Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [122]
Slowly and somewhat reluctantly, Spencer Tracy was beginning to lay down roots in Los Angeles. It was clear he was to be stuck at Fox, churning out second-rate movies, for the full term of his contract. “I don’t believe an actor lives who can make four to eight films a year and survive,” he told Mook one day over lunch. “It’s expecting too much of audiences to ask them to see you that often and not tire of you. I think Paul Muni has the ideal contract—one which specifies only two pictures a year and which permits him to do stage plays in the interim.”
If it was only the stage that could bring him the artistic satisfaction he craved, he needed a different kind of gratification from his work in the movies. The money he made could justify a bad picture only if he could do something meaningful with it. A passage from the Gospel of Luke stayed with him from childhood: “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much had been committed, of him they will ask the more.” When Carroll came out at Christmastime, he was, as he later put it, “ogling the poinsettias and the climate” when Spence, with an extra $500 a week at his disposal (his pay cut restored and his new option period having kicked in), proposed that he resign his position with Thompson’s Malted Milk in Waukesha and come to live in California as his business manager. Louise was too busy with John to manage the accounts as she once had, and their mother needed more attention than Spence alone could provide. Hesitant at first, Carroll said that he had met a girl he wanted to marry. “Move out,” said Spence, “and when I’m finished with my next picture, I’ll go back with you to be your best man.”
Carroll was present throughout the shooting of The Power and the Glory, quietly chain-smoking in the background, and he could see his brother was drinking too much. Apart from dinner at home, Spence was essentially living at the Riviera, especially during the week, and it was easy for him to get diverted on the way back to his room. On nights when he “wanted to go out and get drunk,” he would call the driver he kept on salary for his mother’s use and the man would accompany him “to various bootlegging and drinking joints around Los Angeles.”
At one point during production, Spence disappeared altogether. “To the best of my recollection … he was found several days later by (I think it was) Bing Crosby in Tijuana,” said Colleen Moore. It fell to Carroll—as it had fallen to their uncle Andrew in the previous generation—to go down and get his brother and bring him back to the set. Bill Howard, who had spent considerable time of his own in the Fox doghouse, covered for Spence and managed to keep the film on schedule. Nothing more was said about it. “He just went on as if it hadn’t happened,” said Moore.
When The Power and the Glory finished on April 24, 1933, Tracy was still committed to The American, and he wasn’t happy about it. The film would carry a significantly lower budget than the Lasky picture while exploring some of the same themes, and both were likely to be released within a few weeks of each other. The issue came to a head on the twenty-eighth, when the Fox brass decided to hold The Power and the Glory for a fall release. It was good news for the picture, but W. R. “Billy” Wilkerson, the crusading publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, saw it as a typical case of shortsightedness on the part of the studio and said as much in an editorial. The American, Wilkerson noted, would likely be released before The Power and the Glory, “[s]o when the latter picture is released, instead of Tracy getting the benefit of his admirable work in an entirely new type of role, he will be playing ‘just another old man,’ losing all the benefit that would accrue to him from the more carefully-made production.”
After a tense few days, the starting date for The American