Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [424]
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not retiring. The only time an actor really retires is when they don’t want him anymore. I don’t think that’s true in my case, although maybe it is. But I don’t see any point in making run-of-the-mill pictures. People can get as much of that stuff as they want on television. I’m not money hungry, and what I’d like to do is make maybe one picture a year or even less. But I want the picture to be memorable, something substantial and worthwhile. When I get out of my Thunderbird these days, my back hurts. And it’s not because of the driver’s seat. It’s because I’m not a kid anymore. And if I’m going to do a picture, I want the story to be solid and meaningful and entertaining. When the public walks out of the theater where a picture of mine’s been playing, I want to feel that the people have gotten their money’s worth.
He was working interiors the day his uncle Andrew died in Freeport at the age of seventy-two. It wasn’t unexpected; Andrew Tracy, in his forty-second year at the bank, had endured a trumped-up embezzlement investigation that left his spirit broken. Spence had sent Carroll to Freeport for moral support, and Carroll had brought Gene Sullivan down from Milwaukee. Results of a lie detector test were inconclusive, and a grand jury refused to indict him.
“So the whole thing evaporated,” said Andrew’s son Frank.
And after that he was never any good healthwise. His mental attitude was very sour. A couple of times I met with him in Chicago at the Blackstone when Spence was going through. And Spence would say, “Jesus, your dad is in terrible shape.” I’d say, “Yeah, he is.” He’d say, “That goddamn bank. That’s all he’s got in his head. No wonder he couldn’t get by a lie detector—the goddamn bank was like his wife. Could accept no criticism, wouldn’t sign that non-indictment thing … it was loyalty.” I said, “That’s the way he is, Spence. That’s the way he is. He’s straight as an arrow. He’ll accept no criticism of his character or his actions.” And Spence said, “Well, it’s gonna kill him.” Spence was very good to him, very concerned. He used to call up from California: “How’s he doing today?” And when he died, he called and said, “I can’t make it. We’re finishing up The Mountain. This picture’s a stinker, and I want to get it in back of me. I hate it. I’ve been buried in the thing for so long. I think in two weeks we can wrap it up here, and I’m going to stay with it.”
Tracy’s loathing of a picture was, for once, well founded. By purposely reducing the Teller brothers to “simple good and simple evil,” Ranald MacDougall had robbed them of all shading. The Mountain was ill written, miscast, awkwardly staged—and almost everyone, at least secretly, seemed to know it. “Oh, God, that was a terrible picture!” Claire Trevor exclaimed in 1983. “It goes on forever and it’s bad. Spencer Tracy plays the older brother of Robert Wagner who was then a beanpole, he was so skinny. He looked like he was twelve years old, and Spence had already gotten heavy and old-looking. It was ludicrous.” Eddie Dmytryk admitted that he never should have done the picture: “[Tracy] was playing Bob Wagner’s older brother but looked like Bob’s grandfather. We poured him on the plane but he continued drinking back here. It was an awful situation. I realized I had become his keeper.”
Tracy tried mightily in individual scenes, and occasionally he prevailed on a crowded soundstage when all eyes were upon him. Dmytryk described a scene toward the end of the picture in which Zachary recounts the climb and the rescue of the lone survivor, an Indian girl, and casts himself in a harsh light, insisting the hero of the day was his younger brother, killed in the process. “It is a long scene, running five to six minutes, interrupted only by one short question from E. G. Marshall near the beginning. I shot Tracy’s close-up first, as was frequently my custom, to ensure that this shot, in which most of this scene would