As planned, Spencer Tracy rejoined The Last Mile on September 1, 1930—in New York, however, not Chicago, Herman Shumlin having extended the Broadway run on the promise of Tracy’s return. Curiously, his absence hadn’t made much of a difference in terms of ticket sales, and Wexley, the author, actually liked Thomas Mitchell’s work as Mears better than Tracy’s—though his was certainly a minority report. (“Poor Tommy,” said Chester Erskine, “he just couldn’t get into that part.”) Mitchell played the role five weeks, then went on one night stewed to the gills, heaving and snorting and stumbling into the footlights. Erskine replaced him with Allen Jenkins, Mitchell’s understudy, and it was Jenkins who played the role—superbly, as one cast member recalled—until his predecessor had completed Up the River.
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 even years, and the care he would need, how much and for how long, was unknowable as well. All that was certain was that the cost would be stratospheric. Tracy went to the Lambs Club that day and wrote out a long-delayed reply to Sol 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 Hall? Or where the manager of the baseball team bewails the fact that he has lost the jail series by having a pitcher electrocuted just before the final game? Or that sequence in which the convicts, with bared heads and reverential attitudes, sing the ‘varsity song’ of their alma mater?”
The picture was a surprise hit, opening as it did between two much fancier Fox productions, the $2 million widescreen epic The Big Trail and the futuristic musical Just Imagine. Louise thought the film terrifically funny—particularly a safecracking scene with Warren Hymer loafing and listening to the radio while Tracy did the dirty work—but Spence’s reaction was sharper, more critical, and he couldn’t quite fall into the lighthearted mood of the crowd. “I thought I was the worst actor I had ever seen on the screen,” he later said of the experience. “I was surprised that Ford and the Fox officials didn’t remake the picture.”
The Last Mile ended its New York run after thirty-six weeks, and Tracy left for Chicago on November 1. Johnny’s left leg had improved steadily—he could now sit on the floor and hitch himself along—and he was back to taking short lessons at home from one of his teachers at the Wright Oral School. Both Spence and Louise thought the play would have a decent run at Chicago’s Harris Theatre, and that there would be plenty of time to pack before the move to Los Angeles. “We decided to store our furniture until we came back,” Louise said. “That we might not come back, except on trips, I do not think ever occurred to either of us.”
The Last Mile got off to a slow start in Chicago, and the company manager posted a closing notice the week of November 10. Then there was an urgent message from Fox asking Spence to come immediately, so he wired Louise and asked if she could meet him in Chicago that following week.
The prospect [Louise wrote] of sorting our various possessions, packing those we might need for the next six months or year, arranging for their shipping, and that of the Ford roadster we had bought the preceding spring, as well as the storing of the furniture, all within a week, and transporting an invalid child who could not even stand, as well as a still unbroken Irish Setter puppy across the continent, with an overnight stop in Chicago, and, at the end of the trip, finding a place to live, more doctors, and a teacher for John, well might have filled me with dismay. But, except for a faint picture of myself, telegram in hand, wondering why it was men always happened to be someplace else when there was any moving, and thinking this would be the scramble to end all scrambles, I remember no particular emotion. I knew we would make it somehow. We always did.
In Chicago the closing notice stayed up all of forty minutes, then it was removed on orders from New York. Two days later, a letter from Fox set Tracy’s start date at December 1, promising twenty weeks at $750 a week and commencing with a six-week layoff period. He would be expected to report to work in Los Angeles on January 11, 1931. With the play set to move from the Harris to the smaller Princess, he started dickering with both Shumlin and Equity to get out of town on a two-week notice.
When Johnny’s doctor heard they were leaving New York, he told Louise he would like an orthopedist to examine the child and it was arranged. After he had carried the boy from the waiting room into his office, the orthopedist asked Louise what she thought the trouble was. She said, “Polio.”
He stared at her in disbelief. “Polio!” he exclaimed. “How long ago?”
“Three months.”
“And you mean nothing has been done for him up to now?”
She told him her story, ending with the news that they would be leaving for California in a few days. He told her he could do nothing in three days, and that he should have seen the boy when the attack first occurred. He wrote down the name of a doctor in Los Angeles. “He is one of the two finest men on the coast, and, I believe, the finest. Don’t waste a moment after you reach there before making an appointment. Tell whomever you talk to in his office that it is urgent.” The man whose name he wrote on the card was Dr. John C. Wilson, the chief of the orthopedic department at Children’s Hospital.
Mother Tracy was only told of her grandson’s illness the day before he was due to arrive from New York. In the aftermath of her accident, Carrie had suffered a complete nervous collapse and it was feared the shock of the news might be too great for her. Her orthopedist, Dr. Charles Pease, was present when Spencer broke the news, and he asked if he might drop around and see John the following day. When he did, he confirmed the other doctor’s endorsement of Dr. Wilson, but then he went a step further.
“Every day is precious,” he said. “It will be another three or four days at least before anything can be done in Los Angeles. If you will stay over one more day here, and allow me to, I will take him to the Children’s Memorial Hospital and put a cast on his leg. That, at the moment, is the most important thing to be done.”
