Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [162]
There was still, however, the unfinished business of Tracy’s last two films for Fox. After a studio showing of Dante’s Inferno on April 16, George Wasson had persuaded Tracy to waive billing on the picture. It’s a Small World opened in Los Angeles two days later, essentially dumped by a company no longer invested in the promotion of its star. Small World didn’t make New York until June, when it graced the bottom half of a double bill at the Times, a small grind house at the edge of the Forty-second Street theater district.
The day after Murder Man closed at the Capitol, Dante’s Inferno opened down the block at the Rivoli over Sol Wurtzel’s vehement objection. (“You can’t release Dante’s Inferno in the summertime!” he told playwright S. N. “Sam” Behrman.) At first Wurtzel was proven wrong, the film shattering a five-year attendance record in the midst of a sizzling heat wave. The conclusion of the picture’s ten-minute depiction of hell brought forth a burst of applause from an opening day audience, but, with another act yet to come, it was anticlimactic, and the critical consensus was that the rest of the picture was dull. “As you may have gathered,” Douglas Churchill said in concluding his notice, “Dante’s Inferno will be greedily accepted by children and received with mixed emotion by their elders.”
It flamed out quickly, word of mouth being poor, and it was a clunk in the playoffs, where the strategy of emphasizing the Inferno sequence, with its writhing bodies and implied nudity, kept small-town audiences away. When the final tally was in, Wurtzel’s masterwork posted a loss of more than a quarter-million dollars.
Tracy had just returned from Santa Barbara, where the annual Fiesta Week was in full swing, when, on August 16, 1935, word spread through the film colony that Will Rogers had been killed in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska. Tracy had been aware his pal Bill was off with aviator Wiley Post, but the true purpose of the trip—the opening of an air route between Alaska and Siberia—had not been widely known. Flags were dropped to half staff at public buildings in Beverly Hills, where Rogers had reigned as “honorary mayor” in the 1920s and where city and police officials now gathered to mourn. All municipal court cases were postponed, and the gala premiere of Rogers’ newest picture, Steamboat Round the Bend, was canceled at Grauman’s Chinese. John Ford, who directed the movie, “went to pieces,” Rogers having declined to sail with him to Hawaii so as to make the flight with Post. “You keep your duck and float on the water,” Rogers had told him. “I’ll take my eagle and fly.”
Louise hadn’t known Rogers well—he called her “Ma Tracy”—but Spence was inconsolable. They attended the simple funeral at Forest Lawn on the afternoon of the twenty-second, where only the four Cherokee Indians in attendance managed to remain stoic. Later, he gave an interview that was spun into a bylined remembrance for Picture Play magazine, recounting a time at Bill Howard’s house when Rogers came by: “We sat around talking for a while. When he rose to go, Howard urged him to have a nip while waiting for his car to be brought around. ‘I ain’t got any car.’ ‘Well, let me have mine brought around to take you home. It’s raining.’ ‘Naw. I walked over. I reckon I kin walk back.’ It was eight miles to his home, but walk he did. The last we saw of him he was ambling gayly down the path, cutting at shrubs and bushes with a stick he had picked up.”
News of Rogers’ death ignited another round of drinking on Tracy