James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Louise caught up with him in Yuma via long distance—the postmarks having given them away—and Tracy got so agitated he began hurling dishes against the wall of his hotel room. The disturbance caused the guests in the adjacent room to alert the manager, and when the police showed up Tracy was charged with being “drunk and resisting an officer, cursing and breaking up things in a hotel room,” and summarily dragged off to jail. Spectators described a “beautiful battle” in which one cop was able to take both men down “for the count.” As Louise set out for Yuma with Audrey Caldwell’s husband, Orville, behind the wheel, Spence and Tully were on ice, but only long enough to make bail of fifteen dollars each. They were back on the road—reportedly to Nogales—by the time she arrived.

  Andrew Tracy had taken to writing straighten-up letters whenever he read about his nephew’s troubles in the papers. Knowing Andrew would likely read about this incident, Spence sent a long, rambling wire to his uncle before quitting Yuma. It ran several pages and kept returning to a central theme: I LOVE YOU ANDREW. In Freeport, Andrew read the telegram with a heavy heart. “Oh, God,” he sighed, putting it down. “He’s drunk again.”

  Tracy’s disappearance forced Winfield Sheehan to deny press reports that he had been pulled from the cast of The Farmer Takes a Wife, the “big, expensive picture” for which Tracy had been set. The film would pair him for the first time with Janet Gaynor, Fox’s top adult draw, and actor Henry Fonda, imported from Max Gordon’s Broadway production of the same title. It’s a Small World was previewed in Glendale on March 25, where it was found, in the words of the Reporter review, to be “so sadly lacking in story punch that it could be run backward or forward with very few able to detect the procedure.”

  Sheehan may well have sensed trouble in Tracy’s relationship with the studio, for on Friday, March 29, he voluntarily took him out of The Farmer Takes a Wife, not as a disciplinary measure (as some suggested) but in the sincere belief that Spence “should rest before he begins another picture.” Sheehan had his own problems with the Fox hierarchy, as Kent was working a deal that would merge Schenck’s 20th Century with Fox and bring Darryl F. Zanuck to the studio as its new production head. According to Glendon Allvine, Fox’s former publicity chief, it was a move calculated to break Sheehan’s contract “by wounding his vanity and dignity and pride in the company he had helped create, and bringing in a man 20 years younger to replace him.”

  By the end of that day, Sheehan’s troubles at Fox no longer mattered to Spencer Tracy, for Leo Morrison had finally settled a deal at M-G-M.

  * * *

  1 The players are numbered according to their relative positions on the field. No. 1 ranges closest to the opposing team’s goal and spearheads the attack.

  2 For purposes of handicapping, polo players were rated by “goals.” A better player might be a six-goal man, a lesser player a two-goal man. Tommy Hitchcock, one of the best-known players of the 1920s and ’30s, was rated ten goals, the highest possible. Will Rogers, known more for his horsemanship than for the shots he made, was a three-goal player. Tracy was a no-goal player; the lowest possible rating was a minus two.

  CHAPTER 11

  That Double Jackpot

  * * *

  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the most structured of the major studios, a machine of an organization that not only ground out a disproportionate share of Hollywood’s prestige product but sold it with a sophistication that bordered on the supernatural. Much of what happened within its beaverboard walls was due to the philosophies and dictates of Irving Grant Thalberg, the frail production chief whose tireless cultivation of the studio’s star roster did much to establish and sustain the M-G-M brand. The slogan “More stars than there are in Heaven” was more than just an empty boast. While other organizations typically stumbled upon star material, Metro had the fewest surprises in terms of what it had to sell the public at any given moment. “Without stars,” Thalberg once said, “a company is in the position of starting over again each year.”

  It was Thalberg’s doing that brought Tracy to M-G-M in the spring of 1935, but not everyone at the studio shared his enthusiasm. Of the nineteen pictures Tracy made for Fox, only Quick Millions and The Power and the Glory were truly memorable, and even those were considered flops at the box office. Tracy got by playing gangsters, vagabonds, and con men, and although he had genuinely distinguished himself as J. Aubrey Piper in The Show-Off, his reputation as a troublemaker was well known.