As the Tracys learned, the affected muscles should have been put in a cast to enforce complete rest immediately after the attack. The fact that Johnny had instead been encouraged to work the muscles had undoubtedly resulted in permanent damage, though it was impossible to say exactly how much. The next day, the boy’s leg was encased in plaster from hip to toe. Then Louise mentioned a persistent weakness in John’s back, and Dr. Pease ordered some x-rays of the spine. After they had returned to the hotel, the doctor called and said he would like to make a back cast, too, a removable one. It wouldn’t delay their departure; he’d come to the hotel and do the job right there. So that evening, with Louise assisting, he made a half cast for Johnny’s back that reached from his shoulder to his hips and around under his arms.
They left Chicago in the midst of a blinding snowstorm and were met in California by Leo Morrison, who had two taxis on hold and promptly hailed a third when he took in the size and breadth of the party. He knew a boarding kennel where they could leave the dog, essentially taking charge of everything. “I feel sure,” said Louise, “I must have drawn a long sigh of relief as I sank onto the brown leather seat of the cab, with Pat—no longer carsick—sitting quietly at my feet. We were there! That mad ten days were over and we were there. I could have said home, but that would not have occurred to me.”
When they saw Dr. Wilson, he listened to a history of the case and then walked over to the table on which John was lying and told him to raise his leg—his good one. John did so and moved it easily from side to side.
“Now the other one,” he said.
“But he can’t—” Louise began, but even as she spoke, and to John’s wide-eyed amazement, he raised the leg with its heavy cast almost straight up.
“Well,” said the doctor, turning to Louise. “You see what just a few days of immobilization has done for this leg? You fell into good hands in Chicago. I feel sure we can do a lot for this boy.”
The Fox Film Corporation was an organization in free fall. William Fox, the visionary head of the empire, had been crippled by the stock market meltdown and forced to sell when some $25 million in short-term notes came due. A company called General Theatres Equipment paid $18 million for Fox’s voting shares—a bargain price considering the deal included control of Fox Film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Gaumont British, and 1,500 theaters in the United States and Great Britain. Fox’s cronies, including his two brothers-in-law, were swept from the board, and Fox himself was handed the chairmanship of a newly created “advisory board” that left him with no authority. In charge of the restructured company would be Fox’s former secretary and longtime lieutenant, Winfield R. Sheehan.
Winnie Sheehan (as he was known to practically everyone) was a police reporter on the New York World when he made the jump to machine politics as secretary to city fire commissioner Rhinelander Waldo. At about the same time, a former cloth sponger named Bill Fox was entering into a partnership with Tammany politicians “Big Tim” and “Little Tim” Sullivan to run the City Theatre on East Fourteenth Street. Fox, of the firm of Fox, Moss & Brill, was struck by the fact that the Sullivans never had any trouble with fire regulations, and the connection he made was to Sheehan. Indeed, when Waldo was moved to the position of police commissioner in 1911, Sheehan followed as general factotum and bagman. He was dragged before a committee of the Board of Aldermen on more than one occasion, but they never could make anything stick until a whorehouse madam testified that she had paid graft to an agent of Sheehan’s at the rate of one hundred dollars a month. Forced to resign, Sheehan went to work for Fox, who understood and valued his connections. In 1916 Sheehan attained the position of vice president and general manager of the newly established Fox Film Corporation.
“The Sheehan influence on Fox production began there at the beginning with an approach reminiscent of the New York World’s Sunday supplement,” the industry’s first historian, Terry Ramsaye, later wrote. “The pictures were addressed at the masses with alarming and successful precision, from the vampiring roles of Theda Bara and Virginia Pearson to such classics as Bertha the Sewing Machine Girl… That did not, however, represent Mr. Sheehan’s ceiling of taste or capacity. He was affected both by the market and by William Fox, who was able to cry at his own emotions in the making of Over the Hill, his own version of Will Carleton’s sad fifth reader poem of ‘Over the Hill to the Poor House.’ ”
Blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, Sheehan was a supremely cynical little man, an Irishman and a Roman Catholic in an industry dominated by Jews. Fox was a big thinker when it came to exhibition, a man who built the world’s most lavish movie theaters and filled them with widescreen and sound. And while it was Fox who gave the world Movietone, the sound-on-film miracle that became the industry standard, it was Sheehan who produced the pictures that made Movietone matter. Winnie Sheehan came west in 1926, assuming charge of the Fox plant on Western Avenue in Los Angeles. What Price Glory?, 7th Heaven, Mother Machree, Sunny Side Up, and The Cock-Eyed World were all made on Sheehan’s watch. Raoul Walsh, Frank Borzage, and John Ford prospered at Fox, as did Janet Gaynor, Warner Baxter, Edmund Lowe, and Victor McLaglen. Sheehan put Will Rogers in talkies, made the first western feature with dialogue, and won five of the first twelve Academy Awards.
Sheehan, who was personally responsible for the company’s European distribution network, often seemed more focused on foreign markets—which accounted for roughly 33 percent of Fox’s revenue—than he was on the domestic market. Distracted, he could find time for no more than a dozen pictures a year and relied on an ever-shifting group of associate producers to take up the slack—men like Ralph Block, Ned Marin, George Middleton, and James Kevin McGuinness, none of whom had the creative chops to make great or even consistently good movies. All were presided over by Sheehan’s superintendent, a tough, humorless character named Sol Wurtzel, who had started with Fox as a stenographer and knew about as well as anyone how to get an incoherent picture shot in twelve days.
