This Day in Theater History (Odets Makes Last Broadway Splash in ‘The Country Girl’)

Nov. 10, 1950—Playwright Clifford Odets—onetime hope of the American theater, more recently scorned as a Hollywood sellout—landed his last Broadway success with The Country Girl, which premiered at the Lyceum Theatre.

Though the play ran for 235 performances—which, according to the economics for non-musicals of the time, was enough to secure a profit—it has not been revived as often as other works by major American playwrights, such as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee.

Most Americans, if they are aware at all of this drama of an alcoholic has-been reaching again for Broadway stardom, recognize it from the 1954 film starring Bing Crosby, William Holden, and, in her Oscar-winning role, Grace Kelly.

The original play, staged by Odets himself, possessed nothing like the box-office draws of the Paramount movie, though one principal had known renown, and two others would experience it.

*Holden’s role, as hotshot young director Bernie Dodd (with elements of Odets’ friend Elia Kazan), was played by Steven Hill, better known to posterity as the original team leader in the Mission: Impossible TV series and as D.A. Adam Schiff on the long-running Law and Order.

*Georgie Elgin, the alcoholic’s beleaguered wife played by Kelly, was originally performed by Uta Hagen, who won the Tony Award for the role—and would win another, a dozen years later, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, while earning additional recognition as an influential acting teacher.

*The principal actor that I knew the least about was Paul Kelly (no relation to Grace), who may have felt the greatest affinity with his character. Over two decades before, he had served 25 months for manslaughter for killing in a drunken fistfight the husband of his lover (and eventual wife). He had painstakingly rebuilt his career since then, but surely experienced the same regret as Frank Elgin’s over alcohol’s role in derailing his career.

The Country Girl was Odets’ second attempt in as many years to return to the heights of the New York theater scene he had occupied in the mid-to-late 1930s, as a founding member and most significant playwright associated with The Group Theatre.

When he came back to the Great White Way after a financially rewarding but creatively unsatisfactory stint as Hollywood screenwriter and director, he no longer exhibited the concerns with the working classes that animated him previously. But he continued to write about what he knew: in this case, actors.

In The Big Knife (1949), he had implicitly indicted himself for yielding to compromise and temptation—and explicitly assailed the studio system for blackmail and other thuggish methods for keeping stars in line. But even the presence of a real-life Hollywood star (and Odets friend) John Garfield hadn’t been enough to keep the production going beyond three months.

The Country Girl was different, depicting a struggle in which the pressures from without were nothing like the pressures from within faced by

The George Seaton screenplay departed somewhat from the play by making its fragile leading man into a musical-comedy star, making the part more comfortable for recording artist Crosby. But those encountering the drama after seeing the film may be surprised by other changes, both in casting and dialogue.

For one thing, Frank and Georgie have been married about 10 years before the play begins, and the drab existence resulting from his drinking has robbed her of vibrancy and youth. At 31 years old, Hagen would have been closer to the age that Odets had in mind than Grace Kelly, who sought to downplay her glamour and youth by wearing glasses, brown wool, shapeless dresses, and cardigan dresses.

In the years since, actresses who played Georgie have been considerably older than Grace Kelly or even Hagen, including, in TV productions, Shirley Knight (38) and Faye Dunaway (40), and, onstage, Jennifer Jones and Maureen Stapleton (both 47), Christine Lahti (34), and Frances McDormand (51).

Additionally, for whatever reason, Seaton chose not to use as much of what F. W. Dupee called Odets’ “sad and seedy poetry”—idiomatic speech like “tense as a bug in June,” or  “an ulcerated sponge for a brain.” And these days, some ethnic references (for instance, to Chinese laundry workers) are likely to be deleted for stage shows because of political incorrectness.

Odets would likely have responded with dismay to at least some of these changes. Producer Dwight Deere Wiman had postponed the play’s opening for the 1949-50 season to allow the playwright more time to tinker with the dialogue.

