Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [80]
The death house’s where they come and go,
They linger just a little time,
Before they give you the electric chair,
Sentenced for some awful crime…
With James Bell in Chester Erskine’s staging of The Last Mile. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
And suddenly Tracy, his words erupting like rifle shots, appeared at the bars of his cage: “Shut up, you crazy bastard!”
Unminding, Leach continued on.
“Drake!” hollered Tracy. “Why don’t you stop him?”
“Stop him yerself,” returned the guard, played with surly intransigency by Don Costello. “I like it.”
“Bitch!”
And so it went, the panic of impending doom informing every glance, every line, every nuance of posture. Hardened prisoners awkwardly reassured and comforted each other as one among them sat trembling and hopeless, the preparations for execution going forth as mandated by law.
“No detail is missed,” Burns Mantle, the veteran critic, wrote for the New York Daily News. “For half an hour you sit, tense and miserable, through the visits of the prison priest for the last prayers; the visit of reporters for the last messages of the condemned; the visits of the guards to cut the trousers leg, moisten the hair of the head, and shave the temples of the man to go. You hear the reading of the death warrant and finally you grip the arms of your chair as the march to the chair begins and the mumbling, shaken voice of Richard Walters is heard, assuring his cell mates that he will be game, that he will meet them, he hopes, somewhere, sometime.”
And through the green door he staggered: “I wish I’m the last one who ever sits in that goddamn bastard chair!” After a moment’s silence, as the other condemned men waited, tightly gripping the bars, there came a deep, reverberating hum from the dynamos, and the lights went dim. Then a pause as they came back up. Howard Phillips as Fred Mayor, Number Three, broke down and sobbed. Then again the whine of the motors and again the lights went low. And then Tracy delivered his curtain line, an echo straight from the Texas death house. “They’re givin’ him the juice again!” he erupted in a burst of animal fury. “What the hell are they tryin’ to do? Cook him??”
And from that moment forward, Spencer Tracy, with both truth and passion as his twin weapons, dominated the play. Chet Erskine was at the back of the auditorium: “I suddenly saw him, after a hesitant start, realize his power as he felt the audience drawn into the experience of the play and respond to the measure of his skill and the power of his personality. I knew that he had found himself as an actor, and I knew that he knew it.”
At intermission the audience sat in stunned silence at first, and then the conversation and the milling about was unusually subdued. Some people left the theater and never came back. There was a report that one woman got physically ill. Burns Mantle could remember no other experience “as emotionally upsetting” and fought an impulse to bolt from the room. “Nothing this season,” said Gilbert Gabriel of the American, “has crossed the footlights with such unregenerate savagery. Nothing, I’ll witness, has left its house so shaken and stirred as the first act of The Last Mile did.” The performances in Hartford hadn’t gone like this, and the cast took their cigarette break in utter silence.
When the curtain rose on the second act, the scene was the same, except that Walters had been replaced by Jackson, the black man, in Cell 7. Two weeks had passed, and now it was time for Mayor to die. The banter and the action were familiar from the events of the first act, and then the guard Drake got too close to Mears’ cell while pushing the condemned’s last meal through the aperture. In a flash, Mears had his arm around the guard’s throat, and the other convicts watched motionless, their eyes popping in disbelief, as he choked him into unconsciousness.
Tracy was so keyed up—as were they all—that, as Herman Shumlin