CHAPTER 8
Tracy followed John Cromwell’s advice and looked up Snowy Baker, the rugged Australian sportsman who ran the Riviera Polo Club and Equestrian Center in the Santa Monica Canyon. Reginald Leslie “Snowy” Baker was a genuine legend in his home country, a champion horseman, swimmer, rugby player, oarsman, cricketer, and boxer whose work in movies brought him to the United States. He started coaching on the side, and fell in with the developers of the Riviera Country Club in 1928. With Baker as his mentor, Tracy went headlong into polo, embracing it, as Louise put it, “the way people sometimes go when they have waited so long to find something which they really want to do.” He arranged for a horse by the month and lessons, and he took a room at the club so that he would be sure to get in his daily stick-and-ball practice, rising at 6:30 each morning to ride for thirty or forty-five minutes before going to the studio.
As with Tracy’s three previous Fox pictures, Disorderly Conduct had been designed for other actors. Originally it was to be another Quirt and Flagg comedy with Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe. When Lowe failed to come to terms over a new contract, Tracy was promptly dropped in his place. Then McLaglen was shifted to another picture, making room for Ralph Bellamy. With the company hemorrhaging red ink, Sheehan renewed his commitment to building Tracy into a marketable commodity, and one of the men he entrusted with the task was producer John W. Considine, Jr.
At Riviera with Reginald Leslie “Snowy” Baker. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
The son of a noted vaudeville impresario, Johnny Considine was, in the words of Joan Bennett, a “wild, attractive Irishman” who had worked almost exclusively for Joseph M. Schenck, the president of United Artists. He started with Schenck as a script clerk and was line producer on most of Schenck’s later productions, Son of the Sheik, Tempest, and Abraham Lincoln among them. Considine made the jump to Fox in November 1930 and Sheehan gave him his own unit, a move which led to speculation he was grooming the younger man to replace Sol Wurtzel. Considine’s third picture at Fox was Six Cylinder Love, a project hardly calculated to bond him to Tracy, and when he was subsequently given She Wanted a Millionaire, Considine spent an inordinate amount of time haunting the set, convinced that Tracy and Joan Bennett, to whom he would soon propose marriage, were having an affair. His concerns were hardly assuaged after Bennett’s accident, when Tracy became a daily visitor to her hospital room.
Disorderly Conduct was again the work of William Anthony McGuire, who was more a hand at comedy than anything approaching melodrama and whose famous technique of seeing the first act of a play in rehearsal before writing the second and third acts did not stand him in good stead as a screenwriter. McGuire’s scripts tended to start out well before sputtering out in a fantasia of clichés. Disorderly Conduct was no different, a plot-driven muddle that nevertheless gave Tracy his strongest screen character yet. Rather than playing a crook or a con man, Tracy found himself cast as an honest cop disillusioned by the graft and corruption he sees around him. Filming began November 30 with Considine making his directorial debut under Sheehan’s supervision. In support were Sally Eilers, Ralph Bellamy, Allan Dinehart, Ralph Morgan, and the ubiquitous faux Swedish comedian El Brendel.
It wasn’t an easy picture to make. Tightly wound, Tracy often brought tension to a set and was liable to explode if something went awry. Considine knew next to nothing about directing actors and leaned heavily on cinematographer Ray June, who, in collaboration with William Cameron Menzies, had shot many of his productions for Schenck. Moreover, Tracy had been warned that Considine was laying for him, the two men having developed an intense dislike for one another since discovering their common interest in Joan Bennett.
“Tracy came into my dressing room and wanted a drink,” Ralph Bellamy remembered. “My God, he looked awful. I gave him the drink, and somehow he managed to get some more, I guess, because when it came time to shoot he wasn’t around. I finally found him passed out in his dressing room. In order to cover for him, I had a doctor friend say he was ill.” Bellamy, sure that Tracy was in no condition to drive, insisted that Spence follow behind him in his own car as they drove home. “He was still in the police uniform. In the rear-view mirror I saw him stop, so I turned around and went back. He had pulled over another car, and when I got there he was standing next to it in that uniform, bawling the hell out of a woman driver.”
Considine let Tracy have his head with the character of Officer Dick Fay and was rewarded with a performance that far exceeded the limitations of the material. Six pictures into his Fox contract, Tracy was essentially typed as a comedian, the failure of Quick Millions having convinced both Sheehan and Wurtzel that audiences wouldn’t accept him in a serious role. It was Jack Blystone who saw considerably more depth to him, but Blystone’s picture was now on hold and there was no telling if they’d ever get around to finishing it. So Tracy immersed himself in the role of Fay, the good-natured cop on the beat, and brought something extraordinary to it by illuminating the small details the story afforded him.
Demoted after pulling over the daughter of a rich bootlegger, Fay declares himself no longer on the square and takes a bribe in exchange for tipping off a gambling hall of an impending police raid. But turning crooked doesn’t suit him, and he wears his newfound notoriety as a prizefighter might wear an ill-fitting suit of clothes. Suspecting a double cross, the crooks make an attempt on Fay’s life, during which his little nephew is shot dead. In the intense reaction scene that follows, Tracy’s expression ripens from abject grief to horror as an all-consuming trance of vengeance overtakes him. “I did it,” he tells Lucy Beaumont, the distinguished British actress playing his widowed mother, quivering and backing away from her as if dripping with poison. “Just as sure as if I put my own gun to his little body, I killed him, Mom.” Instinctively she places her hands on his chest, and he erupts as if suddenly shot through with electricity. “Don’t touch me, Mom! I’m crooked! I’m low! I’m everything that you hate! That’s why those men were after me, Ma, and that’s why he’s dead! They killed him, Ma, but I’m the cause of it!” And then he kneels at the side of the bed that holds the body of his nephew and crumples into tears.
In Disorderly Conduct (1932). The critic for the Hollywood Citizen News likened Tracy’s work in the movie to that of “the late and great Lon Chaney in his straight roles.” Dickie Moore, who played Tracy’s nephew in the picture, remembered him as “warm yet distant.” (SUSIE TRACY)
Fay cleans up the gang in a memorably framed shot, his back to the camera, the action visible through the broken glass of an office door. The extreme violence of the last act was at odds with the earlier action, the wisecracking exchanges with Sally Eilers, the scenes of low comedy with El Brendel, but the character arc somehow managed to play, Tracy finding the humanity in brief vignettes where, for instance, Fay silently caresses the headlamp of his motorcycle after having been demoted from sergeant to patrolman, the machine drawing his affection like a familiar old horse.
Given the vigilantism of the character, Sheehan had two endings prepared and shot, one in which Fay is wounded in the confrontation but survives, the other in which he dies. Tracy appeared in both but favored the latter as the stronger and more dramatically valid way of ending the picture. Sheehan planned to preview the film with each of the endings but never got the opportunity.
All during the production of Disorderly Conduct, the Fox lot was crawling with auditors from the east, Chase Bank representatives seeking to limit Sheehan’s influence solely to the production of features. They brought new people in for budgeting and scheduling, and Keith Weeks, the former prohibition agent who was Sheehan’s handpicked studio manager, was given fifteen minutes to clear out of his office. Harley Clarke had been removed as Fox president—sent back to Chicago by the very people who had put him there in the first place—and replaced with Edward R. Tinker, board chairman of Chase National, a career banker who freely admitted he knew absolutely nothing about running a studio.
Tinker’s solution to the Fox problem was the only one he could reasonably be expected to manage. Instead of making better movies—“There is nothing in this business which good pictures cannot cure,” Nicholas Schenck, president of Loew’s Inc., parent of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, had famously said—he elected instead to cut operating costs. All contracts were on the table, and Sheehan, under siege, had the richest one of all, paying $6,000 a week and due to escalate, at each succeeding option period, in $1,000 increments. Sheehan had already accepted a 25 percent cut in pay under Clarke—something Wurtzel had successfully refused—and was facing yet another cut when he disappeared altogether, supposedly ill, his whereabouts unknown and his resignation rumored to be imminent.
She Wanted a Millionaire resumed filming on January 5, 1932, little more than a week after Considine wrapped Disorderly Conduct. Joan Bennett had been five months in recovery—having had to learn to walk all over again—but there wasn’t much left to do on the picture, other than to film a Grand Guignol finale that hardly fit the rest of the story. Two days into it, news came that Sheehan had suffered a nervous breakdown—an “authentic” one, the trade press reported—brought on, it was construed, by the systematic stripping of his studio authority. While he was reportedly recuperating at a sanitarium near San Francisco, responsibility for the balance of the Fox season fell to Wurtzel, who was charged with bringing the average cost of a Fox feature down to an industry-wide target of $200,000.
While his own productions came nowhere near that target figure—the modest Disorderly Conduct cost nearly $300,000—it was hard to argue with the fact that the few profitable pictures Fox had released in recent times had all been personally supervised by Winnie Sheehan. Both Delicious and Daddy Long Legs were Sheehan productions, as were Frank Borzage’s Bad Girl and The Man Who Came Back. When Sheehan’s attorney wired Tinker’s office in New York requesting a three-month leave of absence, it was, after due consideration, granted at 50 percent of the production chief’s usual salary—a grand gesture given how easy it would have been to remove him altogether had the Fox hierarchy wanted to do so.