For all the time and energy Odets devoted to getting the play right, he still marred it with unnecessary touches—chiefly the complications arising from the Georgie-Dodd relationship, at first a clash of adversaries before becoming a love affair that takes them by surprise.

An anonymous reviewer from Time Magazine adeptly identified the “austere telling without a false word or a florid gesture” that would have sustained Odets’ “compact little tragedy of misunderstanding” between Georgie and Dodd over who was really responsible for Frank’s skittishness, depression and breakdown.

Even so, the drama represented more than what Howard Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune called “a fiercely affectionate anecdote about backstage doings."

There are reasons why, despite critics’ predictable carping that this and other Odets plays are “dated,” directors, dramaturges and actors have not utterly forgotten this drama.

Odets might not be writing anymore about the proletariat he sprang from, and the mechanics of staging a show may have changed (near-endless small “workshopping” instead of short, nerve-racking out-of-town tryouts). 

But theater professionals still know how well he showed the tension inherent in bringing an untried play to the stage, as well as the raging, crippling insecurity that so often dogs actors who depend on the public for approval that can never be enough.

Although the history of the American theater is filled with alcoholics, Odets may have been inspired by a relatively recent example: actress Laurette Taylor, who, after years on the bottle, pulled herself together long enough in 1944 by offering a career-defining performance in The Glass Menagerie. 

Outside of Eugene O’Neill, it’s hard to think of another play that limns so thoroughly the self-deception of alcoholics and the vortex into which they pull those closest to them.

In the remaining dozen years of Odets’ life, he would never repeat even the moderate success he enjoyed with The Country Wife, let alone enjoy the acclaim and hope generated by the half-dozen 1930s plays running from Awake and Sing to Golden Boy.

Long under FBI surveillance for his relatively brief Communist party membership in the 1930s, he was hauled in 1952 before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

 Responsible for raising two children (including a daughter with severe developmental disabilities) after the death of his estranged wife, he named names, albeit none that hadn’t been provided previously to the committee.

He took one more shot at Broadway with his retelling of Noah and the Flood, Flowering Peach.  But his relationship with producer Robert Whitehead was rockier than the one he had enjoyed with his friend Wiman, and any hope for greater attention to the play vanished when the advisory board for the Pulitzer overruled the jury’s selection of his drama and rewarded it instead to Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Back in Hollywood, he masterfully rewrote Ernest Lehman’s initial screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success, but the film’s cult classic status did not come till after his death. 

In the hospital with fatal stomach cancer, he was serving as script supervisor for the short-lived (and even less remembered) anthology series, The Richard Boone Show, a vehicle unworthy of his talent.

But long before, he had already recognized the thin line between success and oblivion in The Country Girl.

Quote of the Day (John Newton, on the Christian’s ‘Many Difficulties He Has Had to Struggle With’)

“The exercised and experienced Christian, by the knowledge he has gained of his own heart and the many difficulties he has had to struggle with, acquires a skill and compassion in dealing with others; and without such exercise, all our study, diligence, and gifts in other ways, would leave us much at a loss in some of the most important parts of our calling.”— English Anglican clergyman, hymn writer, and slavery abolitionist John Newton (1725-1807), Aug. 30, 1770 letter, in Cardiphonia: or, The Utterance of the Heart (1780)

John Newton—born 300 years ago today in London—knew all about a Christian’s “difficulties.” Before his conversion, his days, as a young sailor on a slave ship, been filled with drinking, gambling, and profanity. Nor was his radical change of heart the product of a single day: it would be some years before he gave up how he made money, as the captain of several slave ships and an investor in the slave trade.

But when the change was complete, it was remarkable. He became one of the most prominent proponents of the African slave trade, and lived to see Great Britain abolish the practice just a few months before his death.

Long after his death, Newton has continued to influence lives. Among his compositions is “Amazing Grace,” perhaps the best-known Christian hymn. It has sustained movements, notably for civil rights, and, at the most personal level, individuals struggling with substance abuse, as related in this March 2018 blog post on the Website for the Council on Recovery.

