April 5, 1900—Spencer Tracy—nine times nominated for an Academy Award, twice a winner, often regarded as the best film actor of his generation—was born in Milwaukee, Wisc. The city contained the major elements that enriched and disrupted his life: a multitude of people from every walk of life that he would one day depict onscreen, along with abundant pubs that fed the gnawing thirst for alcohol that afflicted his father and himself.
Film theorists often point out that there are two typical actor types onscreen: personality stars, who more or less play themselves in role after role, with slight variations, and chameleons, given to transforming themselves from one role to another not just psychologically but physically. Errol Flynn, John Wayne and, to an extent, Clark Gable, exemplify the first type; Paul Muni, Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, and Sean Penn epitomize the second.
But there’s another, fully recognizable sort: the actor as Everyman—someone who may not always physically transform himself, but who, you soon recognize, invests each role with so many subtle shadings that it’s as if they’ve remade themselves over each time. The roles are not extreme character types, but as if you look over the actor’s resume you can’t help but marvelous at the actor's range. They can be equally versatile at comedy or drama. Jack Lemmon was a recent example; Tom Hanks, a current one. Spencer Tracy was their great forebear.
Early on, it seemed as if Tracy might become a chameleon actor because of the showier roles he assumed. He won the first of his back-to-back Oscars as a Portuguese fisherman-turned-father-figure in Captains Courageous (1937). But four years later, he was so embarrassed by his performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—one that, at the director’s and studio’s insistence, relied more on makeup than he wished—that he largely avoided such roles again for the rest of his career.
The introduction of sound made possible the emergence of Tracy’s naturalistic acting style. Actors no longer had to rely on physical gesturing that sometimes became silly and exaggerated. Such actors conveyed much with their voice, and so much more through their eyes. Elizabeth Taylor, his co-star in Father of the Bride (1950), said it best: “His acting seemed almost effortless, it seemed almost as if he wasn’t doing anything, and yet he was doing everything. It came so subtly out of his eyes, every muscle in his face—he was a film actor.” You can see how adaptable Tracy's gaze can be when you consider how he could be deliver a masterful slow burn in his effervescent comedies with Hepburn (Adam's Rib, for instance) or summon righteous indignation (Bad Day at Black Rock).
Film theorists often point out that there are two typical actor types onscreen: personality stars, who more or less play themselves in role after role, with slight variations, and chameleons, given to transforming themselves from one role to another not just psychologically but physically. Errol Flynn, John Wayne and, to an extent, Clark Gable, exemplify the first type; Paul Muni, Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, and Sean Penn epitomize the second.
But there’s another, fully recognizable sort: the actor as Everyman—someone who may not always physically transform himself, but who, you soon recognize, invests each role with so many subtle shadings that it’s as if they’ve remade themselves over each time. The roles are not extreme character types, but as if you look over the actor’s resume you can’t help but marvelous at the actor's range. They can be equally versatile at comedy or drama. Jack Lemmon was a recent example; Tom Hanks, a current one. Spencer Tracy was their great forebear.
Early on, it seemed as if Tracy might become a chameleon actor because of the showier roles he assumed. He won the first of his back-to-back Oscars as a Portuguese fisherman-turned-father-figure in Captains Courageous (1937). But four years later, he was so embarrassed by his performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—one that, at the director’s and studio’s insistence, relied more on makeup than he wished—that he largely avoided such roles again for the rest of his career.
The introduction of sound made possible the emergence of Tracy’s naturalistic acting style. Actors no longer had to rely on physical gesturing that sometimes became silly and exaggerated. Such actors conveyed much with their voice, and so much more through their eyes. Elizabeth Taylor, his co-star in Father of the Bride (1950), said it best: “His acting seemed almost effortless, it seemed almost as if he wasn’t doing anything, and yet he was doing everything. It came so subtly out of his eyes, every muscle in his face—he was a film actor.” You can see how adaptable Tracy's gaze can be when you consider how he could be deliver a masterful slow burn in his effervescent comedies with Hepburn (Adam's Rib, for instance) or summon righteous indignation (Bad Day at Black Rock).
Tracy could be cantankerous, particularly while in his cups, but he was also unpretentious about his appearance (“This mug of mine is as plain as a barn door. Why should people pay thirty-five cents to look at it?”). That lack of vanity enabled him to take on a variety of roles: WWII doomed pilot (A Guy Named Joe), inventor (Edison the Man), attorney (Adam’s Rib), sportswriter (Woman of the Year), radical lawyer (Inherit the Wind), judge of high-echelon Nazis (Justice at Nuremberg), Cuban fisherman (The Old Man and the Sea) and liberal newspaper editor (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?)