  Metro, however, was in the midst of an initiative to pump up its player ranks, and Tracy would fill a valuable slot in the studio’s fabled stock company. In terms of genuine male stars, M-G-M had only Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery as leading men, neither of whom fell comfortably into the mugg category Tracy had so expertly occupied at Fox. William Powell was in his forties, Wallace Beery nearly fifty, Jackie Cooper just twelve. Charles Laughton was strictly a character man, and Maurice Chevalier was, well, Maurice Chevalier. Franchot Tone and the impossibly beautiful Robert Taylor were being brought along, as was Nelson Eddy, who seemingly came out of nowhere. In March alone, nine players were signed to term contracts, Reginald Owen, Edna May Oliver, Robert Benchley, and Charles Trowbridge among them. The studio wasn’t above acquiring talent that, by Thalberg’s reckoning, had been mismanaged elsewhere—the Marx Brothers and now Tracy being the most recent examples.

  A memorandum of agreement between Spencer Tracy and M-G-M was signed on Tuesday, April 2, 1935. It outlined a seven-year deal, calling for five pictures a year at $25,000 a picture to start. The studio would advance $1,250 a week against each film, with the unpaid balance due at the end of production. Tracy was to receive first featured billing after the star or costar, with nobody’s name in larger type. The concluding sentence of the document confirmed that Tracy was not yet done at Fox: “We recognize the fact that this contract is binding only if Mr. Tracy secures a release from his Fox contract.” That same day a meeting took place at Fox Hills. Calls were exchanged between organizations, and the contract Tracy had signed with Fox on November 6, 1934, was terminated “by mutual consent.” Tracy verbally agreed—and M-G-M’s Benny Thau concurred—that prior to April 1, 1936, he would make one additional picture for Fox at the rate of $3,000 a week. Papers on both coasts carried the news of the move the following morning.

  “It is understood that Tracy received a very flattering offer from M-G-M and was very desirous of accepting it,” Edwin Schallert wrote in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. “Winfield Sheehan kindly conceded to him and allowed him to go to the other studio.” The Hollywood Reporter added that Tracy’s new contract would take effect on his thirty-fifth birthday. “His first picture there will be Riffraff, the Frances Marion waterfront story that had the names of Gloria Swanson and Clark Gable penciled opposite it on the M-G-M assignment sheet for some time. Irving Thalberg declined to state last night whether Miss Swanson is still in line for the female lead.”

  Louella Parsons bested them all when she said there was a “whisper” that Jean Harlow would be starred in Riffraff “and right away because M-G-M is eager to get more of her pictures on the market.” Thalberg was no longer in charge of production, his health having forced him to take on a lighter workload, but he was still responsible for the development and casting of seven pictures a year.

  “Spencer Tracy,” Thalberg told Parsons, “will become one of M-G-M’s most valuable stars.”

  The Tracys were still settling into their new home on the Cooper ranch, with its chickens, its horses, its solitary goat. Louise thought the house too big, but the expanse of land—five acres planted mostly with walnut trees—was exhilarating. “We looked at a number of pieces of property with the idea of building,” she said, “but Spencer always shied at the final jump. He blamed this on two hazards: summer heat and the distance from the studio. Luckily, we found a place to rent.”

  There was a swimming pool, and John at long last learned to swim, as did Susie, who was approaching the age of three. They brought White Sox t
o the property, and Johnny’s riding improved as he cantered up and down the driveway by himself. On Easter Sunday they attended a polo match at Riviera. Then, in May, Spence and Louise had a “second honeymoon” in San Francisco, where Louise took the opportunity to visit the Gough School for the Deaf. When she asked if she could hire someone to come to Los Angeles for a few weeks over the summer and work with John on his voice and speech, an exploratory examination was suggested. A few weeks later she was back with her son, and after a brief interview the woman asked, “How much of a hearing loss has he?”

  Louise answered that his loss was complete, but knew it was unusual for a child to be “stone” deaf. John hadn’t been tested since he was eight, and there was newer and better equipment now available. They marched him down the hall to the school’s 2A Audiometer, where they would be able to tell if he had, at age eleven, any usable hearing.

  “Although I dreaded having one more nail driven into the already seemingly well-secured lid,” she said, “still, having no hope, I could suffer no real disappointment.” He was fitted with the headphones, then sat expectantly through the first part of the test. Suddenly he started, surprised, and then he went still, the unmistakable quality of listening in his wide blue eyes.

