Spence had two pictures in the queue himself, and the similar circumstances forged a bond between them. Ten days into production on Goldie, Quick Millions opened at the Roxy in New York while Universal’s Iron Man, a fight drama from the author of Little Caesar, debuted at the Globe with Harlow in the female lead opposite Lew Ayres. The Fox publicity people gave Tracy every support, billing his name above the title in ads that bore the headline “A New Star Shines.” The picture garnered generally favorable reviews from a fraternity clearly fed up with racketeer stories, and Tracy’s personal notices were uniformly fine. (“Mr. Tracy’s performance is forceful and he succeeds in impressing one with his characterization,” wrote Mordaunt Hall. “Through his gait and the angle at which he wears his hat, the conception of the truck driver is always in evidence, despite his expensive clothes.”) Yet the overnight figures were disappointing.
Harlow’s picture did better at the much smaller Globe, where fight and gang subjects often found a warm reception. Filling the 5,886-seat Roxy was a terrific burden to place on a film as modest as Quick Millions. Tracy knew it wasn’t the breakout hit he had hoped it would be, and no one had to tell him Six Cylinder Love would be a stiff. Both Sheehan and Wurtzel cooled, and the film wound up the week with a gate of $62,000—brutally bad for the world’s largest movie theater. Then temperatures broke and Warners’ Public Enemy, featuring Harlow and an equally unknown James Cagney in the leads, moved into the New York Strand. Fueled by a predominantly male audience that liked its gangster pictures loud and violent, Public Enemy took in about as much money as Quick Millions in a theater less than half the size of the plateresque Roxy. With two successful movies playing simultaneously on Broadway, Harlow was suddenly big news, and M-G-M’s Secret Six made her even bigger news when it was released nationally on April 25. Goldie was completed a week later—May 2, 1931—and Harlow was rushed east for a week of appearances at Chicago’s Oriental Theatre.
Jean Harlow’s participation in Goldie brought Tracy to the attention of Howard Hughes, who, having amassed some two million feet of stunt flying footage for Hell’s Angels, was looking for stories in which he could incorporate the trims. In the movie business since 1926, Hughes had distinguished himself with a comedy called Two Arabian Knights, a buddy picture on the order of What Price Glory? that won an Academy Award for its director, Lewis Milestone. Almost immediately there was talk of a sequel, but Hughes got mired in the making of Hell’s Angels and struggling with the problem of how to release a $2 million silent film when the public was clamoring for talkies. His solution—reshoot it with dialogue—occupied most of his time for another year. He produced just two other pictures in the interim: The Racket (again with Milestone) and The Mating Call. By the time he got back to the notion of a Two Arabian Knights sequel, Louis Wolheim, one of the two original stars, was dead, and William Boyd, the other half of the team, was working at RKO.
Hughes focused on developing a script, a gloss on the original as reimagined by Joseph Moncure March, the author of Hell’s Angels. The project never really coalesced until Hughes saw Tracy as the bacchanalian seaman of Goldie and impulsively made the deal to borrow him for six weeks at a flat rate of $11,187.50. With Tracy set to start with Hughes on May 10, the rest of the package was carelessly thrown together. Veteran comic George Cooper (who was in the shots to be used from the earlier film), George Irving, and actress Lola Lane were all added to the cast. The crucial role of Sergeant Hogan, the Wolheim part, was filled by actor-playwright Sidney Toler, who played cops and comic heavies but was as unlike the gnarled Wolheim as any actor could be.
