Tracy began work on January 29, 1934, having taken a corner suite at the Beverly Wilshire. Mastering the carnation-wearing Piper, his boasts and vulnerabilities, was as intense a job of preparation as he had ever undertaken for a film. Blessed with exceptional material and fueled by countless cups of black coffee, he managed one of the most deeply layered performances he had ever given, at once dim and overbearing and yet desperate to the point of near-tragedy. Leavening the character still further was Clara Blandick’s acid performance as Ma Fisher, Amy’s skeptical mother, who can’t stand her daughter’s windbag of a boyfriend and makes no attempt to hide it. Aubrey is a big talker who holds down a clerical position with the Mid-Atlantic; all his clothes are castoffs, all his cars are demos. He invades the Fisher family like a backslapping pestilence. Amy’s parents are suddenly “Mumsie” and “Popsie-Wopsy.” The house rings with forced laughter.
“How do you think your mother’s gonna take it?” Aubrey asks Amy, suddenly quiet and pensive when they decide to tie the knot.
“Well, I don’t know. You see—”
“Well, I know she’s not just as fond of me as she might be, is she?”
“Oh,” says Amy, “but it’s not that she doesn’t approve of you, Aubrey. But …”
“It’s because I’m not serious enough,” he says, now a chastened little boy, all knowing and fidgety. “I joke too much to suit a lot of people. Sometimes I just try to kid ’em, you know, and they think I mean it. You think I’m on the level, don’t you Amy?”
They marry, Ma Fisher sourly resigned to the situation as they take their own apartment. Aubrey can’t handle money, can’t live on thirty dollars a week. He spends everything he makes, fills the apartment with tables and lamps and a fancy record changer he can’t afford. (“Plays twelve records without stoppin’,” he boasts.) When his salary is attached by creditors, Amy has had enough. Tearfully, she announces they’ll have to give up their apartment and move back home with her parents. He resists, grandly at first, then remorsefully, swearing he’ll turn over a new leaf. “I’m gonna get down to work,” he vows, building up a head of steam. “No more goin’ to the office late. Quarter of eight every morning from now on … Yeah, and I’m gonna quit watchin’ the clock to find out what time I can leave. I’m gonna make ’em promote me. And I’m gonna stop talkin’ big until I am big! Yessir, you’re … you’re gonna be proud of me, Amy.”
Aubrey’s newfound zeal for responsibility trips him up in a heartbeat. He butts into real estate negotiations at the Road and ends up costing them a small fortune. After he’s been fired, he’s walking a sandwich sign around town when he learns his brother-in-law is ready to accept an outright payment of $5,000 for an invention. (“Why Joe, you must be crazy. Five-thousand for an invention that must be worth millions? Why, they can’t do that to you!”) He takes it upon himself to go see the lawyer involved and demands $100,000 against 50 percent of the net profits. Shown the door, he’s convinced he’s queered the deal and that Joe is going to kill him for it.
Aubrey goes home to Amy, comes clean, tells her everything. He’s a whipped dog by the time Joe comes in, happy as a lark. After thinking about it, the lawyers had called him with their best offer: $50,000 and 20 percent of the profits. As Joe is excitedly relating it all, Aubrey is peering over Amy’s shoulder, timidly at first, and the transformation from Jekyll to Hyde was never more adroitly handled. Wordlessly, the chastened Aubrey, eyes downcast, becomes the Aubrey of old, at once smug and self-satisfied, his tongue rolling extravagantly in his mouth. It’s a magnificent shot, both horrifying and hilarious, screen acting at its finest. As Joe shows him the check, Aubrey regards it dismissively. “Joesy,” he says, “I think you coulda done better.”
Tracy lay low during the filming of The Show-Off, keeping his name out of the columns. The film finished on Friday, February 16. Two days later he and Loretta turned heads when they showed up for Mass together at Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. That evening he was nominated by the membership of the Screen Actors Guild to serve on one of two NRA code administration committees, more than a thousand votes being cast at the Hollywood Women’s Club to fill a total of fourteen slots.