  “I can hear,” he said.

  Moving to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was like a shot of adrenaline for Spencer Tracy. The care with which he was handled and managed was light-years from the ineptitude he had known at Fox. “Spencer Tracy, looking like a million dollars, is reporting at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios every day,” Louella Parsons reported in mid-May. “If Irving Thalberg has his way, Spencer’s name will be electric-lighted throughout the world within the next year.” When Thalberg’s picture got delayed, Tracy was offered to other producers on the lot, specifically Lawrence Weingarten, who had an original story of high finance for him called “Plunder,” and Harry Rapf, who was developing a script from writer-director Tim Whelan titled The Murder Man.

  A newspaper story, The Murder Man had been written on spec by Whelan and his collaborator, the British playwright and librettist Guy Bolton. A studio reader, who covered the material just days before Tracy’s arrival at M-G-M, thought it a “first-rate yarn, well written, cleverly constructed, full of suspense. Dialogue good and not so snappy as to get under the feet of the swift action.” There was one great flaw: the hero of the piece, a well-known reporter who covers murder investigations for a metropolitan daily, turns out to be the perpetrator of one of the murders he has written about so presciently. “If he could be made to kill the man who stole his wife instead of merely the one who stole his money, we could get away with it.”

  Rapf himself was prone to sentiment and soft edges—Min and Bill, The Champ, The Sin of Madelon Claudet—so he was somewhat out of his element with a hardboiled crime melodrama. For the rewrite, he paired Whelan with a junior writer named John C. Higgins, who was working on the studio’s Crime Does Not Pay series of short subjects. With Higgins contributing dialogue, the two men gave the title character a stronger motivation. Tormented by his wife’s suicide and the reason for it, the character was recast in the image of the actor they now knew would be playing the part—a binge-drinking insomniac with a reputation for disappearing for days at a time. Tracy seemed to relish the part as a form of public confessional, a cleansing that signaled an end to his turbulent days at Fox.

  He began the picture on May 28 with Virginia Bruce, a pale blonde who had been one of the original Goldwyn girls, as his leading lady. The film was, like The Show-Off, a quickie by Metro standards, and production zipped along at a brisk pace. Shooting in Culver City was a different experience from working at Fox Hills, where the atmosphere was decidedly more administrative than creative. Sheehan’s shimmering Movietone complex was like a gigantic amusement park, expansive and contiguous. Metro, by comparison, was scattered over six separate lots, cramped and shedded and separated from one another by public thoroughfares. Exteriors at many studios were marred by airplanes and wind noise and the chirping of birds, but at M-G-M there were also Pacific Electric train whistles to contend with and the sounds of traffic just steps away.

  Stages, dressing rooms, and administrative offices were concentrated on Lot 1, where the colonnade along Washington Boulevard was originally designed as frontage for the Triangle Film Corporation, so named because it was conceived as a gathering of three major producers: Thomas Ince, D. W. Griffith, and Mack Sennett. When that fragile alliance failed in 1919, the plant passed to Goldwyn, which based its production activities there until its acquisition by Marcus Loew’s Metro Pictures Corporation in 1924. Louis B. Mayer, whose own company was located on the grounds of Colonel William Selig’s former studio and zoo in East Los Angeles, came aboard to manage the newly formed company, bringing Irving Thalberg and the dour Harry Rapf with him.

  With Robert Barrat and Virginia Bruce in The Murder Man, Tracy’s first assignment under his new M-G-M contract, 1935. (SUSIE TRACY)

  Whelan had been a gag writer for Harold Lloyd, and he kept the action smart and sassy. He held Tracy’s first appearance until the second reel, but, unlike at Fox, where Tracy frequently appeared out of nowhere, his character dominated the early action as reporters for the Star fanned out over the city in search of Steve Gray, the paper’s famed “murder man,” missing after one of his legendary benders. In Whelan’s fanciful scenario, Gray is found aboard an all-night merry-go-round, snoozing soundly, a long string of tickets draped carelessly around his neck. As with The Show-Off, Tracy was on his best behavior, his lines down, his scenes frequently in the can with a single take. Thrown from a horse one Sunday while riding with cameraman Les White, he worked the next day as usual, nursing a back injury and a sprained arm. When a bit player failed to show for a brief exchange in a phone booth at the climax of the picture, Tracy mussed his hair and played the part himself.

