At the time of this conversation with Mr. Tracy, he had requested the other persons present to leave the room so that he could talk to me alone. He finally started to tell me what he desired to say and after several unsuccessful attempts he discarded the idea in the middle of a sentence and rolled over and proceeded to go back to sleep, thus ending the conversation.
The doctor tried to get him to take the hypodermic. When he refused, the ambulance attendant was summoned, and it was he who managed to get the patient to his feet and down the elevator to the ambulance, which was waiting in the garage. The doctor assured Wasson that Tracy was in no condition to work and would be unable to work for several days. The next morning, Tracy was removed from the studio payroll.
Marie Galante had the reputation of being a jinxed picture. It had been in the works, off and on, for two years, the book on which it was based being an international best seller. The tale of a shanghaied prostitute making her way across Central America, it seemed to Winnie Sheehan the ideal vehicle for Clara Bow (though no one could reasonably expect her to affect a French accent). They were ready to go with a script by Dudley Nichols, Tracy up front as Crawbett and William K. Howard directing, when Bow, suffering increasingly from the chronic depression that would soon end her career, backed out. The picture was shelved until Sheehan saw actor Miles Malleson’s adaptation of the German war drama The Ace in London and was taken with the performance of French chanteuse Ketti Gallian. Just twenty, Gallian played her entire role in French and required a translator to converse with the cigar-puffing studio boss. When she arrived in Hollywood on Christmas Eve, 1933, she knew barely half a dozen words of English and had virtually no experience in front of a camera.
Playing opposite Clara Bow, still a big box office name, was a vastly different proposition from propping up a newcomer, and Tracy came to regard Marie Galante as a throwback to the days of Society Girl and Painted Woman, when the purpose of the picture was to showcase the girl and he was kept offscreen until the second or third reel. Sheehan had Sonya Levien and Samuel Hoffenstein do a polish on the Nichols screenplay, revising Marie’s lines so that a non-English speaker could handle them, and then Henry King had suggestions when he came aboard as director. Reginald Berkeley, known for his work on Cavalcade, did his own version of the script, juggling concerns from the German, Japanese, and Panamanian governments over how their nationals were to be portrayed. Subsequently, Berkeley’s work was enhanced and emended by John Zinn, Jack Yellen, and Seton I. Miller. All told, twelve writers had a hand in rendering Marie Galante completely unrecognizable by the time it reached the screen.
When Tracy was carted off to the hospital the day before filming was to commence, it was agreed he would be unable to render services until the second week in July and his contract was extended accordingly. The picture was held, even though Henry King had an entire reel’s worth of action to shoot with Ketti Gallian before Tracy would be needed. Then, after a week, with Tracy still hospitalized, Sheehan announced that he was replacing him with Edmund Lowe.
Loretta Young, meanwhile, was in the hospital herself, recovering from elective surgery of an unspecified nature and getting the word out, as best she could, that she and Spence were kaput. “Speaking of TRACY,” Lloyd Pantages wrote in his column of July 5, “his romance with LORETTA YOUNG is COMPLETELY at the ‘Commander Byrd at the Pole’ stage—you know, FRIGID.” Earlier, Spence had shown up at Loretta’s hospital, flowers in hand, wobbling from room to room, and she had locked herself in the bathroom while Josie Wayne got rid of him.
The final scene in the relationship came a few weeks later, during a charity match at the Uplifters Club. Loretta attended with a party of friends, and Eddie Cantor, acting as master of ceremonies, introduced her to the crowd. Tracy was astride his horse in midfield. “At the mention of Loretta’s name,” said Jack Grant, who was present that day, “Spencer involuntarily rose in his saddle as though shot. He gazed in her direction for a long moment before he was aware that as many eyes were observing him as were looking at Loretta.” He trotted his pony off to the sidelines and made himself as inconspicuous as possible. That afternoon, it was reported, he played with particular ferocity.
