James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  With Claire Luce, Humphrey Bogart, and Warren Hymer in Up the River (1930). (SUSIE TRACY)

  Tracy made his last shot on Sunday, August 17, at around five in the afternoon, and was on a train bound for New York by eight that same evening. Before he left, the terms of a new contract were discussed, but he told Sol Wurtzel, the superintendent of production under Winfield Sheehan, he had given his word he’d return to The Last Mile and was honor-bound to do so. Louise and Johnny went back to San Diego for a few days and then left for home. In Chicago, they stopped to see Mother Tracy, who was still in the hospital. While there, Johnny showed signs of fatigue and nausea and was registering a slight fever. The symptoms would fade and then return, and just before it was time to leave, they worsened.

  Louise called the general practitioner who was overseeing Carrie’s recovery, but it never occurred to her to call the orthopedist who was in charge of her broken back. The doctor came to the hotel, gave the child a cursory examination, and said he thought that Johnny was probably just upset from all the travel and the change in his eating habits, and that he didn’t think it was anything serious or a reason to delay the rest of their trip. Despite his assurances, Louise felt a certain undercurrent of dread: “I knew I must get home as quickly as possible before whatever I felt was going to happen did so.” That night on the train, she slept in the berth with her son, and his body felt very hot. He tossed relentlessly, moaning in his sleep, and occasionally he would cry out sharply, partially awaken, and then draw his legs up and point to them. And Louise, by that point, knew exactly what was happening.

  * * *

  1 Sam Golden was the owner of the Artcraft Litho and Printing Company, which produced most of the programs and window cards seen on Broadway.

  2 The rare exception to the rule was Journey’s End, a British war drama with an all-male cast that was a hit in New York and Chicago as well as in London.

  3 The fact that Sheehan was also negotiating a new two-year contract with Ford couldn’t have hurt.

  4 Due to a delay in starting Up the River, Bogart was put into A Devil With Women and ended up shooting both films simultaneously. The Ford picture was released on October 12, 1930, making it Bogart’s feature debut. A Devil With Women was released a month later.

  5 Leslie died on July 15, 1930. He was twenty-two years old.

  6 Fortunately, Tracy tanned well in the California sun. According to author and makeup artist Michael Blake, he would have needed a good, even color to work without makeup. “Perhaps some base color under the eyes to ‘even him out’ as we put it.” Blake is certain he would have needed powder. “No doubt the oils in his skin would make him appear ‘shiny’ under the lights, and he would need powder to dull the shine down or he’d be too bright under the lights.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Quick Millions

  * * *

  As planned, Spencer Tracy rejoined The Last Mile on September 1, 1930—in New York, however, not Chicago, Herman Shumlin having extended the Broadway run on the promise of Tracy’s return. Curiously, his absence hadn’t made much of a difference in terms of ticket sales, and Wexley, the author, actually liked Thomas Mitchell’s work as Mears better than Tracy’s—though his was certainly a minority report. (“Poor Tommy,” said Chester Erskine, “he just couldn’t get into that part.”) Mitchell played the role five weeks, then went on one night stewed to the gills, heaving and snorting and stumbling into the footlights. Erskine replaced him with Allen Jenkins, Mitchell’s understudy, and it was Jenkins who played the role—superbly, as one cast member recalled—until his predecessor had completed Up the River.

  Tracy’s return to New York coincided neatly with the release of The Hard Guy, which showed up on a bill at the Strand and drew favorable comment from Variety. (“Well acted and directed, short is very worthwhile subject for any house.”) He wired Chicago:

  THOUGHT OF DEAR DAD TONIGHT AND THE THRILL HE WOULD HAVE HAD COULD HE HAVE WALKED UP BROADWAY WITH ME TONIGHT AND IN BLAZING LIGHTS ON GREAT BROADWAY ASTOR STRAND THEATRE SEEN “SPENCER TRACY IN VITAPHONE PRODUCTION.”

