Louise hadn’t known Rogers well—he called her “Ma Tracy”—but Spence was inconsolable. They attended the simple funeral at Forest Lawn on the afternoon of the twenty-second, where only the four Cherokee Indians in attendance managed to remain stoic. Later, he gave an interview that was spun into a bylined remembrance for Picture Play magazine, recounting a time at Bill Howard’s house when Rogers came by: “We sat around talking for a while. When he rose to go, Howard urged him to have a nip while waiting for his car to be brought around. ‘I ain’t got any car.’ ‘Well, let me have mine brought around to take you home. It’s raining.’ ‘Naw. I walked over. I reckon I kin walk back.’ It was eight miles to his home, but walk he did. The last we saw of him he was ambling gayly down the path, cutting at shrubs and bushes with a stick he had picked up.”
News of Rogers’ death ignited another round of drinking on Tracy’s part, and it may well have been a subtle warning when, two days after the news broke, the studio fed an item to Louella Parsons. “Perhaps my sense of humor is distorted,” she wrote, “but somehow when they told me at M-G-M that Spencer Tracy would be making a costume picture, I had to smile. I just couldn’t picture the virile Spence doing a hand-kissing act. But this picture, I am assured, is going to be different.” Parsons went on to report that Tracy was to star in an original story about an Irish captain of the Grenadiers, the action for which would take place in England, France, Italy, and Germany. The title? Tosspot…which was—and still is, of course—another word for “drunkard.”
Riffraff had been developed specifically for Jean Harlow. “The studio doesn’t think so,” Thalberg said, “but I think she needs a crack at a dramatic story, and this is it.” The actress donned a red wig for the part of Hattie, a feisty cannery worker who’s stuck on Dutch, the cocky leader of the tuna fishermen and their union. It was a thankless role for Tracy, and Judith Wood, playing Harlow’s friend Mabel, remembered the picture was held several days owing to his “illness.” She went over to him when he finally appeared, having known him from Looking for Trouble (the eventual title of Trouble Shooter): “I said, ‘I’m sorry you were sick, Spencer,’ and he said, ‘Sick! Hell, I was drunk.’ ”
The picture began shooting on August 29, its script having been given a final polish by Anita Loos, who took screen credit along with H. W. Hanemann and Frances Marion. Tracy kept to himself, and associate producer David Lewis, who was present throughout the course of production, never got to know him. Harlow, who wasn’t drinking herself at the time, could see that Tracy was and resented it bitterly. One day, she stalked off the set and makeup artist Layne Britton followed. “What’s wrong, Baby?” he asked. “Tracy’s gassed,” she replied, “and I’m not going to work ’til he gets straightened out.”
Tracy was developing a reputation for being testy, and he gave unit publicist Cecil “Teet” Carle more “static, more worries, frets, resentments, frustrations, and ulcer symptoms” than any other performer. “A press agent welcomes consistency. A 100% heel or bitch can be coped with because he never varies. But Spence could be snarly and nasty one day, palsy and helpful the next.”
Publicist Eddie Lawrence had his first encounter with Tracy when assigned to write the pressbook for the picture. Tracy was in his dressing room with the door closed. Lawrence knocked, and Tracy “wiped me out. He said, ‘Don’t you ever, EVER knock on my door when the door is closed!’ And I said [in a crushed voice], ‘Oh.’ And so I went to see [M-G-M’s advertising director] Frank [Whitbeck]. And I said, ‘Frank, what’s this with Spencer?’ He said, ‘Well, you know, he has this terrible insomnia, and he’s resting.’ So it was quite understandable. Spence would leave the studio and go get a rubdown and sleep on it.”
Filming Riffraff with Jean Harlow. Director J. Walter Ruben looks on, 1935. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Riffraff was a major undertaking, much of it shot on M-G-M’s Lot 1, where an elaborate wharf had been constructed alongside a man-made lake. The exteriors and the scenes shot on location at San Pedro gave the film size, but also made for an exceptionally long shoot. A total of fifty-six days was spent filming an unexceptional movie that did nothing to enhance the Thalberg legend nor advance Tracy’s standing with audiences.
