James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Without Love moved into the Music Hall on March 22, 1945, and, despite pallid reviews, had the biggest Lenten opening in the theater’s twelve-year history. Accompanied by Radio City’s annual “Glory of Easter” pageant, the picture played to $17,000 on the first day alone and sold a record 92,138 tickets over the four-day holiday weekend. Tracy attended Easter Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, quietly and without fanfare, and was afterward photographed walking along Fifth Avenue, the first time he had been observed in public in more than a month. The next day he was seen lunching with Sherwood, who had just returned from service in the Pacific as a representative of the Navy Department.

  “Are you ever going to write another play?” Tracy asked him. It had been five years since There Shall Be No Night, the playwright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the Russian invasion of Finland.

  “I’m thinking about one,” Sherwood replied, “and if it develops along the lines I contemplate, I’d surely like to have you in it.”

  When columnist Earl Wilson saw him on April 4, Tracy was already talking of the new Sherwood play as if it were a done deal. “I’ve got to go back to Hollywood and knock off an epic,” he said, “then I’m coming back to Broadway to see if I can still act.” He was drinking sarsaparilla from a demitasse cup, sober but weary on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday. “It’s your goddamn movie name that causes you trouble,” he went on. “You make so much money, your economic problem ceases to exist. No options to worry about. The dough rolls in. You forget how to act because you don’t have to act anymore. I heard of a guy who had a 15-year contract at M-G-M. If I had a 15-year contract, I could think of nothing but to get a .45 and blow my brains out. To think of coming in that gate at M-G-M or, for that matter, any gate for 15 years! A Broadway show would give me a chance to see if I can still act. I used to be able to act. Broadway doesn’t care about your goddamn movie name.”

  He was back in Los Angeles when FDR died in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12. His wire to Sherwood the next day, praising the playwright’s radio address, urged him to get on with the play they had discussed—a call to postwar America to take on the greatest possible share of world leadership. “Whoever might be called upon to express your thoughts from a stage or screen would be highly honored, but that is really unimportant. It is only important that you write them and that they are imparted so the greatest number of people may know them.”

  Seen lunching with Louise at Romanoff’s, Tracy told Louella Parsons he would make another picture before going into the Sherwood play so as to free up as much time as possible. “I would be off the screen for over a year if I waited until fall,” he reasoned. “That’s why I came home from New York.” Having, however, passed on They Were Expendable, his talks with the studio weren’t particularly productive. They squabbled over money, Tracy objecting to the inference he was worth only $110,000 a picture. The new deal, after a year’s leave of absence, would limit the studio to two pictures a year, with his guarantee capped at $220,000 per annum. At one point, Leo Morrison let drop the fact that his client had authorized him to terminate his contract, a prospect no one on the executive side found attractive.

  Kate returned to California with plans to do a picture, Green Dolphin Street, and make a Pacific tour as Spence had done. They had scant time together; he was committed to a six-week tour of Europe for the OWI and left for New York within days of her arrival. But once there, something happened and plans for the tour were aborted. Whether it was canceled, scarcely a week before VE Day, or whether it was Tracy who, once again, bailed on the trip at the last possible moment, nobody seems to know. Garson Kanin remembered Tracy once telling him that President Roosevelt had wanted him to deliver a top-secret message to “someone, somewhere” and that Tracy laid the trip’s subsequent cancellation to the president’s sudden death. “The thing I couldn’t understand,” Tracy said to Kanin, “was why me of all people. But, of course, I said nothing and agreed to do as I was told, that’s all.” Waiting at the River Club for the trip to get under way, Tracy, in Kanin’s words, “fell ill.”

  Howard Dietz had assigned the judicious Milton Weiss to look after M-G-M’s No. 1 star, and Weiss, in Dietz’s opinion, had his hands full. “I’m at the Sherry-Netherland,” Weiss advised Dietz over the phone one afternoon, “and the big man is drinking vodka martinis and smashing the glasses against the mirror back of the bar. He says you should be looking after him, not me, and he won’t stop drinking until you show him that you care. You’d better come up here.”

  With Dietz’s appearance, Tracy turned belligerent: “You were too stuck up to come and meet me yourself. Well, let’s see if you can do better than Milton. Milton has it all over you as a diplomat. You think you’re too high class to give aid and comfort to an actor. You’ve had shows on Broadway and you go for actors like Fred Astaire, Clifton Webb, and dancers. It makes you a high-class press agent. Furthermore, you look like me. Well, I won’t go back to California unless you come with me.”

