CHAPTER 6
In the years prior to 1924, Texas counties with inmates convicted of capital crimes conducted their own executions, generally by hanging. Then the legislature consolidated all such business at the State Penitentiary in Huntsville, establishing a death row at the birthplace of Sam Houston. Its centerpiece, at the end of a brief corridor adjacent to nine holding cells, was a handsome new electric chair, built of solid oak by prison craftsmen. They did their work well; over the next forty years, “Old Sparky” would become the final unpadded resting stop for 361 men and women on their way to court-mandated eternity. One such prisoner, a condemned killer called Robert Blake, was dispatched on April 19, 1929—but not before having set down on paper a taste of life in the Texas death house called “The Law Takes Its Toll.”
When the American Mercury posthumously published the sketch in July of that year, it attracted a lot of attention, including that of a twenty-two-year-old actor and playwright named Ely John Wexley. Blake’s account, in the form of a one-act play, covered the eighteen hours leading up to the execution of Number Six, one of a handful of condemned men—five white, one Mexican—at Huntsville. Number Seven breaks into verse more often than not, Number Nine has gone mad, howling “Jo-------nes!” at all hours. The talk among the others centers on clemency, then the banter turns grim as the details of the condemned man’s ritual play themselves out—the last meal, the slitting of the trouser legs, the shaving of the head, and the ceremonial reading of the death warrant.
“Wonder how it will feel,” Six muses. “I hope it won’t take long. Wonder if a fellow knows anything after the first shot hits him … You know, it’s funny. I was worse at my trial than I am here. I almost broke down there at the trial. I lost 15 pounds when my trial was going on.” The guard, having some difficulty opening the door to the death chamber, yanks at the lock and rattles it. Number Seven tells Six to take the keys and open the door himself. “I’d stay here until next Christmas before I’d open that door for ’em,” Six declares. “Well, the door is open. I’ll say goodbye to everybody again.”
These lines, Blake notes, were written while Six was being strapped into the chair. “I hope I am the last one that ever sits in this chair,” Six calls out. “Tell my mother that my last words were of her.” The lights go dim as they hear the whine of a motor. The others cry out, and then the lights go dim again and yet again.
“They’re giving him the juice again!” shouts Number Five. “Wonder what they’re trying to do, cook him?”
Wexley saw the basis of a full-length play in “The Law Takes Its Toll,” but struggled with the problem of expanding it to three acts until the events of October 3, 1929. The attempted escape of two prisoners at the Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City went awry when a guard was killed while grappling over a set of keys. Knowing they’d hang for his death and, consequently, had nothing to lose, the convicts began taking hostages. In the bloody standoff that followed, eight guards and five inmates were killed and another ten were wounded. Wexley plumbed the New York dailies for details of the riot, and his play took shape within a couple of weeks.
The first act was Blake’s sketch almost verbatim, Wexley’s chief liberty being to change Blake’s Mexican prisoner to a black man. The second and third acts portrayed an opportunistic escape attempt patterned on the events at Cañon City. In the end, the matter of a title was more vexing than the structure; Wexley had inserted bits of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” amid the machine gun bursts of his play’s final moments (“Oh, the wild charge they made! All the world wondered!”) and so he decided to call it All the World Wondered. Inexplicably, his agent sent the play to producer Herman E. Shumlin, a onetime reporter and press agent whose track record was 0–4, his last play having tanked just two days prior to the onset of Black Tuesday. Shumlin, who was used to seeing only “the bottom of the barrel,” was astonished at the raw power of Wexley’s play and managed to scare up the money to produce it at a time when “all the backers anybody could think of were jumping out of high windows.”
“It was one o’clock when I finished reading it,” Shumlin recalled, “and I went all the way out to Brooklyn and woke up Sam Golden, the printer, and read it to him.1 He gave me a check for $500 to buy an option on the play, I think maybe because he wanted to go back to bed. After that, my troubles began, raising the money to put the show on. I borrowed from a bank. I squeezed my relatives dry.” The title was the first thing to go, but it would be nearly a month before the play had the title under which it would see its Broadway debut: The Last Mile.
To direct, Shumlin selected Chester Erskine, who had earlier had a hand in staging The Criminal Code, a similarly themed prison drama that was one of the season’s few genuine hits. Briefly an actor but too tall and pale for anything but character work, Erskine knew the success of Wexley’s play would depend on its casting and the ability of its actors to inhabit their characters to the point of morbidity. Skeptical of Spencer Tracy from the outset, Erskine regarded their meeting as a courtesy at first, not the urgent mating dance that comes with the ideal match of actor and role.
“I had seen a few of his performances,” Shumlin said, “and was not overly impressed by him as a candidate for the lead in The Last Mile. I was just about to dismiss him when something about our too-brief casting interview stayed with me. Since it was getting on to dinnertime, I invited him to join me at a theatrical haunt. There, in a less strained atmosphere, I was suddenly made aware as we were talking that, beneath the surface, here was a man of passion, violence, sensitivity, and desperation: no ordinary man, and just the man for the part.”
Wexley’s play was intense, grim, uncompromising; hard to take over the course of three acts. And there were no women in the cast, an anomaly on Broadway, where the ticket-buying decisions were often made by wives and girlfriends and where the matinee trade was crucial to the success of a show.2 Louise, as was her habit, read the script and told Spence she thought it “pretty bad.” There was little that jumped off the page, other than the unusually coarse language tossed between the prisoners. “It was so violent,” she said, grimacing. “That was the kind of part I never liked him in.”
