Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [423]
Location work on The Mountain ended with a retake, as the weather prevented further shooting at the village. After lunch, the B Unit went to the first Téléphérique station to shoot plates, and the ordeal was at last at an end. There was a party that night and a presentation to the guides who had made the whole expedition possible.
“It was quite a wingding,” Eddie Dmytryk recalled, “and, naturally, many toasts had to be drunk with the excellent local wines. Just as naturally, Tracy had to drink them.” Said Wagner:
It was the end of the location and everyone was rather relaxed. And he started off by stopping and having a beer, then a little piece of cheese, and everyone was all very happy … When we left [Chamonix], it was Claire Trevor, [her husband] Milton [Bren], myself. We were all in a van coming down the hill, and I remember Spence took his hat off and he went, “Whooow!” and flung it right out into the Alps. We got down to Paris, and it didn’t take much for him … Spence was very nervous about flying … I think he was very anxious, and when we got on the plane he had a few belts on the plane. We landed in New York and got on another plane to come to L.A., and he was out of control.
The flight was to be met at LAX by Louise and Susie, but Carroll headed them off, gravely whispering something in Louise’s ear. “It was the first inkling I ever had that he had a drinking problem,” Susie remembered. “On the way home, my mother explained it a bit, saying it was something he’d had to battle all his life.”2
Where he went, whom he was with, is uncertain to this day. “Carroll came and got him,” said Wagner, “and they took him away.” Tracy’s datebook entry for the twenty-eighth carries a picture of a jug and the notation “Home TWA 11 PM drove.” The final two days of September show identical words: “out” and “orchestra.” (“He wasn’t belligerent,” said Wagner. “He said, ‘We’ll get the band and we’ll get together.’ ”)
“For the next six days,” wrote Eddie Dmytryk, “I received daily progress reports: This quiet, very private man was on the town, and in spades. I shot what few scenes I could without him, then closed down. On day seven, he was in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. I planned to restart production a week from that day, and in a week he showed up, ready to work. For a few days he had a bottle of milk constantly at hand. Then it was back to Cokes again and what Warren G. Harding called ‘normalcy.’ ”
Somewhat chastened after ten days of “illness,” Tracy became a model employee, welcoming visitors to the set—Cary Grant, Pearl Bailey, Jesse Lasky, Donald O’Connor—and cooperating with the press to the extent of handwriting the answers to eighteen questions submitted him by Jack Hirshberg of the studio’s publicity department. On what basis do you select your roles? one question asked. “Don’t just want to make movies at this stage of the game,” he replied. “I’m an old bastard. Hard to please.” Do you ever want to direct? “No. Lack patience to deal with actors.” Teet Carle, who had worked with Tracy as a publicist at M-G-M, was now publicity director at Paramount: “[Tracy] prompted the tops in good fellowship reunions when I met him in the studio café. I was his ‘old buddy’ whom he had missed. Maybe he, at long last, was sleeping better.”
At the beginning of production, Tracy had notified Bill McGarry and Harry Caplan that he was accustomed to taking a ninety-minute lunch (although it was not mentioned in his contract). At the studio he fell into the habit of returning to the set thirty to forty-five minutes later than expected, setting off another round of internal hand-wringing.