James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  “Now the other one,” he said.

  “But he can’t—” Louise began, but even as she spoke, and to John’s wide-eyed amazement, he raised the leg with its heavy cast almost straight up.

  “Well,” said the doctor, turning to Louise. “You see what just a few days of immobilization has done for this leg? You fell into good hands in Chicago. I feel sure we can do a lot for this boy.”

  The Fox Film Corporation was an organization in free fall. William Fox, the visionary head of the empire, had been crippled by the stock market meltdown and forced to sell when some $25 million in short-term notes came due. A company called General Theatres Equipment paid $18 million for Fox’s voting shares—a bargain price considering the deal included control of Fox Film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Gaumont British, and 1,500 theaters in the United States and Great Britain. Fox’s cronies, including his two brothers-in-law, were swept from the board, and Fox himself was handed the chairmanship of a newly created “advisory board” that left him with no authority. In charge of the restructured company would be Fox’s former secretary and longtime lieutenant, Winfield R. Sheehan.

  Winnie Sheehan (as he was known to practically everyone) was a police reporter on the New York World when he made the jump to machine politics as secretary to city fire commissioner Rhinelander Waldo. At about the same time, a former cloth sponger named Bill Fox was entering into a partnership with Tammany politicians “Big Tim” and “Little Tim” Sullivan to run the City Theatre on East Fourteenth Street. Fox, of the firm of Fox, Moss & Brill, was struck by the fact that the Sullivans never had any trouble with fire regulations, and the connection he made was to Sheehan. Indeed, when Waldo was moved to the position of police commissioner in 1911, Sheehan followed as general factotum and bagman. He was dragged before a committee of the Board of Aldermen on more than one occasion, but they never could make anything stick until a whorehouse madam testified that she had paid graft to an agent of Sheehan’s at the rate of one hundred dollars a month. Forced to resign, Sheehan went to work for Fox, who understood and valued his connections. In 1916 Sheehan attained the position of vice president and general manager of the newly established Fox Film Corporation.

  “The Sheehan influence on Fox production began there at the beginning with an approach reminiscent of the New York World’s Sunday supplement,” the industry’s first historian, Terry Ramsaye, later wrote. “The pictures were addressed at the masses with alarming and successful precision, from the vampiring roles of Theda Bara and Virginia Pearson to such classics as Bertha the Sewing Machine Girl… That did not, however, represent Mr. Sheehan’s ceiling of taste or capacity. He was affected both by the market and by William Fox, who was able to cry at his own emotions in the making of Over the Hill, his own version of Will Carleton’s sad fifth reader poem of ‘Over the Hill to the Poor House.’ ”

  Blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, Sheehan was a supremely cynical little man, an Irishman and a Roman Catholic in an industry dominated by Jews. Fox was a big thinker when it came to exhibition, a man who built the world’s most lavish movie theaters and filled them with widescreen and sound. And while it was Fox who gave the world Movietone, the sound-on-film miracle that became the industry standard, it was Sheehan who produced the pictures that made Movietone matter. Winnie Sheehan came west in 1926, assuming charge of the Fox plant on Western Avenue in Los Angeles. What Price Glory?, 7th Heaven, Mother Machree, Sunny Side Up, and The Cock-Eyed World were all made on Sheehan’s watch. Raoul Walsh, Frank Borzage, and John Ford prospered at Fox, as did Janet Gaynor, Warner Baxter, Edmund Lowe, and Victor McLaglen. Sheehan put Will Rogers in talkies, made the first western feature with dialogue, and won five of the first twelve Academy Awards.

  Sheehan, who was personally responsible for the company’s European distribution network, often seemed more focused on foreign markets—which accounted for roughly 33 percent of Fox’s revenue—than he was on the domestic market. Distracted, he could find time for no more than a dozen pictures a year and relied on an ever-shifting group of associate producers to take up the slack—men like Ralph Block, Ned Marin, George Middleton, and James Kevin McGuinness, none of whom had the creative chops to make great or even consistently good movies. All were presided over by Sheehan’s superintendent, a tough, humorless character named Sol Wurtzel, who had started with Fox as a stenographer and knew about as well as anyone how to get an incoherent picture shot in twelve days.

