Still, in the months to follow, it would be Sol Wurtzel calling the shots, not Sheehan, and Wurtzel’s interests were not necessarily those of his boss. New players were significantly cheaper than established ones, and part of Wurtzel’s mandate was to bring along the starlets Fox had under contract at $500 a week—girls like Sally Eilers and red-headed Peggy Shannon. Wurtzel had less personal interest in Spencer Tracy than in James Dunn, Eilers’ costar in Bad Girl, who had been pitchforked over Tracy for his greater (perceived) appeal as a leading man. With She Wanted a Millionaire finally in the can, Wurtzel, singularly unimpressed with Disorderly Conduct, assigned Tracy a secondary role in Young America, a Borzage production due to start in the middle of February.
She Wanted a Millionaire opened at the Roxy Theatre on February 19, 1932, and became the first Tracy picture to hit a Manhattan screen in nine months. With the film’s emphasis on Joan Bennett and Fred Waring’s orchestra on the surrounding program, he might just as well have stayed off screen altogether. Tracy was much better served by Sky Devils, which began limited runs in and around Los Angeles in mid-January and performed on par with or better than Street Scene, Palmy Days, Tonight or Never, or any of the other recent United Artists releases. The picture ran two and a half weeks at UA’s flagship theater in Los Angeles, which was the longest run the house had seen since Hughes’ Front Page had played there the previous year.
With Disorderly Conduct set for release in mid-April, the unit publicist on Young America was able to stir up some press interest in Tracy, principally among the members of the freelance corps who fed the fan magazines. Four took the bait, drawing assignments from the newsstand monthlies that targeted a largely female readership. Dutifully, Tracy spent time with each, opening up as best he could, but of the four men he saw over the course of ten days, only Dick Mook was potentially someone to whom he could really talk. Unlike the others, Mook was a seasoned newspaperman, six years Tracy’s senior, who had come west from his native Tennessee with the advent of talkies. He wasn’t a press flack, nobody’s lap dog, and his stuff differed considerably from the fluff that passed for editorial content in most of the major movie magazines. Low-key and gracious, he was often visible at parties and social events where other journalists were rarely to be found.
Mook recalled:
After the preview [of Disorderly Conduct], one of the Fox officials sought to introduce the members of the cast. They were all right down in front—where they belonged—and when they were introduced they could rise, face the audience, and bow. That is, they were all down in front except Mr. Tracy. He had waited to come in until after the picture started and then had taken a seat directly in front of the door. When the picture was finished he meant to duck out the door, but another official stood in front of it and blocked him. When he was introduced, he gave an ashamed little bow and ran. Outside, I encountered him again and, in that beneficent manner of mine, bestowed the accolade. “A great performance, Tracy,” I said. “Thanks,” he came back at me brilliantly and fled.
Intrigued, Mook phoned the studio the next day and made an appointment for lunch. “I came to the conclusion,” he said, “that it was not possible for a man to be as brilliant on the screen and as uninteresting off as Tracy had tried to be.” As they completed their interview, Tracy leaned forward conspiratorially: “How’d you like to go down to the brewery one day and swill a little beer?”
“I’d like it fine,” Mook replied.
“All right,” said Tracy. “I’ll get hold of Frank Borzage and find out when he can go and then I’ll call you. What’s your phone number?”
Mook gave it to him but said, “Why do you want to wear yourself out writing it down? You know you’ll never call me.”
“You think so?” said Tracy. “Well, I’ll bet you five to one I’ll call you within a week.”
Mook left, firmly convinced the next time he’d see Tracy was when he pulled another assignment or happened to catch him on the lot. Good to his word, though, Tracy called him just three days later. “They’ve closed the brewery up,” he said, “but how about coming out to the house for dinner tonight?”
