CHAPTER 9
Good notices notwithstanding, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing didn’t put Tracy over as he had hoped. After winning the role of Tom Garner in The Power and the Glory, he fell back to playing muggs and adventurers. “The situation was not of Tracy’s making,” Frederick Lewis pointed out in a 1937 profile for Liberty magazine. “He was simply the victim of a Hollywood wisdom which let Victor McLaglen go ‘because he can’t act’ and didn’t know, until it loaned Shirley Temple to another company, that it had on its payroll—at $150 a week!—the greatest box office moneymaker since the picture learned to talk.”
The character of Bill in Man’s Castle was another mugg, albeit better written than most—a cocky vagabond whose vagrant lifestyle is compromised when he allows the indigent Trina to share his shanty lean-to on the New York riverfront. The screenplay was by Jo Swerling, veteran of a half dozen pictures with director Frank Capra. Based on an unproduced play, its mix of unmarried characters gave the guardians of the Code fits, particularly a plainspoken prostitute named Flossie whose lines had already been considerably toned down before Tracy ever saw a script. The principal attraction was Frank Borzage, with whom Tracy played polo, went drinking, and flew to Agua Caliente occasionally in the director’s Waco F2 biplane. When Borzage chose to open the film on an elegant note, Bill in tux, opera cape, and top hat feeding the pigeons on a park bench, Trina seated next to him, a famished stranger envying the birds, he was suddenly wary of the extent to which Borzage, the Academy Award–winning director of 7th Heaven, aimed to romanticize the story’s more sordid elements.
“They had decided that he was to dress up and this was to be a romantic thing,” said Lorraine Foat, who saw him not long after the film was released. “He didn’t want to do the romances in the beginning. He had the fixation, I think, on his looks, but he never really talked about it. He might laugh. ‘Whoa, I couldn’t do that sort of thing!’ That’s what he said about Loretta Young, who was a very pretty, dainty person. They decided … that they were going to change his role, and he was not very happy about that. He just had kind of a strict feeling about the way he handled girls or women on the stage…[When] he played with Ethyl Williams … there was a romantic scene, but he was a very careful distance from her.”
Man’s Castle did not come together easily. The start of production was delayed two weeks with the advent of a technicians’ strike, then actress Helen MacKeller, originally cast as Flossie, fell ill, causing her scenes to be reshot with Marjorie Rambeau. The delays forced out Minor Watson, committed to John Golden for a play in New York, and Arthur Hohl took his place as the lecherous Bragg. Borzage, too, tended to work more deliberately than most directors, preferring rehearsal to speed, mood to stagecraft. “That Frank Borzage had a way with actors,” said Loretta Young, who felt she finally “proved she could really act” in Man’s Castle. “He made you believe your part and this intensity came over on the screen.”
The film’s centerpiece was Stephen Goosson’s spectacular Hoover Flats set, an artful assemblage of old cars and ramshackle huts topped with plywood and corrugated sheet metal and weighed down with bricks, washtubs, cracker boxes, and broken chairs. Crowded into the largest stage on the Columbia lot and set against a cubist mosaic of junk and weeds, it descended in forced perspective to the East River and the Manhattan skyline beyond, a sort of makeshift resort for the downtrodden, at once both vast and intimate.
Production got under way on July 28, 1933, not long after Tracy was observed moving into an apartment at the Chateau Elysée. “Irritable as a bear” when preparing for a role, he had come to relish the advantage of sleeping at Riviera, where he could concentrate on the business of perfecting a character. Away from the chaos of the movie set and the distractions of a home life that included two small children, he could study the script as late as he liked and still get in his stick-and-ball practice.
That all changed when Carroll Tracy came west and moved into the ivy-covered “Grand Hotel of Golf” with his new bride. By the time the boys’ aunt Jenny arrived with her daughter, Jane, for the summer, Mother Tracy was also living at Riviera and taking her meals in the dining room that overlooked the course. Jenny and Jane Feely took the room next door to Carrie’s, bringing the total number of family members on the property to five. After wrapping The Power and the Glory, Spence retreated to the relative privacy of 712 Holmby, at least temporarily.
Family portrait, 1932. (SUSIE TRACY)
Jane’s first memory of the house in Westwood was of year-old Susie in the yard in a playpen. There was a pool and a pair of servants named Felix and Bessie. Spencer wasn’t around much, but Louise was unfailingly solicitous and kindly.
Jane admired Louise’s elegance and poise, the way she carried herself and the way she spoke. “Her diction was so perfect, so beautiful. There was a little bit of a formality to her that attracted me. She seemed to me to be kind of an actressy sort of person, and I admired her because I was at that stage where I thought people in the theatre—actors and actresses—were kind of superior to the rest of us.” Louise was a little taller than Jane, but they wore the same dress size. “I inherited her clothing, always. We always got the two big boxes from Aunt Carrie and Louise. I got through high school and two years of college in her good clothes. And beyond that.” A check also arrived each month from the time of Bernard’s death in 1931. “Sometimes it would be late and [Mama] would write to Louise because we got to depend on it. And it varied in size; sometimes it was $50 and sometimes $75 and sometimes $100.” Jenny Feely tried to tell Louise one time how much their generosity had meant to them. “Aunt Jenny,” Louise said calmly, cutting her off, “that’s what money is for.”
Johnny was a constant presence, delighted to have visitors around. As Jane recalled,
He practiced speaking and watching you, learning how to read your lips. After a while, it was no problem talking to him because he was pretty good. He was a very sunny, happy little kid. He was lonely, though. There was nobody around to play with. He hadn’t gotten into a school where he had any kind of association with children. [Louise] was determined that he would be mainstreamed immediately. He was not going to be placed among deaf children. He was going to be made to speak. All of us were told, “When he comes into the room, we all stop and we speak to John first.” When he would come in he would say, “Mother, what talk?” And she would explain what we were talking about. And she would impress on all of us that we should speak slowly and include him in the conversation. I guess you could say she had this overpowering sense of direction and protection, that this was her life’s work.
There were no outward signs of trouble; the Tracys were an extraordinarily demonstrative family. “Everybody kissed everybody when they came in and when they left. Much outward affection among all of them then. Carroll and Dorothy and Spencer and Louise would go and kiss Mother Tracy before they left and when they came in. Everybody was very affectionate.” Louise and Spencer also seemed perfectly comfortable with one another. “Good-natured. They kind of bantered a little bit. I don’t remember there being any harshness or any anger between them at that time. I didn’t notice it. I think there probably was an undercurrent; must have been at that time, but it was not evident to me.”
When Spence moved to the Chateau, a huge, Normandy-themed castle a few blocks from the Columbia lot, no one seemed to notice. Louise took it in stride, focused as she was on Johnny and her plan to establish a private school for the deaf. The Chateau, however, was a high-profile venue. There were a lot of tenants employed in the industry, so his comings and goings were observed to a degree unthinkable at the Riviera. When he sat down for lunch with a writer from Modern Screen, the subject naturally got raised: two Hollywood divorces had broken that same day, and two others had come to light the previous week—including the headline-grabbing separation of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.
“The day Louise and I stood up,” Tracy told the man, a freelancer named Carter Bruce, “we were just two half-scared—and also half-starved—young stock actors who had felt mutual attraction, part mental but a greater part sex. Marriage came to us over a period of years during which we shared each other’s life. Those years weren’t any too fat either. When I married Louise, I thought she was a pretty girl and about the best actress I had ever seen. But I didn’t know then that she was the kind who could laugh on an empty stomach, who could kid away the tough sledding and never care that she wore the same dress day in and day out months at a time.”
He dismissed the rumors that he and Louise were separating. “They make me laugh. They’re too silly to even deny. I don’t think anyone could ever say enough words between us to dissolve the amount of marriage we’ve experienced—long before Hollywood and her standards happened to us.”
Ironically, by the time the article appeared, word of a Tracy “separation” was, in fact, old news. The Examiner carried an item about it on August 30, the same day Man’s Castle wrapped at Columbia. “If there is any blame to be attached, it is mine,” Tracy told a reporter. “If our friends will only let us alone, I think we can work out our problems.” He attributed the separation to growing incompatibility and nothing more. “Mrs. Tracy and I are still excellent friends, and perhaps living apart for a while will lead to a reunion.”
Louise made no statement, preferring to let Spence do all the talking, yet it was her idea to publicly confirm a trial separation. “The papers forced us into it,” she later explained to their friend Mook. “They found out Spencer had taken an apartment at a local hotel and threatened all sorts of things if we didn’t give them some kind of statement, so we decided this was the simplest way out—that it would clarify matters. It isn’t what we would have chosen for ourselves, but, under the circumstances, it was simply making the best of a bad bargain.” Spence added bitterly: “I gave them a statement of the facts as they are, but that wasn’t enough. They wanted a statement with ‘hot news’ in it.”