Wurtzel tried all genres but rarely did any well. When a good movie got made at Fox, it was more the result of leaving a director like Ford or Borzage or William K. Howard alone. Sheehan announced forty-eight to fifty-two pictures a season, then left it to Wurtzel to figure out how to deliver on the promise. Sheehan himself inhabited a vast Beverly Hills mansion with sunken gardens and a library ceiling imported from Spain. Though he usually had a half-chewed cigar rolling around in his mouth, his meals were grandly served on golden plates with golden goblets at their side. He had the Irish gift of conviviality, but could also be a ruthless son of a bitch.
Louise was taken house hunting by Mary Ford. “I was appalled at the rents,” she said, “especially in Beverly Hills. Mary said I now was connected with an industry which, in quite a measure, had been responsible for those rents, and that I must take the bad with the good. I was beginning to realize that the salary which had looked so big, unless we were careful, probably would leave a smaller net income than the one Spencer had been drawing in New York on the stage.” The places in Louise’s price range were all dreary affairs, obvious rentals, dark inside with cheap oriental rugs cast about. On the second day she took a six-month lease on a plain-looking Spanish stucco on a hill just east of the UCLA campus. It had the requisite red tile roof, a nice rose garden, and a little yard in which Johnny’s recovery could take place.
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 the sparest of dialogue, and the script gave the actors room to work. Its quality delighted Tracy, its bitter sarcasms unique in a medium still struggling to find its voice. Brown proved to be as good a director as he was a writer, moving quickly between setups, eschewing coverage and virtually cutting in the camera. “I had worked for Fox some years,” Sam Brown said, “thus it was I who chose his team: Joseph August as cameraman, Harold Schuster, Murnau’s editor on Sunrise. Even the script girl was the best in the studio; later she became a script writer for [Darryl F.] Zanuck. Happily, he was surrounded, because Rowland shot very little film … The heads at Fox when they saw the rushes went crazy. Rowland hadn’t covered himself at all. If he had Tom Mix’s editor, for example, he would not have known what to do with it. But Schuster knew.”
The process of making the film was less chaotic than for Up the River, Brown being eager to bring the picture in not only on time but substantially under budget. Tracy was equally anxious to do well, giving “Bugs” Raymond a sort of Cohanesque charm that ran counter to the shakedowns and murders he ordered. What emerged was the most engaging racketeer the talkies had yet produced, an affable crook with a glint of bedbug insanity in his eyes, one who aspired to legitimacy and then let it be his undoing.
With his illustrator’s sensibilities, Brown surrounded Tracy with an unusual group of supporting players, many picked as much for their faces as for their acting abilities. Typical was dancer George Raft, whom Brown had seen in vaudeville and who was dining with friends one evening at the Brown Derby when the director came over, introduced himself, and offered him a test. Raft, as it turned out, wasn’t good at delivering dialogue, but his pose as a ferret-faced hood was priceless. His dark hair slicked back with pomade, he made an ominous counterpoint to Tracy’s genial, offhanded mick. Making liberal use of locations in and around Los Angeles, Brown brought the film, retitled Quick Millions, in for a negative cost of $171,000. Everyone at Fox was thrilled with the result, and Sheehan awarded Brown a $1,000 bonus. “All the directors at the studio watched it,” Sam Brown remembered, “even Mr. Ford.”
Rowland Brown had brought forth a new kind of gangster picture, low-key and artfully composed and less nerve-rattling than the brassy Warner fare. Both he and Tracy were part of a new wave in Hollywood, doing fresh things with old ideas, but the public, with its collective mind on its pocketbook, wasn’t necessarily paying attention. Established stars were fading—John Gilbert, Ramon Navarro, Norma Talmadge, Harry Langdon—yet new ones were conspicuously slow in taking their place. And there was always the shared feeling among Irish Catholics that no matter how well something was going, it could all collapse without warning.
Around the house, Spence took to using the phrase “Now when the bubble bursts …” to preface any discussions of the future, as if it were a foregone conclusion. In shooting an early scene, he and Raft found themselves seated together at a testimonial dinner for Bugs’ associate, the vicious “Nails” Markey. Tracy recognized one of the diners, a dress extra, as King Baggott, one of the first genuine stars of the movies, an action hero back when Tracy was still lighting lamps in Bay View. “Look at that man,” he whispered to Raft. “Once a great star and now an extra for a few bucks a day when he can get the work. That could happen to me. That’s what really scares me.”
The humble beginnings of Daniel J. “Bugs” Raymond in the opening minutes of Quick Millions. (SUSIE TRACY)
With all the gladhanding and backslapping attendant on the completion of Quick Millions, it came as a letdown that Tracy’s next assignment was a talking remake of Six Cylinder Love. William Anthony McGuire’s hit comedy was in its seventh month at the Harris Theatre the night Tracy got his first look at Manhattan, and Fox had filmed it the following year with members of the original Broadway cast reprising their stage roles. The material hadn’t aged well, and at a time when American picturegoers were more concerned about feeding and clothing their families than affording an expensive car, the choice showed just how desperately out of touch studio management was with its intended audience. Sheehan then compounded the goof by putting Lorin Raker, another New York import, in the male lead. Slight and doll-like, Raker was too old to be playing a newlywed opposite Sidney Fox, nearly twenty years his junior, and lacked both the name and the presence of a leading man.