Still, in the months to follow, it would be Sol Wurtzel calling the shots, not Sheehan, and Wurtzel’s interests were not necessarily those of his boss. New players were significantly cheaper than established ones, and part of Wurtzel’s mandate was to bring along the starlets Fox had under contract at $500 a week—girls like Sally Eilers and red-headed Peggy Shannon. Wurtzel had less personal interest in Spencer Tracy than in James Dunn, Eilers’ costar in Bad Girl, who had been pitchforked over Tracy for his greater (perceived) appeal as a leading man. With She Wanted a Millionaire finally in the can, Wurtzel, singularly unimpressed with Disorderly Conduct, assigned Tracy a secondary role in Young America, a Borzage production due to start in the middle of February.
She Wanted a Millionaire opened at the Roxy Theatre on February 19, 1932, and became the first Tracy picture to hit a Manhattan screen in nine months. With the film’s emphasis on Joan Bennett and Fred Waring’s orchestra on the surrounding program, he might just as well have stayed off screen altogether. Tracy was much better served by Sky Devils, which began limited runs in and around Los Angeles in mid-January and performed on par with or better than Street Scene, Palmy Days, Tonight or Never, or any of the other recent United Artists releases. The picture ran two and a half weeks at UA’s flagship theater in Los Angeles, which was the longest run the house had seen since Hughes’ Front Page had played there the previous year.
With Disorderly Conduct set for release in mid-April, the unit publicist on Young America was able to stir up some press interest in Tracy, principally among the members of the freelance corps who fed the fan magazines. Four took the bait, drawing assignments from the newsstand monthlies that targeted a largely female readership. Dutifully, Tracy spent time with each, opening up as best he could, but of the four men he saw over the course of ten days, only Dick Mook was potentially someone to whom he could really talk. Unlike the others, Mook was a seasoned newspaperman, six years Tracy’s senior, who had come west from his native Tennessee with the advent of talkies. He wasn’t a press flack, nobody’s lap dog, and his stuff differed considerably from the fluff that passed for editorial content in most of the major movie magazines. Low-key and gracious, he was often visible at parties and social events where other journalists were rarely to be found.
Mook recalled:
After the preview [of Disorderly Conduct], one of the Fox officials sought to introduce the members of the cast. They were all right down in front—where they belonged—and when they were introduced they could rise, face the audience, and bow. That is, they were all down in front except Mr. Tracy. He had waited to come in until after the picture started and then had taken a seat directly in front of the door. When the picture was finished he meant to duck out the door, but another official stood in front of it and blocked him. When he was introduced, he gave an ashamed little bow and ran. Outside, I encountered him again and, in that beneficent manner of mine, bestowed the accolade. “A great performance, Tracy,” I said. “Thanks,” he came back at me brilliantly and fled.
Intrigued, Mook phoned the studio the next day and made an appointment for lunch. “I came to the conclusion,” he said, “that it was not possible for a man to be as brilliant on the screen and as uninteresting off as Tracy had tried to be.” As they completed their interview, Tracy leaned forward conspiratorially: “How’d you like to go down to the brewery one day and swill a little beer?”
“I’d like it fine,” Mook replied.
“All right,” said Tracy. “I’ll get hold of Frank Borzage and find out when he can go and then I’ll call you. What’s your phone number?”
Mook gave it to him but said, “Why do you want to wear yourself out writing it down? You know you’ll never call me.”
“You think so?” said Tracy. “Well, I’ll bet you five to one I’ll call you within a week.”
Mook left, firmly convinced the next time he’d see Tracy was when he pulled another assignment or happened to catch him on the lot. Good to his word, though, Tracy called him just three days later. “They’ve closed the brewery up,” he said, “but how about coming out to the house for dinner tonight?”
Mook arrived to find that Spence was working late. He ended up dining alone with Louise, his host arriving home only after the table had been cleared. The houseboy, said Mook, had to fix him some bacon and eggs. “As he brought them in, he turned to Mrs. Tracy. ‘Can he have some cheese?’ ” Weeze considered. “I glanced at Spencer. His forehead was wrinkled with worry, and from the expression on his face you would have thought the fate of the universe hinged on her decision. ‘I suppose so,’ she said finally. ‘He’s been working hard. But only a little.’ She turned to me: ‘It’s so fattening, I only let him have it once a week.’ ”
Samuel Richard “Dick” Mook. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
A few days later, Mook was again lunching with Tracy at the Café de Paris, the themed commissary on the Fox lot. Spence noticed Doris Kenyon, his costar in Young America, picking at a salad at the far end of the room. “He knew she was on a diet,” Mook said. “As he watched her, a devilish expression spread over his face.” Tracy called over the waitress, ordered a huge banana split, and had the thing sent over to her. It returned a few minutes later, untouched but with the following note: “You poor undernourished dear. You need this more than I. You must keep your strength up.” Tracy, Mook estimated, weighed at least 180 at the time. “Spence eyed it longingly, finally threw discretion to the winds, and ate every drop of it after threatening to kill me if I told Louise.”
He finished Young America on March 10, happy for the experience of having worked with Borzage, but aware the film would add nothing to his standing with audiences. The leads belonged to two young boys, Tommy Conlon and the director’s nephew Ray Borzage, and Tracy was left to play Kenyon’s irascible husband, a busy druggist with no time for the troubled boy his wife has taken into their home. Derived from an antique play, the script was stiff and artificial, nothing like the social commentary it aspired to be, and Tracy struggled to make an impression in what was essentially a supporting part. Giving his character an ever-present pipe and working it extravagantly, he engaged in some shameless fly-catching.
Within two weeks Wurtzel had him back at work in another supporting role, bolstering James Dunn and Peggy Shannon in the flop Broadway comedy Society Girl. Again he had little to work with, and again his performance smacked of gimmickry, all intensity and torn paper, the only member of the cast with any energy to show. A key confrontation between Tracy and Dunn took days to shoot—“ever since they can remember,” as one visitor to the set put it—and ended with the pudgy Dunn (who was contractually obligated to stay below 157 pounds) busting his third-billed costar in the nose. “I’m playing telephone repairmen or the hero’s best friend who always gets the Dumb Dora blonde,” Spence complained to Pat O’Brien.
About the same time, Sheehan was granted a two-month extension on his leave of absence. For the time being, the 1932–33 season would be entirely in Wurtzel’s hands. Details were necessarily skimpy, but when the program of features was announced, Tracy was top-lined in three: Rackety Rax, a football comedy with Greta Nissen and El Brendel; Shanghai Madness, an exotic adventure yarn; and an oft-threatened remake of What Price Glory? with Ralph Bellamy now in place of Warren Hymer. By the time he started After the Rain in early June, Tracy was plainly demoralized, supporting the unexceptional Peggy Shannon in an obvious knockoff of Sadie Thompson and not even making his first appearance until the middle of the third reel. After the read-through, Jack Blystone, who was directing, asked him what he thought of the script. “Great,” Tracy replied. “I get six days off.”
The release of Disorderly Conduct was the one bright spot in an otherwise dismal spring. Despite the happy ending Wurtzel had naturally chosen to go with, Dick Mook thought the role of Officer Fay to be Tracy’s finest screen portrayal. “It was the picture that sold me on Tracy,” he later said. “I immediately started a one-man campaign for him.” In its review, The Motion Picture Herald advised exhibitors that Tracy “should be played up strong for future B.O. strength,” and the film played to capacity audiences in Los Angeles, where it opened at Loew’s State with Raquel Torres and bandleader Eddie Peabody on the supporting bill.
Strong promotional support led to domestic rentals of $427,659, making Disorderly Conduct not only the most popular of all of Tracy’s pictures for Fox, but also the first since Up the River to actually show a profit. Tired of getting stuck almost exclusively in comedies, Tracy hoped the picture’s success would encourage Wurtzel to use him in more varied fare. “The last two parts I did in New York—Conflict and The Last Mile—were heavy dramas,” he told Mook by way of explanation. “Everything before that was comedy. I was brought out here and put into a film called Up the River. Because it was a prison picture, they figured it was not unlike the two plays mentioned. The picture turned out to be a satire, and the reviews stressed my comedy scenes more than the dramatic ones. Immediately the dramas were forgotten. I played a mugg comedian—a racketeer—in a picture that got good notices and I’ve been playing those parts ever since …”
With After the Rain in progress and a baby due, Tracy moved his family to a larger house in Westwood, a sprawling six-bedroom Spanish showplace on a steep rise overlooking Holmby Avenue. “I could not but add up, from month to month, the ever-increasing grand total we had paid out in rent,” wrote Louise, “and mentally apply it instead to a house we might have bought and be paying for. But Spencer would not listen to any hints dropped on this subject. Although he had done fairly well and might reasonably hope to work out his contract, he personally never had any feeling of security and refused to obligate himself or to sign a lease for a period longer than the date of the next option.”
