Out from under the cloud of the kidnapping threat, Loretta and Spence went dining and dancing with Josie and Duke Wayne in the Beverly Wilshire’s exclusive Gold Room, by now a favorite haunt. Loretta was turned out in a white sailor frock—blue collar, white stars, red anchors—and Spence, equally festive, was blasted well before dinner. It fell to Duke to get him past the other diners—Winnie Sheehan, George Burns and Gracie Allen, the scenarist and playwright Edgar Allan Woolf—and up to his suite without creating too much of a fuss. “Once deposited in the room,” recalled actor William Bakewell, “Tracy became so violent in his efforts to get away that big Duke (no teetotaler himself) had no alternative but to coldcock him with a short right to the jaw, which left Spence draped on the bed for a sobering night’s sleep.”
Tracy’s first film for M-G-M, 1934. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Three days later the annual Academy Awards banquet took place at the Biltmore Hotel. Loretta had made plans to attend with Spence and the Waynes, but when the time came for him to appear, Tracy was nowhere to be found. She went without him, fighting back tears, and it was several days before she heard from him. “Spence was a darling when he was sober,” Young later told her daughter, Judy Lewis. “He was absolutely awful when he was drinking.”
Bottoms Up was released the week of March 26, hailed for its sly send-up of the movie business—the Motion Picture Herald called it “a comedy of values”—even if its musical numbers were of the kind that almost killed off the genre in the early days of sound. Now I’ll Tell finished on April 4, and Tracy took the opportunity to get out of town, going back to New York for a couple of weeks and finding no peace there either. He descended on Manhattan asking about the prospects of the Giants, wondering whether one of his polo ponies had gotten over the colic and apologizing for having taken on a few pounds since his last visit to the Big Apple. “Hollywood’s too easy a burg to live in,” he told a reporter for the American, trafficking in irony. “Polo, sunshine, fishing, and all the rest drive a guy crazy with happiness. Broadway’s good to look at from the back end of an observation car going [to] Hollywood.”
Handing a redcap his bag, Tracy passed through the gate at Grand Central and saw a crowd of onlookers being held behind a rope. “What are all these people here for?” he asked. The answer that came back was that they were all there to catch a glimpse of him. He refused to believe it until the group surged past the police line and followed him to his taxi. “Holy Moses!” he said, landing in the back seat of the cab. “I would never have thought it.” At the hotel, a telegram was awaiting him from Edwin Burke, reporting on the Pasadena preview of Now I’ll Tell. Its concluding line: YOU’RE STILL MY FAVORITE ACTOR. “Gee, that’s great of Eddie,” Tracy said. “He’s a swell guy.”
When he got back to Los Angeles, Tracy was seen out on the town with Loretta again, dining and dancing and generally behaving himself. Following Sheehan’s carefully orchestrated plan, the book Now I’ll Tell was published by Vanguard Press on May 3, 1934, and the film of the same title opened in theaters on May 11. The movie garnered generally favorable notices, even as it varied wildly from the book on which it was purportedly based. Rothstein became Golden, the Black Sox scandal became a fixed prizefight, the various showgirls with whom Rothstein consorted were rolled into the Peggy Warren character played by the Harlowesque Alice Faye.
Burke’s coaching paid off in a forceful performance that, while not Rothstein himself, hued to the spirit of the man. In her book Mrs. Rothstein recorded his first private words to her after their wedding at Saratoga: “Sweet, I had a bad day today, and I’ll need your jewelry for a few days.” She could tell when he was losing big because his voice went flat, even as his expression remained unchanged. He did not bother to watch the finish of a race on which he won $800,000, so certain he was of the outcome, and he orchestrated Nicky Arnstein’s surrender to the police by riding him to headquarters in a touring car pacing the end of a police parade.
In a city where interest in Rothstein still ran high, Now I’ll Tell filled the Roxy as no Tracy film had been able to do. The film went on to do well in urban centers, less well in rural and neighborhood houses where gangster stories never fully caught on. Fox’s efforts to position it as a biographical picture as well as a crime melodrama went nowhere, and it ended up, like so many other Fox titles on Tracy’s résumé, posting a loss by the time it was played out.
