James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Cousin Jane, early on, could sense there was something amiss: “I remember very vividly going to the set with Carroll, meeting Loretta Young, having her send me back to the Riviera Country Club in her town car with her autographed picture. Later, she came and brought me a prayer book, which I think I still have.” The story broke wide open with Louella Parsons’ column of September 14: “Her dining tete-a-tete with Spencer Tracy, going to the movies with him, and forgetting all her other admirers has made Hollywood wonder about Loretta Young. The reason for this Tracy interest is given as a plan Miss Young and Mr. Tracy have to star in a stage play together this coming season. Mrs. Tracy insists that Spencer’s interest in Loretta has nothing to do with her separation from the actor. She and Spencer agreed to part long before he became interested in Loretta.”

  Emotionally immature, her hormones at odds with her strict Catholic upbringing, Loretta Young was used to sending mixed signals to the opposite sex, aggressive with men but never quite knowing what to do about the fire once it had been lit. She told a fan magazine she had to feel a “romantic interest” in a leading man in order to give a sincere performance. “I’ve been in love at least 50 times,” she said blithely, frankly admitting she used the word “love” much too lightly. “Spencer heard of that one quote,” she later said, “and remarked that he hoped he wasn’t just Number Fifty-One in the long line.”

  They kept a low profile at first, spending a lot of time with the Jo Swerlings and frequenting little restaurants like the Thistle Inn on San Vincente, where they were unlikely to be seen. “I remember Carroll really shadowing me, shadowing us all, when we went to the set,” Jane said, “and when there was a break he’d say, ‘Let’s go have a milk shake.’ The four of us. Loretta Young said, ‘Are you going to pay, or is Carl [meaning Carroll] going to pay?’ And [Spencer] said, ‘Carl’s going to pay.’ She constantly called him ‘Carl’ and I was a little put off by that. I know afterwards, as I grew older, that Mother and Aunt Carrie had lengthy discussions about it and what they were going to do, and Aunt Carrie would cry a lot.” The couple grew bolder, and Loretta wound up spending most Sundays watching Spence on the polo field. One day Johnny came with him and she found him charming. When Johnny turned away, she saw how Spence would stamp the ground twice with his foot to get his attention. “I have never known a man with as much gentleness,” she said.

  Predictably, the relationship ate at him, as did all his infidelities. The mortal sin of adultery had brought him the burden of a deaf child, a responsibility he was ill-equipped to carry on his own, one he could manage only with the help and support of his wife. It was as if God had placed upon him something that could only be endured within the sacrament of marriage, a strengthening rather than a weakening of the bond between them. But as a sexual being, one for whom the potential for sin was ever-present, he also subscribed to the notion that denial equals permission, that Louise’s tacit approval was part and parcel of the distance she placed between them. Madge Evans admitted to having been involved with him at one point, presumably during their time out of town together in Dread. Bette Davis, though newly married, took note of the spark between them. Joan Bennett was seemingly available, but broke her hip before things could get very far. (He told Loretta how astonished he had been to see Joan’s leg sticking out from under the covers of her hospital bed and observing that there was polish on her toenails.) He talked about other actresses, women who slept around and weren’t “ladies”—the kind men wanted to marry.

  The relationship with Loretta Young was an almost spiritual melding of two souls, its intensity something Tracy had never before encountered. He talked a lot about his kids—John especially, who was, she decided, the most important person in his life. He talked less about Louise, but always with tremendous feeling and respect. Gretchen was different—more delicate, more beautiful, more sensitive. Seventeen years younger, she wasn’t as well educated as Louise, nor was she as good an actress. There was nothing even remotely insightful about her, yet she was pure and magical and full of life. She could give him her complete attention in a way Louise never could, and there was, of course, the common bond of their faith.