With Raker topping the cast, Tracy found himself relegated to the peripheral part of Donroy, the slick salesman who first sells Gilbert and Marilyn Sterling their neighbors’ car, then takes it off their hands at the end of the film when he peddles it to the cash-rich janitor, a bootlegger. Not only was the material stale, but the director was Thornton Freeland, a man who had been around the business a long while, but usually as someone’s assistant. Freeland displayed a production manager’s flair for camera, his principal credit being the stagebound musical Whoopie (in which all the directorial highlights were the work of dance director Busby Berkeley). Having worked with John Ford and Rowland Brown on his first two pictures, Tracy thought Freeland inept and did nothing the director told him to do without arguing bitterly about it. The film took twenty-two days to make, unconscionable given the result.
The virtue of Six Cylinder Love was that Tracy himself was required for relatively little of it. He would come home, for he was scarcely ten minutes from the studio, slip quietly into the house, change his clothes and be gone again before Louise had a chance to notice. One day she saw him in a pair of well-worn trousers, and a passing remark drew a vague, evasive answer. The more curious she got, the more mysterious he got. Then he’d joke about it, bringing the subject up himself at dinner, but never to the point of explaining much of anything. Then one Sunday, as he and Louise were motoring out toward the ocean along Sunset Boulevard, he slowed and pointed out a sign:
HOTTENTOT RIDING ACADEMY
HORSES 75 CENTS PER HOUR
“That’s it,” he said.
“That’s what?”
“That’s where I’ve been coming.”
“You mean you’ve been riding?”
“Sure,” he said. “Riding. Want to go over and see the horses? Midnight, coal black, that’s the one I ride.”
He inched the car down a narrow ravine to where there was a rundown barn and some stables and found Midnight. Louise, who had practically grown up on horses, was enchanted. “But you’ve never been on a horse in your life before,” she said. “How in the world did you happen to start?”
“I rode once in Silvermine last fall. Remember? I just thought maybe I’d like it.”
“But I thought you said you were scared to death.”
“Well, I was … but I still think maybe I’d like it.”
Louise devoutly hoped that he would. “He never had cared for any sport that I knew of since he was a boy and liked to box (and he boxed very well I have been told). Ever since I had known him, he had taken no exercise except a little walking by fits and starts, and he had no hobbies. His entire interest, and most of his friends, had been in the theatre. This opened up new vistas.”
They rode together at the Hottentot a few times, walking and trotting slowly along a little trail that led from the stables through a narrow ravine back of the hills that bordered the boulevard. Then they ran into John Cromwell, who was directing features for Paramount. Somehow the subject got around to horses and riding, and Spence shyly told him what he had been doing.
“Start polo,” Cromwell urged. “It’s a great way to learn to ride. Go out to Snowy Baker at Riviera. He’ll teach you. It’s wonderful! Most thrilling thing in the world!”
The third film on Tracy’s schedule was another comedy, a talking remake of a Fox silent called A Girl in Every Port. Sheehan was following through on a threat to make Tracy and Warren Hymer into the new Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen, the team that had played Quirt and Flagg in the popular comedies that followed the colossal success of What Price Glory? Tracy liked Hymer, a bright guy with an impressive pedigree, but he was strictly a one-note actor, all bluster and business with no shading of any sort. Six years younger than Tracy, Hymer was the son of playwright John B. Hymer and actress Elsie Kent. Educated at Yale, he was signed by Fox in 1929 and settled into a succession of dummy roles, instantly typed as a talkative moron. Hymer responded to his predicament in time-honored fashion, drinking himself into belligerence both off the set and on. “Oh, God,” said John Ford, “what a time I had with him. I threw him into a sanatorium and hospitals …”
Goldie, as the film came to be known, seemed designed to showcase the new Fox lot in Beverly Hills, 108 acres of prime California real estate known officially as Movietone City. The story took Tracy and Hymer through a succession of international locales, Russia to Venice to Greece to Rio and finally to a carnival in Calais, where they discover the title character diving into a tub of water from a height of two hundred feet. The principal girl in a picture full of them was Jean Harlow, who was being rented to Fox at the rate of $1,250 a week by producer Howard Hughes. Just twenty, Harlow had risen from extra work and bit parts to the female lead in Hughes’ $4 million air spectacle Hell’s Angels. Having been kept under wraps for nearly a year, Harlow now had three pictures in the can, and their collective impact would make her a star. Her delivery tended to be wooden—more so after speech lessons—but her milky white complexion and platinum hair made the eye go straight to her in any shot she was in. She played tarts, gangsters’ molls, and the like, and the script for Goldie broke questionable ground when the word “tramp” was applied to her character on four separate occasions. She was sweet-natured, though, earnest and professional, and had a photographic memory to rival Tracy’s own. When director Ben Stoloff had to call for another take, it was generally because she mispronounced a word or moved incorrectly, never because she went up.
Spence had two pictures in the queue himself, and the similar circumstances forged a bond between them. Ten days into production on Goldie, Quick Millions opened at the Roxy in New York while Universal’s Iron Man, a fight drama from the author of Little Caesar, debuted at the Globe with Harlow in the female lead opposite Lew Ayres. The Fox publicity people gave Tracy every support, billing his name above the title in ads that bore the headline “A New Star Shines.” The picture garnered generally favorable reviews from a fraternity clearly fed up with racketeer stories, and Tracy’s personal notices were uniformly fine. (“Mr. Tracy’s performance is forceful and he succeeds in impressing one with his characterization,” wrote Mordaunt Hall. “Through his gait and the angle at which he wears his hat, the conception of the truck driver is always in evidence, despite his expensive clothes.”) Yet the overnight figures were disappointing.