Four weeks into the matter, it became apparent there was something more to the separation than just “growing incompatibility.” Man’s Castle was made over the hottest days of summer, turning the uncooled soundstage with the Hooverville set into what one visitor described as a blazing inferno. Takes had to be aborted as perspiration beaded on the foreheads of the actors, and more work got done at night than during the oppressive afternoon hours. At the tender age of twenty, Loretta Young already had fifty films, an annulled marriage, and several high-profile relationships to her credit. (“I’ve always been very susceptible to men,” she once commented, “and all of them were gorgeous.”) Small and slight, with light brown hair and an underdeveloped figure, her fortune was her face, a tableau of Catholic innocence, soulful blue eyes, and full lips, convincingly virginal, yet old enough to radiate sex appeal, sensual and restrained.
“Spencer and I were such complete strangers that we hadn’t even seen one another on the screen previous to our being cast together in Man’s Castle,” she said at the time. “I admired his work so much during rehearsal that I went to see several of his recent pictures. He later flattered me very much by telling me that he had done the same thing.” She had worked with some of the screen’s finest actors, Walter Huston, John Barrymore, and the late Lon Chaney among them, but she had never met anyone quite like Spencer Tracy. “Such fire, the talent blazed at you.” The company worked late one night when the picture was about ten days along. “Spencer asked me if I would care to dine with him and run over some of the dialogue. I accepted and we went to the Victor Hugo restaurant. A columnist saw us there and the next day we read the first of the romantic reports.”
Stephen Goosson’s Hoover Flats set for Man’s Castle, which covered 21,000 square feet, lent size and color to an otherwise intimate love story. Here Tracy and Loretta Young, age twenty, pose with director Frank Borzage, 1933. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Young, who went by her given name, “Gretchen,” among friends and family, made little secret of her infatuation with Tracy. Borzage, in fact, may have encouraged it, knowing it was helping the film. (“The story was a trifle,” she said, “but we lived it.”) For once she didn’t push her scenes, sensing the camera was picking up the underlying emotions between them. It was also picking up what Tracy was thinking, a trickier proposition as he was as cool as the character he was playing. Yet she could whisper in his ear and his expression would speak volumes.
“I believe,” he said, “that the first time I ever really became conscious of Loretta as a girl, as a woman, was the first time she noticed me as a man—to feel sorry for. She watched me lunching on the lot. She could see that I was feeling kinda low … And so, that day Loretta came over to me and out of the goodness of her heart asked if I would like to drive out to her house and have a glass of beer. We were knocking off early. I told her I would. I did. We sat in the garden two or three hours, Loretta, her mother, and I. We talked and had a lot of laughs. It was pleasant. It was fun. Life seemed sort of decent again.”
Tracy took to calling her “little ol’ Whoosits,” which was what the character of Bill called Trina in the story. His confidence and command of the role played out in stark contrast to his own personal diffidence. Acting was the one thing he could do in which he had unshakable confidence. Cursed with a sensitive nature, he was all too aware of his inadequacies as a husband, as a father, as a son, as a lover. He was homely, overweight, as ill suited to stardom as any actor could possibly be. “The idea,” he said, “that such a gorgeous person—so sophisticated, so capable of having any man in the world she wanted—should prefer me. It was just too much.”
Alarmed, Young’s agent, former First National executive Dave Thompson, phoned her mother to advise her that Tracy was widely regarded around town as an alcoholic. “He must have meant Lee Tracy, not Spence,” Gretchen said when her mother relayed the news. Worse to Gladys Belzer was the fact that Tracy was a Catholic with a wife and two kids. “Don’t fall in love with him!” she warned.
“Oh, Mama … I think I already have!”
Amid much fanfare, The Power and the Glory had its world premiere at New York’s Gaiety Theatre on the night of August 16, 1933. Although the film itself drew oddly mixed reviews—the Times, Variety, and the New York American all according it raves, the World-Telegram, Herald Tribune, and Evening Post somewhat less emphatic—notices for the actors, Tracy in particular, were exceptionally fine. For the first time, he saw such words as “flawless,” “vivid,” and “brilliant” applied to one of his movie performances. Given the forgettable fare in which he routinely appeared, many of the best reactions were couched in degrees of genuine surprise. Regina Crewe of the American marveled at the transformative arc of his work in tones that suggested she never would have thought it possible: “The man grows in stature before our eyes. He develops gradually, logically, inexorably from a rural urchin of the swimmin’ hole to the iron man of far-reaching affairs. He becomes a familiar figure, understandable in all his strengths and weaknesses, at once admirable and fearsome. The role dominates the drama. And Spencer Tracy dominates the role.” Bland Johannsen of the Daily Mirror thought Tracy’s performance matchless. “He never has had a more exacting role, or one which he handled with such sure skill and finish.” Mordaunt Hall’s notice in the Times went so far as to declare, “No more convincing performance has been given on the screen than Spencer Tracy’s impersonation of Tom Garner.”
Tracy’s off-screen relationship with Loretta Young paid dividends for director Frank Borzage. Man’s Castle is one of Borzage’s best-remembered films. (SUSIE TRACY)
The Gaiety being a legit house commandeered by Fox for its class product, The Power and the Glory became the first roadshow attraction of the new season, a two-a-day reserved-seat event going up against such mass-market favorites as Tugboat Annie and RKO’s Morning Glory. Driven by the reviews as much as the ballyhoo—and more than a little curiosity regarding its “Narratage” technique—The Power and the Glory grossed $9,500 for its first seven days, solid business for an eight-hundred-seat theater—better, in fact, than Cavalcade had done at the exact same venue. It dipped only slightly for its second week, M-G-M’s all-star Dinner at Eight giving it the stiffest possible competition. The Power and the Glory managed a total of three weeks and five days at the Gaiety and could have stayed even longer had the theater not been committed to the premiere of Berkeley Square on September 13. Adroitly, Fox shifted the picture to the new Radio City Music Hall (as it had Cavalcade), and it played yet another week at the theater that had supplanted the Roxy as the world’s largest.
By all standards, the picture looked like a hit. Fueled again by mostly excellent reviews, it did comparable business in Chicago and Los Angeles (where it was incongruously paired with speakeasy impresario Texas Guinan’s torrid stage act). Past its initial showcasings in major metropolitan markets, however, The Power and the Glory was a loser, failing to ignite the passions of grassroots moviegoers who knew only vaguely who Spencer Tracy was, who preferred Colleen Moore in her flapper days, and who liked their storytelling straightforward and linear. Subsequent runs drew flat rentals of twenty-five dollars or less in neighborhood houses. According to studio records, the picture ultimately drew $563,323.88 in worldwide rentals—respectable, even exceptional given the average maximum for a picture was in the $400,000 range—but scarcely enough for an A-picture of its stature to break even. It was never reissued. A few years later, largely forgotten, the negative and master lavender were destroyed in a New Jersey fire.
Cousin Jane, early on, could sense there was something amiss: “I remember very vividly going to the set with Carroll, meeting Loretta Young, having her send me back to the Riviera Country Club in her town car with her autographed picture. Later, she came and brought me a prayer book, which I think I still have.” The story broke wide open with Louella Parsons’ column of September 14: “Her dining tete-a-tete with Spencer Tracy, going to the movies with him, and forgetting all her other admirers has made Hollywood wonder about Loretta Young. The reason for this Tracy interest is given as a plan Miss Young and Mr. Tracy have to star in a stage play together this coming season. Mrs. Tracy insists that Spencer’s interest in Loretta has nothing to do with her separation from the actor. She and Spencer agreed to part long before he became interested in Loretta.”
Emotionally immature, her hormones at odds with her strict Catholic upbringing, Loretta Young was used to sending mixed signals to the opposite sex, aggressive with men but never quite knowing what to do about the fire once it had been lit. She told a fan magazine she had to feel a “romantic interest” in a leading man in order to give a sincere performance. “I’ve been in love at least 50 times,” she said blithely, frankly admitting she used the word “love” much too lightly. “Spencer heard of that one quote,” she later said, “and remarked that he hoped he wasn’t just Number Fifty-One in the long line.”
They kept a low profile at first, spending a lot of time with the Jo Swerlings and frequenting little restaurants like the Thistle Inn on San Vincente, where they were unlikely to be seen. “I remember Carroll really shadowing me, shadowing us all, when we went to the set,” Jane said, “and when there was a break he’d say, ‘Let’s go have a milk shake.’ The four of us. Loretta Young said, ‘Are you going to pay, or is Carl [meaning Carroll] going to pay?’ And [Spencer] said, ‘Carl’s going to pay.’ She constantly called him ‘Carl’ and I was a little put off by that. I know afterwards, as I grew older, that Mother and Aunt Carrie had lengthy discussions about it and what they were going to do, and Aunt Carrie would cry a lot.” The couple grew bolder, and Loretta wound up spending most Sundays watching Spence on the polo field. One day Johnny came with him and she found him charming. When Johnny turned away, she saw how Spence would stamp the ground twice with his foot to get his attention. “I have never known a man with as much gentleness,” she said.
