Wurtzel, whose commercial instincts ranged from the plebeian to the downright bizarre, had overseen a 1924 feature of the same title. What he proposed to get from a talking version was not much different from the earlier picture, an allegorical tale of damnation and redemption with a fabulous tour of the Inferno as its centerpiece. The idea was first floated back in January, the crown jewel of the seventeen pictures Wurtzel proposed to deliver that season. It was formally announced for the program in June, promising an “amazing drama” depicting the “afterlife fate of ruthless millionaires in lower regions” as envisioned by director Harry Lachman and a small army of artists and technicians.
The original outline by Philip Klein and Rose Franklin proposed a radical break from the plotline of the original film, suggesting a sort of Cavalcade of tormented souls: “The drama aims at three separate groups of people—the romance of the so-called flaming youth of today, the middle-age story of a man and wife, and the lonely strength of a financial genius. Each contributes to, and enriches, the other while the pictorial leveler of the Inferno is an integral part of the story development, rather than an illusion of abstract thought.” Wurtzel thought the storyline too fussy, and when Robert Yost, onetime head of the Fox story department, got involved, it was reduced to the rise and fall of one principal character, an itinerant carny by the name of Jim Carter. Wurtzel declared he wanted Tracy for the part of Carter, proposing once again to team him with Claire Trevor.
As a junior writer, Eric Knight, the British journalist who would come to be known as the creator of Lassie, was brought in on a story conference. Carter, Wurtzel explained, was to be a stoker on a ship. “He clouts the engineer and swims to shore and lands at a sort of Coney Island, where there’s a concession—a sort of side show—called the Inferno. He goes inside and meets the daughter of the man and they get married and have a kid. Then he gets the ambition bug. Before long, he owns the concession—then the whole island—then he builds a great big inferno sideshow on a weak pier that collapses.”
So far, so good, but then Wurtzel, Klein, and Lachman proceeded, in true Fox fashion, to bring in a current—and completely unrelated—story, the previous month’s disastrous sinking of the S.S. Morro Castle, making it the third act of the picture. Bewildered, Knight withdrew, deciding it would be better “to play Achilles and sulk in his tent” than to try and urge Wurtzel and his associates to a more coherent treatment. Dante’s Inferno entered production the week of December 3, 1934, as did Will Rogers’ Life Begins at 40, George White’s Scandals, and The Little Colonel, a musical from the makers of Bottoms Up with Fox’s newest and most commercially potent star, six-year-old Shirley Temple.
Fox, for a change, was riding high. In the space of two years, Sidney R. Kent had taken a $15 million loser and restored it to profitability, showing a net income of more than $1 million for the first six months of 1934. In gratitude, the Fox board, including the representatives of Chase Bank, the company’s biggest stockholder, tore up Kent’s old contract and awarded him a new three-year deal. Weakened in the process was Winnie Sheehan, whose rumored departure was always part of the industry grapevine. Kent and Sheehan conferred, posed for pictures, got along for the sake of the company, but Kent was onto bigger things for Fox, and none of them involved the man who was Spencer Tracy’s biggest booster.
Tracy came to terms with Louise’s passion for polo and grew to admire her accomplishments on the field. (HERALD EXAMINER COLLECTION, LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY)
Louise, meanwhile, was barnstorming across Texas with a handpicked group of eight other players, staging exhibition games to “prove to the unsuspecting public that girls’ polo can be good polo.” They stopped in Abilene, Arlington Downs, Austin, and San Antonio, playing to large crowds and consistently making front-page copy in the sports sections of the local papers. Louise throughout urged more and better opportunities for female players. “Our shots are not as long,” she acknowledged in the Abilene Morning News, “but they can be just as good shots, and the players can master the difficulties encountered in hard riding. Then, too, it is no harder on women physically than a good game of tennis singles. I’ve played both, so I should know.”
Spence was plainly fascinated by Weeze’s self-styled “missionary tour,” coming as it did on the heels of the newly organized Pacific Coast Women’s Polo Association. Within days of her return, Harrison Carroll of the Evening Herald Express ran the following item: “The Spencer Tracy reconciliation is almost complete; Spencer and his wife, guests at a dinner given in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop Aldrich (visiting banker) from New York, spent the entire evening dancing together.”
