Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [89]
Tracy’s return to New York coincided neatly with the release of The Hard Guy, which showed up on a bill at the Strand and drew favorable comment from Variety. (“Well acted and directed, short is very worthwhile subject for any house.”) He wired Chicago:
THOUGHT OF DEAR DAD TONIGHT AND THE THRILL HE WOULD HAVE HAD COULD HE HAVE WALKED UP BROADWAY WITH ME TONIGHT AND IN BLAZING LIGHTS ON GREAT BROADWAY ASTOR STRAND THEATRE SEEN “SPENCER TRACY IN VITAPHONE PRODUCTION.”
In Los Angeles, Jack Gardner, the Fox casting director, was penciling out the best offer he could make on a fifty-two-week contract. Sol Wurtzel had offered $500 a week to start, but Tracy was noncommittal, citing his obligation to Shumlin and his need to get back to New York. It wasn’t just a ploy; Tracy was genuinely conflicted about taking the Fox offer. Louise disliked movie work and thought the only real pleasure an actor had was in developing a part over a number of performances, each audience bringing something new to the experience. Spence had spent nearly a decade building up to the point where he could command serious critical and commercial attention, and now he was being asked to chuck it all for the gossamer of a Hollywood contract.
Chuck Sligh was in town, and Spence raised the subject with him.
We were walking down Park or Fifth Avenue one day. He was telling me about it. “I’ve got this offer,” he said. “I never liked the thought of going in the movies. You’ve got a line on the floor, you can’t go past it, you’ve got to stand that way and look this way.”
“Gee, I don’t think I’d like that.”
He said, “They’re offering me $500 a week. God, I don’t know. I just don’t know what to do.”
I said, “Why don’t you tell them [that] if they’ll pay you a thousand dollars a week, you’ll take it and give it a try and see how you like it?”
“Well, I think maybe I’ll do that.”
Gardner’s offer, the best he could do, was $750 a week for the first year and $1,000 a week for the second, graduating to $2,500 a week in the fifth year of the contract. A night letter went out on September 4, 1930:
FORWARDING YOU TODAY LETTER EXERCISING OPTION IN YOUR CONTRACT LETTER GIVES FULL DETAILS STOP VERY HAPPY TO HAVE YOU WITH US
KINDEST REGARDS SOL M WURTZEL
Louise arrived back in New York the following morning. Johnny, by then, was running a fever and showing signs of stiffness as well as severe muscle pain. Over the next few days, a total of six doctors saw him, including three pediatricians who agreed he was showing the classic symptoms of spinal meningitis. Two different neurologists attempted spinal punctures, neither with the benefit of anesthetic. Johnny lost consciousness one afternoon, his face assuming a strange pinched look and his body stiffening slightly but unmistakably, his head pulling backward as if suddenly possessed. A third neurologist put him in the hospital—not St. Luke’s where he had been before but a newer, fancier place—and a furor was sparked when the doctor wrote on the admitting card “Poliomyelitis.”
Spence and Louise had to don aprons to see him—large coveralls of stiff white linen—and scrub up afterward, turning the taps on and off with their elbows. Nothing could be done for him, they were told. The disease would have to run its course, then either Johnny would get better or he wouldn’t. Tracy endured the nightmare of The Last Mile, channeling his confusion and fury into a performance actor Dore Schary remembered as both “magnificent and terrifying.” What no one could possibly have known was the emotional price he paid, conjuring the reality of Killer Mears while grappling with the knowledge that his child was hovering near death in a crosstown hospital room, his chances for part of one week, as cousin Frank Tracy recounted, “about zilch.”
By the twelfth they knew that Johnny would live, but beyond that there were no assurances. The level of paralysis would take months to know, perhaps