James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Tempting fate, Shumlin set the New York opening of the play, still titled All the World Wondered, for February 13, pointing out that the numerals in “1930” added up to thirteen. Tryouts took place at Parsons’ Theatre in Hartford beginning on the sixth, and the cast, to a man, was dubious. “They all felt that the play was a good one, an unusual one,” Shumlin said, “but they were almost all a little doubtful of its chances for success. This was hardly astonishing since it departed to such a great extent from the traditional rules of what a successful play should be.”

  That first performance was a ragged affair, the set being insubstantial compared to what they would have in New York, but Tracy as Mears was letter perfect. “Tracy fought the role through rehearsal—not the doing of it, but the surrendering to it,” Erskine said. “When, however, he finally did surrender to it, it was total, absolute, and frightening. He did not simulate anger and violence, he was anger and violence. In one night—at the out-of-town opening—he changed from a presentable juvenile and a hopeful leading man to an artist, a true artist. He had crossed the threshold into that area where he could submerge himself in a role to the point of eliminating himself completely, to the point where he could no longer tell which was which himself.”

  All the World Wondered brought forth a mixed reaction from the Hartford audience. One man was overheard to say to his wife, “It ain’t so pleasant to see Romeo and Juliet either.” Another, putting a brighter spin on the evening, said, “Well, it’s kinda good to see a show without any wimmen in it, ain’t it?” The notices were similarly conflicted, recognizing the power of the material but wondering just how much the general public could take. “One would call it rank melodrama,” said the reviewer for the Hartford Times, “if it were not so truthful a report of what all the world knows has happened at least three times in our large American prisons within the past six months … Either this show will be a dismal failure or it will pack them in.”

  Erskine and Wexley set about doctoring the play, shaping the dialogue to accommodate the needs and characteristics of its individual actors. (“Some individuals simply cannot say things in a certain way,” Erskine explained, “no matter how splendid an actor or actress they may be. Expressing the same thought in another way is the director’s only alternative.”) About one thing both men were adamant: All six of the condemned men would stay guilty as sin—no cheap points for making one of the characters unjustly convicted. Erskine noted that of the three basic appeals in the theatre—eye, ear, and instinct—the oldest and strongest was instinct, and that his best chance for success would be to strive for “sympathy for a situation rather than for the people who are in that situation.”

  The camaraderie of the cast was infectious, and when the company manager, in his line of duty, went through the group, asking which of them wanted Pullmans on the way back to New York, they decided en masse to take the midnight train instead and sit up in the coach together. “Hearing this,” said Shumlin, “the management (Erskine and myself) gave up our ‘sumptuous’ drawing room and all rode back together, playing poker (which cost me $26) eating sandwiches and in general having one swell time.”

  The following Thursday night, Wexley’s revision, titled The Last Mile, opened at the Sam H. Harris Theatre before an audience that had only the vaguest idea of what they were about to see. At 8:50 p.m. the curtain rose on a stark row of identically configured cells, each but one inhabited by the pale gray figure of a condemned prisoner. Erskine had told the cast he didn’t want anyone wearing makeup, and it was Henry Dreyfus’ lighting scheme that took the place of greasepaint and eyebrow pencil. A slab of concrete had been poured to stabilize the iron bars, and the harsh acoustics lent a cold authenticity to the prison set. A steel door at stage right led to offices and the outside world. A green door at stage left opened into the bright white light of the death chamber.

  Actor Howard Phillips, clutching the bars, spoke first: “Nine o’clock, Walters.”

  “How do you know?” asked James Bell.

  “Just heard the whistle blow.”

  “Funny,” mused Bell. “I didn’t hear it. You’ve got good ears, Three.”

  “Sure I got good ears. Nothin’ to do but listen, is there?”