Harlow’s picture did better at the much smaller Globe, where fight and gang subjects often found a warm reception. Filling the 5,886-seat Roxy was a terrific burden to place on a film as modest as Quick Millions. Tracy knew it wasn’t the breakout hit he had hoped it would be, and no one had to tell him Six Cylinder Love would be a stiff. Both Sheehan and Wurtzel cooled, and the film wound up the week with a gate of $62,000—brutally bad for the world’s largest movie theater. Then temperatures broke and Warners’ Public Enemy, featuring Harlow and an equally unknown James Cagney in the leads, moved into the New York Strand. Fueled by a predominantly male audience that liked its gangster pictures loud and violent, Public Enemy took in about as much money as Quick Millions in a theater less than half the size of the plateresque Roxy. With two successful movies playing simultaneously on Broadway, Harlow was suddenly big news, and M-G-M’s Secret Six made her even bigger news when it was released nationally on April 25. Goldie was completed a week later—May 2, 1931—and Harlow was rushed east for a week of appearances at Chicago’s Oriental Theatre.
Jean Harlow’s participation in Goldie brought Tracy to the attention of Howard Hughes, who, having amassed some two million feet of stunt flying footage for Hell’s Angels, was looking for stories in which he could incorporate the trims. In the movie business since 1926, Hughes had distinguished himself with a comedy called Two Arabian Knights, a buddy picture on the order of What Price Glory? that won an Academy Award for its director, Lewis Milestone. Almost immediately there was talk of a sequel, but Hughes got mired in the making of Hell’s Angels and struggling with the problem of how to release a $2 million silent film when the public was clamoring for talkies. His solution—reshoot it with dialogue—occupied most of his time for another year. He produced just two other pictures in the interim: The Racket (again with Milestone) and The Mating Call. By the time he got back to the notion of a Two Arabian Knights sequel, Louis Wolheim, one of the two original stars, was dead, and William Boyd, the other half of the team, was working at RKO.
Hughes focused on developing a script, a gloss on the original as reimagined by Joseph Moncure March, the author of Hell’s Angels. The project never really coalesced until Hughes saw Tracy as the bacchanalian seaman of Goldie and impulsively made the deal to borrow him for six weeks at a flat rate of $11,187.50. With Tracy set to start with Hughes on May 10, the rest of the package was carelessly thrown together. Veteran comic George Cooper (who was in the shots to be used from the earlier film), George Irving, and actress Lola Lane were all added to the cast. The crucial role of Sergeant Hogan, the Wolheim part, was filled by actor-playwright Sidney Toler, who played cops and comic heavies but was as unlike the gnarled Wolheim as any actor could be.
At first Tracy was glad to be out of Fox, even though the company would be collecting considerably more on the loan-out than he.2 Filming on Ground Hogs (as the film was to be titled) got under way at the Armory in Culver City on Tuesday, May 19, the company shooting a full day of exteriors and working well into the night. The director Hughes picked for the film was Edward Sedgwick, who had turned out a number of silent comedies but whose experience with sound was limited to Buster Keaton’s recent features. Sedgwick was a throwback to the days when a director could talk an actor through a scene while the cameras were cranking, and he apparently had no knowledge or appreciation of Tracy’s stage experience. Ridgeway “Reggie” Callow, one of the assistant directors on Hughes’ payroll, witnessed a testy exchange between Sedgwick and Tracy: “[Sedgwick] told him to take three steps forward and then turn sideways and reach out—all these meticulous directions—so Spencer said, ‘One, two, three, and then I turn, reach out … now, what the hell do I do next?’ ”
The atmosphere on the set wasn’t good at all, and Sedgwick compounded the problem when he refused to show Hughes the rushes, claiming they weren’t yet ready for viewing. Tracy worked well with Cooper, wide-eyed and elfin, but the on-screen chemistry between him and Toler was poor, Toler being wholly unsuited for the part of a roughneck sergeant. On Sunday, May 24, they traveled to Riverside, two hours east of Los Angeles, where they roomed at the Mission Inn and spent nine days shooting exteriors at March Field. Away from Louise and Johnny, Tracy recalled his days at Norfolk and behaved much as his character Wilkie would have under similar circumstances. “It was just the role he was playing,” said Callow. “You know, he was drinking pretty heavily in those days, particularly with his buddy Warren Hymer … But the drinking never interfered with his performance; he always had his lines down.”
Once the March Field scenes were in the can, the company returned for studio work on the Metropolitan lot in Hollywood, where Hughes’ production company, Caddo, was based. But after just one day of filming, Hughes closed the film down, dismissing both Sedgwick and Toler and scrapping some $250,000 worth of footage. Within a week he had novelist Dashiell Hammett working on a new version of the script to be directed, it was announced, by writer-director Tom Buckingham.
Tracy returned to his home studio with time on his hands. If news of his drinking had gotten back to Louise, it wouldn’t have surprised her. In New York, he did most of his imbibing at the Lambs, where he was contained and protected and surrounded by pals like Pat O’Brien and Frank McHugh. The booze was of the highest possible quality, a step above the industrial and grain alcohols served in most speakeasies (where the flavoring could range from prune juice to creosote). In Hollywood, the best stuff—genuine or slightly cut—came from inside the studio walls, where it seemed fully half the mechanics, doormen, chauffeurs, and office boys were dealers. Hymer had no trouble staying sloshed, despite the warnings and entreaties of the studio brass, and he proved a poor influence on Spence, especially when the two were disgruntled at work or away on location.
