Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [322]
Garson Kanin had gone off to direct his own play, Born Yesterday, and actor Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who replaced Rex Williams in the part of Gil Hartnick, one of Vinion’s colleagues on the paper, marveled at the spectacle of Tracy giving the actors notes after every performance. “Despite his notable achievements, he aroused little respect from our cast by insisting that all the actors maintain an artificially high pitch and level of performance,” Zimbalist wrote in his autobiography. “When he slipped in comfortably underneath everybody else, the audience would say, ‘He’s so natural!’ His notes comprised a list of those whose energy level was dropping (almost to normal). We all knew what his game was but were helpless to do anything about it.”
When the last performance took place on the night of January 19, Samrock reported to Sherwood that the cast felt miserable “because the full impact of what can happen conveyed itself to them only after the last performance. It was sad and a little more than depressing.” A letter of thanks over Sherwood’s signature was distributed to the cast: “As a kind of final curtain on my relationship with Spencer, I must tell you that all his talk the last few days was, ‘Where did I go wrong?’ The only other note worth mentioning is that he fully promised me, without any prodding on my part, that he was returning to Hollywood and would proceed with all that was in him to sell the moving picture rights of The Rugged Path.”
On January 24, Sherwood addressed both Samrock and press representative William Fields in acknowledging what both men had gone through in the interests of the play and their friendships with him. “I appreciate it very deeply, and I bitterly regret the initial mistake that I made when I first put my faith, and the fruits of long labors, in one who had proved, over and over again, that he possesses the morals and scruples and integrity and human decency of a louse. This, unfortunately, has not been merely one of those irritating experiences that one can laugh off and quickly forget. There certainly was an ugly kind of poison which spread to all of us and it is no easy task to get rid of it. I know we will get rid of it but, speaking for myself, it will not be forgotten.”
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1 He needn’t have bothered; Lardner died in 1934.
2 Released as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).
CHAPTER 22
State of the Union
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The first meeting of the newly installed board of John Tracy Clinic took place on the evening of November 18, 1943. A new demonstration nursery was several weeks into its thirty-six-week session and hot lunches were being prepared daily by a rotation of volunteer mothers. Spence was fighting off a cold, eager to get the last shots for A Guy Named Joe in the can, but Walt Disney, otherwise immersed in the production of war propaganda at his Burbank studio, was interested in seeing firsthand how the clinic worked. It was when Louise was showing him around a few days later that they came upon the kids during nap time.
“Don’t they have cots?” he asked.
“No,” Louise told him. “They just sleep on mats on the floor.”
The next day there were cots and, at Christmas time, a truckload of gifts—puppets and toys, all Disney-licensed, that could be used in teaching.
The service report at the February 1944 meeting was a succession of modest statistics: thirty-one children in the summer course, eight in nursery school, four in a weekly afternoon class. One hundred and seven families were enrolled in the correspondence course, twenty-five mothers were taking adult classes in child psychology and speech, some four hundred other families were assisted in some way via the mails. Granted its federal tax exemption status on June 19, 1944, the clinic had three full-time instructors. In February 1945