Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [123]
In Milwaukee they stayed at the Schroeder Hotel, and when Carroll was married that following Wednesday, it was at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. His bride was a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher named Dorothy Sullivan, a talkative little redhead, not more than five feet or so in height, and Carroll towered over her like a giant. “This may be just what Carroll needs,” Spence said to his uncle Andrew on the way to the ceremony. “Carroll needs a job and a wife … Carroll needs a life of his own.”
Carroll Tracy had always been the forgotten son, the one his father John despaired over. “John thought Carroll was a dud,” said Frank Tracy, who heard it from his father. “Oh yeah, Carroll was hopeless. You know—nice guy, never got in trouble, anything like that, but he ain’t goin’ nowhere.” Spence was, admittedly, a troublemaker, but he had energy and drive and was able to make his own way in the world. Carroll had only gotten the job at Thompson’s because Sam Thompson was an old friend of the family.
There was a big reception, and the only time Frank ever saw Spence take a drink of hard liquor was at the intimate gathering that followed the main event. The Sullivans were a big Irish family, and there were kids crawling all over the place. “I had the impression that he needed a drink,” Frank said. “It was going to go on for several hours. My dad and I left about nine or ten. He stayed.” The following morning, with Carroll and Dorothy off on their honeymoon, Spence quietly boarded a train for the West Coast and was back home by Memorial Day.
Although Shanghai Madness had been on the Fox schedule for more than a year—always with Tracy’s name attached—he rightly saw the film as a comedown after The Power and the Glory—as almost any picture would be. “What are you dissatisfied about?” Carroll would say to him, having only his own work at Thompson’s to compare it to. “Stick with it. What more can you ask?” The screenplay, by the colorful journalist and short-story writer Austin Parker, was better than for most Fox programmers, and the director once again would be Jack Blystone. “I would have felt more that I was getting somewhere if anyone on the lot had seemed to be taking any particular interest in me,” Tracy said. “But I was just another actor, sometimes getting good parts, sometimes bad. I didn’t feel I was doing my best work and I was getting a bit cynical about it.”
When the shooting script came down from mimeo on May 19, the cast was headed by Ralph Morgan, who had played so well opposite Tracy in The Power and the Glory, and actress Claire Trevor, fresh from her Fox debut in a George O’Brien western called Life in the Raw. Then someone got the bright idea of putting Trevor in O’Brien’s next picture as well, and producer Al Rockett borrowed Elizabeth Allan from M-G-M to replace her. Allan lasted only as long as it took for her to quarrel with Blystone, normally the most agreeable of directors. Marion Burns, who had played Joan Bennett’s two-timing sister in Me and My Gal, had the part for a few days, then Fay Wray, fresh from the release of King Kong, stepped into the role with little more than a week’s notice.
Tracy’s character, Jackson, is given a general court-martial for firing on a Communist boat that killed two of his men. Found guilty, he can’t get a job when he rescues Wildeth Christie from a stranded