A review in his college paper of one early performance pointed to the assets he possessed to the end: "steadiness...strength, and suppressed emotion." Those qualities proved especially helpful when Tracy came to embody such leader and conscience-of-America roles as the priest in San Francisco, intrepid colonial commander Major Robert Rogers in Northwest Passage, Lt. Col. James Doolittle in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Chief Judge Dan Haywood in Justice at Nuremberg, and—one of my favorites—one-armed war veteran John J. Macreedy, coming to a small Western town to discover the truth about the mysterious death of a Japanese-American war veteran, in Bad Day at Black Rock.
Blessed with a phenomenal memory, Tracy stunned fellow actors by the way he could come to the set each day and nail a scene in only one or two takes. The ones lucky enough to win his trust found a man of uncommon professionalism, intelligence, humor, and kindness. (He was practically a father figure to Taylor in her first adult role.)
Unfortunately, in the last decade of his life, Tracy was forced to turn down roles because of poor health, resulting from binge drinking, diabetes, a heart attack, and emphysema. It wasn’t just parts in films such as Ten North Frederick, Cheyenne Autumn and The Cincinnati Kid—high-profile projects that didn’t turn out as well as the assembled talent promised. No, the one that really got away from Tracy was Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
As recounted in Kate Remembered, by A. Scott Berg, Katharine Hepburn urged her frequent co-star and longtime companion to take the role of James Tyrone in Sidney Lumet’s 1962 adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s posthumous autobiographical tragedy, believing—absolutely correctly, I think—that Tracy would be brilliant in the role. Actually, that may have been the trouble: unlike his other roles, Tracy understood this one so well that he couldn’t escape out of himself.
Over the years, Hepburn offered Berg two different explanations for Tracy’s eventual rejection of the role:
1) he didn’t think himself physically capable of assuming such an emotionally strenuous role; and
2) he didn’t believe he could do justice to the Pulitzer Prize-winning play.
Actually, I think there’s a third explanation—one that accounts for Hepburn’s theories but adds to them: The film touched, in one form or another, on every possible anguished circumstance of Tracy’s own heritage and upbringing:
* An Irish Potato Famine legacy of privation. James Tyrone, like Tracy’s father John, was the child of Famine-era emigrants. The son was able to move up the social ladder in both cases--Tyrone, as a matinee idol; John Tracy, somewhat less glamorously, as general sales manager for a motor truck compan-- but the stories of this era left a searing mark on the children. (Tyrone was so scarred by early poverty that he grew up to become a miser.)
* The ravages of substance abuse. Mary Tyrone’s drug addiction is only one-half of the substance abuse story of the play; son Jamie, it is equally clear, will, in the not-so-distant future, be undone by alcoholism. The tragedy of multiple-generation addiction also occurred in the Tracy family, as John and Spencer both struggled with alcoholism.
* Mother love. The deterioration of onetime beauty Mary Tyrone plunges her husband and two sons into their own spiral of guilt. In later life, Tracy remembered the pain he caused his mother when, at age seven, he tried to run away from home.
* Prostitutes. By college, Edmund Tyrone has already been initiated into the world of prostitutes through brother Jamie. After his death, several biographers claimed that Tracy frequently patronized hookers, too.
* An enduring regret and guilt. James Tyrone’s great regret lies in the course of his acting career. His need for money—almost as insatiable as Jamie’s for alcohol—leads him to become associated with a single, well-paying star vehicle rather than the variety of Shakespearean roles he should have had. Tracy’s regret lay not in his career—he placed little importance on the worth of acting—but in his family life. His firstborn son, John, was born deaf. Spencer was riven by the thought that he might have been responsible for the birth defect. More specifically, some biographers claim, he blamed the venereal disease he’d caught at a bawdy house for John’s condition. (That notion has been disputed—with some degree of credibility, I think—in a letter to the New York Times that daughter Susie wrote 15 years ago.) In his biography of Hepburn, William Mann posits that Tracy engaged in furtive homosexual encounters. (That claim, based on heavily veiled sources, is far more problematic.)
* A thwarted vacation in the Catholic Church. Mary Tyrone put aside her wish to become a nun when she fell in love with the charismatic actor James Tyrone. One reason Tracy played so many priests in his career is, simply, that he admired them. He thought he might have a vocation, then put it aside. The long-term affair with Hepburn, maintained even while he was married, along with his binge drinking, would probably have been enough to convince him he was a bad Catholic, never mind any other secrets he might have harbored.
Stories of actors breaking down as they confront their deepest selves are commonplace. Think of Rock Hudson on the set of Seconds, the sci-fi shocker he hoped would be a change of pace from his romantic comedies but which reminded him all too much of his secret double-life as a closeted homosexual. For his own well-being, it might have been just as well that Tracy didn’t go any further with O’Neill’s play. But we can still mourn what never came to be: another indelible portrait in Tracy's remarkable gallery of characters.
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