They were settled in the new house in time to celebrate Johnny’s eighth birthday on June 26. The five guests at the party were all girls, since neither John nor his parents knew any boys. Spence and Louise expected the new baby to be a girl, and had been referring to her for the better part of nine months as “Susie.” Five days later, on July 1, 1932, a Susie did indeed arrive at Good Samaritan Hospital, a seven-and-a-half-pound baby girl to be christened, at her father’s insistence, Louise Treadwell Tracy. Spence was on Catalina Island at the time, making location shots for After the Rain. When word came, he caught a speedboat to the mainland and arrived at the hospital early on a Saturday morning, able to stay just long enough to ascertain that everything was going to be all right. “I was so pleased because it was a little girl,” Louise said. “That was what he wanted. I thought that would be nice, but he was thrilled to death.”
John was especially excited and couldn’t wait to see his new sister. His mother had talked to him from time to time, telling him that he would soon have a little brother or sister, and approximately when that would be, but waiting the two weeks it would take to bring her home was almost more than he could stand. On the big day, his father, looking for a distraction, took him for ice cream, roaring eighty miles an hour down Sepulveda Boulevard between Sunset and Wilshire. Returning home, they both sat on the lawn eating their ice cream and waiting. When the car finally arrived, John rushed up excitedly and saw the baby for the first time. A look of utter bewilderment crossed his face. “He had very little to say,” said Louise, “and soon turned his attention to me. That something was wrong was obvious.”
The baby’s room was done up in pink with voluminous ruffled organdy curtains. After Susie was placed in her crib, John stood beside her for some time, touching her and making tentative efforts at play. “I was disappointed,” he said later. “I didn’t realize the baby would be so small. I had thought I’d play with her outdoors that afternoon.” At last he went to his mother and rendered his verdict. “Too small,” he said, again showing her the desired height, his hand about chest high. His mother explained as best she could that this was the way they came and that it wasn’t possible to exchange her for a larger size. John, however, was adamant.
“Back,” he said. “Too small.”
He would have nothing more to do with the baby for several days, and Louise felt that she had somehow lost standing because she could do no better than that. Then, finally, he was drawn back to the little pink room, and eventually he made his peace with her.
“Very sweet,” he said.
Sheehan returned to Fox in mid-June, just in time to see Society Girl released to scathing reviews and tepid box office. Dunn’s pose as a boxer drew laughs from audiences asked to believe he was a lean specimen of welterweight splendor when obviously tipping the scales at 170 or better. “James Dunn seems only a little more absurd as a prizefighter (we knew he was only fooling when he said he didn’t eat dessert) than Peggy Shannon does as a social butterfly—and that is something of a record,” wrote Helen Klumpf in the Los Angeles Times. “It might all have been dismissed as conscious irony if Spencer Tracy had not been there bringing reality and sincerity into the proceedings.”
Tracy was mortified by the recent pictures he had been asked to make and said as much to Sheehan when he got the chance. “Sheehan … had steadfast faith in Tracy,” Dick Mook said, “but he seemed unable to find decent pictures for him.” After nine features in the space of two years, Tracy was scarcely noticeable to the 70 million viewers who took in films on a weekly basis. In August, concurrent with the release of After the Rain (retitled The Painted Woman), Variety published the results of a survey conducted by exhibitor Harold B. Franklin in which 133 players were graded according to their marquee value. The biggest moneymakers were Maurice Chevalier, Greta Garbo, George Arliss, and Ronald Colman. Will Rogers and Janet Gaynor, the top Fox draws, were rated as third-tier stars, with Warner Baxter, Jimmy Dunn, and Charles Farrell occupying the fifth tier. Other Fox personalities to make the list were George O’Brien, Marian Nixon, Sally Eilers, Joan Bennett, El Brendel, Frank Albertson, William Collier, Sr., and Minna Gombel. After ten feature pictures, Tracy didn’t rate a mention.
“If pressed, he’ll admit that he may be a fair actor,” Mook wrote at the time, “but his looks are a source of constant anxiety to him. Once he said to me wildly, ‘Look, for Pete’s sake, they’ve got me playing love scenes with Joan Bennett. I should be playing muggs, because that’s what I look like.’ ” Money was a constant worry. Tracy was pulling down $1,000 a week but seemingly spending it as fast as he was taking it in. “It was nice to see all that money,” Louise said. “I don’t think we thought it would really last. Of course, when you get more money you find there are many more places to put it. We were just as poor as we had always been.”
Upon his return to the studio, Sheehan pretty much laid waste to Wurtzel’s plans for the new season, canceling What Price Glory? and pulling Tracy out of Rackety Rax when a more promising picture came up at Warners. Warden Lewis E. Lawes, who carried warm memories of Tracy from the days of The Last Mile and Up the River, suggested him for the role of Tommy Connors in the film version of Lawes’ best-selling memoir, Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing. At a price of $10,400 for four weeks, the deal was considerably richer for Fox than the previous loan-outs to Howard Hughes had been, but Tracy didn’t mind, given his genuine affection for Lawes and the realization this would likely be the closest he would ever come to playing The Last Mile on screen.1 “I remember one night he, his wife, and I were going to a picture,” said Mook. “He was telling me Warner Bros. had just borrowed him for the lead in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. ‘If this doesn’t put me over,’ he said, ‘I’ll just have to resign myself to playing character parts the rest of my life.’ ”
The film was originally planned as another pairing of James Cagney and director William Wellman, the team responsible for Public Enemy, but when Cagney declared himself a free agent in a contract dispute with the studio, actor George Brent was assigned the role. Lawes, who had script approval, disliked Courtenay Terrett’s attempt at flushing a storyline out of the episodic book and kept up a steady correspondence with Jack L. Warner, even as plans went forward for director Ray Enright and a four-man crew to shoot nine days of exteriors at the prison. With Tracy obtained from Fox and a revised screenplay by Wilson Mizner and Brown Holmes (who had contributed to the script of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang), Lawes finally got on board, suggesting the film had “every possibility of becoming a masterpiece.”
The cast was a notch above the typical assemblage at Fox. Bette Davis, making her seventh film for Warner Bros., was cast as Tracy’s girl. Arthur Byron, new to pictures after a long career on the New York stage, was set for the part of the warden. Lyle Talbot, Louis Calhern, and Warren Hymer were in supporting roles, Hymer, billed fifth, now earning just $750 a week on a two-week minimum. Tracy was pleased to have an extended scene with his old friend Grant Mitchell.
Allotted twenty-four days, the filming of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing got under way at the First National Studios in Burbank on August 15, 1932. Matching close shots with the footage Enright made in Ossining was a tedious process, veteran cinematographer Barney McGill and his crew blocking the action with the help of an on-set Moviola and scores of reference stills. Erected on Burbank’s Stage 3 were shower and visiting rooms, the prison’s barbershop, machine and shoemaking shops, a mess hall, death row, and a faithful re-creation of Lawes’ own office, down to the books on his shelves. Director Michael Curtiz worked the company in twelve-hour shifts, generally getting four to five minutes of usable film a day.
When Davis started work on the twenty-fifth, she found an instant rapport with her leading man. “He was crazy about my performance in a terrible independent potboiler I’d made with Pat O’Brien, The Menace,” she said. “It was the first picture he’d seen of mine—he thought I was different from any other actress in Hollywood.” Davis was only nine days on Sing Sing, but could vividly recall Tracy’s approach to the job: “Spence didn’t have any pretenses, and for an actor that’s like saying the Hudson River never freezes over. Most of them are so worried about makeup and camera angles that they don’t give you what you must have in a scene: concentration. They just stand there and look beautiful … But Tracy had no such conceit. For the run of the picture we had this wonderful vitality and love for each other.”
The guts of the picture were the scenes that took place in the old cell block of the prison. Warners arranged to shoot the interiors on M-G-M’s Stage 10 in Culver City, where the set built for The Big House was still standing. Limited to four days, Curtiz shot eighteen hours at a stretch, driving cast and crew almost to the breaking point. Yet, predictably, the only outburst came from Warren Hymer, who showed up drunk on the second night, appearing nearly three hours late for a 6:30 call. When he refused to don his wardrobe, Hymer, who had been let out of his Fox contract after the debacle of Goldie, was sent home and docked accordingly. The next day he was on time but clearly hungover. When Curtiz said something, he responded by saying, “Aw, dry up, or I’ll walk out on you.”
Tracy immediately got in his face: “If you ever come here like that again, I’ll save you the trouble. I’ll walk out and refuse to finish the picture as long as you’re in the cast. Then they can decide whether they want to re-shoot the whole picture with someone else in my part and keep you, or whether they’ll re-shoot the few scenes you’re in and keep me!” Hymer sobered up for the balance of the shoot but was late again on two subsequent occasions. Retakes and process work finished 20,000 Years in Sing Sing on September 14, two days over schedule. Tracy had just a week to study the script for his next picture at Fox, a comedy-romance with Joan Bennett titled Pier 13.
That summer, there had been a conference on deaf education at UCLA. The principal of the Clarke School for the Deaf in Massachusetts was attending some of the sessions, and Louise was eager to meet her. The Clarke was the first permanent oral school in the United States, and the first to teach deaf children to speak. John’s leg was improving steadily, and Louise knew he would soon be able to go away to school. “He needed more work,” she said. “He needed children with their companionship and competition, and there seemed no way he could get this in Los Angeles.” There was no school of national standing closer than St. Louis, and Louise didn’t like what she had heard of most state schools. “If John must go away to school,” she declared, “he must go to the best.”
