Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [158]
Louise caught up with him in Yuma via long distance—the postmarks having given them away—and Tracy got so agitated he began hurling dishes against the wall of his hotel room. The disturbance caused the guests in the adjacent room to alert the manager, and when the police showed up Tracy was charged with being “drunk and resisting an officer, cursing and breaking up things in a hotel room,” and summarily dragged off to jail. Spectators described a “beautiful battle” in which one cop was able to take both men down “for the count.” As Louise set out for Yuma with Audrey Caldwell’s husband, Orville, behind the wheel, Spence and Tully were on ice, but only long enough to make bail of fifteen dollars each. They were back on the road—reportedly to Nogales—by the time she arrived.
Andrew Tracy had taken to writing straighten-up letters whenever he read about his nephew’s troubles in the papers. Knowing Andrew would likely read about this incident, Spence sent a long, rambling wire to his uncle before quitting Yuma. It ran several pages and kept returning to a central theme: I LOVE YOU ANDREW. In Freeport, Andrew read the telegram with a heavy heart. “Oh, God,” he sighed, putting it down. “He’s drunk again.”
Tracy’s disappearance forced Winfield Sheehan to deny press reports that he had been pulled from the cast of The Farmer Takes a Wife, the “big, expensive picture” for which Tracy had been set. The film would pair him for the first time with Janet Gaynor, Fox’s top adult draw, and actor Henry Fonda, imported from Max Gordon’s Broadway production of the same title. It’s a Small World was previewed in Glendale on March 25, where it was found, in the words of the Reporter review, to be “so sadly lacking in story punch that it could be run backward or forward with very few able to detect the procedure.”
Sheehan may well have sensed trouble in Tracy’s relationship with the studio, for on Friday, March 29, he voluntarily took him out of The Farmer Takes a Wife, not as a disciplinary measure (as some suggested) but in the sincere belief that Spence “should rest before he begins another picture.” Sheehan had his own problems with the Fox hierarchy, as Kent was working a deal that would merge Schenck’s 20th Century with Fox and bring Darryl F. Zanuck to the studio as its new production head. According to Glendon Allvine, Fox’s former publicity chief, it was a move calculated to break Sheehan’s contract “by wounding his vanity and dignity and pride in the company he had helped create, and bringing in a man 20 years younger to replace him.”
By the end of that day, Sheehan’s troubles at Fox no longer mattered to Spencer Tracy, for Leo Morrison had finally settled a deal at M-G-M.
* * *
1 The players are numbered according to their relative positions on the field. No. 1 ranges closest to the opposing team’s goal and spearheads the attack.
2 For purposes of handicapping, polo players were rated by “goals.” A better player might be a six-goal man, a lesser player a two-goal man. Tommy Hitchcock, one of the best-known players of the 1920s and ’30s, was rated ten goals, the highest possible. Will Rogers, known more for his horsemanship than for the shots he made, was a three-goal player. Tracy was a no-goal player; the lowest possible rating was a minus two.
CHAPTER 11
That Double Jackpot
* * *
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the most structured of the major studios, a machine of an organization that not only ground out a disproportionate share of Hollywood’s prestige product but sold it with a sophistication that bordered on the supernatural. Much of what happened within its beaverboard walls was due to the philosophies and dictates of Irving Grant Thalberg, the frail production chief whose tireless cultivation of the studio’s star roster did much to establish and sustain the M-G-M brand. The slogan “More stars than there are in Heaven” was more than just an empty boast.