Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [150]
King then caught her by the shoulders and gave her a shake and said, “Here is where you’re supposed to break down emotionally and cry and tell this man you’re sorry.” When again she said, “I can’t cry,” King slapped her hard across the face and called, “Action!” Crying and running her dialogue in a mixture of French and English, Gallian was suddenly giving the camera everything it needed. “Spence,” King urged, “play the scene, play the scene!” Tracy, who had never been witness to such a brazen piece of direction, was dumbfounded. “I never saw a man so embarrassed in my life,” King said, “[but] he finally grabbed her by the shoulders and he got warmed up to do it and the scene came off in great shape.”
Marie Galante was approximately two-thirds finished when, on Monday, August 13, Tracy again failed to report for work and was again taken off salary. According to Edmund Hartmann, the uncredited writer on the set, he turned up in New York and was returned to Hollywood on a chartered plane. “In the middle of the flight,” recalled Hartmann, “he came to and went berserk. The co-pilot had to go in with a monkey wrench and knock him out cold.” King shot around him for a week, then the picture was shut down pending his return. “Tracy came back to Fox,” said Hartmann, “but he didn’t look anything like the man in the footage we already had shot. King was a big, tough guy—but a wonderful man—and he said to Tracy, ‘You dirty, yellow son-of-a-bitch. You ruined the lives of all the people working on the picture. They’re all fired until we start up again!’ ”
Sidney Kent, who was running the Westwood and Western Avenue plants while Sheehan was away, threatened to start the picture over again with Edmund Lowe in the part of Crawbett and sue Tracy for $125,000 to cover the costs of the shutdown and all the work that had to be remade. Kent had one of his people call Neil McCarthy, Tracy’s attorney, and outline the arrangement: Tracy would pay Fox $25,000 upon resuming the picture and half his $2,000 weekly salary for the remaining seventeen weeks of the year. Further, should the studio choose to exercise the final option on his five-year contract, he would agree to a holdback of 50 percent while making the first picture of the new term, with the balance paid only upon completion of the second picture under the deal.
“I recommended to Spencer that he pay the money and go back to work,” McCarthy recalled. “I was impelled to do this largely because I felt that if we could hit his pocketbook hard, it might act as an additional strength to keep him from drinking, and particularly during a picture.” On McCarthy’s advice, Tracy capitulated and agreed to what Variety called “the most severe penalty ever imposed on a film player for holding up production.” Chastened, he resumed production the day after Labor Day looking wan and lifeless.
As her anxiety over the kidnapping threat subsided, Louise made preparations to return the children to the house on Holmby. Spence, who was making Now I’ll Tell at the time, thought that unwise, the writer of the two letters having shown an intimate knowledge of its layout and their habits there. “This was a real blow,” said Louise. “We fitted into that house so perfectly. I had hoped we would not move again until we moved into a home of our own, which I continued to believe we sometime would do. I fumed and seethed that a featherweight scamp, in concocting such a crackpot scheme, should be able to upset our whole existence.”
They found a new place on Palm Drive in Beverly Hills, a palatial spread on—for a change—flat ground with a large