Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (42 page)

That colleagues noted a transformation in Fleming is evident in an item found in Louis Lighton’s papers. Among the notebooks and scraps of paper containing scribbles of story and film ideas, Lighton wrote, “Vic’s parenthood.” Under the guidance of Lighton and Fleming, and with that thought in the background, the movie version of
Captains Courageous,
Rudyard Kipling’s virtually plotless 1897 novel about a spoiled young man’s redemption through labor on a New England cod fleet, became a moving paradigm of fathering.

In his final year at Paramount, Lighton made two standout productions with Fleming’s directing and acting protégés:
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
and
Peter Ibbetson,
both directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Gary Cooper. When Lighton moved to MGM in 1936, it was natural for Thalberg to pair him and Fleming. They shared a professional past and a forthright aesthetic.

Budd Schulberg said Lighton, like Fleming, “was very un-Hollywood, not mixed up in the social scene, seemed to stay apart from
that.”
Elia Kazan, in
A Life
(1988), wrote that the producer consciously made films dealing “with individual standards, never politics; with courage and decency, privileges and responsibility . . . Lighton’s work goal was to capture a single, strongly felt human emotion, one he believed in himself.” Lighton respected all the old “tough” directors, including John Ford and Hathaway, but “his particular favorite” was Fleming.

Kazan observed of Lighton, “perhaps because he had no children, his best films dealt with children,” including
Captains Courageous.
In 1931, Thalberg approached Kipling to purchase screen rights to the poems “Gunga Din” and “On the Road to Mandalay” as well as
Captains Courageous
and
Kim.
Three years later, Thalberg optioned the novels for $25,000 each. He assigned Lighton to both as soon as the producer arrived at MGM in 1935.

MGM’s pre-Lighton treatments for
Captains Courageous
didn’t win Kipling over. An attempt to inject the story with sex prompted the author to inform the studio that “a happily married lady codfish lays about a million eggs at one confinement.” Kipling died in January 1936 and Thalberg in September. By then Lighton had taken charge of the production, and he quickly dispensed with vulgar notions.

At the end of April, with Fleming back on his feet, MGM announced that he would direct the picture and Freddie Bartholomew would star in it. (Lighton wanted to make
Kim
with Fleming and Bartholomew, too.) Franchot Tone was reported to have nailed down the adult lead a year before, but Tracy was luckier casting. It would be the first of five Fleming-Tracy collaborations. The actor was closer to the director in temperament, though not in background, than Cooper, Fonda, or even Gable. Both Fleming and his new star radiated complicated moods and feelings beneath a tough-smart surface.

According to Lighton (via Kazan), Fleming would say, “A good actor is one who, when he’s asked what he does for a living, will drop his head, kick a little shit, and speaking with a bit of shame, mumble, ‘I’m an actor.’ ” He might have been thinking of Tracy. Tracy was born in 1900 in Milwaukee, and his hard-drinking Irish-American father owned a trucking company; his mother’s ancestors had founded Brown University. He settled into acting at Ripon College and went on to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. It took Tracy eight years to become a breakout stage star with the prison drama
The Last Mile,
in 1930. Although John Ford snatched him up for a prison com
edy
called
Up the River,
it would take more than half the decade for Tracy to have the same impact on-screen. When he did, he became, as
Time
declared, “cinema’s no. 1 actor’s actor.” But he was a conflicted man—a boozer and a married Catholic whose lasting romantic connection would be to a woman not his wife, Katharine Hepburn. “Spencer always thought acting was a rather silly way for a grown man to make a living,” Hepburn wrote.

He arrived at MGM at the end of 1935 after an unsatisfying five years at Fox, where he’d kept busy in character roles—eighteen films, including loan-outs, between 1932 and 1934—and where stardom had eluded him. By the time he entered MGM, he and his wife, Louise Treadwell, had weathered his intimate friendship or affair with Loretta Young and an embarrassment of drunk-and-disorderly charges stemming from binge drinking. To explain his carousing, studio publicists forwarded the story that Tracy felt God had punished him for his vices by making his son, John, born in 1924, deaf.