Tracy’s contract for All the World Wondered, signed on January 14, 1930, called for his now standard price of $400 a week, payable Saturdays, and weekly bonuses of $50 and $100 if the gross hit $8,000 and $10,000, respectively. Rehearsals began the following day, Tracy meeting his fellow prisoners for the first time: James Bell, who would play the gutsy Richard Walters, Cell 7, whose execution is imminent as the curtain rises; Howard Phillips, whose hot-tempered Fred Mayor, Cell 3, would be next in rotation; Hale Norcross, who, as “Red” Kirby, Cell 9, would be the graybeard, the senior member of the group; Ernest Whitman, the muscular black man engaged to play the superstitious Vincent Jackson, Cell 13; George Leach, chosen by Erskine to play Eddie Werner, Cell 11, Wexley’s crazy man, a poet of sorts; and Joseph Spurin-Calleia, the Maltese actor and singer who would be playing the dapper Tom D’Amoro, Cell No. 1. All took their places alongside the men who would be their captors: Don Costello, Herbert Heywood, Orville Harris, Ralph Theodore, Richard Abbott, Henry O’Neill, Clarence Chase, Allen Jenkins, Albert West.
“The sixteen were seated in a straight line across the stage,” Herman Shumlin recalled, “and when they read their parts for the first time, it was clear they meant business … Maybe (in part, at least) the absence of women in the cast had something to do with it too. With no good-looking actress to make them feel self-conscious, they seemed to forget they were actors of long experience, with all kinds of past performances and position to live up to. Instead, they gave themselves up completely to the emotional fury of the play and into the guiding hands of the director.”
“Tracy was perfect. Tracy made the show. But then Tracy got worried and he said he wouldn’t do it. He had to shoot a priest in the play and he said he’d rather not.” Henry O’Neill, the actor playing Father O’Connors and a fellow Catholic, could see that Tracy’s torment was deep and genuine and not simply a dodge, and he took him downtown to see a priest. As Shumlin remembered it, “The father told Tracy he need have no scruples,” but then Wexley fixed the problem by writing the priest’s death out of the script altogether, finding the mere threat of his shooting more effective in sustaining the tension than the act itself.
Erskine quickly got the show on its feet, marking out the individual cells—each just two and a half steps wide—on the floor with a piece of chalk. Tracy spent a lot of time miming the window in the back of his cell, looking out to such an exaggerated degree that Erskine, three years his junior, made a memorable comment: “Spence, I didn’t tell you to break the window, I told you to look through it.” His point, which Tracy took to heart, was that a good actor didn’t look out the window—he let the audience look out the window.
“He was,” said Erskine, “cooperative and disciplined, and set an attitude for the other performers who followed his lead. He was the kind of actor whom a director leans on for just such behavior.” They spent such long hours at it that Tracy took a room at the Lambs Club, three blocks from the theater, to avoid traveling all the way home to Ninety-eighth Street. Tensions ran high, rehearsal being a thoroughly emotional process, and there were more than the usual flashes of temper.
“I cannot remember,” wrote Tracy, “when I have spent so much time with other members of the cast outside of the theater, discussing the story of the play back and forth. And I don’t think any of us can ever forget the first dress rehearsal inside the completed prison set. It had been all very well to pretend to be clutching at bars on bare and dingy stages—but now, confined within a four-by-nine cell, chafing at real cold steel—well, it was a sensation! The end of the first act found us rushing out into the wings, desperate for cigarettes. Nobody had any intention of staying in the cell longer than necessary.”
Never before had Tracy immersed himself so deeply in a part, and never had he felt so completely drained by one. “As Killer Mears he had to expose a less-winning phase of his personality,” Erskine said, “one which might unlock secrets of his inner self and which he would have preferred to remain hidden. It is a choice many actors have to make but which only the artists can survive.”
Tempting fate, Shumlin set the New York opening of the play, still titled All the World Wondered, for February 13, pointing out that the numerals in “1930” added up to thirteen. Tryouts took place at Parsons’ Theatre in Hartford beginning on the sixth, and the cast, to a man, was dubious. “They all felt that the play was a good one, an unusual one,” Shumlin said, “but they were almost all a little doubtful of its chances for success. This was hardly astonishing since it departed to such a great extent from the traditional rules of what a successful play should be.”
That first performance was a ragged affair, the set being insubstantial compared to what they would have in New York, but Tracy as Mears was letter perfect. “Tracy fought the role through rehearsal—not the doing of it, but the surrendering to it,” Erskine said. “When, however, he finally did surrender to it, it was total, absolute, and frightening. He did not simulate anger and violence, he was anger and violence. In one night—at the out-of-town opening—he changed from a presentable juvenile and a hopeful leading man to an artist, a true artist. He had crossed the threshold into that area where he could submerge himself in a role to the point of eliminating himself completely, to the point where he could no longer tell which was which himself.”
All the World Wondered brought forth a mixed reaction from the Hartford audience. One man was overheard to say to his wife, “It ain’t so pleasant to see Romeo and Juliet either.” Another, putting a brighter spin on the evening, said, “Well, it’s kinda good to see a show without any wimmen in it, ain’t it?” The notices were similarly conflicted, recognizing the power of the material but wondering just how much the general public could take. “One would call it rank melodrama,” said the reviewer for the Hartford Times,“if it were not so truthful a report of what all the world knows has happened at least three times in our large American prisons within the past six months … Either this show will be a dismal failure or it will pack them in.”
