James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  The guts of the picture were the scenes that took place in the old cell block of the prison. Warners arranged to shoot the interiors on M-G-M’s Stage 10 in Culver City, where the set built for The Big House was still standing. Limited to four days, Curtiz shot eighteen hours at a stretch, driving cast and crew almost to the breaking point. Yet, predictably, the only outburst came from Warren Hymer, who showed up drunk on the second night, appearing nearly three hours late for a 6:30 call. When he refused to don his wardrobe, Hymer, who had been let out of his Fox contract after the debacle of Goldie, was sent home and docked accordingly. The next day he was on time but clearly hungover. When Curtiz said something, he responded by saying, “Aw, dry up, or I’ll walk out on you.”

  Tracy immediately got in his face: “If you ever come here like that again, I’ll save you the trouble. I’ll walk out and refuse to finish the picture as long as you’re in the cast. Then they can decide whether they want to re-shoot the whole picture with someone else in my part and keep you, or whether they’ll re-shoot the few scenes you’re in and keep me!” Hymer sobered up for the balance of the shoot but was late again on two subsequent occasions. Retakes and process work finished 20,000 Years in Sing Sing on September 14, two days over schedule. Tracy had just a week to study the script for his next picture at Fox, a comedy-romance with Joan Bennett titled Pier 13.

  That summer, there had been a conference on deaf education at UCLA. The principal of the Clarke School for the Deaf in Massachusetts was attending some of the sessions, and Louise was eager to meet her. The Clarke was the first permanent oral school in the United States, and the first to teach deaf children to speak. John’s leg was improving steadily, and Louise knew he would soon be able to go away to school. “He needed more work,” she said. “He needed children with their companionship and competition, and there seemed no way he could get this in Los Angeles.” There was no school of national standing closer than St. Louis, and Louise didn’t like what she had heard of most state schools. “If John must go away to school,” she declared, “he must go to the best.”

  Bette Davis with Tracy in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. The two actors had undeniable chemistry but were never to make another film together. (SUSIE TRACY)

  The principal, a Miss Leonard, told Louise that even if she wanted to send John to Clarke—and she hadn’t yet said that she did—the enrollment for the coming year was full and only a last-minute cancellation in his age group could create room for him. Moreover, Clarke, although a private school, was obligated to take applicants from Massachusetts before considering kids from out of state. It all sounded pretty hopeless, and Louise secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Then, less than a week before the start of school, a telegram arrived. The unexpected had happened, and there was indeed a place for John. The Tracys were asked to wire their answer immediately.

  It was a tough decision. Louise drove with Spence to Burbank the next morning, and the two of them struggled with it. “He was against sending him,” she remembered. “He said his leg came first, and that he did not think he should go away from home and Dr. Wilson’s care yet. Dr. Wilson, when approached in regard to it, had said that if we felt we must send him, all right, but that he wished, naturally, that we could find something in Los Angeles for a little while longer.” In view of their attitudes, it would have been easy to say no, but Louise couldn’t bring herself to do it. “It was too easy,” she said. “It couldn’t be right.” She told herself she wasn’t being fair to John, and that she was shirking her duty. And so she argued with Spence: “I leaned over backward in doing it. I do not think I convinced him, but he said if I really thought it right, to send him.” To their surprise, John was delighted. “I think the thing that pleased him most was that he would be with children again.”

  When she left with John for Northampton, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing was still in production, and had Bette Davis not just married her high school sweetheart, musician Harmon Nelson, there might have been more than a strictly professional relationship between her and Spence. “Up to the time of Sing Sing, only George Arliss had given me encouragement,” Davis said. “He was a father figure for me, the kindly, gentle father that I’d never had. My own was a holy terror. But Spence and I were smitten with each other before we knew it. He didn’t have to pretend he was strong, because he was strong, but, oh, he could be tender too … I’ve often wondered if we’d been at the same studio what would have happened?”

