James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  They all loved living on the beach at Las Tunas, but the closing down of She Wanted a Millionaire coincided with the end of their lease, and the Tracys moved into Hollywood’s Chateau Elysée while they looked for another place to rent. The next day, Spence got word that Hughes had retooled Ground Hogs and was set to resume filming under a new title, Sky Devils, on August 10. In place of Tom Buckingham, whom Hughes had shifted to another picture, director Eddie Sutherland had taken charge, completely remapping the third act of the script and scuttling an Arabian Nights sequence planned for the film simply because there had been one in the earlier Milestone picture. Sutherland, borrowed from Paramount, was a golfing buddy of Hughes’ and a specialist in broad comedy. He first made a name for himself with a largely improvised war farce called Behind the Front and continued on with nearly two dozen features, including M-G-M’s 1928 picturization of The Baby Cyclone.

  Congenial and literate, Sutherland recast Sidney Toler’s failed part with William “Stage” Boyd, the original Quirt of What Price Glory?, and set about reshooting all the material Ed Sedgwick had left behind. Fox agreed to return Tracy for four—but no more than six—weeks at the rate of $1,864.60 a week, the same money they had charged the first time around. He was back at March Field on August 29 when word reached him that his cousin Bernard Feely had died at the age of twenty-three.

  Spence had first laid eyes on him in 1910, when Bernard was not yet three, and had kept in touch through the intervening years. Spence’s uncle Pat had traveled the state for the Lanpher-Skinner Company of St. Louis, selling hats and furs, and when he retired he had invested in farmland that could be worked by tenants. Then came the droughts and the winds that presaged the Dust Bowl, and as the topsoil blew away, Patrick Feely, by then an invalid, mortgaged the farmsteads one by one. After he died of tuberculosis in September 1926, Spence’s aunt Jenny took in boarders, made doughnuts, gave music and dancing lessons in the parlor. Bernard went to work as an usher in a movie theater and began studying chemical engineering at the Northern State Teachers College. One of his professors there told him he should really go to the School of Mines in Rapid City, and a good friend of his parents, a Mrs. Lincoln, paid his tuition. He went for two years, working all the while and following Spence’s career in Billboard and Variety. He had a job lined up, but then a strep infection set in and progressed to pneumonia.

  With Bernard now gone, Jenny and her daughter, fourteen-year-old Jane, were without means, and Spence, stuck on a hot, dusty movie set playing low comedy to George Cooper and Stage Boyd, saw yet another purpose to the earning power God had somehow seen fit to give him. And back in town that night he sent off a telegram to his favorite aunt in Aberdeen, South Dakota:

  YOU HAVE LOST ONE SON BUT YOU HAVE GAINED ANOTHER.

  It was Johnny who first raised the matter of a sibling. “John, one,” he would say sadly, accustomed to referring to himself in the third person. Then he’d say, “Two—boy, girl,” nodding happily and leveling his hand about chest high. “So big.” His parents agreed. John needed a playmate, and they thought—almost reflexively—of adopting. John’s need was immediate; he couldn’t wait for a little brother or sister to grow to a suitable size.

  There was also the thing that had happened to John, the horrible thing with the unknowable cause that could happen again. Spence, particularly, was tormented by the thought, the possibility, that they could have another child so afflicted. Louise, too, although she didn’t share his Irish temperament, his deep sense of guilt and foreboding. Where Spence felt the raw burden of sin and dark purpose in Johnny’s disability, Louise saw a biological mystery, a circumstance of terrific power. And where Spence bore the blame, all visceral and unspoken, Louise felt only responsibility, the need to do everything she could either to fix their son’s deafness or to marginalize it to the point where it would no longer matter. The only constructive thing Spence could do under such circumstances was to earn the money she would need to do what she had to do for John. They both grappled with imperfect thoughts, unjustified feelings of inadequacy and torment.

  Louise talked to a woman at the Home Adoption Society, who was plainly dubious of their plan.