They were a happy pair, Johnny and his mother. They learned in San Francisco that he had some hearing—not much, but some. “I can hear,” John proudly announced to just about everyone, confident that he would soon be hearing as well as everyone else. “We could not bring ourselves to disabuse his mind of this completely,” Louise said, “and, after all, how did we know, anyway?”
What hearing he had was in the speech range, which suggested the possibility that with the right hearing aid he might acquire a more natural tone of talking and the necessary adjuncts—rhythm, accent, inflection. As soon as possible, he was given an audiometric test at the Western Electric office in Los Angeles. The technician was not able to give them an audiogram, a detailed chart, but thought John had about 15 percent usable hearing and recommended the company’s most powerful instrument, a large air-conduction aid of the type used in schools. He was sorry, the man said, but the company didn’t let their machines go out on trial. “Of course,” said Louise, “we bought his machine.”
A woman from the Gough School came to Van Nuys for a month over the summer of 1935 and worked with Johnny for three hours a day. At the end of summer, just as Spence was beginning work on Riffraff, she said that she was sure he heard enough to make residual training worthwhile. He had worked hard, and his speech showed considerable improvement. Louise, however, was not convinced the psychological effect had been good.
In the first place, John started out—perhaps we all did—with too much optimism. But, of course, we adults had understood the limitations both of John’s hearing and of the instrument, and were experienced in disappointments. John had confidently expected the impossible. He was too young to appreciate the amount of intense and protracted work necessary to gain small results, although I do believe that the long uphill struggle with his leg, and his great patience and cooperation there, had given him an insight and philosophy beyond his years. Still, I am sure the labor must have seemed to him out of all proportion to any apparent gain, and his disappointment, as week followed week and no great change in his hearing took place, must have been keen.
It was a case of overdoing a good thing, and the whole experience, with all its attendant anxieties, left him apathetic and rebellious and unwilling to continue with even the short daily periods his mother attempted into the fall. When Johnny’s tutor came back into the picture, she would have none of the hearing aid and consigned it to the closet. She said it was too much to fuss with in the scant ninety minutes they had together each day, and that John had too little hearing to make any work with a hearing aid worthwhile. When Johnny wrote his autobiography in 1946, he made no mention of it.
By September they knew that they liked the San Fernando Valley, its open spaces, its solitude, its decidedly rural way of life. However hot the days were, the nights were cool enough for blankets. “We also knew,” said Louise, “we wanted a home with more ‘outside’ than ‘inside,’ call it a ranch, farm, or just ‘place.’ ” Spence, now faced with a thirty-mile drive to the studio, stayed at the Beverly Wilshire during the week, coming home to Van Nuys on Sundays or whenever he wasn’t shooting a picture in Culver City. They planted a vegetable garden, added three dogs (including a mate for Pat named Queenie), more chickens, and a thoroughbred mare in foal. Casually, they also began looking for property to buy.
Having worked in support to Jean Harlow for two solid months, Tracy was now returned to Harry Rapf for a picture called Whipsaw. Again he was cast in support of a big name, Myrna Loy, who had made a terrific hit as Nora Charles opposite William Powell in The Thin Man. After being paired again with Powell in a second picture and then loaned very profitably to both Columbia and Paramount, Loy fled to Europe, feeling exploited and unwilling to return until her compensation had been brought into line with tha
t of her costar. The ensuing standoff took almost a year to resolve; when Loy returned to M-G-M in September 1935, she had been offscreen for nine months.
Whipsaw was a caper movie, based on a story by James Edward Grant that had appeared in Liberty magazine. Loy was an international jewel thief, Tracy the undercover G-man trying to win her confidence. The script was all thrust and parry, the kind of dialogue at which Loy had proven so adept in her pictures with Powell. Tracy lacked Powell’s elegance—the picture was first conceived with Powell in mind—but made up for it with an earthiness that played surprisingly well against Loy’s composure and poise. Despite their initial dustup over his drinking—perfectly justified, he later acknowledged—Tracy had grown immensely fond of Jean Harlow during the making of Riffraff and found Loy, in comparison, somewhat aloof. “[S]he had me scared,” Tracy admitted. “I didn’t know how she’d feel about [working with me]. And what worried me the most was kissing her.”
