Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [458]
There wasn’t any answer because I never did think of the snapper. He did it 14 different ways, and he was just setting the stage properly. Anyway, for some reason after that, and I choose to believe that it was because the material was right and we had a rapport and he felt I was doing my job and God knows he was doing his, he went along just fine. The cooperation and the driving intensity to do the job was beyond anything I’d ever experienced.
“Everyone on the set was sort of petrified when Tracy came about,” remembered actor Jimmy Boyd, who at age twenty was chosen to play Howard, one of Cates’ biology students. “Once he was on the set, everyone shut up.” Reared in the South, Boyd himself wasn’t familiar with Tracy or his work. He was a semiregular on Bachelor Father, a Revue TV series shooting two stages over, and always seemed to be in transit between the two jobs. “He just smiled,” Boyd said of Tracy. “He heard that I was quite a swinger around town. Spencer would motion me over to sit with him. Then he’d ask, ‘What blonde were you with last night?’ It wasn’t that he was so serious, he just thought it was kind of funny.”
The give-and-take between Tracy and March seemed to energize them both, and the long scenes they played were done without cuts. “I had about 250 extras as spectators on the set,” Kramer said, “and because of the camera movement I wasn’t able to do what we usually do, which is snip part of them every day so that when you do a closeup or whatever, but we were moving in circles and I needed them there. As a result, for some 35 days these 250 people sat there and watched these fellows go at each other, and they started to applaud at the end of each scene alternately. Both of them came alive under the influence of the applause.”
March’s character was, by definition, the more theatrical of the two, a man used to filling whole arenas in the days before amplification. (“I seen him once,” Meeker, the bailiff, tells Cates. “At a Chautauqua meeting in Chattanooga. The tent poles shook!”) The courtroom makes a puny theater for a figure of such size, playing to the crowd as he does with grand gestures and thundering oratory. Drummond, the old warrior, lies back, permitting the bombastic Brady to do the heavy lifting of the buffoon. It made for a bantering relationship between the two actors, each of whom had obvious affection for the other.
“Better stand up,” Tracy advised columnist Joe Hyams as March approached. “Here comes the Doctor Doctor. Freddie has two doctorates. He just got his second from his alma mater, Elmira.”
“Tracy’s got a doctorate, too,” March shot back, taking a seat for himself. “Got his right after Captains Courageous. They wanted to take it away from him after he did Jekyll and Hyde.”
Hyams observed Tracy taking Gene Kelly aside to warn him that March had been cracking walnuts during what was supposed to have been Kelly’s close-up. March, in turn, urged Tracy to tell Hyams when he was going to retire. “When you’ve seen this picture all put together,” Tracy retorted, “you will have seen me in my prime. I cracked Brazil nuts all through your scenes.”
There was, to be sure, a considerable amount of fly-catching, March with his food, his sweating, his belches and grimaces. “He wouldn’t put down the fucking fan,” Tracy later said of his colleague’s performance. Yet he allowed, “It was a lot of fun. I love Freddie. We got along beautifully, wonderfully.”
Donna Anderson, who was studying with a coach, tried talking to Tracy about acting but could never get much out of him. “He was very nice to me,” she said. “I would ask him about acting, and he would say, ‘There’s nothing I can teach you. You either are an actor, or you’re not. And you are.’ Then he’d change the subject with a wave of the hand.”
Gene Kelly, who hadn’t played many straight parts,