  In Los Angeles, Jack Gardner, the Fox casting director, was penciling out the best offer he could make on a fifty-two-week contract. Sol Wurtzel had offered $500 a week to start, but Tracy was noncommittal, citing his obligation to Shumlin and his need to get back to New York. It wasn’t just a ploy; Tracy was genuinely conflicted about taking the Fox offer. Louise disliked movie work and thought the only real pleasure an actor had was in developing a part over a number of performances, each audience bringing something new to the experience. Spence had spent nearly a decade building up to the point where he could command serious critical and commercial attention, and now he was being asked to chuck it all for the gossamer of a Hollywood contract.

  Chuck Sligh was in town, and Spence raised the subject with him.

  We were walking down Park or Fifth Avenue one day. He was telling me about it. “I’ve got this offer,” he said. “I never liked the thought of going in the movies. You’ve got a line on the floor, you can’t go past it, you’ve got to stand that way and look this way.”

  “Gee, I don’t think I’d like that.”

  He said, “They’re offering me $500 a week. God, I don’t know. I just don’t know what to do.”

  I said, “Why don’t you tell them [that] if they’ll pay you a thousand dollars a week, you’ll take it and give it a try and see how you like it?”

  “Well, I think maybe I’ll do that.”

  Gardner’s offer, the best he could do, was $750 a week for the first year and $1,000 a week for the second, graduating to $2,500 a week in the fifth year of the contract. A night letter went out on September 4, 1930:

  FORWARDING YOU TODAY LETTER EXERCISING OPTION IN YOUR CONTRACT LETTER GIVES FULL DETAILS STOP VERY HAPPY TO HAVE YOU WITH US

  KINDEST REGARDS SOL M WURTZEL

  Louise arrived back in New York the following morning. Johnny, by then, was running a fever and showing signs of stiffness as well as severe muscle pain. Over the next few days, a total of six doctors saw him, including three pediatricians who agreed he was showing the classic symptoms of spinal meningitis. Two different neurologists attempted spinal punctures, neither with the benefit of anesthetic. Johnny lost consciousness one afternoon, his face assuming a strange pinched look and his body stiffening slightly but unmistakably, his head pulling backward as if suddenly possessed. A third neurologist put him in the hospital—not St. Luke’s where he had been before but a newer, fancier place—and a furor was sparked when the doctor wrote on the admitting card “Poliomyelitis.”

  Spence and Louise had to don aprons to see him—large coveralls of stiff white linen—and scrub up afterward, turning the taps on and off with their elbows. Nothing could be done for him, they were told. The disease would have to run its course, then either Johnny would get better or he wouldn’t. Tracy endured the nightmare of The Last Mile, channeling his confusion and fury into a performance actor Dore Schary remembered as both “magnificent and terrifying.” What no one could possibly have known was the emotional price he paid, conjuring the reality of Killer Mears while grappling with the knowledge that his child was hovering near death in a crosstown hospital room, his chances for part of one week, as cousin Frank Tracy recounted, “about zilch.”

  By the twelfth they knew that Johnny would live, but beyond that there were no assurances. The level of paralysis would take months to know, perhaps even years, and the care he would need, how much and for how long, was unknowable as well. All that was certain was that the cost would be stratospheric. Tracy went to the Lambs Club that day and wrote out a long-delayed reply to Sol Wurtzel:

  My Dear Mr. Wurtzel:

  Enclosed please find signed letter.

  I am very happy that you should want me to return and will do my best to warrant your confidence.

  We are still doing fair business here. Looks like perhaps four or five more weeks and then Chicago. I will keep you informed at all times.

&nb
sp; Hope “Up the River” proves a big hit.

  My thanks and sincere regards. Spencer T.

  A few days later, Johnny was discharged from the hospital as “cured,” but the use of that word became a cruel hoax when he was urged by a nurse to try and stand on his own and had to pull himself around on the floor. “Mrs. Tracy,” one of the doctors said to Louise, “you must think we doctors are a pack of fools. John is getting well, but certainly not because of anything we have done.” When they brought Johnny home, the two doctors on the case assured Louise that they did not believe he had any paralysis at all, despite the fact that he could move only one leg slightly and the other almost not at all. All he needed was rest, she was told—rest and sunshine.

