Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [96]
With Raker topping the cast, Tracy found himself relegated to the peripheral part of Donroy, the slick salesman who first sells Gilbert and Marilyn Sterling their neighbors’ car, then takes it off their hands at the end of the film when he peddles it to the cash-rich janitor, a bootlegger. Not only was the material stale, but the director was Thornton Freeland, a man who had been around the business a long while, but usually as someone’s assistant. Freeland displayed a production manager’s flair for camera, his principal credit being the stagebound musical Whoopie (in which all the directorial highlights were the work of dance director Busby Berkeley). Having worked with John Ford and Rowland Brown on his first two pictures, Tracy thought Freeland inept and did nothing the director told him to do without arguing bitterly about it. The film took twenty-two days to make, unconscionable given the result.
The virtue of Six Cylinder Love was that Tracy himself was required for relatively little of it. He would come home, for he was scarcely ten minutes from the studio, slip quietly into the house, change his clothes and be gone again before Louise had a chance to notice. One day she saw him in a pair of well-worn trousers, and a passing remark drew a vague, evasive answer. The more curious she got, the more mysterious he got. Then he’d joke about it, bringing the subject up himself at dinner, but never to the point of explaining much of anything. Then one Sunday, as he and Louise were motoring out toward the ocean along Sunset Boulevard, he slowed and pointed out a sign:
HOTTENTOT RIDING ACADEMY
HORSES 75 CENTS PER HOUR
“That’s it,” he said.
“That’s what?”
“That’s where I’ve been coming.”
“You mean you’ve been riding?”
“Sure,” he said. “Riding. Want to go over and see the horses? Midnight, coal black, that’s the one I ride.”
He inched the car down a narrow ravine to where there was a rundown barn and some stables and found Midnight. Louise, who had practically grown up on horses, was enchanted. “But you’ve never been on a horse in your life before,” she said. “How in the world did you happen to start?”
“I rode once in Silvermine last fall. Remember? I just thought maybe I’d like it.”
“But I thought you said you were scared to death.”
“Well, I was … but I still think maybe I’d like it.”
Louise devoutly hoped that he would. “He never had cared for any sport that I knew of since he was a boy and liked to box (and he boxed very well I have been told). Ever since I had known him, he had taken no exercise except a little walking by fits and starts, and he had no hobbies. His entire interest, and most of his friends, had been in the theatre. This opened up new vistas.”
They rode together at the Hottentot a few times, walking and trotting slowly along a little trail that led from the stables through a narrow ravine back of the hills that bordered the boulevard. Then they ran into John Cromwell, who was directing features for Paramount. Somehow the subject got around to horses and riding, and Spence shyly told him what he had been doing.
“Start polo,” Cromwell urged. “It’s a great way to learn to ride. Go out to Snowy Baker at Riviera. He’ll teach you. It’s wonderful! Most thrilling thing in the world!”
The third film on Tracy’s schedule was another comedy, a talking remake of a Fox silent called A Girl in Every Port. Sheehan was following through on a threat to make Tracy and Warren Hymer into the new Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen, the team that had played Quirt and