Tracy and Loretta Young at the Cocoanut Grove, June 14, 1934. Their very public relationship would end later that same evening. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
As the studio readied the oft-delayed Marie Galante for Sheehan’s latest enthusiasm, a French import named Ketti Gallian, Tracy made the papers by trouncing a producers’ polo team 9 to 3 and accepting a handsome trophy from Carole Lombard at Uplifters Field.
He and Loretta took to going to Confession together on Saturday afternoons, and Loretta was shaken when one of the priests at Good Shepherd refused to give her absolution. She was seeing a married man, she was told, a Roman Catholic who had been married in the church. She knew, she later said, that if she left the church that day without absolution, she might never come back. Desperate, she walked across the aisle to the other box and told that priest the whole story. He eventually said that he would give her absolution only if she would agree to come back every Friday thereafter for counseling. When she got outside, she told Spence what had transpired—he apparently never told her if he was given absolution—and he understood her crisis of faith, just as she seemed to understand his and the role it played in his drinking. “I am sure the pressure and the soul-searching had something to do with it,” she said, “but gradually we faced the fact that there was nothing we could do.”
On June 8, 1934, Loretta went to her regular Friday night counseling session at Good Shepherd. Then, sometime over the next few days, she sat down and composed a handwritten letter that began with the words “My darling” and ended with the word “Me.” She admitted that when she was with him she had no logic, common sense, or resistance, and that after prayer and counseling, she knew the only way they could go on would be in an entirely platonic relationship. It would be enough for her, she said, just to be with him and to hear his voice, and they would be without sin, but she knew that she would need his help. He would have to decide if he could handle it, and, were it impossible, she would understand. She signed off with the words “I love you.” It reached him in a plain envelope addressed to “Mr. Spencer Tracy.”
On June 14, the couple was photographed together at the Cocoanut Grove, Loretta’s unseasonable mink coat casually draped over the back of her chair, a wide-brimmed summer hat framing her pale face, Spence’s wedding ring still plainly in view.
That night at the Grove was the last time they were seen out on the town together. Within hours Tracy had disappeared into his suite at the Beverly Wilshire, and when he emerged nearly two weeks later, it was to board an ambulance that would take him to a hospital.
* * *
1 Lee Tracy, whose drinking was the stuff of legend in Hollywood, was accused of insulting a member of the Mexican Cadet Corps during a Revolution Day parade. Accounts differ as to exactly what he was supposed to have done, but the most common version of the story has him urinating off a hotel balcony. Later it was surmised that the growing strength of organized labor in Mexico had much to do with the resulting uproar over the incident.
2 Minnesota banker Edward G. Bremer had been kidnapped by the Barker-Karpis gang the previous month. His ransom of $200,000 was one of the largest ever paid.
3 In addition, Franklin Pangborn played the title character in Poor Aubrey (1930), a Vitaphone short derived from the original one act by George Kelly.
CHAPTER 10
And Does Love Last?
* * *
It was a measure of her despair over the winter of 1933–34 that Louise Tracy was willing to leave the children—year-old Susie and, particularly, John, the focus of her life—in Spence’s care and go off to New Yor
k with no specific plan in mind and no date set for her return. She was obviously hurting, humiliated, and maybe even a bit angry, but to all who saw her, the few friends she allowed into her life, her mother-in-law, the servants, John’s therapists and teachers, she was calm, collected, the very picture of reserve and forbearance. She had seen her own father walk away from her parents’ marriage in much the same way that Spence now seemed to be walking away from theirs. He put it on her to divorce him if she saw fit, knowing she was perfectly within her rights to do so, knowing that he himself could never take the step of divorcing her. She had never given him any cause to do so, never would. What they said in public was remarkably candid and true; what they said in private is anyone’s guess.