  When she asked me why we wanted to adopt a child, I answered, naturally, that we wanted a playmate for our son. I went on to explain his deafness and the reason for wishing an older child rather than a baby. She told me that John’s deafness created a problem in our household, which constituted an “abnormal” situation and might be a handicap to another child. She said that the Society was averse to placing one of its children in less than a perfect environment … She also went on to say that, in any case, she thought we had much better take a boy, as a different sex complicated things still further. She said, however, that I might fill out an application, if I wished, and then, if adoption was thought to be possible at all, the whole situation could be investigated thoroughly.

  The friends they brought into the discussion advised against adopting an older child, concerned that habits and attitudes set even before the age of three could somehow hamper John’s progress. Spence and Louise continued to bat the idea around, wondering not only what age an adopted child should be but whether they could even get one. As soon as he had finished with Hughes and Sky Devils, they moved from the Chateau Elysée to a rented house in the Hollywood Hills where they could spread out again and take full stock of the situation.

  Sheehan had no immediate assignment for him, preoccupied as he was with the Chase Bank’s pursuit of Harley Clarke, the interim president of Fox, who had managed to turn a $13 million profit (in William Fox’s last year at the helm) into a net loss of nearly $3 million. Spence, as it turned out, would have six glorious weeks off before the start of his next picture. Leaving John in Mother Tracy’s able care, he and Louise went off to spend a few days at Arrowhead Springs, a resort in the mountains above San Bernardino. They started riding again, Spence deciding that he really did like it, and reconnected on other levels as well. Perhaps it was nothing more than Louise, for the first time in years, being apart from John and the constant, almost compulsive attention she lavished on him. And perhaps, too, it was Spence being away from the pressures of the studio and the worry that option time typically brought upon a contract player of any stripe. Wurtzel had picked up his option so early on that he was assured a regular paycheck through November 1932—more than a year in the future.

  Those few days at Arrowhead were relatively carefree, a throwback to the very earliest days of their marriage, when there were just the two of them and their worries extended no farther than the mastering of next week’s part. Not long after they returned home—about the time Spence started shooting a picture called Disorderly Conduct—Louise discovered, at the age of thirty-five, that she was once again pregnant.

  * * *

  1 Filmed as The Doorway to Hell (1930).

  2 During the six-week period Tracy would receive $4,500 from Fox, leaving the studio with a net profit on his services of $6,687.50.

  3 Screenwriter Frederica Sagor once described Sheehan’s story mind as “unhinged.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Power and the Glory

  * * *

  Tracy followed John Cromwell’s advice and looked up Snowy Baker, the rugged Australian sportsman who ran the Riviera Polo Club and Equestrian Center in the Santa Monica Canyon. Reginald Leslie “Snowy” Baker was a genuine legend in his home country, a champion horseman, swimmer, rugby player, oarsman, cricketer, and boxer whose work in movies brought him to the United States. He started coaching on the side, and fell in with the developers of the Riviera Country Club in 1928. With Baker as his mentor, Tracy went headlong into polo, embracing it, as Louise put it, “the way people sometimes go when they have waited so long to find something which they really want to do.” He arranged for a horse by the month and lessons, and he took a room at the club so that he would be sure to get in his daily stick-and-ball practice, rising at 6:30 each morning to ride for thirty or forty-five minutes befo
re going to the studio.

  As with Tracy’s three previous Fox pictures, Disorderly Conduct had been designed for other actors. Originally it was to be another Quirt and Flagg comedy with Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe. When Lowe failed to come to terms over a new contract, Tracy was promptly dropped in his place. Then McLaglen was shifted to another picture, making room for Ralph Bellamy. With the company hemorrhaging red ink, Sheehan renewed his commitment to building Tracy into a marketable commodity, and one of the men he entrusted with the task was producer John W. Considine, Jr.