Predictably, the relationship ate at him, as did all his infidelities. The mortal sin of adultery had brought him the burden of a deaf child, a responsibility he was ill-equipped to carry on his own, one he could manage only with the help and support of his wife. It was as if God had placed upon him something that could only be endured within the sacrament of marriage, a strengthening rather than a weakening of the bond between them. But as a sexual being, one for whom the potential for sin was ever-present, he also subscribed to the notion that denial equals permission, that Louise’s tacit approval was part and parcel of the distance she placed between them. Madge Evans admitted to having been involved with him at one point, presumably during their time out of town together in Dread. Bette Davis, though newly married, took note of the spark between them.Joan Bennett was seemingly available, but broke her hip before things could get very far. (He told Loretta how astonished he had been to see Joan’s leg sticking out from under the covers of her hospital bed and observing that there was polish on her toenails.) He talked about other actresses, women who slept around and weren’t “ladies”—the kind men wanted to marry.
The relationship with Loretta Young was an almost spiritual melding of two souls, its intensity something Tracy had never before encountered. He talked a lot about his kids—John especially, who was, she decided, the most important person in his life. He talked less about Louise, but always with tremendous feeling and respect. Gretchen was different—more delicate, more beautiful, more sensitive. Seventeen years younger, she wasn’t as well educated as Louise, nor was she as good an actress. There was nothing even remotely insightful about her, yet she was pure and magical and full of life. She could give him her complete attention in a way Louise never could, and there was, of course, the common bond of their faith.
Jane Feely (center) could sense there was something between her cousin and his costar. (JANE FEELY DESMOND)
“He was not a devout Catholic,” his cousin Jane said,
and he was often not a practical one either. I would call him a spiritual Catholic. I would say he understood what the law of love was, what Christianity teaches, what the Catholic Church teaches, and what we live by and what we believe. I can remember one thing that kind of struck me. We were at Louise’s, we were at the house, and he and Carroll came home from somewhere—he was living at home at that time—and he said, “You know, Aunt Jenny, I went by this church over in Beverly Hills, and there were all these people. Mass was over, and they brought out the Host in a big monstrance.” And my mother said, “Spencer, it’s the 40 hours. You remember the 40-hour devotion.” And he said, “Forty hours? Oh, yeah … I guess I forgot.” The point was that he made a big issue about being there, so that she would know he had been to Mass. It was very obvious he knew what they were doing.
When it came time for Jenny and Jane to return to Aberdeen, a veil of sadness descended over the family. Carrie Tracy would miss Jenny’s spark, her laugh, her sense of shared experience. Spencer’s relationship with Loretta Young had turned into a very public event, and Louise was clearly mortified. “In the family,” said Jane, “those were the things you pulled the lace curtains for—not that it wasn’t true, but you didn’t talk about it. Ever.” Before she left, Aunt Jenny broached the subject with Spencer just long enough to say, “I hope you’re not going to drag the Tracy name through the divorce courts!”
They had talked about marriage, Spence and Gretchen, but she never asked him to get a divorce, partly because she knew they could never marry in the church, and partly because she knew deep in her heart that he would never divorce Louise. “I really don’t think I could,” Tracy told his friend Bogart. “What could I say to Johnny? How could I make a nine year old little boy understand that I’m leaving his mother?”
His drinking accelerated, and he was arrested for public drunkenness one night while attempting to back out of a driveway in the 8400 block of Sunset Boulevard. The address was on a strip of county land across the street from a clutch of notorious businesses. The House of Francis, an apartment building that housed one of the town’s priciest brothels, was at 8439 Sunset, and Milton Farmer’s Clover Club, a fancy after-hours restaurant and bar where casino-style gambling was available in the back room, was at 8469. Tracy’s private behavior and his public image converged in the press that next day.
“Securely held with handcuffs and leg straps, Spencer Tracy, portrayer of ‘he-man’ roles on the screen, yesterday spent two hours in the county jail after he had been booked as drunk,” began a four-inch item in the Examiner that carried the headline SPENCER TRACY BOOKED IN JAIL. “Tracy last year played the starring role in the film Twenty Years in Sing Sing [sic], a motion picture showing prison life based on actual events in the New York penitentiary.”
“You see,” Tracy later said by way of explanation,
I’d never known anything of this sort. My life has been so completely different, so distant from this kind of thing. And to be suddenly the center of a group that was brilliant and rich and worldly was fascinating to me. The women were gay and beautiful always—they wore furs and jewels and creations in the evening. We dressed for dinner. I’d never done that. We had cocktails in the afternoon, and champagne with food, and liqueurs afterward, and highballs in the evening … I forgot all the precepts upon which I had built my life, accepted all the attitudes and philosophies that I’d despised for so many years.
With the completion of Man’s Castle, Tracy returned to his home studio and almost immediately was put into a picture called The Mad Game, which was being rushed to meet a November 17 release date. Resentment over long hours and salary cuts—not to mention quality of material—ran deep among contract players, many of whom were coming to see the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a tool of the producers and not the impartial arbiter of labor disputes it had proposed to be. With virtually no time off between pictures, Tracy joined the nascent Screen Actors Guild, becoming one of twenty-five directors of the organization alongside such friends and colleagues as Ralph Bellamy, George Raft, Robert Montgomery, Chester Morris, Miriam Hopkins, James Cagney, Ann Harding, Boris Karloff, Edward G. Robinson, Ralph Morgan, and Grant Mitchell.
Within a month, twenty-three major stars would resign from the academy and more than five hundred actors would answer the call to complete SAG membership forms in the first serious blow to the academy since its inception in 1927. The Mad Game counted as another regression after the twin experiences of The Power and the Glory and Man’s Castle. It was, like Shanghai Madness before it, a formula picture, the sort of gangster melodrama Warner Bros. did better than anyone. It had been a story with the Hammettesque title Lead Harvest, but then William Conselman started drafting the screenplay under Winnie Sheehan’s supervision and it evolved into a film about the kidnapping game—the “snatch racket” that was emerging with the end of Prohibition.
After the taking of the Lindbergh baby in March 1932, most city and state censor boards discouraged such storylines, fearful the public would take offense. And with the release of First National’s Three on a Match in October of that year, the industry entered into a gentlemen’s agreement not to make any more like it. Sheehan was adamant about The Mad Game, however, and agreed to remove actual scenes of kidnapping in order to keep the project alive. In July 1933 the Hays office warned Fox the film would likely encounter problems in New York State, where the son of a prominent politician was being held for ransom. Sheehan left for Europe that same month, confident all problems with the script had been worked out and that the film would start as planned as soon as Tracy had finished at Columbia.
For the girl in The Mad Game, Sheehan wanted Tracy teamed with Claire Trevor, a pairing that had almost taken place for Shanghai Madness. Like Tracy, Trevor had studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and then moved on to stock and a string of Vitaphone shorts. She made a genuine Broadway hit for herself in The Party’s Over, then left to accept Sheehan’s offer of a contract, a move she already had reason to regret. “The pictures were so cheesy,” she said late in life, “those eighteen-day schedules. And usually directors had full sway—directors who had failed long before and were sort of resurrected to do a picture. Or else we’d have a brand-new guy who had never done anything.” The director of The Mad Game, Irving Cummings, fell more into the first category than the second, a large, sonorous figure who, like Ed Sedgwick, was a holdover from silent days.
Tracy found himself pleasantly surprised by Trevor’s smart work as the newspaper reporter who loves his blustery beer baron and rolls her own cigarettes. “He liked the way I delivered lines, tossed lines away. He really liked my style.” He also liked the looks of the twenty-three-year-old hazel-eyed blonde and said as much early on in the shoot. She, of course, had already heard about Loretta (who was in Hawaii with her mother at the time) and responded to his overtures with a prim, “I don’t go out with married men.” After a loaded pause, Tracy flashed her a big smile. “Stay that way!” he said approvingly.
About this time, Dick Mook asked Louise to sit for an interview. He was one of the first people Spence had told about the separation: “If you think it’s necessary to run a story on it, go ahead and write it. It’s the only one we’ll give out.” The news about him and Loretta Young had subsequently made all the papers. Louise hadn’t said anything to the press, and Dick thought she should at least have a chance to give her side of the story. “I’d known Louise and Spencer—intimately—almost from the time they first came to Hollywood,” he said. “I’d done one of the first stories on him the magazines carried, and from that casual contact have developed two of the few friendships I really prize. The announcement of their separation hurt me as much as though I, myself, had been involved.”
