Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [320]
There settled over the company a sort of grand acquiescence, as if everyone knew that it was Tracy who was keeping the play open and yet resenting him all the same. Anxious to keep their star satisfied and prove to him that he was indeed doing well, Victor Samrock had a number of standing room stubs added to the nightly till in order to bring the show to straight capacity business. The producers also bought several box seats to show a clean sheet on the statement. Tracy, in turn, kept to himself, arriving on matinee days at 2:46 for a 2:45 curtain and rarely speaking to the other members of the cast. Somewhere toward the end of the first week, he granted an interview to Eugene Kinkead of the New Yorker. “I can’t say I’m enjoying myself,” he said. “I’m gratified at my personal reception by the critics; I’m sorry they didn’t like the play. I’ve looked up the record of plays that have been panned, plays with so-called stars in them, and I’ve never seen an instance of a serious play holding up under the kind of reviews we’ve had. Still, you find standees at all performances. I’m amazed. Our audiences give us hearty, healthy applause. I’m frankly a little confused.”
He went on:
Metro wants me to come back. My next picture will be either Sea of Grass by Conrad Richter or Cass Timberlane—probably the former. I don’t know what to do. I’m terribly upset. Sherwood to me really has great integrity, and I know the fabulous figures he’s been offered to write pictures. It’s a little discouraging. I think there’s some of the finest writing in the play I’ve ever seen. I was amazed to find he was not treated with more respect by one or two of the critics. I’ve never known integrity like his. It’s damned, damned unfortunate. Anyway, I’ll stay with it until my boy John, who is flying from California soon, has seen it. He wants to see me act. I’d like to come back in another play, and in another play by Robert Sherwood.
Kinkead’s piece ran in the “Talk of the Town” section of the magazine’s issue of November 24, and the swell of organizational outrage was instantaneous. Tracy’s statements, however well intentioned, brought an immediate decline in advance sales. Sherwood also considered it “one of the very worst blows of all” in their struggle to sell the movie rights. “This, of course, was followed by numerous newspaper items indicating that Tracy might leave at any moment, and the show was marked with the stamp of doom.”
There were a few cast replacements—actors leaving for more promising jobs—and the gate started to slide as Christmas approached. Capacity at the Plymouth was $26,268 a week, but in the play’s second month the average hovered at around $20,000, dipping some weeks to below $19,000. Playing to empty seats, Tracy feared his stature in Hollywood might suffer and let it be known that he was thinking of leaving the show on January 5. Sherwood, pleading poverty, had taken a job with Sam Goldwyn writing the screenplay for a home-front picture called Glory for Me,2 and from California he appealed to Tracy to allow the play one hundred performances, which would take it into the week ending February 9, 1946. “We are still the biggest legitimate gross in town,” he stressed, “and will undoubtedly remain so through these bad two weeks then back to capacity.”
Tracy said that he might reconsider his closing date, a statement that, like the previous one, got reported in the New York Times. Reacting to the damage such uncertainty did to the advance sale, both Samrock and Sherwood pleaded again for a definite decision. “I understand your problems,” Sherwood told Tracy in a day letter, “and know that despite them you have given a magnificent performance in my play. But you must also understand, Spencer, that neither I nor the rest of the Playwrights’ Company could get away with the obvious lie that we would close the play January fifth for any reason other than the fact that you are leaving it. This is not an attempt to trap you into extending the run. It