James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  While the film was in production, Briskin, fighting back, reassured Dr. Wingate that “great care” would be used in the scene “and as both people are fully clothed, we see nothing that can be censorable about it.” Regarding the brief exchange of dialogue, “It is impossible to eliminate the words requested, as they are the essence of our story.” A scene of Bill and Trina skinny-dipping in the East River was similarly filmed with care, although a quick shot of Tracy diving, unclothed, into the water and Young’s similarly undressed body passing over his were removed before the film could be passed for release.

  The matter was allowed to rest until the movie was ready to be screened in early October. Wingate, clearly under the spell Borzage had cast, saw nothing other than beauty in the way the story unfolded and was effusive afterward in his praise of the film. “It struck us as a fine and tender picture,” he wrote Harry Cohn, “treated in such a way as to be satisfactory under the Code. We also trust that it will be free from any serious danger of censorship difficulty.” Predictably, after Wingate had offered forth such a bold and authoritative assurance, the New York State Censor Board, which Wingate himself used to head, refused to license the film for exhibition without a number of deletions.

  Man’s Castle and The Mad Game were previewed within days of each other, the latter having had its release moved up so as to avoid the spectacle of two Tracy pictures competing head-on. Fox management needn’t have worried, as the two films were designed to appeal to vastly different audiences. Mad Game was a gangster picture, perfumed, at the behest of the Hays office, with a lot of indignant dialogue about the kidnapping racket and how it was “the lowest of the low.” Tracy was noted largely for his use of makeup, a plot device requiring his character to submit to plastic surgery in order to infiltrate his former gang. He laid it on thick, turning into a cheap Italian hood with curly, permed hair and a putty nose that Cummings emphasized by shooting him mostly in profile.

  Man’s Castle was another matter entirely, a film made with exquisite care and sensitivity and aimed at a more sophisticated crowd, principally adult females and the men whose moviegoing choices they influenced. The press preview at Los Angeles’ Romanesque Forum Theatre took place on a Tuesday night. Most observers thought the picture dragged in places and that judicious tightening was in order, but all were agreed on the splendid work done by both Tracy and Loretta Young, on Borzage’s command of the material, and on the film’s cumulative effect on an audience.

  “Tracy’s matter-of-fact sincerity and defensive bluster as Bill kept the character at the right pitch every moment,” Billy Wilkerson said in the Reporter. “Avoiding any of the ordinary theatrical tricks, he made the character so real that one forgot he was acting. No study of a man at war with himself inside, asking no help from anyone, could carry more conviction than Spencer Tracy gives it here.”

  When Trouble Shooter finished in mid-November, someone—maybe Loretta—got the idea they should go up to San Francisco for a couple of weeks. They were both between pictures; Loretta’s mother would meet them there, and her friend Josephine Wayne would accompany them. (Josie’s husband, actor John Wayne, was working and said he would come up on weekends.) Tracy suggested driving to Santa Barbara the first night and got a limousine big enough for the three of them, a driver, and Spence’s stand-in at the time, a man named Clarence, whose height and general build approximated Tracy’s own and whose job it was to stand patiently on the stage while the camera was positioned and the lighting was set.

  Young’s attitude toward the relationship, no matter how much she thought she was in love, was that it was a completely impossible thing, dangerous and forbidden, and although she indulged herself as might a frisky teenager, she stopped short of consummation, convinced as she was that any form of birth control was tantamount to murder. She could remember one time when they were to meet the Swerlings in Santa Barbara, and their hosts had conspired to afford them some private time. Spence was perfectly happy with the accommodation, and she managed to stay just barely out of reach until Jo and his wife Flo got in the next day. “Flo,” said Fay Wray, “was enchanted with the romance—and happy to be a confidante.”

