Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [148]
Marie Galante was set to start on Wednesday, June 27, 1934, but calls to Tracy’s fourth-floor suite at the Beverly Wilshire went unreturned, and he failed to show for costume fittings and a conference with director Henry King. On the night of the twenty-sixth—Johnny’s tenth birthday—Fox legal counsel George Wasson went to the hotel with a letter over the signature of studio manager Jack Gain directing Tracy to report to King at ten o’clock the next morning to begin work on the picture. At suite 412, Wasson was admitted by Wingate Smith and an older man whom Wasson did not identify. Smith was Jack Ford’s brother-in-law and longtime assistant, a well-known and well-liked figure around the Fox lot.
“Mr. Tracy at the time was in bed, asleep, and apparently in no condition to be disturbed,” Wasson recounted in a memo for record. “Mr. Smith informed me that Mr. Tracy has been suffering from an excess consumption of alcohol, and from a lack of proper food and sleep; Mr. Smith also informed me that he had been in constant attendance upon Mr. Tracy for a period of approximately two weeks and that, although Mr. Tracy was not in a condition of continued unconsciousness, Mr. Tracy was, even in his waking, conscious moments, unable to control his physical and mental coordination.”
At the time of Wasson’s arrival, Smith had already summoned a doctor, who planned to give Tracy a hypodermic so that he could be removed to the hospital and given the constant care and attention required to “restore him to his normal faculties.” Wasson waited until the doctor arrived, approximately twenty minutes, then attempted to speak with the patient.
When Mr. Tracy awoke, he was apparently conscious, but in a semi-dazed and incoherent condition, being able to speak only a part of a sentence without his mind wandering to some other subject or failing to operate entirely. Mr. Tracy seemed to be laboring under some great mental stress and I endeavored to find the cause but was unsuccessful. I advised Mr. Tracy that it was our desire to have him report to our studio the following day and he informed me that he would not do so. I then told Mr. Tracy that I came to present him with a notice to report and proceeded to read the attached notice to Mr. Tracy.
At the time of this conversation with Mr. Tracy, he had requested the other persons present to leave the room so that he could talk to me alone. He finally started to tell me what he desired to say and after several unsuccessful attempts he discarded the idea in the middle of a sentence and rolled over and proceeded to go back to sleep, thus ending the conversation.
The doctor tried to get him to take the hypodermic. When he refused, the ambulance attendant was summoned, and it was he who managed to get the patient to his feet and down the elevator to the ambulance, which was waiting in the garage. The doctor assured Wasson that Tracy was in no condition to work and would be unable to work for several days. The next morning, Tracy was removed from the studio payroll.
Marie Galante had the reputation of being a jinxed picture. It had been in the works, off and on, for two years, the book on which it was based being an international best seller. The tale of a shanghaied prostitute making her way across Central America, it seemed to Winnie Sheehan the ideal vehicle for Clara Bow (though no one could reasonably expect her to affect a French accent). They were ready to go with a script by Dudley Nichols, Tracy up front as Crawbett and William K. Howard directing, when Bow, suffering increasingly from the chronic depression that would soon end her career, backed out. The picture was shelved until Sheehan saw actor Miles Malleson’s adaptation of the German war drama The Ace in London and was taken with the performance of French chanteuse Ketti Gallian. Just twenty, Gallian played her entire role in French and required