“I am still married to Louise,” he told Walter Ramsey, who was writing his life story for Modern Screen. “There has been no divorce action started. At the present time, there is only one thing of paramount importance, my children, and a bad second best, my screen work. No matter how Louise and I solve our problem, we have mutually agreed that neither of us shall be sidetracked from the children. At the moment, they are staying with my mother. Louise is away on a much-needed rest. Naturally, their custody will remain with their mother, where it should be. But the fact that we have parted with the greatest friendliness means that their home will always be open to me, and, I hope, their hearts.” He characterized talk of an engagement between himself and Loretta Young as being in “very poor taste.” He paused, then slowly added: “This is really a strange time in my life to be giving my life story. At present, things are muddled and uncertain.”
His name once again in the papers, Tracy’s fan mail surged, as it usually did when he was considered news. One letter, in pencil, looked not unlike countless others written him and scores of other contract players, the spelling poor, the syntax shaky. It arrived at the house on Holmby, however, and for that reason alone it received special attention. Inspired, perhaps, by the subject matter of his picture The Mad Game, it bore a Los Angeles postmark and read as follows:
Feb. 20, 1934
Spencer Tracy
this is to let you know you and your friend are covered. By Rattlesnake. Pete Are Silverton I am give you a brake We. could have pick you up and carried you a way But I voted hand of[f] you until you were warned are quite a contact you will save your Self lots. of troble. and Serious worry if you obay orders to the letter you need not worry if not look out we sure get you are your mother are your baby are Miss Young going a way wont help you a dam. [But] we get you [j]ust the same See if you know this car #Lic .36876 [Tracy’s LaSalle] and this one #.84838 [his mother’s Cadillac] who cars are these do not run to the law are try to trick us we have fail Bremar2 was warned 14 days and was only ask $30,000 he refuse it you know the rest he made his own Bargin when we got him you do the same if you dont obay orders we want 8,000 of you and Miss Young this is your. this is your contact 4,000 in 1,000 and the other 4,000 in $50 and 20, and 10. this must be put in a box mark Mr. Silverton and given to your negro Buttler he is to deliver to Western Ave. and Wilshiar Box must be Wrap well he must not. know. anything. only to deliver. and he must not. be. follow. my spy on the look. out. he is to start with this box March 10th at 6.30 PM from your house 712 Holmby Ave
Rattlesnake Pete are Silverton
Don’t let us hafter get you don’t mark this money if you do you will regret it.
Louise had gone to New York thinking she might return to the stage but found the East Coast in the midst of its heaviest storm since the famous blizzard of 1888, the city paralyzed under nine inches of snow. She bought a new mink coat, her first in a number of years, and spent her days walking, snow whirling around her, lost in thought, the sounds of scraping shovels, stomping feet, and squeaking wheels everywhere. Unable to reach her, Spence bundled up the children and took them off to the Town House, the fashionable hotel overlooking Westlake Park where Mother Tracy was now residing. Susie was too young to sense that anything was wrong, but Johnny, nearing his tenth birthday, was upset when told he could never be alone anywhere.
“I felt ashamed at the idea,” Johnny said, “because I thought I was still being treated as if I were a baby. Eventually, after Father probably noticed my annoyance at being considered ‘a baby,’ he told me I was not that and explained all about it. He said that I would be taken away by ‘a bad man’ and would never come back if I went out alone and was found by the man. He tried to make it simple for me to understand. I understood it very well and was shocked and frightened.”
Once the ch
ildren were safe and Loretta—who was shooting Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back—had been advised, Tracy called an acquaintance at the Los Angeles Police Department, Detective Lieutenant Frank “Lefty” James, whose unit was known for its investigations of local mob figures. Once the case was established as a “confidential police matter,” a detective was posted alongside him and would remain his constant companion until the crisis had passed.
