• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3838 0

could afford to pay. Responsible for all of John’s care, his mother’s support, and Louise’s help around the house, there was precious little left from paycheck to paycheck, nothing much to show for a weekly salary more than twice what most families made do with in a month. The circumstances gnawed at him, fueled his occasional rounds with Hymer, Wallace Ford, McHugh, and others in his small circle of friends. He was torn between hoping the studio would drop his next option and knowing not quite what he’d do if they did. Could he pull up stakes so completely as he had before? Move everyone back to New York? Find a play with a chance at a run? Live again without the security of a term contract? When he saw the first rushes on She Wanted a Millionaire, Sheehan told him to lose weight, and Tracy dropped eleven pounds without having to be asked twice.

They all loved living on the beach at Las Tunas, but the closing down of She Wanted a Millionaire coincided with the end of their lease, and the Tracys moved into Hollywood’s Chateau Elysée while they looked for another place to rent. The next day, Spence got word that Hughes had retooled Ground Hogs and was set to resume filming under a new title, Sky Devils, on August 10. In place of Tom Buckingham, whom Hughes had shifted to another picture, director Eddie Sutherland had taken charge, completely remapping the third act of the script and scuttling an Arabian Nights sequence planned for the film simply because there had been one in the earlier Milestone picture. Sutherland, borrowed from Paramount, was a golfing buddy of Hughes’ and a specialist in broad comedy. He first made a name for himself with a largely improvised war farce called Behind the Front and continued on with nearly two dozen features, including M-G-M’s 1928 picturization of The Baby Cyclone.

Congenial and literate, Sutherland recast Sidney Toler’s failed part with William “Stage” Boyd, the original Quirt of What Price Glory?, and set about reshooting all the material Ed Sedgwick had left behind. Fox agreed to return Tracy for four—but no more than six—weeks at the rate of $1,864.60 a week, the same money they had charged the first time around. He was back at March Field on August 29 when word reached him that his cousin Bernard Feely had died at the age of twenty-three.

Spence had first laid eyes on him in 1910, when Bernard was not yet three, and had kept in touch through the intervening years. Spence’s uncle Pat had traveled the state for the Lanpher-Skinner Company of St. Louis, selling hats and furs, and when he retired he had invested in farmland that could be worked by tenants. Then came the droughts and the winds that presaged the Dust Bowl, and as the topsoil blew away, Patrick Feely, by then an invalid, mortgaged the farmsteads one by one. After he died of tuberculosis in September 1926, Spence’s aunt Jenny took in boarders, made doughnuts, gave music and dancing lessons in the parlor. Bernard went to work as an usher in a movie theater and began studying chemical engineering at the Northern State Teachers College. One of his professors there told him he should really go to the School of Mines in Rapid City, and a good friend of his parents, a Mrs. Lincoln, paid his tuition. He went for two years, working all the while and following Spence’s career in Billboard and Variety. He had a job lined up, but then a strep infection set in and progressed to pneumonia.

With Bernard now gone, Jenny and her daughter, fourteen-year-old Jane, were without means, and Spence, stuck on a hot, dusty movie set playing low comedy to George Cooper and Stage Boyd, saw yet another purpose to the earning power God had somehow seen fit to give him. And back in town that night he sent off a telegram to his favorite aunt in Aberdeen, South Dakota:

YOU HAVE LOST ONE SON BUT YOU HAVE GAINED ANOTHER.

It was Johnny who first raised the matter of a sibling. “John, one,” he would say sadly, accustomed to referring to himself in the third person. Then he’d say, “Two—boy, girl,” nodding happily and leveling his hand about chest