Erskine and Wexley set about doctoring the play, shaping the dialogue to accommodate the needs and characteristics of its individual actors. (“Some individuals simply cannot say things in a certain way,” Erskine explained, “no matter how splendid an actor or actress they may be. Expressing the same thought in another way is the director’s only alternative.”) About one thing both men were adamant: All six of the condemned men would stay guilty as sin—no cheap points for making one of the characters unjustly convicted. Erskine noted that of the three basic appeals in the theatre—eye, ear, and instinct—the oldest and strongest was instinct, and that his best chance for success would be to strive for “sympathy for a situation rather than for the people who are in that situation.”
The camaraderie of the cast was infectious, and when the company manager, in his line of duty, went through the group, asking which of them wanted Pullmans on the way back to New York, they decided en masse to take the midnight train instead and sit up in the coach together. “Hearing this,” said Shumlin, “the management (Erskine and myself) gave up our ‘sumptuous’ drawing room and all rode back together, playing poker (which cost me $26) eating sandwiches and in general having one swell time.”
The following Thursday night, Wexley’s revision, titled The Last Mile, opened at the Sam H. Harris Theatre before an audience that had only the vaguest idea of what they were about to see. At 8:50 p.m. the curtain rose on a stark row of identically configured cells, each but one inhabited by the pale gray figure of a condemned prisoner. Erskine had told the cast he didn’t want anyone wearing makeup, and it was Henry Dreyfus’ lighting scheme that took the place of greasepaint and eyebrow pencil. A slab of concrete had been poured to stabilize the iron bars, and the harsh acoustics lent a cold authenticity to the prison set. A steel door at stage right led to offices and the outside world. A green door at stage left opened into the bright white light of the death chamber.
Actor Howard Phillips, clutching the bars, spoke first: “Nine o’clock, Walters.”
“How do you know?” asked James Bell.
“Just heard the whistle blow.”
“Funny,” mused Bell. “I didn’t hear it. You’ve got good ears, Three.”
“Sure I got good ears. Nothin’ to do but listen, is there?”
“Nothin’ to do but listen,” Bell repeated listlessly. “Well, fellers, this is my last coupla hours …”
The words took on a forlorn, obligatory cadence, as if governed by a weary piece of machinery. Then George Leach, as the ghostly Werner, broke into a crude verse about the chair they all called the Midnight Special:
The death house’s where they come and go,
They linger just a little time,
Before they give you the electric chair,
Sentenced for some awful crime…
With James Bell in Chester Erskine’s staging of The Last Mile. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
And suddenly Tracy, his words erupting like rifle shots, appeared at the bars of his cage: “Shut up, you crazy bastard!”
Unminding, Leach continued on.
“Drake!” hollered Tracy. “Why don’t you stop him?”
“Stop him yerself,” returned the guard, played with surly intransigency by Don Costello. “I like it.”
“Bitch!”
And so it went, the panic of impending doom informing every glance, every line, every nuance of posture. Hardened prisoners awkwardly reassured and comforted each other as one among them sat trembling and hopeless, the preparations for execution going forth as mandated by law.
“No detail is missed,” Burns Mantle, the veteran critic, wrote for the New York Daily News. “For half an hour you sit, tense and miserable, through the visits of the prison priest for the last prayers; the visit of reporters for the last messages of the condemned; the visits of the guards to cut the trousers leg, moisten the hair of the head, and shave the temples of the man to go. You hear the reading of the death warrant and finally you grip the arms of your chair as the march to the chair begins and the mumbling, shaken voice of Richard Walters is heard, assuring his cell mates that he will be game, that he will meet them, he hopes, somewhere, sometime.”
And through the green door he staggered: “I wish I’m the last one who ever sits in that goddamn bastard chair!” After a moment’s silence, as the other condemned men waited, tightly gripping the bars, there came a deep, reverberating hum from the dynamos, and the lights went dim. Then a pause as they came back up. Howard Phillips as Fred Mayor, Number Three, broke down and sobbed. Then again the whine of the motors and again the lights went low. And then Tracy delivered his curtain line, an echo straight from the Texas death house. “They’re givin’ him the juice again!” he erupted in a burst of animal fury. “What the hell are they tryin’ to do? Cook him??”
And from that moment forward, Spencer Tracy, with both truth and passion as his twin weapons, dominated the play. Chet Erskine was at the back of the auditorium: “I suddenly saw him, after a hesitant start, realize his power as he felt the audience drawn into the experience of the play and respond to the measure of his skill and the power of his personality. I knew that he had found himself as an actor, and I knew that he knew it.”
At intermission the audience sat in stunned silence at first, and then the conversation and the milling about was unusually subdued. Some people left the theater and never came back. There was a report that one woman got physically ill. Burns Mantle could remember no other experience “as emotionally upsetting” and fought an impulse to bolt from the room. “Nothing this season,” said Gilbert Gabriel of the American, “has crossed the footlights with such unregenerate savagery. Nothing, I’ll witness, has left its house so shaken and stirred as the first act of The Last Mile did.” The performances in Hartford hadn’t gone like this, and the cast took their cigarette break in utter silence.
When the curtain rose on the second act, the scene was the same, except that Walters had been replaced by Jackson, the black man, in Cell 7. Two weeks had passed, and now it was time for Mayor to die. The banter and the action were familiar from the events of the first act, and then the guard Drake got too close to Mears’ cell while pushing the condemned’s last meal through the aperture. In a flash, Mears had his arm around the guard’s throat, and the other convicts watched motionless, their eyes popping in disbelief, as he choked him into unconsciousness.