Marie Galante opened with scarcely a mention of Tracy from the New York critics, and now he found himself—for the first time in nearly a decade—generating less ink than his crusading spouse. He gave her a diamond-studded wristwatch for Christmas, was seen out on the town with her, dancing at the Beverly Wilshire and the Cocoanut Grove and talking animatedly at the Clover Club. While their reconciliation wasn’t yet a done deal, they had come to realize they were greater as a couple than the sum of their individual parts and that nothing could really dissolve all the life they had shared, all the marriage they’d experienced.
Dante’s Inferno was hardly an actor’s dream. Tracy was not keen on doing it, but could scarcely refuse given the fiscal sword of Damocles that now hung over his head. Claire Trevor was no more enthused with the material, nor with Lachman’s handling of it. “They gave him a lot of time and a lot of money,” she said, “but it was not an A-picture. Harry Lachman was a dreamer, really a creator, an artist, but crazy, you know? The picture had no boundary, no spine, no foundation. It may have been an A-movie budget, but it was a B-movie script.”
The plan originally was to shoot the carnival exteriors at Long Beach or Ocean Park, but Lachman thought the real concessions too drab to use. So an amusement pier was constructed on a stage at Western Avenue and real-life concessionaires given jobs as extras at five dollars a day. The vast set saved the inevitable delays that would otherwise have resulted from winter wind and rain, but also made it possible for Lachman to shoot round the clock, and frequently he did.
Filming crept past the first of the year and eventually encroached on the start date of another picture, a modest comedy titled It’s a Small World. Rather than delay it, the studio compelled Tracy to begin the second film while still shooting the first, splitting his time between two stages over a period of a couple of weeks. After nearly ten weeks of filming, Lachman had a perfectly serviceable melodrama, the sort of thing Fox normally turned out in eighteen to twenty-four days. Dispensing with his actors in mid-February, Lachman spent the next month—and approximately $200,000— perfecting the Inferno segment, which would occupy an entire reel of footage and employ the services of several prominent illustrators and designers, Willie Pogany and Hubert Julian Stowitts among them.
It was Stowitts, particularly, who was responsible for the conga lines of writhing bodies, oiled and muscular, stripped to within an inch of the Production Code and arrayed along tiered and cavernous pits of fire, their size due, in large part, to the masterly glass paintings of Ben Carré. Nearly naked extras were lined up and sprayed with makeup that gave them a translucent quality, while miniature figures of men were cast in plaster and suspended from a revolving disk to create the illusion of flight. Spun before the lens of a high-speed camera, they appeared to be real bodies floating in slow motion through the sulfurous air of the director’s own private Hades. The miniatures were the responsibility of Fred Sersen and his special effects crew, while the fire effects were the work of Lee Zavits, who would later be instrumental in bringing off the burning of Atlanta for Gone With the Wind. When production on Dante’s Inferno came to an end, Lachman and his crew had spent nearly $750,000 and printed an estimated 300,000 feet of film.
Tracy was sometimes dwarfed by the bizarre spectacle of Dante’s Inferno (1935). Set by unit art director David S. Hall. (SUSIE TRACY)
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bsp; “I ran amuck,” Tracy admitted in the confessional of the fan magazines,
that’s all. I did all kinds of crazy things. That I have not had to pay a sterner penalty is due to the kindness of Winfield Sheehan, the head of Fox, who forgave me for not showing up on the set, and to the kindness, the extraordinary kindness of my wife, who took those blows like a thoroughbred and a sportswoman and did the thing only a superwoman can do—nothing. Louise is an extraordinary woman. That is why it is possible for me to go home again. She has never upbraided me nor berated me. She never will. She never used the things most women would use as baits to a man who needed to be reminded—she never pleaded the children nor our years together nor the “rights” that legitimately grow out of such sharing. She asked me to come home, of course, but that was all. And I have learned—my son has taught me—that there are those things in life which are stronger even than memories, than personal desires or lovely idylls.