Spence was finally able to reach Louise in Miami Beach, where she had fled after the novelty of the snow had worn off. Though he told her he did not seriously anticipate any trouble, he thought she would want to come home anyway, and she returned to Los Angeles the following morning. All the employees at the Town House were on guard, and despite her strong feelings that the whole business was absurd, Louise found herself grasping Johnny’s hand just a little more tightly and stepping just a little more quickly as they negotiated the hotel corridors. Outside of school, where he was guarded by two detectives, the outdoors John saw the most were the garden at the back entrance of the hotel, where Louise was thankful for the company of the gardener and the big doorman was just a few yards away.
While behaving as though there was nothing out of the ordinary, Tracy started one of the oddest pictures he would ever make, a gangster story, fittingly, with the singular title “Now I’ll Tell” by Mrs. Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein, of course, was the famous bootlegger and gambling czar who so prominently figured in the rigging of the 1919 World Series, the infamous “Black Sox” scandal in which six players for the Chicago White Sox conspired to throw five games to Cincinnati in exchange for a collective payoff of $100,000. Known variously as the Fixer, the Big Bankroll, and Mr. Big, Rothstein was most closely associated with horse racing, the 1921 Travers Stakes conspiracy being the best known of his alleged capers.
Little about Rothstein’s criminal activities could ever be proven, and even the events surrounding his death were in dispute. In 1909 Rothstein married a New York showgirl named Carolyn Green, who, though estranged, was still his wife at the time of his killing in 1928. She claimed to know the inside dope on her husband’s various enterprises, including the truth behind his murder. As Mrs. Carolyn Rothstein Behar, she granted Fox Film a $2,500 option on the rights to a memoir she proposed to write on her life with the man Damon Runyon dubbed “The Brain.”
Rothstein was a contemporary of Winnie Sheehan’s in criminal and political circles, and it was Sheehan’s idea not only to make a film about him but to coordinate its release with the publication of the book on which it was supposedly based. The deal with Behar was signed in July 1933, not long before Sheehan was to leave for Europe. It gave her time to write the book on her own but reserved the studio’s right to impose a ghostwriter in the event she was unable to finish. The plan was to have the story serialized in a first-class magazine or published in book form no later than March 1, 1934.
When Sheehan left the first week in August, he was accompanied by playwright and scenarist Edwin Burke, who was to spend his time in Paris researching a film on the life of chemist Louis Pasteur. By the time of their return in October, Burke had not only drawn the assignment from Sheehan to write the screenplay based on Behar’s memoir, but to direct the film as well. A former actor, alumnus of the American Academy and a fellow Lamb, Burke pressed for the unlikely casting of Spencer Tracy to play America’s best-known Jewish gangster.
In New York, Burke stopped off to work with Behar. Looking to punch up the story and fill in a number of blanks, he interviewed some of Rothstein’s former associates, and the collaboration resulted in an original story for the screen called “Now I’ll Tell.” Satisfied the film project was on its way, Sheehan hired novelist Donald Henderson Clarke to bring the book into being. In 1929 Clarke had published his own book on the subject, In the Reign of Rothstein; two days after he came aboard, Behar signed a contract with Vanguard Press, Clarke’s longtime publisher. Burke now found himself in the position of working ahead of Behar and Clarke, adding in material that would more than likely differ from events described in the book. Behar was surprisingly scrupulous about what she wrote, and although she wouldn’t object to Burke’s fabrications, neither would she agree to say they were true.
On February 8, 1934, Fox purchased worldwide motion picture rights to the book for $25,000. By that point, Burke had abandoned any pretense of his picture being a literal representation of the book, and when the shooting script was finalized on February 23, the name of Tracy’s character, the film’s title notwithstanding, had become “Murray Golden.” Tracy was tense and withdrawn during the first days of filming, his police guard ever-present, and he seemed to rely on Burke to an unusual degree in characterizing Rothstein.
The film had been in production scarcely a week when a second extortion letter arrived: “Rattlesnake has not give orders to take you yet[.] I give you nice chance then I strike if you disobey[.] I am plenty good to you I see mother and baby I see you and your queen … I want to see the money with note say that it ok from you and your queen you have my orders.”