The night after the story broke, Louise and Mook sat across from one another in a smoky Los Angeles nightclub. (Mook was still taking her around to industry events and previews, and when Spence saw him, he’d usually ask, “Are you seeing to it that Louise has a good time?”) Dick thought her remarkably composed that night.
“There’s nothing about it that necessitates your wearing such a long face,” she said calmly. “It’s just one of those things. It doesn’t mean that this is the end. In every marriage, no matter how happy it is, there are bound to come times when some sort of adjustment is necessary. This happens to be one of those times in ours. This ‘separation’ will simply clarify matters. We’re not going to get a divorce. At least, that isn’t our present intention. Nor am I going abroad with the children, as the papers reported. We’ll probably be back together by the time your story breaks.”
Mook said something about the Hollywood press and how anybody’s affairs were everybody’s. “Hollywood had nothing to do with it,” she said, declining the bait.
I don’t feel bitter towards Hollywood because Hollywood has done nothing to us—except give us more money than we’ve ever had before. This and a chance to have a home of our own. I love this place. So does Spencer. I’ll admit that if he had been engaged in any other kind of work in some other city, we could probably have worked things out quietly between ourselves without having to tell the world our troubles, but that would only have been because he wouldn’t have been in the public eye. Newspapers are here to give the people news. If he had been news in some other city, it would have been the same thing.
We lead a very close family life. We seldom go out anywhere, and we see few people outside our immediate family. We both felt we were getting into a rut. How many times have I been out alone with you? Can you remember? Hasn’t Spencer even urged you on numerous occasions to ask me out so I’d get a different viewpoint, get to talk about different things?
He needs the same change. I’ve repeatedly told him to go out with other people. Occasionally he’s gone out with some of the girls he’s worked with. I haven’t minded because he always told me about it. One of his recent pictures he worked nights a great deal. His leading lady happened to be single and they had dinner together a few times. Once, one of his other pictures was being previewed. I’d already seen it, so he asked this girl to go with him and people saw them there. Why shouldn’t he take a friend who was interested to see it?
Marriage out here may be a little more difficult than elsewhere because everyone knows everyone else—at least by sight—and there’s little else to talk about. I can’t truthfully say that Spencer and I are still madly, passionately in love with each other. I don’t believe that kind of love ever lasts. It burns itself out by its very intensity. But in its place comes a deep, understanding companionship and devotion. That’s what we have—and prize.
With Sheehan out of the country, Tracy was loaned to a start-up called 20th Century, which was based on the United Artists lot in Hollywood. Coincidentally, it was the same company Gretchen had just joined, an operation assembled by Joe Schenck and run by the former head of production at Warner Bros., Darryl F. Zanuck. At the moment, 20th Century was just an office, a line of credit, and Zanuck’s fabled way with a script. Everything else was rented, including most of the stars they used in their productions. George Arliss, also from Warners, was their big male draw, a distinguished British character actor who specialized in period subjects and biographies. Gretchen feared she would get stuck playing his daughter and tried to have a clause inserted into her contract preventing such a thing. When Zanuck refused, she signed anyway and ended up in her first picture, House of Rothschild, playing Arliss’ daughter.
Twentieth had a slate of twelve films for the 1933–34 season, Rothschild being the seventh. Others on the schedule were Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, The Affairs of Cellini, and The Trouble Shooter, a story based on the adventures of a telephone repairman that proposed to team Tracy with comedian Jack Oakie, borrowed from Paramount. (“The talk,” said Oakie, “was that with his underplaying and my jumping around we were a perfect twosome.”) Filming began on October 9, just as Man’s Castle was being readied for release.
The path to the screen for Man’s Castle was littered with parsed dialogue, trimmed footage, and the dubious approvals of the Hays office. Borzage flouted the Production Code in several key respects, insisting the lead characters remain unmarried until the very end of the picture, when an unplanned pregnancy forces Bill into an armed robbery from which he escapes unpunished. Flossie, the aging whore, retains most of her unsavory qualities, easy to discern for any adult paying attention, the details investing Borzage’s fantasy world with a sordid reality that would not have been possible only a year later.
The problems began in June when Dr. James Wingate of the MPPDA read Jo Swerling’s draft screenplay and ordered a number of cuts, including the removal of Bill’s climactic action of feeling Trina’s stomach and the line, “Geez! It’s movin’!” and Trina’s response, “Life.” It was daring for the time and absolutely essential to the picture as far as Borzage was concerned. Wingate subsequently met with the director, Swerling, and Columbia’s Sam Briskin over the proposed changes to the script, and most were eventually agreed to, save those specifically tied to the climax. “The studio believes they can handle this scene in such a way as to make it acceptable,” Wingate advised in an internal memorandum. “We are reserving our opinion until we see the picture.”
While the film was in production, Briskin, fighting back, reassured Dr. Wingate that “great care” would be used in the scene “and as both people are fully clothed, we see nothing that can be censorable about it.” Regarding the brief exchange of dialogue, “It is impossible to eliminate the words requested, as they are the essence of our story.” A scene of Bill and Trina skinny-dipping in the East River was similarly filmed with care, although a quick shot of Tracy diving, unclothed, into the water and Young’s similarly undressed body passing over his were removed before the film could be passed for release.
The matter was allowed to rest until the movie was ready to be screened in early October. Wingate, clearly under the spell Borzage had cast, saw nothing other than beauty in the way the story unfolded and was effusive afterward in his praise of the film. “It struck us as a fine and tender picture,” he wrote Harry Cohn, “treated in such a way as to be satisfactory under the Code. We also trust that it will be free from any serious danger of censorship difficulty.” Predictably, after Wingate had offered forth such a bold and authoritative assurance, the New York State Censor Board, which Wingate himself used to head, refused to license the film for exhibition without a number of deletions.
Man’s Castle and The Mad Game were previewed within days of each other, the latter having had its release moved up so as to avoid the spectacle of two Tracy pictures competing head-on. Fox management needn’t have worried, as the two films were designed to appeal to vastly different audiences. Mad Game was a gangster picture, perfumed, at the behest of the Hays office, with a lot of indignant dialogue about the kidnapping racket and how it was “the lowest of the low.” Tracy was noted largely for his use of makeup, a plot device requiring his character to submit to plastic surgery in order to infiltrate his former gang. He laid it on thick, turning into a cheap Italian hood with curly, permed hair and a putty nose that Cummings emphasized by shooting him mostly in profile.
Man’s Castle was another matter entirely, a film made with exquisite care and sensitivity and aimed at a more sophisticated crowd, principally adult females and the men whose moviegoing choices they influenced. The press preview at Los Angeles’ Romanesque Forum Theatre took place on a Tuesday night. Most observers thought the picture dragged in places and that judicious tightening was in order, but all were agreed on the splendid work done by both Tracy and Loretta Young, on Borzage’s command of the material, and on the film’s cumulative effect on an audience.
“Tracy’s matter-of-fact sincerity and defensive bluster as Bill kept the character at the right pitch every moment,” Billy Wilkerson said in the Reporter. “Avoiding any of the ordinary theatrical tricks, he made the character so real that one forgot he was acting. No study of a man at war with himself inside, asking no help from anyone, could carry more conviction than Spencer Tracy gives it here.”
When Trouble Shooter finished in mid-November, someone—maybe Loretta—got the idea they should go up to San Francisco for a couple of weeks. They were both between pictures; Loretta’s mother would meet them there, and her friend Josephine Wayne would accompany them. (Josie’s husband, actor John Wayne, was working and said he would come up on weekends.) Tracy suggested driving to Santa Barbara the first night and got a limousine big enough for the three of them, a driver, and Spence’s stand-in at the time, a man named Clarence, whose height and general build approximated Tracy’s own and whose job it was to stand patiently on the stage while the camera was positioned and the lighting was set.
Young’s attitude toward the relationship, no matter how much she thought she was in love, was that it was a completely impossible thing, dangerous and forbidden, and although she indulged herself as might a frisky teenager, she stopped short of consummation, convinced as she was that any form of birth control was tantamount to murder. She could remember one time when they were to meet the Swerlings in Santa Barbara, and their hosts had conspired to afford them some private time. Spence was perfectly happy with the accommodation, and she managed to stay just barely out of reach until Jo and his wife Flo got in the next day. “Flo,” said Fay Wray, “was enchanted with the romance—and happy to be a confidante.”
