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for ice cream and cookies. Actor Lynne Overman was the first added member, McHugh having known him since 1926. Dry and insinuative, Overman was, in McHugh’s words, “one of the wisest, wittiest, and gentlest companions” he’d ever known. “He had a keen sense of good taste for [the] excellent but simple things of life. Food and drink seemed to be his hobby. You could also add ladies.” Frank Morgan and Ralph Bellamy later completed the core group, and it became a Wednesday night tradition, the various members dropping in and out as their work schedules permitted. Their wives, who never joined in, called it “the Boys’ Club.”

According to Cagney, it was columnist Sidney Skolsky who hung the name “Irish Mafia” on the group, although Morgan was German, Bellamy was English, and Allen Jenkins, who joined in occasionally, was of early American stock. “There was no thought of it having anything to do with our Irishness,” Cagney said. “But Skolsky, of course, had to make a big thing of it and call it the Irish Mafia. Such nonsense. We happened to be people who liked each other and that is all.”

Stromberg continued to wrestle with Northwest Passage into November 1939. Originally the plan had been to film the entire book and release it with an intermission, as David Selznick intended to do with Gone With the Wind. When King Vidor wrapped the first half, however, it was over two hours in length and had cost more than $2.5 million—extraordinary for its time. And, unlike GWTW, the picture had, for all practical purposes, an all-male cast and virtually none of what was politely referred to at the time as “feminine interest.” At a negative cost of $4 million, Northwest Passage would surpass Ben-Hur as the most expensive picture in M-G-M’s fifteen-year history. In November it was prudently decided to finish the picture with a new ending and release it as Northwest Passage (Book I—Rogers’ Rangers) with the intention of filming Book II as a separate feature once Book I had proven itself commercially.

The core of the group that came to be known—erroneously—as the Irish Mafia. Left to right: James Cagney, Frank McHugh, Pat O’Brien, and Tracy. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

“I did the entire picture in three months of work,” Vidor recounted,

and at the end of that time I still had not received the second part of the script. I called the studio and they said, “Come back.” So I loaded up the trains with all of our stuff and we came back. When I saw the producer he said, “Keep the actors on salary. We’ll have it in another week.” They were sitting right where I had left them three months before. They were probably still working on the same line of dialogue. After another week no progress had been made, so the head of the studio said, “Take these people off salary.” I went to New York and started to work on something else. After I got to New York they called me up. Jack Conway had written a different ending to the story. We didn’t have jet travel then, so I said, “Okay, let Conway shoot the tag,” and left it at that.

Tracy was happy to be done with the picture and hoped the issue of Book II would never come up again. “When a truly historical character is the hero of a bestselling novel, then you are really up against it,” he said wearily. “Everyone who reads the novel has his own picture of the physical and mental characteristics of a man like Rogers. The actor can read everything available on the character, pick out his more human or understandable traits, and go from there, discarding the unessentials. But he is likely to disappoint a lot of people … I have tried to get Rogers’ mental attitude, his psychology. I don’t know whether I have succeeded; I can only hope.”

While he was on location with Northwest Passage, enthusiasm at Fox was building for Stanley and Livingstone. On July 11 associate producer Kenneth Macgowan wired him at McCall:

THE PREVIEW WAS REALLY EXTRAORDINARY. WHEN WE GOT TO THE THEATER IN INGLEWOOD WE WERE DISMAYED TO FIND THAT ABOUT THREE-FOURTHS OF THE AUDIENCE RANGED FROM BABES IN ARMS AND FIVE YEAR OLDS TO HIGH SCHOOL