Marie Galante finally got under way on July 13 with Tracy back heading the cast. Berkeley had just submitted his final version of the script, a loose compendium of everything that had come before, but Henry King still wanted a junior writer on the set, uncertain as to what Ketti Gallian could actually handle in the way of dialogue. “[S]he was not an experienced actor,” King explained. “She didn’t know how to go from one thing to another and how to create emotions.” A lengthy test King shot of her was excellent, and whatever Sheehan thought of Tracy at that particular moment in time, he felt that Ketti Gallian was potentially the biggest of stars and that she deserved the best possible support, which the forty-four-year-old Edmund Lowe decidedly was not.
Tracy felt a grudging affinity to the white-faced Gallian, who was ordered to stop using the American slang she learned from Maurice Chevalier and constantly hounded about her weight. (She was caught bingeing on chocolate bars out behind the stage, and the studio assigned a “secretary” to bird-dog her every move.) One crucial scene required her to cry, and when she told the director she couldn’t do it, King took Tracy aside and suggested that he grab her roughly by the shoulders and shake her. “Ketti Gallian had been out the night before and had had a few drinks too many,” King remembered. “She didn’t feel so great and she was supposed to be doing this scene where she was supposed to cry and beg. She said, ‘I can’t cry, I can’t cry.’ I said, ‘Spence, give her a shake. Slap her face. Get into the mood of the thing.’ Spence looked at me and I looked at her. Spence just couldn’t do it himself.”
King then caught her by the shoulders and gave her a shake and said, “Here is where you’re supposed to break down emotionally and cry and tell this man you’re sorry.” When again she said, “I can’t cry,” King slapped her hard across the face and called, “Action!” Crying and running her dialogue in a mixture of French and English, Gallian was suddenly giving the camera everything it needed. “Spence,” King urged, “play the scene, play the scene!” Tracy, who had never been witness to such a brazen piece of direction, was dumbfounded. “I never saw a man so embarrassed in my life,” King said, “[but] he finally grabbed her by the shoulders and he got warmed up to do it and the scene came off in great shape.”
Marie Galante was approximately two-thirds finished when, on Monday, August 13, Tracy again failed to report for work and was again taken off salary. According to Edmund Hartmann, the uncredited writer on the set, he turned up in New York and was returned to Hollywood on a chartered plane. “In the middle of the flight,” recalled Hartmann, “he came to and went berserk. The co-pilot had to go in with a monkey wrench and knock him out cold.” King shot around him for a week, then the picture was shut down pending his return. “Tracy came back to Fox,” said Hartmann, “but he didn’t look anything like the man in the footage we already had shot. King was a big, tough guy—but a wonderful man—and he said to Tracy, ‘You dirty, yellow son-of-a-bitch. You ruined the lives of all the people working on the picture. They’re all fired until we start up again!’ ”
Sidney Kent, who was running the Westwood and Western Avenue plants while Sheehan was away, threatened to start the picture over again with Edmund Lowe in the part of Crawbett and sue Tracy for $125,000 to cover the costs of the shutdown and all the work that had to be remade. Kent had one of his people call Neil McCarthy, Tracy’s attorney, and outline the arrangement: Tracy would pay Fox $25,000 upon resuming the picture and half his $2,000 weekly salary for the remaining seventeen weeks of the year. Further, should the studio choose to exercise the final option on his five-year contract, he would agree to a holdback of 50 percent while making the first picture of the new term, with the balance paid only upon completion of the second picture under the deal.
“I recommended to Spencer that he pay the money and go back to
work,” McCarthy recalled. “I was impelled to do this largely because I felt that if we could hit his pocketbook hard, it might act as an additional strength to keep him from drinking, and particularly during a picture.” On McCarthy’s advice, Tracy capitulated and agreed to what Variety called “the most severe penalty ever imposed on a film player for holding up production.” Chastened, he resumed production the day after Labor Day looking wan and lifeless.
As her anxiety over the kidnapping threat subsided, Louise made preparations to return the children to the house on Holmby. Spence, who was making Now I’ll Tell at the time, thought that unwise, the writer of the two letters having shown an intimate knowledge of its layout and their habits there. “This was a real blow,” said Louise. “We fitted into that house so perfectly. I had hoped we would not move again until we moved into a home of our own, which I continued to believe we sometime would do. I fumed and seethed that a featherweight scamp, in concocting such a crackpot scheme, should be able to upset our whole existence.”
