Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,707

This is the grave of Spencer Tracy.

Born in 1900 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Tracy grew up fairly well off there. His mom came from money and his dad had a successful trucking business. But Tracy was a handful as a child, hated school, and his Catholic parents basically threw him into a Dominican nunnery run boarding school at the age of 9. He spent the rest of his childhood in Catholic schools and became a passable student, but what he really loved was the movies. He watched them all the time and acted them out for friends (being the silent era this was somewhat easier to do) and he basically credited the movies with saving his life. In high school, he became buddies with a guy named Pat O’Brien and they decided they would make it in Hollywood. Eventually, they both would. But first World War I came calling. They enlisted together, but the war ended before they could see any action.

By this time, Tracy was actually a pretty good student and had repaired relations with his parents, so when he came back to finish high school, his father urged him to be the first person in his family with a college degree, so he went to Ripon College and while there, started acting. He was very good, which I don’t need to tell you all. He was so good that he left Ripon and transferred to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, a big step for a midwestern kid. O’Brien went there too so they were back to hanging together. By 1922, Tracy was on Broadway and he got his degree in 1923.

Things were tough for the first few years. He traveled around in stock companies, got a couple small roles on Broadway, got some bad reviews. In 1926, he made an ultimatum with himself. He had gotten another role on Broadway, in George Cohan’s new play, named Yellow. If he got bad reviews, he would leave acting and go start a business. The reviews of the play were mixed, but Cohan loved Tracy’s work and really encouraged him to keep going. They would work together quite a bit over the years and Cohan was of course a big deal. Cohan centered his next play, The Baby Cyclone, around Tracy and it went over great.

In 1930, with the arrival of sound in pictures, the film companies needed to look for a different kind of actor since so many of their stars had terrible voices. So they came to Broadway to scout and it didn’t take them long to find Tracy. He hadn’t really thought much about it. He had done a couple of little talkie shorts, but he considered himself a Broadway guy. But a young director named John Ford had seen Tracy’s plays and so he approached him directly. I have not seen Up the River, but it is notable for the feature film debuts for both Tracy and Humphrey Bogart. Fox then offered Tracy a huge contract. He needed that. He had kids by this time. One was deaf and had polio. He jumped at the offer.

Even though Tracy did not exactly have the handsome face of a leading star, he was such a good actor and the face was so expressive that Fox committed to making him a big star. Still it took time. With that face, he was mostly put in bad comedies and he got frustrated. But like with the theater, it just took a little time. Tracy’s big break toward fame happened in 1933, in William K. Howard’s The Power and the Glory, which is also the first film made from a Preston Sturges script. But still things were rough for awhile. One problem is that Fox didn’t know what to do with him. Another is that he was a massive drunk who would disappear on benders, often delaying productions.

So when MGM approached Fox about taking Tracy off their hands, both sides were fine with it. But Irving Thalberg thought Tracy was great and started putting him with the best actors, including in Jimmy Stewart’s first film, 1935’s The Murder Man. Realizing that Tracy had an odd sex appeal, Thalberg had Tracy cast with MGM’s hottest actresses, including Myrna Loy and Jean Harlow. Fritz Lang’s Fury proved that Tracy could succeed as a leading man. I’ve never seen that and I need to get that one off the list. Tracy also tried to stop drinking, which was a mixed success as these things often are, but still, it made everyone he worked with feel a better about him.

By 1937, Tracy was an A+ Hollywood actor, winning the Academy Award for Captains Courageous, a film I think no one has seen today and which Tracy had to talk in a “foreign” accent, but hey, good for him. When he won Best Actor again the next year for Boys Town, he sent the Oscar to Father Flanagan, the head of the actual Boys Town. Tracy was still a very serious Catholic and he did not take playing Catholics lightly. It was a mission from God, basically.

The next major life changing event for Tracy was being cast in Woman of the Year, with Katharine Hepburn. First, it’s a fantastic film. Second, he and Hepburn started dating. Now, Tracy was still married and he would never get a divorce. He was a Catholic after all! In fact, he and his wife had mostly separated in 1933 anyway, though had years of occasionally getting back together in between his affairs with a lot of major actresses. To say Hepburn was an independent woman is a huge understatement. She made her choices. But they basically lived together for the rest of his life. He continued to support his family, but effectively cut them out of his personal life. She more or less took care of the old drunk. And they worked together frequently, to great effect. Whether their on-screen chemistry was quite Bogart-Bacall, well, not quite sure I’d say that, and neither actor screamed SEX like those two, but they most certainly had first rate chemistry.

There are so many films to discuss, so let’s just keep this short and you all can have fun in the comments. After 12 years without recognition from the Academy, he was nominated for Father of the Bride in 1950, acting across from Elizabeth Taylor. 1953s The Actress did not do well commercially, but won Tracy a Golden Globe. He was nominated for another Academy Award for Bad Day in Black Rock, which is such a fantastic film and Tracy is really perfect here, especially with Robert Ryan hamming it up as a very evil man opposite him. He was nominated again in 1958 for The Old Man and the Sea, a physically difficult production. Another nomination came from Inherit the Wind in 1960, who plays a perfect slightly disguised Clarence Darrow.

By the 60s, Tracy’s health was getting no better and he pretty much just worked with Stanley Kramer, starting with Inherit the Wind, then in Judgement at Nuremberg. Sidney Lumet really wanted him for the father in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but his health just couldn’t handle it. Ralph Richardson is great in that, sure, but Tracy would have been awesome.

In 1967, Tracy decided to make one last film, his ninth with Hepburn. This is of course Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In some ways, this is a dated and painful artifact of 1960s white liberalism. But this can be true and it remain an important and well-acted film. It’s problematic, you bet it is. But you have to reckon with it.

Seventeen days after completing the shooting of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Tracy died. He was 67 years old and looked 87. That’s what several thousand gallons of whiskey and tens of thousands of cigarettes will do to a man. Hepburn did not attend the funeral out of respect for the family of the still married Tracy.

Spencer Tracy is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

Tracy was nominated for nine Best Actor Academy Awards, though only won two. He remains tied with Olivier for the most ever nominations in that category. If you would like this series to visit other Best Actor winners, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Gary Cooper is in Southampton, New York and Bing Crosby is in Culver City, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.