Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [77]
The first act was Blake’s sketch almost verbatim, Wexley’s chief liberty being to change Blake’s Mexican prisoner to a black man. The second and third acts portrayed an opportunistic escape attempt patterned on the events at Cañon City. In the end, the matter of a title was more vexing than the structure; Wexley had inserted bits of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” amid the machine gun bursts of his play’s final moments (“Oh, the wild charge they made! All the world wondered!”) and so he decided to call it All the World Wondered. Inexplicably, his agent sent the play to producer Herman E. Shumlin, a onetime reporter and press agent whose track record was 0–4, his last play having tanked just two days prior to the onset of Black Tuesday. Shumlin, who was used to seeing only “the bottom of the barrel,” was astonished at the raw power of Wexley’s play and managed to scare up the money to produce it at a time when “all the backers anybody could think of were jumping out of high windows.”
“It was one o’clock when I finished reading it,” Shumlin recalled, “and I went all the way out to Brooklyn and woke up Sam Golden, the printer, and read it to him.1 He gave me a check for $500 to buy an option on the play, I think maybe because he wanted to go back to bed. After that, my troubles began, raising the money to put the show on. I borrowed from a bank. I squeezed my relatives dry.” The title was the first thing to go, but it would be nearly a month before the play had the title under which it would see its Broadway debut: The Last Mile.
To direct, Shumlin selected Chester Erskine, who had earlier had a hand in staging The Criminal Code, a similarly themed prison drama that was one of the season’s few genuine hits. Briefly an actor but too tall and pale for anything but character work, Erskine knew the success of Wexley’s play would depend on its casting and the ability of its actors to inhabit their characters to the point of morbidity. Skeptical of Spencer Tracy from the outset, Erskine regarded their meeting as a courtesy at first, not the urgent mating dance that comes with the ideal match of actor and role.
“I had seen a few of his performances,” Shumlin said, “and was not overly impressed by him as a candidate for the lead in The Last Mile. I was just about to dismiss him when something about our too-brief casting interview stayed with me. Since it was getting on to dinnertime, I invited him to join me at a theatrical haunt. There, in a less strained atmosphere, I was suddenly made aware as we were talking that, beneath the surface, here was a man of passion, violence, sensitivity, and desperation: no ordinary man, and just the man for the part.”
Wexley’s play was intense, grim, uncompromising; hard to take over the course of three acts. And there were no women in the cast, an anomaly on Broadway, where the ticket-buying decisions were often made by wives and girlfriends and where the matinee trade was crucial to the success of a show.2 Louise, as was her habit, read the script and told Spence she thought it “pretty bad.” There was little that jumped off the page, other than the unusually coarse language tossed between the prisoners. “It was so violent,” she said, grimacing. “That was the kind of part I never liked him in.”
Tracy’s contract for All the World Wondered, signed on January 14, 1930, called for his now standard price of $400 a week, payable Saturdays, and weekly bonuses of $50 and $100 if the gross hit $8,000 and $10,000, respectively. Rehearsals began the following day, Tracy meeting his fellow prisoners for the first time: James Bell, who would play the gutsy Richard Walters, Cell 7, whose execution is imminent as the curtain rises; Howard Phillips, whose hot-tempered Fred Mayor, Cell 3, would be next in rotation; Hale Norcross, who, as “Red” Kirby, Cell 9, would be the graybeard, the senior member of the group; Ernest Whitman, the muscular black man engaged to play the superstitious Vincent Jackson, Cell 13; George Leach, chosen by Erskine to