  Jane Feely (center) could sense there was something between her cousin and his costar. (JANE FEELY DESMOND)

  “He was not a devout Catholic,” his cousin Jane said,

  and he was often not a practical one either. I would call him a spiritual Catholic. I would say he understood what the law of love was, what Christianity teaches, what the Catholic Church teaches, and what we live by and what we believe. I can remember one thing that kind of struck me. We were at Louise’s, we were at the house, and he and Carroll came home from somewhere—he was living at home at that time—and he said, “You know, Aunt Jenny, I went by this church over in Beverly Hills, and there were all these people. Mass was over, and they brought out the Host in a big monstrance.” And my mother said, “Spencer, it’s the 40 hours. You remember the 40-hour devotion.” And he said, “Forty hours? Oh, yeah … I guess I forgot.” The point was that he made a big issue about being there, so that she would know he had been to Mass. It was very obvious he knew what they were doing.

  When it came time for Jenny and Jane to return to Aberdeen, a veil of sadness descended over the family. Carrie Tracy would miss Jenny’s spark, her laugh, her sense of shared experience. Spencer’s relationship with Loretta Young had turned into a very public event, and Louise was clearly mortified. “In the family,” said Jane, “those were the things you pulled the lace curtains for—not that it wasn’t true, but you didn’t talk about it. Ever.” Before she left, Aunt Jenny broached the subject with Spencer just long enough to say, “I hope you’re not going to drag the Tracy name through the divorce courts!”

  They had talked about marriage, Spence and Gretchen, but she never asked him to get a divorce, partly because she knew they could never marry in the church, and partly because she knew deep in her heart that he would never divorce Louise. “I really don’t think I could,” Tracy told his friend Bogart. “What could I say to Johnny? How could I make a nine year old little boy understand that I’m leaving his mother?”

  His drinking accelerated, and he was arrested for public drunkenness one night while attempting to back out of a driveway in the 8400 block of Sunset Boulevard. The address was on a strip of county land across the street from a clutch of notorious businesses. The House of Francis, an apartment building that housed one of the town’s priciest brothels, was at 8439 Sunset, and Milton Farmer’s Clover Club, a fancy after-hours restaurant and bar where casino-style gambling was available in the back room, was at 8469. Tracy’s private behavior and his public image converged in the press that next day.

  “Securely held with handcuffs and leg straps, Spencer Tracy, portrayer of ‘he-man’ roles on the screen, yesterday spent two hours in the county jail after he had been booked as drunk,” began a four-inch item in the Examiner that carried the headline SPENCER TRACY BOOKED IN JAIL. “Tracy last year played the starring role in the film Twenty Years in Sing Sing [sic], a motion picture showing prison life based on actual events in the New York penitentiary.”

  “You see,” Tracy later said by way of explanation,

  I’d never known anything of this sort. My life has been so completely different, so distant from this kind of thing. And to be suddenly the center of a group that was brilliant and rich and worldly was fascinating to me. The women were gay and beautiful always—they wore furs and jewels and creations in the evening. We dressed for dinner. I’d never done that. We had cocktails in the afternoon, and champagne with food, and liqueurs afterward, and highballs in the evening … I forgot all the precepts upon which I had built my life, accepted all the attitudes and philosophies that I’d despised for so many years.

  With the completion of Man’s Castle, Tracy returned to his home studio and almost immediately was put into a picture called The Mad Game, which was being rushed to meet a November 17 release date. Resentment over long hours and salary c
uts—not to mention quality of material—ran deep among contract players, many of whom were coming to see the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a tool of the producers and not the impartial arbiter of labor disputes it had proposed to be. With virtually no time off between pictures, Tracy joined the nascent Screen Actors Guild, becoming one of twenty-five directors of the organization alongside such friends and colleagues as Ralph Bellamy, George Raft, Robert Montgomery, Chester Morris, Miriam Hopkins, James Cagney, Ann Harding, Boris Karloff, Edward G. Robinson, Ralph Morgan, and Grant Mitchell.

