The ranch itself made for better photo ops, and the same magazine, Screenland, had run a pictorial spread a few months earlier, all exterior shots made by an M-G-M photographer showing Spence and the kids out among the animals, pitching hay, working the fields, drinking from the garden hose, and nuzzling the dogs. The headline was “Tracy Takes It Easy,” but what it showed was an increasingly rare event, a day spent at home where Spence was indeed at rest, his wife and kids enjoying the air, the sun, the dust kicked up by the horses and the cars, the notion that this was as far away from the studio as one could get and still earn the extraordinary living he had come to expect from his position as a genuine star of the movies.
A rare day together on the ranch, as captured by a studio photographer, 1939. (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy wasn’t there the day Mook showed up; he was shooting Edison, the Man, and so Louise gamely showed Dick around, poking into Spence’s modest room, where the desk was piled high with scripts and mail and random scraps of paper, notes he had written himself and stuffed in his pockets. Two wastebaskets had come from an old lady who made them both herself—one pictured Stanley, the other Livingstone, and both arrived accompanied by a bill for sixteen dollars. A globe sat to one side, to the other a bookcase that held a model of the Carrie B (which Mook always referred to as “Tracy’s Folly”). The other rooms were similarly plain, though homey and obviously lived in. There were no formal areas nor guest rooms, nothing set aside for company or otherwise off limits to the kids and the dogs.
They strolled out back, past the pool and the tennis court and the onetime bunkhouse, to where the horses were kept, White Sox, Johnnie, four or five racehorses, none on the level of Man o’ War nor ready even for Santa Anita but all right for the lesser tracks. “At least we think they are,” Louise said. She pointed out a small horse, a yearling, which they had entered in a breeder’s sale. “What a shame to sell her,” Mook, the Tennessee horseman, remarked. “No,” Louise said. “We’ve had our fun with her while she was growing up. Racehorses are an expensive proposition. We’d better get our money out of her if we can. We’ll probably sell the other racers, too, when we can, and only keep the polo ponies.”
It was a crisp, windy day, and with the kids in school and Spence off making a picture, the place seemed quiet and empty and Louise somewhat subdued, as if she had everything she could possibly ask of life except happiness and a sense of purpose beyond John and the job of being Mrs. Spencer Tracy—a role that qualified her, in the opinion of many, as a candidate for sainthood. At the age of forty-three she was no longer playing competitive polo, no longer in the swim of things at Riviera. Her friend Audrey Caldwell once allowed as how Louise should never have given up the stage, but it had been nearly twelve years since that abbreviated season at Lima, where she had last appeared before an audience as leading woman in a company of actors.
“That’s all there is—there isn’t any more,” she said to Mook, wryly echoing Ethel Barrymore’s famous curtain line. “Are we going to see you again soon, or are you going to go on ignoring us?”
If Louise knew of Spence’s relationship with Ingrid Bergman, she never let on. If anything, she made it easier for him by absenting herself from the Encino ranch, either with trips to Arizona or Palm Springs, or her frequent visits to New York, where Johnny was once again a student at the Wright Oral School. Spence was on the wagon, working constantly, home, at times, for tennis and swimming, occasionally for dinner out or a movie in the company of friends. They attended the premiere of Disney’s Fantasia at the Carthay Circle and caught up with Citizen Kane some four months after its release. On a day-to-day basis they were leading separate lives—purposely, it would seem, for when Louise was in residence, Spence usually was not, and when he was around, Louise often was elsewhere, leaving the children in his care and the care of the help—Miss Lystad, Susie’s Norwegian nurse; Margaret, the family cook; Hughie, who took care of the horses and lived out back of the property. Spence’s presence at the dinner table became something of an event, and Susie would later remember his palming quarters (“What’s that behind your ear?”) as the last vestige of his childhood magic act.
“I could see a change over the years,” said Chuck Sligh, whose business occasionally brought him to Los Angeles.