Tracy was so keyed up—as were they all—that, as Herman Shumlin remembered it, he “so far forgot he was only acting that when he grabbed the guard from whom he obtains the keys of his cell and choked him, he actually choked him so relentlessly that the curtain of the third act had to be deferred three minutes before the guard, Don Costello, regained full consciousness and sufficient strength to go on with the play.”
As Tracy told it, “I was supposed to grab the guard to get the keys to unlock the cell, but that night the keys flew into the footlights. So I choked the guard a little more, grabbed his gun, and said, ‘Now get those keys, you son of a bitch!’ The poor guy crawled down and got the keys and, afterward, when I saw the marks on his neck, I realized I’d really choked him. He was damn near dead.”
The tension mounted from there. The prisoners rounded up all the guards they could find, making their intentions clear they’d start shooting them—one at a time—if their demands weren’t met.
Hale Norcross cut his right hand so badly breaking out a pane of glass at the back of a cell that blood streamed down the sleeve of his costume. And when the curtain rang down five minutes early, a series of backstage signals having gone temporarily awry, the cast “almost massacred” the poor stagehand blamed for the mistake. But such was the intensity of the performance that no one in the audience seemed to notice, and when Tracy exulted, “Well men, it’s on! The war’s begun! Shoot, you bastards! Shoot!!” and the curtain again came down—this time legitimately—there was a palpable sense of relief all around.
The third act built to a nerve-racking barrage of explosions and machine gun fire, Tracy savagely murdering two of the hostages before stepping himself into the line of fire, the searchlight catching him in its glare, the bursts coming as the priest intones Latin and the two remaining convicts stand motionless amid the dust and the fury. “Let ’em wonder out there,” he shouts. “Let all the world wonder. Let the whole goddamn world wonder!” And then slowly, quietly: “I’m goin’ out into the open air …”
Curtain.
At first the audience wasn’t sure what to do, and the curtain rose on the first of the calls to only tepid applause, but then it built, quickly, forcefully, as the crowd as one came to the full realization of what it had just witnessed, a numbing, heart-pounding, ear-shattering performance torn straight from the pages of their daily newspapers. By the time Tracy, drenched in perspiration, came to the fore, his arms limp, summoning every ounce of strength he still had within him, they were shouting and stomping and on their feet, and the ovation continued solidly through the cast bow, through the second calls, and kept up until he had taken fourteen curtain calls for himself. And he knew, as did the critics cheering in the stalls, that something extraordinary had just happened, and that he finally had what he had pursued so relentlessly over the past seven years—the lead in a hit play on Broadway.
Herman Shumlin had spent the entire performance in an advanced state of agitation, fidgeting and nervously walking in and out of the building. When the play was over, someone came running up to him and said that Alexander Woollcott was looking for him backstage. “I told him to say I was gone. I couldn’t think of going backstage.” Minutes later, Woollcott, in his usual opening night costume—dark blue cape and black felt hat, oversized and flopping—found him. “This is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life,” he said, his voice trembling with feeling. “I can’t begin to tell you how important this play is to me. I’m not a critic anymore, so I can’t write a review of it in the newspaper, but if there is anything I can do for you, just tell me.” Shumlin considered the offer, then asked if he might write a short letter that could be used as an advertisement.
Woollcott’s demonstration was a bellwether, for the notices the next day were universally positive, some extraordinarily so. “A prison play that is so relentless that it lacerates you, so anguishing that it tears your heart with pity, so real that you feel you cannot face another of its terrific brutalities, so grimly compelling that you follow it with a breathless sickened interest, and so superbly done that cheers are constantly rising in your parched throat, arrived last evening at the Harris,” John Mason Brown heralded in the New York Evening Post.
The Last Mile drew the most consistently favorable notices a nonmusical had gotten in months, and was far and away the critical favorite of the nine Broadway shows that opened that week. “The Last Mile,” wrote Whitney Bolton, “is a play of desperation and fury with the power and sweep to drive the blood from your heart and leave you frozen before the granitic spectacle of the condemned. It is a ferment of steel and stone and the withering frost of terror, a restless working force to fasten the mind and nerves and hold them resolutely.” Brooks Atkinson called it “taut, searing drama with a motive” and Richard Lockridge described it as “grimly effective.”
To all, the play was memorably acted, and the ensemble cast was praised as widely as the play itself. Robert Littell in the World said that Tracy had made Killer Mears into “a thrillingly savage and icy rebel.” The whole fire and grandeur of the play, as Bolton put it, was encompassed in Tracy’s masterful portrayal of Mears, “a murderer of brutality and an imprudent but iron-hearted man, a man for the gods to wonder upon as he thrashes through the redoubtable, inexorable application of doom.” Richard Dana Skinner, critic for the Commonweal, declared that Tracy had put “the final seal on his qualifications as one of our best and most versatile young actors—a position he has been headed for ever since his outstanding work in that trivial little comedy, The Baby Cyclone.”
The Harris was practically sold out the following evening, and the gross for the first full week of performances was about $11,000—moderate, given the exceptional reviews, but predictable given the weak matinee trade. Woollcott’s letter arrived, thanking Shumlin for the most satisfactory evening in the theater that any new play had given him that season. “Mr. Erskine’s direction was brilliant in its imaginativeness and in its resourcefulness,” he wrote. “After having been told that all the good actors have deserted to the talkies, it is mystifying to find a cast packed with good ones. Perhaps, after all, it does help to have intelligence, intuition, and energy employed in casting.” The next day, under the headline ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT GOES TO THE PLAY, Shumlin ran it as a two-column ad in every newspaper in the city.
