Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [155]
It was Stowitts, particularly, who was responsible for the conga lines of writhing bodies, oiled and muscular, stripped to within an inch of the Production Code and arrayed along tiered and cavernous pits of fire, their size due, in large part, to the masterly glass paintings of Ben Carré. Nearly naked extras were lined up and sprayed with makeup that gave them a translucent quality, while miniature figures of men were cast in plaster and suspended from a revolving disk to create the illusion of flight. Spun before the lens of a high-speed camera, they appeared to be real bodies floating in slow motion through the sulfurous air of the director’s own private Hades. The miniatures were the responsibility of Fred Sersen and his special effects crew, while the fire effects were the work of Lee Zavits, who would later be instrumental in bringing off the burning of Atlanta for Gone With the Wind. When production on Dante’s Inferno came to an end, Lachman and his crew had spent nearly $750,000 and printed an estimated 300,000 feet of film.
Tracy was sometimes dwarfed by the bizarre spectacle of Dante’s Inferno (1935). Set by unit art director David S. Hall. (SUSIE TRACY)
“I ran amuck,” Tracy admitted in the confessional of the fan magazines,
that’s all. I did all kinds of crazy things. That I have not had to pay a sterner penalty is due to the kindness of Winfield Sheehan, the head of Fox, who forgave me for not showing up on the set, and to the kindness, the extraordinary kindness of my wife, who took those blows like a thoroughbred and a sportswoman and did the thing only a superwoman can do—nothing. Louise is an extraordinary woman. That is why it is possible for me to go home again. She has never upbraided me nor berated me. She never will. She never used the things most women would use as baits to a man who needed to be reminded—she never pleaded the children nor our years together nor the “rights” that legitimately grow out of such sharing. She asked me to come home, of course, but that was all. And I have learned—my son has taught me—that there are those things in life which are stronger even than memories, than personal desires or lovely idylls.
It was December 1934, that time when he and Louise were seen almost everywhere together. He was still living at the Beverly Wilshire, but there were times at Riviera, especially on Sundays, when they were together more than they were apart. And on the days when Spence knew he would be working late, when Lachman was fussing over shots or script and taking forever to make up his mind, he would look in for breakfast and sit with Louise and the kids. “My going back had been a slow process in a way,” he told Gladys Hall in February 1935.
I’ve been unhappy for a long while, lonely, unsatisfied. Life has seemed thin and reasonless. But it sometimes takes an apparently little thing, a word, to help one make the decision. I was having breakfast last week with Mrs. Tracy and the children. I’ve never been out of touch with them, as you know. There’s never been any legal separation or anything like that.
Well, the other day, at the breakfast table, Johnny was ready for school. He wanted me to take him. I was due at the studio and couldn’t. His mother said that she would take him. And then he looked at me with a look that seemed to cut clean through all the painful business of the past months and said, “No. Girls belong with mothers. Boys belong with fathers.” I knew right then and there that nothing else mattered, not really. Not by comparison with … with this. He was right. Boys do belong with their fathers and,