Now Loretta was at it again, planning a two-week vacation in California’s most romantic city, chaperoned as if it were a convent field trip. Spence started drinking in Santa Barbara, passing on dinner, and Loretta, who hadn’t seen this before, didn’t catch on until he was completely and utterly looped. She called Clarence, who was upstairs in his room, and had their bags transferred to the coastal Southern Pacific. She and Josie were gone before Tracy knew what had happened. In San Francisco they checked in at the Mark Hopkins, expecting Spence to show up eventually but not knowing quite when or where. Three days into their stay they were attending an elegant dinner party in the main dining room of the hotel when Tracy slipped into the room, stepping gingerly as he scrutinized every woman at every table, quietly excusing himself and moving on to the next. Loretta could see he was looking for her and hid out in the ladies’ room, telling Josie to alert her when he had finally given up. Three days later, he called her at the hotel, sober and contrite. She almost talked herself into imagining that she had dreamed the whole incident.
Back in Los Angeles, Carroll called her late one night and told her that Spence was drinking and refusing to eat. He was sure that she was mad at him, Carroll said, sure he had lost her for good, but if she would come down to the hotel and personally ask him to, Spence said that he would stop.
Loretta was skeptical, unwilling to be seen in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire at one in the morning asking for Mr. Tracy’s room, but Carroll thought it might somehow work. He sent a limo for her and met her at the hotel’s basement elevator. Upstairs, she found Spence sitting on the floor, propped in a corner, his pajamas askew and barely coherent. He told her he was sure he wouldn’t be this way if only they were able to get married. And as she put her arms around him, he leaned into her and began to cry.
Back at Fox, Tracy went into a musical comedy called Bottoms Up and was soon being linked in the gossip columns with the film’s leading lady, a petite British import named Pat Paterson. “If the off-set scenes of Pat Paterson, English beauty brought here by Winfield Sheehan, and Spencer Tracy were put into one picture you might see the beginning of a romance,” Louella Parsons wrote. “These two are in the same picture, but that doesn’t necessitate lunching together, talking together, and seeing each other at every possible moment. Maybe Spence is just trying to make Loretta Young jealous, or maybe it’s a lovers’ quarrel, but all the Fox studio is agog over his attentions to Pat Paterson, who is as blond as Loretta and the same type.” At twenty-three, Paterson was three years older than Loretta, getting used to a new country and clearly on the make. After an initial flurry of attention from Tracy, she met actor Charles Boyer at a studio gathering and was Mrs. Boyer within the space of a few weeks.
Spence and Loretta were back out in public again by the first of the year, going to films together and attending industry functions. On New Year’s Eve they went to a movie—“a lousy movie,” Tracy emphasized—and stopped at a hamburger stand on the way home. For Loretta’s twenty-first birthday they celebrated in grand style with Duke and Josie Wayne. The following weekend, they accompanied the Waynes to Palm Springs. A few years earlier, when Duke was under contract to Fox, there was talk of teaming the two of them. “It’s a good thing you’re good looking,” Spence would say, “because you can’t act your way out of a paper bag.” The affable Wayne would just laugh and say, “That’s right, Fats. I’ll catch on, then you watch out!”
The one time Loretta met Mother Tracy, Carrie was as cold as a Milwaukee winter, and it dawned on her that she was regarded by Spence’s mother as her son’s mistress. Shortly thereafter, Tracy agreed to an interview with journalist Gladys Hall for a piece in Movie Mirror magazine “if it would protect Loretta—I want to protect Loretta in this.” The assumption around town, of course, was that Loretta Young was responsible for the breakup of the Tracy marriage, when, as Spence always insisted, it in no way concerned her.
How could it? I mean, how could it because—as a matter of recorded and verifiable fact—and the register of the Chateau Elysée plus the starting date of our picture, Man’s Castle, will bear me out—I was registered at the Elysée here in Hollywood three weeks before I ever set foot on the first set of Man’s Castle. If anyone is sufficiently interested or sufficiently skeptical to want to check me on this, the data is available. And before I started to work on that picture, I had never done more than lay eyes on Loretta Young a couple of times, here and there around town. I had never exchanged four words with her. I don’t suppose that I had ever so much as passed a remark about her.
When Hall asked if he wanted to marry Loretta Young, Tracy looked at her and asked, “What man wouldn’t?” The question of a divorce, he said, was completely in Louise’s hands. “At the moment, Mrs. Tracy is living at home with the children. I am living at the Town House with my mother. I have dinner at the house with the children every Sunday. I go out there to see them as often as I can. This morning, for instance, I had a late call at the studio. I drove out there to see the kids. Johnny hasn’t been told anything about it. Johnny believes that I am working and away, as I’ve had to be before, on location and so on. When the time comes and everything is settled one way or another, I’ll tell him the truth. He is entitled to that.”
Then there was, he said, the religious aspect, which would have to be “very seriously” considered.
I am a Catholic, you see. Loretta is a Catholic. And so, on account of all these complications it would honestly be rather ridiculous and wholly untrue for me to attempt to make a definite statement. Our personal emotions have nothing to do with what we can do. The way I feel about Loretta must be pretty obvious. We haven’t tried to hide or beat around the bush or camouflage anything. We have nothing to be ashamed of. I am free to go with whom I please, at any time I please. If I were just playing around, if this were just another “Hollywood romance,” if I were a man, recently separated from his wife and from the bonds of marriage and wanting to have a good time for myself, I would be going out with three or four different girls. There is only the one.
This is profoundly sincere with me. It is serious. It is important. It stands apart from any other experience in my not-very-experienced life. I mean, even before I was married, I was working hard, trying to get a foothold on the footlights, struggling, worrying, no time for play. Loretta is young. That attracts me, of course. I can kid her a lot. I do. We have good times together, by ourselves, in our own way … Now and again we go to the Grove or the Beverly Wilshire and dance, but for the most part we take long walks and have long arguments and a lot of fun. Loretta is fun to talk to. I, who have always especially liked and enjoyed the talk and companionship of men, get a kick out of just being with her. We always go to church together on Sunday mornings. I drive out to her place and pick her up and we go. Mrs. Tracy is not a Catholic, and so, of course, this is something I never had before.
This is, honestly, our past and our present—the future is not entirely in our hands. There is nothing we can do about it but wait—and hope.
Bottoms Up was the brainchild of the prolific Tin Pan Alley songwriter and Broadway producer B. G. “Buddy” DeSylva, who had collaborated with director David Butler on three other decidedly oddball musicals for Fox. In an industry notoriously reluctant to laugh at itself, Bottoms Up was an anomaly, a satire which not only took aim at Hollywood but specifically at the company producing it. The story concerned a Russian-born studio head, Louie Wolf, who is beholden to an East Coast banker, a Mr. Baldwin. The matinee-handsome movie star, who may well have been inspired by Tracy’s own circumstances, is a self-loathing drunkard who considers his latest picture “the most stupendous piece of junk I’ve ever seen.” Tracy’s character, a genial cigar-flourishing con man named Smoothie, is down to his last dime and determined, with nothing more than a gardenia in his lapel, to conquer the town: “Now look, Mr. Baldwin, you make 52 pictures a year, don’t you, but only twelve of them are hits. Now my idea is only to produce the twelve good ones.”
While Bottoms Up was being filmed at Fox Hills, Louise was struggling to get Johnny accepted as a morning student at the Hollywood Progressive School. Spence was in touch with her daily and appeared for an admissions conference one morning when he could get away from the set. “The superintendent at first protested that it would be too cruel to enter Johnny in a school where the children were completely normal,” he recalled. “She argued he would not be able to keep up with them, and that he would be unhappy as they passed him in grades. This almost broke [Louise’s] heart. She said, ‘Of course, you understand, we’re not begging you to take him. It is really a privilege.’ The superintendent, no doubt feeling sorry for her and perhaps a little bit ashamed, suggested that she bring Johnny to school the following morning and she would see how he got along.”
Johnny entered the third grade as a “guest,” limited to one hour in a single classroom. “The class happened to be doing arithmetic,” Louise said. “This was John’s meat. He was happy, too, at being with children again and instantly became a part of things. His hand went up with the others as the teacher put a problem in addition on the board. I held my breath, as I felt uncertain John would be given his chance. He was.” As John would later write, “I didn’t know that being deaf was a great handicap. I just got along beautifully with those boys and girls without realizing it.”
It was also during the production of Bottoms Up that an extraordinary editorial ran in the pages of the Hollywood Reporter. Every Monday, Wilkerson printed a front-page column called “Tradeviews” in which he held forth on some timely aspect of the motion picture business. One week, he might rail over labor practices, the next the bane of nepotism and how it made for worse and costlier pictures. The Power and the Glory, the highpoint of Tracy’s career, had been followed into release by the thoroughly undistinguished Mad Game. Then Man’s Castle came a week later and was not the hit it should have been, domestic rentals just about covering its cost. When Fox announced that Bottoms Up would be followed by something called The Gold Rush of 1933, the primary excuse for which would be Tracy’s reteaming with Claire Trevor, Wilkerson could see that Tracy’s work in Power and the Glory and Man’s Castle hadn’t counted for much.