The drama’s appeal was completely lost on women, and there was talk of eliminating the Wednesday matinee altogether. One critic actually recorded some of the comments he overheard from female audience members as he sat “enthralled by the terrible intensity and realism” of the thing: “For goodness sakes! What did you ever pick out such a thing as this for?” And: “My dear, this is simply terrible. Let’s go someplace and dance.” And: “Why in Heaven’s name did the critics rave about this melodrama?” Playing Killer Mears wouldn’t make a matinee idol of Spencer Tracy, but the name gained new prominence in the minds of theatergoers, and new respect on the parts of producers and critics. By Lent, when business everywhere was typically slow, the box office had leveled off at around $13,000, putting The Last Mile on a par with Street Scene and Death Takes a Holiday.
For Tracy the timing was right, for unlike Baby Cyclone, which had opened when most movies were still free of voice, The Last Mile came at a time when Broadway was vigorously being scouted for actors, directors, and writers who could manage dialogue. Within a month he had made his screen debut in a lively Vitaphone short called Taxi Talks.
Tracy had already made two tests, one for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and one for Fox at that company’s Tenth Avenue studio. Nothing had come of either of them. “Nobody ever said a word—they never even called to tell me I was lousy. In those days they loaded you with makeup for a screen test. I wasn’t exactly pretty anyway, so I probably ended up looking like a gargoyle. They most likely threw the film in the ashcan, but I didn’t care very much because I never thought I’d be a movie actor; I had no ambition in that direction and was perfectly happy on the stage.”
The Tracys’ movie consumption had leveled off with the coming of talkies. The action pictures Spence liked so much had slowed to a crawl, and Louise genuinely disliked the static musicals that, at least for a while, seemed to be all Hollywood was turning out. “The first sound movie that we saw, we thought that, well, they’ve got to do better than this,” she said. “I can’t remember that we were very impressed.” She wrote her sister after the second audition: “Spencer doesn’t photograph well … we don’t think there is much chance for enough salary to make it worthwhile to leave the stage. So for the present we are just forgetting about the talkies.”
Neither company came back for a second look when The Last Mile hit big, but Warner Bros. scooped him up as a matter of course. The company was making a point of filming practically anyone they could get in a car to its Vitaphone studio complex, a rambling group of gray stone buildings at Avenue M and East Fourteenth Street in the heart of Flatbush. Since each voice and screen test required a crew of eight and about two hours to make, it made better economic sense to put an actor in a releasable one- or two-reeler and apply the $300-to-$500 cost of a test to the production of a short picture. Initially, Vitaphone subjects drew heavily from the concert stage and vaudeville, committing more than one hundred specialties to film in a single year. By 1928, vaudeville playlets, one-act dramas, and comedies were being integrated into the schedule, and the ever-expanding Vitaphone release index consisted of several hundred individual films.
Taxi Talks, which came from the husband-and-wife team of Frederick and Fanny Hatton, was an exercise in modern slang as observed in the back seat of a taxi cab. The Hattons wrote it for producer Rosalie Stewart, who subsequently released it to vaudeville. Vitaphone paid $2,000 for the picture rights—absolute top dollar for a fourteen-minute short—and cast it with Broadway luminaries Katherine Alexander (currently in The Boundary Line at the 48th Street Theatre), Mayo Methot (who had just closed in Sidney Howard’s Half Gods), Roger Pryor (of the hit comedy Apron Strings), and Tracy, none of whom had ever before appeared in a film.
The process of making Taxi Talks was relatively painless. For Tracy, it involved traveling to Brooklyn on March 3, 1930. The action took place almost entirely in the cab, Alexander, as a gangster’s moll, slipping in beside him just as it pulls away from the curb. Tracy’s role, a “gunman” as specified in his contract, was opposite his old girl, the only dramatic segment of an otherwise smart and breezy comedy. “What have I done to make you want to leave me?” the girl implores. “Me, that would die for you?”
“You ain’t done nothin’,” he tells her. “I’m just tired of you, that’s all. I want to get me a new gal … and I’m going to get me one with some spunk and class.”
She threatens to “fix” the other woman. “I’ll put her where she won’t run after you … I know a lot about her … Plenty to put her in hock, and I’ll do it too!”
“You never meant a thing to me,” he tells her finally. “I’d given you up a long time ago, only you were useful. Yeah, and cut out all the talk about suicide, too. Say listen, I never cared for you the way I do for this woman—she’s the only woman in the world I ever wanted, see? Yeah, and she’s mine …”
Unable to take it anymore, the moll grabs a knife and shoves it deep into his stomach. “You got me!” he gasps. “Well … do something … can’t you? I’m dizzy … I’m … you dirty little hell cat, you’ve croaked me! You’ll … you …”
“Joe …” she calls frantically. “I didn’t mean to do it … Joe … Joe … Oh … Oh God! Joe! I didn’t mean to do it—I didn’t mean to do it! Stop this taxi … stop it I say!”
The driver looks back over his shoulder, apparently not having noticed any of it. “What’s the matter? HOLY—GEE!”
“You better drive to the nearest police station,” she somberly tells him. “I just killed a man.”