  Within a month, twenty-three major stars would resign from the academy and more than five hundred actors would answer the call to complete SAG membership forms in the first serious blow to the academy since its inception in 1927. The Mad Game counted as another regression after the twin experiences of The Power and the Glory and Man’s Castle. It was, like Shanghai Madness before it, a formula picture, the sort of gangster melodrama Warner Bros. did better than anyone. It had been a story with the Hammettesque title Lead Harvest, but then William Conselman started drafting the screenplay under Winnie Sheehan’s supervision and it evolved into a film about the kidnapping game—the “snatch racket” that was emerging with the end of Prohibition.

  After the taking of the Lindbergh baby in March 1932, most city and state censor boards discouraged such storylines, fearful the public would take offense. And with the release of First National’s Three on a Match in October of that year, the industry entered into a gentlemen’s agreement not to make any more like it. Sheehan was adamant about The Mad Game, however, and agreed to remove actual scenes of kidnapping in order to keep the project alive. In July 1933 the Hays office warned Fox the film would likely encounter problems in New York State, where the son of a prominent politician was being held for ransom. Sheehan left for Europe that same month, confident all problems with the script had been worked out and that the film would start as planned as soon as Tracy had finished at Columbia.

  For the girl in The Mad Game, Sheehan wanted Tracy teamed with Claire Trevor, a pairing that had almost taken place for Shanghai Madness. Like Tracy, Trevor had studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and then moved on to stock and a string of Vitaphone shorts. She made a genuine Broadway hit for herself in The Party’s Over, then left to accept Sheehan’s offer of a contract, a move she already had reason to regret. “The pictures were so cheesy,” she said late in life, “those eighteen-day schedules. And usually directors had full sway—directors who had failed long before and were sort of resurrected to do a picture. Or else we’d have a brand-new guy who had never done anything.” The director of The Mad Game, Irving Cummings, fell more into the first category than the second, a large, sonorous figure who, like Ed Sedgwick, was a holdover from silent days.

  Tracy found himself pleasantly surprised by Trevor’s smart work as the newspaper reporter who loves his blustery beer baron and rolls her own cigarettes. “He liked the way I delivered lines, tossed lines away. He really liked my style.” He also liked the looks of the twenty-three-year-old hazel-eyed blonde and said as much early on in the shoot. She, of course, had already heard about Loretta (who was in Hawaii with her mother at the time) and responded to his overtures with a prim, “I don’t go out with married men.” After a loaded pause, Tracy flashed her a big smile. “Stay that way!” he said approvingly.

  About this time, Dick Mook asked Louise to sit for an interview. He was one of the first people Spence had told about the separation: “If you think it’s necessary to run a story on it, go ahead and write it. It’s the only one we’ll give out.” The news about him and Loretta Young had subsequently made all the papers. Louise hadn’t said anything to the press, and Dick thought she should at least have a chance to give her side of the story. “I’d known Louise and Spencer—intimately—almost from the time they first came to Hollywood,” he said. “I’d done one of the first stories on him the magazines carried, and from that casual contact have developed two of the few friendships I really prize. The announcement of their separation hurt me as much as though I, myself, had been involved.”

  The night after the story broke, Louise and Mook sat across from one another in a smoky Los Angeles nightclub. (Mook was still taking her around to industry events and previews, and when Spence saw him, he’d usually ask, “Are you seeing to it that Louise has a good time?”) Dick thought her remarkably composed that night.

  “There’s nothing about it that necessitates your wearing such a long face,” she said calmly. “It’s just one of those things. It doesn’t mean that this is the end. In every marriage, no matter how happy it is, there are bound to come times when some sort of adjustment is necessary. This happens to be one of those times in ours. This ‘separation’ will simply clarify matters. We’re not going to get a divorce. At least, that isn’t our present intention. Nor am I going abroad with the children, as the papers reported. We’ll probably be back together by the time your story breaks.”

  Mook said something about the Hollywood press and how anybody’s affairs were everybody’s. “Hollywood had nothing to do with it,” she said, declining the bait.