  Now Loretta was at it again, planning a two-week vacation in California’s most romantic city, chaperoned as if it were a convent field trip. Spence started drinking in Santa Barbara, passing on dinner, and Loretta, who hadn’t seen this before, didn’t catch on until he was completely and utterly looped. She called Clarence, who was upstairs in his room, and had their bags transferred to the coastal Southern Pacific. She and Josie were gone before Tracy knew what had happened. In San Francisco they checked in at the Mark Hopkins, expecting Spence to show up eventually but not knowing quite when or where. Three days into their stay they were attending an elegant dinner party in the main dining room of the hotel when Tracy slipped into the room, stepping gingerly as he scrutinized every woman at every table, quietly excusing himself and moving on to the next. Loretta could see he was looking for her and hid out in the ladies’ room, telling Josie to alert her when he had finally given up. Three days later, he called her at the hotel, sober and contrite. She almost talked herself into imagining that she had dreamed the whole incident.

  Back in Los Angeles, Carroll called her late one night and told her that Spence was drinking and refusing to eat. He was sure that she was mad at him, Carroll said, sure he had lost her for good, but if she would come down to the hotel and personally ask him to, Spence said that he would stop.

  Loretta was skeptical, unwilling to be seen in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire at one in the morning asking for Mr. Tracy’s room, but Carroll thought it might somehow work. He sent a limo for her and met her at the hotel’s basement elevator. Upstairs, she found Spence sitting on the floor, propped in a corner, his pajamas askew and barely coherent. He told her he was sure he wouldn’t be this way if only they were able to get married. And as she put her arms around him, he leaned into her and began to cry.

  Back at Fox, Tracy went into a musical comedy called Bottoms Up and was soon being linked in the gossip columns with the film’s leading lady, a petite British import named Pat Paterson. “If the off-set scenes of Pat Paterson, English beauty brought here by Winfield Sheehan, and Spencer Tracy were put into one picture you might see the beginning of a romance,” Louella Parsons wrote. “These two are in the same picture, but that doesn’t necessitate lunching together, talking together, and seeing each other at every possible moment. Maybe Spence is just trying to make Loretta Young jealous, or maybe it’s a lovers’ quarrel, but all the Fox studio is agog over his attentions to Pat Paterson, who is as blond as Loretta and the same type.” At twenty-three, Paterson was three years older than Loretta, getting used to a new country and clearly on the make. After an initial flurry of attention from Tracy, she met actor Charles Boyer at a studio gathering and was Mrs. Boyer within the space of a few weeks.

  Spence and Loretta were back out in public again by the first of the year, going to films together and attending industry functions. On New Year’s Eve they went to a movie—“a lousy movie,” Tracy emphasized—and stopped at a hamburger stand on the way home. For Loretta’s twenty-first birthday they celebrated in grand style with Duke and Josie Wayne. The following weekend, they accompanied the Waynes to Palm Springs. A few years earlier, when Duke was under contract to Fox, there was talk of teaming the two of them. “It’s a good thing you’re good looking,” Spence would say, “because you can’t act your way out of a paper bag.” The affable Wayne would just laugh and say, “That’s right, Fats. I’ll catch on, then you watch out!”

  The one time Loretta met Mother Tracy, Carrie was as cold as a Milwaukee winter, and it dawned on her that she was regarded by Spence’s mother as her son’s mistress. Shortly thereafter, Tracy agreed to an interview with journalist Gladys Hall for a piece in Movie Mirror magazine “if it would protect Loretta—I want to protect Loretta in this.” The assumption around town, of course, was that Loretta Young was responsible for the b
reakup of the Tracy marriage, when, as Spence always insisted, it in no way concerned her.

  How could it? I mean, how could it because—as a matter of recorded and verifiable fact—and the register of the Chateau Elysée plus the starting date of our picture, Man’s Castle, will bear me out—I was registered at the Elysée here in Hollywood three weeks before I ever set foot on the first set of Man’s Castle. If anyone is sufficiently interested or sufficiently skeptical to want to check me on this, the data is available. And before I started to work on that picture, I had never done more than lay eyes on Loretta Young a couple of times, here and there around town. I had never exchanged four words with her. I don’t suppose that I had ever so much as passed a remark about her.

  When Hall asked if he wanted to marry Loretta Young, Tracy looked at her and asked, “What man wouldn’t?” The question of a divorce, he said, was completely in Louise’s hands. “At the moment, Mrs. Tracy is living at home with the children. I am living at the Town House with my mother. I have dinner at the house with the children every Sunday. I go out there to see them as often as I can. This morning, for instance, I had a late call at the studio. I drove out there to see the kids. Johnny hasn’t been told anything about it. Johnny believes that I am working and away, as I’ve had to be before, on location and so on. When the time comes and everything is settled one way or another, I’ll tell him the truth. He is entitled to that.”