Covered by two elaborately blimped cameras, the scene consumed roughly four minutes of screen time, and it is unlikely that Tracy and Alexander, even allowing for false starts and technical malfunctions, needed more than an hour or two to complete it. “It was all strange and new and uncomfortable and rather embarrassing,” Alexander said, “but, honestly, playing even the shortest scene with [Tracy] there was simply no question that he was a brilliant actor.” For an afternoon’s work Tracy collected $150 and was back at the Lambs by nightfall. The thing he would remember most vividly about the experience was the makeup they made him wear, as he was by then used to wearing none at all in his role as Killer Mears. Perversely, the only cast member signed as a result of Taxi Talks was Evelyn Knapp, a young actress who had no Broadway credits whatsoever.
The Last Mile continued to be an important show, outlasting The Criminal Code and seemingly set for the balance of the season. (Even the ticket brokers eventually came around and made an eight-week buy on seats.) In Hollywood, the success of both plays did not go unnoticed. The picture rights were snapped up, and M-G-M began filming its own prison melodrama, The Big House, with Martin Flavin, author of The Criminal Code, on hand to punch up the dialogue. John Wexley was similarly courted by Universal, and at Fox, generally the most derivative of the major studios, an original screenplay was commissioned from Maurine Watkins, author of the racy Jazz Age satire Chicago. Based in New York, Watkins naturally chose Sing Sing as the backdrop for her story, the nineteenth-century prison at Ossining—on the Hudson some forty miles north of Manhattan—being famous for the progressive policies of Warden Lewis E. Lawes, an author, lecturer, and death penalty opponent who had just recently made the cover of Timemagazine. Unlike Wexley, Watkins had a firm and obvious title before writing a single word: Up the River.
John Ford, assigned to direct the film, was brought in from Los Angeles to “assess the new plays and scout young actors.” The next picture on his schedule being a prison yarn, he naturally arranged to see The Last Mile on his first night in town. “I liked it so much,” he remembered, “that I went back the next night and was tantalized by Spence. I began to see that he had it all—the consummate power of an actor. So, hell, I went a third time, and introduced myself to Spence backstage. He took me to the Lambs Club for what turned out to be quite an evening. We stayed until about four o’clock, when I think they threw us out. Most of the time we only talked baseball, but I liked Spence so much I knew I had to have him in my next picture, whether it was Up the River or something else. The way it turned out, I was supposed to see six plays in six nights, but I saw The Last Mile every night I was there.”
Ford, a crusty Irishman, was directing Harry Carey westerns when Tracy was still cadging dimes from his father to go see them. “I’d meet Spencer after the show and we’d go over to the Lambs Club and drink ale. In those days we could both drink pretty well after a fashion.” The management at Fox, Ford discovered, did not share his enthusiasm for Spencer Tracy. As Tracy described the scene: “Ford said, ‘I’d like to have him,’ and the Fox guy said, ‘Well, we made tests of him. They’re not very good. He looks lousy in makeup.’ Ford said, ‘Makeup? He’s not going to wear any makeup in my picture. He’s the guy I want.’ When we got out of the office, he told me how much money to ask for.”
While all the head scratching was taking place over on Tenth Avenue, Sam Sax, the newly appointed production chief at Vitaphone, took the opportunity to contract with Tracy for a second short. In the six weeks since they had filmed Taxi Talks, staffing at Warners’ Brooklyn studio had been beefed up to the point where it constituted the largest production force in the nation devoted solely to one- and two-reelers. Sax now had four directors and a staff of five writers churning out playlets, flash acts, musical comedies, and miniature revues in a general attempt to escape the old stigma of vaudeville. Sax had a story called The Hard Guy, a seriocomic sketch with a trick finish, and he doubled Tracy’s original fee to get him to do it. There was an element of brinkmanship in the offer, for The Hard Guy was filmed under Arthur Hurley’s direction on Monday, May 5, 1930, with the supposition that an offer from Warner Bros. would soon be forthcoming. Fox signed Tracy to a one-picture contract the very next day.
Tracy, Valli Roberts, and Katherine Alexander in The Hard Guy. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Ford had persuaded Winfield R. Sheehan, general manager of the Fox studio, to take a flyer on Tracy. Sheehan, aligned with AT&T and the banking interests that controlled Fox, was locked in a protracted litigation with founder William Fox over leadership of the company, and was stuck in New York while the battle played itself out. He may well have seen The Last Mile for himself, for he had plenty of opportunity, and it would have been the experience of seeing Tracy live—and not in his abortive Movietone test—that convinced him to let Ford have his way.3 Fox was adding stage-trained actors to the payroll at a furious rate, and during Sheehan’s six-month stay at the Hotel Savoy, Humphrey Bogart, George Brent, Robert (later Bob) Burns, Larry Fine, Ted Heeley, Rose Hobart, Harry (later Moe) Howard, Shemp Howard, Elizabeth and Helen Keating, Nat Pendleton, Tyrone Power, John Swor, Ruth Warren, and Charles Winninger were all signed to contracts. That Tracy was practically an afterthought, engaged just days before Sheehan’s return to California, is supported by the somewhat bewildering way in which he was approached.
“The producer,” said Tracy,
was well known, the theater was well known, and I was sufficiently well known so that nobody could possibly have had any difficulty in getting in touch with me. They could have reached me through the producer, they could easily have found out where I lived, they could have reached me at the Lambs Club, or by the simple process of coming back stage after the show. But what they did was to get hold of an agent. They told him they wanted me for a part in Up the River and he called me up on the telephone. When I went over to the Fox offices, everything was cut and dried. Jack Ford was determined to have me for the part, and they had decided exactly what contract they would offer me. The agent sat in the next room while I talked to them. He had nothing whatever to do with the negotiations.