  Joan Bennett was also newly married—not to John Considine, as she might have been, but to author and screenwriter Gene Markey. Had there been anything between her and Spence on the first film (and she always denied there had been), there was nothing but genuine friendship between them on this second one. Pier 13 was the slapdash story of a cop and a gum-chewing waitress, a wisecracking romance marred by a darker element completely out of tone with the rest of the film. The script was the work of no fewer than seven writers, principally Arthur Kober, a scenarist and press agent who invested it with what little heart the thing managed to have on paper. The fact that Spence and Joan could take the script’s lines and contrivances and weave them into a credible relationship—something that was clearly impossible on She Wanted a Millionaire—made Pier 13 a memorable experience all around. “I wasn’t one of those simpering idiots for a change,” Bennett said.

  Raoul Walsh, never known for his light touch with comedy, directed with a keen awareness the material was second rate. He allowed the cast to embellish shamelessly—sometimes, as with Will Stanton’s interminable drunk routine, to ruinous extremes. “[Spence] joked his way through it,” Bennett remembered, “and threw in ad-libbed lines—very funny ones, I might add. And he and Raoul Walsh got along beautifully so that Raoul didn’t object to Spence throwing in a thing or two of his own.” They finished in just nineteen days—six under schedule—and Tracy went on to his next, Face in the Sky, virtually without pause.

  Toward the end of the year, Screenland turned a few pages over to Dick Mook, who had a Roman holiday “giving medals to everyone I like and razzberries to everyone I don’t.” He awarded a joint medal to his pal Tracy and Paul Muni for being “the two finest actors on the screen.” (Muni had appeared in Scarface and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang that year.) The nod came as a complete surprise to Tracy, who admired Muni’s work and didn’t think he was doing anything nearly as good. He called Mook and asked him to lunch. “Dick,” he said, “did you really mean what you said in your ‘Medals and Birds’ or was that out of friendship?”

  Mook assured him that he meant every word.

  “You see,” said Tracy, “I’m not getting anywhere out here. My option is coming up, and I was thinking of asking them to let me out of my contract. I don’t want to throw away dirty water until I have clean. But if I’m as good as you say, I should be able to find work at other studios, shouldn’t I?”

  Mook had been an officer in the army during the war, and Spence seemed to regard him as an older brother, a guy whose advice he could ask. It was, said Mook, “an inviolable rule” of his never to advise anyone on a move that was going to vitally affect his or her life. “I broke it that time to urge Spence to get away if he could.”

  But there was no getting away. On October 25, the Finance Committee voted to exercise Tracy’s next option, bumping his rate to $1,500 a week on December 1, 1932. With three households to support—his own, his mother’s, and now his aunt Jenny’s—and John attending the Clarke School for the Deaf in Boston, the extra money would be welcome. Yet he could see no improvement in the material he was being assigned, and Leo Morrison, who saw his commission jump from $100 to $150 a week, was of little help in soliciting offers from other studios. Tracy had little, if any, cachet with the moviegoing public, and the box office performance of his last released film, The Painted Woman, was characterized in Variety as “an atrocity.”

  Riviera, with its five turf fields, its quarter-mile training track, its stables and bridle paths, had become a grassy green retreat, a haven whe
re the reality of Tracy’s life in a cushy sort of purgatory—not quite a movie star, certainly not the actor he had imagined himself as being—rarely intruded. He kept up his lessons with Snowy Baker and started playing twice a week on the scrub team. The speed, the exhilaration, the fear of riding drained him completely, and he left the field utterly spent, his mind blissfully clear of the problems that almost always preoccupied him whenever he wasn’t working. He bought a mount called White Sox, one of the prizes of the Hal Roach stable. “There’s something about horses which, once you really become interested in them, just naturally makes you think this is a pretty good world,” he said.

  The costs were substantial, but no more so than for membership at a first-rate country club like Hillcrest or Wilshire. For the same $1,000 per annum, a player could belong to Riviera and maintain a stable of three ponies. Dick Mook asked Louise if she didn’t mind his living at Riviera, seeing so little of him as she did. “No,” she said. “He comes home to dinner every night, and I’m glad he’s got something that interests him at last … He’s got the most volatile disposition I’ve ever seen—up in the clouds one minute and down in the depths the next. And when he’s low, he’s very, very low. All this exercise absorbs a certain amount of that nervous energy and he isn’t so apt to become depressed.”