  “Nothin’ to do but listen,” Bell repeated listlessly. “Well, fellers, this is my last coupla hours …”

  The words took on a forlorn, obligatory cadence, as if governed by a weary piece of machinery. Then George Leach, as the ghostly Werner, broke into a crude verse about the chair they all called the Midnight Special:

  The death house’s where they come and go,

  They linger just a little time,

  Before they give you the electric chair,

  Sentenced for some awful crime…

  With James Bell in Chester Erskine’s staging of The Last Mile. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  And suddenly Tracy, his words erupting like rifle shots, appeared at the bars of his cage: “Shut up, you crazy bastard!”

  Unminding, Leach continued on.

  “Drake!” hollered Tracy. “Why don’t you stop him?”

  “Stop him yerself,” returned the guard, played with surly intransigency by Don Costello. “I like it.”

  “Bitch!”

  And so it went, the panic of impending doom informing every glance, every line, every nuance of posture. Hardened prisoners awkwardly reassured and comforted each other as one among them sat trembling and hopeless, the preparations for execution going forth as mandated by law.

  “No detail is missed,” Burns Mantle, the veteran critic, wrote for the New York Daily News. “For half an hour you sit, tense and miserable, through the visits of the prison priest for the last prayers; the visit of reporters for the last messages of the condemned; the visits of the guards to cut the trousers leg, moisten the hair of the head, and shave the temples of the man to go. You hear the reading of the death warrant and finally you grip the arms of your chair as the march to the chair begins and the mumbling, shaken voice of Richard Walters is heard, assuring his cell mates that he will be game, that he will meet them, he hopes, somewhere, sometime.”

  And through the green door he staggered: “I wish I’m the last one who ever sits in that goddamn bastard chair!” After a moment’s silence, as the other condemned men waited, tightly gripping the bars, there came a deep, reverberating hum from the dynamos, and the lights went dim. Then a pause as they came back up. Howard Phillips as Fred Mayor, Number Three, broke down and sobbed. Then again the whine of the motors and again the lights went low. And then Tracy delivered his curtain line, an echo straight from the Texas death house. “They’re givin’ him the juice again!” he erupted in a burst of animal fury. “What the hell are they tryin’ to do? Cook him??”

  And from that moment forward, Spencer Tracy, with both truth and passion as his twin weapons, dominated the play. Chet Erskine was at the back of the auditorium: “I suddenly saw him, after a hesitant start, realize his power as he felt the audience drawn into the experience of the play and respond to the measure of his skill and the power of his personality. I knew that he had found himself as an actor, and I knew that he knew it.”

  At intermission the audience sat in stunned silence at first, and then the conversation and the milling about was unusually subdued. Some people left the theater and never came back. There was a report that one woman got physically ill. Burns Mantle could remember no other experience “as emotionally upsetting” and fought an impulse to bolt from the room. “Nothing this season,” said Gilbert Gabriel of the American, “has crossed the footlights with such unregenerate savagery. Nothing, I’ll witness, has left its house so shaken and stirred as the first act of The Last Mile did.” The performances in Hartford hadn’t gone like this, and the cast took their cigarette break in utter silence.

  When the curtain rose on the second act, the scene was the same, except that Walters had been replaced by Jackson, the black man, in Cell 7. Two weeks had passed, and now it was time for Mayor to die. The bant
er and the action were familiar from the events of the first act, and then the guard Drake got too close to Mears’ cell while pushing the condemned’s last meal through the aperture. In a flash, Mears had his arm around the guard’s throat, and the other convicts watched motionless, their eyes popping in disbelief, as he choked him into unconsciousness.

  Tracy was so keyed up—as were they all—that, as Herman Shumlin remembered it, he “so far forgot he was only acting that when he grabbed the guard from whom he obtains the keys of his cell and choked him, he actually choked him so relentlessly that the curtain of the third act had to be deferred three minutes before the guard, Don Costello, regained full consciousness and sufficient strength to go on with the play.”

  As Tracy told it, “I was supposed to grab the guard to get the keys to unlock the cell, but that night the keys flew into the footlights. So I choked the guard a little more, grabbed his gun, and said, ‘Now get those keys, you son of a bitch!’ The poor guy crawled down and got the keys and, afterward, when I saw the marks on his neck, I realized I’d really choked him. He was damn near dead.”

