Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [156]
Dick Mook talked of Tracy’s naïveté, which was never more apparent than when he was around other film players. When in 1932 James Cagney told Mook that Tracy was “the finest actor on the American stage,” Tracy was nonplussed. He had met Cagney but did not know him. “Did he really say that?” Tracy asked incredulously, scarcely able to believe it. The following year, he approached Gary Cooper at a party and took his hand. “I am Spencer Tracy,” he said, “and I want to tell you how much I enjoyed your work in A Farewell to Arms.” Cooper assured him it was unnecessary to introduce himself, as he had watched Tracy’s own work with great interest.
The two men struck up an acquaintance, and when Tracy decided it was time to come home, he and Louise leased a ranch that Cooper owned on Dinsmore Avenue in Van Nuys. “We’re going to find out how we like the ranch life, how we like the Valley, and if we do, we’ll buy a place of our own there and settle down to some real homesteading. The children are going to have a real home now. We’ll have horses and dogs. I’ve already bought a horse for Johnny and a pony for small Susie. I’ll ride with Johnny. I’ll take him to school whenever I can. I’ll be there when he wants me.”
He added, “I suppose there comes a time in the life of almost every man when he wants to go hunting, big-game hunting, love-hunting, crazy-adventure hunting, some such nostalgia. I have had such a trip. And now I’ve come home again.”
In his later years Tracy maintained it was Fox Film Corporation that terminated their relationship in the spring of 1935. The details of the story, however, kept shifting. “They fired me,” he told the AP’s Bob Thomas in 1952. “Those were in the days when I was still drinking, and I got drunk now and then. But never on a picture—always between. Anyway, they worried. I was all set for a big, expensive picture. But they came to me and asked if I was going to behave. I told them, ‘That’s a heck of a way to get me to behave! If you’re worried about me, why don’t you let me go?’ That’s all they needed. I wasn’t a box office star or anything. I was out of the studio the same day.” Another version had him showing up drunk at the studio and being fired by an administrative executive, allegedly someone who lacked the authority to do such a thing. Sheehan supposedly raised hell when he found out, but Tracy, by that time, had signed with M-G-M and was completely out of reach.
The actual details are skimpy, but neither the Fox legal files nor Tracy’s own records—such as they are—support either account. Tracy did indeed sign a new contract with Fox on November 6, 1934, and Jack Gain’s memo to Sidney Kent clearly shows that no agent was in on the deal. Gain was, in fact, vigorously patting himself on the back for moving so quickly and taking advantage of Tracy’s good mood in the wake of Sheehan’s suggestion that he “get out of town.” Had he waited, Gain implied, renewing the pact would have been much more difficult, if not downright impossible. Tracy’s services were never shopped to other studios; in fact, he accepted a weekly rate $250 less than would otherwise have been due him under the terms of the old contract. Admittedly, the new pact wiped away all further obligations for the delays incurred on Marie Galante and Helldorado, but an agent would undoubtedly have driven a harder bargain for a man who was now widely regarded as one of the screen’s best actors.
A week later, an item appeared in Variety indicating that Fox had given Tracy a straight two-year deal, no options. “Old pact,” the