Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [154]
Fox, for a change, was riding high. In the space of two years, Sidney R. Kent had taken a $15 million loser and restored it to profitability, showing a net income of more than $1 million for the first six months of 1934. In gratitude, the Fox board, including the representatives of Chase Bank, the company’s biggest stockholder, tore up Kent’s old contract and awarded him a new three-year deal. Weakened in the process was Winnie Sheehan, whose rumored departure was always part of the industry grapevine. Kent and Sheehan conferred, posed for pictures, got along for the sake of the company, but Kent was onto bigger things for Fox, and none of them involved the man who was Spencer Tracy’s biggest booster.
Tracy came to terms with Louise’s passion for polo and grew to admire her accomplishments on the field. (HERALD EXAMINER COLLECTION, LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY)
Louise, meanwhile, was barnstorming across Texas with a handpicked group of eight other players, staging exhibition games to “prove to the unsuspecting public that girls’ polo can be good polo.” They stopped in Abilene, Arlington Downs, Austin, and San Antonio, playing to large crowds and consistently making front-page copy in the sports sections of the local papers. Louise throughout urged more and better opportunities for female players. “Our shots are not as long,” she acknowledged in the Abilene Morning News, “but they can be just as good shots, and the players can master the difficulties encountered in hard riding. Then, too, it is no harder on women physically than a good game of tennis singles. I’ve played both, so I should know.”
Spence was plainly fascinated by Weeze’s self-styled “missionary tour,” coming as it did on the heels of the newly organized Pacific Coast Women’s Polo Association. Within days of her return, Harrison Carroll of the Evening Herald Express ran the following item: “The Spencer Tracy reconciliation is almost complete; Spencer and his wife, guests at a dinner given in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop Aldrich (visiting banker) from New York, spent the entire evening dancing together.”
Marie Galante opened with scarcely a mention of Tracy from the New York critics, and now he found himself—for the first time in nearly a decade—generating less ink than his crusading spouse. He gave her a diamond-studded wristwatch for Christmas, was seen out on the town with her, dancing at the Beverly Wilshire and the Cocoanut Grove and talking animatedly at the Clover Club. While their reconciliation wasn’t yet a done deal, they had come to realize they were greater as a couple than the sum of their individual parts and that nothing could really dissolve all the life they had shared, all the marriage they’d experienced.
Dante’s Inferno was hardly an actor’s dream. Tracy was not keen on doing it, but could scarcely refuse given the fiscal sword of Damocles that now hung over his head. Claire Trevor was no more enthused with the material, nor with Lachman’s handling of it. “They gave him a lot of time and a lot of money,” she said, “but it was not an A-picture. Harry Lachman was a dreamer, really a creator, an artist, but crazy, you know? The picture had no boundary, no spine, no foundation. It may have been an A-movie budget, but it was a B-movie script.”
The plan originally was to shoot the carnival exteriors at Long Beach or Ocean Park, but Lachman thought the real concessions too drab to use. So an amusement pier was constructed on a stage at Western Avenue and real-life concessionaires given jobs as extras at five dollars a day. The vast set saved the inevitable delays that would otherwise have resulted from winter wind and rain, but also made it possible for Lachman to shoot round the clock, and frequently he did.
Filming crept past the first of the year and eventually encroached on the start date of another picture, a modest comedy titled It’s a Small World. Rather than delay it, the studio compelled Tracy to begin the second film while still shooting the first, splitting his time between two stages over a period of a couple