Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [311]
When columnist Earl Wilson saw him on April 4, Tracy was already talking of the new Sherwood play as if it were a done deal. “I’ve got to go back to Hollywood and knock off an epic,” he said, “then I’m coming back to Broadway to see if I can still act.” He was drinking sarsaparilla from a demitasse cup, sober but weary on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday. “It’s your goddamn movie name that causes you trouble,” he went on. “You make so much money, your economic problem ceases to exist. No options to worry about. The dough rolls in. You forget how to act because you don’t have to act anymore. I heard of a guy who had a 15-year contract at M-G-M. If I had a 15-year contract, I could think of nothing but to get a .45 and blow my brains out. To think of coming in that gate at M-G-M or, for that matter, any gate for 15 years! A Broadway show would give me a chance to see if I can still act. I used to be able to act. Broadway doesn’t care about your goddamn movie name.”
He was back in Los Angeles when FDR died in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12. His wire to Sherwood the next day, praising the playwright’s radio address, urged him to get on with the play they had discussed—a call to postwar America to take on the greatest possible share of world leadership. “Whoever might be called upon to express your thoughts from a stage or screen would be highly honored, but that is really unimportant. It is only important that you write them and that they are imparted so the greatest number of people may know them.”
Seen lunching with Louise at Romanoff’s, Tracy told Louella Parsons he would make another picture before going into the Sherwood play so as to free up as much time as possible. “I would be off the screen for over a year if I waited until fall,” he reasoned. “That’s why I came home from New York.” Having, however, passed on They Were Expendable, his talks with the studio weren’t particularly productive. They squabbled over money, Tracy objecting to the inference he was worth only $110,000 a picture. The new deal, after a year’s leave of absence, would limit the studio to two pictures a year, with his guarantee capped at $220,000 per annum. At one point, Leo Morrison let drop the fact that his client had authorized him to terminate his contract, a prospect no one on the executive side found attractive.
Kate returned to California with plans to do a picture, Green Dolphin Street, and make a Pacific tour as Spence had done. They had scant time together; he was committed to a six-week tour of Europe for the OWI and left for New York within days of her arrival. But once there, something happened and plans for the tour were aborted. Whether it was canceled, scarcely a week before VE Day, or whether it was Tracy who, once again, bailed on the trip at the last possible moment, nobody seems to know. Garson Kanin remembered Tracy once telling him that President Roosevelt had wanted him to deliver a top-secret message to “someone, somewhere” and that Tracy laid the trip’s subsequent cancellation to the president’s sudden death. “The thing I couldn’t understand,” Tracy said to Kanin, “was why me of all people. But, of course, I said nothing and agreed to do as I was told, that’s all.” Waiting at the River Club for the trip to get under way, Tracy, in Kanin’s words, “fell ill.”
Howard Dietz had assigned the judicious Milton Weiss to look after M-G-M’s No. 1 star, and Weiss, in Dietz’s opinion, had his hands full. “I’m at the Sherry-Netherland,” Weiss advised Dietz over the phone one afternoon, “and the big man is drinking vodka martinis and smashing the glasses against the mirror back of the bar. He says you should be looking after him, not me, and he won’t stop drinking until you show him that you care. You’d better come up here.”
With Dietz’s appearance, Tracy turned belligerent: “You were too stuck up to come and meet me yourself. Well, let’s see if you can do better than Milton. Milton has it all over you as a diplomat. You think you’re too high class to give aid and comfort to an actor. You’ve had shows on Broadway