One of those individuals is singer Judy Collins, who began singing the hymn in concert in 1964 and recorded it in 1970. In an interview with Beliefnet, she told how the song offers “a spiritual message which anybody can relate to, because people understand that transformation happens. And that it comes as a surprise and is often inexplicable, which means grace has to have something to do with it.”

Quote of the Day (Robert Armstrong, on the 'Bills' for the Freedom to Drink and Take Drugs)

“We need to remember, as our bongs gurgle merrily, how our society and its rituals have been shaped around the original legal drug. We teach the young about its dangers. We have an entire subculture, in Alcoholics Anonymous, that has grown up to help the people who have a deadly relationship with drink. And still we bury 140,000 Americans a year who die from drinking too much; guns kill only a third as many. This is what we pay for the freedom to drink. The bill for the freedom to take drugs is yet to be presented.”—Financial commentator Robert Armstrong, “How America Got High As a Kite,” The Financial Times, Nov. 18-19, 2023

The image accompanying this post shows Nicolas Cage in his Oscar-winning role as a depressed alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas.

Quote of the Day (Richard Burton, on Alcohol and ‘The Age of the Abyss’)

“I stuck to my diet and had a whisky and soda before lunch, followed by a half dozen belons, a steak au poivre, a salad with French dressing, and a hefty lump of cheese. I drank Lafite ‘60, about two glasses, and two or three brandies after the cheese with sugarless and creamless coffee. Later that night I had a couple more whiskies and soda. Apart from water that is all I took in that day…. E[lizabeth Taylor] was astonishingly drunk even as I got to lunch. I don't recollect her before ever being incoherent from drink. I expect it from the drugs she's forced to take, but not from the booze. Christ I hope she's alright. It would be frightful to live the rest of our lives in an alcoholic haze, seeing the world through fumes of spirits and cigarette smoke. Never quite sure what you did or said the day before, or what you read, whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon. Good I'm going to have a whisky and soda right now. There are few pleasures to match tipsiness in this murderous world especially if, like me, you believe in your bones that it, the world as we know it, is not going to last much longer. This is the age of the abyss and any minute now or dark day we could tumble over the edge into primal chaos. Some frigging foreigner will press a button and gone it will all be. Even the Miners Arms in Pontrhydyfen. Our little lives will be shattered with a cosmic bang. ‘These millions of white faces,’ as Archie MacLeish says, and then ‘nothing, nothing, nothing at all.‘ But don't let's be stoned all the time. Let's have days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical….”—Actor Richard Burton (1925-1984), diary entry for January 10, 1969, The Richard Burton Diaries, edited by Chris Williams (2012)

I have always wanted to read the diaries of Richard Burton, and this past weekend I finally got my hands on a copy at a library near me. Since then, I’ve been consuming entries the way I once might have gone after a Crackerjack box, sampling one here, one there, finding myself unable to stop. 

The entry here hardly contains the most news—it doesn’t describe his purchases, for wife Elizabeth Taylor, diamonds and a plane, each costing at least $900,000, nor his high-profile friends and films of the time. 

But these lines may evoke something more revelatory and fascinating than any more seemingly momentous incident. Such was the consequence of a self-loathing genius—a talented writer who (perhaps correctly) believed he was miscast as a gifted, well-compensated actor—pursuing “the drinking man’s diet.”

There are several astonishing elements of this entry:

*That phrase, “that is all I took in that day.” The amount of alcohol involved is not inconsiderable.

*Burton largely passes over his own drinking, but not his wife’s.

*Shortly after conjuring up the very real consequences of alcohol abuse, the actor indulges in his thirst for another whisky and soda.

*Burton wishes for liquid oblivion to wipe out “the age of the abyss” he sees in the hands of nuclear powers around the world—but somehow also wishes for “days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical”—an outcome that feels ever more elusive by the end of this paragraph.

