Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [90]
My Dear Mr. Wurtzel:
Enclosed please find signed letter.
I am very happy that you should want me to return and will do my best to warrant your confidence.
We are still doing fair business here. Looks like perhaps four or five more weeks and then Chicago. I will keep you informed at all times.
Hope “Up the River” proves a big hit.
My thanks and sincere regards. Spencer T.
A few days later, Johnny was discharged from the hospital as “cured,” but the use of that word became a cruel hoax when he was urged by a nurse to try and stand on his own and had to pull himself around on the floor. “Mrs. Tracy,” one of the doctors said to Louise, “you must think we doctors are a pack of fools. John is getting well, but certainly not because of anything we have done.” When they brought Johnny home, the two doctors on the case assured Louise that they did not believe he had any paralysis at all, despite the fact that he could move only one leg slightly and the other almost not at all. All he needed was rest, she was told—rest and sunshine.
“For two weeks he stayed in bed and got the rest,” Louise said, “but all the sunshine he could get in the apartment was in the form of viosterol capsules. At the end of two weeks, he seemed no better. He had no appetite, was listless and uninterested. He would lie hour after hour, moving only his eyes as they followed his [toy] autos whizzing down the ironing board stretched from bed to floor. The family living below us deserved a medal for their uncomplaining patience.”
They decided the best medicine for Johnny would indeed be rest and sunshine, and with the doctor’s approval they stretched him out on pillows and blankets on the back seat of the car and took off for Silvermine, in Connecticut, where they would have a rustic inn pretty much to themselves. The weather was warm and John began to grow stronger, his left leg gradually improving. Spence came out on Sundays and Mondays and ofttimes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, days when he had no matinees to play. He and Louise spent time visiting some of the local kennels—everyone seemed to own at least one dog—and although there were a number of very sound reasons why they shouldn’t want the responsibility of keeping one in the city, he suddenly said one day, “I think John should have a dog—now.”
And so they got a dog, a six-month-old Irish setter. Louise got the inn’s permission to let him sleep in her room on the promise that she would pay for any damage. They named the dog Pat—an easy word for John to say.
Maurine Watkins saw so little of her original story that she proposed splitting the writing credit for Up the River with Willie Collier and Jack Ford. Both executed releases on their material, but it was Watkins who bore the brunt of Winfield Sheehan’s disappointment when he saw how his gritty prison yarn had ripened into low comedy. “Sheehan refused to go to the preview,” Ford recalled, “but just at that time all the exhibitors were out here for one of their meetings, and they all went to see it, and they fell out of their chairs. One guy actually did fall out of his chair—they had to bring him to. A very funny picture—for those days. I kept ducking the woman who wrote the original script, but she went to another studio on the success of Up the River and got three times her salary per script.”
Up the River opened at New York’s Roxy Theatre on October 18, 1930, and proved “violently funny” to the thousands who filled the auditorium that first afternoon. Regina Crewe of the American celebrated the film’s absurdist aspects as if they came straight from the Marx Brothers: “Can you imagine the roars of laughter greeting the scene where the ‘important guy’ of the underworld arrives to do his bit and is welcomed by the prison band and as big a turnout as an oceanic flier gets at City