Louise would take a sherry before dinner, but she never particularly cared about it, and neither, really, did Spence. “It had always been there,” she said of his intolerance for alcohol, “[but] I was not [aware of it]…there seemed to be no reason. He always liked milk and donuts and buttermilk.” The root of his problem, she came to realize, was not his taste for the stuff, but his very genuine awkwardness in social situations and the inability to make small talk: “My husband had a shy side. Many times he was very ill at ease. Actually, the gruffness, the shortness, was a cover-up. I’ve seen him struggle very hard to relate to others.”
An industry journalist, a freelancer from Memphis named S. R. “Dick” Mook, frequented the Fox lot at the time of Up the River and observed the struggle firsthand:
I had seen a few rushes of the opus, and knew both Spence and the film were going to be sensational. Imagine my delight when Robert Montgomery brought him down to Neil Hamilton’s beach home one Sunday when I was there. I sat back and confidently waited for the flow of wisecracks to start—wisecracks his film portrayal had led me to believe I might expect from him. I was doomed to disappointment. Beyond “Hello” when he came in and “Bye” when he left, I don’t believe Spence uttered a half-dozen words during the afternoon. The meeting was a complete flop. Long afterwards, when I got to know him well, I started jibing him about that day. “I didn’t know any of you people,” Spence muttered uncomfortably. “I just can’t give out with strangers.”
And so to get through the obligations the industry naturally placed on a contract player of Tracy’s standing, he would take a drink to calm himself, make himself more at ease around people he didn’t know. “He could drink the least little bit,” Louise said, “[and] it simply [went] straight to the brain … He couldn’t [have drinks before dinner]. He struggled against it…[and] I gradually saw that he really shouldn’t drink at all.”
The closing down of Ground Hogs dovetailed neatly with the end of the lease on the house in Westwood. Having gradually discarded his casts, John was now on crutches, vigorously swinging from room to room and up and down the walk in front of the house. Thinking it might benefit him, the Tracys took a little cottage for the months of June and July at Las Tunas, a quiet strip of beach about midway between Santa Monica and Malibu that nestled up against Roosevelt Highway on the back side. Carroll’s arrival in California that spring had enabled Mother Tracy to take a house of her own in Los Angeles, leaving Spence, Louise, and John to fit compactly into two relatively small but very livable bedrooms.
After little more than a week at Las Tunas, John’s back was entirely well and Dr. Wilson decided he should start walking without the crutches for a half hour each day. His first steps took place in the living room at the beach, and they had trouble convincing him that he could do it. “He just stood there,” Louise said, “arms outstretched at either side to balance himself, shaking his head and looking utterly frightened and miserable. For weeks his progress was difficult and slow. He had to conquer that fear and feeling of insecurity each time, and he complained of his legs hurting. Eventually he walked, but only for a few minutes at a time.” After a month John was on his feet forty minutes a day, and by August he was standing a full hour. He progressed to two and a half hours without the crutches, and was up to four hours a day by the first of September.
The release of Goldie on June 28, 1931, did nothing to alleviate Tracy’s growing anxiety over the course of his career. Despite Harlow’s newfound prominence, Sheehan and the sales department had so little faith in the picture, chopped to fifty-eight minutes, that they opened it in Brooklyn, where the populace could be found romping in the waters off Coney Island, not packing the theaters. Variety labeled it a “direct imitation” of the McLaglen-Lowe series, though not as good. “For general b[ox] o[ffice],” the trade paper concluded, “it’s a poor entry.”
Tracy now had three pictures in release under the terms of his new contract, all undeniable losers. “They said Quick Millions was the most marvelous picture ever made. All of Hollywood said it. I was so excited I didn’t know what to do. Then that picture went out and grossed about a dollar and eighty cents.” Six Cylinder Love brought in more—$327,000 worldwide—but cost more and lost nearly $25,000.
He went back to work in July, starting a picture with actress Joan Bennett called She Wanted a Millionaire. The fact that it was a program picture and by definition, therefore, second rate, did not mean it would look noticeably cheaper or less carefully produced than the premium Fox product. The production values on all Fox pictures, regardless of category, were second to none. Some of the top cameramen in the industry—Joe August, Ernest Palmer, John F. Seitz, George Barnes, John J. Mescall—were employed at Fox, as were art directors such as Ben Carré, Duncan Cramer, and Joseph Urban, the legendary designer of the Ziegfeld Follies. Even the second-tier Fox directors—Ben Stoloff, Sidney Lanfield, David Butler—were talented and conscientious, a cut above the staff directors at most other studios. The things that most noticeably cheapened the films that came out of Fox were the scripts.
