Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [106]
All during the production of Disorderly Conduct, the Fox lot was crawling with auditors from the east, Chase Bank representatives seeking to limit Sheehan’s influence solely to the production of features. They brought new people in for budgeting and scheduling, and Keith Weeks, the former prohibition agent who was Sheehan’s handpicked studio manager, was given fifteen minutes to clear out of his office. Harley Clarke had been removed as Fox president—sent back to Chicago by the very people who had put him there in the first place—and replaced with Edward R. Tinker, board chairman of Chase National, a career banker who freely admitted he knew absolutely nothing about running a studio.
Tinker’s solution to the Fox problem was the only one he could reasonably be expected to manage. Instead of making better movies—“There is nothing in this business which good pictures cannot cure,” Nicholas Schenck, president of Loew’s Inc., parent of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, had famously said—he elected instead to cut operating costs. All contracts were on the table, and Sheehan, under siege, had the richest one of all, paying $6,000 a week and due to escalate, at each succeeding option period, in $1,000 increments. Sheehan had already accepted a 25 percent cut in pay under Clarke—something Wurtzel had successfully refused—and was facing yet another cut when he disappeared altogether, supposedly ill, his whereabouts unknown and his resignation rumored to be imminent.
She Wanted a Millionaire resumed filming on January 5, 1932, little more than a week after Considine wrapped Disorderly Conduct. Joan Bennett had been five months in recovery—having had to learn to walk all over again—but there wasn’t much left to do on the picture, other than to film a Grand Guignol finale that hardly fit the rest of the story. Two days into it, news came that Sheehan had suffered a nervous breakdown—an “authentic” one, the trade press reported—brought on, it was construed, by the systematic stripping of his studio authority. While he was reportedly recuperating at a sanitarium near San Francisco, responsibility for the balance of the Fox season fell to Wurtzel, who was charged with bringing the average cost of a Fox feature down to an industry-wide target of $200,000.
While his own productions came nowhere near that target figure—the modest Disorderly Conduct cost nearly $300,000—it was hard to argue with the fact that the few profitable pictures Fox had released in recent times had all been personally supervised by Winnie Sheehan. Both Delicious and Daddy Long Legs were Sheehan productions, as were Frank Borzage’s Bad Girl and The Man Who Came Back. When Sheehan’s attorney wired Tinker’s office in New York requesting a three-month leave of absence, it was, after due consideration, granted at 50 percent of the production chief’s usual salary—a grand gesture given how easy it would have been to remove him altogether had the Fox hierarchy wanted to do so.
Still, in the months to follow, it would be Sol Wurtzel calling the shots, not Sheehan, and Wurtzel’s interests were not necessarily those of his boss. New players were significantly cheaper than established ones, and part of Wurtzel’s mandate was to bring along the starlets Fox had under contract at $500 a week—girls like Sally Eilers and red-headed Peggy Shannon. Wurtzel had less personal interest in Spencer Tracy than in James Dunn, Eilers’ costar in Bad Girl, who had been pitchforked over Tracy for his greater (perceived) appeal as a leading man. With She Wanted a Millionaire finally in the can, Wurtzel, singularly unimpressed with Disorderly Conduct, assigned Tracy a secondary role in Young America, a Borzage production due to start in the middle of February.
She Wanted a Millionaire opened at the Roxy Theatre on February 19, 1932, and became the first Tracy picture to hit a Manhattan screen in nine months. With the film’s emphasis on Joan Bennett and Fred Waring’s orchestra on the surrounding program, he might just as well have stayed off screen altogether. Tracy was much