Colleen Moore, who had played in films with John Barrymore, Fredric March, and Jean Hersholt, thought Tracy the best of the lot. “He was the greatest actor I ever worked with,” she said. Fittingly, Tracy’s most affecting scene in the film was played opposite Moore in the moments following the birth of their son. In the script, Sally’s face is very white, her eyes unusually big and dark. She smiles at him but does not speak. Tom sinks to his knees, takes her hand, and speaks gently: “My son … my son. I’ve got a son. Oh, Sally, they’ll never stop me now. Thank you …” On the set, Howard trusted his actors’ instincts and gave them wide latitude with the unfolding of a scene. Tracy entered in something of a trance, still processing the momentous news that he was now a father. He dropped to his knees at the bed. “Sally, are you all right? I’ve got a son. You gave me a son.” Moore’s face was toward the camera, her eyes closed, but as Tracy spoke, she found it impossible to maintain her composure. “We finally had to shoot it with my back towards the camera because every time he did his scene, I cried so hard because he was so good. No actor ever did that to me.”
When it came time for Tracy to recite the Lord’s Prayer, Howard moved in close, keeping Moore’s face entirely out of the shot. “Our Father … Who art in Heaven…,” he began haltingly, sticking to the spirit of the scene if not necessarily the text. “Thank you, God. Thank you for your kindness … for Thine is the power and the glory, for ever and ever.”
As Tracy later told Clifford Jones, the actor playing his adult son: “This isn’t a business about making faces. You have to concentrate … and listen … because the camera is there picking up your thoughts.”
On location for The Power and the Glory. From left: William K. Howard, Colleen Moore, screenwriter Preston Sturges, and Tracy. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
“In 1933, I was 21 years old,” wrote Lincoln Cromwell,
and about to graduate from UCLA. I had applied to and been accepted at the medical schools of both the University of Southern California and McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. McGill was my first choice, but I didn’t have the funds to attend either school. At this point, almost miraculously, the man who was to become a patron and sponsor entered my life.
Until then, I had never heard of Spencer Tracy. He was just beginning to become known and I wasn’t much of a moviegoer. Yet, one spring morning I found myself sitting on the porch of his house in Westwood, sipping lemonade with Spencer and his wife, Louise. At the end of that conversation, which lasted a couple of hours, Spencer informed me that he would underwrite all expenses for my first year of medical school at McGill and, if I proved successful, would pay for the rest of my medical education. There would be a price, Spencer said. I was to write him a weekly letter, telling him what I was learning and describing my life at McGill. Thus we entered into a pact that was to last five years.
In Brentwood, Cromwell and his family lived next door to a Mrs. Brumadge, who in turn shared the hometown of Enid, Oklahoma, with Dr. Howard Dennis. Concerned a promising student might have to forgo medical school, Mrs. Brumadge boarded a bus one day and rode into town to ask Dr. Dennis if anything could be done. “Denny,” as Spence liked to call him, was a good friend, the quiet man with the wavy brown hair and the glass eye who routinely patched him up whenever he was injured at polo. He understood Spence’s need to make his good fortune count for something and that he had thought of putting a boy through medical school as if to fill the slot he had himself abandoned when he fell in with the Mask and Wig. Tracy, Cromwell learned, had wanted a son to accomplish the great things in life he knew he never would and was unable to shake the notion that the deep sense of disappointment he felt was the same as what his own father must have felt toward him. “There would be people he would meet,” Louise said, “professional people, doctors and so on, and it bothered him. You know—‘What do you do?’ Of course, most of them knew, but then, an actor. ‘What is an actor?’ he said. He did belittle it, and he wished he had been something else.”
Slowly and somewhat reluctantly, Spencer Tracy was beginning to lay down roots in Los Angeles. It was clear he was to be stuck at Fox, churning out second-rate movies, for the full term of his contract. “I don’t believe an actor lives who can make four to eight films a year and survive,” he told Mook one day over lunch. “It’s expecting too much of audiences to ask them to see you that often and not tire of you. I think Paul Muni has the ideal contract—one which specifies only two pictures a year and which permits him to do stage plays in the interim.”
If it was only the stage that could bring him the artistic satisfaction he craved, he needed a different kind of gratification from his work in the movies. The money he made could justify a bad picture only if he could do something meaningful with it. A passage from the Gospel of Luke stayed with him from childhood: “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much had been committed, of him they will ask the more.” When Carroll came out at Christmastime, he was, as he later put it, “ogling the poinsettias and the climate” when Spence, with an extra $500 a week at his disposal (his pay cut restored and his new option period having kicked in), proposed that he resign his position with Thompson’s Malted Milk in Waukesha and come to live in California as his business manager. Louise was too busy with John to manage the accounts as she once had, and their mother needed more attention than Spence alone could provide. Hesitant at first, Carroll said that he had met a girl he wanted to marry. “Move out,” said Spence, “and when I’m finished with my next picture, I’ll go back with you to be your best man.”