At first Tracy was glad to be out of Fox, even though the company would be collecting considerably more on the loan-out than he.2 Filming on Ground Hogs (as the film was to be titled) got under way at the Armory in Culver City on Tuesday, May 19, the company shooting a full day of exteriors and working well into the night. The director Hughes picked for the film was Edward Sedgwick, who had turned out a number of silent comedies but whose experience with sound was limited to Buster Keaton’s recent features. Sedgwick was a throwback to the days when a director could talk an actor through a scene while the cameras were cranking, and he apparently had no knowledge or appreciation of Tracy’s stage experience. Ridgeway “Reggie” Callow, one of the assistant directors on Hughes’ payroll, witnessed a testy exchange between Sedgwick and Tracy: “[Sedgwick] told him to take three steps forward and then turn sideways and reach out—all these meticulous directions—so Spencer said, ‘One, two, three, and then I turn, reach out … now, what the hell do I do next?’ ”
The atmosphere on the set wasn’t good at all, and Sedgwick compounded the problem when he refused to show Hughes the rushes, claiming they weren’t yet ready for viewing. Tracy worked well with Cooper, wide-eyed and elfin, but the on-screen chemistry between him and Toler was poor, Toler being wholly unsuited for the part of a roughneck sergeant. On Sunday, May 24, they traveled to Riverside, two hours east of Los Angeles, where they roomed at the Mission Inn and spent nine days shooting exteriors at March Field. Away from Louise and Johnny, Tracy recalled his days at Norfolk and behaved much as his character Wilkie would have under similar circumstances. “It was just the role he was playing,” said Callow. “You know, he was drinking pretty heavily in those days, particularly with his buddy Warren Hymer … But the drinking never interfered with his performance; he always had his lines down.”
Once the March Field scenes were in the can, the company returned for studio work on the Metropolitan lot in Hollywood, where Hughes’ production company, Caddo, was based. But after just one day of filming, Hughes closed the film down, dismissing both Sedgwick and Toler and scrapping some $250,000 worth of footage. Within a week he had novelist Dashiell Hammett working on a new version of the script to be directed, it was announced, by writer-director Tom Buckingham.
Tracy returned to his home studio with time on his hands. If news of his drinking had gotten back to Louise, it wouldn’t have surprised her. In New York, he did most of his imbibing at the Lambs, where he was contained and protected and surrounded by pals like Pat O’Brien and Frank McHugh. The booze was of the highest possible quality, a step above the industrial and grain alcohols served in most speakeasies (where the flavoring could range from prune juice to creosote). In Hollywood, the best stuff—genuine or slightly cut—came from inside the studio walls, where it seemed fully half the mechanics, doormen, chauffeurs, and office boys were dealers. Hymer had no trouble staying sloshed, despite the warnings and entreaties of the studio brass, and he proved a poor influence on Spence, especially when the two were disgruntled at work or away on location.
Louise would take a sherry before dinner, but she never particularly cared about it, and neither, really, did Spence. “It had always been there,” she said of his intolerance for alcohol, “[but] I was not [aware of it]…there seemed to be no reason. He always liked milk and donuts and buttermilk.” The root of his problem, she came to realize, was not his taste for the stuff, but his very genuine awkwardness in social situations and the inability to make small talk: “My husband had a shy side. Many times he was very ill at ease. Actually, the gruffness, the shortness, was a cover-up. I’ve seen him struggle very hard to relate to others.”
An industry journalist, a freelancer from Memphis named S. R. “Dick” Mook, frequented the Fox lot at the time of Up the River and observed the struggle firsthand:
I had seen a few rushes of the opus, and knew both Spence and the film were going to be sensational. Imagine my delight when Robert Montgomery brought him down to Neil Hamilton’s beach home one Sunday when I was there. I sat back and confidently waited for the flow of wisecracks to start—wisecracks his film portrayal had led me to believe I might expect from him. I was doomed to disappointment. Beyond “Hello” when he came in and “Bye” when he left, I don’t believe Spence uttered a half-dozen words during the afternoon. The meeting was a complete flop. Long afterwards, when I got to know him well, I started jibing him about tha
t day. “I didn’t know any of you people,” Spence muttered uncomfortably. “I just can’t give out with strangers.”
And so to get through the obligations the industry naturally placed on a contract player of Tracy’s standing, he would take a drink to calm himself, make himself more at ease around people he didn’t know. “He could drink the least little bit,” Louise said, “[and] it simply [went] straight to the brain … He couldn’t [have drinks before dinner]. He struggled against it…[and] I gradually saw that he really shouldn’t drink at all.”