  Wurtzel tried all genres but rarely did any well. When a good movie got made at Fox, it was more the result of leaving a director like Ford or Borzage or William K. Howard alone. Sheehan announced forty-eight to fifty-two pictures a season, then left it to Wurtzel to figure out how to deliver on the promise. Sheehan himself inhabited a vast Beverly Hills mansion with sunken gardens and a library ceiling imported from Spain. Though he usually had a half-chewed cigar rolling around in his mouth, his meals were grandly served on golden plates with golden goblets at their side. He had the Irish gift of conviviality, but could also be a ruthless son of a bitch.

  Louise was taken house hunting by Mary Ford. “I was appalled at the rents,” she said, “especially in Beverly Hills. Mary said I now was connected with an industry which, in quite a measure, had been responsible for those rents, and that I must take the bad with the good. I was beginning to realize that the salary which had looked so big, unless we were careful, probably would leave a smaller net income than the one Spencer had been drawing in New York on the stage.” The places in Louise’s price range were all dreary affairs, obvious rentals, dark inside with cheap oriental rugs cast about. On the second day she took a six-month lease on a plain-looking Spanish stucco on a hill just east of the UCLA campus. It had the requisite red tile roof, a nice rose garden, and a little yard in which Johnny’s recovery could take place.

  It was wonderful to spread out over a house and a yard again; the weather was warm and sunny and the rains came only at night. There was a wicker chaise longue in the den, and every day it was taken outside. John’s nurse would carry him downstairs around ten and he would lie outside, except for lunch, until late afternoon. Mother Tracy arrived with her own nurse in tow, determined not to like anything about California. The roses had none of the size and color of Eastern roses, the fruits and vegetables were flavorless, the weather was downright monotonous. Spence cajoled and charmed her, as he had always been able to do in the past, and she settled in for a stay that would come to be permanent.

  Johnny’s treatments consisted of putting him in a tub of hot salt water—where he was afraid at first he was going to drown—and giving him foot and leg exercises, all followed by a gentle massage. By the first of the year he was slowly improving, gaining weight and tanning just like his father. Dr. Wilson consented to having his lessons resumed, and a teacher from the Los Angeles School for the Deaf came for half an hour each day after school. Louise wasn’t satisfied with the arrangement—the late hour and John’s obvious fatigue—but over the short term it was the best option available.

  Spence drove to the studio on January 16, 1931, and balked at signing the fourteen-page contract Leo Morrison had negotiated. He wanted the right to quit and return to the stage at the end of the first or second year, and he believed he was entitled to a share of any profit the studio made on a loan-out. Wurtzel held firm. “The remarkable thing about Wurtzel,” said the playwright S. N. Behrman, “was his manner of speech, his voice. It had a curious, granulated quality, like an instrument for crushing pebbles. Remarks erupted from him; there was always a fascinating absence of preamble.”

  With chronic constipation and a facial tic that curled his mouth into a nervous smile, Wurtzel appeared to be both pained and gloating at having his quarry over a barrel. Tracy was certainly trapped, having already accepted $4,500 in salary. In the presence of one of the studio lawyers, whose name also happened to be Tracy, he signed the document, sourly and without ceremony, submitting himself to the meat grinder that was the Fox Film production line. He then left for Palm Sprin
gs to study the script to his first picture, Sky Line, on which filming was set to commence in ten days.

  The author of Sky Line was also its director, a former illustrator and sports cartoonist named Rowland Brown. Brown had originally come to Fox as a day laborer, a hefty, hard-drinking Irishman who would work his way up through the ranks. He turned to screenwriting under the auspices of the late Kenneth Hawks, went to Universal for a short while, then sold a grim mob story, “A Handful of Clouds,” to Warner Bros.1 In collaboration with Courtenay Terrett, a star reporter and author of the racketeering exposé Only Saps Work, Brown produced for Sheehan an original screenplay that was a model of economy, an entry for Fox in the gangster sweepstakes at a time when Little Caesar was breaking attendance records in New York.

  “Terrett knew well the milieu he described,” Brown’s brother, Sam, told Philippe Garnier, “but the matter of writing scenarios he left to Rowland.” Brown had a knack for illuminating character through the sparest of dialogue, and the script gave the actors room to work. Its quality delighted Tracy, its bitter sarcasms unique in a medium still struggling to find its voice. Brown proved to be as good a director as he was a writer, moving quickly between setups, eschewing coverage and virtually cutting in the camera. “I had worked for Fox some years,” Sam Brown said, “thus it was I who chose his team: Joseph August as cameraman, Harold Schuster, Murnau’s editor on Sunrise. Even the script girl was the best in the studio; later she became a script writer for [Darryl F.] Zanuck. Happily, he was surrounded, because Rowland shot very little film … The heads at Fox when they saw the rushes went crazy. Rowland hadn’t covered himself at all. If he had Tom Mix’s editor, for example, he would not have known what to do with it. But Schuster knew.”