  The game itself was quite simple: A team consisted of four riders in numbered jerseys, moving a ball down the field through six periods of play known as “chukkers.” When the ball was thrown in by one of two umpires, the field would erupt with the fury of galloping hooves, divots flying, the cracks of mallets connecting with the hard surface of the ball, horses and riders shoving against each other for position.

  There was, above all, the camaraderie of the field, nourishing because it had nothing whatsoever to do with the industry. To the fore came Will Rogers, who was one of the prime movers in the establishment of the club, and whose 224-acre ranch—originally a weekend retreat—sat just north of Riviera in an adjoining canyon. Rogers was one of the first people Tracy met when he came to Fox, and it was Rogers who seconded John Cromwell’s enthusiasm for the game of polo. Frank Borzage played, as did Dick Powell, Darryl Zanuck, Raymond Griffith, Johnny Mack Brown, Jack Warner, Jimmy Gleason, Charlie Farrell, Frank Lloyd, Jack Holt, and producer Walter Wanger.

  Rogers became a role model of sorts, a man of genuine humility whose loyalties and charities were legion. Tracy lunched most days at Rogers’ corner table in the Café de Paris, where the Oklahoma-born humorist was surrounded by friends. “Only people he liked were invited to sit at that table,” Tracy said, “and no one who sat there ever paid a check.” Rogers considered the restaurant his club, and if he wasn’t filming, he was there in boots, overalls, maybe a sweater or a leather jacket. “He was first to the café,” said Douglas Churchill, who covered Hollywood for the New York Times, “and in the parade that paused at his table were some of the great and near-great of the world. Every visitor to the lot, if in the position to demand such a thing, wanted to meet Rogers.”

  Over the summer of 1932, Riviera played host to the cavalries of the Tenth Olympic Games, and Tracy got to know a few of the participants, particularly Baron Takeichi Nishi, a first lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army. Nishi, with his excellent command of English and a taste for sporty convertibles, became a favorite of the Hollywood set. In early June, Tracy played host to the entire Japanese Olympic team at a luncheon on the Fox lot. The next night, he and Louise gave a dinner in honor of Baron Shino, the head of the team, and were present in August when Nishi won the gold medal for show jumping, Japan’s only Olympic medal in an equestrian event. Having said goodbye to him aboard the M.S. Chichibu Maru, they were surprised to find him back at their door the very next evening. Nishi had forgotten Louise’s birthday, and had flown back from San Francisco to present her with a box of candy. He then returned north by plane in time to catch the ship for Yokohama.

  Louise was six weeks in the East, first to get John settled at the Clarke School in Northampton, then to New York for three weeks, then back to Clarke for a final check before returning home to California. She found the school’s spare, institutional interiors chilling, and sensed the administration’s lack of interest in John’s special needs—the physical therapy his leg still required and the fact that he was behind most of the other children in vocabulary and comprehension. John liked the idea of rooming with two other boys. (“Three!” he kept chortling as he noted the other pieces of furniture in the room.) For Louise, however, it took some getting used to.

  She suppressed her concerns, bothered though she was, and kept quiet when she saw the children on the playground making no effort whatsoever to speak. “Speech had been left in the school building,” she wrote, “and in its place were gestures and grimaces. These children, evidently, either never had acquired the speech and lip reading habit at home or had lost it here, for lack of encouragement. A kind of helpless terror engulfed me. I saw John look anxiously from one child to another. He tried to talk to them. He had words or phrases, if not sentences, for some of the haphazard and unsupervised games they were trying to play. They looked as blankly at John as he did at them. He came over to me several times and shook his head at this strange state of affairs.”

  In Springfield a specialist recommended by Dr. Wilson did a muscle test that showed a slight difference was developing in the boy’s two legs. At the time, John’s right leg was an eighth- to a quarter-inch shorter—hardly measurable—but with eight or nine years of growth ahead of him, there was no telling how pronounced the difference might become.