Louise had longed to take up polo, but Spence was against it, seemingly jealous of his time alone on the field and disapproving in general of women in the game. Then it became a discussion of Western saddle—which Louise knew—versus the lighter, hornless English saddle used in the game. It would be like learning to ride all over again and entirely too dangerous. “He said, ‘You aren’t going to do that,’ and I said, ‘Well, everybody else here is doing it.’ ” One afternoon Snowy Baker talked her into trying it, and Spence had a fit. “I can’t see any harm in stick-and-balling,” she said, employing the term for simply working out on a pony. He thought for a moment and then allowed as how he supposed not. She borrowed one of his hardwood mallets, awkward and unwieldy, and began taking lessons, marching past the grooms at the stables with as little self-consciousness as she could manage.
Louise had ridden White Sox on picnics into Mandeville Canyon, on Saturday morning rides with the children, and on moonlit outings up into the hills and across Will Rogers’ ranch. She had watched with growing envy the women who played in the mixed games on the dirt field. “Never have I seen women have as much fun at any sport—at anything—as the women I watched at Riviera,” she wrote. “There were times when I thought them nothing more than mad, and others, nothing less than goddesses. Grimy goddesses, I grant you—grimy but glowing. One can’t leave a dirt field after six or eight chukkers and still hope to resemble ‘what the well-dressed sportswoman will wear.’ At last, when I could bear it no longer, I determined, if possible, to sit with them—or play with them—upon Olympus.”
She was immediately embraced by the women who played the dirt field, who occasionally mixed it up with the men and sometimes even won. She made her best and most lasting friendships at Riviera—Lieutenant and Mrs. Gilbert Proctor, Audrey Caldwell, Walt and Lillian Disney, a Mrs. Chaffey (a full generation older and still playing), Mr. and Mrs. Carl Beal, Audrey Scott, the screenwriter Mary McCall. After a few lessons, a group of them corralled her in the office: there was a mixed handicap tournament starting, and they needed more women.
“Feeling far more mad than goddess-like,” she said, “I finally agreed to play. From the moment of the first throw-in when, as No. 1,1 I knew just enough to turn and ride toward our goal and heard the thunderous pounding of racing hoofs behind me, to the last gasping moment and I slid from my horse—Spencer’s horse—at the end of the game, it was more fun than I ever imagined.”
Spence was amused and even grudgingly pleased when he learned of Weeze’s debut on the field, and soon she had a pony of her own, a little brown horse named Blossom. And where Spence found exhilaration and exercise and release on the field, now so did Louise, and it meant a lot to her when she showed up the day after the news of the separation hit the papers and not one of her fellow players mentioned it. “No one asked any questions and no one appeared interested.”
Tracy relished his time on the polo field but thought the game too dangerous for women. (SUSIE TRACY)
She played furiously that fall and in January announced that she and Audrey Caldwell, a former actress, like herself, who had married an actor, would give California the first women’s polo association in the United States. Teams from San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Fullerton, San Pedro, and Long Beach were expected to throw in, and Snowy Baker opined that the better female players were equal to the one-goal players on the men’s teams.2
Louise began writing a play as well, a caustic comedy in three acts about a philandering husband having a very public affair aboard an ocean liner bound for Honolulu. Titled That Broader Outlook, it gave her a chance, via the character of Jane Stafford, to explain herself, to show the world what she was up against. It also contained a wry portrait of Mother Tracy, appalled by her son’s behavior but sure Jane’s mishandling of the situation was part of the problem. When the ship’s doctor suggests her son is a great deal like his father, always a good fellow, open and aboveboard, Abigail Stafford replies, “In most ways he is. He’d be more so if … if he had been managed differently. There’s no use talking, women aren’t the wives they used to be.”
Assertive and opinionated, Mother Stafford takes Jane to task for sitting “like a bump on a log” while Mrs. Darling beguiles her husband “into all kinds of foolishness without raising your hand to stop it.” She warns Jane, “He’ll fall in love with her if you’re not careful.”
JANE
Oh, no, I think not.
ABIGAIL
Well that’s all you know about it. He kisses her.