  Then there was, he said, the religious aspect, which would have to be “very seriously” considered.

  I am a Catholic, you see. Loretta is a Catholic. And so, on account of all these complications it would honestly be rather ridiculous and wholly untrue for me to attempt to make a definite statement. Our personal emotions have nothing to do with what we can do. The way I feel about Loretta must be pretty obvious. We haven’t tried to hide or beat around the bush or camouflage anything. We have nothing to be ashamed of. I am free to go with whom I please, at any time I please. If I were just playing around, if this were just another “Hollywood romance,” if I were a man, recently separated from his wife and from the bonds of marriage and wanting to have a good time for myself, I would be going out with three or four different girls. There is only the one.

  This is profoundly sincere with me. It is serious. It is important. It stands apart from any other experience in my not-very-experienced life. I mean, even before I was married, I was working hard, trying to get a foothold on the footlights, struggling, worrying, no time for play. Loretta is young. That attracts me, of course. I can kid her a lot. I do. We have good times together, by ourselves, in our own way … Now and again we go to the Grove or the Beverly Wilshire and dance, but for the most part we take long walks and have long arguments and a lot of fun. Loretta is fun to talk to. I, who have always especially liked and enjoyed the talk and companionship of men, get a kick out of just being with her. We always go to church together on Sunday mornings. I drive out to her place and pick her up and we go. Mrs. Tracy is not a Catholic, and so, of course, this is something I never had before.

  This is, honestly, our past and our present—the future is not entirely in our hands. There is nothing we can do about it but wait—and hope.

  Bottoms Up was the brainchild of the prolific Tin Pan Alley songwriter and Broadway producer B. G. “Buddy” DeSylva, who had collaborated with director David Butler on three other decidedly oddball musicals for Fox. In an industry notoriously reluctant to laugh at itself, Bottoms Up was an anomaly, a satire which not only took aim at Hollywood but specifically at the company producing it. The story concerned a Russian-born studio head, Louie Wolf, who is beholden to an East Coast banker, a Mr. Baldwin. The matinee-handsome movie star, who may well have been inspired by Tracy’s own circumstances, is a self-loathing drunkard who considers his latest picture “the most stupendous piece of junk I’ve ever seen.” Tracy’s character, a genial cigar-flourishing con man named Smoothie, is down to his last dime and determined, with nothing more than a gardenia in his lapel, to conquer the town: “Now look, Mr. Baldwin, you make 52 pictures a year, don’t you, but only twelve of them are hits. Now my idea is only to produce the twelve good ones.”

  While Bottoms Up was being filmed at Fox Hills, Louise was struggling to get Johnny accepted as a morning student at the Hollywood Progressive School. Spence was in touch with her daily and appeared for an admissions conference one morning when he could get away from the set. “The superintendent at first protested that it would be too cruel to enter Johnny in a school where the children were completely normal,” he recalled. “She argued he would not be able to keep up with them, and that he would be unhappy as they passed him in grades. This almost broke [Louise’s] heart. She said, ‘Of course, you understand, we’re not begging you to take him. It is really a privilege.’ The superintendent, no doubt feeling sorry for her and perhaps a little bit ashamed, suggested that she bring Johnny to school the following morning and she would see how he got along.”

  Johnny entered the third grade as a “guest,” limited to one hour in a single classroom. “The class happened to be doing arithmetic,” Louise said. “This was John’s meat. He was happy, too, at being with children again and instantly became a part of things. His hand went up with the others as the teacher put a problem in addition on the board. I held my breath, as I felt uncertain John would be given his chance. He was.” As John would later write, “I didn’t know that being deaf was a great handicap. I just got along beautifully with those boys and girls without realizing it.”