  The process of making the film was less chaotic than for Up the River, Brown being eager to bring the picture in not only on time but substantially under budget. Tracy was equally anxious to do well, giving “Bugs” Raymond a sort of Cohanesque charm that ran counter to the shakedowns and murders he ordered. What emerged was the most engaging racketeer the talkies had yet produced, an affable crook with a glint of bedbug insanity in his eyes, one who aspired to legitimacy and then let it be his undoing.

  With his illustrator’s sensibilities, Brown surrounded Tracy with an unusual group of supporting players, many picked as much for their faces as for their acting abilities. Typical was dancer George Raft, whom Brown had seen in vaudeville and who was dining with friends one evening at the Brown Derby when the director came over, introduced himself, and offered him a test. Raft, as it turned out, wasn’t good at delivering dialogue, but his pose as a ferret-faced hood was priceless. His dark hair slicked back with pomade, he made an ominous counterpoint to Tracy’s genial, offhanded mick. Making liberal use of locations in and around Los Angeles, Brown brought the film, retitled Quick Millions, in for a negative cost of $171,000. Everyone at Fox was thrilled with the result, and Sheehan awarded Brown a $1,000 bonus. “All the directors at the studio watched it,” Sam Brown remembered, “even Mr. Ford.”

  Rowland Brown had brought forth a new kind of gangster picture, low-key and artfully composed and less nerve-rattling than the brassy Warner fare. Both he and Tracy were part of a new wave in Hollywood, doing fresh things with old ideas, but the public, with its collective mind on its pocketbook, wasn’t necessarily paying attention. Established stars were fading—John Gilbert, Ramon Navarro, Norma Talmadge, Harry Langdon—yet new ones were conspicuously slow in taking their place. And there was always the shared feeling among Irish Catholics that no matter how well something was going, it could all collapse without warning.

  Around the house, Spence took to using the phrase “Now when the bubble bursts …” to preface any discussions of the future, as if it were a foregone conclusion. In shooting an early scene, he and Raft found themselves seated together at a testimonial dinner for Bugs’ associate, the vicious “Nails” Markey. Tracy recognized one of the diners, a dress extra, as King Baggott, one of the first genuine stars of the movies, an action hero back when Tracy was still lighting lamps in Bay View. “Look at that man,” he whispered to Raft. “Once a great star and now an extra for a few bucks a day when he can get the work. That could happen to me. That’s what really scares me.”

  The humble beginnings of Daniel J. “Bugs” Raymond in the opening minutes of Quick Millions. (SUSIE TRACY)

  With all the gladhanding and backslapping attendant on the completion of Quick Millions, it came as a letdown that Tracy’s next assignment was a talking remake of Six Cylinder Love. William Anthony McGuire’s hit comedy was in its seventh month at the Harris Theatre the night Tracy got his first look at Manhattan, and Fox had filmed it the following year with members of the original Broadway cast reprising their stage roles. The material hadn’t aged well, and at a time when American picturegoers were more concerned about feeding and clothing their families than affording an expensive car, the choice showed just how desperately out of touch studio management was with its intended audience. Sheehan then compounded the goof by putting Lorin Raker, another New York import, in the male lead. Slight and doll-like, Raker was too old to be playing a newlywed opposite Sidney Fox, nearly twenty years his junior, and lacked both the name and the presence of a leading man.

  With Raker topping the cast, Tracy found himself relegated to the peripheral part of Donroy, the slick salesman who first sells Gilbert and Marilyn Sterling their neighbors’ car, then takes it off their hands at the end of the film when he peddles it to the cash-rich janitor, a bootlegger. Not only was the material stale, but the director was Thornton Freeland, a man who had been around the business a long while, but usually as someone’s assistant. Freeland displayed a production manager’s flair for camera, his principal credit being the stagebound musical Whoopie (in which all the directorial highlights were the work of dance director Busby Berkeley). Having worked with John Ford and Rowland Brown on his first two pictures, Tracy thought Freeland inept and did nothing the director told him to do without arguing bitterly about it. The film took twenty-two days to make, unconscionable given the result.