Mook arrived to find that Spence was working late. He ended up dining alone with Louise, his host arriving home only after the table had been cleared. The houseboy, said Mook, had to fix him some bacon and eggs. “As he brought them in, he turned to Mrs. Tracy. ‘Can he have some cheese?’ ” Weeze considered. “I glanced at Spencer. His forehead was wrinkled with worry, and from the expression on his face you would have thought the fate of the universe hinged on her decision. ‘I suppose so,’ she said finally. ‘He’s been working hard. But only a little.’ She turned to me: ‘It’s so fattening, I only let him have it once a week.’ ”
Samuel Richard “Dick” Mook. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
A few days later, Mook was again lunching with Tracy at the Café de Paris, the themed commissary on the Fox lot. Spence noticed Doris Kenyon, his costar in Young America, picking at a salad at the far end of the room. “He knew she was on a diet,” Mook said. “As he watched her, a devilish expression spread over his face.” Tracy called over the waitress, ordered a huge banana split, and had the thing sent over to her. It returned a few minutes later, untouched but with the following note: “You poor undernourished dear. You need this more than I. You must keep your strength up.” Tracy, Mook estimated, weighed at least 180 at the time. “Spence eyed it longingly, finally threw discretion to the winds, and ate every drop of it after threatening to kill me if I told Louise.”
He finished Young America on March 10, happy for the experience of having worked with Borzage, but aware the film would add nothing to his standing with audiences. The leads belonged to two young boys, Tommy Conlon and the director’s nephew Ray Borzage, and Tracy was left to play Kenyon’s irascible husband, a busy druggist with no time for the troubled boy his wife has taken into their home. Derived from an antique play, the script was stiff and artificial, nothing like the social commentary it aspired to be, and Tracy struggled to make an impression in what was essentially a supporting part. Giving his character an ever-present pipe and working it extravagantly, he engaged in some shameless fly-catching.
Within two weeks Wurtzel had him back at work in another supporting role, bolstering James Dunn and Peggy Shannon in the flop Broadway comedy Society Girl. Again he had little to work with, and again his performance smacked of gimmickry, all intensity and torn paper, the only member of the cast with any energy to show. A key confrontation between Tracy and Dunn took days to shoot—“ever since they can remember,” as one visitor to the set put it—and ended with the pudgy Dunn (who was contractually obligated to stay below 157 pounds) busting his third-billed costar in the nose. “I’m playing telephone repairmen or the hero’s best friend who always gets the Dumb Dora blonde,” Spence complained to Pat O’Brien.
About the same time, Sheehan was granted a two-month extension on his leave of absence. For the time being, the 1932–33 season would be entirely in Wurtzel’s hands. Details were necessarily skimpy, but when the program of features was announced, Tracy was top-lined in three: Rackety Rax, a football comedy with Greta Nissen and El Brendel; Shanghai Madness, an exotic adventure yarn; and an oft-threatened remake of What Price Glory? with Ralph Bellamy now in place of Warren Hymer. By the time he started After the Rain in early June, Tracy was plainly demoralized, supporting the unexceptional Peggy Shannon in an obvious knockoff of Sadie Thompson and not even making his first appearance until the middle of the third reel. After the read-through, Jack Blystone, who was directing, asked him what he thought of the script. “Great,” Tracy replied. “I get six days off.”
The release of Disorderly Conduct was the one bright spot in an otherwise dismal spring. Despite the happy ending Wurtzel had naturally chosen to go with, Dick Mook thought the role of Officer Fay to be Tracy’s finest screen portrayal. “It was the picture that sold me on Tracy,” he later said. “I immediately started a one-man campaign for him.” In its review, Th
e Motion Picture Herald advised exhibitors that Tracy “should be played up strong for future B.O. strength,” and the film played to capacity audiences in Los Angeles, where it opened at Loew’s State with Raquel Torres and bandleader Eddie Peabody on the supporting bill.
Strong promotional support led to domestic rentals of $427,659, making Disorderly Conduct not only the most popular of all of Tracy’s pictures for Fox, but also the first since Up the River to actually show a profit. Tired of getting stuck almost exclusively in comedies, Tracy hoped the picture’s success would encourage Wurtzel to use him in more varied fare. “The last two parts I did in New York—Conflict and The Last Mile—were heavy dramas,” he told Mook by way of explanation. “Everything before that was comedy. I was brought out here and put into a film called Up the River. Because it was a prison picture, they figured it was not unlike the two plays mentioned. The picture turned out to be a satire, and the reviews stressed my comedy scenes more than the dramatic ones. Immediately the dramas were forgotten. I played a mugg comedian—a racketeer—in a picture that got good notices and I’ve been playing those parts ever since …”
With After the Rain in progress and a baby due, Tracy moved his family to a larger house in Westwood, a sprawling six-bedroom Spanish showplace on a steep rise overlooking Holmby Avenue. “I could not but add up, from month to month, the ever-increasing grand total we had paid out in rent,” wrote Louise, “and mentally apply it instead to a house we might have bought and be paying for. But Spencer would not listen to any hints dropped on this subject. Although he had done fairly well and might reasonably hope to work out his contract, he personally never had any feeling of security and refused to obligate himself or to sign a lease for a period longer than the date of the next option.”
