James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  1 After being purchased by Universal, the film rights to The Last Mile passed to producer Sam Bishoff and his partners, who made the film at California Tiffany Studios. Preston Foster played Killer Mears.

  2 This would have been The Painted Woman.

  3 Perversely, income taxes came due on March 15, with new percentage rates nearly doubling over the previous tax year. With only $750 a week coming in and virtually nothing in the bank, Tracy learned he owed nearly $9,000 in federal taxes.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Amount of Marriage We’ve Experienced

  * * *

  Good notices notwithstanding, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing didn’t put Tracy over as he had hoped. After winning the role of Tom Garner in The Power and the Glory, he fell back to playing muggs and adventurers. “The situation was not of Tracy’s making,” Frederick Lewis pointed out in a 1937 profile for Liberty magazine. “He was simply the victim of a Hollywood wisdom which let Victor McLaglen go ‘because he can’t act’ and didn’t know, until it loaned Shirley Temple to another company, that it had on its payroll—at $150 a week!—the greatest box office moneymaker since the picture learned to talk.”

  The character of Bill in Man’s Castle was another mugg, albeit better written than most—a cocky vagabond whose vagrant lifestyle is compromised when he allows the indigent Trina to share his shanty lean-to on the New York riverfront. The screenplay was by Jo Swerling, veteran of a half dozen pictures with director Frank Capra. Based on an unproduced play, its mix of unmarried characters gave the guardians of the Code fits, particularly a plainspoken prostitute named Flossie whose lines had already been considerably toned down before Tracy ever saw a script. The principal attraction was Frank Borzage, with whom Tracy played polo, went drinking, and flew to Agua Caliente occasionally in the director’s Waco F2 biplane. When Borzage chose to open the film on an elegant note, Bill in tux, opera cape, and top hat feeding the pigeons on a park bench, Trina seated next to him, a famished stranger envying the birds, he was suddenly wary of the extent to which Borzage, the Academy Award–winning director of 7th Heaven, aimed to romanticize the story’s more sordid elements.

  “They had decided that he was to dress up and this was to be a romantic thing,” said Lorraine Foat, who saw him not long after the film was released. “He didn’t want to do the romances in the beginning. He had the fixation, I think, on his looks, but he never really talked about it. He might laugh. ‘Whoa, I couldn’t do that sort of thing!’ That’s what he said about Loretta Young, who was a very pretty, dainty person. They decided … that they were going to change his role, and he was not very happy about that. He just had kind of a strict feeling about the way he handled girls or women on the stage…[When] he played with Ethyl Williams … there was a romantic scene, but he was a very careful distance from her.”

  Man’s Castle did not come together easily. The start of production was delayed two weeks with the advent of a technicians’ strike, then actress Helen MacKeller, originally cast as Flossie, fell ill, causing her scenes to be reshot with Marjorie Rambeau. The delays forced out Minor Watson, committed to John Golden for a play in New York, and Arthur Hohl took his place as the lecherous Bragg. Borzage, too, tended to work more deliberately than most directors, preferring rehearsal to speed, mood to stagecraft. “That Frank Borzage had a way with actors,” said Loretta Young, who felt she finally “proved she could really act” in Man’s Castle. “He made you believe your part and this intensity came over on the screen.”

  The film’s centerpiece was Stephen Goosson’s spectacular Hoover Flats set, an artful assemblage of old cars and ramshackle huts topped with plywood and corrugated sheet metal and weighed down with bricks, washtubs, cracker boxes, and broken chairs. Crowded into the largest stage on the Columbia lot and set against a cubist mosaic of junk and weeds, it descended in forced perspective to the East River and the Manhattan skyline beyond, a sort of makeshift resort for the downtrodden, at once both vast and intimate.

  Production got under way on July 28, 1933, not long after Tracy was observed moving into an apartment at the Chateau Elysée. “Irritable as a bear” when preparing for a role, he had come to relish the advantage of sleeping at Riviera, where he could concentrate on the business of perfecting a character. Away from the chaos of the movie set and the distractions of a home life that included two small children, he could study the script as late as he liked and still get in his stick-and-ball practice.

