Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [200]
Joan Crawford and Tracy in a candid moment on the set of Mannequin (1937). (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Tracy had been off radio since February, when Louis B. Mayer, under pressure from exhibitors, imposed a ban on broadcasting for all contract players. The practice of putting film stars on the air in tab versions of their latest pictures had been blamed for weak showings at the box office, and The Good Earth and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney became the first Metro releases with no radio exposure whatsoever. By summer the blanket restriction appeared to be loosening, and Loew’s gave its consent for the American Tobacco Company to enter into agreements with six reigning M-G-M personalities, Robert Taylor, Myrna Loy, and Tracy among them, to appear on programs sponsored by the company and produced by its agency, Lord & Thomas. The studio retained the right of script approval, and American Tobacco agreed to supply each artist’s “smoking needs” with a carton a week of Lucky Strike cigarettes.4 Tracy didn’t appear for American Tobacco during the run of the agreement, but was among the stable of stars—which included virtually everyone other than Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer—to appear on Metro’s own weekly program, a frantic vaudeville of premium names known collectively as Good News of 1938.
Tracy disliked radio, but the money it paid made it difficult to refuse. Here he prepares for a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast of “Arrowsmith” in October 1937. With him are Fay Wray and host Cecil B. DeMille. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
The show, a historic collaboration between M-G-M and the Maxwell House division of General Foods, originated from Hollywood’s El Capitan theater every Thursday night (so as not to conflict with movie attendance on Fridays and Saturdays). Jeanette MacDonald, Allan Jones, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Judy Garland, Sophie Tucker, and Buddy Ebsen all crowded into the first broadcast on November 4, and Tracy, along with Joan Crawford, Robert Young, Mickey Rooney, and Ted Heeley, was part of the second installment on November 11. Having seen Mannequin at the studio only two days before (“Stinks!” he wrote in his datebook), he and Crawford now performed an episode from the picture, really just a teaser, thus discharging his contractual obligation to make such an appearance. The next time he emoted on Good News, he collected a fee of $3,500 for his trouble.
Tracy had just committed to making a picture called Test Pilot for Victor Fleming when, on November 20, 1937, Eddie Mannix’s wife was killed in a bizarre automobile accident outside of Palm Springs. Bernice Mannix had gone to the desert with family friends and had gambled into the early morning hours at the Dunes, a popular nightspot run by a Detroit mobster named Al Wertheimer. Wertheimer was driving her back to the desert home of Joe Schenck, where she and a niece were staying, when he suddenly swerved to avoid a tow truck that had stopped for a stalled car on the highway. Slamming on the brakes, Wertheimer lost control of his coupe, which left the pavement and overturned, throwing its driver clear but crushing its thirty-seven-year-old passenger. Reached at home, Eddie Mannix was rushed by air to Banning, where the body had been taken. The couple had been married eighteen years.
Tracy saw Mannix the next afternoon and was an active pallbearer at the High Mass celebrated in Beverly Hills the following morning (as were Harry Rapf, Clark Gable, Woody Van Dyke, and Hunt Stromberg). He went straight from Good Shepherd to Riviera, where he played furiously and lost to a six-goal champion. That evening, he sat with Mannix, Howard Strickling, and others at the former’s modest two-bedroom house on Linden Drive. The following morning, Spence and Louise left to accompany Mannix, his niece Alice, and Strickling on the train back to Boston, where Bernice would be laid to rest. “I remember seeing Uncle Eddie and Tracy going back for hot fudge sundaes,