Carroll was present throughout the shooting of The Power and the Glory, quietly chain-smoking in the background, and he could see his brother was drinking too much. Apart from dinner at home, Spence was essentially living at the Riviera, especially during the week, and it was easy for him to get diverted on the way back to his room. On nights when he “wanted to go out and get drunk,” he would call the driver he kept on salary for his mother’s use and the man would accompany him “to various bootlegging and drinking joints around Los Angeles.”
At one point during production, Spence disappeared altogether. “To the best of my recollection … he was found several days later by (I think it was) Bing Crosby in Tijuana,” said Colleen Moore. It fell to Carroll—as it had fallen to their uncle Andrew in the previous generation—to go down and get his brother and bring him back to the set. Bill Howard, who had spent considerable time of his own in the Fox doghouse, covered for Spence and managed to keep the film on schedule. Nothing more was said about it. “He just went on as if it hadn’t happened,” said Moore.
When The Power and the Glory finished on April 24, 1933, Tracy was still committed to The American, and he wasn’t happy about it. The film would carry a significantly lower budget than the Lasky picture while exploring some of the same themes, and both were likely to be released within a few weeks of each other. The issue came to a head on the twenty-eighth, when the Fox brass decided to hold The Power and the Glory for a fall release. It was good news for the picture, but W. R. “Billy” Wilkerson, the crusading publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, saw it as a typical case of shortsightedness on the part of the studio and said as much in an editorial. The American, Wilkerson noted, would likely be released before The Power and the Glory, “[s]o when the latter picture is released, instead of Tracy getting the benefit of his admirable work in an entirely new type of role, he will be playing ‘just another old man,’ losing all the benefit that would accrue to him from the more carefully-made production.”
After a tense few days, the starting date for The American was pushed back a couple of weeks and the role reassigned to Preston Foster, arguably a bigger name if not quite the same caliber of actor. Shanghai Madness, Tracy’s next scheduled picture, was set to start in early June, allowing him time to go east with Carroll. Andrew Tracy met the Los Angeles Limited in Dixon early one Sunday morning and drove the brothers the forty miles to Freeport. They had break
fast at their uncle’s cold-water flat, went to Mass at St. Mary’s, and stopped at the Calvary Cemetery, where, clad in his overcoat, hat in hand, Spence kneeled at the grave of their father and wept. “We all sort of wandered off and left him alone a long time,” said Frank Tracy, Andrew’s fourteen-year-old son.
In Milwaukee they stayed at the Schroeder Hotel, and when Carroll was married that following Wednesday, it was at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. His bride was a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher named Dorothy Sullivan, a talkative little redhead, not more than five feet or so in height, and Carroll towered over her like a giant. “This may be just what Carroll needs,” Spence said to his uncle Andrew on the way to the ceremony. “Carroll needs a job and a wife … Carroll needs a life of his own.”
Carroll Tracy had always been the forgotten son, the one his father John despaired over. “John thought Carroll was a dud,” said Frank Tracy, who heard it from his father. “Oh yeah, Carroll was hopeless. You know—nice guy, never got in trouble, anything like that, but he ain’t goin’ nowhere.” Spence was, admittedly, a troublemaker, but he had energy and drive and was able to make his own way in the world. Carroll had only gotten the job at Thompson’s because Sam Thompson was an old friend of the family.
There was a big reception, and the only time Frank ever saw Spence take a drink of hard liquor was at the intimate gathering that followed the main event. The Sullivans were a big Irish family, and there were kids crawling all over the place. “I had the impression that he needed a drink,” Frank said. “It was going to go on for several hours. My dad and I left about nine or ten. He stayed.” The following morning, with Carroll and Dorothy off on their honeymoon, Spence quietly boarded a train for the West Coast and was back home by Memorial Day.
Although Shanghai Madness had been on the Fox schedule for more than a year—always with Tracy’s name attached—he rightly saw the film as a comedown after The Power and the Glory—as almost any picture would be. “What are you dissatisfied about?” Carroll would say to him, having only his own work at Thompson’s to compare it to. “Stick with it. What more can you ask?” The screenplay, by the colorful journalist and short-story writer Austin Parker, was better than for most Fox programmers, and the director once again would be Jack Blystone. “I would have felt more that I was getting somewhere if anyone on the lot had seemed to be taking any particular interest in me,” Tracy said. “But I was just another actor, sometimes getting good parts, sometimes bad. I didn’t feel I was doing my best work and I was getting a bit cynical about it.”
When the shooting script came down from mimeo on May 19, the cast was headed by Ralph Morgan, who had played so well opposite Tracy in The Power and the Glory, and actress Claire Trevor, fresh from her Fox debut in a George O’Brien western called Life in the Raw. Then someone got the bright idea of putting Trevor in O’Brien’s next picture as well, and producer Al Rockett borrowed Elizabeth Allan from M-G-M to replace her. Allan lasted only as long as it took for her to quarrel with Blystone, normally the most agreeable of directors. Marion Burns, who had played Joan Bennett’s two-timing sister in Me and My Gal, had the part for a few days, then Fay Wray, fresh from the release of King Kong, stepped into the role with little more than a week’s notice.