The agent was one Leo Morrison, late of the United Booking Office, a powerful presence in vaudeville who brought the first large contingent of New York stage actors to talking pictures in 1928. Morrison had offices in both New York and Hollywood (where he occupied the mezzanine level at the Roosevelt Hotel) and vague ties to Winnie Sheehan, who, with his Tammany background, would have expected him to play ball. Morrison later claimed to have seen Tracy in The Last Mile, and he may well have been the one who first alerted Fox to Tracy’s nascent appeal. It is just as possible, however, that Tracy was delivered to Morrison in payment for a favor of some kind, or that Morrison would be paying someone a kickback on the commission.
Morrison had other clients at Fox, notably Mae Clarke, Beatrice Lillie, Ruth Warren, Rose Hobart, and Leo Carrillo. The contract Tracy signed employed him for a period of six weeks, commencing June 16, 1930, at a rate of $600 a week. It included a six-month option on his further services and an acknowledgment that Herman Shumlin expected him back in New York no later than August 21 “AS SHOW MUST OPEN CHICAGO SEPTEMBER FIRST.”
Up the River had a rocky time making its way to the screen. Warden Lawes was famous for his stewardship of prison baseball, grooming a field, building grandstands, and busing in teams from other facilities. They played tennis at Sing Sing, handball and miniature golf, too. Lawes was shaved every morning by a convict who had slashed a man’s throat, and trustees cared for his three children. Ford had visited Sing Sing and, having observed her interaction with the prisoners, asked the warden if his eight-year-old daughter, Joan Marie, known to just about everyone as Cherie, would like to come to Hollywood.
Ford liked the idea of working against the hellhole cliché of other prison pictures—Paramount’s Thunderbolt comes immediately to mind—but Watkins’ story lacked the vigor and cynicism of Chicago, written as it was by someone who had no direct knowledge of prison life and scarcely six months’ experience as a newspaperwoman. (Frances Marion, the veteran screenwriter who took scenario credit on The Big House, was reputed to have been fronting for Robert Tasker, who spent nearly six years in San Quentin.) Tentative casting had Tracy teamed with Warren Hymer, a comic heavy, leaving the love story to the film’s juvenile lead, Humphrey Bogart, and Broadway actress Claire Luce. Fox had an oversupply of contract players, and there was a push to use as many as possible: Robert Burns and John Swor, Goodie Montgomery, Elizabeth and Helen Keating. With the exception of Hymer, none had ever before appeared in a feature.4 Others proposed for the cast were Ilka Chase, Lee Tracy, Mitchell Harris, Stepin Fetchit, and Willie Collier, the American stage institution who would also be serving as Ford’s dialogue director.
“Sheehan wanted to do a great picture about a prison break,” Ford told Peter Bogdanovich, “so he had some woman write the story and it was just a bunch of junk. Then he went away for a while, and day by day Bill Collier, who was a great character comedian, and I rewrote the script. There was so much opportunity for humor in it that eventually it turned out to be a comedy—all about what went on inside a prison; we had them playing baseball against Sing Sing, and these two fellows broke back in so they’d be in time for the big game.”
Tracy was set to leave The Last Mile on May 26 when actor Lawrence Leslie, his replacement, fell ill with grippe. He remained with the play another week as Herman Shumlin monitored Leslie’s worsening condition, then stayed yet another week as Thomas Mitchell was brought in to replace him.5 He was finally able to step away on Saturday, June 7, and left immediately for the West Coast. Despite the rush to get him to Los Angeles, where he arrived late Monday evening, Tracy found there was absolutely nothing for him to do.
The release of The Big House on June 21 validated Ford’s determination to take the picture in a different direction. M-G-M’s movie was well received, grim as it was, graphic and utterly devoid of comedy. Ford and Collier worked nearly two months on Up the River, joking it up, giving Watkins detailed notes and edits, and stalling production until the end of July. Tracy rented a Ford roadster, and every Tuesday afternoon he drove down to the Fox lot and drew $600. “I’m in Hollywood all alone, nothing to do,” he told his cousin Frank. “I’d call up once in a while. ‘No, we’re still working on the script.’ I was hoping someone would give me something to memorize, something to do. Nothing. Absolutely zilch. John Ford was working on another film, waiting for this one to get together. He was busy.”
The plan at first had been for Spence to go to California alone, since the film wouldn’t take long to shoot and the studio would cover only his own expenses. Then, after a week of sitting around and waiting for something to happen, he called Louise and asked her to come and to bring Johnny out with her. Louise, who had just had her appendix out, hobbled down to the bank and drew out the last of their savings to make the trip. They arrived in time to celebrate Johnny’s sixth birthday, and it was on that day that they went and had his hair cut. As the auburn curls and bangs fell to the floor, Spence and his boy cavorted in front of the mirror and made fun of Weeze’s long face. They found a tiny bungalow on Franklin Avenue where they could live until Spence had finished his scenes. They spent Sundays with the Fords at their beachfront home and had time to drive down to San Diego to visit Louise’s father and sister. They also renewed some old friendships; Grant Mitchell was in town making a picture and Frank McHugh was under contract to Warner Bros.
