Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [179]
The picture ran up domestic rentals of $685,000, then surprised everyone by doing an almost equal amount in foreign rentals—practically unheard of, apart from the films of Greta Garbo. It may have been a measure of Fritz Lang’s international reputation or simply the strength of its subject matter, but Fury logged worldwide billings of $1,300,000, surpassing Riffraff to make it the most popular of all of Tracy’s movies. Producer Walter Wanger, late of M-G-M, jumped at the chance to reassemble a winning package, and Tracy, much to his horror, found upon his return from Hawaii that he had been lent to Wanger for a second picture with Lang and Sylvia Sidney.2 With a commitment also under way for Tracy to go into The Plough and the Stars at RKO, the only diplomatic solution was to cancel all loan-outs and keep Tracy, suddenly hot and getting hotter, under the protective wing of his home studio.
Tracy logged some of the best reviews of his career as the vengeful Joe Wilson of Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936). (SUSIE TRACY)
Where Fox had pretty much left audiences to figure Tracy out for themselves, Metro was in the process of shaping his public image and building him into a top-flight attraction. His first three pictures had been a matter of getting his sea legs. The Murder Man was a programmer, Whipsaw a vehicle for Myrna Loy, Riffraff for Jean Harlow. No longer tethered to one of the studio’s big female attractions, Tracy caught fire with Fury, and audiences who, just a year earlier, had no clear handle on him, were suddenly turning out to see him. It was a transition that was nothing short of miraculous, but there was something else at work as well, a willingness on the part of the public to embrace a leading man who was not textbook handsome nor bigger than life.
“What the movies need,” said actress Carole Lombard, as if speaking for a whole generation of filmgoers, “are more Clark Gables and Gary Coopers. By that I mean virile men stars. Right now there are three times as many [of] the milder romantic types. This needs to be changed.” The actors she included on her personal list of “he-men” were Randolph Scott, James Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Fred MacMurray, Charles Bickford … and Spencer Tracy. “Half the leading men today either can’t act, look like coal-beavers in dinner clothes, or make love like wrestlers.”
If there was one man in the Metro organization responsible for Tracy’s rise, it was Edgar J. Mannix, vice president and general manager of the studio. Where Louis B. Mayer was the public face of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Eddie Mannix was often regarded as the private one, the man who supervised the supervisors at M-G-M, a professional Irishman who kept a clutch of shillelaghs outside the door of his office. Born in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Mannix was shanty to the bone, part of a gang of Irish street toughs making trouble for the Schenck brothers, whose Palisade Park extended into Fort Lee from Cliffside to the south. Nicholas Schenck, no less streetwise, heard they were lobbing rocks at the trolleys attempting to enter the park and said, “Find the leader and hire him!”
Mannix started as a ticket taker for Schenck in 1910 and worked his way into management, eventually jumping to film production at the ramshackle studio on East Forty-eighth Street where Nick’s brother Joe made feature pictures starring his wife, actress Norma Talmadge. When Nick Schenck became vice president of Loew’s Incorporated in 1924, he sent Mannix west as comptroller and special assistant to Irving Thalberg, tasked with keeping an eye on Mayer.
Stocky and rough-hewn, Mannix was a bulldog in both style and appearance, with big jowly cheeks and a powerful jaw. He excelled at labor relations, and when he turned on the charm there was nobody more ingratiating. He was a great storyteller, a man of the people, and he could get anyone on his side with a frank talk, a direct word, a pat on the back. His