  The tension mounted from there. The prisoners rounded up all the guards they could find, making their intentions clear they’d start shooting them—one at a time—if their demands weren’t met.

  Hale Norcross cut his right hand so badly breaking out a pane of glass at the back of a cell that blood streamed down the sleeve of his costume. And when the curtain rang down five minutes early, a series of backstage signals having gone temporarily awry, the cast “almost massacred” the poor stagehand blamed for the mistake. But such was the intensity of the performance that no one in the audience seemed to notice, and when Tracy exulted, “Well men, it’s on! The war’s begun! Shoot, you bastards! Shoot!!” and the curtain again came down—this time legitimately—there was a palpable sense of relief all around.

  The third act built to a nerve-racking barrage of explosions and machine gun fire, Tracy savagely murdering two of the hostages before stepping himself into the line of fire, the searchlight catching him in its glare, the bursts coming as the priest intones Latin and the two remaining convicts stand motionless amid the dust and the fury. “Let ’em wonder out there,” he shouts. “Let all the world wonder. Let the whole goddamn world wonder!” And then slowly, quietly: “I’m goin’ out into the open air …”

  Curtain.

  At first the audience wasn’t sure what to do, and the curtain rose on the first of the calls to only tepid applause, but then it built, quickly, forcefully, as the crowd as one came to the full realization of what it had just witnessed, a numbing, heart-pounding, ear-shattering performance torn straight from the pages of their daily newspapers. By the time Tracy, drenched in perspiration, came to the fore, his arms limp, summoning every ounce of strength he still had within him, they were shouting and stomping and on their feet, and the ovation continued solidly through the cast bow, through the second calls, and kept up until he had taken fourteen curtain calls for himself. And he knew, as did the critics cheering in the stalls, that something extraordinary had just happened, and that he finally had what he had pursued so relentlessly over the past seven years—the lead in a hit play on Broadway.

  Herman Shumlin had spent the entire performance in an advanced state of agitation, fidgeting and nervously walking in and out of the building. When the play was over, someone came running up to him and said that Alexander Woollcott was looking for him backstage. “I told him to say I was gone. I couldn’t think of going backstage.” Minutes later, Woollcott, in his usual opening night costume—dark blue cape and black felt hat, oversized and flopping—found him. “This is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life,” he said, his voice trembling with feeling. “I can’t begin to tell you how important this play is to me. I’m not a critic anymore, so I can’t write a review of it in the newspaper, but if there is anything I can do for you, just tell me.” Shumlin considered the offer, then asked if he might write a short letter that could be used as an advertisement.

  Woollcott’s demonstration was a bellwether, for the notices the next day were universally positive, some extraordinarily so. “A prison play that is so relentless that it lacerates you, so anguishing that it tears your heart with pity, so real that you feel you cannot face another of its terrific brutalities, so grimly compelling that you follow it with a breathless sickened interest, and so superbly done that cheers are constantly rising in your parched throat, arrived last evening at the Harris,” John Mason Brown heralded in the New York Evening Post.

  The Last Mile drew the most consistently favorable notices a nonmusical had gotten in months, and was far and away the critical favorite of the nine Broadway shows that opened that week. “The Last Mile,” wrote Whitney Bolton, “is a play of desperation and fury with the power and sweep to drive the blood from your heart and leave you frozen before the granitic spectacle of the condemned. It is a ferment of steel and stone and the withering frost of terror, a restless working force to fasten the mind and nerves and hold them resolutely.” Brooks Atkinson called it “taut, searing drama with a motive” and Richard Lockridge described it as “grimly effective.”

