Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [112]
Bette Davis with Tracy in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. The two actors had undeniable chemistry but were never to make another film together. (SUSIE TRACY)
The principal, a Miss Leonard, told Louise that even if she wanted to send John to Clarke—and she hadn’t yet said that she did—the enrollment for the coming year was full and only a last-minute cancellation in his age group could create room for him. Moreover, Clarke, although a private school, was obligated to take applicants from Massachusetts before considering kids from out of state. It all sounded pretty hopeless, and Louise secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Then, less than a week before the start of school, a telegram arrived. The unexpected had happened, and there was indeed a place for John. The Tracys were asked to wire their answer immediately.
It was a tough decision. Louise drove with Spence to Burbank the next morning, and the two of them struggled with it. “He was against sending him,” she remembered. “He said his leg came first, and that he did not think he should go away from home and Dr. Wilson’s care yet. Dr. Wilson, when approached in regard to it, had said that if we felt we must send him, all right, but that he wished, naturally, that we could find something in Los Angeles for a little while longer.” In view of their attitudes, it would have been easy to say no, but Louise couldn’t bring herself to do it. “It was too easy,” she said. “It couldn’t be right.” She told herself she wasn’t being fair to John, and that she was shirking her duty. And so she argued with Spence: “I leaned over backward in doing it. I do not think I convinced him, but he said if I really thought it right, to send him.” To their surprise, John was delighted. “I think the thing that pleased him most was that he would be with children again.”
When she left with John for Northampton, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing was still in production, and had Bette Davis not just married her high school sweetheart, musician Harmon Nelson, there might have been more than a strictly professional relationship between her and Spence. “Up to the time of Sing Sing, only George Arliss had given me encouragement,” Davis said. “He was a father figure for me, the kindly, gentle father that I’d never had. My own was a holy terror. But Spence and I were smitten with each other before we knew it. He didn’t have to pretend he was strong, because he was strong, but, oh, he could be tender too … I’ve often wondered if we’d been at the same studio what would have happened?”
Joan Bennett was also newly married—not to John Considine, as she might have been, but to author and screenwriter Gene Markey. Had there been anything between her and Spence on the first film (and she always denied there had been), there was nothing but genuine friendship between them on this second one. Pier 13 was the slapdash story of a cop and a gum-chewing waitress, a wisecracking romance marred by a darker element completely out of tone with the rest of the film. The script was the work of no fewer than seven writers, principally Arthur Kober, a scenarist and press agent who invested it with what little heart the thing managed to have on paper. The fact that Spence and Joan could take the script’s lines and contrivances and weave them into a credible relationship—something that was clearly impossible on She Wanted a Millionaire—made Pier 13 a memorable experience all around. “I wasn’t one of those simpering idiots for a change,” Bennett said.
Raoul Walsh, never known for his light touch with comedy, directed with a keen awareness the material was second rate. He allowed the cast to embellish shamelessly—sometimes, as with Will Stanton’s interminable drunk routine, to ruinous extremes. “[Spence] joked his way through it,” Bennett remembered, “and threw in ad-libbed lines—very funny ones, I might add. And he and Raoul Walsh got along beautifully so that Raoul didn’t object to Spence throwing in a thing or two of his own.” They finished in just