Clear-eyed enough to see the disappointing finish to his life and his wife’s (who, though successfully drying out in the Betty Ford Clinic in the 1980s, lived out the rest of her days more by taking advantage of her celebrity than by strengthening her real muscles as an actor), Burton is also seemingly powerless to stop it. 

It is quite sad to behold the evolution—or, rather, the devolution—of these entries. Initial ones, from the early 1940s, are short, befitting a youth still struggling to find his place and his voice.  The decade or so from the 1960s to early 1970s featured the longest ruminations, when the actor would take out his typewriter and type right in front of Ms. Taylor. He was trying to harness his creativity by imposing self-discipline. But, from the mid-Seventies and continuing for several years, there were no entries. 

Burton had slipped into an extended lost weekend of substance abuse. The voice on stage had, despite heavy cigarette use, lost little of its mellifluous richness. But the “voice” on the printed page, in the last entries from early 1983, over a year before his death, is exhausted, confessing that his last wife, Sally, is “still depressed and fed up….Being with me is not as glamorous as people think.”

Perhaps it was no accident that some of his best, Oscar-nominated performances--in Becket, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and his late-career triumph of stage and screen, Equus--center around disillusioned, burnt-out cases

This Day in Film History (‘Days of Wine and Roses,’ Drama of Addiction, Opens)

December 26, 1962—Days of Wine and Roses, perhaps the most searing drama about alcoholism put on the big screen since The Lost Weekend, opened just before a new year in which, once again, all too many people would get drunk in more than just a silly way—and in which far too few would decide that somehow, they must start their lives all over again, like Jack Lemmon’s public-relations man, Joe Clay.

Like The Lost Weekend, Days of Wine and Roses expanded the repertoires of its male star (Ray Milland, in the case of the former, and Lemmon) and directors (Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards, respectively) far beyond the comedies for which they had been primarily known. And, like that earlier film’s Don Birnam, the predicament of Joe Clay hinges on a relationship with women.

Well, in the case of The Lost Weekend, sort of. Jane Wyman’s warmly sympathetic magazine researcher could set Birnam right, maybe, if only he could open his eyes. Then again, maybe not. The original source of the Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett script, a novel by Charles Jackson, implied strongly that Birnam’s chemical addiction—and larger depression—traced back to a homosexual affair in college. With such subject matter verboten on the big screen before the Sixties, the best that Wilder and Brackett could do was drop hints about Birnam’s orderly (played by Frank Faylen) at the hospital, and to use the failed writer’s genteel artistic background and massive case of writer's block as code for lack of male virility.

Days of Wine and Roses is, on the other hand, unmistakably a love story between a man and woman, albeit one with a twist. Take the bowler hat that Lemmon wears in the photo accompanying this post. Fans of his most significant prior film, The Apartment (1960), would have recognized that little bit of stage business as the same one that junior-executive-on-the make Chuck Baxter tries out in front of the girl of his dreams, Fran Kubelik.

To his regret, Lemmon was offered the role of Clay onscreen rather than the man who had played the part originally in the 1957 teleplay by J. P. Miller, good friend, Cliff Robertson, whom producers felt did not provide sufficient box-office pull. Some critics have suggested that Robertson, Piper Laurie, and TV director John Frankenheimer created a grittier drama than the one on which Lemmon, Lee Remick and film director Blake Edwards collaborated.

But the comedy backgrounds of Lemmon and Edwards (he had done Breakfast at Tiffany’s the year before) served the film extremely well, I think. The opening scenes between Lemmon and Remick, typified by that bowler hat, look like they’re going to start a rather traditional rom-com, with the protagonists meeting cute. But they pull you in and seduce you, the way alcohol does in this film. We think we’re about to watch Pillow Talk, but instead we get Scenes From an Alcoholic Marriage. (The initial shock of that was such that there were a virtually unheard-of number of walkouts at a preview for the film. Studio execs were sure they had a disaster on their hands until someone remembered that the audience hadn't been told beforehand that they would be watching a drama--and a particularly devastating one, at that.)

