Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [414]
That evening, Tracy boarded a United Airlines flight for Denver, arriving back in Montrose on the morning of the fourteenth. The weather was bad—Wise got only one scene in the can—and Tracy wasn’t called for work at all. The next day was sunny and clear, and Tracy shot his first scene for the picture, Rodock’s entrance to the ranch. The company finished the day with a barn interior. “[G]ood day’s work,” Tracy wrote. “Bob Wise agrees with foregoing.” That evening, assistant director Arvid Griffin barbecued steaks and tomatoes for everyone on an outdoor grill.
“We arranged our shooting up at the ranch,” said Wise,
in a way that [Tracy] could come up for only an hour or two the first couple of days to get acclimated because it was much higher than the town we were staying in. After that, I still took it very easy—just two or three hours a day. He was being a little irascible with both Bob Francis and Irene Papas, but I attributed that to the altitude. He kept complaining about shortness of breath and suggesting that we move the location to a lower altitude. Finally, about the fifth day, he had a bit of action where he had to bend over and pick up a horse’s hoof and examine it. When he came up, he kind of gasped and said, “Bob, you better get someone else to replace me. The only way I can finish this film is if you can scrub this location and we go down to a lower place.” I just about had it up to my eyeballs by that time. I said, “Okay, Spencer, we go down the hill and talk to the studio.” I called Sam Zimbalist, who knew of the problems I was having, and told him I couldn’t continue with Tracy. An hour later he called me back and said that Tracy was out of the picture.
Tracy tersely recorded the events of the day in his datebook: “Wise and Griff[in] talk to Strickling—all feel cannot go on in altitude…[C]all to studio. Replaced.”
Said Wise: “I went over to see him. I was so angry at this man because of the mess he caused, but he was so emotional about it.” Tracy, he recalled, was almost in tears. “It’s the end of my career,” he told the director. “I’m finished. I’ll never make another picture.” Wise, at first, could muster little sympathy for a man who had given him such fits. Like everyone else, Wise thought Tracy had conspired to make The Mountain during the time it would have taken to rebuild the sets at a lower elevation. “After one hour of this, as mad as I was, I was also feeling sympathy and sorrow for him. Tracy always came on the screen like the Rock of Gibraltar, yet he was actually the reverse of his screen image.”
That night, Tracy made a one-word entry in his datebook: “Gin!” He caught an 11:00 p.m. flight out of Grand Junction, arriving back in Los Angeles at three in the morning. Tom Pryor of the New York Times got hold of the story and ran it as an eight-inch item on the twenty-first:
This morning the studio publicity department said Mr. Tracy had experienced difficulties working in a high altitude. Montrose, on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, is 5,820 feet above sea level. Later, a studio executive acknowledged that the altitude was not the only cause of Mr. Tracy’s return. “Spencer is very exacting about everything he does,” the executive said, “and he is unhappy about several things. The studio has to determine if it wants to give in to him on some points.” Metro executives are meeting with the actor’s agent, Bert Allenberg of the William Morris agency, and it is expected that a decision about Mr. Tracy’s continuance will be made within forty-eight hours.
Had Eddie Mannix been on hand, had Kate been there, had Tracy had the kind of gentle handling and reassurance he always needed at the start of a picture, the outcome might have been different. Mannix, however, was recovering