When I first went to California in ’34 or ’35 I stayed at their house … they certainly seemed very happy and everything was fine. And [then] I was at the ranch maybe twice. The first time I went, I remember specifically because Louise said, “Spence isn’t going to be here because he’s making a movie and he has to get in for makeup and everything very early in the morning. It’s a lot easier for him to stay at the hotel and be there in the morning instead of driving way into there from here. So why don’t you just take his room and stay there?” So I did. And I looked in the closet and there were, oh, four or five or six suits … but the next time I went out there and stayed in Spence’s room, I opened the closet door and there was practically nothing.
Tracy was also distancing himself from his brother Carroll, whom he blamed for getting him into “deep trouble” with the Internal Revenue Service. At one point, as he later told it, he was sure he was going to jail, and a man from the IRS actually appeared at the studio to audit his records.
“I keep seeing the name Feely,” the man said. “Jenny Feely, Aberdeen, South Dakota. Who is that?”
“That’s my aunt.”
“I see regular payments …”
“Yes, that’s right. You can ask her. I send checks to her.”
“And she lives on Washington Street in Aberdeen?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well,” said the man, “I know Jenny Feely who lives on Washington Street in Aberdeen, South Dakota. My name is Walter Higginbottom, and I was born and brought up two blocks up the street from her.” He closed the file lying in front of him on the table. “That’s all right, Mr. Tracy.”
Spence’s cousin Frank was out over the summer of 1940, and the tension between the two brothers was palpable. “It was a period,” said Frank,
of two or three months—two or three months—that he and Carroll did not speak. He didn’t even look at him. He’d sit by the pool (and the kids were in Hawaii with Louise, or somewhere) and he’d talk to me and he wouldn’t even LOOK at Carroll. Carroll usually picked me up at the hotel and drove me out there. We’d sit around for a couple of hours, have lunch, and [Spence would] never talk to him. Never even look at him. He wasn’t even there … surely there must have been some business points they had to discuss, or SOMETHING … Carroll never opened his mouth. That went on for a couple of months. And then when the ice finally broke, it just barely broke. It was like “pass the salt” or something. Matter of fact, most of the time I was out there, they didn’t speak.
One night Spence and Frank were driving to the studio to see a picture. It was just the two of them, and Spence began to ruminate on the matter of his big brother. “I don’t know what the hell to do with Carroll,” he said. “Christ, he’s been out here seven years and he still doesn’t do anything. I pay him $250 a week … he’s always on the golf course, when I want him I can’t find him, or when I want him he’s doing something for [somebody else]…the guy’s all screwed up … I don’t know what the hell to do with him. But he’s my brother. I love the big lug. What am I going to do?” He spoke, Frank said, in a tone of almost complete disgust. “If it weren’t for me getting him out here in California,” Spence said, “he’d still be selling malted milk in Milwaukee for Sam Thompson.”
Where Carroll was an almost constant source of frustration for his younger brother, Peggy Gough, Tracy’s secretary, was a godsend. A graduate of UCLA, she handled the job with quiet efficiency, sorting the mail, taking dictation, helping her boss cope with the weird business of being a movie star. Working out of his combination office–dressing room on the second floor of an apartment building on M-G-M’s Lot 1, she diplomatically fielded appeals for money and what Tracy called “oddments”—butto
ns from his jackets, locks of hair, contest prizes and the like. She ordered stills from his movies, answered fan mail, made luncheon and dinner reservations, sent out photos, turned down party invitations, delivered messages, and kept the number at the house in Encino a closely guarded secret.
Pleas for autographs were the most common, and they came in all sorts of forms. People would see him leave his car and poke hastily scrawled scraps of paper through the windows. One went so far as to scratch a name and address into the paint of his new Lincoln, which he then had to have refinished. Before going to work for Tracy, Peggy never knew how many requests a public figure could get—hundreds a month, not to mention appeals from legitimate charities, which also numbered in the hundreds. “He is a very charitable person,” she said at the time. “In fact, many of his friends call him a sucker, but he just laughs it off. You’ve no idea how much can be given away right inside the studio itself—not a day passes that some extra or old-time actor doesn’t come up with a hard luck story, and the only ones he refuses are the ones he knows are downright fakes who make a business of it, and, unfortunately, there are a good many of them.”1
There was also the matter of the fan club, a job of care and feeding for which he was profoundly unsuited. One of the earliest rackets in the movie business, clubs had been known to charge fans as much as $2.50 a year to officially admire a preening film idol and another fifty cents for a lithographed picture of same. The money went into the pockets of organizers or, in some cases, the star himself. After a vogue that lasted well into the twenties, such organizations fell into disrepute, and some studios—such as Fox—forbade them altogether. It was radio that fueled a new wave of them in the mid-thirties, and soon men like Howard Strickling saw the value in building and maintaining mailing lists so that when the sales organization had trouble selling its block into a place like Kokomo, the local fan clubs could be rallied into action. The membership of Jean Harlow’s fan club reportedly topped fifteen thousand at the time of her death.