The closing down of Ground Hogs dovetailed neatly with the end of the lease on the house in Westwood. Having gradually discarded his casts, John was now on crutches, vigorously swinging from room to room and up and down the walk in front of the house. Thinking it might benefit him, the Tracys took a little cottage for the months of June and July at Las Tunas, a quiet strip of beach about midway between Santa Monica and Malibu that nestled up against Roosevelt Highway on the back side. Carroll’s arrival in California that spring had enabled Mother Tracy to take a house of her own in Los Angeles, leaving Spence, Louise, and John to fit compactly into two relatively small but very livable bedrooms.
After little more than a week at Las Tunas, John’s back was entirely well and Dr. Wilson decided he should start walking without the crutches for a half hour each day. His first steps took place in the living room at the beach, and they had trouble convincing him that he could do it. “He just stood there,” Louise said, “arms outstretched at either side to balance himself, shaking his head and looking utterly frightened and miserable. For weeks his progress was difficult and slow. He had to conquer that fear and feeling of insecurity each time, and he complained of his legs hurting. Eventually he walked, but only for a few minutes at a time.” After a month John was on his feet forty minutes a day, and by August he was standing a full hour. He progressed to two and a half hours without the crutches, and was up to four hours a day by the first of September.
The release of Goldie on June 28, 1931, did nothing to alleviate Tracy’s growing anxiety over the course of his career. Despite Harlow’s newfound prominence, Sheehan and the sales department had so little faith in the picture, chopped to fifty-eight minutes, that they opened it in Brooklyn, where the populace could be found romping in the waters off Coney Island, not packing the theaters. Variety labeled it a “direct imitation” of the McLaglen-Lowe series, though not as good. “For general b[ox] o[ffice],” the trade paper concluded, “it’s a poor entry.”
Tracy now had three pictures in release under the terms of his new contract, all undeniable losers. “They said Quick Millions was the most marvelous picture ever made. All of Hollywood said it. I was so excited I didn’t know what to do. Then that picture went out and grossed about a dollar and eighty cents.” Six Cylinder Love brought in more—$327,000 worldwide—but cost more and lost nearly $25,000.
He went back to work in July, starting a picture with actress Joan Bennett called She Wanted a Millionaire. The fact that it was a program picture and by definition, therefore, second rate, did not mean it would look noticeably cheaper or less carefully produced than the premium Fox product. The production values on all Fox pictures, regardless of category, were second to none. Some of the top cameramen in the industry—Joe August, Ernest Palmer, John F. Seitz, George Barnes, John J. Mescall—were employed at Fox, as were art directors such as Ben Carré, Duncan Cramer, and Joseph Urban, the legendary designer of the Ziegfeld Follies. Even the second-tier Fox directors—Ben Stoloff, Sidney Lanfield, David Butler—were talented and conscientious, a cut above the staff directors at most other studios. The things that most noticeably cheapened the films that came out of Fox were the scripts.
Sheehan flattered himself in thinking he somehow knew the story elements that were guaranteed crowd pleasers, and Wurtzel was fiercely devoted to formula in pictures of all types. Between them, they dictated the structure of Fox films to an unusual degree, almost always to their detriment. Fox screenplays were rigidly plotted and rarely character-driven. The typical Fox picture under the Sheehan regime started out well enough—he favored playwrights who knew how to get a story off the ground—but there was always room for improvement. Where most other producers would polish dialogue or bring in a specialist to punch up a particular scene, Sheehan’s screenplays often jumped genre in the third act, shifting to a different locale or taking on an entirely different mood or coloring. The climax would be a train wreck of melodrama, hurried and illogical, bringing the film to a perfunctory end at seventy minutes or thereabouts.3
Tracy and his son John, circa 1931. (SUSIE TRACY)
The script for She Wanted a Millionaire was no exception. It started out as one of Sheehan’s own ideas, a sexy morality tale based on a news story about a beauty contestant wed to a theater magnate twenty-nine years her senior. He set about to make her over, sending her to a private finishing school and paying for special tutors. Eventually deeming her perfect, he then grew insanely jealous, certain every young man in the world was after her. The end came on March 11, 1931, when in a drunken rage he tried to strangle her and she shot and killed him. Sheehan clipped the item from the Los Angeles Evening Herald and had the story outlined and adapted by a succession of writers: Frank Dolan, Sally Frank, Dudley Nichols, even Hugh Stange, the author of Veneer. After six weeks of spinning it out in every conceivable direction, he developed a revised outline with the assistance of Sonya Levien. Days after Levien turned in her version, Sheehan put William Anthony McGuire, the author of Six Cylinder Love, on the job. By the time the film was ready to shoot, the screenplay had gone through twelve drafts, four by McGuire alone.