Bette Davis with Tracy in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. The two actors had undeniable chemistry but were never to make another film together. (SUSIE TRACY)
The principal, a Miss Leonard, told Louise that even if she wanted to send John to Clarke—and she hadn’t yet said that she did—the enrollment for the coming year was full and only a last-minute cancellation in his age group could create room for him. Moreover, Clarke, although a private school, was obligated to take applicants from Massachusetts before considering kids from out of state. It all sounded pretty hopeless, and Louise secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Then, less than a week before the start of school, a telegram arrived. The unexpected had happened, and there was indeed a place for John. The Tracys were asked to wire their answer immediately.
It was a tough decision. Louise drove with Spence to Burbank the next morning, and the two of them struggled with it. “He was against sending him,” she remembered. “He said his leg came first, and that he did not think he should go away from home and Dr. Wilson’s care yet. Dr. Wilson, when approached in regard to it, had said that if we felt we must send him, all right, but that he wished, naturally, that we could find something in Los Angeles for a little while longer.” In view of their attitudes, it would have been easy to say no, but Louise couldn’t bring herself to do it. “It was too easy,” she said. “It couldn’t be right.” She told herself she wasn’t being fair to John, and that she was shirking her duty. And so she argued with Spence: “I leaned over backward in doing it. I do not think I convinced him, but he said if I really thought it right, to send him.” To their surprise, John was delighted. “I think the thing that pleased him most was that he would be with children again.”
When she left with John for Northampton, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing was still in production, and had Bette Davis not just married her high school sweetheart, musician Harmon Nelson, there might have been more than a strictly professional relationship between her and Spence. “Up to the time of Sing Sing, only George Arliss had given me encouragement,” Davis said. “He was a father figure for me, the kindly, gentle father that I’d never had. My own was a holy terror. But Spence and I were smitten with each other before we knew it. He didn’t have to pretend he was strong, because he was strong, but, oh, he could be tender too … I’ve often wondered if we’d been at the same studio what would have happened?”
Joan Bennett was also newly married—not to John Considine, as she might have been, but to author and screenwriter Gene Markey. Had there been anything between her and Spence on the first film (and she always denied there had been), there was nothing but genuine friendship between them on this second one. Pier 13 was the slapdash story of a cop and a gum-chewing waitress, a wisecracking romance marred by a darker element completely out of tone with the rest of the film. The script was the work of no fewer than seven writers, principally Arthur Kober, a scenarist and press agent who invested it with what little heart the thing managed to have on paper. The fact that Spence and Joan could take the script’s lines and contrivances and weave them into a credible relationship—something that was clearly impossible on She Wanted a Millionaire—made Pier 13 a memorable experience all around. “I wasn’t one of those simpering idiots for a change,” Bennett said.
Raoul Walsh, never known for his light touch with comedy, directed with a keen awareness the material was second rate. He allowed the cast to embellish shamelessly—sometimes, as with Will Stanton’s interminable drunk routine, to ruinous extremes. “[Spence] joked his way through it,” Bennett remembered, “and threw in ad-libbed lines—very funny ones, I might add. And he and Raoul Walsh got along beautifully so that Raoul didn’t object to Spence throwing in a thing or two of his own.” They finished in just nineteen days—six under schedule—and Tracy went on to his next, Face in the Sky, virtually without pause.
Toward the end of the year, Screenland turned a few pages over to Dick Mook, who had a Roman holiday “giving medals to everyone I like and razzberries to everyone I don’t.” He awarded a joint medal to his pal Tracy and Paul Muni for being “the two finest actors on the screen.” (Muni had appeared in Scarface and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang that year.) The nod came as a complete surprise to Tracy, who admired Muni’s work and didn’t think he was doing anything nearly as good. He called Mook and asked him to lunch. “Dick,” he said, “did you really mean what you said in your ‘Medals and Birds’ or was that out of friendship?”
Mook assured him that he meant every word.
“You see,” said Tracy, “I’m not getting anywhere out here. My option is coming up, and I was thinking of asking them to let me out of my contract. I don’t want to throw away dirty water until I have clean. But if I’m as good as you say, I should be able to find work at other studios, shouldn’t I?”
Mook had been an officer in the army during the war, and Spence seemed to regard him as an older brother, a guy whose advice he could ask. It was, said Mook, “an inviolable rule” of his never to advise anyone on a move that was going to vitally affect his or her life. “I broke it that time to urge Spence to get away if he could.”
But there was no getting away. On October 25, the Finance Committee voted to exercise Tracy’s next option, bumping his rate to $1,500 a week on December 1, 1932. With three households to support—his own, his mother’s, and now his aunt Jenny’s—and John attending the Clarke School for the Deaf in Boston, the extra money would be welcome. Yet he could see no improvement in the material he was being assigned, and Leo Morrison, who saw his commission jump from $100 to $150 a week, was of little help in soliciting offers from other studios. Tracy had little, if any, cachet with the moviegoing public, and the box office performance of his last released film, The Painted Woman, was characterized in Variety as “an atrocity.”
Riviera, with its five turf fields, its quarter-mile training track, its stables and bridle paths, had become a grassy green retreat, a haven where the reality of Tracy’s life in a cushy sort of purgatory—not quite a movie star, certainly not the actor he had imagined himself as being—rarely intruded. He kept up his lessons with Snowy Baker and started playing twice a week on the scrub team. The speed, the exhilaration, the fear of riding drained him completely, and he left the field utterly spent, his mind blissfully clear of the problems that almost always preoccupied him whenever he wasn’t working. He bought a mount called White Sox, one of the prizes of the Hal Roach stable. “There’s something about horses which, once you really become interested in them, just naturally makes you think this is a pretty good world,” he said.
The costs were substantial, but no more so than for membership at a first-rate country club like Hillcrest or Wilshire. For the same $1,000 per annum, a player could belong to Riviera and maintain a stable of three ponies. Dick Mook asked Louise if she didn’t mind his living at Riviera, seeing so little of him as she did. “No,” she said. “He comes home to dinner every night, and I’m glad he’s got something that interests him at last … He’s got the most volatile disposition I’ve ever seen—up in the clouds one minute and down in the depths the next. And when he’s low, he’s very, very low. All this exercise absorbs a certain amount of that nervous energy and he isn’t so apt to become depressed.”
The game itself was quite simple: A team consisted of four riders in numbered jerseys, moving a ball down the field through six periods of play known as “chukkers.” When the ball was thrown in by one of two umpires, the field would erupt with the fury of galloping hooves, divots flying, the cracks of mallets connecting with the hard surface of the ball, horses and riders shoving against each other for position.
There was, above all, the camaraderie of the field, nourishing because it had nothing whatsoever to do with the industry. To the fore came Will Rogers, who was one of the prime movers in the establishment of the club, and whose 224-acre ranch—originally a weekend retreat—sat just north of Riviera in an adjoining canyon. Rogers was one of the first people Tracy met when he came to Fox, and it was Rogers who seconded John Cromwell’s enthusiasm for the game of polo. Frank Borzage played, as did Dick Powell, Darryl Zanuck, Raymond Griffith, Johnny Mack Brown, Jack Warner, Jimmy Gleason, Charlie Farrell, Frank Lloyd, Jack Holt, and producer Walter Wanger.
Rogers became a role model of sorts, a man of genuine humility whose loyalties and charities were legion. Tracy lunched most days at Rogers’ corner table in the Café de Paris, where the Oklahoma-born humorist was surrounded by friends. “Only people he liked were invited to sit at that table,” Tracy said, “and no one who sat there ever paid a check.” Rogers considered the restaurant his club, and if he wasn’t filming, he was there in boots, overalls, maybe a sweater or a leather jacket. “He was first to the café,” said Douglas Churchill, who covered Hollywood for the New York Times, “and in the parade that paused at his table were some of the great and near-great of the world. Every visitor to the lot, if in the position to demand such a thing, wanted to meet Rogers.”
Over the summer of 1932, Riviera played host to the cavalries of the Tenth Olympic Games, and Tracy got to know a few of the participants, particularly Baron Takeichi Nishi, a first lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army. Nishi, with his excellent command of English and a taste for sporty convertibles, became a favorite of the Hollywood set. In early June, Tracy played host to the entire Japanese Olympic team at a luncheon on the Fox lot. The next night, he and Louise gave a dinner in honor of Baron Shino, the head of the team, and were present in August when Nishi won the gold medal for show jumping, Japan’s only Olympic medal in an equestrian event. Having said goodbye to him aboard the M.S. Chichibu Maru, they were surprised to find him back at their door the very next evening. Nishi had forgotten Louise’s birthday, and had flown back from San Francisco to present her with a box of candy. He then returned north by plane in time to catch the ship for Yokohama.