In Tracy’s case, a club took shape after Captains Courageous but fell apart with the illness of its president, a woman known simply as Miss Barclay. When a club member wrote in, Peggy explained the situation and the woman wrote back, offering to form another on Tracy’s behalf. Mrs. Frances Rasinen of Detroit had previously run a club for singer-actor Johnnie “Scat” Davis and came well recommended for the job. With annual dues set at fifty cents, she built up a membership in short order, Tracy agreeing to sign a five-by-seven photo to each new member. The inaugural issue of the club’s quarterly newsletter, The Tracy Topper, was published in October 1940, but Mrs. Rasinen proved to be high maintenance, and in the club’s prime Peggy was responding to two or three letters a week, juggling dozens of names and addresses and trying as best she could to keep everyone happy.
There was time to talk over the summer of 1940, and cousin Frank asked Spence about acting. “I said, ‘Did you ever think about doing anything else?’ He said, ‘Well, my Dad wanted me to go into business with him, and I was only interested in medicine. I’d have liked to be a doctor, but I knew I could never make it academically. Maybe I was bright enough, but I didn’t have any kind of dedication. I had no motivation at all. You know, school was abhorrent.’ ” And then he told Frank what he had told Pat O’Brien, that one of the things he had really thought about was being a priest, but, as with medicine, he never thought he could “get through the Latin and all that stuff.”
Frank struggled to control his look of surprise. “What?” he said.
“I don’t go to church as much as I should,” Spence continued. “I get to Mass fairly regularly, but I could be a lot better. This kind of life, sometimes you’re traveling, sometimes you’re working. Sunday’s just another Tuesday or Wednesday. I don’t practice the religion the way I should. I often thought about the priesthood. I went to St. Rose’s for those years. Nuns. Every year. They drill that religion into you. I’ve got it in my head. I know what’s right and wrong, I know what’s sinful. I know. It bothers me. I’ve got a conscience.”
David Caldwell, Audrey and Orville’s fifteen-year-old son, felt quite close to the Tracys. “I never had the impression of Spence as a movie star,” he said. “He was always very friendly and seemed to be interested in asking about things I was doing. And Louise certainly kept in pretty close touch. She even got me to help John very often with his studies.” David was at the ranch one day, passing through the succession of rooms that included Spence’s, when he noticed the Oscar for Captains Courageous sitting on the bookcase.
“There was always a great deal weighing on him, I must say … I said, ‘Oh, that’s what this looks like.’ And he said something which was close to these words: ‘There are qualities that make a man a good actor but don’t necessarily make him a good man.’ I was just very shocked at that statement. It was in a calm voice from him … but it had a lot of meaning behind it.”
The idea for Woman of the Year came from director Garson Kanin, who conceived it as a vehicle for an actress he had designs on marrying. Kanin, twenty-eight, had been with RKO three years, having spun a year’s apprenticeship with Samuel Goldwyn into a chance to direct a picture for producer Robert Sisk. A specialist in snappy comedies, Kanin was rushing to complete Tom, Dick and Harry, his seventh movie for the studio, when he described his concept to screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr. Kanin’s principal character was modeled on columnist Dorothy Thompson, who was, according to Time magazine, one of the two most influential women in the nation. (The other was Eleanor Roosevelt.) His notion was to portray a courtship between the outspoken political pundit and a hardheaded sportswriter—the Post’s Jimmy Cannon in Kanin’s mind—who worked on the same paper. “[T]hey clash in print about something; meet; clash in person; both wrong, both right—not bad!”
