Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [398]
Richard Widmark had declined to sign a new contract with Fox, and Zanuck retaliated by assigning him to Broken Lance, where he was accorded fourth billing after Tracy, Wagner, and Jean Peters.
I told Tracy I was trying to get out of the movie, but it had nothing to do with him. I told him, “You’re the greatest actor, and I’ve admired you since I was a babe in arms.” He understood completely. Strangely enough, a few weeks later, we were shooting a scene and I had nothing to do—just stand around. It was Spence’s scene; he was doing all the talking. I happened to be standing in the wrong place or something, and he looked up and said, “Who the fuck do you think is the star of this picture?” I said, “Oh, Spence, come on.” Then he got embarrassed. That’s the other side of Tracy. He could be very petty and egomaniacal.
Tracy was impressed when he learned that Sol Siegel, the line producer on Broken Lance, was the same man who had fired Eddie Dmytryk from Paramount in 1940. That it was the same Sol Siegel who wanted him for a picture at Fox thirteen years later gave Dmytryk a measure of “personal vindication” that made the offer of Broken Lance irresistible. So when the AP’s Bob Thomas visited the set, Tracy puckishly appropriated the story, suitably embellished, and claimed for the first time that he himself had been fired from Fox in 1935. There was nobody to contradict him—Thomas didn’t know any better, both Winnie Sheehan and Sidney Kent were dead, and Zanuck hadn’t yet arrived on the scene when Tracy made the move to Metro.
“But one thing pleased me about the whole affair,” Tracy said to Thomas. “At eight o’clock that night, my agent took me over to M-G-M to have a talk with Louis B. Mayer. At nine o’clock I was signed to a contract, and I’ve been there ever since.”
The column ran nationally, suggesting that Zanuck could have had Tracy in his stable of stars all along had his predecessors only behaved more judiciously. Perhaps more to the point were reports that Tracy would be leaving M-G-M at the end of his current contract.
“Will I sign again? I don’t know. At first I didn’t think I would because I didn’t think they wanted me. Nobody said anything about staying. I think that’s why a lot of actors leave. But we have started having talks, and something may come of it. I still have three pictures to make for them. After that, who knows?”
When Tracy left for New York and London on April 24, it was to meet up with Kate and prepare for the filming of Highland Fling, which was set to go at the end of June. Based on the book Digby by David Walker, the script was by Angus McPhail, whose Whiskey Galore was one of the comic gems to emerge from Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios. The settling of arrangements to shoot the film in Scotland coincided with the cancellation of The Millionairess, which, despite Hepburn’s participation and a “brilliant” screenplay from Preston Sturges, collapsed under its own weight.
She was back in New York when Tracy’s TWA flight touched down at Idlewild, and they met for an intimate dinner the next night at the Pierre. A pinched nerve—an old neck injury—was troubling him, and he needed three fillings in his teeth replaced. They dined with Laura Harding, Constance Collier, the Douglases (who were passing through town), the Leland Haywards, Irene Selznick. Tracy filled the time between meals and doctor appointments watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV.
In London they met up with the Kanins, the Don Stewarts, George Cukor (whose M-G-M contract would soon be up), the Douglases (again), Bobby Helpmann, and Michael Benthall. Tracy’s guests drank freely around him; one night with the Stewarts, he noted Guinness Stout and Ale in his book with some big question marks following the entry. Two nights later, in the same company, he drew a picture of a bottle of Dubonnet on the page. Once with Kate, Helpmann, and Benthall,