  It was on the train back to Northampton that it suddenly dawned on John that his mother was returning home. With a wide, dark look of fear in his eyes, he flung himself upon her. Somehow, they got through the rest of the day and that night at the hotel. By morning, when she took him back to school, the storm had passed and he marched off to Sunday school with the other children, gently swaying as he did when he walked, smiling and waving happily, and Louise watched and waved back as they dipped below a hill, two by two, and gradually out of sight.

  It was the morning of October 20 when Weeze arrived back in Los Angeles. Spence was finishing Pier 13 and looking at starting another picture within days. There was a brand-new daughter waiting at home, one Louise hardly knew, and one who wanted, at least at first, nothing to do with her. With Johnny in the East, they tried to make sure he received a letter or at least a card almost every day. Mother Tracy—Mum Mum—did best. “Father and Carroll went to church and Father has gone to ride,” she wrote Johnny on October 2 while Louise was still in New York. “We are all fine and Susie is growing very fast. She has three new rattles and can hold one and shake it now. She smiles and can say, ‘Goo.’ Very funny.” Spence, who preferred wires to writing, contributed just a line or two. “Can you see the very small boat in this picture?” he carefully wrote on the illustrated stationery of the Santa Barbara Biltmore. “Show this to Mother so she may see how fine Father writes.”

  Louise took over when she returned, writing to John every day or two. “Friday, Father and I rode on the horses,” she reported in her first letter. “Father rode on the black horse. His name is Whitesocks [sic]. I rode on the white horse. His name is White Cloud. They went very fast.” Then the next: “Today is Sunday. Father and I rode Whitesocks and White Cloud this morning. We rode up in the mountains. Mum Mum and Carroll are coming to dinner today. Father, Carroll, and I went to a football game yesterday. We had lots of fun.” And then: “Father is working. We cannot go for a ride on the horses today. Perhaps tomorrow we shall go. Mum Mum and I shall go to the movies today and see Father. Father says it is very terrible.”2 And: “Father and I went to a large party Saturday. There were sixty people there.”

  They went out very little. Spence still didn’t mix well with strangers, and the thought of dressing up and going to the Trocadero or the Colony after a full day at the studio was profoundly unappealing. “You know how I feel about nightlife,” Spence said to h
is pal Mook. “I hate it. But I’m at the studio all day and I see a lot of people and have laughs, etcetera. Louise is home all day and never sees anybody. Why don’t you take her to these previews with you?” Mook did, and Tracy found that he enjoyed the solitude.

  The few days he wasn’t working were spent at Riviera, where a game could likely be had on any day but Monday. Large concrete grandstands built alongside Number One Field for the Olympics now held tourists straining to catch sight of their favorites. Women played on the old dirt field, and Louise was asked repeatedly why she didn’t play too. She demurred, diplomatically at first, suggesting that, although she rode, she would never be equal to polo. “Spencer had expressed himself vigorously, a number of times, on the subject of women playing,” she later explained, “and as long as he felt that way, I had no intention of making an issue of it.”

  Face in the Sky was the work of a novelist and short-story writer named Miles Connolly, who was joining Fox after stints as a supervisor at both RKO and Columbia. Connolly’s story concerned the wanderings of Joe Buck, an itinerant artist who paints lipstick ads on the sides of barns. Buck was a cut above the characters Tracy was used to portraying, a rural philosopher and a bit of a dreamer, happy with his lot in life and proud of his work. “I wouldn’t trade jobs with anybody in the world,” he says earnestly. “I mean these guys they call the great captains of industry. Why, they’re a lot of buck privates. Why do you suppose this country built all the good roads? So people could look at the billboards. Who made Americans snappy dressers? Me and my profession. Who gave the gals all their beautiful figures? I did … Say, I keep millions of clerks at work. I make the whistles toot and the factories smoke, and that makes us outdoor artists the greatest salesmen in the world.”