Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [244]
The ovation that greeted his remarks continued as the procession slowly made its way to the president’s home for a luncheon that included Mayor Carl Zeidler of Milwaukee. He was then whisked back to West Hall, his old campus home, where he was presented with a small golden gavel in commemoration of his time as leader of Alpha Phi Omega. Following a reception at the home of Professor Boody, he was driven out to the Green Lake home of Harold Bumby, now a successful industrialist whose various enterprises included a major interest in Speed Queen. A sitdown dinner for fifty was staged at the Bumby household, where the guests included Lorraine Foat Holmes, who hadn’t seen him in several years. He looked heavier, she observed, and grayer, but was still very much the Spence she always knew.
Accepting an honorary doctorate at Ripon College, June 10, 1940. Left to right: Silas Evans, college president, Tracy, Professors H. Phillips Boody and J. Clark Graham. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Tracy said, “This day will live with me as the greatest so far in this part of my life.” Walter Monfried, long the Milwaukee Journal theater and music critic, would also remember it, but for a somewhat different reason. At the end of commencement exercises, Monfried made his way to a telephone and called the Journal. “I have the Tracy story,” he said. “Do you want to take it now?”
“Hell, no!” his city editor replied. “Italy has just gone to war against France and England—Tracy can wait ’til tomorrow!”
With its top-heavy assortment of players, Boom Town opened in New York over the Labor Day weekend and handily played to more people than any single attraction since Gone With the Wind. Tracy made a quick visit east, ostensibly to support the picture but in reality to meet with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who received him in the Oval Office on September 16, 1940.
The president, who was in a close race for a third term against Wendell Willkie, thanked Tracy for his help in shoring up support within the film industry. Pat O’Brien had just been elected chairman of the “Hollywood for Roosevelt” committee, and although Tracy generally disapproved of actors giving off their political preferences, he agreed to lend his name to the cause, as had Myrna Loy, Thomas Mitchell, Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Humphrey Bogart, and Jimmy Cagney. Robert Montgomery was O’Brien’s counterpart on the Republican side, and his constituents included Walt Disney, Fred Astaire, Lionel Barrymore, Gary Cooper, Jack Warner, Bing Crosby, Irene Dunne, and Louis B. Mayer.
While in Washington, Tracy fielded the usual questions at an afternoon “press party” arranged by the studio. Asked again if he ever thought of going back to the stage, he replied, “Another picture like I Take This Woman and I might have to in order to eat.” He said that any play that came along for him would likely have to wait a couple of years. His next picture, he told the group, would probably be Tortilla Flat, followed by The Yearling. What he didn’t say—doubtless because he didn’t want to answer the questions that would inevitably follow—was that he would be starting the Boys Town sequel in the space of a few weeks.
The studio was pressuring him to do Dr. Ephraim McDowell, the story of the pioneering American surgeon, and had already put novelist and biographer Gene Fowler to work on a script. Tracy didn’t like the story and didn’t much care to do another period picture, nor, for that matter, another biography. He had a tense meeting with Eddie Mannix on October 17, followed by a session on the twenty-first with Mannix, Benny Thau, and Neil McCarthy. It was the opening salvo in negotiations over a new contract, and Tracy went through the motions of doing costume and makeup tests while a sometimes heated discussion ensued.
At first, Father Flanagan was dubious about a second picture. Given the drop in contributions after the first picture appeared,