Lemmon’s Clay begins by getting Remick’s Kirsten Arnasen, a teetotaling secretary with an endearing sweet tooth, to share his good times by trying a Brandy Alexander (with a doubly intoxicating mixture of brandy and creme de cocoa). By the middle of the film, she fully shares what has become his full-fledged addiction. By the film’s pull-no-punches ending, the intensity of her addiction is so bad that his only hope of extricating himself is to break away from her, no matter how much it hurts. (That is the blunt message delivered by Clay's sponsor, who, as I indicated in a post from earlier today, was played by the late, great Jack Klugman.)

The attractiveness of Lemmon and Remick is essential to keeping viewers’ interest through the rest of the film. Their characters, after all, end up doing unsavory, degrading things for the sake of the booze that becomes part of their “threesome.” This is what part of what Kim Morgan has in mind in her film blog, Sunset Gun, when she writes:

“Lemmon and Remick's most interesting characteristic is, sadly, that they are alcoholics. They can't indulge the brilliant mental gymnastics of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf's George and Martha, whose addiction and spitefulness are, in a highly dysfunctional way, disarmingly romantic and strangely heroic. Lee and Jack -- they're like a lot of people -- just regular old drunks. No wonder they drink.”

That lack of “mental gymnastics” is precisely why the humor and vivacity that Lemmon and Remick carry from their prior work is so necessary in this film. Without the sympathy generated in those opening scenes before the marriage of Joe and Kirsten, it is questionable if viewers would root for them to find a way out of their predicament.

As it turned out, many people did. In addition to a win for Best Song (the title tune, by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini), the film garnered nominations for Lemmon, Remick, best art direction and best costume design. (Inexplicably, it was edged out of a Best Picture nomination by the likes of Mutiny on the Bounty and The Music Man.) It was also named one of the best 400 films by the American Film Institute.

Several years ago, on a long flight back from California, I spoke with a lawyer who, despite (or, I have thought sometimes since, because of) his completely drink-besotted state, knew every word in the film’s Oscar-winning title song. Had he been alive to see it, that might have made lyricist Mercer smile at first—before he realized that this highly intelligent, charming, literate man not only shared his most humane qualities, but also his thirst for drink.

(Incidentally, nearly three decades after the film, Lemmon shocked an Inside the Actors Studio audience with his first public admission that he also—like Mercer and Miller--had been an alcoholic, offscreen as well as on.)

As with The Lost Weekend, many viewers of Days of Wine and Roses are likely to recall one scene as particularly memorable in depicting the desperate state of an alcoholic: Birnam’s Sunday search for a pawnshop where he can get enough money for a drink, versus Clay’s trashing of his father-in-law’s greenhouse in search of a bottle he firmly believes is there. Yet for me, one other scene in the Edwards film has left a much more shattering, enduring impression.

Years ago, a female friend recalled, virtually word for word, these lines from Remick toward the end, when she explains why giving up alcohol has become so difficult: “This is the way I look when I'm sober. It's enough to make a person drink, wouldn't you say? You see, the world looks so dirty to me when I'm not drinking. Joe, remember Fisherman's Wharf? The water when you looked too close? That's the way the world looks to me when I'm not drinking.”

So often when I think of my friend, those lines come to mind. Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen the film since she recalled that bit of telling dialogue: It hurts me too much to think of it.

This Day in Yankee History (Mickey Mantle Dies)

August 13, 1995—Hall of Fame centerfielder Mickey Mantle, a hero to thousands but a disappointment to himself, died of liver cancer at age 63, after a public admission of alcoholism and attempt to redeem the little time he had left.

Long into retirement, but before he sought help for his alcohol problem, Mantle related a continuing nightmare he had: He had come to Yankee Stadium in his uniform, ready to play, even hearing his name on the loudspeaker. But unable to go through the gate, or even squeeze through a hole in the fence, he could not get through to teammates waiting on the other side.