We’ll place the name of Spencer Tracy at the top of any list crediting really fine performances, rating artistic ability, or an instance of one of the greatest prospective draws in this business if given good material. We have never seen Tracy giving anything resembling a bad performance, and we have seen him in some pictures that were so bad that standout ability was almost impossible. But not for Tracy; that boy makes even impossible characters interesting.
Tracy never acts; he rather underplays his parts; you never have a feeling that he is trying to perform and that’s what makes him so good. And it’s a damned shame that he has to be tied to a studio whose production intelligence does not approach his fine talents. This business is missing one of the best money draws it ever had because of this. Give Tracy two or three GOOD pictures, one after the other, and there is not a male star (or female) who would top him in selling tickets, for he has everything that any audience wants in a screen performer.
Wilkerson’s column was required reading throughout the industry, and a light obviously went on somewhere. Two days after its appearance, an item in the paper reported that M-G-M had placed a new talking version of George Kelly’s hit comedy The Show-Offback on its production schedule. “The picture was temporarily put on the shelf a few weeks ago because the studio was unable to secure a suitable lead at that time. M-G-M now has a lead in mind, but is keeping it quiet for the time being.” The next day, January 26, 1934, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer concluded an agreement to borrow Spencer Tracy for the lead.
Originally, The Show-Off had been acquired from Paramount for actor Lee Tracy, whose first work on Broadway was in the original 1924 production. Tracy’s five-year contract with the studio was abruptly terminated in the aftermath of an international incident the actor allegedly precipitated during the filming of Viva Villa in Mexico.1 The project languished for nearly two months with no obvious replacement for the title role until Wilkerson’s editorial appeared. Suddenly, Metro made a bid for the services of Spencer Tracy and didn’t flinch when Fox specified the breathtaking fee of $5,200 a week—close to double what 20th Century had paid just four months earlier.
Writer-producer Lucien Hubbard was in charge of The Show-Off but word was that Irving Thalberg was the real force behind the scenes, and Tracy hoped something larger was at hand than a deal for a single picture. He had never before worked at M-G-M, had never even been on the lot, but to be an M-G-M player was to be among the finest array of acting talent anywhere in the world. The Barrymores were under contract to M-G-M, as were Helen Hayes, Marie Dressler, Robert Montgomery, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Greta Garbo. Metro pictures had a sheen and a respectability second to none, and the brand definitely meant something at the box office. No studio was as profitable nor had as many resources at its disposal.
The wiry Hubbard, who knew Tracy from the Uplifters Club, had been William Wellman’s producer on Wings and would later play himself, a midlife war correspondent, in Wellman’s Story of G.I. Joe. He knew how to make B-pictures quickly, but with the spit and polish of someone who took pride in his work and had an excellent sense of story and casting. His treatment of The Show-Off was a model of classy packaging. Tracy’s leading lady would be M-G-M contract player Madge Evans, the same actress who had appeared opposite him in Sam Harris’ ill-fated production of Dread. Grant Mitchell would be in the picture, as would Henry Wadsworth, Lois Wilson, Clara Blandick, and Alan Edwards, solid players all. The script was by Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had adapted a number of plays to film, most recently Rose Franken’s Another Language and Dinner at Eight. James Wong Howe, who shot The Power and the Glory, would be in charge of the camerawork, and the director would be Charles F. “Chuck” Riesner, a specialist in comedy who had been eight years with Chaplin and codirected Buster Keaton’s spectacular Steamboat Bill Jr. Riesner’s background—he had been a prizefighter, vaudevillian, song writer, and actor—somehow made him ideal for telling the story of J. Aubrey Piper, the well-meaning rattlebrain of Kelly’s classic play.
Tracy began work on January 29, 1934, having taken a corner suite at the Beverly Wilshire. Mastering the carnation-wearing Piper, his boasts and vulnerabilities, was as intense a job of preparation as he had ever undertaken for a film. Blessed with exceptional material and fueled by countless cups of black coffee, he managed one of the most deeply layered performances he had ever given, at once dim and overbearing and yet desperate to the point of near-tragedy. Leavening the character still further was Clara Blandick’s acid performance as Ma Fisher, Amy’s skeptical mother, who can’t stand her daughter’s windbag of a boyfriend and makes no attempt to hide it. Aubrey is a big talker who holds down a clerical position with the Mid-Atlantic; all his clothes are castoffs, all his cars are demos. He invades the Fisher family like a backslapping pestilence. Amy’s parents are suddenly “Mumsie” and “Popsie-Wopsy.” The house rings with forced laughter.
“How do you think your mother’s gonna take it?” Aubrey asks Amy, suddenly quiet and pensive when they decide to tie the knot.
“Well, I don’t know. You see—”
“Well, I know she’s not just as fond of me as she might be, is she?”
“Oh,” says Amy, “but it’s not that she doesn’t approve of you, Aubrey. But …”
“It’s because I’m not serious enough,” he says, now a chastened little boy, all knowing and fidgety. “I joke too much to suit a lot of people. Sometimes I just try to kid ’em, you know, and they think I mean it. You think I’m on the level, don’t you Amy?”
They marry, Ma Fisher sourly resigned to the situation as they take their own apartment. Aubrey can’t handle money, can’t live on thirty dollars a week. He spends everything he makes, fills the apartment with tables and lamps and a fancy record changer he can’t afford. (“Plays twelve records without stoppin’,” he boasts.) When his salary is attached by creditors, Amy has had enough. Tearfully, she announces they’ll have to give up their apartment and move back home with her parents. He resists, grandly at first, then remorsefully, swearing he’ll turn over a new leaf. “I’m gonna get down to work,” he vows, building up a head of steam. “No more goin’ to the office late. Quarter of eight every morning from now on … Yeah, and I’m gonna quit watchin’ the clock to find out what time I can leave. I’m gonna make ’em promote me. And I’m gonna stop talkin’ big until I am big! Yessir, you’re … you’re gonna be proud of me, Amy.”
Aubrey’s newfound zeal for responsibility trips him up in a heartbeat. He butts into real estate negotiations at the Road and ends up costing them a small fortune. After he’s been fired, he’s walking a sandwich sign around town when he learns his brother-in-law is ready to accept an outright payment of $5,000 for an invention. (“Why Joe, you must be crazy. Five-thousand for an invention that must be worth millions? Why, they can’t do that to you!”) He takes it upon himself to go see the lawyer involved and demands $100,000 against 50 percent of the net profits. Shown the door, he’s convinced he’s queered the deal and that Joe is going to kill him for it.
Aubrey goes home to Amy, comes clean, tells her everything. He’s a whipped dog by the time Joe comes in, happy as a lark. After thinking about it, the lawyers had called him with their best offer: $50,000 and 20 percent of the profits. As Joe is excitedly relating it all, Aubrey is peering over Amy’s shoulder, timidly at first, and the transformation from Jekyll to Hyde was never more adroitly handled. Wordlessly, the chastened Aubrey, eyes downcast, becomes the Aubrey of old, at once smug and self-satisfied, his tongue rolling extravagantly in his mouth. It’s a magnificent shot, both horrifying and hilarious, screen acting at its finest. As Joe shows him the check, Aubrey regards it dismissively. “Joesy,” he says, “I think you coulda done better.”
Tracy lay low during the filming of The Show-Off, keeping his name out of the columns. The film finished on Friday, February 16. Two days later he and Loretta turned heads when they showed up for Mass together at Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. That evening he was nominated by the membership of the Screen Actors Guild to serve on one of two NRA code administration committees, more than a thousand votes being cast at the Hollywood Women’s Club to fill a total of fourteen slots.
“I am still married to Louise,” he told Walter Ramsey, who was writing his life story for Modern Screen. “There has been no divorce action started. At the present time, there is only one thing of paramount importance, my children, and a bad second best, my screen work. No matter how Louise and I solve our problem, we have mutually agreed that neither of us shall be sidetracked from the children. At the moment, they are staying with my mother. Louise is away on a much-needed rest. Naturally, their custody will remain with their mother, where it should be. But the fact that we have parted with the greatest friendliness means that their home will always be open to me, and, I hope, their hearts.” He characterized talk of an engagement between himself and Loretta Young as being in “very poor taste.” He paused, then slowly added: “This is really a strange time in my life to be giving my life story. At present, things are muddled and uncertain.”