  Dietz managed to whisper instructions to Weiss, whose subsequent departure Tracy didn’t seem to notice.

  I got Tracy up to his suite on the seventh floor and worked on him. I finally got him to agree to go back to California. “But only if you come too,” he said. We took a limousine to LaGuardia, and the three of us, Tracy, Weiss, and I boarded the plane. Tracy’s consciousness was sketchy, so I left him in the hands of Milton, who gave instructions to the pilot to go west after I had climbed out. The plane took gracefully to the air, and I sank into a gratefully relieved sigh and headed for home and bed. The phone rang at midnight. It’s your guess who was on the wire. “You thought you were rid of me,” the voice said. “Well, I’ll meet you in the bar at the Sherry-Netherland at nine o’clock. You’d better relieve Milton, he needs some sleep.” Tracy was calling from Chicago.

  Without Hepburn to contain him, Tracy ran amok in New York for the better part of a week, sometimes in the company of Charles Newhill, who was devoted to him, sometimes not. Agent Harold Rose’s abiding image of him came from this period, when a cab rolled up to the Sherry-Netherland and Tracy came tumbling out of the back seat in the company of an obvious prostitute. Whitey Hendry, M-G-M’s chief of police, was dispatched to New York, and it was Hendry and a few elite members of his studio constabulary who arranged for Tracy, fighting mad and struggling wildly against a set of camisole restraints, to be admitted to Doctors Hospital in the early morning hours of May 11, 1945.

  * * *

  1 It is unlikely, however, that Tracy was hospitalized for a period of six weeks. In August 1944 Jack Lait of Variety, subbing for Walter Winchell, reported that Tracy had spent “two weeks in a Chicago hospital, incognito,” and this is probably closer to the truth.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Rugged Path

  * * *

  When Tracy was moved the following day, it was to a private room on a restricted floor where, under the name of Charles Newhill, there would be little chance of a Winchell or a Kilgallen catching wind of it. There he began the grueling process of cold-turkey detox, restrained, restless, hallucinating at all hours. Fed a liquid diet of milk, eggs, and fruit juice, he was given daily injections of thiamine chloride and turned every two hours like a premium side of beef.

  He strained at the jacket, talking loudly and incoherently and tossing about furiously. He was incontinent, obstreperous, and when they removed the arm restraints, he struck out at the nurses. He thought he saw strange men hiding in the corners of the room and comely young women seated at the side of his bed. Sodium Luminal was administered at eight-hour intervals to promote sleep, and the patient alternated spells of confused drowsiness with fitful, often violent periods of rest.

  By the morning of the thirteenth he was quieter, less restive, and said that he had been on a “big drunk” and was having terrible nightmares. He would cry uncontrollably for minutes on end, begging for cigarettes and then talking expansively of getting better. The doctor visited one afternoon and ordered his res
traints removed. At once he started smoking and talking cheerfully of California. By the first of the week he was bathed, shaved, and welcoming visitors. “Very pleasant and friendly,” the chart read. There were quiet conversations with the evening nurses, but still there were prolonged episodes of weeping. When plagued by intervals of restlessness and loud moaning, he was ordered off caffeinated beverages—coffee and Coca-Cola—and his sleeping briefly improved. Soon, though, he was fearful and restless again, and the medications no longer seemed to be working. He fell into a pattern of asking to be sedated just so he could get a little sleep, but then he was rarely out for more than two or three hours at a stretch.

  Discharged on May 19, Tracy was still unable to sleep very much, but he was finally free of the symptoms of alcoholism. He made his way back to Los Angeles, where Kate was waiting for him and where her own Pacific tour was subsequently canceled because of “ill health.” The events of the preceding three months had badly shaken them both, and now Tracy would be entering a period of unprecedented sobriety.

  Producer Arthur Hopkins, who directed both Tracy and Hepburn in their Broadway debuts, had monitored the situation and kept in close touch with Kate in California. “Spence,” he wrote her,

  is finding his way out … Spence, in his meditations, will learn discrimination. He will recognize the enemy and reject him. This is not a struggle, for struggle gives the adversary strength. It is not Will Power or Resolution. It is realization of God’s presence and God’s desire to strengthen us and make us useful to Him. You too, Kate, in strengthening Spence, strengthen yourself. Faith increases as you draw upon it. It is the accumulation of that [which] vanishes when not drawn upon.