JANE
No doubt. It requires no beguiling for Jack to kiss pretty women. I don’t suppose there is room on this steamer, steerage and lifeboats included, to hold all the women Jack has kissed in the last ten years, and his yearly average is decidedly on the increase.
Jane is patient because she knows she shares the blame, but not quite in the way her mother-in-law thinks. “I haven’t a doubt,” she says, “that I’ve failed in many ways to be a good wife. That is only another reason I do not feel qualified to dictate Jack’s code of behavior.”
JANE
In the first place, I’m not losing Jack’s love, and I would lose it if I nagged and made scenes. Jack hates unpleasantness, he simply runs from it. If I made our relations quarrelsome or unpleasant, he would begin at once to deceive me, and I prefer to have his confidence, even when it hurts, than to be contentedly deceived.
ABIGAIL
Confidence? I guess confidence isn’t what it used to be, any more than love is. Do you mean to tell me that Jack has confided to you all the times he has kissed this Darling woman?
JANE
Not in detail, I’ll admit. He didn’t come down last night and say, “Well, I kissed Mrs. Darling thirty-seven times.” But he indicated that her romantic intensity was well sustained. He said, as I remember, that she was a handful. His endurance is never alarming. He will be relieved when she goes on and we stop in Honolulu. You see, in Jack’s code of behavior, flirting is a pastime and has no bearing on our real loyalty as man and wife.
To his mother, Jack explains his tomcat ways in terms of compatibility, much as Louise had put it to Dick Mook.
JACK
Jane and I understand each other all right. You don’t realize people look at things differently than they used to. Jane’s no end highbrow and prosy. Now don’t misunderstand what I mean—I wouldn’t have any other wife in the world, and she’s a wonderful mother; you know that. But we have each got to interest ourselves in our own way. We’re an institution, not a jail.
Louise got just twelve single-spaced pages into That Broader Outlook before giving up on it, unsure of where she was going and knowing it cut too close to the bone to ever be produced. She put it away, along with her poems and her clippings, but she never destroyed it.
Marie Galante was set to start on Wednesday, June 27, 1934, but calls to Tracy’s fourth-floor suite at the Beverly Wilshire went unreturned, and he failed to show for costume fittings and a conference with director Henry King. On the night of the twenty-sixth—Johnny’s tenth birthday—Fox legal counsel George Wasson went to the hotel with a letter over the signature of studio manager Jack Gain directing Tracy to report to King at ten o’clock the next morning to begin work on the picture. At suite 412, Wasson was ad
mitted by Wingate Smith and an older man whom Wasson did not identify. Smith was Jack Ford’s brother-in-law and longtime assistant, a well-known and well-liked figure around the Fox lot.
“Mr. Tracy at the time was in bed, asleep, and apparently in no condition to be disturbed,” Wasson recounted in a memo for record. “Mr. Smith informed me that Mr. Tracy has been suffering from an excess consumption of alcohol, and from a lack of proper food and sleep; Mr. Smith also informed me that he had been in constant attendance upon Mr. Tracy for a period of approximately two weeks and that, although Mr. Tracy was not in a condition of continued unconsciousness, Mr. Tracy was, even in his waking, conscious moments, unable to control his physical and mental coordination.”
At the time of Wasson’s arrival, Smith had already summoned a doctor, who planned to give Tracy a hypodermic so that he could be removed to the hospital and given the constant care and attention required to “restore him to his normal faculties.” Wasson waited until the doctor arrived, approximately twenty minutes, then attempted to speak with the patient.
When Mr. Tracy awoke, he was apparently conscious, but in a semi-dazed and incoherent condition, being able to speak only a part of a sentence without his mind wandering to some other subject or failing to operate entirely. Mr. Tracy seemed to be laboring under some great mental stress and I endeavored to find the cause but was unsuccessful. I advised Mr. Tracy that it was our desire to have him report to our studio the following day and he informed me that he would not do so. I then told Mr. Tracy that I came to present him with a notice to report and proceeded to read the attached notice to Mr. Tracy.
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