It was December 1934, that time when he and Louise were seen almost everywhere together. He was still living at the Beverly Wilshire, but there were times at Riviera, especially on Sundays, when they were together more than they were apart. And on the days when Spence knew he would be working late, when Lachman was fussing over shots or script and taking forever to make up his mind, he would look in for breakfast and sit with Louise and the kids. “My going back had been a slow process in a way,” he told Gladys Hall in February 1935.
I’ve been unhappy for a long while, lonely, unsatisfied. Life has seemed thin and reasonless. But it sometimes takes an apparently little thing, a word, to help one make the decision. I was having breakfast last week with Mrs. Tracy and the children. I’ve never been out of touch with them, as you know. There’s never been any legal separation or anything like that.
Well, the other day, at the breakfast table, Johnny was ready for school. He wanted me to take him. I was due at the studio and couldn’t. His mother said that she would take him. And then he looked at me with a look that seemed to cut clean through all the painful business of the past months and said, “No. Girls belong with mothers. Boys belong with fathers.” I knew right then and there that nothing else mattered, not really. Not by comparison with … with this. He was right. Boys do belong with their fathers and, even more, fathers belong with their sons. And fathers have no rights that do not include their sons. I’d been thinking that I had “rights”—that I could lead my own life and all that sort of thing—but actually I foreswore that right the day that Johnny was born. I was responsible for this young life. He has a great many years ahead of him. And they are likely to be difficult years because of his handicap of not hearing. It is up to me to live those years to come with him. His place is with me. Mine is with him.
Dick Mook talked of Tracy’s naïveté, which was never more apparent than when he was around other film players. When in 1932 James Cagney told Mook that Tracy was “the finest actor on the American stage,” Tracy was nonplussed. He had met Cagney but did not know him. “Did he really say that?” Tracy asked incredulously, scarcely able to believe it. The following year, he approached Gary Cooper at a party and took his hand. “I am Spencer Tracy,” he said, “and I want to tell you how much I enjoyed your work in A Farewell to Arms.” Cooper assured him it was unnecessary to introduce himself, as he had watched Tracy’s own work with great interest.
The two men struck up an acquaintance, and when Tracy decided it was time to come home, he and Louise leased a ranch that Cooper owned on Dinsmore Avenue in Van Nuys. “We’re going to find out how we like the ranch life, how we like the Valley, and if we do, we’ll buy a place of our own there and settle down to some real homesteading. The children are going to have a real home now. We’ll have horses and dogs. I’ve already bought a horse for Johnny and a pony for small Susie. I’ll ride with Johnny. I’ll take him to school whenever I can. I’ll be there when he wants me.”
He added, “I suppose there comes a time in the life of almost every man when he wants to go hunting, big-game hunting, love-hunting, crazy-adventure hunting, some such nostalgia. I have had such a trip. And now I’ve come home again.”
In his later years Tracy maintained it was Fox Film Corporation that terminated their relationship in the spring of 1935. The details of the story, however, kept shifting. “They fired me,” he told the AP’s Bob Thomas in 1952. “Those were in the days when I was still drinking, and I got drunk now and then. But never on a picture—always between. Anyway, they worried. I was all set for a big, expensive picture. But they came to me and asked if I was going to behave. I told them, ‘That’s a heck of a way to get me to behave! If you’re worried about me, why don’t you let me go?’ That’s all they needed. I wasn’t a box office star or anything. I was out of the studio the same day.” Another version had him showing up drunk at the studio and being fired by an administrative executive, allegedly someone who lacked the authority to do such a thing. Sheehan supposedly raised hell when he found out, but Tracy, by that time, had signed with M-G-M and was completely out of reach.
The actual details are skimpy, but neither the Fox legal files nor Tracy’s own records—such as they are—support either account. Tracy did indeed sign a new contract with Fox on November 6, 1934, and Jack Gain’s memo to Sidney Kent clearly shows that no agent was in on the deal. Gain was, in fact, vigorously patting himself on the back for moving so quickly and taking advantage of Tracy’s good mood in the wake of Sheehan’s suggestion that he “get out of town.” Had he waited, Gain implied, renewing the pact would have been much more difficult, if not downright impossible. Tracy’s services were never shopped to other studios; in fact, he accepted a weekly rate $250 less than would otherwise have been due him under the terms of the old contract. Admittedly, the new pact wiped away all further obligations for the delays incurred on Marie Galante and Helldorado, but an agent would undoubtedly have driven a harder bargain for a man who was now widely regarded as one of the screen’s best actors.
