Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [113]
Toward the end of the year, Screenland turned a few pages over to Dick Mook, who had a Roman holiday “giving medals to everyone I like and razzberries to everyone I don’t.” He awarded a joint medal to his pal Tracy and Paul Muni for being “the two finest actors on the screen.” (Muni had appeared in Scarface and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang that year.) The nod came as a complete surprise to Tracy, who admired Muni’s work and didn’t think he was doing anything nearly as good. He called Mook and asked him to lunch. “Dick,” he said, “did you really mean what you said in your ‘Medals and Birds’ or was that out of friendship?”
Mook assured him that he meant every word.
“You see,” said Tracy, “I’m not getting anywhere out here. My option is coming up, and I was thinking of asking them to let me out of my contract. I don’t want to throw away dirty water until I have clean. But if I’m as good as you say, I should be able to find work at other studios, shouldn’t I?”
Mook had been an officer in the army during the war, and Spence seemed to regard him as an older brother, a guy whose advice he could ask. It was, said Mook, “an inviolable rule” of his never to advise anyone on a move that was going to vitally affect his or her life. “I broke it that time to urge Spence to get away if he could.”
But there was no getting away. On October 25, the Finance Committee voted to exercise Tracy’s next option, bumping his rate to $1,500 a week on December 1, 1932. With three households to support—his own, his mother’s, and now his aunt Jenny’s—and John attending the Clarke School for the Deaf in Boston, the extra money would be welcome. Yet he could see no improvement in the material he was being assigned, and Leo Morrison, who saw his commission jump from $100 to $150 a week, was of little help in soliciting offers from other studios. Tracy had little, if any, cachet with the moviegoing public, and the box office performance of his last released film, The Painted Woman, was characterized in Variety as “an atrocity.”
Riviera, with its five turf fields, its quarter-mile training track, its stables and bridle paths, had become a grassy green retreat, a haven where the reality of Tracy’s life in a cushy sort of purgatory—not quite a movie star, certainly not the actor he had imagined himself as being—rarely intruded. He kept up his lessons with Snowy Baker and started playing twice a week on the scrub team. The speed, the exhilaration, the fear of riding drained him completely, and he left the field utterly spent, his mind blissfully clear of the problems that almost always preoccupied him whenever he wasn’t working. He bought a mount called White Sox, one of the prizes of the Hal Roach stable. “There’s something about horses which, once you really become interested in them, just naturally makes you think this is a pretty good world,” he said.
The costs were substantial, but no more so than for membership at a first-rate country club like Hillcrest or Wilshire. For the same $1,000 per annum, a player could belong to Riviera and maintain a stable of three ponies. Dick Mook asked Louise if she didn’t mind his living at Riviera, seeing so little of him as she did. “No,” she said. “He comes home to dinner every night, and I’m glad he’s got something that interests him at last … He’s got the most volatile disposition I’ve ever seen—up in the clouds one minute and down in the depths the next. And when he’s low, he’s very, very low. All this exercise absorbs a certain amount of that nervous energy and he isn’t so apt to become depressed.”
The game itself was quite simple: A team consisted of four riders in numbered jerseys, moving a ball down the field through six periods of play known as “chukkers.” When the ball was thrown in by one of two umpires, the field would erupt with the fury of galloping hooves, divots flying, the cracks of mallets connecting with the hard surface of the ball, horses and riders shoving against each other for