  At Riviera with Reginald Leslie “Snowy” Baker. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  The son of a noted vaudeville impresario, Johnny Considine was, in the words of Joan Bennett, a “wild, attractive Irishman” who had worked almost exclusively for Joseph M. Schenck, the president of United Artists. He started with Schenck as a script clerk and was line producer on most of Schenck’s later productions, Son of the Sheik, Tempest, and Abraham Lincoln among them. Considine made the jump to Fox in November 1930 and Sheehan gave him his own unit, a move which led to speculation he was grooming the younger man to replace Sol Wurtzel. Considine’s third picture at Fox was Six Cylinder Love, a project hardly calculated to bond him to Tracy, and when he was subsequently given She Wanted a Millionaire, Considine spent an inordinate amount of time haunting the set, convinced that Tracy and Joan Bennett, to whom he would soon propose marriage, were having an affair. His concerns were hardly assuaged after Bennett’s accident, when Tracy became a daily visitor to her hospital room.

  Disorderly Conduct was again the work of William Anthony McGuire, who was more a hand at comedy than anything approaching melodrama and whose famous technique of seeing the first act of a play in rehearsal before writing the second and third acts did not stand him in good stead as a screenwriter. McGuire’s scripts tended to start out well before sputtering out in a fantasia of clichés. Disorderly Conduct was no different, a plot-driven muddle that nevertheless gave Tracy his strongest screen character yet. Rather than playing a crook or a con man, Tracy found himself cast as an honest cop disillusioned by the graft and corruption he sees around him. Filming began November 30 with Considine making his directorial debut under Sheehan’s supervision. In support were Sally Eilers, Ralph Bellamy, Allan Dinehart, Ralph Morgan, and the ubiquitous faux Swedish comedian El Brendel.

  It wasn’t an easy picture to make. Tightly wound, Tracy often brought tension to a set and was liable to explode if something went awry. Considine knew next to nothing about directing actors and leaned heavily on cinematographer Ray June, who, in collaboration with William Cameron Menzies, had shot many of his productions for Schenck. Moreover, Tracy had been warned that Considine was laying for him, the two men having developed an intense dislike for one another since discovering their common interest in Joan Bennett.

  “Tracy came into my dressing room and wanted a drink,” Ralph Bellamy remembered. “My God, he looked awful. I gave him the drink, and somehow he managed to get some more, I guess, because when it came time to shoot he wasn’t around. I finally found him passed out in his dressing room. In order to cover for him, I had a doctor friend say he was ill.” Bellamy, sure that Tracy was in no condition to drive, insisted that Spence follow behind him in his own car as they drove home. “He was still in the police uniform. In the rear-view mirror I saw him stop, so I turned around and went back. He had pulled over another car, and when I got there he was standing next to it in that uniform, bawling the hell out of a woman driver.”

  Considine let Tracy have his head with the character of Officer Dick Fay and was rewarded with a performance that far exceeded the limitations of the material. Six pictures into his Fox contract, Tracy was essentially typed as a comedian, the failure of Quick Millions having convinced both Sheehan and Wurtzel that audiences wouldn’t accept him in a serious role. It was Jack Blystone who saw considerably more depth to him, but Blystone’s picture was now on hold and there was no telling if they’d ever get around to finishing it. So Tracy immersed himself in the role of Fay, the good-natured cop on the beat, and brought something extraordinary to it by illuminating the small details the story afforded him.

  Demoted after pulling over the daughter of a rich bootlegger, Fay declares himself no longer on the square and takes a bribe in exchange for tipping off a gambling hall of an impending police raid. But turning crooked doesn’t suit him, and he wears his newfound notoriety as a prizefighter might wear an ill-fitting suit of clothes. Suspecting a double cross, the crooks make an attempt on Fay’s life, during which his little nephew is shot dead. In the intense reaction scene that follows, Tracy’s expression ripens from abject grief to horror as an all-consuming trance of vengeance overtakes him. “I did it,” he tells Lucy Beaumont, the distinguished British actress playing his widowed mother, quivering and backing away from her as if dripping with poison. “Just as sure as if I put my own gun to his little body, I killed him, Mom.” Instinctively she places her hands on his chest, and he erupts as if suddenly shot through with electricity. “Don’t touch me, Mom! I’m crooked! I’m low! I’m everything that you hate! That’s why those men were after me, Ma, and that’s why he’s dead! They killed him, Ma, but I’m the cause of it!” And then he kneels at the side of the bed that holds the body of his nephew and crumples into tears.