Tracy’s character, Jackson, is given a general court-martial for firing on a Communist boat that killed two of his men. Found guilty, he can’t get a job when he rescues Wildeth Christie from a stranded rickshaw and a near-riot. It’s only her second day in Shanghai and he’s the only white man she’s seen. The subtext is that Wildeth was a wild girl back home and that her father has brought her to Shanghai as an “experiment.” She’s randy and lonely and virtually throws herself at Jackson. (“I’m lots of fun to play around with,” she tells him.) There was a good deal of energy in Wray’s lusty performance and considerable chemistry between her and her costar as well. “No nonsense, no pretension,” she said of him. “I wanted so to complement his realities that I wore no makeup. Without having a light summer tan and without the artistry of the cameraman, Lee Garmes, I might not have been able to do that.”
Where The Power and the Glory advanced Tracy’s mastery of the art of film acting and would serve to cement his reputation as one of the best young actors in Hollywood, Shanghai Madness gave him a rugged sort of sex appeal that came with the frank sensuality of Fay Wray. Where previously he had been a sort of roughneck Lothario, struggling to gin up the chemistry with such nonstarters as Peggy Shannon and Sally Eilers, he now had someone he could connect with as fully as Joan Bennett and Bette Davis, but on a more carnal level, the kind of unspoken appeal that electrifies the screen and registers with audiences. Without saying as much, Shanghai Madness would advance his standing with the Fox hierarchy more than would The Power and the Glory, and not necessarily in the career-advancing way he might have hoped.
As they progressed with the picture, The Power and the Glory was put before a preview audience for the first time on the night of June 18, 1933. Tracy was there, sporting a bruise over one eye and a sprained wrist from having been thrown to the gravel by one of his polo ponies. Billy Wilkerson, who had earlier gone to bat for him over the matter of The American, published a review the next morning in which he called the film “the most daring piece of screen entertainment that has ever been attempted since the camera first began to flick.” After crediting the author, producer, and director, “the big applause of the picture should go and will go to Spencer Tracy. This sterling performer has finally been given an opportunity to show an ability that has been boxed in by gangster roles, thugs, etc. And how the baby does troupe! And the part is no made-to-order affair; it required great ability and Tracy had every requirement. If The Power and the Glory does nothing else, it has introduced (at least to this reviewer) Mr. Tracy as one of the screen’s best performers and, as such, he should be given roles befitting that ability, thereby giving additional contribution to better pictures.”
Wilkerson’s notice made The Power and the Glory the talk of the town, and suddenly everyone wanted to see Lasky’s daring new film. The clamor was so great that Wilkerson took the unprecedented step of running a follow-up the next day, a sort of review of a review, saying the film had actually “frightened us because of our thoughts that the average audience would not go for it.” The challenging structure would nonetheless make it a critics’ darling, the most written-about movie in a long, long time. “Mr. Tracy was heard to remark in the lobby after the preview that he hoped the next time the picture was shown it would be heard. For his deserving information, he is wrong. Every softly modulated word or whisper WAS heard. Great actors cannot help being personal. The same with genius. Mr. Tracy is both in this picture.”
In the midst of all this, Frank Borzage was preparing a breadline romance at Columbia called A Man’s Castle. He wanted Tracy for the lead but had not parted with Fox on particularly good terms. When the formal request for a loan-out came through, the answer back to Columbia was no. Borzage considered Ralph Bellamy, then under contract to the studio, but according to Hearst columnist Louella Parsons, the one thing he wanted “most in all the world” was Tracy for his picture. Plainly speaking, The Power and the Glory had driven up Fox’s asking price for their hot new actor, and Columbia’s Harry Cohn, at least at first, wasn’t willing to pay it. Wilkerson’s item, invoking the word “genius” as it did, likely made the difference, for when the deal was consummated, Sheehan got $3,000 a week for Tracy’s services and a $3,600 bonus merely for agreeing to the loan.
As soon as Fay Wray knew that Tracy had been set for Man’s Castle, she mounted a campaign to land the role opposite him. “I tried to shape events,” she said, “by talking to the writer Jo Swerling and asking him to please help me get the lead in that film.” Borzage reportedly tested a number of candidates, but the only actresses mentioned publicly for the role were Loretta Young, late of Warner Bros., and Anita Louise. The desirability of the part was only intensified by the buzz surrounding Tracy’s work i
n The Power and the Glory. Production on Shanghai Madness was, in fact, suspended briefly to make retakes on Lasky’s picture.
At the close of Shanghai Madness, Spence, as was his habit, asked Fay Wray for her photograph, and she signed it “… with my utmost admiration,” the same words Cary Grant had chosen when he signed a photograph of himself to her. “And we both hoped,” she added, “that I would be in Man’s Castle.” The very next night, she was in a nightclub with her husband, the writer John Monk Sanders, and Tracy was there also, standing at the bar, completely and obviously blotto. “I stood about two feet from him and said hello. He looked at me but didn’t know me or, apparently, even see me … I didn’t get the part in A Man’s Castle.”
* * *
James Curtis Page 27