  To all, the play was memorably acted, and the ensemble cast was praised as widely as the play itself. Robert Littell in the World said that Tracy had made Killer Mears into “a thrillingly savage and icy rebel.” The whole fire and grandeur of the play, as Bolton put it, was encompassed in Tracy’s masterful portrayal of Mears, “a murderer of brutality and an imprudent but iron-hearted man, a man for the gods to wonder upon as he thrashes through the redoubtable, inexorable application of doom.” Richard Dana Skinner, critic for the Commonweal, declared that Tracy had put “the final seal on his qualifications as one of our best and most versatile young actors—a position he has been headed for ever since his outstanding work in that trivial little comedy, The Baby Cyclone.”

  The Harris was practically sold out the following evening, and the gross for the first full week of performances was about $11,000—moderate, given the exceptional reviews, but predictable given the weak matinee trade. Woollcott’s letter arrived, thanking Shumlin for the most satisfactory evening in the theater that any new play had given him that season. “Mr. Erskine’s direction was brilliant in its imaginativeness and in its resourcefulness,” he wrote. “After having been told that all the good actors have deserted to the talkies, it is mystifying to find a cast packed with good ones. Perhaps, after all, it does help to have intelligence, intuition, and energy employed in casting.” The next day, under the headline ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT GOES TO THE PLAY, Shumlin ran it as a two-column ad in every newspaper in the city.

  The drama’s appeal was completely lost on women, and there was talk of eliminating the Wednesday matinee altogether. One critic actually recorded some of the comments he overheard from female audience members as he sat “enthralled by the terrible intensity and realism” of the thing: “For goodness sakes! What did you ever pick out such a thing as this for?” And: “My dear, this is simply terrible. Let’s go someplace and dance.” And: “Why in Heaven’s name did the critics rave about this melodrama?” Playing Killer Mears wouldn’t make a matinee idol of Spencer Tracy, but the name gained new prominence in the minds of theatergoers, and new respect on the parts of producers and critics. By Lent, when business everywhere was typically slow, the box office had leveled off at around $13,000, putting The Last Mile on a par with Street Scene and Death Takes a Holiday.

  For Tracy the timing was right, for unlike Baby Cyclone, which had opened when most movies were still free of voice, The Last Mile came at a time when Broadway was vigorously being scouted for actors, directors, and writers who could manage dialogue. Within a month he had made his screen debut in a lively Vitaphone short called Taxi Talks.

  Tracy had already made two tests, one for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and one for Fox at that company’s Tenth Avenue studio. Nothing had come of either of them. “Nobody ever said a word—they never even called to tell me I was lousy
. In those days they loaded you with makeup for a screen test. I wasn’t exactly pretty anyway, so I probably ended up looking like a gargoyle. They most likely threw the film in the ashcan, but I didn’t care very much because I never thought I’d be a movie actor; I had no ambition in that direction and was perfectly happy on the stage.”

  The Tracys’ movie consumption had leveled off with the coming of talkies. The action pictures Spence liked so much had slowed to a crawl, and Louise genuinely disliked the static musicals that, at least for a while, seemed to be all Hollywood was turning out. “The first sound movie that we saw, we thought that, well, they’ve got to do better than this,” she said. “I can’t remember that we were very impressed.” She wrote her sister after the second audition: “Spencer doesn’t photograph well … we don’t think there is much chance for enough salary to make it worthwhile to leave the stage. So for the present we are just forgetting about the talkies.”

  Neither company came back for a second look when The Last Mile hit big, but Warner Bros. scooped him up as a matter of course. The company was making a point of filming practically anyone they could get in a car to its Vitaphone studio complex, a rambling group of gray stone buildings at Avenue M and East Fourteenth Street in the heart of Flatbush. Since each voice and screen test required a crew of eight and about two hours to make, it made better economic sense to put an actor in a releasable one- or two-reeler and apply the $300-to-$500 cost of a test to the production of a short picture. Initially, Vitaphone subjects drew heavily from the concert stage and vaudeville, committing more than one hundred specialties to film in a single year. By 1928, vaudeville playlets, one-act dramas, and comedies were being integrated into the schedule, and the ever-expanding Vitaphone release index consisted of several hundred individual films.