They were settled in the new house in time to celebrate Johnny’s eighth birthday on June 26. The five guests at the party were all girls, since neither John nor his parents knew any boys. Spence and Louise expected the new baby to be a girl, and had been referring to her for the better part of nine months as “Susie.” Five days later, on July 1, 1932, a Susie did indeed arrive at Good Samaritan Hospital, a seven-and-a-half-pound baby girl to be christened, at her father’s insistence, Louise Treadwell Tracy. Spence was on Catalina Island at the time, making location shots for After the Rain. When word came, he caught a speedboat to the mainland and arrived at the hospital early on a Saturday morning, able to stay just long enough to ascertain that everything was going to be all right. “I was so pleased because it was a little girl,” Louise said. “That was what he wanted. I thought that would be nice, but he was thrilled to death.”
John was especially excited and couldn’t wait to see his new sister. His mother had talked to him from time to time, telling him that he would soon have a little brother or sister, and approximately when that would be, but waiting the two weeks it would take to bring her home was almost more than he could stand. On the big day, his father, looking for a distraction, took him for ice cream, roaring eighty miles an hour down Sepulveda Boulevard between Sunset and Wilshire. Returning home, they both sat on the lawn eating their ice cream and waiting. When the car finally arrived, John rushed up excitedly and saw the baby for the first time. A look of utter bewilderment crossed his face. “He had very little to say,” said Louise, “and soon turned his attention to me. That something was wrong was obvious.”
The baby’s room was done up in pink with voluminous ruffled organdy curtains. After Susie was placed in her crib, John stood beside her for some time, touching her and making tentative efforts at play. “I was disappointed,” he said later. “I didn’t realize the baby would be so small. I had thought I’d play with her outdoors that afternoon.” At last he went to his mother and rendered his verdict. “Too small,” he said, again showing her the desired height, his hand about chest high. His mother explained as best she could that this was the way they came and that it wasn’t possible to exchange her for a larger size. John, however, was adamant.
“Back,” he said. “Too small.”
He would have nothing more to do with the baby for several days, and Louise felt that she had somehow lost standing because she could do no better than that. Then, finally, he was drawn back to the little pink room, and eventually he made his peace with her.
“Very sweet,” he said.
Sheehan returned to Fox in mid-June, just in time to see Society Girl released to scathing reviews and tepid box office. Dunn’s pose as a boxer drew laughs from audiences asked to believe he was a lean specimen of welterweight splendor when obviously tipping the scales at 170 or better. “James Dunn seems only a little more absurd as a prizefighter (we knew he was only fooling when he said he didn’t eat dessert) than Peggy Shannon does as a social butterfly—and that is something of a record,” wrote Helen Klumpf in the Los Angeles Times. “It might all have been dismissed as conscious irony if Spencer Tracy had not been there bringing reality and sincerity into the proceedings.”
Tracy was mortified by the recent pictures he had been asked to make and said as much to Sheehan when he got the chance. “Sheehan … had steadfast faith in Tracy,” Dick Mook said, “but he seemed unable to find decent pictures for him.” After nine features in the space of two years, Tracy was scarcely noticeable to the 70 million viewers who took in films on a weekly basis. In August, concurrent with the release of After the Rain (retitled The Painted Woman), Variety published the results of a survey conducted by exhibitor Harold B. Franklin in which 133 players were graded according to their marquee value. The biggest moneymakers were Maurice Chevalier, Greta Garbo, George Arliss, and Ronald Colman. Will Rogers and Janet Gaynor, the top Fox draws, were rated as third-tier stars, with Warner Baxter, Jimmy Dunn, and Charles Farrell occupying the fifth tier. Other Fox personalities to make the list were George O’Brien, Marian Nixon, Sally Eilers, Joan Bennett, El Brendel, Frank Albertson, William Collier, Sr., and Minna Gombel. After ten feature pictures, Tracy didn’t rate a mention.
