Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [182]
Almost on cue, Tracy was announced as having won the Screen Writers Guild award for Fury and would take the honor again in July for his work in San Francisco. Life was good and getting better all the time. He played polo nearly every day at Riviera or on the field of the Will Rogers estate. When Sol Wurtzel wired him in mid-July, congratulating him on his performance in the Lang picture, he added that he hoped that he and Mrs. Tracy had enjoyed their trip to Honolulu. Tracy replied:
HAD WONDERFUL TRIP. MRS. TRACY DID TOO BECAUSE I STAYED ON WATER WAGON.
Of all Spencer Tracy’s early pictures, Ed Sullivan liked The Show-Off best.
In fact I was so impressed by it that in the following day’s column, I suggested that he was the brightest possibility among the younger coast actors … And then came Fury from the pen of Norman Krasna. There was plenty of raw meat in this one, meat enough for a Killer Mears to sink his teeth in, and sufficient shading to establish the contrast of restraint and furious bitterness … But Fury was not quite enough. It was reminiscent, you see, of Killer Mears. Tracy was on the way, but he needed something completely different, a part completely removed from blood-and-thunder. And he found that as the priest in San Francisco, for when he donned the clergyman’s collar, it was Hollywood’s benediction.
Tracy later told Sullivan that he was the first writer to come out and predict full stardom for him at a time when no one else could see it. “You’ll never know how much it meant to me at that particular moment—and you’ll never know how much I hoped you were right.”
If settling something so “completely different” on him had finally made audiences sit up and take notice, it was a tactic that bore repeating. In lieu of loan-outs to Wanger and RKO, which would have produced solid pictures but more of the same, Tracy was cast alongside William Powell, Jean Harlow, and Myrna Loy in a screwball comedy called Libeled Lady. Comedy, of course, wasn’t a stretch for him—it had been his forte in stock—but most moviegoers hadn’t seen him in one, and never, for that matter, in the sort of hard-driving part that typified the screwball genre. Powell, Harlow, and Loy were among the biggest draws in the industry, and equal billing in such a powerhouse company could only serve to enhance Tracy’s standing with both exhibitors and the general public.
Based on a clever story by Wallace Sullivan, Libeled Lady had Tracy back in a newsroom setting as an editor whose paper is threatened with ruination when it mistakenly puts an heiress in the middle of a London scandal and is sued for libel. In short order, Tracy’s character, Haggerty, marries off his fiancée (Harlow) to Chandler (Powell), who then sets about to seduce the litigious heiress (Loy). Tracy handled the part with such aplomb that his work appeared effortless. (“Walking on the set, if you didn’t know him, you’d take him for one of the workmen,” said Sidney Skolsky.) There was, however, tension between Harlow and Powell, who were in a difficult relationship together. The delectable Loy, meanwhile, was newly married to producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr., and Tracy made an elaborate show of his disappointment.
“He moped around pretending to pout, playing the wronged suitor,” Loy wrote. “He set up a ‘Hate Hornblow Table’ in the commissary, announcing that only men I had spurned could sit there. So all these men joined him who were supposed to have crushes on me, which they didn’t have at all. It was just a gag, but Spence made his point.”
Libeled Lady was being directed by Jack Conway, a restless, red-faced Irishman who would jump to his feet at the slightest provocation and act out