  “For two weeks he stayed in bed and got the rest,” Louise said, “but all the sunshine he could get in the apartment was in the form of viosterol capsules. At the end of two weeks, he seemed no better. He had no appetite, was listless and uninterested. He would lie hour after hour, moving only his eyes as they followed his [toy] autos whizzing down the ironing board stretched from bed to floor. The family living below us deserved a medal for their uncomplaining patience.”

  They decided the best medicine for Johnny would indeed be rest and sunshine, and with the doctor’s approval they stretched him out on pillows and blankets on the back seat of the car and took off for Silvermine, in Connecticut, where they would have a rustic inn pretty much to themselves. The weather was warm and John began to grow stronger, his left leg gradually improving. Spence came out on Sundays and Mondays and ofttimes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, days when he had no matinees to play. He and Louise spent time visiting some of the local kennels—everyone seemed to own at least one dog—and although there were a number of very sound reasons why they shouldn’t want the responsibility of keeping one in the city, he suddenly said one day, “I think John should have a dog—now.”

  And so they got a dog, a six-month-old Irish setter. Louise got the inn’s permission to let him sleep in her room on the promise that she would pay for any damage. They named the dog Pat—an easy word for John to say.

  Maurine Watkins saw so little of her original story that she proposed splitting the writing credit for Up the River with Willie Collier and Jack Ford. Both executed releases on their material, but it was Watkins who bore the brunt of Winfield Sheehan’s disappointment when he saw how his gritty prison yarn had ripened into low comedy. “Sheehan refused to go to the preview,” Ford recalled, “but just at that time all the exhibitors were out here for one of their meetings, and they all went to see it, and they fell out of their chairs. One guy actually did fall out of his chair—they had to bring him to. A very funny picture—for those days. I kept ducking the woman who wrote the original script, but she went to another studio on the success of Up the River and got three times her salary per script.”

  Up the River opened at New York’s Roxy Theatre on October 18, 1930, and proved “violently funny” to the thousands who filled the auditorium that first afternoon. Regina Crewe of the American celebrated the film’s absurdist aspects as if they came straight from the Marx Brothers: “Can you imagine the roars of laughter greeting the scene where the ‘important guy’ of the underworld arrives to do his bit and is welcomed by the prison band and as big a turnout as an oceanic flier gets at City Hall? Or where the manager of the baseball team bewails the fact that he has lost the jail series by having a pitcher electrocuted just before the final game? Or that sequence in which the convicts, with bared heads and reverential attitudes, sing the ‘varsity song’ of their alma mater?”

  The picture was a surprise hit, opening as it did between two much fancier Fox productions, the $2 million widescreen epic The Big Trail and the futuristic musical Just Imagine. Louise thought the film terrifically funny—particularly a safecracking scene with Warren Hymer loafing and listening to the radio while Tracy did the dirty work—but Spence’s reaction was sharper, more critical, and he couldn’t quite fall into the lighthearted mood of the crowd. “I thought I was the worst actor I had ever seen on the screen,” he later said of the experience. “I was surprised that Ford and the Fox officials didn’t remake the picture.”

  The Last Mile ended its New York run after thirty-six weeks, and Tracy left for Chicago on November 1. Johnny’s left leg had improved steadily—he could now sit on the floor and hitch himself along—and he was back to taking short lessons at home from one of his teachers at the Wright Oral School. Both Spence and Louise thought the play would have a decent run at Chicago’s Harris Theatre, and that there would be plenty of time to pack before the move to Los Angeles. “We decided to store our furniture until we came back,” Louise said. “That we might not come back, except on trips, I do not think ever occurred to either of us.”

  The Last Mile got off to a slow start in Chicago, and the company manager posted a closing notice the week of November 10. Then there was an urgent message from Fox asking Spence to come immediately, so he wired Louise and asked if she could meet him in Chicago that following week.