  It was also during the production of Bottoms Up that an extraordinary editorial ran in the pages of the Hollywood Reporter. Every Monday, Wilkerson printed a front-page column called “Tradeviews” in which he held forth on some timely aspect of the motion picture business. One week, he might rail over labor practices, the next the bane of nepotism and how it made for worse and costlier pictures. The Power and the Glory, the highpoint of Tracy’s career, had been followed into release by the thoroughly undistinguished Mad Game. Then Man’s Castle came a week later and was not the hit it should have been, domestic rentals just about covering its cost. When Fox announced that Bottoms Up would be followed by something called The Gold Rush of 1933, the primary excuse for which would be Tracy’s reteaming with Claire Trevor, Wilkerson could see that Tracy’s work in Power and the Glory and Man’s Castle hadn’t counted for much.

  We’ll place the name of Spencer Tracy at the top of any list crediting really fine performances, rating artistic ability, or an instance of one of the greatest prospective draws in this business if given good material. We have never seen Tracy giving anything resembling a bad performance, and we have seen him in some pictures that were so bad that standout ability was almost impossible. But not for Tracy; that boy makes even impossible characters interesting.

  Tracy never acts; he rather underplays his parts; you never have a feeling that he is trying to perform and that’s what makes him so good. And it’s a damned shame that he has to be tied to a studio whose production intelligence does not approach his fine talents. This business is missing one of the best money draws it ever had because of this. Give Tracy two or three GOOD pictures, one after the other, and there is not a male star (or female) who would top him in selling tickets, for he has everything that any audience wants in a screen performer.

  Wilkerson’s column was required reading throughout the industry, and a light obviously went on somewhere. Two days after its appearance, an item in the paper reported that M-G-M had placed a new talking version of George Kelly’s hit comedy The Show-Off back on its production schedule. “The picture was temporarily put on the shelf a few weeks ago because the studio was unable to secure a suitable lead at that time. M-G-M now has a lead in mind, but is keeping it quiet for the time being.” The next day, January 26, 1934, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer concluded an agreement to borrow Spencer Tracy for the lead.

  Originally, The Show-Off had been acquired from Paramount for actor Lee Tracy, whose first work on Broadway was in the original
1924 production. Tracy’s five-year contract with the studio was abruptly terminated in the aftermath of an international incident the actor allegedly precipitated during the filming of Viva Villa in Mexico.1 The project languished for nearly two months with no obvious replacement for the title role until Wilkerson’s editorial appeared. Suddenly, Metro made a bid for the services of Spencer Tracy and didn’t flinch when Fox specified the breathtaking fee of $5,200 a week—close to double what 20th Century had paid just four months earlier.

  Writer-producer Lucien Hubbard was in charge of The Show-Off but word was that Irving Thalberg was the real force behind the scenes, and Tracy hoped something larger was at hand than a deal for a single picture. He had never before worked at M-G-M, had never even been on the lot, but to be an M-G-M player was to be among the finest array of acting talent anywhere in the world. The Barrymores were under contract to M-G-M, as were Helen Hayes, Marie Dressler, Robert Montgomery, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Greta Garbo. Metro pictures had a sheen and a respectability second to none, and the brand definitely meant something at the box office. No studio was as profitable nor had as many resources at its disposal.

  The wiry Hubbard, who knew Tracy from the Uplifters Club, had been William Wellman’s producer on Wings and would later play himself, a midlife war correspondent, in Wellman’s Story of G.I. Joe. He knew how to make B-pictures quickly, but with the spit and polish of someone who took pride in his work and had an excellent sense of story and casting. His treatment of The Show-Off was a model of classy packaging. Tracy’s leading lady would be M-G-M contract player Madge Evans, the same actress who had appeared opposite him in Sam Harris’ ill-fated production of Dread. Grant Mitchell would be in the picture, as would Henry Wadsworth, Lois Wilson, Clara Blandick, and Alan Edwards, solid players all. The script was by Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had adapted a number of plays to film, most recently Rose Franken’s Another Language and Dinner at Eight. James Wong Howe, who shot The Power and the Glory, would be in charge of the camerawork, and the director would be Charles F. “Chuck” Riesner, a specialist in comedy who had been eight years with Chaplin and codirected Buster Keaton’s spectacular Steamboat Bill Jr. Riesner’s background—he had been a prizefighter, vaudevillian, song writer, and actor—somehow made him ideal for telling the story of J. Aubrey Piper, the well-meaning rattlebrain of Kelly’s classic play.