Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [94]
It was wonderful to spread out over a house and a yard again; the weather was warm and sunny and the rains came only at night. There was a wicker chaise longue in the den, and every day it was taken outside. John’s nurse would carry him downstairs around ten and he would lie outside, except for lunch, until late afternoon. Mother Tracy arrived with her own nurse in tow, determined not to like anything about California. The roses had none of the size and color of Eastern roses, the fruits and vegetables were flavorless, the weather was downright monotonous. Spence cajoled and charmed her, as he had always been able to do in the past, and she settled in for a stay that would come to be permanent.
Johnny’s treatments consisted of putting him in a tub of hot salt water—where he was afraid at first he was going to drown—and giving him foot and leg exercises, all followed by a gentle massage. By the first of the year he was slowly improving, gaining weight and tanning just like his father. Dr. Wilson consented to having his lessons resumed, and a teacher from the Los Angeles School for the Deaf came for half an hour each day after school. Louise wasn’t satisfied with the arrangement—the late hour and John’s obvious fatigue—but over the short term it was the best option available.
Spence drove to the studio on January 16, 1931, and balked at signing the fourteen-page contract Leo Morrison had negotiated. He wanted the right to quit and return to the stage at the end of the first or second year, and he believed he was entitled to a share of any profit the studio made on a loan-out. Wurtzel held firm. “The remarkable thing about Wurtzel,” said the playwright S. N. Behrman, “was his manner of speech, his voice. It had a curious, granulated quality, like an instrument for crushing pebbles. Remarks erupted from him; there was always a fascinating absence of preamble.”
With chronic constipation and a facial tic that curled his mouth into a nervous smile, Wurtzel appeared to be both pained and gloating at having his quarry over a barrel. Tracy was certainly trapped, having already accepted $4,500 in salary. In the presence of one of the studio lawyers, whose name also happened to be Tracy, he signed the document, sourly and without ceremony, submitting himself to the meat grinder that was the Fox Film production line. He then left for Palm Springs to study the script to his first picture, Sky Line, on which filming was set to commence in ten days.
The author of Sky Line was also its director, a former illustrator and sports cartoonist named Rowland Brown. Brown had originally come to Fox as a day laborer, a hefty, hard-drinking Irishman who would work his way up through the ranks. He turned to screenwriting under the auspices of the late Kenneth Hawks, went to Universal for a short while, then sold a grim mob story, “A Handful of Clouds,” to Warner Bros.1 In collaboration with Courtenay Terrett, a star reporter and author of the racketeering exposé Only Saps Work, Brown produced for Sheehan an original screenplay that was a model of economy, an entry for Fox in the gangster sweepstakes at a time when Little Caesar was breaking attendance records in New York.
“Terrett knew well the milieu he described,” Brown’s brother, Sam, told Philippe Garnier, “but the matter of writing scenarios he left to Rowland.” Brown had a knack for illuminating character through