They found a new place on Palm Drive in Beverly Hills, a palatial spread on—for a change—flat ground with a large screened-in porch out back. For his tenth birthday, Johnny got a bicycle, something he had long wanted, and, to everyone’s surprise, he was quickly able to master the thing, even with his weak leg (which Louise feared would prevent him from ever riding it unaided). “Yes, he fell,” said Louise, “but other children fall. If he were to be like other children, he must fall sometimes.”
Occasionally, she brought him to Riviera, where she would put him on Blossom or White Sox and lead him around the yard in front of the stables. “When I mounted the horse,” John wrote, “I held the saddle tightly with both of my hands and wanted to get off. I realized I was so high and was afraid that I’d surely fall off and get hurt.” His mother insisted that he keep riding, despite his fear, and gradually he progressed to the ring near one of the polo fields, staying on entirely by balance and still tethered to the lead rope. But he never developed any real confidence on a horse—with only one leg to hold on by—until they got him a Western saddle, which made for a far more comfortable and secure ride.
He reentered Hollywood Progressive School in the fall, attending only the morning sessions (to leave time for his treatments and rest periods), but now, like other children, he was starting off for school each day at 8:30 in the morning. Primarily, he studied arithmetic and made things from clay and wood. “He had needed the companionship of hearing children,” Louise wrote, “and began to make adjustments toward life which any child learns to make at school and with other children, and which were more numerous for any handicapped child.”
Lincoln Cromwell’s first year at McGill University was similarly limited, mostly anatomy and related subjects—lectures, readings, lab dissections, the gruesome humor of students learning everything they can about the composition and workings of the human body. Dutifully, Cromwell kept up a running, if largely one-sided, correspondence with his famous sponsor, reporting on exams and study groups and distinctive members of the faculty, mixing in thumbnail sketches of the other students, accounts of the weather and boardinghouse horseplay, anything that could help portray the color, the drudgery, the genuinely hard work that went with being a medical student. “Immersed as we were in the study of anatomy,” he wrote, “it never occurred to me that any descriptions of our dissections would be offensive to Spencer. And, in fact, they were not. He was always highly interested in even the most technical aspects of the study of medicine.”
Through the turmoil of that first year—which spanned almost the full extent of the Loretta Young affair, the very public separation of the Tracys, the fights, binges, extortion letters, the mediocre pictures and the loan-outs, the arrest off Sunset, and the hopes, largely dashed, of bigger things to come—Tracy had Cromwell’s letters, bright spots in a fast life that was sometimes more than he could handle. “Glad you are getting along so well,” Carroll wrote back in October 1933. “Spencer is away on location. He got a big laugh over your letter about the stiffs. Keep us posted on all you are doing.”
In December, Cromwell heard from Dr. H. O. Dennis, the man who had originally put the two of them together. Spence had read some of his letters aloud, and Denny was pleased to be able to report that Tracy was “very well satisfied with his bargain up to this time, and that he is as proud of you as you are grateful to have him as a friend.” A couple of weeks later, Tracy himself wrote, reiterating in a fatherly tone how much he enjoyed the letters. “Have just signed a new contract [meaning his third option had been taken up at Fox] so you will have no worries as far as your continuing at McGill is concerned.” Enclosed with the letter was a check for twenty-five dollars “which I want you to use for a Christmas present for yourself.”
Cromwell came home to Los Angeles over the summer of 1934, driving a 1920 Studebaker loaded with paying passengers. A few weeks after his arrival, during the early days of filming Marie Galante, Spence invited him to dinner, which turned out to be a formal party at which he was the guest of honor. “After dinner they wanted to go out on the town, but I declined because I had to be at work at Douglas [Aircraft] early in the morning. I recall that Spencer laughed and said something like, ‘Well, he seems very conscientious so we’ll have to let him go.’ ” He saw Tracy several more times over the summer, then was horrified when he called Carroll just short of his departure and found that his benefactor had lost his job and that “everything, including me, was on hold.” The date was August 26, 1934, and it was doubtless Cromwell’s presence—one of the many responsibilities Tracy now carried—that contributed to his going back to Fox the following day and agreeing to Sidney Kent’s punitive terms for reinstatement.