  That all changed when Carroll Tracy came west and moved into the ivy-covered “Grand Hotel of Golf” with his new bride. By the time the boys’ aunt Jenny arrived with her daughter, Jane, for the summer, Mother Tracy was also living at Riviera and taking her meals in the dining room that overlooked the course. Jenny and Jane Feely took the room next door to Carrie’s, bringing the total number of family members on the property to five. After wrapping The Power and the Glory, Spence retreated to the relative privacy of 712 Holmby, at least temporarily.

  Family portrait, 1932. (SUSIE TRACY)

  Jane’s first memory of the house in Westwood was of year-old Susie in the yard in a playpen. There was a pool and a pair of servants named Felix and Bessie. Spencer wasn’t around much, but Louise was unfailingly solicitous and kindly.

  Jane admired Louise’s elegance and poise, the way she carried herself and the way she spoke. “Her diction was so perfect, so beautiful. There was a little bit of a formality to her that attracted me. She seemed to me to be kind of an actressy sort of person, and I admired her because I was at that stage where I thought people in the theatre—actors and actresses—were kind of superior to the rest of us.” Louise was a little taller than Jane, but they wore the same dress size. “I inherited her clothing, always. We always got the two big boxes from Aunt Carrie and Louise. I got through high school and two years of college in her good clothes. And beyond that.” A check also arrived each month from the time of Bernard’s death in 1931. “Sometimes it would be late and [Mama] would write to Louise because we got to depend on it. And it varied in size; sometimes it was $50 and sometimes $75 and sometimes $100.” Jenny Feely tried to tell Louise one time how much their generosity had meant to them. “Aunt Jenny,” Louise said calmly, cutting her off, “that’s what money is for.”

  Johnny was a constant presence, delighted to have visitors around. As Jane recalled,

  He practiced speaking and watching you, learning how to read your lips. After a while, it was no problem talking to him because he was pretty good. He was a very sunny, happy little kid. He was lonely, though. There was nobody around to play with. He hadn’t gotten into a school where he had any kind of association with children. [Louise] was determined that he would be mainstreamed immediately. He was not going to be placed among deaf children. He was going to be made to speak. All of us were told, “When he comes into the room, we all stop and we speak to John first.” When he would come in he would say, “Mother, what talk?” And she would explain what we were talking about. And she would impress on all of us that we should speak slowly and include him in the conversation. I guess you could say she had this overpowering sense of direction and protection, that this was her life’s work.

  There were no outward signs of trouble; the Tracys were an extraordinarily demonstrative family. “Everybody kissed everybody when they came in and when they left. Much outward affection among all of them then. Carroll and Dorothy and Spencer and Louise would go and kiss Mother Tracy before they left and when they came in. Everybody was very affectionate.” Louise and Spencer also seemed perfectly comfortable with one another. “Good-natured. They kind of bantered a little bit. I don’t remember there being any harshness or any anger between them at that time. I didn’t notice it. I think there probably was an undercurrent; must have been at that time, but it was not evident to me.”

  When Spence moved to the Chateau, a huge, Normandy-themed castle a few blocks from the Columbia lot, no one seemed to notice. Louise took it in stride, focused as she was on Johnny and her plan to establish a
private school for the deaf. The Chateau, however, was a high-profile venue. There were a lot of tenants employed in the industry, so his comings and goings were observed to a degree unthinkable at the Riviera. When he sat down for lunch with a writer from Modern Screen, the subject naturally got raised: two Hollywood divorces had broken that same day, and two others had come to light the previous week—including the headline-grabbing separation of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

  “The day Louise and I stood up,” Tracy told the man, a freelancer named Carter Bruce, “we were just two half-scared—and also half-starved—young stock actors who had felt mutual attraction, part mental but a greater part sex. Marriage came to us over a period of years during which we shared each other’s life. Those years weren’t any too fat either. When I married Louise, I thought she was a pretty girl and about the best actress I had ever seen. But I didn’t know then that she was the kind who could laugh on an empty stomach, who could kid away the tough sledding and never care that she wore the same dress day in and day out months at a time.”

