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at the beach, and they had trouble convincing him that he could do it. “He just stood there,” Louise said, “arms outstretched at either side to balance himself, shaking his head and looking utterly frightened and miserable. For weeks his progress was difficult and slow. He had to conquer that fear and feeling of insecurity each time, and he complained of his legs hurting. Eventually he walked, but only for a few minutes at a time.” After a month John was on his feet forty minutes a day, and by August he was standing a full hour. He progressed to two and a half hours without the crutches, and was up to four hours a day by the first of September.

The release of Goldie on June 28, 1931, did nothing to alleviate Tracy’s growing anxiety over the course of his career. Despite Harlow’s newfound prominence, Sheehan and the sales department had so little faith in the picture, chopped to fifty-eight minutes, that they opened it in Brooklyn, where the populace could be found romping in the waters off Coney Island, not packing the theaters. Variety labeled it a “direct imitation” of the McLaglen-Lowe series, though not as good. “For general b[ox] o[ffice],” the trade paper concluded, “it’s a poor entry.”

Tracy now had three pictures in release under the terms of his new contract, all undeniable losers. “They said Quick Millions was the most marvelous picture ever made. All of Hollywood said it. I was so excited I didn’t know what to do. Then that picture went out and grossed about a dollar and eighty cents.” Six Cylinder Love brought in more—$327,000 worldwide—but cost more and lost nearly $25,000.

He went back to work in July, starting a picture with actress Joan Bennett called She Wanted a Millionaire. The fact that it was a program picture and by definition, therefore, second rate, did not mean it would look noticeably cheaper or less carefully produced than the premium Fox product. The production values on all Fox pictures, regardless of category, were second to none. Some of the top cameramen in the industry—Joe August, Ernest Palmer, John F. Seitz, George Barnes, John J. Mescall—were employed at Fox, as were art directors such as Ben Carré, Duncan Cramer, and Joseph Urban, the legendary designer of the Ziegfeld Follies. Even the second-tier Fox directors—Ben Stoloff, Sidney Lanfield, David Butler—were talented and conscientious, a cut above the staff directors at most other studios. The things that most noticeably cheapened the films that came out of Fox were the scripts.

Sheehan flattered himself in thinking he somehow knew the story elements that were guaranteed crowd pleasers, and Wurtzel was fiercely devoted to formula in pictures of all types. Between them, they dictated the structure of Fox films to an unusual degree, almost always to their detriment. Fox screenplays were rigidly plotted and rarely character-driven. The typical Fox picture under the Sheehan regime started out well enough—he favored playwrights who knew how to get a story off the ground—but there was always room for improvement. Where most other producers would polish dialogue or bring in a specialist to punch up a particular scene, Sheehan’s screenplays often jumped genre in the third act, shifting to a different locale or taking on an entirely different mood or coloring. The climax would be a train wreck of melodrama, hurried and illogical, bringing the film to a perfunctory end at seventy minutes or thereabouts.3

Tracy and his son John, circa 1931. (SUSIE TRACY)

The script for She Wanted a Millionaire was no exception. It started out as one of Sheehan’s own ideas, a sexy morality tale based on a news story about a beauty contestant wed to a theater magnate twenty-nine years her senior. He set about to make her over, sending her to a private finishing school and paying for special tutors. Eventually deeming her perfect, he then grew insanely jealous, certain every young man in the world was after her. The end came on March 11, 1931, when in a drunken rage he tried to strangle her and she shot and killed him. Sheehan clipped the item from the Los