His name once again in the papers, Tracy’s fan mail surged, as it usually did when he was considered news. One letter, in pencil, looked not unlike countless others written him and scores of other contract players, the spelling poor, the syntax shaky. It arrived at the house on Holmby, however, and for that reason alone it received special attention. Inspired, perhaps, by the subject matter of his picture The Mad Game, it bore a Los Angeles postmark and read as follows:
Feb. 20, 1934
Spencer Tracy
this is to let you know you and your friend are covered. By Rattlesnake. Pete Are Silverton I am give you a brake We. could have pick you up and carried you a way But I voted hand of[f] you until you were warned are quite a contact you will save your Self lots. of troble. and Serious worry if you obay orders to the letter you need not worry if not look out we sure get you are your mother are your baby are Miss Young going a way wont help you a dam. [But] we get you [j]ust the same See if you know this car #Lic .36876 [Tracy’s LaSalle] and this one #.84838 [his mother’s Cadillac] who cars are these do not run to the law are try to trick us we have fail Bremar2 was warned 14 days and was only ask $30,000 he refuse it you know the rest he made his own Bargin when we got him you do the same if you dont obay orders we want 8,000 of you and Miss Young this is your. this is your contact 4,000 in 1,000 and the other 4,000 in $50 and 20, and 10. this must be put in a box mark Mr. Silverton and given to your negro Buttler he is to deliver to Western Ave. and Wilshiar Box must be Wrap well he must not. know. anything. only to deliver. and he must not. be. follow. my spy on the look. out. he is to start with this box March 10th at 6.30 PM from your house 712 Holmby Ave
Rattlesnake Pete are Silverton
Don’t let us hafter get you don’t mark this money if you do you will regret it.
Louise had gone to New York thinking she might return to the stage but found the East Coast in the midst of its heaviest storm since the famous blizzard of 1888, the city paralyzed under nine inches of snow. She bought a new mink coat, her first in a number of years, and spent her days walking, snow whirling around her, lost in thought, the sounds of scraping shovels, stomping feet, and squeaking wheels everywhere. Unable to reach her, Spence bundled up the children and took them off to the Town House, the fashionable hotel overlooking Westlake Park where Mother Tracy was now residing. Susie was too young to sense that anything was wrong, but Johnny, nearing his tenth birthday, was upset when told he could never be alone anywhere.
“I felt ashamed at the idea,” Johnny said, “because I thought I was still being treated as if I were a baby. Eventually, after Father probably noticed my annoyance at being considered ‘a baby,’ he told me I was not that and explained all about it. He said that I would be taken away by ‘a bad man’ and would never come back if I went out alone and was found by the man. He tried to make it simple for me to understand. I understood it very well and was shocked and frightened.”
Once the children were safe and Loretta—who was shooting Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back—had been advised, Tracy called an acquaintance at the Los Angeles Police Department, Detective Lieutenant Frank “Lefty” James, whose unit was known for its investigations of local mob figures. Once the case was established as a “confidential police matter,” a detective was posted alongside him and would remain his constant companion until the crisis had passed.
Spence was finally able to reach Louise in Miami Beach, where she had fled after the novelty of the snow had worn off. Though he told her he did not seriously anticipate any trouble, he thought she would want to come home anyway, and she returned to Los Angeles the following morning. All the employees at the Town House were on guard, and despite her strong feelings that the whole business was absurd, Louise found herself grasping Johnny’s hand just a little more tightly and stepping just a little more quickly as they negotiated the hotel corridors. Outside of school, where he was guarded by two detectives, the outdoors John saw the most were the garden at the back entrance of the hotel, where Louise was thankful for the company of the gardener and the big doorman was just a few yards away.
While behaving as though there was nothing out of the ordinary, Tracy started one of the oddest pictures he would ever make, a gangster story, fittingly, with the singular title “Now I’ll Tell” by Mrs. Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein, of course, was the famous bootlegger and gambling czar who so prominently figured in the rigging of the 1919 World Series, the infamous “Black Sox” scandal in which six players for the Chicago White Sox conspired to throw five games to Cincinnati in exchange for a collective payoff of $100,000. Known variously as the Fixer, the Big Bankroll, and Mr. Big, Rothstein was most closely associated with horse racing, the 1921 Travers Stakes conspiracy being the best known of his alleged capers.
Little about Rothstein’s criminal activities could ever be proven, and even the events surrounding his death were in dispute. In 1909 Rothstein married a New York showgirl named Carolyn Green, who, though estranged, was still his wife at the time of his killing in 1928. She claimed to know the inside dope on her husband’s various enterprises, including the truth behind his murder. As Mrs. Carolyn Rothstein Behar, she granted Fox Film a $2,500 option on the rights to a memoir she proposed to write on her life with the man Damon Runyon dubbed “The Brain.”
Rothstein was a contemporary of Winnie Sheehan’s in criminal and political circles, and it was Sheehan’s idea not only to make a film about him but to coordinate its release with the publication of the book on which it was supposedly based. The deal with Behar was signed in July 1933, not long before Sheehan was to leave for Europe. It gave her time to write the book on her own but reserved the studio’s right to impose a ghostwriter in the event she was unable to finish. The plan was to have the story serialized in a first-class magazine or published in book form no later than March 1, 1934.
When Sheehan left the first week in August, he was accompanied by playwright and scenarist Edwin Burke, who was to spend his time in Paris researching a film on the life of chemist Louis Pasteur. By the time of their return in October, Burke had not only drawn the assignment from Sheehan to write the screenplay based on Behar’s memoir, but to direct the film as well. A former actor, alumnus of the American Academy and a fellow Lamb, Burke pressed for the unlikely casting of Spencer Tracy to play America’s best-known Jewish gangster.
In New York, Burke stopped off to work with Behar. Looking to punch up the story and fill in a number of blanks, he interviewed some of Rothstein’s former associates, and the collaboration resulted in an original story for the screen called “Now I’ll Tell.” Satisfied the film project was on its way, Sheehan hired novelist Donald Henderson Clarke to bring the book into being. In 1929 Clarke had published his own book on the subject, In the Reign of Rothstein; two days after he came aboard, Behar signed a contract with Vanguard Press, Clarke’s longtime publisher. Burke now found himself in the position of working ahead of Behar and Clarke, adding in material that would more than likely differ from events described in the book. Behar was surprisingly scrupulous about what she wrote, and although she wouldn’t object to Burke’s fabrications, neither would she agree to say they were true.
On February 8, 1934, Fox purchased worldwide motion picture rights to the book for $25,000. By that point, Burke had abandoned any pretense of his picture being a literal representation of the book, and when the shooting script was finalized on February 23, the name of Tracy’s character, the film’s title notwithstanding, had become “Murray Golden.” Tracy was tense and withdrawn during the first days of filming, his police guard ever-present, and he seemed to rely on Burke to an unusual degree in characterizing Rothstein.
The film had been in production scarcely a week when a second extortion letter arrived: “Rattlesnake has not give orders to take you yet[.] I give you nice chance then I strike if you disobey[.] I am plenty good to you I see mother and baby I see you and your queen … I want to see the money with note say that it ok from you and your queen you have my orders.”
From March 6 to March 11, two detective lieutenants were stationed at the house on Holmby. On the evening of March 10, a dummy package was prepared as specified in the first letter, and Tracy’s black chauffeur, Walter, drove to the intersection of Western Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard with Detective Lieutenant Joseph Filkas concealed in the back seat. Walter was told to expect a man to leap onto the running board of the moving car. The setup went flawlessly, but nobody attempted to board the car, drive alongside it, or otherwise collect the money.
There was no further communication from “Rattlesnake Pete” either, and Tracy could think of no one who might have written the letters, other than possibly Walter’s predecessor, whose name he mentioned only because he said that he had been forced to discharge the man. The only handwriting samples he could find—endorsements on the backs of canceled checks—were inconclusive, but police interviewed the man anyway. He denied he had been sacked, told them instead he had quit when Carrie Tracy moved out to Riviera, which was too far for him to go by streetcar. “He further stated that Mrs. Tracy, Sr., was a very nervous woman, highly-strung and hard to please.” The case wasn’t officially closed, but the police decided either the threat was a hoax or the crooks had gotten cold feet. Newspapers published details of the case on March 24, prompting the local office of the FBI to contact and interview Tracy for their own files.
With the tension surrounding the drop on March 10, the national release of The Show-Off passed almost without notice. On his best behavior, Tracy had finished the picture in just seventeen days—something of a record—and it had gone to preview six days after that, playing to a large, appreciative audience at the Fox Uptown Theatre. The Reporter, with obvious pride in having influenced the matter, trumpeted Tracy’s appeal in its notice the following day: “Spencer Tracy does the impossible in The Show-Off. He carries the entire thing on his own shoulders—and the part is terrific. The Show-Off is, of course, a one-part story, with everyone more or less taking back seats and leaving most of the work to the main character. And what Tracy does with it! In spite of the fact that the play as a whole is too widely familiar to hold any new excitement for the theatregoer, and that his role is a series of dramatic and emotional peaks that would tax the strength of any actor, Tracy turns in a performance that is all wool and a yard wide.”