  He dismissed the rumors that he and Louise were separating. “They make me laugh. They’re too silly to even deny. I don’t think anyone could ever say enough words between us to dissolve the amount of marriage we’ve experienced—long before Hollywood and her standards happened to us.”

  Ironically, by the time the article appeared, word of a Tracy “separation” was, in fact, old news. The Examiner carried an item about it on August 30, the same day Man’s Castle wrapped at Columbia. “If there is any blame to be attached, it is mine,” Tracy told a reporter. “If our friends will only let us alone, I think we can work out our problems.” He attributed the separation to growing incompatibility and nothing more. “Mrs. Tracy and I are still excellent friends, and perhaps living apart for a while will lead to a reunion.”

  Louise made no statement, preferring to let Spence do all the talking, yet it was her idea to publicly confirm a trial separation. “The papers forced us into it,” she later explained to their friend Mook. “They found out Spencer had taken an apartment at a local hotel and threatened all sorts of things if we didn’t give them some kind of statement, so we decided this was the simplest way out—that it would clarify matters. It isn’t what we would have chosen for ourselves, but, under the circumstances, it was simply making the best of a bad bargain.” Spence added bitterly: “I gave them a statement of the facts as they are, but that wasn’t enough. They wanted a statement with ‘hot news’ in it.”

  Four weeks into the matter, it became apparent there was something more to the separation than just “growing incompatibility.” Man’s Castle was made over the hottest days of summer, turning the uncooled soundstage with the Hooverville set into what one visitor described as a blazing inferno. Takes had to be aborted as perspiration beaded on the foreheads of the actors, and more work got done at night than during the oppressive afternoon hours. At the tender age of twenty, Loretta Young already had fifty films, an annulled marriage, and several high-profile relationships to her credit. (“I’ve always been very susceptible to men,” she once commented, “and all of them were gorgeous.”) Small and slight, with light brown hair and an underdeveloped figure, her fortune was her face, a tableau of Catholic innocence, soulful blue eyes, and full lips, convincingly virginal, yet old enough to radiate sex appeal, sensual and restrained.

  “Spencer and I were such complete strangers that we hadn’t even seen one another on the screen previous to our being cast together in Man’s Castle,” she said at the time. “I admired his work so much during rehearsal that I went to see several of his recent pictures. He later flattered me very much by telling me that he had done the same thing.” She had worked with some of the screen’s finest actors, Walter Huston, John Barrymore, and the late Lon Chaney among them, but she had never met anyone quite like Spencer Tracy. “Such fire, the talent blazed at you.” The company worked late one night when the picture was about ten days along. “Spencer asked me if I would care to dine with him and run over some of the dialogue. I accepted and we went to the Victor Hugo restaurant. A columnist saw us there and the next day we read the first of the romantic reports.”

  Stephen Goosson’s Hoover Flats set for Man’s Castle, which covered 21,000 square feet, lent size and color to an otherwise intimate love story. Here Tracy and Loretta Young, age twenty, pose with director Frank Borzage, 1933. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  Young, who went by her given name, “Gretchen,” among friends and family, made little secret of her infatuation with Tracy. Borzage, in fact, may have encouraged it, knowing it was helping the film. (“The story was a trifle,” she said, “but we lived it.”) For once she didn’t push her scenes, sensing the camera was picking up the underlying emotions between them. It was also picking up what Tracy was thinking, a trickier proposition as he was as cool as the character he was playing. Yet she could whisper in his ear and his expression would speak volumes.

  “I believe,” he said, “that the first time I ever really became conscious of Loretta as a girl, as a woman, was the first time she noticed me as a man—to feel sorry for. She watched me lunching on the lot. She could see that I was feeling kinda low … And so, that day Loretta came over to me and out of the goodness of her heart asked if I would like to drive out to her house and have a glass of beer. We were knocking off early. I told her I would. I did. We sat in the garden two or three hours, Loretta, her mother, and I. We talked and had a lot of laughs. It was pleasant. It was fun. Life seemed sort of decent again.”

