Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [125]
As soon as Fay Wray knew that Tracy had been set for Man’s Castle, she mounted a campaign to land the role opposite him. “I tried to shape events,” she said, “by talking to the writer Jo Swerling and asking him to please help me get the lead in that film.” Borzage reportedly tested a number of candidates, but the only actresses mentioned publicly for the role were Loretta Young, late of Warner Bros., and Anita Louise. The desirability of the part was only intensified by the buzz surrounding Tracy’s work in The Power and the Glory. Production on Shanghai Madness was, in fact, suspended briefly to make retakes on Lasky’s picture.
At the close of Shanghai Madness, Spence, as was his habit, asked Fay Wray for her photograph, and she signed it “… with my utmost admiration,” the same words Cary Grant had chosen when he signed a photograph of himself to her. “And we both hoped,” she added, “that I would be in Man’s Castle.” The very next night, she was in a nightclub with her husband, the writer John Monk Sanders, and Tracy was there also, standing at the bar, completely and obviously blotto. “I stood about two feet from him and said hello. He looked at me but didn’t know me or, apparently, even see me … I didn’t get the part in A Man’s Castle.”
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1 After being purchased by Universal, the film rights to The Last Mile passed to producer Sam Bishoff and his partners, who made the film at California Tiffany Studios. Preston Foster played Killer Mears.
2 This would have been The Painted Woman.
3 Perversely, income taxes came due on March 15, with new percentage rates nearly doubling over the previous tax year. With only $750 a week coming in and virtually nothing in the bank, Tracy learned he owed nearly $9,000 in federal taxes.
CHAPTER 9
The Amount of Marriage We’ve Experienced
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Good notices notwithstanding, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing didn’t put Tracy over as he had hoped. After winning the role of Tom Garner in The Power and the Glory, he fell back to playing muggs and adventurers. “The situation was not of Tracy’s making,” Frederick Lewis pointed out in a 1937 profile for Liberty magazine. “He was simply the victim of a Hollywood wisdom which let Victor McLaglen go ‘because he can’t act’ and didn’t know, until it loaned Shirley Temple to another company, that it had on its payroll—at $150 a week!—the greatest box office moneymaker since the picture learned to talk.”
The character of Bill in Man’s Castle was another mugg, albeit better written than most—a cocky vagabond whose vagrant lifestyle is compromised when he allows the indigent Trina to share his shanty lean-to on the New York riverfront. The screenplay was by Jo Swerling, veteran of a half dozen pictures with director Frank Capra. Based on an unproduced play, its mix of unmarried characters gave the guardians of the Code fits, particularly a plainspoken prostitute named Flossie whose lines had already been considerably toned down before Tracy ever saw a script. The principal attraction was Frank Borzage, with whom Tracy played polo, went drinking, and flew to Agua Caliente occasionally in the director’s Waco F2 biplane. When Borzage chose to open the film on an elegant note, Bill in tux, opera cape, and top hat feeding the pigeons on a park bench, Trina seated next to him, a famished stranger envying the birds, he was suddenly wary of the extent to which Borzage, the Academy Award–winning director of 7th Heaven, aimed to romanticize the story’s more sordid elements.
“They had decided that he was to dress up and this was to be a romantic thing,” said Lorraine Foat, who saw him not long after the film was released. “He didn’t want to do the romances in the beginning. He had the fixation, I think, on his looks,