When the picture opened at New York’s Capitol Theatre the following week, business went big, with Jimmy Durante, Polly Moran, and Lou Holtz accompanying it onstage. The entire bill was held a second week, a respectable showing for the 5,400-seat house. The New York critics proved a tougher audience than the public. The play itself had been sixteen months on Broadway in its original run and had just completed a successful revival with Raymond Walburn in the title role. On film, The Show-Off had been done twice already, Sennett stalwart Ford Sterling having originated the role for Paramount in 1926, and Hal Skelly having brought it to the talking screen in 1930.3 Reviewers wondered, with some justification, why bother?
The answer for Metro was Spencer Tracy, who was so ideal for the role of Aubrey Piper that familiarity with the storyline was immaterial. Mordaunt Hall in the Times took pains to detail the various differences between George Kelly’s original and Mankiewicz’s adaptation, allowing as how the play, in its newest incarnation, lacked “the nimble wit and subtle shadings” of the original. “Mr. Tracy gives a capital performance,” he concluded, “and if the picture does not come up to expectations, it is not his fault, for it would be difficult to select another player who can do as well by the part.”
Ed Sullivan, the popular columnist for the New York Daily News, thought it Tracy’s best work yet and suggested he was “in the vanguard of the youngsters upon whom the movies must rely to replace the aging veterans.” In England, John Betjeman ranked Tracy in the same class as Eddie Cantor and Chaplin, even as his style of acting was so vastly different: “His appeal is entirely based on dialogue and the wrinkled expression of his enormous Irish face.” At the bargain price of $162,000, The Show-Off showed a profit of $78,000 on worldwide rentals of $397,000. If the film amounted to nothing more than a feature-length audition for Spencer Tracy, it was spectacularly successful.
Out from under the cloud of the kidnapping threat, Loretta and Spence went dining and dancing with Josie and Duke Wayne in the Beverly Wilshire’s exclusive Gold Room, by now a favorite haunt. Loretta was turned out in a white sailor frock—blue collar, white stars, red anchors—and Spence, equally festive, was blasted well before dinner. It fell to Duke to get him past the other diners—Winnie Sheehan, George Burns and Gracie Allen, the scenarist and playwright Edgar Allan Woolf—and up to his suite without creating too much of a fuss. “Once deposited in the room,” recalled actor William Bakewell, “Tracy became so violent in his efforts to get away that big Duke (no teetotaler himself) had no alternative but to coldcock him with a short right to the jaw, which left Spence draped on the bed for a sobering night’s sleep.”
Tracy’s first film for M-G-M, 1934. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Three days later the annual Academy Awards banquet took place at the Biltmore Hotel. Loretta had made plans to attend with Spence and the Waynes, but when the time came for him to appear, Tracy was nowhere to be found. She went without him, fighting back tears, and it was several days before she heard from him. “Spence was a darling when he was sober,” Young later told her daughter, Judy Lewis. “He was absolutely awful when he was drinking.”
Bottoms Up was released the week of March 26, hailed for its sly send-up of the movie business—the Motion Picture Herald called it “a comedy of values”—even if its musical numbers were of the kind that almost killed off the genre in the early days of sound. Now I’ll Tell finished on April 4, and Tracy took the opportunity to get out of town, going back to New York for a couple of weeks and finding no peace there either. He descended on Manhattan asking about the prospects of the Giants, wondering whether one of his polo ponies had gotten over the colic and apologizing for having taken on a few pounds since his last visit to the Big Apple. “Hollywood’s too easy a burg to live in,” he told a reporter for the American, trafficking in irony. “Polo, sunshine, fishing, and all the rest drive a guy crazy with happiness. Broadway’s good to look at from the back end of an observation car going [to] Hollywood.”
Handing a redcap his bag, Tracy passed through the gate at Grand Central and saw a crowd of onlookers being held behind a rope. “What are all these people here for?” he asked. The answer that came back was that they were all there to catch a glimpse of him. He refused to believe it until the group surged past the police line and followed him to his taxi. “Holy Moses!” he said, landing in the back seat of the cab. “I would never have thought it.” At the hotel, a telegram was awaiting him from Edwin Burke, reporting on the Pasadena preview of Now I’ll Tell. Its concluding line: YOU’RE STILL MY FAVORITE ACTOR. “Gee, that’s great of Eddie,” Tracy said. “He’s a swell guy.”
When he got back to Los Angeles, Tracy was seen out on the town with Loretta again, dining and dancing and generally behaving himself. Following Sheehan’s carefully orchestrated plan, the book Now I’ll Tell was published by Vanguard Press on May 3, 1934, and the film of the same title opened in theaters on May 11. The movie garnered generally favorable notices, even as it varied wildly from the book on which it was purportedly based. Rothstein became Golden, the Black Sox scandal became a fixed prizefight, the various showgirls with whom Rothstein consorted were rolled into the Peggy Warren character played by the Harlowesque Alice Faye.
Burke’s coaching paid off in a forceful performance that, while not Rothstein himself, hued to the spirit of the man. In her book Mrs. Rothstein recorded his first private words to her after their wedding at Saratoga: “Sweet, I had a bad day today, and I’ll need your jewelry for a few days.” She could tell when he was losing big because his voice went flat, even as his expression remained unchanged. He did not bother to watch the finish of a race on which he won $800,000, so certain he was of the outcome, and he orchestrated Nicky Arnstein’s surrender to the police by riding him to headquarters in a touring car pacing the end of a police parade.
In a city where interest in Rothstein still ran high, Now I’ll Tell filled the Roxy as no Tracy film had been able to do. The film went on to do well in urban centers, less well in rural and neighborhood houses where gangster stories never fully caught on. Fox’s efforts to position it as a biographical picture as well as a crime melodrama went nowhere, and it ended up, like so many other Fox titles on Tracy’s résumé, posting a loss by the time it was played out.
Tracy and Loretta Young at the Cocoanut Grove, June 14, 1934. Their very public relationship would end later that same evening. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
As the studio readied the oft-delayed Marie Galante for Sheehan’s latest enthusiasm, a French import named Ketti Gallian, Tracy made the papers by trouncing a producers’ polo team 9 to 3 and accepting a handsome trophy from Carole Lombard at Uplifters Field.
He and Loretta took to going to Confession together on Saturday afternoons, and Loretta was shaken when one of the priests at Good Shepherd refused to give her absolution. She was seeing a married man, she was told, a Roman Catholic who had been married in the church. She knew, she later said, that if she left the church that day without absolution, she might never come back. Desperate, she walked across the aisle to the other box and told that priest the whole story. He eventually said that he would give her absolution only if she would agree to come back every Friday thereafter for counseling. When she got outside, she told Spence what had transpired—he apparently never told her if he was given absolution—and he understood her crisis of faith, just as she seemed to understand his and the role it played in his drinking. “I am sure the pressure and the soul-searching had something to do with it,” she said, “but gradually we faced the fact that there was nothing we could do.”
On June 8, 1934, Loretta went to her regular Friday night counseling session at Good Shepherd. Then, sometime over the next few days, she sat down and composed a handwritten letter that began with the words “My darling” and ended with the word “Me.” She admitted that when she was with him she had no logic, common sense, or resistance, and that after prayer and counseling, she knew the only way they could go on would be in an entirely platonic relationship. It would be enough for her, she said, just to be with him and to hear his voice, and they would be without sin, but she knew that she would need his help. He would have to decide if he could handle it, and, were it impossible, she would understand. She signed off with the words “I love you.” It reached him in a plain envelope addressed to “Mr. Spencer Tracy.”
On June 14, the couple was photographed together at the Cocoanut Grove, Loretta’s unseasonable mink coat casually draped over the back of her chair, a wide-brimmed summer hat framing her pale face, Spence’s wedding ring still plainly in view.
That night at the Grove was the last time they were seen out on the town together. Within hours Tracy had disappeared into his suite at the Beverly Wilshire, and when he emerged nearly two weeks later, it was to board an ambulance that would take him to a hospital.
1 Lee Tracy, whose drinking was the stuff of legend in Hollywood, was accused of insulting a member of the Mexican Cadet Corps during a Revolution Day parade. Accounts differ as to exactly what he was supposed to have done, but the most common version of the story has him urinating off a hotel balcony. Later it was surmised that the growing strength of organized labor in Mexico had much to do with the resulting uproar over the incident.
2 Minnesota banker Edward G. Bremer had been kidnapped by the Barker-Karpis gang the previous month. His ransom of $200,000 was one of the largest ever paid.
3 In addition, Franklin Pangborn played the title character in Poor Aubrey (1930), a Vitaphone short derived from the original one act by George Kelly.