lorraine, for which he had partnered with Ingrid Bergman and producer Walter Wanger. The epic film had recently had its New York and Hollywood premieres to very mixed reviews, and Fleming was reported to have been “exhausted” after the nearly two-year ordeal of getting it made. (“Vic Fleming wore himself out on that picture,” Bergman later wrote. “He was here, there, and everywhere.”) Fleming was vacationing