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By Root 4045 0

choir sang. Father Flanagan spoke of the good he hoped the movie would accomplish, and the showing began with the roar of the M-G-M lion. As in Westwood, applause punctuated much of the film, particularly when Omaha landmarks were recognized or mentioned. At the fadeout, Father Flanagan was asked to escort Tracy and Mickey Rooney to the stage, where Tracy stood with his arm around Rooney as he had in the picture. After saying, “Words fail me for the first time,” Rooney predicted another Oscar for his costar. Tracy’s first words in the hushed auditorium were inaudible, as if stifled by emotion. Then he was heard to say: “You thanked us for coming here. We should get on our knees to you.” He proceeded to return Rooney’s compliment, telling the crowd that Rooney was destined to become “one of the great actors of his day.”

Still neither an admirer of the script nor of his own performance, Tracy chose his next words carefully. “I do not like to stand here stripped clean of Father Flanagan,” he said, adding that if the picture was great, it was because “the great goodness and sweetness and beauty of the soul of this man shines even through me to you.”

During his days at Fox, when Tracy misbehaved it generally hit the papers. His tangles with the police made the wire services, and his relationship with Loretta Young was about as public as one could get. His hospitalization in 1934 was explained as a polo accident, but other episodes were reported with a fair degree of accuracy. Had he torn up the Lambs Club while working at Fox, word likely would have gotten out; the Lambs membership was too far-ranging and included press agents and columnists. Fox management lacked the wherewithal—and likely the willingness—to stifle unflattering ink. In the Fox model, theaters and real estate were the assets, not the contract players Winnie Sheehan hired by the dozens. And, like most other studios, Fox didn’t build stars because Fox—Sheehan and Wurtzel in particular—didn’t know how. With no investment to protect, a second-tier player like Spencer Tracy could make a drunken scene in Yuma, and the police and the press were free to say whatever they wanted. That all stopped when Tracy joined M-G-M.

The joint philosophy of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg was that the stars on the payroll were hard-dollar assets in the same sense that equipment and real estate were assets—more so in the case of Metro because the Loew’s theater circuit was considerably smaller than those of Fox and Paramount. Mayer was fond of likening talent to precious stones: “If you have a diamond or a ruby, you take care of it, you put it in a safe, you clean it and polish it.” It was the only business, he once said, where the assets walked out the gate every night. After Thalberg’s untimely death, the stars weren’t nurtured quite as creatively as before, but the men Mayer and Thalberg had put into place shared their values and attitudes, and principal among them was Howard Strickling.

The quintessential company man, Strickling had been a publicist for the old Metro organization before the merger that created Metro-Goldwyn. He left because he expected to get fired anyway, and Mayer found him working in Paris for Rex Ingram. Persuaded to join the newly assembled company, Strickling set about building the largest and most efficient publicity machine the industry would ever know. “Early on,” he said, “I learned that people need help, and the secret of my job was learning how to help them. Help them and they help you. That’s what M-G-M was all about, and it was particularly true for the actors—most of them were insecure and overly sensitive and self-centered, so you had to convince them you had their best interests at heart.”

Strickling controlled access to the world’s greatest assemblage of contract talent, and when he and his staff “helped” a particular journalist or outlet, their “help” was expected in return. When something potentially damaging occurred, Strickling started working the phones. In cases where an incident occurred out of town, a representative was often