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of filming Marie Galante, Spence invited him to dinner, which turned out to be a formal party at which he was the guest of honor. “After dinner they wanted to go out on the town, but I declined because I had to be at work at Douglas [Aircraft] early in the morning. I recall that Spencer laughed and said something like, ‘Well, he seems very conscientious so we’ll have to let him go.’ ” He saw Tracy several more times over the summer, then was horrified when he called Carroll just short of his departure and found that his benefactor had lost his job and that “everything, including me, was on hold.” The date was August 26, 1934, and it was doubtless Cromwell’s presence—one of the many responsibilities Tracy now carried—that contributed to his going back to Fox the following day and agreeing to Sidney Kent’s punitive terms for reinstatement.

“I was ready to start the second year of medical school,” Cromwell wrote, “and apparently Spencer would continue my support.”

In September Jesse Lasky asked Loretta Young to come to his office. She was making The White Parade for him at Fox, and he wanted her for his next picture as well, a tale about modern travelers stranded in a California ghost town called Helldorado. She knew the film was set to star Spencer Tracy—had been since the spring—and although she would have loved to have done it, she didn’t dare, not wanting to “start the whole thing over again.” Lasky was glad he asked, sure there was no good to come from forcing the two of them to work together again, and within a few days had signed Madge Evans for the role of Glenda Wynant, spoiled society girl. The film was set to start on Monday, September 24, but Tracy, who had been seen around town the previous couple of weeks with actress Erin O’Brien-Moore, never showed, and by noon it was obvious he wasn’t going to.

“The studio gumshoed all the bars but couldn’t find him,” Lasky said. “Postponing the scheduled starting date of a picture is sometimes prohibitively costly, if not downright impossible, because of interlocked commitments geared to a timetable. In this case, we couldn’t even shoot around our star until he showed up because he had to be in almost all the scenes. We slapped Richard Arlen into the part, which didn’t fit him at all, but there was no time to tailor it to his personality. The studio rounded up Tracy a few days later, and I sent word to him that I would never ask him what happened but that it might have happened to me instead of him and I was glad it didn’t so I was willing to forget it.”

Jack Gain prepared once again to charge Tracy for holding up production, in this case one and a half days of overhead for the idle company. On October 13, 1934, Winfield Sheehan returned to the studio and the matter was placed before him. He talked privately with Tracy and, according to Dick Mook, told him that he knew things hadn’t been easy but that he still believed in him. “Forget what’s happened,” Sheehan said grandly. “Get out of town a few weeks and pull yourself together.” Winnie Sheehan, Tracy later told Mook, was, with the exception of Louise and his own mother, “the most understanding person I have ever met.”

With a great weight suddenly lifted from his shoulders, at least momentarily, Tracy made plans to go to Hawaii for a week with Carroll. He was within a few days of sailing and unusually relaxed when he met with Gain on the subject of a new contract. “While discussing the contract,” Gain later recounted in a memo to Sidney Kent,

he informed me he wanted to make only four pictures per year—he wanted approval of stories—he wanted the right to do a picture on the outside, in addition to which he wanted much more money than I offered him, none of which were granted … In my opinion, the deal was a very good one, considering the offers that Tracy received from other studios, and I am positive that if the discussion has to be re-opened and changed so that we are compelled to make him pay the additional $6000 and keep half his salary as outlined by [studio treasurer Sidney] Towell, that he will definitely walk