  In Disorderly Conduct (1932). The critic for the Hollywood Citizen News likened Tracy’s work in the movie to that of “the late and great Lon Chaney in his straight roles.” Dickie Moore, who played Tracy’s nephew in the picture, remembered him as “warm yet distant.” (SUSIE TRACY)

  Fay cleans up the gang in a memorably framed shot, his back to the camera, the action visible through the broken glass of an office door. The extreme violence of the last act was at odds with the earlier action, the wisecracking exchanges with Sally Eilers, the scenes of low comedy with El Brendel, but the character arc somehow managed to play, Tracy finding the humanity in brief vignettes where, for instance, Fay silently caresses the headlamp of his motorcycle after having been demoted from sergeant to patrolman, the machine drawing his affection like a familiar old horse.

  Given the vigilantism of the character, Sheehan had two endings prepared and shot, one in which Fay is wounded in the confrontation but survives, the other in which he dies. Tracy appeared in both but favored the latter as the stronger and more dramatically valid way of ending the picture. Sheehan planned to preview the film with each of the endings but never got the opportunity.

  All during the production of Disorderly Conduct, the Fox lot was crawling with auditors from the east, Chase Bank representatives seeking to limit Sheehan’s influence solely to the production of features. They brought new people in for budgeting and scheduling, and Keith Weeks, the former prohibition agent who was Sheehan’s handpicked studio manager, was given fifteen minutes to clear out of his office. Harley Clarke had been removed as Fox president—sent back to Chicago by the very people who had put him there in the first place—and replaced with Edward R. Tinker, board chairman of Chase National, a career banker who freely admitted he knew absolutely nothing about running a studio.

  Tinker’s solution to the Fox problem was the only one he could reasonably be expected to manage. Instead of making better movies—“There is nothing in this business which good pictures cannot cure,” Nicholas Schenck, president of Loew’s Inc., parent of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, had famously said—he elected instead to cut operating costs. All contracts were on the table, and Sheehan, under siege, had the richest one of all, paying $6,000 a week and due to escalate, at each succeeding option period, in $1,000 increments. Sheehan had already accepted a 25 percent cut in pay under Clarke—something Wurtzel had successfully refused—and was facing yet another cut when he disappeared altogether, supposedly ill, his whereabouts unknown and his resignation rumored to be imminent.

  She Wanted a Millionaire resumed filming on January 5, 1932, little more than a week after Considine wrapped Disorderly Conduct. Joan Bennett had been five mont
hs in recovery—having had to learn to walk all over again—but there wasn’t much left to do on the picture, other than to film a Grand Guignol finale that hardly fit the rest of the story. Two days into it, news came that Sheehan had suffered a nervous breakdown—an “authentic” one, the trade press reported—brought on, it was construed, by the systematic stripping of his studio authority. While he was reportedly recuperating at a sanitarium near San Francisco, responsibility for the balance of the Fox season fell to Wurtzel, who was charged with bringing the average cost of a Fox feature down to an industry-wide target of $200,000.

  While his own productions came nowhere near that target figure—the modest Disorderly Conduct cost nearly $300,000—it was hard to argue with the fact that the few profitable pictures Fox had released in recent times had all been personally supervised by Winnie Sheehan. Both Delicious and Daddy Long Legs were Sheehan productions, as were Frank Borzage’s Bad Girl and The Man Who Came Back. When Sheehan’s attorney wired Tinker’s office in New York requesting a three-month leave of absence, it was, after due consideration, granted at 50 percent of the production chief’s usual salary—a grand gesture given how easy it would have been to remove him altogether had the Fox hierarchy wanted to do so.