Louise was six weeks in the East, first to get John settled at the Clarke School in Northampton, then to New York for three weeks, then back to Clarke for a final check before returning home to California. She found the school’s spare, institutional interiors chilling, and sensed the administration’s lack of interest in John’s special needs—the physical therapy his leg still required and the fact that he was behind most of the other children in vocabulary and comprehension. John liked the idea of rooming with two other boys. (“Three!” he kept chortling as he noted the other pieces of furniture in the room.) For Louise, however, it took some getting used to.
She suppressed her concerns, bothered though she was, and kept quiet when she saw the children on the playground making no effort whatsoever to speak. “Speech had been left in the school building,” she wrote, “and in its place were gestures and grimaces. These children, evidently, either never had acquired the speech and lip reading habit at home or had lost it here, for lack of encouragement. A kind of helpless terror engulfed me. I saw John look anxiously from one child to another. He tried to talk to them. He had words or phrases, if not sentences, for some of the haphazard and unsupervised games they were trying to play. They looked as blankly at John as he did at them. He came over to me several times and shook his head at this strange state of affairs.”
In Springfield a specialist recommended by Dr. Wilson did a muscle test that showed a slight difference was developing in the boy’s two legs. At the time, John’s right leg was an eighth- to a quarter-inch shorter—hardly measurable—but with eight or nine years of growth ahead of him, there was no telling how pronounced the difference might become.
It was on the train back to Northampton that it suddenly dawned on John that his mother was returning home. With a wide, dark look of fear in his eyes, he flung himself upon her. Somehow, they got through the rest of the day and that night at the hotel. By morning, when she took him back to school, the storm had passed and he marched off to Sunday school with the other children, gently swaying as he did when he walked, smiling and waving happily, and Louise watched and waved back as they dipped below a hill, two by two, and gradually out of sight.
It was the morning of October 20 when Weeze arrived back in Los Angeles. Spence was finishing Pier 13 and looking at starting another picture within days. There was a brand-new daughter waiting at home, one Louise hardly knew, and one who wanted, at least at first, nothing to do with her. With Johnny in the East, they tried to make sure he received a letter or at least a card almost every day. Mother Tracy—Mum Mum—did best. “Father and Carroll went to church and Father has gone to ride,” she wrote Johnny on October 2 while Louise was still in New York. “We are all fine and Susie is growing very fast. She has three new rattles and can hold one and shake it now. She smiles and can say, ‘Goo.’ Very funny.” Spence, who preferred wires to writing, contributed just a line or two. “Can you see the very small boat in this picture?” he carefully wrote on the illustrated stationery of the Santa Barbara Biltmore. “Show this to Mother so she may see how fine Father writes.”
Louise took over when she returned, writing to John every day or two. “Friday, Father and I rode on the horses,” she reported in her first letter. “Father rode on the black horse. His name is Whitesocks [sic]. I rode on the white horse. His name is White Cloud. They went very fast.” Then the next: “Today is Sunday. Father and I rode Whitesocks and White Cloud this morning. We rode up in the mountains. Mum Mum and Carroll are coming to dinner today. Father, Carroll, and I went to a football game yesterday. We had lots of fun.” And then: “Father is working. We cannot go for a ride on the horses today. Perhaps tomorrow we shall go. Mum Mum and I shall go to the movies today and see Father. Father says it is very terrible.”2 And: “Father and I went to a large party Saturday. There were sixty people there.”
They went out very little. Spence still didn’t mix well with strangers, and the thought of dressing up and going to the Trocadero or the Colony after a full day at the studio was profoundly unappealing. “You know how I feel about nightlife,” Spence said to his pal Mook. “I hate it. But I’m at the studio all day and I see a lot of people and have laughs, etcetera. Louise is home all day and never sees anybody. Why don’t you take her to these previews with you?” Mook did, and Tracy found that he enjoyed the solitude.
The few days he wasn’t working were spent at Riviera, where a game could likely be had on any day but Monday. Large concrete grandstands built alongside Number One Field for the Olympics now held tourists straining to catch sight of their favorites. Women played on the old dirt field, and Louise was asked repeatedly why she didn’t play too. She demurred, diplomatically at first, suggesting that, although she rode, she would never be equal to polo. “Spencer had expressed himself vigorously, a number of times, on the subject of women playing,” she later explained, “and as long as he felt that way, I had no intention of making an issue of it.”
Face in the Sky was the work of a novelist and short-story writer named Miles Connolly, who was joining Fox after stints as a supervisor at both RKO and Columbia. Connolly’s story concerned the wanderings of Joe Buck, an itinerant artist who paints lipstick ads on the sides of barns. Buck was a cut above the characters Tracy was used to portraying, a rural philosopher and a bit of a dreamer, happy with his lot in life and proud of his work. “I wouldn’t trade jobs with anybody in the world,” he says earnestly. “I mean these guys they call the great captains of industry. Why, they’re a lot of buck privates. Why do you suppose this country built all the good roads? So people could look at the billboards. Who made Americans snappy dressers? Me and my profession. Who gave the gals all their beautiful figures? I did … Say, I keep millions of clerks at work. I make the whistles toot and the factories smoke, and that makes us outdoor artists the greatest salesmen in the world.”
The girl in the picture was Marian Nixon, a veteran of more than fifty films who had gained new popularity by taking the role refused by Janet Gaynor in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Nixon gave Tracy some badly needed support in terms of name value, as did Stu Erwin, who played his dim-witted sidekick. The principal difference, beyond Connolly’s story and the script fashioned from it, lay in its director, Harry Lachman. Born in Illinois, Lachman was, like Rowland Brown, trained as an illustrator, but where Brown fell into the life of a roustabout, Lachman went to Paris to study and became one of Europe’s better known Postimpressionist painters. He entered films in 1925, initially working in an advisory capacity with Rex Ingram, later directing pictures of his own in both England and France. One of Sheehan’s trophies, Lachman was given a generous schedule on Face in the Sky and was able to give Tracy a sense of how a real artist would carry himself.
Meanwhile, Pier 13, retitled Me and My Gal, played a week’s stand at the Roxy in New York and cemented Tracy’s reputation as a poor draw. Sold as a “high-speed comedy-melodrama,” it got caught in the usual pre-Christmas slump and set an all-time low for the massive theater, a weekend blizzard eliminating virtually all the automobile trade. Whatever business there was in the city seemed reserved for Paramount’s A Farewell to Arms at the Criterion and Metro’s Flesh at the Capitol.
In the middle of December, just as Face in the Sky was finishing up, Louise went east to bring Johnny home for the holidays. While the sight of fresh snow was exhilarating, the mood at the Clarke School was anything but. Johnny was listless, his face pallid. When she embraced him, he was sullen and unresponsive. Upon investigation, she found his rest period had been combined with his physical therapy, negating the value of each. His digestion was poor, potatoes being part of nearly every meal, and he was beginning to show the symptoms of a chest cold. When the housemother asked what of John’s she wanted packed, Louise said, “Everything.”
On the train going back, John’s cough got worse, and he ran a temperature of 104. By the time they got to Los Angeles, his fever had broken but now Louise had it. She was over it in time for Susie’s first Christmas, but Spence had a surprise of his own. On New Year’s Day, he and Louise were en route to Havana via the Panama Canal aboard the liner S.S. Santa Rosa. They would be gone the better part of a month.
In November 1932, while Tracy was on location shooting Face in the Sky, Preston Sturges met writer-producer Hector Turnbull at a party. Sturges, author of the hit play Strictly Dishonorable, had fallen into the lucrative business of screenwriting. Universal snapped up his play and, eventually, Sturges as well. Then, unsure of quite what to do with him, they assigned him to a series of workaday projects, the last of which was the script for the H. G. Wells thriller The Invisible Man. More attuned to originals than adaptations, Sturges wrote an entirely new story to go with the title and was fired for his trouble. Now, with three flop plays to his credit and his name on exactly the same number of flop movies, Sturges was hustling an original story for the screen that he proposed to write on spec and sell on percentage as he would a play. The title he gave his story was The Power and the Glory.
Turnbull, story editor and associate producer to his brother-in-law, Jesse L. Lasky, was intrigued by Sturges’ idea, which was inspired by the life of C. W. Post, the cereal king of Battle Creek. Sturges had briefly been married to Post’s granddaughter, Eleanor Hutton, and he heard the story of the Postum Cereal Company (later General Foods) in snippets. Post was a restless man who built a sales career in “agricultural implements” into one of the great fortunes of the Gilded Age—a rancher, inventor, and art collector who shot and killed himself at the age of fifty-nine. The life of a self-made man naturally interested Sturges, who was himself an inventor and a businessman, but the screen was full of such stories. It was the death of such a man by his own hand that intrigued Sturges, and his nonlinear telling of the life of Tom Garner, his fictional rail tycoon—which mirrored the way Sturges himself had heard the Post story—would begin with Garner’s funeral and move back and forth in time as it depicted his rise from track walker to president. It was a compelling notion with an audacious structure, and Turnbull offered to arrange a conference with Lasky, who had recently joined Fox as an independent producer.
