Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [211]
He found himself at the Lambs that night, but the atmosphere was depressing, most of his old pals having decamped for Hollywood. He dined with actor Wallace Ford—who was playing Of Mice and Men at the Music Box—and the two engaged in a “friendly” dispute over a check for $5.60. Sometime that night, with all the dread of the last month having drained from him completely, he took a drink after seven months and two weeks of sobriety.
Actor David Wayne, new to Broadway, happened onto the scene in the club’s fabled taproom: “The huge supply of liquor that was stacked behind the bar he swept off and hurled to the floor and about the room. It looked as if a hurricane had struck. I know, because I walked into the place a few hours after the destruction began. It was awesome! Some two days later he was still on his feet amidst the ruins of the club, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The by-laws at that time forbade the expulsion of any member as long as he remained on his feet.”
According to Wayne, the studio had an ambulance standing by so that when Tracy “finally collapsed” he could be lifted aboard and driven to a waiting plane. Six long days passed before the siege came to an end. Attempts to contact Louise were unsuccessful; first she was “in” and then, when advised as to what the club was calling about, she was “out.” As someone party to the event observed: “What she should not see, she would not see.”
Billy “Square Deal” Grady, the former Broadway agent who described himself as the studio’s “eyes and ears” in New York, secured two plane tickets west, but after nearly a week of steady drinking, Tracy was in no shape to be seated alongside civilians. Grady quietly turned in the tickets, and M-G-M chartered a private plane out of Newark at a cost of $3,000. In Los Angeles, Tracy managed to slip away and went missing for six days. At no time did he attempt to contact Louise, nor Carroll, and there were no sightings at any of his usual haunts. “No one was able to find him,” said Dore Schary, “until it occurred to somebody to look in the polo stables he had. And they found him there asleep—and quite under the weather.”
He was hospitalized, and the consulting physician on the case told him and Louise that if he continued to drink as he had that season, in five years he would be dead.
“Unfortunately, Spencer Tracy is still very much under the weather,” John Considine delicately advised Father Flanagan in a letter on April 27, when Tracy was in fact missing and nowhere to be found. “He was all ready to sail for Europe but at the last minute decided that it would be better for him to come back to his home and try and recuperate from the effects of the serious surgical operation he underwent a month or so ago. I shall let you hear from me again as soon as I get some definite information about his condition.”
On May 3, with Tracy in the hospital, Considine sent the Reverend Flanagan a copy of Dore Schary’s latest version of the screenplay, which combined early material from Eleanore Griffin with Schary’s own progressive drafts, designed to make Flanagan’s character less a straight man and more the idealistic young priest who willed his boys’ home into being. Where reality intervened, Schary had a melodramatic equivalent to make the same point: the gradual dawning on “Father Eddie” that serving the needs of homeless boys would prevent them from growing into homeless men became a tense monologue from