  It was when The Murder Man wrapped after seventeen days of filming that Tracy got a real sense of why M-G-M pictures were a cut above all the others. Where Fox would likely have shipped the film or settled at best for a few trims, Rapf ordered retakes, a new scene, and, ultimately, a completely new finish. When the picture was finally put before a preview audience on the night of July 5, 1935, it unfolded with such impact that the crowd was visibly saddened when Gray was revealed as the guilty party in the picture’s closing moments.

  Tracy, said the man from Daily Variety, played the role with “quiet, compelling conviction.” A week later, The Murder Man was released nationally, finding its way to Loew’s Capitol for the week of July 26. Bolstered by a $10,000 stage show starring Lou Holtz and Belle Baker, it drew $54,000 for the week, excellent despite the common judgment that the picture itself was too modest for a deluxe house. Print critics such as Abel Green objected to Tracy’s character as “the criminal reporter type of make-believe city-roomer who dictates his stories into an Ediphone, gets pickled in the time-honored Jesse Lynch Williams tradition, and talks to and insults his managing editor in a manner no star legman ever dreamed of doing without getting the blue slip pronto.”

  “Despite all this,” wrote Leo Mishkin in the Telegraph, “The Murder Man manages to be a fairly exciting piece of work. This is chiefly due, I suspect, to the acting of Brother Tracy, a man with a keen sense of values and an excellent fund of conviction. As a matter of fact, it is not too much to say that Brother Tracy is one of the finest play actors in Hollywood, and if somebody would only give him a decent story, he would emerge as a star of the first magnitude. He is real, he is convincing, and he seems to know who it’s all about. That he makes The Murder Man a plausible and believable motion picture is a mighty tribute to his prowess.”

  There was still, however, the unfinished business of Tracy’s last two films for Fox. After a studio showing of Dante’s Inferno on April 16, George Wasson had persuaded Tracy to waive billing on the picture. It’s a Small World opened in Los Angeles two days later, essentially dumped by a company no longer invested in the promotion of its star. Small World
didn’t make New York until June, when it graced the bottom half of a double bill at the Times, a small grind house at the edge of the Forty-second Street theater district.

  The day after Murder Man closed at the Capitol, Dante’s Inferno opened down the block at the Rivoli over Sol Wurtzel’s vehement objection. (“You can’t release Dante’s Inferno in the summertime!” he told playwright S. N. “Sam” Behrman.) At first Wurtzel was proven wrong, the film shattering a five-year attendance record in the midst of a sizzling heat wave. The conclusion of the picture’s ten-minute depiction of hell brought forth a burst of applause from an opening day audience, but, with another act yet to come, it was anticlimactic, and the critical consensus was that the rest of the picture was dull. “As you may have gathered,” Douglas Churchill said in concluding his notice, “Dante’s Inferno will be greedily accepted by children and received with mixed emotion by their elders.”

  It flamed out quickly, word of mouth being poor, and it was a clunk in the playoffs, where the strategy of emphasizing the Inferno sequence, with its writhing bodies and implied nudity, kept small-town audiences away. When the final tally was in, Wurtzel’s masterwork posted a loss of more than a quarter-million dollars.

  Tracy had just returned from Santa Barbara, where the annual Fiesta Week was in full swing, when, on August 16, 1935, word spread through the film colony that Will Rogers had been killed in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska. Tracy had been aware his pal Bill was off with aviator Wiley Post, but the true purpose of the trip—the opening of an air route between Alaska and Siberia—had not been widely known. Flags were dropped to half staff at public buildings in Beverly Hills, where Rogers had reigned as “honorary mayor” in the 1920s and where city and police officials now gathered to mourn. All municipal court cases were postponed, and the gala premiere of Rogers’ newest picture, Steamboat Round the Bend, was canceled at Grauman’s Chinese. John Ford, who directed the movie, “went to pieces,” Rogers having declined to sail with him to Hawaii so as to make the flight with Post. “You keep your duck and float on the water,” Rogers had told him. “I’ll take my eagle and fly.”