Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [487]
“The comedians,” said Marshall Schlom, “treated him as if he were God. When he came on the set, it was: ‘Do you want a glass of water?’ They valued his being there, and maybe that all paid off for Stanley. The only [other] one who got that kind of respect was Buster Keaton. When Buster worked, the comedians were toast. They fell apart.” Sid Caesar, the quietest of the principal comics, was also the most awestruck: “Seeing [Tracy] made me flash back to Loew’s Proctor Theatre in Yonkers when I saw him on the big screen in Captains Courageous with Freddie Bartholomew. Tracy kept to himself during most of the shooting. Every morning he would say, ‘Hello, Mr. Caesar,’ but we hardly ever spoke.”
On location, Tracy seemed to favor the women, particularly Edie Adams and Dorothy Provine. To Adams, who hadn’t done much movie work, he offered words of encouragement. To the twenty-seven-year-old Provine he seemed very much like her own father, and he would sit with her at lunch. “Everyone knew that he was not very well,” she said. “He’d say, ‘What time is your call tomorrow?’ I’d say, ‘Six o’clock.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, well, we’ll change that.’ So then he’d change his own call to later.”
The fact that Tracy looked old and diminished on camera wasn’t helped by his refusal to wear makeup. He was aided in his early scenes by the trademark hat he wore cocked over one eye, a show of bravado on even the toughest of days. He often arrived late and left early, laid low by bladder troubles, his own chronic sleeplessness, and the continuing loss of his friends and contemporaries. “We got to the set one day,” Caesar recalled, “and heard that Marilyn Monroe had died. Tracy was real broken up about that. He turned to me and said, ‘You think they would have stopped shooting for a minute out of respect.3 A star dies and the studio doesn’t stop for a minute. Clark Gable brought so much money into M-G-M and no one stopped when he died. There was no respect.’ ”
He got winded easily during the chase scenes through the back alleys of Long Beach, and the shots were mostly of his double, Tracy only breaking into a run for a few feet at a time. “During the filming of Mad World with all the comedians,” said Kramer, “I think that Spencer Tracy was in poorer health than I could remember: he had bad color and no stamina whatsoever. But then, even though this lack of energy showed, I think he had his best time ever during the making of a film.”
Off camera Tracy sat watching the comedians work, clearly fascinated at how they differed from actors. “The people whose memories have lived are entertainers, not actors,” he once observed. “Bert Williams, Al Jolson, Jack Benny. They’re entertainers and they’re allowed their wonderful instincts without any cages or anybody telling them, ‘No, stop there.’ Now some of them, of course, go way over and have to be held down. But great artists like Benny and Williams and Jolson—Gee, I want to tell you, when I watch a fellow like Bob Hope do a monologue, or Benny, the timing is something to behold.” Said Buddy Hackett: “He just loved watchin’ the guys.”
Kramer was under terrific pressure to bring the picture in on budget, and it took all his considerable skills as a producer to bring the thing off at all, let alone well. Despite the controls he had in place, the stunt-flying sequences nearly wrecked him. “It had been budgeted at $6.3 million,” Marshall Schlom remembered,
Two old masters: Tracy briefly shared the screen with Buster Keaton in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. (SUSIE TRACY)
but Paul Mantz was draining the budget with overages.