Tracy first heard of The Power and the Glory when news of Sturges’ percentage deal made the rounds, but it wasn’t until he was called back from Cuba that there was serious talk of his doing the picture. Originally, he had been set to appear opposite Clara Bow in Marie Galante, but when Bow resisted the assignment—as she did practically all assignments—both Tracy and director William K. Howard were suggested to Lasky. Face in the Sky had just been released, and though audiences stayed away in droves, Lasky saw much to like in Tracy’s genial performance. It was, in fact, hard to picture another actor on the Fox lot handling a character who aged from twenty to sixty over the course of a film. (“You know, Spencer, I don’t think you’ll need so very much makeup to play a man of fifty-five,” Bill Howard said as he gave Tracy’s face a hard look.)
Having declined to produce a treatment, Sturges finished the entire script by mid-January. It took form as a recollection, a give-and-take, between the central character’s oldest friend, Henry, and Henry’s wife, who clearly hates the man. Henry, it seems, knows the real story behind the death of Tom Garner’s first wife, as well as the reason Garner’s second marriage ended in tragedy. He and Tom meet as children, then Garner is seen years later bullying his board of directors into purchasing another line—a deal he has, in fact, already consummated. Here Tom is established as a tough and resourceful businessman, clearly where he is through hard work and raw, undeniable talent. From there Sturges pulled the story back in time to the meeting between Tom and his first wife, Sally. He then jumped forward to contrast that scene with Tom’s encounter with Eve, the daughter of the president of his new rail subsidiary. Having prodded Tom to success, Sally now regrets it. Tom, a cold shadow of his former self, tells her that he loves the younger Eve. In a daze, Sally leaves his office and steps in front of a streetcar.
Throughout, the vignettes are joined by Henry’s sympathetic narration. Tom is an antiunionist whose confrontation with his striking employees is one of the highlights of the picture. But his life goes sour as he becomes old and sedentary. As C. W. Post’s health failed, so does Tom Garner’s second marriage. His young wife shows her contempt for the old man she has married by falling into bed with his grown son. The Power and the Glory was the American success story gone sour; wealth and happiness as the prelude to disaster. It was a tragedy of theatrical quality, thoroughly cinematic in its rhythms and ambitions, and behind it was the echo of great literature. “The manuscript crackled with its originality of conception and craftsmanship,” Lasky said. “I was astounded. It was the most perfect script I’d ever seen.”
The president of Fox—the company’s third in as many years—was Sidney R. Kent, a slick salesman from the ranks of distribution who had been vice president and general manager of Paramount-Publix before having his contract settled. Tall and personable, Kent knew everything there was to know about block booking and the hustling of product; considerably less, it seemed, about the actual making of movies. Having inherited a deficit from Edward R. Tinker, Kent reported a loss of more than $9 million for the thirty-nine weeks ended September 24, 1932. With Sheehan in Europe, he declared the cost of pictures would have to be brought into line with admission prices, which had eroded nearly 50 percent in the space of a year. Only Sheehan’s glistening production of Cavalcade provided some breathing room for the company when it opened in New York on January 5, 1933, and became the surprise hit of the season.
Normally based in New York, Kent appeared unannounced one day at Movietone City and began making changes. He gave Sol Wurtzel a slate of six pictures to produce and promptly replaced him as superintendent with J. J. Gain, the studio’s newly appointed business manager. Salary cuts, Kent indicated, would go into effect within two weeks, and most people under contract would be asked to share the pain. “We will have to predicate all our plans on current conditions and gear ourselves to operate, if not profitably, at least without a loss for the next two years … Pictures will be produced here ranging from $225,000 to $240,000 in budget. Now and then we will turn out a Cavalcade. That type of picture is necessary for prestige, but the average picture will be cut considerably in cost.”
It took some talking on Lasky’s part to convince Kent that The Power and the Glory had potential as a “prestige” title, especially in light of Sturges’ extraordinary contract demands. Having first fixed the arbitrary and heart-stopping price of $62,475 on the property, he then insisted on a percentage of the gross at a time when participation deals of any kind were highly unusual. After struggling through a down year, Kent was out to improve the overall quality of Fox product. “Decided I was to do ‘Power and the Glory’ for Jesse Lasky,” Tracy wrote in his Daily Reminder on February 1, 1933. “Script by Preston Sturges, author of ‘Strictly Dishonorable’—great script + great part. Sounds like a winner … I hope so.”
The day after his meeting with Lasky and Turnbull, Tracy drove to Santa Barbara for a polo tournament with Big Boy Williams. He hadn’t slept well in months and hoped the combination of riding and relaxation would make a difference. He had White Sox shipped up on the train and was able to take him around the track the next morning. For ten days he followed the same general routine: a ride in the morning, lunch at the hotel, a game in the afternoon. Then dinner with friends and often a movie at one of the theaters along State Street.
Back at the studio, there were meetings with Lasky, Sturges, and Bill Howard. They discussed story, clothes, and the actress who was to play Garner’s wife. Both Irene Dunne and Mary Astor were considered before Lasky, an avowed partisan of industry veterans, settled on Colleen Moore. One of the most popular stars of silent pictures, Moore hadn’t played in a film since 1929. Yet she was, at thirty-two, the ideal age to play both younger and older, and she would bring some added name power to the picture. “They sent me the script,” she remembered. “Mr. Lasky talked to me and Bill Howard talked to me. Well, the minute I read the script, I couldn’t wait to do it.” Delays were inevitable. By February 20, nearly two hundred people had been dropped from the Fox payroll and salary cuts were estimated as saving another $10,000 a week.
The film was set to start on Monday, February 27, but then on Saturday they were told it had been postponed three weeks. In the meantime, Lasky and Sturges were drawn into meetings with Dr. James Wingate of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) over the sexual relationship in the script between Tom Garner, Jr., and his stepmother, Eve. The Power and the Glory was unacceptable under the Production Code, even though, as Sturges pointed out, the relationship technically was not incestuous. In a subsequent letter to the filmmakers, Wingate suggested that such an “unfortunate affair” could only be redeemed “if the son kills himself also.” Word of the situation reached Sidney Kent through Will Hays, president of the MPPDA, and Kent shot a letter off to Sheehan in California: “If there is in this story a sex relationship such as Mr. Hays mentions, it will have to come out. I think the quicker we get away from degenerates and fairies in our stories, the better off we are going to be and I do not want any of them in Fox pictures.”
When Sturges was finally told he could come in and sign his contract, a legal holiday was declared in California. Three days later, on March 4, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House, and the following day he issued a presidential proclamation declaring a mandatory four-day bank holiday. No checks could be signed or cashed, and no pictures could be funded. The same day, as a financial pall settled over the entire country, the major studios, with no actors’ union—no equivalent of Equity—to oppose them, began instituting a mandatory 50 percent reduction in salary for all contract players. George Bagnall, the Fox studio treasurer, induced Tracy—who could ill afford it—to accept the cut for an eight-week period beginning March 6.3
When it looked as if the negotiations with Sturges had irreparably stalled, Sol Wurtzel stepped in and asked that Tracy be assigned to The American, a picture based on the life of Anton Cermak, the first foreign-born mayor of Chicago. Admitting it was a plum part, Tracy nevertheless asked to be let out of the assignment, convinced its similarity to The Power and the Glory would freeze him out of the latter picture should it subsequently get made. Fortunately, Sturges’ contract was finally signed on March 15, and production began eight days later. “The schedule calls for thirty-three days,” Sturges wrote his father on March 27, “but it will probably take a little longer than that. It should be finished by the first of May. We have an excellent cast, an excellent director, an excellent cameraman, and an excellent film editor (cutter). If your son is any good at all as an author, we should have an excellent picture.”
It was about this time that Louise began talking to Spence about starting a school for the deaf in Los Angeles. A checkup in January had shown that John’s leg had gone back considerably during his time at Clarke and that the food there had tied his stomach in knots. He was put on daily treatments and a strict diet, but Louise thought there must be a better answer. “I felt we might start in a very modest sort of way, say with three or four children. These should not be hard to find, especially as we were willing to finance the venture, and, for the time being, a tuition fee could be waived. I mentally began to turn our den and patio into school room and play yard. All we needed was one good teacher and some children.”
Louise mentioned the idea to John’s teacher, Mrs. Payzant, who was plainly appalled by it. The public school system, however overtaxed, needed every student it could get. A loss of even a few would trigger a drop in funding that could result in a teacher losing her job. Louise went to the department of handicapped children at the Board of Education, but they couldn’t release any names, nor could they offer any suggestions. Next she tried doctors, talking to Dr. Dietrich, who was their pediatrician, and Dr. Dennis, their family practitioner, both of whom thought her plan quite reasonable, even if they knew of no children who were deaf. She wrote a letter about what she wanted to do, which she thought she could mail to all physicians in the county of Los Angeles, but the head of the medical association didn’t think it would do any good. She talked to other physicians and otologists, all of whom assured her they personally knew of no deaf children.
Finally, she called the mother of a deaf girl she knew had been going to Wright Oral. This woman belonged to a prominent Los Angeles family of considerable means, and Louise asked if she would be at all interested in such a venture. “She said she had tried the same thing herself once and had had to give it up. She had been able to get neither cooperation nor interest from anyone.” Louise learned later that, according to a survey, there were more than two hundred deaf children of school age in the state of California who were not in school because there were inadequate facilities. While Louise was sputtering over the complete lack of understanding and interest, even in the salons of the state capital, an educator asked her, “Why are you interested in the deaf?” She could see his point. “Most people are not interested in the deaf,” he went on, “until the problem becomes their own.”
