Harris had planned to move the company to Philadelphia, but a musicians’ strike intervened and the play landed instead in Brooklyn. Stopping at the Lambs, Tracy was asked by Ring Lardner, the renowned author of Alibi Ike and Haircut, what he was doing. “I told him,” said Tracy, “I was going to Brooklyn with Dread and he said, ‘Is there any other way?’ ”
Lardner’s disdain notwithstanding, Dread managed to fill the 1,700-seat Majestic on a Monday night. “In the parlance of the stage,” said the notice in the Brooklyn Standard Union, “overplaying a part means ‘taking it big,’ mostly concerned where grief and semi-madness are the expressive emotions. Dread calls for both emotions in a large measure. Spencer Tracy and Miss Madge Evans play the two important characters with proper reserve. Others might have ‘taken it big’ and ruined what is now a most thrilling piece of drama … The audience called for ten final curtains, which speaks for itself.”
The strong responses in both Washington and Brooklyn would have assured a place for Dread on Broadway but for the fact that the play opened in Brooklyn on October 28, 1929. The next day—October 29—would go down in history as Black Tuesday, the day when huge blocks of stock were thrown on the plummeting market, and paper millionaires were rendered penniless in the space of a few hours. Sam Harris, his funding uncertain, sent both Dread and the promising Swan Song (by the surefire team of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur) to the storehouse, hinting the Davis play “may be rewritten” but ultimately allowing only one Broadway production to go forth under his management in the year following the crash. The Brooklyn performance of Dread on the night of November 2 was the last ever given anywhere. Louise disliked the play, its obvious hokum, and thought it deserved to close, but Spence was bitterly disappointed and always carried the lingering suspicion it would have made him a star. In May 1940 he lamented its disappearance to Halsey Raines of the New York Herald Tribune, saying that the property he was “most enthusiastic” about, the one he was sure would have been “a box office sensation” had it come to Broadway, was an obscure but singularly nerve-racking play called Dread.
“Now we sometimes laugh about Dread,” Louise later wrote, “and Spencer will relate with great gusto how the family nearly was broken up, of how his mother demanded that he leave the stage and get a job whereby he could be sure of supporting his wife and child, and how his wife said if he left the stage she would leave him. But at that time it was not so funny.” In the wake of the stock market crash, Mother Tracy took note of the fact that her son had worked eight jobs in the fifteen months since the close of The Baby Cyclone. An actor wasn’t paid for up to five weeks of rehearsal, and during the first two weeks of performance a show could close without any notice, making it very possible to earn just two weeks’ salary for six or seven weeks’ work. There was also the traveling, and even among the luckiest of actors there were periods before and after when no money at all was coming in. “Even to approximate foresight to any degree,” Louise said, “an actor should divide his weekly salary into tenths, living on one-tenth and banking the other nine to fortify those unproductive ones.”
When playing, Spence was earning as much as $400 a week, but with layoffs and rehearsals factored in, his earnings came closer to $150 a week. So when Mother Tracy raised the subject as forcefully as she could, the best answer her son could give her was “Louise said she’d leave me if I quit the theatre.” Late in life, Louise wasn’t so sure she had ever put it exactly that way. “I don’t remember saying quite that,” she said, “but I might have, because I felt that Spence must do the thing he could do so well.” In 1942 Pat O’Brien recalled witnessing the exchange, which was sparked, as he remembered it, by his suggestion, during a particularly lean period, that both he and Spence call it quits and go back home to Milwaukee and settle down.
Louise flamed. She was always a good actress, but she never put as much emotion into any role as she did in her reply to my suggestion. “No!” she blazed to Spence, ignoring me. “If you give up the theatre I’ll leave you. You’re not a good actor, you’re a great actor! I don’t mind going hungry. I don’t mind doing our laundry. I don’t mind any sacrifice because you have something not one actor in ten-thousand has, and the day will come when you’ll be acclaimed the finest actor on the stage! I’m not only willing but eager to do anything I can to help you toward that day. But DON’T QUIT. You CAN’T.” It isn’t often a man finds someone with that much confidence in him.
After the folding of Dread, Tracy was out of work a full three weeks before he picked up a job replacing Henry Hull in a Jazz Age tragedy titled Veneer. Hull, the nominal star, had decided to leave the show in favor of A. A. Milne’s new comedy Michael and Mary; Tracy stepped into the role of a smooth-talking braggart with less than a week’s rehearsal. Nobody expected it to last very long, but a deal was afoot for the Shuberts to buy in and take the show to Chicago, where fresh casting, slick staging, and a new title might possibly save it. Louise, who read all of Spence’s plays, thought Veneer “an unpleasant play, though very moving at times.” It gave Tracy a chance to wear—and pay for—the expensive wardrobe he had bought for Dread. It was a star part, and for the first time in New York his name would appear in lights on a theater marquee. Most important, it was a job at a time when nearly a third of all the theaters on Broadway were dark, and the new slogan along the big street was “Got change for a match?”
Hull played his final performance on Saturday, November 30, and Tracy stepped into the role of Charlie Riggs two days later. He played a week, then followed the show into an Equity-approved layoff, the Shuberts guaranteeing salaries while they moved the physical production to Chicago’s Garrick Theatre. It opened there on December 20 under the title Blue Heaven and was largely savaged by the critics.
Back in New York, things were particularly grim, with nearly a score of houses lacking legitimate plays. The few genuine hits—Strictly Dishonorable, June Moon, It’s a Wise Child, Berkeley Square—were gobbling up much of the available business, and the holiday spirit was so lacking along the street that the “merchandise” men who supplied wet goods to the Times Square theater district were forced to accept installment payments to move inventory. That Tracy was able to get himself cast in a new play titled All the World Wondered was something of a miracle. The play wasn’t promising—an all-male cast in a decidedly raw portrait of life on death row. They played three days in Hartford, where the audiences were, in Tracy’s words, “as cold as the Yukon.” He wasn’t in a particularly hopeful mood when his pals at the Lambs next saw him, glum and sagging. “He was a pretty disconsolate guy,” Pat O’Brien remembered. They were all sitting at the round table in the grill.
“Boys, I’m in one hell of a flop!” Tracy announced to the group. “I’d like to pull out, but I have a run-of-the-play contract.”
“What do you mean pull out?” someone said. “Stay with it.”
“It’s to have a week of doctoring,” Tracy told them, “and then open on Tuesday.”
“Maybe you’ll get a break,” another suggested helpfully, “and the theater will burn down.”
* * *
1 Despite all the unpleasantness with Cromwell, Tracy made the right decision in going with Cohan. The Cromwell show, What the Doctor Ordered, would have paid less and lasted just twenty performances.
2 Cohan’s mother, Helen Costigan “Nellie” Cohan, died the following day—August 26, 1928.
CHAPTER 6
The Last Mile
* * *
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 sto
p 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 windo
w 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.”
James Curtis Page 17