  The prospect [Louise wrote] of sorting our various possessions, packing those we might need for the next six months or year, arranging for their shipping, and that of the Ford roadster we had bought the preceding spring, as well as the storing of the furniture, all within a week, and transporting an invalid child who could not even stand, as well as a still unbroken Irish Setter puppy across the continent, with an overnight stop in Chicago, and, at the end of the trip, finding a place to live, more doctors, and a teacher for John, well might have filled me with dismay. But, except for a faint picture of myself, telegram in hand, wondering why it was men always happened to be someplace else when there was any moving, and thinking this would be the scramble to end all scrambles, I remember no particular emotion. I knew we would make it somehow. We always did.

  In Chicago the closing notice stayed up all of forty minutes, then it was removed on orders from New York. Two days later, a letter from Fox set Tracy’s start date at December 1, promising twenty weeks at $750 a week and commencing with a six-week layoff period. He would be expected to report to work in Los Angeles on January 11, 1931. With the play set to move from the Harris to the smaller Princess, he started dickering with both Shumlin and Equity to get out of town on a two-week notice.

  When Johnny’s doctor heard they were leaving New York, he told Louise he would like an orthopedist to examine the child and it was arranged. After he had carried the boy from the waiting room into his office, the orthopedist asked Louise what she thought the trouble was. She said, “Polio.”

  He stared at her in disbelief. “Polio!” he exclaimed. “How long ago?”

  “Three months.”

  “And you mean nothing has been done for him up to now?”

  She told him her story, ending with the news that they would be leaving for California in a few days. He told her he could do nothing in three days, and that he should have seen the boy when the attack first occurred. He wrote down the name of a doctor in Los Angeles. “He is one of the two finest men on the coast, and, I believe, the finest. Don’t waste a moment after you reach there before making an appointment. Tell whomever you talk to in his office that it is urgent.” The man whose name he wrote on the card was Dr. John C. Wilson, the chief of the orthopedic department at Children’s Hospital.

  Mother Tracy was only told of her grandson’s illness the day before he was due to arrive from New York. In the aftermath of her accident, Carrie had suffered a complete nervous collapse and it was feared the shock of the news might be too great for her. Her orthopedist, Dr. Charles Pease, was present when Spencer broke the news, and he asked if he might drop around and see John the following day. When he did, he confirmed the other doctor’s endorsement of Dr. Wilson, but then he went a step further.

  “Every day is precious,” he said. “It will be another three or four days at least before anything can be done in Los Angeles. If you will stay over one more day here, and allow me to, I will take him to the Children
’s Memorial Hospital and put a cast on his leg. That, at the moment, is the most important thing to be done.”

  As the Tracys learned, the affected muscles should have been put in a cast to enforce complete rest immediately after the attack. The fact that Johnny had instead been encouraged to work the muscles had undoubtedly resulted in permanent damage, though it was impossible to say exactly how much. The next day, the boy’s leg was encased in plaster from hip to toe. Then Louise mentioned a persistent weakness in John’s back, and Dr. Pease ordered some x-rays of the spine. After they had returned to the hotel, the doctor called and said he would like to make a back cast, too, a removable one. It wouldn’t delay their departure; he’d come to the hotel and do the job right there. So that evening, with Louise assisting, he made a half cast for Johnny’s back that reached from his shoulder to his hips and around under his arms.

  They left Chicago in the midst of a blinding snowstorm and were met in California by Leo Morrison, who had two taxis on hold and promptly hailed a third when he took in the size and breadth of the party. He knew a boarding kennel where they could leave the dog, essentially taking charge of everything. “I feel sure,” said Louise, “I must have drawn a long sigh of relief as I sank onto the brown leather seat of the cab, with Pat—no longer carsick—sitting quietly at my feet. We were there! That mad ten days were over and we were there. I could have said home, but that would not have occurred to me.”

  When they saw Dr. Wilson, he listened to a history of the case and then walked over to the table on which John was lying and told him to raise his leg—his good one. John did so and moved it easily from side to side.