Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [369]
There was, in fact, a general feeling of disgruntlement among the old hands on the M-G-M lot, for Schary was a writer, not an administrator, and his bent for moralizing was milking all the sex and showmanship from the M-G-M brand. For a western called Lone Star, Schary had cut an unscripted shot of Ava Gardner strolling happily down a street, singing to herself, after an evening of obvious lovemaking with Clark Gable, maintaining the image was neither funny nor in good taste. Director Vincent Sherman could remember Tracy’s rueful comment upon hearing the story over lunch one day. “Since Schary took over,” he said, “there’s no fucking in M-G-M pictures.”
L. B. Mayer hated Schary’s taste in material and, at the age of sixty-six, could feel himself being pushed aside by the younger man and his patron, Nicholas Schenck, whose relationship with Mayer had deteriorated to the point where the two men were no longer speaking. Thau, a Mayer partisan whose coolness toward Schary never wavered, had doubtless seen Mayer’s ultimatum coming and conspired to be out of the country when the inevitable rupture took place. As he and Tracy departed for New York, Mayer was rumored to be part of a syndicate looking to buy a controlling interest in Warner Bros. for $25 million.
Reports of Mayer’s resignation were circulating anew as Thau and Tracy quietly knocked about London. The announcement came on June 22, 1951, when the old man issued a statement through a spokesman saying that he was quitting the company that bore his name but not the industry he had helped establish. “I am going to remain in motion picture production, God willing. I am going to be more active than at any time during the last 15 years,” Mayer was quoted as saying.
A formal farewell followed on the twenty-fifth. (“Naturally, I regret severing the ties and relationships that have been built up over the years …”) Both Thau and Mannix took Tracy to dinner at Romanoff’s to assure him that all was well within the company. Tracy had an afternoon appointment with Mayer on the twenty-seventh to say good-bye, and was on hand when Mayer officially left, treading a red carpet laid at the door of the Thalberg Building, the assembled executives and secretaries applauding as he made his exit.
There was a time when it seemed that Dore Schary’s story department functioned largely for the purpose of generating material for Spencer Tracy. In 1950 alone, no fewer than seven properties were supposedly allocated to Tracy and his schedule, when only two could actually be made. Yankees in Texas dealt with the relocation of a Connecticut aviation plant to Texas during the war; People in Love was an original from Karl Tunberg and Leonard Spiegelgass; Angels in the Outfield, a comedy about a ball team so bad that only a miracle could save it.
Tracy resisted When in Rome, another comedy, because it had him playing a crook posing as a priest. Jealousy was one of those multipart affairs in vogue at the time, three stories of the green-eyed monster from three different perspectives, a different actress for each. He turned down Amigo, from a screenplay by Jo Swerling and Sy Bartlett, on the excuse that nobody could follow the late Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa. The flow continued into 1951 with greater success: Plymouth Adventure was always part of the mix, a bad idea that seemingly refused to go away, but January also brought the purchase of Ruth Gordon’s autobiographical play Years Ago, for which Tracy was set to play her father (a role taken on Broadway by Fredric March). And several months later, Pat and Mike was formally added to the M-G-M schedule, intended, as always, to be another vehicle for Tracy and Hepburn.
Originally set as the second of Tracy’s two pictures for the year