Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [85]
Tracy, Valli Roberts, and Katherine Alexander in The Hard Guy. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Ford had persuaded Winfield R. Sheehan, general manager of the Fox studio, to take a flyer on Tracy. Sheehan, aligned with AT&T and the banking interests that controlled Fox, was locked in a protracted litigation with founder William Fox over leadership of the company, and was stuck in New York while the battle played itself out. He may well have seen The Last Mile for himself, for he had plenty of opportunity, and it would have been the experience of seeing Tracy live—and not in his abortive Movietone test—that convinced him to let Ford have his way.3 Fox was adding stage-trained actors to the payroll at a furious rate, and during Sheehan’s six-month stay at the Hotel Savoy, Humphrey Bogart, George Brent, Robert (later Bob) Burns, Larry Fine, Ted Heeley, Rose Hobart, Harry (later Moe) Howard, Shemp Howard, Elizabeth and Helen Keating, Nat Pendleton, Tyrone Power, John Swor, Ruth Warren, and Charles Winninger were all signed to contracts. That Tracy was practically an afterthought, engaged just days before Sheehan’s return to California, is supported by the somewhat bewildering way in which he was approached.
“The producer,” said Tracy,
was well known, the theater was well known, and I was sufficiently well known so that nobody could possibly have had any difficulty in getting in touch with me. They could have reached me through the producer, they could easily have found out where I lived, they could have reached me at the Lambs Club, or by the simple process of coming back stage after the show. But what they did was to get hold of an agent. They told him they wanted me for a part in Up the River and he called me up on the telephone. When I went over to the Fox offices, everything was cut and dried. Jack Ford was determined to have me for the part, and they had decided exactly what contract they would offer me. The agent sat in the next room while I talked to them. He had nothing whatever to do with the negotiations.
The agent was one Leo Morrison, late of the United Booking Office, a powerful presence in vaudeville who brought the first large contingent of New York stage actors to talking pictures in 1928. Morrison had offices in both New York and Hollywood (where he occupied the mezzanine level at the Roosevelt Hotel) and vague ties to Winnie Sheehan, who, with his Tammany background, would have expected him to play ball. Morrison later claimed to have seen Tracy in The Last Mile, and he may well have been the one who first alerted Fox to Tracy’s nascent appeal. It is just as possible, however, that Tracy was delivered to Morrison in payment for a favor of some kind, or that Morrison would be paying someone a kickback on the commission.
Morrison had other clients at Fox, notably Mae Clarke, Beatrice Lillie, Ruth Warren, Rose Hobart, and Leo Carrillo. The contract Tracy signed employed him for a period of six weeks, commencing June 16, 1930, at a rate of $600 a week. It included a six-month option on his further services and an acknowledgment that Herman Shumlin expected him back in New York no later than August 21 “AS SHOW MUST OPEN CHICAGO SEPTEMBER FIRST.”
Up the River had a rocky time making its way to the screen. Warden Lawes was famous for his stewardship of prison baseball, grooming a field, building grandstands, and busing in teams from other facilities. They played