“I was ready to start the second year of medical school,” Cromwell wrote, “and apparently Spencer would continue my support.”
In September Jesse Lasky asked Loretta Young to come to his office. She was making The White Parade for him at Fox, and he wanted her for his next picture as well, a tale about modern travelers stranded in a California ghost town called Helldorado. She knew the film was set to star Spencer Tracy—had been since the spring—and although she would have loved to have done it, she didn’t dare, not wanting to “start the whole thing over again.” Lasky was glad he asked, sure there was no good to come from forcing the two of them to work together again, and within a few days had signed Madge Evans for the role of Glenda Wynant, spoiled society girl. The film was set to start on Monday, September 24, but Tracy, who had been seen around town the previous couple of weeks with actress Erin O’Brien-Moore, never showed, and by noon it was obvious he wasn’t going to.
“The studio gumshoed all the bars but couldn’t find him,” Lasky said. “Postponing the scheduled starting date of a picture is sometimes prohibitively costly, if not downright impossible, because of interlocked commitments geared to a timetable. In this case, we couldn’t even shoot around our star until he showed up because he had to be in almost all the scenes. We slapped Richard Arlen into the part, which didn’t fit him at all, but there was no time to tailor it to his personality. The studio rounded up Tracy a few days later, and I sent word to him that I would never ask him what happened but that it might have happened to me instead of him and I was glad it didn’t so I was willing to forget it.”
Jack Gain prepared once again to charge Tracy for holding up production, in this case one and a half days of overhead for the idle company. On October 13, 1934, Winfield Sheehan returned to the studio and the matter was placed before him. He talked privately with Tracy and, according to Dick Mook, told him that he knew things hadn’t been easy but that he still believed in him. “Forget what’s happened,” Sheehan said grandly. “Get out of town a few weeks and pull yourself together.” Winnie Sheehan, Tracy later told Mook, was, with the exception of Louise and his own mother, “the most understanding person I have ever met.”
With a great weight suddenly lifted from his shoulders, at least momentarily, Tracy made plans to go to
Hawaii for a week with Carroll. He was within a few days of sailing and unusually relaxed when he met with Gain on the subject of a new contract. “While discussing the contract,” Gain later recounted in a memo to Sidney Kent,
he informed me he wanted to make only four pictures per year—he wanted approval of stories—he wanted the right to do a picture on the outside, in addition to which he wanted much more money than I offered him, none of which were granted … In my opinion, the deal was a very good one, considering the offers that Tracy received from other studios, and I am positive that if the discussion has to be re-opened and changed so that we are compelled to make him pay the additional $6000 and keep half his salary as outlined by [studio treasurer Sidney] Towell, that he will definitely walk out on the deal, and the only thing we would have left would be to exercise our option for one year at $2500 weekly, in addition to changing his present frame of mind, which we consider is very good.
Tracy’s estrangement from Leo Morrison was a significant factor in the deal’s getting made, for it would have been considered improper for another company to have opened talks with Tracy while his contract with Fox was still in force. He likely could have doubled his weekly rate by freelancing, yet he had no clear perception of his position in the marketplace. “Spence’s naiveté,” his pal Mook once said, “runs second only to his ability as an actor.” Competition for established screen personalities was at an all-time high, the flow of new talent from the legitimate stage having slowed considerably.
Tracy returned from Honolulu sunburned but rested and went back on salary on November 5, 1934. The next day he signed a new two-year contract calling for $2,250 a week during the first year and $2,500 a week for the second. Sol Wurtzel, grinding out programmers at the Fox Western Avenue complex, had Tracy’s final assignment under the old pact: a high-concept, effects-laden spectacle built around the title Dante’s Inferno.
James Curtis Page 33