“If pressed, he’ll admit that he may be a fair actor,” Mook wrote at the time, “but his looks are a source of constant anxiety to him. Once he said to me wildly, ‘Look, for Pete’s sake, they’ve got me playing love scenes with Joan Bennett. I should be playing muggs, because that’s what I look like.’ ” Money was a constant worry. Tracy was pulling down $1,000 a week but seemingly spending it as fast as he was taking it in. “It was nice to see all that money,” Louise said. “I don’t think we thought it would really last. Of course, when you get more money you find there are many more places to put it. We were just as poor as we had always been.”
Upon his return to the studio, Sheehan pretty much laid waste to Wurtzel’s plans for the new season, canceling What Price Glory? and pulling Tracy out of Rackety Rax when a more promising picture came up at Warners. Warden Lewis E. Lawes, who carried warm memories of Tracy from the days of The Last Mile and Up the River, suggested him for the role of Tommy Connors in the film version of Lawes’ best-selling memoir, Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing. At a price of $10,400 for four weeks, the deal was considerably richer for Fox than the previous loan-outs to Howard Hughes had been, but Tracy didn’t mind, given his genuine affection for Lawes and the realization this would likely be the closest he would ever come to playing The Last Mile on screen.1 “I remember one night he, his wife, and I were going to a picture,” said Mook. “He was telling me Warner Bros. had just borrowed him for the lead in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. ‘If this doesn’t put me over,’ he said, ‘I’ll just have to resign myself to playing character parts the rest of my life.’ ”
The film was originally planned as another pairing of James Cagney and director William Wellman, the team responsible for Public Enemy, but when Cagney declared himself a free agent in a contract dispute with the studio, actor George Brent was assigned the role. Lawes, who had script approval, disliked Courtenay Terrett’s attempt at flushing a storyline out of the episodic book and kept up a steady correspondence with Jack L. Warner, even as plans went for
ward for director Ray Enright and a four-man crew to shoot nine days of exteriors at the prison. With Tracy obtained from Fox and a revised screenplay by Wilson Mizner and Brown Holmes (who had contributed to the script of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang), Lawes finally got on board, suggesting the film had “every possibility of becoming a masterpiece.”
The cast was a notch above the typical assemblage at Fox. Bette Davis, making her seventh film for Warner Bros., was cast as Tracy’s girl. Arthur Byron, new to pictures after a long career on the New York stage, was set for the part of the warden. Lyle Talbot, Louis Calhern, and Warren Hymer were in supporting roles, Hymer, billed fifth, now earning just $750 a week on a two-week minimum. Tracy was pleased to have an extended scene with his old friend Grant Mitchell.
Allotted twenty-four days, the filming of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing got under way at the First National Studios in Burbank on August 15, 1932. Matching close shots with the footage Enright made in Ossining was a tedious process, veteran cinematographer Barney McGill and his crew blocking the action with the help of an on-set Moviola and scores of reference stills. Erected on Burbank’s Stage 3 were shower and visiting rooms, the prison’s barbershop, machine and shoemaking shops, a mess hall, death row, and a faithful re-creation of Lawes’ own office, down to the books on his shelves. Director Michael Curtiz worked the company in twelve-hour shifts, generally getting four to five minutes of usable film a day.
When Davis started work on the twenty-fifth, she found an instant rapport with her leading man. “He was crazy about my performance in a terrible independent potboiler I’d made with Pat O’Brien, The Menace,” she said. “It was the first picture he’d seen of mine—he thought I was different from any other actress in Hollywood.” Davis was only nine days on Sing Sing, but could vividly recall Tracy’s approach to the job: “Spence didn’t have any pretenses, and for an actor that’s like saying the Hudson River never freezes over. Most of them are so worried about makeup and camera angles that they don’t give you what you must have in a scene: concentration. They just stand there and look beautiful … But Tracy had no such conceit. For the run of the picture we had this wonderful vitality and love for each other.”
James Curtis Page 24