Sheehan flattered himself in thinking he somehow knew the story elements that were guaranteed crowd pleasers, and Wurtzel was fiercely devoted to formula in pictures of all types. Between them, they dictated the structure of Fox films to an unusual degree, almost always to their detriment. Fox screenplays were rigidly plotted and rarely character-driven. The typical Fox picture under the Sheehan regime started out well enough—he favored playwrights who knew how to get a story off the ground—but there was always room for improvement. Where most other producers would polish dialogue or bring in a specialist to punch up a particular scene, Sheehan’s screenplays often jumped genre in the third act, shifting to a different locale or taking on an entirely different mood or coloring. The climax would be a train wreck of melodrama, hurried and illogical, bringing the film to a perfunctory end at seventy minutes or thereabouts.3
Tracy and his son John, circa 1931. (SUSIE TRACY)
The script for She Wanted a Millionaire was no exception. It started out as one of Sheehan’s own ideas, a sexy morality tale based on a news story about a beauty contestant wed to a theater magnate twenty-nine years her senior. He set about to make her over, sending her to a private finishing school and paying for special tutors. Eventually deeming her perfect, he then grew insanely jealous, certain every young man in the world was after her. The end came on March 11, 1931, when in a drunken rage he tried to strangle her and she shot and killed him. Sheehan clipped the item from the Los Angeles Evening Herald and had the story outlined and adapted by a succession of writers: Frank Dolan, Sally Frank, Dudley Nichols, even Hugh Stange, the author of Veneer. After six weeks of spinning it out in every conceivable direction, he developed a revised outline with the assistance of Sonya Levien. Days after Levien turned in her version, Sheehan put William Anthony McGuire, the author of Six Cylinder Love, on the job. By the time the film was ready to shoot, the screenplay had gone through twelve drafts, four by McGuire alone.
Tracy wasn’t happy about She Wanted a Millionaire, considered it junk, but as was the case with so many Fox productions, the quality of the filmmakers would far exceed the quality of the material. The supporting cast would include Una Merkel, a fine light comedienne, veteran stage and screen actor James Kirkwood, and Dorothy Peterson, a Broadway contemporary of Tracy’s borrowed from First National. Shooting the film would be John F. Seitz, one of the most experienced and respected of all cinematographers. Directing would be John G. “Jack” Blystone, an old hand at fashioning silk purses from the sows’ ears he was frequently handed by Wurtzel and Sheehan, for whom he had worked since 1920.
Production began on July 6, Tracy making his initial appearance in the film as a rail engineer shuttling coal to the plant where Bennett works. She’s walking home from a bad date, and he gives her a ride. “I remember him as a rather private person,” Bennett later wrote of Tracy, “taciturn, though he had a delicious sense of humor.” No happier with the script than anyone else, Bennett managed to enjoy the process of making the film, if not the film itself. “I liked the director, John Blystone,” she said, “and working with Spencer Tracy was a huge treat.” Once he knew that he was in good company, Tracy opened up a bit, relaxing around his costar and ribbing her as he would one of his colleagues onstage. “He teased me unmercifully, and it always pleased him when I rose to the bait, which was most of the time.”
Blystone, who also hailed from Wisconsin, had a restrained sense of staging, a good eye, and knew how to highlight an actor’s performance. He gave Tracy his head, letting him affect a bit of an accent in his early scenes, remembering all too well the Irish aristocracy aboard the Milwaukee Line. She Wanted a Millionaire was Bennett’s film, on the ascendancy as she was, younger sister to Constance—one of the industry’s top stars—and leading lady to both Ronald Colman and John Barrymore. Tracy, though, had a few flashy moments of his own, none better than when he played a poignant love scene to a simple cape draped over a broom and a chair, dinner for two in his room growing cold, despair settling in as it becomes evident she’s not going to show. He goes to Merkel, Joan’s randy, wisecracking girlfriend, a reporter for the local paper who is typing up a story. Reciting a monologue of grievances, all worked up, he leaves with her to go out and get drunk.
Filming continued at a steady clip until the morning of July 28, 1931. The company was on location in Stone Canyon, a section of Bel Air threaded with bridle paths. Kirkwood, unsteady on his mount, swapped horses with Bennett, who’d been riding since early childhood, and the horse, skittish and unnerved, promptly headed back to the stables. Bennett pulled her around to go back up the hill when the horse saw a camera car racing toward her and shied.
“A tree stopped my flight,” said the actress, “and I ended up in a heap like a discarded rag doll with a hip and three vertebrae broken and a beautiful black eye.” Sensing the worst, Jack Blystone gave orders that she not be moved, and Bennett arrived at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital with one leg pushed up two inches shorter than the other. An orthopedic surgeon set her hip the next morning, but it would likely be four to six months before she could return to work, handing her costar his second aborted picture in a row.
By now Tracy was resigned to making movies as a livelihood, stuck needing a salary only Hollywood could afford to pay. Responsible for all of John’s care, his mother’s support, and Louise’s help around the house, there was precious little left from paycheck to paycheck, nothing much to show for a weekly salary more than twice what most families made do with in a month. The circumstances gnawed at him, fueled his occasional rounds with Hymer, Wallace Ford, McHugh, and others in his small circle of friends. He was torn between hoping the studio would drop his next option and knowing not quite what he’d do if they did. Could he pull up stakes so completely as he had before? Move everyone back to New York? Find a play with a chance at a run? Live again without the security of a term contract? When he saw the first rushes on She Wanted a Millionaire, Sheehan told him to lose weight, and Tracy dropped eleven pounds without having to be asked twice.
They all loved living on the beach at Las Tunas, but the closing down of She Wanted a Millionaire coincided with the end of their lease, and the Tracys moved into Hollywood’s Chateau Elysée while they looked for another place to rent. The next day, Spence got word that Hughes had retooled Ground Hogs and was set to resume filming under a new title, Sky Devils, on August 10. In place of Tom Buckingham, whom Hughes had shifted to another picture, director Eddie Sutherland had taken charge, completely remapping the third act of the script and scuttling an Arabian Nights sequence planned for the film simply because there had been one in the earlier Milestone picture. Sutherland, borrowed from Paramount, was a golfing buddy of Hughes’ and a specialist in broad comedy. He first made a name for himself with a largely improvised war farce called Behind the Front and continued on with nearly two dozen features, including M-G-M’s 1928 picturization of The Baby Cyclone.