  Tracy took to calling her “little ol’ Whoosits,” which was what the character of Bill called Trina in the story. His confidence and command of the role played out in stark contrast to his own personal diffidence. Acting was the one thing he could do in which he had unshakable confidence. Cursed with a sensitive nature, he was all too aware of his inadequacies as a husband, as a father, as a son, as a lover. He was homely, overweight, as ill suited to stardom as any actor could possibly be. “The idea,” he said, “that such a gorgeous person—so sophisticated, so capable of having any man in the world she wanted—should prefer me. It was just too much.”

  Alarmed, Young’s agent, former First National executive Dave Thompson, phoned her mother to advise her that Tracy was widely regarded around town as an alcoholic. “He must have meant Lee Tracy, not Spence,” Gretchen said when her mother relayed the news. Worse to Gladys Belzer was the fact that Tracy was a Catholic with a wife and two kids. “Don’t fall in love with him!” she warned.

  “Oh, Mama … I think I already have!”

  Amid much fanfare, The Power and the Glory had its world premiere at New York’s Gaiety Theatre on the night of August 16, 1933. Although the film itself drew oddly mixed reviews—the Times, Variety, and the New York American all according it raves, the World-Telegram, Herald Tribune, and Evening Post somewhat less emphatic—notices for the actors, Tracy in particular, were exceptionally fine. For the first time, he saw such words as “flawless,” “vivid,” and “brilliant” applied to one of his movie performances. Given the forgettable fare in which he routinely appeared, many of the best reactions were couched in degrees of genuine surprise. Regina Crewe of the American marveled at the transformative arc of his work in tones that suggested she never would have thought it possible: “The man grows in stature before our eyes. He develops gradually, logically, inexorably from a rural urchin of the swimmin’ hole to the iron man of far-reaching affairs. He becomes a familiar figure, understandable in all his strengths and weaknesses, at once admirable and fearsome. The role dominates the drama. And Spencer Tracy dominates the role.” Bland Johannsen of the Daily Mirror thought Tracy’s performance matchless. “He never has had a more exacting role, or one which he handled with such sure skill and finish.” Mordaunt Hall’s notice in the Times went so far as to declare, “No more convincing performance has been given on the screen than Spencer Tracy’s impersonation of Tom Garner.”

  Tracy’s off-screen relationship with Lorett
a Young paid dividends for director Frank Borzage. Man’s Castle is one of Borzage’s best-remembered films. (SUSIE TRACY)

  The Gaiety being a legit house commandeered by Fox for its class product, The Power and the Glory became the first roadshow attraction of the new season, a two-a-day reserved-seat event going up against such mass-market favorites as Tugboat Annie and RKO’s Morning Glory. Driven by the reviews as much as the ballyhoo—and more than a little curiosity regarding its “Narratage” technique—The Power and the Glory grossed $9,500 for its first seven days, solid business for an eight-hundred-seat theater—better, in fact, than Cavalcade had done at the exact same venue. It dipped only slightly for its second week, M-G-M’s all-star Dinner at Eight giving it the stiffest possible competition. The Power and the Glory managed a total of three weeks and five days at the Gaiety and could have stayed even longer had the theater not been committed to the premiere of Berkeley Square on September 13. Adroitly, Fox shifted the picture to the new Radio City Music Hall (as it had Cavalcade), and it played yet another week at the theater that had supplanted the Roxy as the world’s largest.

  By all standards, the picture looked like a hit. Fueled again by mostly excellent reviews, it did comparable business in Chicago and Los Angeles (where it was incongruously paired with speakeasy impresario Texas Guinan’s torrid stage act). Past its initial showcasings in major metropolitan markets, however, The Power and the Glory was a loser, failing to ignite the passions of grassroots moviegoers who knew only vaguely who Spencer Tracy was, who preferred Colleen Moore in her flapper days, and who liked their storytelling straightforward and linear. Subsequent runs drew flat rentals of twenty-five dollars or less in neighborhood houses. According to studio records, the picture ultimately drew $563,323.88 in worldwide rentals—respectable, even exceptional given the average maximum for a picture was in the $400,000 range—but scarcely enough for an A-picture of its stature to break even. It was never reissued. A few years later, largely forgotten, the negative and master lavender were destroyed in a New Jersey fire.