Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [160]
There was a swimming pool, and John at long last learned to swim, as did Susie, who was approaching the age of three. They brought White Sox to the property, and Johnny’s riding improved as he cantered up and down the driveway by himself. On Easter Sunday they attended a polo match at Riviera. Then, in May, Spence and Louise had a “second honeymoon” in San Francisco, where Louise took the opportunity to visit the Gough School for the Deaf. When she asked if she could hire someone to come to Los Angeles for a few weeks over the summer and work with John on his voice and speech, an exploratory examination was suggested. A few weeks later she was back with her son, and after a brief interview the woman asked, “How much of a hearing loss has he?”
Louise answered that his loss was complete, but knew it was unusual for a child to be “stone” deaf. John hadn’t been tested since he was eight, and there was newer and better equipment now available. They marched him down the hall to the school’s 2A Audiometer, where they would be able to tell if he had, at age eleven, any usable hearing.
“Although I dreaded having one more nail driven into the already seemingly well-secured lid,” she said, “still, having no hope, I could suffer no real disappointment.” He was fitted with the headphones, then sat expectantly through the first part of the test. Suddenly he started, surprised, and then he went still, the unmistakable quality of listening in his wide blue eyes.
“I can hear,” he said.
Moving to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was like a shot of adrenaline for Spencer Tracy. The care with which he was handled and managed was light-years from the ineptitude he had known at Fox. “Spencer Tracy, looking like a million dollars, is reporting at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios every day,” Louella Parsons reported in mid-May. “If Irving Thalberg has his way, Spencer’s name will be electric-lighted throughout the world within the next year.” When Thalberg’s picture got delayed, Tracy was offered to other producers on the lot, specifically Lawrence Weingarten, who had an original story of high finance for him called “Plunder,” and Harry Rapf, who was developing a script from writer-director Tim Whelan titled The Murder Man.
A newspaper story, The Murder Man had been written on spec by Whelan and his collaborator, the British playwright and librettist Guy Bolton. A studio reader, who covered the material just days before Tracy’s arrival at M-G-M, thought it a “first-rate yarn, well written, cleverly constructed, full of suspense. Dialogue good and not so snappy as to get under the feet of the swift action.” There was one great flaw: the hero of the piece, a well-known reporter who covers murder investigations for a metropolitan daily, turns out to be the perpetrator of one of the murders he has written about so presciently. “If he could be made to kill the man who stole his wife instead of merely the one who stole his money, we could get away with it.”
Rapf himself was prone to sentiment and soft edges—Min and Bill, The Champ, The Sin of Madelon Claudet—so he was somewhat out of his element with a hardboiled crime melodrama. For the rewrite, he paired Whelan with a junior writer named John C. Higgins, who was working on the studio’s Crime Does Not Pay series of short subjects. With Higgins contributing dialogue, the two men gave the title character a stronger motivation. Tormented by his wife’s suicide and the reason for it, the character was recast in the image of the actor they now knew would be playing the part—a binge-drinking insomniac with a reputation for disappearing for days at a time. Tracy seemed to relish the part as a form of public confessional, a cleansing that signaled an end to his turbulent days at Fox.
He began the picture on May