It was an idyllic summer, marred only by the terrible news that Mother Tracy had broken her back in Chicago. Spence was frantic; she had been riding in a taxi with Carroll when they were broadsided at an intersection. Carroll escaped with minor injuries, but Carrie cracked a vertebra and would be laid up for months. Stuck in California waiting for the picture to start, Spence could do nothing more than call and wire and send money and gifts. Then Louise saw an ominous squib in one of the papers: the number of infantile paralysis cases was on the decline. It was her first inkling that there had been an epidemic. “That’s all John needs,” she muttered to her sister. “If we had known this, we wouldn’t have come.” It would have been silly to go back to New York, so they decided they would just have to be careful, keeping Johnny away from crowds and other children. She combed the papers daily for news, saw the infection rate drop to only one or two cases a day for all of Los Angeles. Gradually, playgrounds and public pools reopened; in time she practically forgot about it.
Eventually, the people at Fox got around to making the picture. “[Ford] called us to the studio at long last to inform us that the drama was now going to be filmed as a comedy,” Claire Luce recalled. “We all groaned inwardly but somehow got through it.” It wasn’t all comedy, though. Ford and Collier had supplied a new frame to the story, turning the prison into a kind of coed country club, but a lot of Watkins’ material remained. The result was an awkward blend of farce and melodrama, a tall order for a newcomer like Tracy, who was called upon to play low comedy one minute, deliver a tense monologue on death row the next. Ford set the tone by opening the film with a nighttime prison break, Tracy and Hymer rendezvousing with a stolen vehicle. “Look at this!” Tracy mutters. “A roadster—and the gang promised me a limousine and a chauffeur!” He tells the dim-witted Hymer to get out and fix a flat, then cheerfully drives off without him. “I don’t see no flat tire!” Hymer shouts. “No?” calls Tracy as he pulls away. “Well, buy a mirror!”
At last there was something to do, and the California summer seemed to energize the whole family. Every morning, after his father had inched the Ford out of the little garage on Franklin, Johnny would race the car down to the corner as Louise watched. “Then, after Spencer had stepped on the gas and disappeared down the street, he would come tearing back again, up and down the sidewalk, brimming with sheer animal spirits, until panting, like a little puppy, he would throw himself down on the grass to rest.”
Up the River got under way on August 1, the company working nonstop to close with Tracy as scheduled. Joan Marie Lawes, who had turned nine while waiting for work on the film to begin, appreciated Tracy’s businesslike attitude toward the process of making the picture: “It was interesting at first, but it was a lot of time, a lot of hot lights and makeup. I couldn’t wait to get home.” Spence did his best to put her at her ease, gently joking with her between shots, and as one of the first actors to play a scene with him on film, she found him to be thoroughly in command of the material. “Playing a scene with him was just talking. That’s all. It was so impressive what he could convey with just his expression.”
As per Ford’s dictate, Tracy wore no makeup, and the wax face of the Vitaphone shorts gave way to a wizard’s grid of lines and crevices, the sort of landscape that told more about a character than a dozen lines of dialogue.6 The script called for as many exteriors as interiors, and a traveling shot atop a train was made using the relatively new Dunning process, where background action was filmed independently of dialogue and married with studio footage in the laboratory. “Up the River turned out all right,” Ford acknowledged, “and Spence was perfect. Unlike most stage-trained actors, he instinctively subdued himself before a camera. And he was as natural as if he didn’t know a camera was there.” According to Claire Luce, no one was particularly happy with the bizarre experience. “We made bets as to who could break our contract first.”
With Claire Luce, Humphrey Bogart, and Warren Hymer in Up the River (1930). (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy made his last shot on Sunday, August 17, at around five in the afternoon, and was on a train bound for New York by eight that same evening. Before he left, the terms of a new contract were discussed, but he told Sol Wurtzel, the superintendent of production under Winfield Sheehan, he had given his word he’d return to The Last Mile and was honor-bound to do so. Louise and Johnny went back to San Diego for a few days and then left for home. In Chicago, they stopped to see Mother Tracy, who was still in the hospital. While there, Johnny showed signs of fatigue and nausea and was registering a slight fever. The symptoms would fade and then return, and just before it was time to leave, they worsened.
Louise called the general practitioner who was overseeing Carrie’s recovery, but it never occurred to her to call the orthopedist who was in charge of her broken back. The doctor came to the hotel, gave the child a cursory examination, and said he thought that Johnny was probably just upset from all the travel and the change in his eating habits, and that he didn’t think it was anything serious or a reason to delay the rest of their trip. Despite his assurances, Louise felt a certain undercurrent of dread: “I knew I must get home as quickly as possible before whatever I felt was going to happen did so.” That night on the train, she slept in the berth with her son, and his body felt very hot. He tossed relentlessly, moaning in his sleep, and occasionally he would cry out sharply, partially awaken, and then draw his legs up and point to them. And Louise, by that point, knew exactly what was happening.
1 Sam Golden was the owner of the Artcraft Litho and Printing Company, which produced most of the programs and window cards seen on Broadway.
2 The rare exception to the rule was Journey’s End, a British war drama with an all-male cast that was a hit in New York and Chicago as well as in London.
3 The fact that Sheehan was also negotiating a new two-year contract with Ford couldn’t have hurt.
4 Due to a delay in starting Up the River, Bogart was put into A Devil With Women and ended up shooting both films simultaneously. The Ford picture was released on October 12, 1930, making it Bogart’s feature debut. A Devil With Women was released a month later.
5 Leslie died on July 15, 1930. He was twenty-two years old.
6 Fortunately, Tracy tanned well in the California sun. According to author and makeup artist Michael Blake, he would have needed a good, even color to work without makeup. “Perhaps some base color under the eyes to ‘even him out’ as we put it.” Blake is certain he would have needed powder. “No doubt the oils in his skin would make him appear ‘shiny’ under the lights, and he would need powder to dull the shine down or he’d be too bright under the lights.”