The dream spoke volumes about the problems of adjusting to life when his old career—and youth—had passed, but also to the camaraderie and sense of responsibility he felt to teammates as run producer throughout his career. He was the Achilles of the New York Yankees, a figure of breathtaking physical strength and inner resolution who continually led his team into the autumn World Series wars--but suffering, like the mythological hero, from a weakness in the lower part of his body.

The known stories about Mantle’s alcoholism are many; the ones that have not seen the light of day might well be legion. At the end of his life, Mantle felt like a failure: to his estranged wife, to his family, even to his talent, which, he believed, he might have been brought to its ultimate fulfillment had he taken better care of himself.

I think he was harder on himself than he deserved. Those of us who have known alcoholics in our own lives are all too keenly aware that, for all the damage they might have caused themselves and those in their orbits, so much worthy of love still exists inside them. In this regard, Mantle was no different.

In choosing an image for this post, I thought at first of one from his last months, showing the exhaustion brought on by the slugger's medical struggles. In the end, I picked this one, of Mantle with his long-suffering wife Merlyn, the woman who for years endured the consequences of his self-destructive behavior.

The photo not only shows the vibrancy that drew so many to this young couple, but also restores to them something of the dignity they might have felt had melted away in the cauldron of fame and self-doubt.

One of the formative books I read as a child was Mantle’s The Quality of Courage (1965), ghostwritten by the fine future Babe Ruth biographer Robert Creamer. It had a simple but ingenious device: taking a cue from the recently deceased President Kennedy, it offered, in effect, profiles in courage of 19 baseball players, including Jackie Robinson, Jimmy Piersall, and Ted Williams.

In our revisionist age, the rage is all for debunking heroes. But imperfection is not an argument against their existence. In fact, I’d say, it’s part of the definition of the term. As far as you can get from godlike, heroes are those who face the demons and carry the burdens, day in and day out.

In October 1964, David Halberstam observed that Mantle might have been more of a hero to his teammates, who could see, right in the locker room, the ferocious effort it took him to suit up, than to fans. But, as his physical frailty increased, those in the stands, too, began to embrace him in greater numbers, as they came to understand the staggering weight of expectations on the back of the limping Yankee giant.

Still later, understanding grew of the double shadow lurking behind the fleet young slugger with the impossibly sunny smile: not just the burden of following Joe DiMaggio (who had treated him coldly in his first season) in center field, but also the haunting fear that he was fated to die young from Hodgkin’s Disease, the medical condition that claimed the lives of Mantle's father, grandfather, two uncles, and son.

Several years after his death, Mantle’s family revealed, in A Hero All His Life, an additional psychic burden he had carried his whole life: he had suffered child sexual abuse at the hands of a half-sister. Recent decades have amply revealed the emotional damage such abuse inflicts, including the alcoholism from which Mantle suffered.

Given all this, it is remarkable that Mantle carried on—indeed, that he achieved so much. Here, for instance, are Allen Barra and Allen St. John, assessing him in the December 4, 1998 issue of The Wall Street Journal:

“At peak value - five or six top seasons - Mantle was better than any postwar player. ... Not only was Mantle the greatest power hitter between Ruth and McGwire in terms of home runs per at bat, he hit for spectacular averages and drew a staggering number of walks. ... His on-base average was only ten points lower than that of Ty Cobb. ... The Mick was a Gold Glove-calibre centerfielder who could switch hit and bunt. His base-stealing percentage is virtually even with Ricky Henderson."

It was the Yankee Clipper rather than The Mick who was lucky enough to count a Nobel Prize-winning laureate as a friend. Nevertheless, for all of “the great DiMaggio’s” sterling qualities as a player, I think it was Mantle rather than the other Yankee centerfield legend who best epitomizes Santiago’s observation in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

This Day in Film History (Birth of Spencer Tracy, Versatile Everyman)

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).

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.