“Gar,” Lardner said, “had decided he needed a writer conversant with the New York newspaper world to work on the script, and Paul [Jarrico, who wrote Tom, Dick and Harry] had volunteered me. To further complicate matters, Gar had just been drafted into the Army, so we talked out a story line in the couple of days before he went off to training camp, leaving his share of the project to his brother Mike.” Michael Kanin was no more established in the profession than Lardner, having written only a few programmers at RKO.
It was an unlikely arrangement, two out-of-work screenwriters with only a logline of an idea, but through Garson Kanin they had access to one of Hollywood’s hottest properties, the newly rejuvenescent Katharine Hepburn, whose shrewd co-opting of the rights to The Philadelphia Story had brought her one of the biggest hits of the season. Kanin had been linked romantically to the thirty-four-year-old actress ever since it came out that he and she had been the only witnesses to the midnight wedding of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Within days, Kanin and Hepburn were denying marriage rumors of their own.
Ring Lardner and Michael Kanin began working out the story from the sportswriter’s perspective, which Lardner then wrote up in the form of a first-person narrative for submission to Hepburn. “Garson,” said Lardner, “probably sent it to her; he was the one who knew her personally. And she responded very well to it. And then we got up this plan of her taking it herself to Louis B. Mayer and talking to him about it.”
It was a sweet position for Katharine Hepburn, who had come to prominence in the early thirties but whose later pictures weren’t calculated to sustain a brand image. She won the Academy Award for Morning Glory, her third movie, and her version of Little Women was an astounding commercial hit. Yet she played character parts and oddballs, and where it once had seemed that audiences couldn’t get enough of her, by 1938 she was part of Harry Brandt’s infamous ad in the Hollywood Reporter in which the president of the Independent Theatre Owners Association labeled her, along with Mae West, Joan Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich, “box office poison.”
“They made a mistake with me at RKO and renewed my contract,” Hepburn later said. “They shouldn’t have done that. I was washed up. If I had gone on m
aking pictures that year I would have been not only washed up, but enshrouded and buried. So I bought out my contract.”
She left the movies and returned to the stage, where Philip Barry and his Philadelphia Story awaited her. Sensing the quality of Barry’s play and its profound commercial potential, she paid $30,000 for the film rights, then passed those rights to Howard Hughes—with whom she had been linked romantically—with the understanding that any deal he made for them would include the proviso that she play the self-centered Tracy Lord, a part that Barry had written with her in mind. It was, of course, the property that had value at the time, not Hepburn, whose participation would otherwise have been a shaky proposition.
Under Joe Mankiewicz’s careful supervision—he had the entire stage production recorded and then clocked for laughs—The Philadelphia Story was a startling success. Hepburn walked away with an Oscar nomination as well as new currency with the moviegoing public. Said Mankiewicz, “Having had a very good time and a very successful time with Kate on Philadelphia Story, in her typical fashion she brought me a screenplay. An untitled screenplay, unauthored as far as the title page was concerned, because she wouldn’t tell me who wrote it. She said, ‘Read this.’ I read it.” Mankiewicz thought it “absolutely marvelous” but wasn’t empowered to make a deal. “And she hadn’t said what she wanted for it, and I said, ‘Kate, I have nothing to do with that. That’s up to the higher levels of L. B. Mayer, but I would love to do it.’ ”
Since Philadelphia Story had generated more than $3 million in worldwide billings for M-G-M, Mayer was only too happy to consider the new eighty-nine-page property, which carried the gold-plated title The New Philadelphia Story. Mankiewicz had already passed the material to Kenneth MacKenna, Metro’s West Coast story editor, and MacKenna, in turn, had handed it over to Sam Katz, one of the rare members of the executive team who actually read the things given him. Having built enthusiasm all around, Hepburn caught a Stratoliner for the coast and took a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. A meeting was scheduled between her, Mankiewicz, Mayer, and Benny Thau for the next morning. “I was terrified,” she said. “Mr. Mayer is a charming man, and I was afraid he’d talk me into promising something I had no intention of doing. He began by saying a lot of nice things to me—still not knowing who wrote the story or how much I’d ask. And I said a lot of nice things to him—the usual preliminaries to hitting each other over the head.”
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