Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [81]
As Tracy told it, “I was supposed to grab the guard to get the keys to unlock the cell, but that night the keys flew into the footlights. So I choked the guard a little more, grabbed his gun, and said, ‘Now get those keys, you son of a bitch!’ The poor guy crawled down and got the keys and, afterward, when I saw the marks on his neck, I realized I’d really choked him. He was damn near dead.”
The tension mounted from there. The prisoners rounded up all the guards they could find, making their intentions clear they’d start shooting them—one at a time—if their demands weren’t met.
Hale Norcross cut his right hand so badly breaking out a pane of glass at the back of a cell that blood streamed down the sleeve of his costume. And when the curtain rang down five minutes early, a series of backstage signals having gone temporarily awry, the cast “almost massacred” the poor stagehand blamed for the mistake. But such was the intensity of the performance that no one in the audience seemed to notice, and when Tracy exulted, “Well men, it’s on! The war’s begun! Shoot, you bastards! Shoot!!” and the curtain again came down—this time legitimately—there was a palpable sense of relief all around.
The third act built to a nerve-racking barrage of explosions and machine gun fire, Tracy savagely murdering two of the hostages before stepping himself into the line of fire, the searchlight catching him in its glare, the bursts coming as the priest intones Latin and the two remaining convicts stand motionless amid the dust and the fury. “Let ’em wonder out there,” he shouts. “Let all the world wonder. Let the whole goddamn world wonder!” And then slowly, quietly: “I’m goin’ out into the open air …”
Curtain.
At first the audience wasn’t sure what to do, and the curtain rose on the first of the calls to only tepid applause, but then it built, quickly, forcefully, as the crowd as one came to the full realization of what it had just witnessed, a numbing, heart-pounding, ear-shattering performance torn straight from the pages of their daily newspapers. By the time Tracy, drenched in perspiration, came to the fore, his arms limp, summoning every ounce of strength he still had within him, they were shouting and stomping and on their feet, and the ovation continued solidly through the cast bow, through the second calls, and kept up until he had taken fourteen curtain calls for himself. And he knew, as did the critics cheering in the stalls, that something extraordinary had just happened, and that he finally had what he had pursued so relentlessly over the past seven years—the lead in a hit play on Broadway.
Herman Shumlin had spent the entire performance in an advanced state of agitation, fidgeting and nervously walking in and out of the building. When the play was over, someone came running up to him and said that Alexander Woollcott was looking for him backstage. “I told him to say I was gone. I couldn’t think of going backstage.” Minutes later, Woollcott, in his usual opening night costume—dark blue cape and black felt hat, oversized and flopping—found him. “This is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life,” he said, his voice trembling with feeling. “I can’t begin to tell you how important this play is to me. I’m not a critic anymore, so I can’t write a review of it in the newspaper, but if there is anything I can do for you, just tell me.” Shumlin considered the offer, then asked if he might write a short letter that could be used as an advertisement.
Woollcott’s demonstration was a bellwether, for the notices the next day were universally positive, some extraordinarily so. “A prison play that is so relentless that it lacerates you, so anguishing that it tears your heart with pity,