A week later, an item appeared in Variety indicating that Fox had given Tracy a straight two-year deal, no options. “Old pact,” the paper noted, “was torn up.” This must have come as news to Leo Morrison, who was aware of M-G-M’s interest in his former client and had an obvious stake in repairing the relationship. Sometime after that item appeared, Morrison got back in touch with Tracy and, subsequently, the two men entered into an oral agreement whereby Morrison would collect a 5 percent commission on all monies received under the deal were he “successful in securing the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract.” Morrison, who was close to M-G-M general manager Eddie Mannix, went into action and was apparently in talks by the time Tracy began work on It’s a Small World on February 2, 1935. Five days into the film, Fox attempted to commence employment under the terms of the new contract, but Tracy, evidently acting under Morrison’s advice, never signed and returned the letters agreeing to appear.
Actress Astrid Allwyn could remember the “tremendous tension” on the set of It’s a Small World more vividly than the film itself. “There is no question in my mind that something was wrong, but I was not that sophisticated to understand the actions of other actors.” There was the pressure on Tracy to sign and return the letters activating his new contract, something Allwyn could not possibly have known. He was also shooting two very different pictures simultaneously, one requiring a long introductory sequence played entirely in the rain. Cinematographer Arthur Miller recalled that director Irving Cummings was “half loaded” on the picture, a circumstance which could not have improved his leading man’s disposition. Moreover, Tracy was in the process of moving for the sixth time in four years. The result was that he was withdrawn and quiet on the set, a considerable counterpoint to the carefree vacationing lawyer he was playing in the film.
The story itself bore a resemblance to the recent Frank Capra comedy It Happened One Night, continuing the proud Fox tradition of cranking out quick and inexpensive knockoffs of the hit pictures of other studios. The mood on the set lightened once Dante’s Inf
erno wrapped, but then Tracy got beaned with a dinner plate while shooting a kitchen scene with actress Wendy Barrie. The injury required five stitches over his right eye and was responsible for a week’s delay in finishing the picture. Tracy was seen at a lavish cocktail party given by Pat and Eloise O’Brien on Valentine’s Day, a two-inch bandage gracing his lower forehead. Sol Wurtzel used the hiatus to make some retakes on Dante’s Inferno, specifically a new ending in the aftermath of the ship disaster in which Tracy’s character looked perfectly natural wearing a bandage. It’s a Small World closed on March 2, 1935, and Tracy retired to the polo fields at Riviera, where he took a serious spill while practicing a few days later.
Whether it was the fall or the move or simply the stress of outmaneuvering the people at Fox, Tracy dropped from sight in early March and headed east with Hugh Tully, an ostler at Riviera. Hughie, the brother of Jim Tully, the famed author of Beggars of Life, knew horses about as well as anyone, and he convinced Tracy that the best polo stock was to be had elsewhere. “Horses out here are no good,” he said. “Better go back east—New England, upstate New York. Good horse farms.” The two men decided they’d drive back to New York and buy some horses. “They’d go off to Virginia, mosey around,” as Frank Tracy remembered it.
They’d be gone a couple of weeks. So before they left, Spence sat down with a stack of cards. Post cards. He wrote about four to his mother, four to Louise, four to Johnny, a couple to Carroll. “Today we did this, and today we did that.” He figured that he would probably not be able to handle a correspondence, and people would begin to wonder where the hell he was. So he got all these cards stamped and addressed, and he gave them to Hughie. First mistake. He said, “Hughie, every few days, mail some of these cards.” Well, Hughie got drunk and he mailed them all the same day. [Spence’s] poor mother and Louise were getting these cards, all of different dates, “Today we saw the Statue of Liberty …” It turned out to be quite a laugh, but it took a while for everybody to see the humor in the situation.
James Curtis Page 34