Hepburn’s biographer William J. Mann in
Kate
(2006) traces the roots of Tracy’s drinking further down in his psyche, painting the actor as bisexual or gay, in torment over the gaps between his secret erotic identity and his supermasculine Hollywood image. Mann effectively deflates the romanticism that usually surrounds Tracy and Hepburn—an image cultivated by Hepburn from nearly the week after Tracy’s death in 1967—but his evidence for the star’s homosexuality is built entirely on stories that passed through George Cukor’s circle. Mann’s single source is party bartender Scotty Bowers. After two tours with the Marines in World War II, he worked at a Richfield gas station that he ran as a male bordello “arranging introductions between returning servicemen and older gentlemen.” Bowers said he had sex with Tracy repeatedly in the guest bungalow on Cukor’s estate, where Tracy lived for the last few years of his life.

Mann summoned a number of testimonials to Bowers’s veracity and Cukor’s implicit trust in him, but no direct statement from Cukor himself. And even the director grew wary of the rumors rampant in his crowd. One of his regulars, a supporting actor named Anderson Lawler, was a key component of a tale often used to portray
Gable
as a bashful bisexual. Cukor called Lawler “a great and bitchy gossip,” but also “an idiot—full of half-assed sophistication.”

Tracy’s alcohol-fueled escapades stayed out of the press after he joined MGM. The studio’s publicity chief, Howard Strickling, a suave,
efficient
“fixer” with connections to pliable police officers and reporters, confessed that he ordered the studio’s security chief, Whitey Hendry, to have an ambulance ready to rescue Tracy from the scene of any trouble in a bar. But the studio also invested Tracy’s moviemaking collaborators with much of the responsibility for keeping him away from booze. While co-producing
Mannequin
(1937), Joseph Mankiewicz ensconced the star in his own home.

The poetic Irish lush was a cliché long before the 1930s, but off-screen Tracy seemed determined to put flesh on it. “I would get drunk and disappear in the middle of a film, get into fights, become a complete bum,” he admitted to Stewart Granger. “At the beginning, the studio heads and my friends would rally round and cover up for me, but eventually the only one left who seemed to care at all was Victor Fleming.”

He was likely speaking of the bender he went on after Thalberg’s death on September 14, 1936, the day
Captains Courageous
had been scheduled to begin principal photography. Tracy was not close to the production chief, but like many others at the studio, he was uncertain about his future when Thalberg died of a heart attack at age thirty-seven. MGM rescheduled the picture to start after Thalberg’s funeral three days later, but Tracy’s drinking held it up for another five days.

Granger wrote up Tracy’s version of the episode nearly twenty years after Tracy’s death, and it may not be reliable in its details, which are flattering to Tracy, with Fleming putting him up at his Cove Way home. Tracy said Fleming fetched him from a Los Angeles drunk tank, “squared the press, the police and the studio,” had his Filipino servant clean him up, and had his own doctor examine him:

I was lying there feeling like death when Vic came in with a case of Scotch. He put it down beside my bed and went to the door. Turning back, he said, “Spence, I’ve just talked to the doctor. He tells me one more bash like that and you’ll be dead. I want you to do me a favor. Drink that whole case of Scotch. It’s the last time you’ll see me, Spence, I’m through,” and he went out and left me alone. I was dying for a drink but I knew it wouldn’t be just one. I knew that I’d lost my last friend and there would be nobody left to give a damn about me. Either I took Vic’s advice and drank the whole case or I shouldn’t take another drink, ever. I decided to give it up.

That’s
not quite how it happened, though, says Edward Hartman. He remembers the emergency phone call that came in one mid-September evening. Fleming told Hartman’s mother, Gladys, “We’re missing Spencer. Can you help us find him?” He also had enlisted his sister Ruth, and she, Gladys, and Clyde Hartman went in different directions. “They had some list of these places where he went, where he was known to go.” Some details after that, including who found Tracy, are in dispute, but in the Hartman version Gladys got him bundled into a cab and put him in Good Samaritan Hospital. There he kept “screaming, yelling, pawing the walls”—and doctors threatened to place him in restraints unless Gladys stayed with him overnight. (She did, but Edward says she “was pretty disgusted with him.”)

Fleming’s next step: shrewdly stashing Tracy away in San Dimas, a dry town far from prying eyes and studio gossip, at Ed and Mamie Hartman’s house. Fleming’s aunt and uncle “wanted to make sure they got some food in him,” says Edward.

The additional delay kept Fleming’s tensions close to the skin. It didn’t require much of a remark from Jules Furthman—probably a crack about Tracy—to set off the director during lunch in the MGM commissary. George Sidney, who began at MGM that year in the shorts department, was a month shy of his twentieth birthday when he saw the outburst. “Vic sat at one end of the table with [Furthman] in the commissary and got into an argument; Vic pulled him out of the chair and dragged him out of the commissary and started hitting him; then they made up and sat down and had lunch.”