Tracy wasn’t happy about She Wanted a Millionaire, considered it junk, but as was the case with so many Fox productions, the quality of the filmmakers would far exceed the quality of the material. The supporting cast would include Una Merkel, a fine light comedienne, veteran stage and screen actor James Kirkwood, and Dorothy Peterson, a Broadway contemporary of Tracy’s borrowed from First National. Shooting the film would be John F. Seitz, one of the most experienced and respected of all cinematographers. Directing would be John G. “Jack” Blystone, an old hand at fashioning silk purses from the sows’ ears he was frequently handed by Wurtzel and Sheehan, for whom he had worked since 1920.
Production began on July 6, Tracy making his initial appearance in the film as a rail engineer shuttling coal to the plant where Bennett works. She’s walking home from a bad date, and he gives her a ride. “I remember him as a rather private person,” Bennett later wrote of Tracy, “taciturn, though he had a delicious sense of humor.” No happier with the script than anyone else, Bennett managed to enjoy the process of making the film, if not the film itself. “I liked the director, John Blystone,” she said, “and working with Spencer Tracy was a huge treat.” Once he knew that he was in good company, Tracy opened up a bit, relaxing around his costar and ribbing her as he would one of his colleagues onstage. “He teased me unmercifully, and it always pleased him when I rose to the bait, which was most of the time.”
Blystone, who also hailed from Wisconsin, had a restrained sense of staging, a good eye, and knew how to highlight an actor’s performance. He gave Tracy his head, letting him affect a bit of an accent in his early scenes, remembering all too well the Irish aristocracy aboard the Milwaukee Line. She Wanted a Millionaire was Bennett’s film, on the ascendancy as she was, younger sister to Constance—one of the industry’s top stars—and leading lady to both Ronald Colman and John Barrymore. Tracy, though, had a few flashy moments of his own, none better than when he played a poignant love scene to a simple cape draped over a broom and a chair, dinner for two in his room growing cold, despair settling in as it becomes evident she’s not going to show. He goes to Merkel, Joan’s randy, wisecracking girlfriend, a reporter for the local paper who is typing up a story. Reciting a monologue of grievances, all worked up, he leaves with her to go out and get drunk.
Filming continued at a steady clip until the
morning of July 28, 1931. The company was on location in Stone Canyon, a section of Bel Air threaded with bridle paths. Kirkwood, unsteady on his mount, swapped horses with Bennett, who’d been riding since early childhood, and the horse, skittish and unnerved, promptly headed back to the stables. Bennett pulled her around to go back up the hill when the horse saw a camera car racing toward her and shied.
“A tree stopped my flight,” said the actress, “and I ended up in a heap like a discarded rag doll with a hip and three vertebrae broken and a beautiful black eye.” Sensing the worst, Jack Blystone gave orders that she not be moved, and Bennett arrived at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital with one leg pushed up two inches shorter than the other. An orthopedic surgeon set her hip the next morning, but it would likely be four to six months before she could return to work, handing her costar his second aborted picture in a row.
By now Tracy was resigned to making movies as a livelihood, stuck needing a salary only Hollywood could afford to pay. Responsible for all of John’s care, his mother’s support, and Louise’s help around the house, there was precious little left from paycheck to paycheck, nothing much to show for a weekly salary more than twice what most families made do with in a month. The circumstances gnawed at him, fueled his occasional rounds with Hymer, Wallace Ford, McHugh, and others in his small circle of friends. He was torn between hoping the studio would drop his next option and knowing not quite what he’d do if they did. Could he pull up stakes so completely as he had before? Move everyone back to New York? Find a play with a chance at a run? Live again without the security of a term contract? When he saw the first rushes on She Wanted a Millionaire, Sheehan told him to lose weight, and Tracy dropped eleven pounds without having to be asked twice.
James Curtis Page 22