Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [116]
The girl in the picture was Marian Nixon, a veteran of more than fifty films who had gained new popularity by taking the role refused by Janet Gaynor in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Nixon gave Tracy some badly needed support in terms of name value, as did Stu Erwin, who played his dim-witted sidekick. The principal difference, beyond Connolly’s story and the script fashioned from it, lay in its director, Harry Lachman. Born in Illinois, Lachman was, like Rowland Brown, trained as an illustrator, but where Brown fell into the life of a roustabout, Lachman went to Paris to study and became one of Europe’s better known Postimpressionist painters. He entered films in 1925, initially working in an advisory capacity with Rex Ingram, later directing pictures of his own in both England and France. One of Sheehan’s trophies, Lachman was given a generous schedule on Face in the Sky and was able to give Tracy a sense of how a real artist would carry himself.
Meanwhile, Pier 13, retitled Me and My Gal, played a week’s stand at the Roxy in New York and cemented Tracy’s reputation as a poor draw. Sold as a “high-speed comedy-melodrama,” it got caught in the usual pre-Christmas slump and set an all-time low for the massive theater, a weekend blizzard eliminating virtually all the automobile trade. Whatever business there was in the city seemed reserved for Paramount’s A Farewell to Arms at the Criterion and Metro’s Flesh at the Capitol.
In the middle of December, just as Face in the Sky was finishing up, Louise went east to bring Johnny home for the holidays. While the sight of fresh snow was exhilarating, the mood at the Clarke School was anything but. Johnny was listless, his face pallid. When she embraced him, he was sullen and unresponsive. Upon investigation, she found his rest period had been combined with his physical therapy, negating the value of each. His digestion was poor, potatoes being part of nearly every meal, and he was beginning to show the symptoms of a chest cold. When the housemother asked what of John’s she wanted packed, Louise said, “Everything.”
On the train going back, John’s cough got worse, and he ran a temperature of 104. By the time they got to Los Angeles, his fever had broken but now Louise had it. She was over it in time for Susie’s first Christmas, but Spence had a surprise of his own. On New Year’s Day, he and Louise were en route to Havana via the Panama Canal aboard the liner S.S. Santa Rosa. They would be gone the better part of a month.
In November 1932, while Tracy was on location shooting Face in the Sky, Preston Sturges met writer-producer Hector Turnbull at a party. Sturges, author of the hit play Strictly Dishonorable, had fallen into the lucrative business of screenwriting. Universal snapped up his play and, eventually, Sturges as well. Then, unsure of quite what to do with him, they assigned him to a series of workaday projects, the last of which was the script for the H. G. Wells thriller The Invisible Man. More attuned to originals than adaptations, Sturges wrote an entirely new story to go with the title and was fired for his trouble. Now, with three flop plays to his credit and his name on exactly the same number of flop movies, Sturges was hustling an original story for the screen that he proposed to write on spec and sell on percentage as he would a play. The title he gave his story was The Power and the Glory.
Turnbull, story editor and associate producer to his brother-in-law, Jesse L. Lasky, was intrigued by Sturges’ idea, which was inspired by the life of C.