Congenial and literate, Sutherland recast Sidney Toler’s failed part with William “Stage” Boyd, the original Quirt of What Price Glory?, and set about reshooting all the material Ed Sedgwick had left behind. Fox agreed to return Tracy for four—but no more than six—weeks at the rate of $1,864.60 a week, the same money they had charged the first time around. He was back at March Field on August 29 when word reached him that his cousin Bernard Feely had died at the age of twenty-three.
Spence had first laid eyes on him in 1910, when Bernard was not yet three, and had kept in touch through the intervening years. Spence’s uncle Pat had traveled the state for the Lanpher-Skinner Company of St. Louis, selling hats and furs, and when he retired he had invested in farmland that could be worked by tenants. Then came the droughts and the winds that presaged the Dust Bowl, and as the topsoil blew away, Patrick Feely, by then an invalid, mortgaged the farmsteads one by one. After he died of tuberculosis in September 1926, Spence’s aunt Jenny took in boarders, made doughnuts, gave music and dancing lessons in the parlor. Bernard went to work as an usher in a movie theater and began studying chemical engineering at the Northern State Teachers College. One of his professors there told him he should really go to the School of Mines in Rapid City, and a good friend of his parents, a Mrs. Lincoln, paid his tuition. He went for two years, working all the while and following Spence’s career in Billboard and Variety. He had a job lined up, but then a strep infection set in and progressed to pneumonia.
With Bernard now gone, Jenny and her daughter, fourteen-year-old Jane, were without means, and Spence, stuck on a hot, dusty movie set playing low comedy to George Cooper and Stage Boyd, saw yet another purpose to the earning power God had somehow seen fit to give him. And back in town that night he sent off a telegram to his favorite aunt in Aberdeen, South Dakota:
It was Johnny who first raised the matter of a sibling. “John, one,” he would say sadly, accustomed to referring to himself in the third person. Then he’d say, “Two—boy, girl,” nodding happily and leveling his hand about chest high. “So big.” His parents agreed. John needed a playmate, and they thought—almost reflexively—of adopting. John’s need was immediate; he couldn’t wait for a little brother or sister to grow to a suitable size.
There was also the thing that had happened to John, the horrible thing with the unknowable cause that could happen again. Spence, particularly, was tormented by the thought, the possibility, that they could have another child so afflicted. Louise, too, although she didn’t share his Irish temperament, his deep sense of guilt and foreboding. Where Spence felt the raw burden of sin and dark purpose in Johnny’s disability, Louise saw a biological mystery, a circumstance of terrific power. And where Spence bore the blame, all visceral and unspoken, Louise felt only responsibility, the need to do everything she could either to fix their son’s deafness or to marginalize it to the point where it would no longer matter. The only constructive thing Spence could do under such circumstances was to earn the money she would need to do what she had to do for John. They both grappled with imperfect thoughts, unjustified feelings of inadequacy and torment.
Louise talked to a woman at the Home Adoption Society, who was plainly dubious of their plan.
When she asked me why we wanted to adopt a child, I answered, naturally, that we wanted a playmate for our son. I went on to explain his deafness and the reason for wishing an older child rather than a baby. She told me that John’s deafness created a problem in our household, which constituted an “abnormal” situation and might be a handicap to another child. She said that the Society was averse to placing one of its children in less than a perfect environment … She also went on to say that, in any case, she thought we had much better take a boy, as a different sex complicated things still further. She said, however, that I might fill out an application, if I wished, and then, if adoption was thought to be possible at all, the whole situation could be investigated thoroughly.
The friends they brought into the discussion advised against adopting an older child, concerned that habits and attitudes set even before the age of three could somehow hamper John’s progress. Spence and Louise continued to bat the idea around, wondering not only what age an adopted child should be but whether they could even get one. As soon as he had finished with Hughes and Sky Devils, they moved from the Chateau Elysée to a rented house in the Hollywood Hills where they could spread out again and take full stock of the situation.
Sheehan had no immediate assignment for him, preoccupied as he was with the Chase Bank’s pursuit of Harley Clarke, the interim president of Fox, who had managed to turn a $13 million profit (in William Fox’s last year at the helm) into a net loss of nearly $3 million. Spence, as it turned out, would have six glorious weeks off before the start of his next picture. Leaving John in Mother Tracy’s able care, he and Louise went off to spend a few days at Arrowhead Springs, a resort in the mountains above San Bernardino. They started riding again, Spence deciding that he really did like it, and reconnected on other levels as well. Perhaps it was nothing more than Louise, for the first time in years, being apart from John and the constant, almost compulsive attention she lavished on him. And perhaps, too, it was Spence being away from the pressures of the studio and the worry that option time typically brought upon a contract player of any stripe. Wurtzel had picked up his option so early on that he was assured a regular paycheck through November 1932—more than a year in the future.
Those few days at Arrowhead were relatively carefree, a throwback to the very earliest days of their marriage, when there were just the two of them and their worries extended no farther than the mastering of next week’s part. Not long after they returned home—about the time Spence started shooting a picture called Disorderly Conduct—Louise discovered, at the age of thirty-five, that she was once again pregnant.