  Above all, Spence must learn that a sense of shame is vanity and is an affront to God … when we pray, it is God who is praying with us. He wants us to understand and be free. Spence is learning this, and you and I with him.

  By 1945 Robert Emmet Sherwood was widely regarded as the dean of American dramatists, a man whose death was likened by Maxwell Anderson to “the removal of a major planet from a solar system.” The author of such varied fare as The Road to Rome, Waterloo Bridge, Idiot’s Delight, and Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Sherwood had enjoyed a string of critical and commercial hits stretching back to the 1920s. At the time he proposed to write a play for Spencer Tracy, he held three Pulitzers for drama—one for each of his previous three plays. In the uncertain business of the American commercial theater in the days immediately following the Second World War, there was nothing more prestigious—nor closer to a sure thing—than a new play from the redoubtable R.E.S.

  Tracy, of course, had attracted plenty of feelers from Broadway, most notably from Kate’s friends at the Theatre Guild, who took his interest in The Devil’s Disciple as a firm commitment and eagerly announced it to the press in August 1941. Paul Osborn put up an original on the basis of Tracy’s praise for Madame Curie, and Oscar Serlin reportedly offered Metro “a terrific amount of money” to lend Tracy for his production of The Moon Is Down, which combined the talents of John Steinbeck and director Chet Erskine. By late 1943 the Guild’s Lawrence Langner was sweetening the pitch by suggesting plays that would accommodate both Tracy and Hepburn, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude and Marco Millions being his top choices. So convinced was Langner that Tracy and O’Neill would make a powerhouse combination, he tried arranging for Tracy to travel to Contra Costa, rationing notwithstanding, to meet the famously reclusive playwright. At the time, however, Tao House was in the grip of a flu epidemic and hospitable to no one.

  In a subsequent letter to Langner, O’Neill thought The Great God Brown “a good bet” for Tracy but warned against Strange Interlude (“Nina’s play—always has been”) and Marco Millions, which he wasn’t keen on seeing revived. “My best bet for Tracy would be Lazarus Laughed,” O’Neill wrote. “Now give heed to this and re-read it carefully in the light of what that play has to say today. ‘Die exultantly that life may live,’ etc. ‘There is no death’ (spiritually) etc. Also think of the light thrown on different facets of the psychology of dictators in Tiberius and Caligula. Hitler doing his little dance of triumph after the fall of France is very like my Caligula.”

  Though Tracy was genuinely thrilled with the substance of O’Neill’s letter, he read Lazarus, with its masked chorus and its Greek pretensions, and frankly admitted he did not understand it. Kate didn’t either, wasn’t much on Strange Interlude, and didn’t know Marco Millions at all. When queried, Langner said that even he couldn’t fathom Lazarus, which, tellingly, had never had a New York production. “I have read it ten times,” Langner said. “I think you have to be a Roman Catholic to really understand it. Maybe if Spencer and Gene got together they could work something out of it, especially as he seems to be willing to rewrite and might clarify for Spencer. I will drop Gene a line and find out whether he would like to talk about it to Spencer.” O’Neill was ill, though, and by the time his precarious health improved, Tracy was committed to Sherwood and his new play and there wasn’t much point in discussing the matter any further.

  The gangling Sherwood was a founding partner of the Playwrights’ Company, a producing organization specifically established to stage the works of its five principals, who, besides Sherwood, were Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice, S. N. Behrman, and the late Sidney Howard. After making his report to the navy, Sherwood set about developing his new play with characteristic discipline, producing two acts and fifteen scenes in little more than a month. As was the custom, Sherwood circulated the playscript among his colleagues at the company and was ready by the end of June to bring it west, where Tracy was nursing a torn leg muscle. “Madeline and I hope to arrive Beverly Hills about July 1st,” he cabled on June 22, “and will then show you the manuscript and talk about it as planned.”