  The virtue of Six Cylinder Love was that Tracy himself was required for relatively little of it. He would come home, for he was scarcely ten minutes from the studio, slip quietly into the house, change his clothes and be gone again before Louise had a chance to notice. One day she saw him in a pair of well-worn trousers, and a passing remark drew a vague, evasive answer. The more curious she got, the more mysterious he got. Then he’d joke about it, bringing the subject up himself at dinner, but never to the point of explaining much of anything. Then one Sunday, as he and Louise were motoring out toward the ocean along Sunset Boulevard, he slowed and pointed out a sign:

  HOTTENTOT RIDING ACADEMY

  HORSES 75 CENTS PER HOUR

  “That’s it,” he said.

  “That’s what?”

  “That’s where I’ve been coming.”

  “You mean you’ve been riding?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Riding. Want to go over and see the horses? Midnight, coal black, that’s the one I ride.”

  He inched the car down a narrow ravine to where there was a rundown barn and some stables and found Midnight. Louise, who had practically grown up on horses, was enchanted. “But you’ve never been on a horse in your life before,” she said. “How in the world did you happen to start?”

  “I rode once in Silvermine last fall. Remember? I just thought maybe I’d like it.”

  “But I thought you said you were scared to death.”

  “Well, I was … but I still think maybe I’d like it.”

  Louise devoutly hoped that he would. “He never had cared for any sport that I knew of since he was a boy and liked to box (and he boxed very well I have been told). Ever since I had known him, he had taken no exercise except a little walking by fits and starts, and he had no hobbies. His entire interest, and most of his friends, had been in the theatre. This opened up new vistas.”

  They rode toge
ther at the Hottentot a few times, walking and trotting slowly along a little trail that led from the stables through a narrow ravine back of the hills that bordered the boulevard. Then they ran into John Cromwell, who was directing features for Paramount. Somehow the subject got around to horses and riding, and Spence shyly told him what he had been doing.

  “Start polo,” Cromwell urged. “It’s a great way to learn to ride. Go out to Snowy Baker at Riviera. He’ll teach you. It’s wonderful! Most thrilling thing in the world!”

  The third film on Tracy’s schedule was another comedy, a talking remake of a Fox silent called A Girl in Every Port. Sheehan was following through on a threat to make Tracy and Warren Hymer into the new Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen, the team that had played Quirt and Flagg in the popular comedies that followed the colossal success of What Price Glory? Tracy liked Hymer, a bright guy with an impressive pedigree, but he was strictly a one-note actor, all bluster and business with no shading of any sort. Six years younger than Tracy, Hymer was the son of playwright John B. Hymer and actress Elsie Kent. Educated at Yale, he was signed by Fox in 1929 and settled into a succession of dummy roles, instantly typed as a talkative moron. Hymer responded to his predicament in time-honored fashion, drinking himself into belligerence both off the set and on. “Oh, God,” said John Ford, “what a time I had with him. I threw him into a sanatorium and hospitals …”

  Goldie, as the film came to be known, seemed designed to showcase the new Fox lot in Beverly Hills, 108 acres of prime California real estate known officially as Movietone City. The story took Tracy and Hymer through a succession of international locales, Russia to Venice to Greece to Rio and finally to a carnival in Calais, where they discover the title character diving into a tub of water from a height of two hundred feet. The principal girl in a picture full of them was Jean Harlow, who was being rented to Fox at the rate of $1,250 a week by producer Howard Hughes. Just twenty, Harlow had risen from extra work and bit parts to the female lead in Hughes’ $4 million air spectacle Hell’s Angels. Having been kept under wraps for nearly a year, Harlow now had three pictures in the can, and their collective impact would make her a star. Her delivery tended to be wooden—more so after speech lessons—but her milky white complexion and platinum hair made the eye go straight to her in any shot she was in. She played tarts, gangsters’ molls, and the like, and the script for Goldie broke questionable ground when the word “tramp” was applied to her character on four separate occasions. She was sweet-natured, though, earnest and professional, and had a photographic memory to rival Tracy’s own. When director Ben Stoloff had to call for another take, it was generally because she mispronounced a word or moved incorrectly, never because she went up.