Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [167]
Whipsaw, released on December 6, was sold almost entirely on the strength of Myrna Loy’s return to the screen. It took a dive in New York, but did better elsewhere, pulling in nearly $1 million in rentals on an investment of $238,000. By pairing him first with Loy, then with Harlow—Riffraff hadn’t yet been released—Metro was getting audiences used to seeing Tracy with top-tier female stars. The next step would be to put their top male stars alongside him—Gable, Powell, and maybe Beery as well. It was a strategy Tracy could appreciate, one that Fox never could have embarked upon, even had it occurred to somebody to try. For Christmas, everyone in the extended family got a card from Spence and a check for fifty dollars, the studio’s return address and Carroll’s careful handwriting on the envelope. (“Fifty dollars in the 1930s was a helluva Christmas,” said Frank Tracy.) Louise made a pitch of her own for a gift when she suggested that Spence give up drinking altogether. “I just think it would be better for you all around, don’t you?”
And so, on December 20, 1935, Tracy took the pledge and declared himself on the wagon.
Norman Krasna was a hot commodity, a balding twenty-five-year-old at work on a slick comedy for Clark Gable when an article in the Nation gave him an idea for a play. There had been a lynching in San Jose following the kidnapping of a department store heiress, and Krasna began to wonder what would have happened if the men they hanged had been innocent. “I told my idea to [M-G-M story editor] Sam Marx and [producer] Joe Mankiewicz. They were crazy about it.”
Sometime later, after Krasna had left M-G-M, Mankiewicz told the story to Louis B. Mayer. Mayer found the subject distasteful but told Mankiewicz, who had exactly one picture to his credit, that he could do it anyway. “I’m going to let you make this film, young man, and I’m going to spend as much money advertising this picture as Irving Thalberg spends on Romeo and Juliet. Otherwise, if it fails, you’ll always say we didn’t get behind it properly. This way, I’m going to prove to you that this picture won’t make a nickel. Now go make it!”
When they phoned Krasna in New York to purchase the story, he said he had pretty much forgotten it. “I had to dictate it as he’d told it to me,” Mankiewicz said, “so that he could sell it to M-G-M.” The two pages that bagged Krasna a $15,000 payday told the story of Joe Wilson, a young lawyer on his honeymoon in California’s Imperial Valley. A sheriff’s assistant throws him in jail on the day a kidnapping has taken place. The men of the town decide to lynch the alleged perpetrator and a mob forms around the jail. Word reaches the governor, who dispatches a troop of militia to guard the jail. Unable to get to the prisoner, the angry townspeople set fire to the building instead, burning it to the ground. “The gimmick, the hook, the invention, the inspiration,” said Krasna, “is that he is still alive.” When Joe appears to witness the hangings of the vigilantes who left him for dead, the district attorney stops the executions in the nick of time. As Joe sinks into a chair, he buries his head in his hands and says, “But they killed my dog—didn’t they?”
Mankiewicz already had the ideal director for Krasna’s story in the person of Fritz Lang. David O. Selznick, Mayer’s son-in-law, had brought Lang to the studio in 1934. Selznick put him on a project called The Journey and paired him with a writer named Oliver H. P. Garrett, but nothing ever came of it. As a screenwriter, Mankiewicz had been assigned to work with Lang because he could speak German.
“I went over and talked to Fritz a couple of times, and I found it very difficult to work with him because he had his office all rigged up as though it was a German office at UFA. He had drawings—what they call a storyboard today