Despite his self-doubts, Tracy had been developing a performing style that suited the Lighton-Fleming mode: “to capture a single, strongly felt human emotion” in a vigorous, unostentatious way. “Spencer does it, that’s all. Feels it. Talks. Listens. He means what he says when he says it, and if you think that’s easy, try it,” said Humphrey Bogart. Tracy told Phillip Trent, who played his son in
The Power and the Glory
(1933), “Always remember, the camera’s picking up what you’re thinking.”

Tracy liked to discuss acting with reporters far less than he did with other actors. But in 1962, making Stanley Kramer’s
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,
he tossed out a couple of nuggets about his approach: “That business of not being typecast, that just bores me. I’ve always played the same character. Larry Olivier says the way to act is, learn your lines and get on with it. I’m Spencer Tracy with some deference to
the
character. When a person says he’s an actor—he’s a personality. The whole idea is to show your personality. There are people who are much better technically, but who cares? Nobody cares.”

“Fox had him playing villains,” Mayer said, “and he probably would never have been anything more than a good character actor if I hadn’t seen something about his face—something more important than his acting ability. We signed him, found just the right stories for him [before 1940, all of Tracy’s MGM scripts were chosen for him] and he became Spencer Tracy the star, not Spencer Tracy the actor.” In 1936, Tracy had enjoyed critical success under Fritz Lang’s direction as the target of a lynch mob in
Fury;
he’d also been in a blockbuster, but only as the second male lead under Gable in the period romantic melodrama
San Francisco.
In
Captains Courageous,
he would be the center of what
Variety
aptly labeled “a big money picture of the sea,” comparable to MGM’s
Mutiny on the Bounty.
He became the focus of Fleming’s effort to contain Kipling’s anecdotes in a well-knit narrative about shifting friendships on a Gloucester schooner, the
We’re Here—
culminating in a race between that vessel and its longtime rival, the
Jennie Cushman.

The script elevates a minor character, Manuel, a warmly rugged Portuguese fisherman, into the protagonist. It also adds some Christian spirituality to the redemption of the spoiled rich boy Harvey Cheyne. (The adapters tailored the part to Bartholomew, four years younger than Kipling’s callow youth; about the only Kipling dialogue in the film is the remarks by sailors calling Harvey a “Jonah,” a harbinger of bad luck.) One thing Mayer must have seen in Tracy’s face—the soulful magnetism of his eyes—anchors Manuel’s guidance of Cheyne into young adulthood. Tracy had scored with audiences and critics as a priest in
San Francisco,
and he’d go on to win a second Oscar for playing Father Flanagan in the lachrymose
Boys Town
(1938). The moviemakers reconceived Manuel to exploit Tracy’s capacity for muscular Christianity—make that muscular Catholicism. (He played Flanagan again in
Men of Boys Town
and a priest evacuating children from a hospital in
The Devil at 4 O’Clock.
)

Marc Connelly and Dale Van Every, as well as John Lee Mahin, got screen credit for the script. Mahin did the final draft and shepherded it through filming. Two-fisted Catholicism came naturally to this non-Catholic screenwriter; twenty years later he wrote John Huston’s island-set World War II fable,
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison,
with
Deborah
Kerr as a nun who helps a Marine played by Robert Mitchum find the faith to fight the Japanese who occupy the island. (The nun and the Marine agree they “both belong to pretty tough outfits.”)

But Mayer was the one who made Christian symbolism with a Catholic overlay part of MGM’s house style. He wrapped a clerical collar around Tracy before Warner Bros. did it with Pat O’Brien for
Angels with Dirty Faces
(1938) or Paramount did it with Bing Crosby for
Going My Way
(1944). He was indulging his appetite for (in his grandson Daniel Selznick’s words) the “pomp and respectability” of the Roman Catholic Church. He also inoculated his studio against the Catholic morality police. In January 1934, before the Production Code clamped down, Archbishop John J. Cantwell of Los Angeles had summoned Mayer, Sheehan from Fox, and J. J. Murdock from RKO to discuss morality in pictures and hint at a possible nationwide Catholic boycott. In March, Joseph Breen, about to become the Production Code chief, wrote to the archbishop of Cincinnati, John T. McNicholas (soon to help found the National Legion of Decency), “Most of the men and women who write the film stories are pagans. Of course, these write film stories that are based upon pagan philosophy and the result is that we are slowly making our audiences
pagans.
How could it be otherwise?”