The Power and the Glory called for a lot of exteriors, significantly Garner’s standoff with striking yard men, the Wobblies vilifying him at the scene of a nighttime rally. Garner wades into them, leaving his bodyguards at the car, completely unfazed by the dangerous mood of the mob. They were shooting out near the rail yards, and Howard drew his extras from the hundreds of men who lived like prairie dogs on a vast stretch of flat land that bordered the eastern edge of downtown Los Angeles. Seeing those men working long hours for a day wage of three dollars and a box lunch mollified whatever hard feelings Tracy was nursing over his temporary cut in pay.
The picture was shot largely on Eastman’s new super-panchromatic film stock, enabling cinematographer James Wong Howe to capture interiors with approximately one-third the light normally needed for such scenes. “Super Pan” brought out new subtleties of shadow and texture, permitting makeup artist Ern Westmore to achieve the old-age effects called for in the script with a minimum of fuss. In Tracy’s case, the lines naturally present in his face were emphasized with a dusting of powder over a foundation base, while Colleen Moore was aged with a careful orchestration of shadows and highlights. Moore also wore a gray wig, while Tracy had his own hair somewhat less convincingly altered with liquid whitener applied with a toothbrush. Much of the effect was achieved with wardrobe, posture, and, as Charles Dudley, the head of the Fox makeup department, put it, “sincerity—characterization and genuine acting ability.”
To Tracy’s mind, Bill Howard was just about the best director he had ever worked with, a dark, meticulous Irishman who gave the film tone and nuance without getting in the way of either the script or the performances. “He had none of the flamboyancies of many directors,” Colleen Moore remembered. “He never raised his voice. He and I had great rapport. I could tell what he was thinking and do it before we talked about it.” Howard, who began directing pictures in 1921, was the ideal man to stage the pantomime scenes in which the actions and words of the characters were simultaneously expressed in voice-over by Garner’s friend, Henry.
While the nonlinear structure of the story made the development of his character all the more difficult, Tracy displayed a range he had never before shown on screen, going as he did from the childlike spirit of the early Tom to the burnt-out shell of the rail executive at the end of his days. It was screen acting at its most profound, forceful yet natural, at times quiet to the point of inaudibility. It was as if he was trying to push the conventions of the screen to new levels of subtlety. And yet, whenever anyone asked, he invariably cited the Lunt-Fontanne film version of The Guardsman as the ideal convergence of stage and talking picture technique. “Look how the dialogue overlapped in that,” he would say. “They never waited for each other to finish talking. It was the most natural thing in the world. When you and I talk or when any two people are chatting they don’t wait every time for the other to finish before starting, the way they do in most pictures. People anticipate the last few words each other will say and butt in on them. That’s one of the things that makes Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne natural. And it’s their naturalness that makes them great.”
Colleen Moore, who had played in films with John Barrymore, Fredric March, and Jean Hersholt, thought Tracy the best of the lot. “He was the greatest actor I ever worked with,” she said. Fittingly, Tracy’s most affecting scene in the film was played opposite Moore in the moments following the birth of their son. In the script, Sally’s face is very white, her eyes unusually big and dark. She smiles at him but does not speak. Tom sinks to his knees, takes her hand, and speaks gently: “My son … my son. I’ve got a son. Oh, Sally, they’ll never stop me now. Thank you …” On the set, Howard trusted his actors’ instincts and gave them wide latitude with the unfolding of a scene. Tracy entered in something of a trance, still processing the momentous news that he was now a father. He dropped to his knees at the bed. “Sally, are you all right? I’ve got a son. You gave me a son.” Moore’s face was toward the camera, her eyes closed, but as Tracy spoke, she found it impossible to maintain her composure. “We finally had to shoot it with my back towards the camera because every time he did his scene, I cried so hard because he was so good. No actor ever did that to me.”
When it came time for Tracy to recite the Lord’s Prayer, Howard moved in close, keeping Moore’s face entirely out of the shot. “Our Father … Who art in Heaven…,” he began haltingly, sticking to the spirit of the scene if not necessarily the text. “Thank you, God. Thank you for your kindness … for Thine is the power and the glory, for ever and ever.”
As Tracy later told Clifford Jones, the actor playing his adult son: “This isn’t a business about making faces. You have to concentrate … and listen … because the camera is there picking up your thoughts.”
On location for The Power and the Glory. From left: William K. Howard, Colleen Moore, screenwriter Preston Sturges, and Tracy. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
“In 1933, I was 21 years old,” wrote Lincoln Cromwell,
and about to graduate from UCLA. I had applied to and been accepted at the medical schools of both the University of Southern California and McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. McGill was my first choice, but I didn’t have the funds to attend either school. At this point, almost miraculously, the man who was to become a patron and sponsor entered my life.
Until then, I had never heard of Spencer Tracy. He was just beginning to become known and I wasn’t much of a moviegoer. Yet, one spring morning I found myself sitting on the porch of his house in Westwood, sipping lemonade with Spencer and his wife, Louise. At the end of that conversation, which lasted a couple of hours, Spencer informed me that he would underwrite all expenses for my first year of medical school at McGill and, if I proved successful, would pay for the rest of my medical education. There would be a price, Spencer said. I was to write him a weekly letter, telling him what I was learning and describing my life at McGill. Thus we entered into a pact that was to last five years.
In Brentwood, Cromwell and his family lived next door to a Mrs. Brumadge, who in turn shared the hometown of Enid, Oklahoma, with Dr. Howard Dennis. Concerned a promising student might have to forgo medical school, Mrs. Brumadge boarded a bus one day and rode into town to ask Dr. Dennis if anything could be done. “Denny,” as Spence liked to call him, was a good friend, the quiet man with the wavy brown hair and the glass eye who routinely patched him up whenever he was injured at polo. He understood Spence’s need to make his good fortune count for something and that he had thought of putting a boy through medical school as if to fill the slot he had himself abandoned when he fell in with the Mask and Wig. Tracy, Cromwell learned, had wanted a son to accomplish the great things in life he knew he never would and was unable to shake the notion that the deep sense of disappointment he felt was the same as what his own father must have felt toward him. “There would be people he would meet,” Louise said, “professional people, doctors and so on, and it bothered him. You know—‘What do you do?’ Of course, most of them knew, but then, an actor. ‘What is an actor?’ he said. He did belittle it, and he wished he had been something else.”
Slowly and somewhat reluctantly, Spencer Tracy was beginning to lay down roots in Los Angeles. It was clear he was to be stuck at Fox, churning out second-rate movies, for the full term of his contract. “I don’t believe an actor lives who can make four to eight films a year and survive,” he told Mook one day over lunch. “It’s expecting too much of audiences to ask them to see you that often and not tire of you. I think Paul Muni has the ideal contract—one which specifies only two pictures a year and which permits him to do stage plays in the interim.”
If it was only the stage that could bring him the artistic satisfaction he craved, he needed a different kind of gratification from his work in the movies. The money he made could justify a bad picture only if he could do something meaningful with it. A passage from the Gospel of Luke stayed with him from childhood: “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much had been committed, of him they will ask the more.” When Carroll came out at Christmastime, he was, as he later put it, “ogling the poinsettias and the climate” when Spence, with an extra $500 a week at his disposal (his pay cut restored and his new option period having kicked in), proposed that he resign his position with Thompson’s Malted Milk in Waukesha and come to live in California as his business manager. Louise was too busy with John to manage the accounts as she once had, and their mother needed more attention than Spence alone could provide. Hesitant at first, Carroll said that he had met a girl he wanted to marry. “Move out,” said Spence, “and when I’m finished with my next picture, I’ll go back with you to be your best man.”
Carroll was present throughout the shooting of The Power and the Glory, quietly chain-smoking in the background, and he could see his brother was drinking too much. Apart from dinner at home, Spence was essentially living at the Riviera, especially during the week, and it was easy for him to get diverted on the way back to his room. On nights when he “wanted to go out and get drunk,” he would call the driver he kept on salary for his mother’s use and the man would accompany him “to various bootlegging and drinking joints around Los Angeles.”
At one point during production, Spence disappeared altogether. “To the best of my recollection … he was found several days later by (I think it was) Bing Crosby in Tijuana,” said Colleen Moore. It fell to Carroll—as it had fallen to their uncle Andrew in the previous generation—to go down and get his brother and bring him back to the set. Bill Howard, who had spent considerable time of his own in the Fox doghouse, covered for Spence and managed to keep the film on schedule. Nothing more was said about it. “He just went on as if it hadn’t happened,” said Moore.
When The Power and the Glory finished on April 24, 1933, Tracy was still committed to The American, and he wasn’t happy about it. The film would carry a significantly lower budget than the Lasky picture while exploring some of the same themes, and both were likely to be released within a few weeks of each other. The issue came to a head on the twenty-eighth, when the Fox brass decided to hold The Power and the Glory for a fall release. It was good news for the picture, but W. R. “Billy” Wilkerson, the crusading publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, saw it as a typical case of shortsightedness on the part of the studio and said as much in an editorial. The American, Wilkerson noted, would likely be released before The Power and the Glory, “[s]o when the latter picture is released, instead of Tracy getting the benefit of his admirable work in an entirely new type of role, he will be playing ‘just another old man,’ losing all the benefit that would accrue to him from the more carefully-made production.”