From March 6 to March 11, two detective lieutenants were stationed at the house on Holmby. On the evening of March 10, a dummy package was prepared as specified in the first letter, and Tracy’s black chauffeur, Walter, drove to the intersection of Western Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard with Detective Lieutenant Joseph Filkas concealed in the back seat. Walter was told to expect a man to leap onto the running board of the moving car. The setup went flawlessly, but nobody attempted to board the car, drive alongside it, or otherwise collect the money.
There was no further communication from “Rattlesnake Pete” either, and Tracy could think of no one who might have written the letters, other than possibly Walter’s predecessor, whose name he mentioned only because he said that he had been forced to discharge the man. The only handwriting samples he could find—endorsements on the backs of canceled checks—were inconclusive, but police interviewed the man anyway. He denied he had been sacked, told them instead he had quit when Carrie Tracy moved out to Riviera, which was too far for him to go by streetcar. “He further stated that Mrs. Tracy, Sr., was a very nervous woman, highly-strung and hard to please.” The case wasn’t officially closed, but the police decided either the threat was a hoax or the crooks had gotten cold feet. Newspapers published details of the case on March 24, prompting the local office of the FBI to contact and interview Tracy for their own files.
With the tension surrounding the drop on March 10, the national release of The Show-Off passed almost without notice. On his best behavior, Tracy had finished the picture in just seventeen days—something of a record—and it had gone to preview six days after that, playing to a large, appreciative audience at the Fox Uptown Theatre. The Reporter, with obvious pride in having influenced the matter, trumpeted Tracy’s appeal in its notice the following day: “Spencer Tracy does the impossible in The Show-Off. He carries the entire thing on his own shoulders—and the part is terrific. The Show-Off is, of course, a one-part story, with everyone more or less taking back seats and leaving most of the work to the main character. And what Tracy does with it! In spite of the fact that the play as a whole is too widely familiar to hold any new excitement for the theatregoer, and that his role is a series of dramatic and emotional peaks that would tax the strength of any actor, Tracy turns in a performance that is all wool and a yard wide.”
When the picture opened at New York’s Capitol Theatre the following week, business went big, with Jimmy Durante, Polly Moran, and Lou Holtz accompanying it onstage. The entire bill was held a second week, a respectable showing for the 5,400-seat house. The New York critics proved a tougher audience than the public. The play itself had been sixteen months on Broadway in its original run and had just completed a successful revival with Raymond Walburn in the title role. On film, The Show-Off had been done twice already, Sennett stalwart Ford Sterling having originated the role for Paramount in 1926, and Hal Skelly having brought it to the talking screen in 1930.3 Reviewers wondered, with som
e justification, why bother?
The answer for Metro was Spencer Tracy, who was so ideal for the role of Aubrey Piper that familiarity with the storyline was immaterial. Mordaunt Hall in the Times took pains to detail the various differences between George Kelly’s original and Mankiewicz’s adaptation, allowing as how the play, in its newest incarnation, lacked “the nimble wit and subtle shadings” of the original. “Mr. Tracy gives a capital performance,” he concluded, “and if the picture does not come up to expectations, it is not his fault, for it would be difficult to select another player who can do as well by the part.”
Ed Sullivan, the popular columnist for the New York Daily News, thought it Tracy’s best work yet and suggested he was “in the vanguard of the youngsters upon whom the movies must rely to replace the aging veterans.” In England, John Betjeman ranked Tracy in the same class as Eddie Cantor and Chaplin, even as his style of acting was so vastly different: “His appeal is entirely based on dialogue and the wrinkled expression of his enormous Irish face.” At the bargain price of $162,000, The Show-Off showed a profit of $78,000 on worldwide rentals of $397,000. If the film amounted to nothing more than a feature-length audition for Spencer Tracy, it was spectacularly successful.
James Curtis Page 31