  I don’t feel bitter towards Hollywood because Hollywood has done nothing to us—except give us more money than we’ve ever had before. This and a chance to have a home of our own. I love this place. So does Spencer. I’ll admit that if he had been engaged in any other kind of work in some other city, we could probably have worked things out quietly between ourselves without having to tell the world our troubles, but that would only have been because he wouldn’t have been in the public eye. Newspapers are here to give the people news. If he had been news in some other city, it would have been the same thing.

  We lead a very close family life. We seldom go out anywhere, and we see few people outside our immediate family. We both felt we were getting into a rut. How many times have I been out alone with you? Can you remember? Hasn’t Spencer even urged you on numerous occasions to ask me out so I’d get a different viewpoint, get to talk about different things?

  He needs the same change. I’ve repeatedly told him to go out with other people. Occasionally he’s gone out with some of the girls he’s worked with. I haven’t minded because he always told me about it. One of his recent pictures he worked nights a great deal. His leading lady happened to be single and they had dinner together a few times. Once, one of his other pictures was being previewed. I’d already seen it, so he asked this girl to go with him and people saw them there. Why shouldn’t he take a friend who was interested to see it?

  Marriage out here may be a little more difficult than elsewhere because everyone knows everyone else—at least by sight—and there’s little else to talk about. I can’t truthfully say that Spencer and I are still madly, passionately in love with each other. I don’t believe that kind of love ever lasts. It burns itself out by its very intensity. But in its place comes a deep, understanding companionship and devotion. That’s what we have—and prize.

  With Sheehan out of the country, Tracy was loaned to a start-up called 20th Century, which was based on the United Artists lot in Hollywood. Coincidentally, it was the same company Gretchen had just joined, an operation assembled by Joe Schenck and run by the former head of production at Warner Bros., Darryl F. Zanuck. At the moment, 20th Century was just an office, a line of credit, and Zanuck’s fabled way with a script. Everything else was rented, including most of the stars they used in their productions. George Arliss, also from Warners, was their big male draw, a distinguished British character actor who specialized in period subjects and biographies. Gretchen feared she would get stuck playing his daughter and tried to have a clause inserted into her contract preventing such a thing. When Zanuck refused, she signed anyway and ended up in her first picture, House of Rothschild, playing Arliss’ daughter.

  Twentieth had a slate of twelve films for the 1933–34 season, Rothschild being the seventh. Others on the schedule were Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, The Affairs of Cellini, and The T
rouble Shooter, a story based on the adventures of a telephone repairman that proposed to team Tracy with comedian Jack Oakie, borrowed from Paramount. (“The talk,” said Oakie, “was that with his underplaying and my jumping around we were a perfect twosome.”) Filming began on October 9, just as Man’s Castle was being readied for release.

  The path to the screen for Man’s Castle was littered with parsed dialogue, trimmed footage, and the dubious approvals of the Hays office. Borzage flouted the Production Code in several key respects, insisting the lead characters remain unmarried until the very end of the picture, when an unplanned pregnancy forces Bill into an armed robbery from which he escapes unpunished. Flossie, the aging whore, retains most of her unsavory qualities, easy to discern for any adult paying attention, the details investing Borzage’s fantasy world with a sordid reality that would not have been possible only a year later.

  The problems began in June when Dr. James Wingate of the MPPDA read Jo Swerling’s draft screenplay and ordered a number of cuts, including the removal of Bill’s climactic action of feeling Trina’s stomach and the line, “Geez! It’s movin’!” and Trina’s response, “Life.” It was daring for the time and absolutely essential to the picture as far as Borzage was concerned. Wingate subsequently met with the director, Swerling, and Columbia’s Sam Briskin over the proposed changes to the script, and most were eventually agreed to, save those specifically tied to the climax. “The studio believes they can handle this scene in such a way as to make it acceptable,” Wingate advised in an internal memorandum. “We are reserving our opinion until we see the picture.”