After a tense few days, the starting date for The American was pushed back a couple of weeks and the role reassigned to Preston Foster, arguably a bigger name if not quite the same caliber of actor. Shanghai Madness, Tracy’s next scheduled picture, was set to start in early June, allowing him time to go east with Carroll. Andrew Tracy met the Los Angeles Limited in Dixon early one Sunday morning and drove the brothers the forty miles to Freeport. They had breakfast at their uncle’s cold-water flat, went to Mass at St. Mary’s, and stopped at the Calvary Cemetery, where, clad in his overcoat, hat in hand, Spence kneeled at the grave of their father and wept. “We all sort of wandered off and left him alone a long time,” said Frank Tracy, Andrew’s fourteen-year-old son.
In Milwaukee they stayed at the Schroeder Hotel, and when Carroll was married that following Wednesday, it was at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. His bride was a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher named Dorothy Sullivan, a talkative little redhead, not more than five feet or so in height, and Carroll towered over her like a giant. “This may be just what Carroll needs,” Spence said to his uncle Andrew on the way to the ceremony. “Carroll needs a job and a wife … Carroll needs a life of his own.”
Carroll Tracy had always been the forgotten son, the one his father John despaired over. “John thought Carroll was a dud,” said Frank Tracy, who heard it from his father. “Oh yeah, Carroll was hopeless. You know—nice guy, never got in trouble, anything like that, but he ain’t goin’ nowhere.” Spence was, admittedly, a troublemaker, but he had energy and drive and was able to make his own way in the world. Carroll had only gotten the job at Thompson’s because Sam Thompson was an old friend of the family.
There was a big reception, and the only time Frank ever saw Spence take a drink of hard liquor was at the intimate gathering that followed the main event. The Sullivans were a big Irish family, and there were kids crawling all over the place. “I had the impression that he needed a drink,” Frank said. “It was going to go on for several hours. My dad and I left about nine or ten. He stayed.” The following morning, with Carroll and Dorothy off on their honeymoon, Spence quietly boarded a train for the West Coast and was back home by Memorial Day.
Although Shanghai Madness had been on the Fox schedule for more than a year—always with Tracy’s name attached—he rightly saw the film as a comedown after The Power and the Glory—as almost any picture would be. “What are you dissatisfied about?” Carroll would say to him, having only his own work at Thompson’s to compare it to. “Stick with it. What more can you ask?” The screenplay, by the colorful journalist and short-story writer Austin Parker, was better than for most Fox programmers, and the director once again would be Jack Blystone. “I would have felt more that I was getting somewhere if anyone on the lot had seemed to be taking any particular interest in me,” Tracy said. “But I was just another actor, sometimes getting good parts, sometimes bad. I didn’t feel I was doing my best work and I was getting a bit cynical about it.”
When the shooting script came down from mimeo on May 19, the cast was headed by Ralph Morgan, who had played so well opposite Tracy in The Power and the Glory, and actress Claire Trevor, fresh from her Fox debut in a George O’Brien western called Life in the Raw. Then someone got the bright idea of putting Trevor in O’Brien’s next picture as well, and producer Al Rockett borrowed Elizabeth Allan from M-G-M to replace her. Allan lasted only as long as it took for her to quarrel with Blystone, normally the most agreeable of directors. Marion Burns, who had playedJoan Bennett’s two-timing sister in Me and My Gal, had the part for a few days, then Fay Wray, fresh from the release of King Kong, stepped into the role with little more than a week’s notice.
Tracy’s character, Jackson, is given a general court-martial for firing on a Communist boat that killed two of his men. Found guilty, he can’t get a job when he rescues Wildeth Christie from a stranded rickshaw and a near-riot. It’s only her second day in Shanghai and he’s the only white man she’s seen. The subtext is that Wildeth was a wild girl back home and that her father has brought her to Shanghai as an “experiment.” She’s randy and lonely and virtually throws herself at Jackson. (“I’m lots of fun to play around with,” she tells him.) There was a good deal of energy in Wray’s lusty performance and considerable chemistry between her and her costar as well. “No nonsense, no pretension,” she said of him. “I wanted so to complement his realities that I wore no makeup. Without having a light summer tan and without the artistry of the cameraman, Lee Garmes, I might not have been able to do that.”
Where The Power and the Glory advanced Tracy’s mastery of the art of film acting and would serve to cement his reputation as one of the best young actors in Hollywood, Shanghai Madness gave him a rugged sort of sex appeal that came with the frank sensuality of Fay Wray. Where previously he had been a sort of roughneck Lothario, struggling to gin up the chemistry with such nonstarters as Peggy Shannon and Sally Eilers, he now had someone he could connect with as fully as Joan Bennett and Bette Davis, but on a more carnal level, the kind of unspoken appeal that electrifies the screen and registers with audiences. Without saying as much, Shanghai Madness would advance his standing with the Fox hierarchy more than would The Power and the Glory,and not necessarily in the career-advancing way he might have hoped.
As they progressed with the picture, The Power and the Glory was put before a preview audience for the first time on the night of June 18, 1933. Tracy was there, sporting a bruise over one eye and a sprained wrist from having been thrown to the gravel by one of his polo ponies. Billy Wilkerson, who had earlier gone to bat for him over the matter of The American, published a review the next morning in which he called the film “the most daring piece of screen entertainment that has ever been attempted since the camera first began to flick.” After crediting the author, producer, and director, “the big applause of the picture should go and will go to Spencer Tracy. This sterling performer has finally been given an opportunity to show an ability that has been boxed in by gangster roles, thugs, etc. And how the baby does troupe! And the part is no made-to-order affair; it required great ability and Tracy had every requirement. If The Power and the Glory does nothing else, it has introduced (at least to this reviewer) Mr. Tracy as one of the screen’s best performers and, as such, he should be given roles befitting that ability, thereby giving additional contribution to better pictures.”
Wilkerson’s notice made The Power and the Glory the talk of the town, and suddenly everyone wanted to see Lasky’s daring new film. The clamor was so great that Wilkerson took the unprecedented step of running a follow-up the next day, a sort of review of a review, saying the film had actually “frightened us because of our thoughts that the average audience would not go for it.” The challenging structure would nonetheless make it a critics’ darling, the most written-about movie in a long, long time. “Mr. Tracy was heard to remark in the lobby after the preview that he hoped the next time the picture was shown it would be heard. For his deserving information, he is wrong. Every softly modulated word or whisper WAS heard. Great actors cannot help being personal. The same with genius. Mr. Tracy is both in this picture.”
In the midst of all this, Frank Borzage was preparing a breadline romance at Columbia called A Man’s Castle. He wanted Tracy for the lead but had not parted with Fox on particularly good terms. When the formal request for a loan-out came through, the answer back to Columbia was no. Borzage considered Ralph Bellamy, then under contract to the studio, but according to Hearst columnist Louella Parsons, the one thing he wanted “most in all the world” was Tracy for his picture. Plainly speaking, The Power and the Glory had driven up Fox’s asking price for their hot new actor, and Columbia’s Harry Cohn, at least at first, wasn’t willing to pay it. Wilkerson’s item, invoking the word “genius” as it did, likely made the difference, for when the deal was consummated, Sheehan got $3,000 a week for Tracy’s services and a $3,600 bonus merely for agreeing to the loan.
As soon as Fay Wray knew that Tracy had been set for Man’s Castle, she mounted a campaign to land the role opposite him. “I tried to shape events,” she said, “by talking to the writer Jo Swerling and asking him to please help me get the lead in that film.” Borzage reportedly tested a number of candidates, but the only actresses mentioned publicly for the role were Loretta Young, late of Warner Bros., and Anita Louise. The desirability of the part was only intensified by the buzz surrounding Tracy’s work in The Power and the Glory. Production on Shanghai Madness was, in fact, suspended briefly to make retakes on Lasky’s picture.
At the close of Shanghai Madness, Spence, as was his habit, asked Fay Wray for her photograph, and she signed it “… with my utmost admiration,” the same words Cary Grant had chosen when he signed a photograph of himself to her. “And we both hoped,” she added, “that I would be in Man’s Castle.” The very next night, she was in a nightclub with her husband, the writer John Monk Sanders, and Tracy was there also, standing at the bar, completely and obviously blotto. “I stood about two feet from him and said hello. He looked at me but didn’t know me or, apparently, even see me … I didn’t get the part in A Man’s Castle.”
1 After being purchased by Universal, the film rights to The Last Mile passed to producer Sam Bishoff and his partners, who made the film at California Tiffany Studios. Preston Foster played Killer Mears.
2 This would have been The Painted Woman.
3 Perversely, income taxes came due on March 15, with new percentage rates nearly doubling over the previous tax year. With only $750 a week coming in and virtually nothing in the bank, Tracy learned he owed nearly $9,000 in federal taxes.