  Bearing the title Out of Hell, Sherwood’s play followed the pattern of his two previous works, an earnest protagonist nobly chucking it all for the greater good of society, plunging himself into politics or, in this case, war, and suffering, in the end, a martyr’s fate. Delayed in his travel plans, Sherwood airmailed a copy to Tracy on the twenty-eighth, dispatching another to actor Montgomery Clift (who he hoped would play opposite Tracy) the next day. Tracy read the play at once, reportedly within hours, and both he and Kate signaled their enthusiasm. “I felt he had things to say,” Tracy said of Sherwood, “things well worth saying that you can’t say in a picture.”

  In New York the playwright spoke with J. Robert Rubin, M-G-M’s vice president and general counsel, and the terms for Tracy’s services seemed satisfactory. When he finally reached Los Angeles, Sherwood and his wife put up at Kate’s rented house on Tower Road, where there followed a series of convivial discussions. “You may be making a mistake with me,” Tracy felt compelled to warn him. “I could be good in this thing, all right. But then, who knows? I could fall off and maybe not show up.” At six feet eight inches, Sherwood towered over his prospective star, his rugged face set off by a neatly trimmed mustache. “Spencer, all I want for myself,” he replied with a characteristic pause in the middle of his statement, “is to see this play played once by you.”

  He nearly got his wish.

  In their early discussions, both men expressed a preference for Garson Kanin as director, even though Kanin’s experience in directing for the stage was minimal. In London the army captain happily accepted the assignment, wondering only if Sherwood had the organizational pull to get him sprung from the military. Sherwood, working through both President Truman and his army chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, assured him that he did.

  A letter of agreement dated July 13, 1945, committed Tracy to rehearsals beginning around Labor Day and an out-of-town opening “on or about” September 28. In exchange for playing Morey Vinion, Sherwood’s quixotic hero, he was to receive 15 percent of the gross weekly box office receipts. A provision giving him the option of investing in the show on a dollar-for-dollar basis was added to the contract, but it seemed unlikely that Tracy would
buy in.

  Sherwood’s sojourn in Beverly Hills sparked the first of a seemingly endless string of rewrites. Nobody was lacking for suggestions—not Tracy, not Kanin, certainly not Hepburn, nor Kanin’s wife of three years, actress-playwright Ruth Gordon. According to Madeline Sherwood, her husband had already done “considerable revision” by July 26 and had sent new copies to his associates at the Playwrights’ Company. There was another round of fixes almost immediately, giving the play, among other things, its permanent title—The Rugged Path.

  Hepburn, who was convinced now more than ever that the best thing for Tracy would be, as their friend Constance Collier put it, to “find release from celluloid fetters,” declared she was going to see him through this thing and passed on the chance to play Isabel Bradley in George Cukor’s proposed filming of The Razor’s Edge. Tracy tried dissuading her from turning the picture down, saying that he really only needed her for the last week of rehearsals and maybe the week of the actual opening, but to no avail. She had, by this point, convinced herself that she was absolutely essential to Spence’s well-being, both personal and professional, and that he was incapable of managing the task without her.

  When he heard the wartime limits on gasoline had been lifted, Tracy decided to motor east with Carroll, leaving Kate in California to further contemplate her decision. The men had so much tire trouble the first two hundred miles, they reconsidered, turned around, and set off again via rail, Hepburn, this time, accompanying them.

  The train was booked solid and it was no secret who was on board. (Lawrence Tibbett, the acclaimed baritone of the Metropolitan Opera, was also a passenger.) At Freeport the boys visited with family—their uncle Andrew, aunt Mum, Jennie’s daughter Jane, who was working at the USO in Savanna, and Kathleen and Henry Willits, who came over from Dubuque. They took a private dining room in the nearby village of Cedarville and had an elaborate family dinner, Spence talking freely of the work ahead. “I don’t know whether this is going to work or not,” he confided. “In the first place, I don’t know if I’ve got the voice for it. I haven’t been on the stage for years and years and I don’t know if I’ll make it. But I feel I want to try it.” The woman who ran the kitchen had brought a couple of teenage girls in to help with the serving. “This little girl was just shaking,” Jane Feely recalled. “The movie star! She was passing the plates around, and Uncle Andrew said, ‘This is Mary Lou Whatever.’ And she said, ‘How do you do … Do you know Van Johnson?’ Oh, Spencer loved that. He said, ‘Yes, I do. What’s your name? I’ll get you an autographed picture of Van Johnson. Carroll, see to it.’ ”