Loy was on her way to becoming a big star, and Tracy covered his nervousness with banter. “He’d keep contrasting me to Jean, telling me what a good sport she was, what a prima donna I was, and how her Victrola had cheered them up on the set,” the actress said in her autobiography. “In self-defense, I finally took the hint. That began his long torch-carrying: I was running and Spence was running after me. He would go out to [Riviera] and call my friend [and stand-in] Shirley Hughes to find out where I was. ‘What difference does it make?’ Shirley told him. ‘She isn’t going to see you.’ Which I never did. I liked him, but not enough.”
They completed Whipsaw in twenty-six days, and Tracy went back to polo, from which he had refrained during the course of production. Over the summer, Johnny had started to ride in the gymkhanas held every month at Riviera, entering the trotting and potato races, the flag relays, and the autograph races that required the participants to dismount and sign their names before remounting and galloping off toward the finishing line. He was watching the last chukker of a mixed game on Thanksgiving Day when his father rode up and told him to get out on the field and play. “I was very much surprised, as it seemed to me all of a sudden. I rode nervously onto the field and only trotted along with the players. Finally, about the middle of the chukker, I hit a ball two or three times for the first time while walking. Obviously, other players waited generously and let me do the job. I was very much excited and felt proud.”
Tracy’s contract with Metro required him to make one radio appearance in support of each film he did for the studio, and his first came up on November 29 when he and Harlow performed scenes from Riffraff on Louella Parsons’ Hollywood Hotel. It was a national hookup, unusual for the time, as most network shows originated in either Chicago or New York City. Parsons used her muscle as columnist for the Hearst syndicate to get the industry’s biggest stars to appear for little more in compensation than a case of Campbell’s soup. The exposure was usually worth it, but for some film personalities the cost came in the terror of broadcasting live for an audience of some 20 million listeners. Tracy, for one, disliked the experience, but it wasn’t what sent him off on another bender in the days that followed.
In the eighteen months since Loretta Young ended their relationship, she had starred or costarred in five motion pictures, including The Crusades for Cecil B. DeMille. Prior to making the DeMille picture she had gone on location to Mount Baker, Washington, for a film adaptation of the famed Jack London novel Call of the Wild. It was a rugged shoot, made all the more so by the volatile mix of personalities at its core. Jack Oakie was in the cast, as boisterous as he was on Looking for Trouble, and directing it, as he had that aforementioned film, was William A. Wellman. Something of a coup for 20th Century was Young’s leading man—Clark Gable, borrowed from M-G-M. Then, of course, there was the flirtatious, semivirginal Loretta herself, now all of twenty-two years old.
Gable was married to a wealthy Houston socialite seventeen years his senior. (It was a “step-up” marriage, as his first wife—his acting coach—put it.) Ria Gable, a matronly fifty-one, was the lingering wife of Hollywood’s biggest male star (and one of its most notorious cocksmen). With an Academy Award looming in his immediate future, Gable had already decided to seek a divorce when he left for Bellingham with Wellman’s company in January 1935. Immediately, he fixed Loretta in his crosshairs, and the blizzard conditions on location only worked to his advantage. Once they began filming, she entered that dreamy zone she almost always occupied when acting opposite a man of just about any description. Gable had an animal-like quality, sexual and dangerous, and she began to regard him romantically. “I think every woman he ever met was in love with him,” she said.
John Tracy on the field at Riviera, circa 1935. (SUSIE TRACY)
Gable’s pursuit of her became an all-consuming goal that bordered on an obsession, and Wellman was so annoyed with his behavior, slowing progress on the picture as it did, that he made a very public issue of it. “I called him for it,” Wellman said, “which I shouldn’t have done in front of my company.” Sometime during the making of the picture, Gable made his move and Loretta soon discovered that she was pregnant. After finishing a role in a minor film called Shanghai, she fled to Europe in the company of her mother. It wasn’t unusual for an unmarried actress to hide a pregnancy, but it was uncommon to carry one to term and remain unmarried. The common remedy—abortion—wasn’t an option for a practicing Catholic, and revealing the father as a married man would have amounted to professional suicide. Upon her return, the actress went into seclusion, illness and fatigue the official reasons.
There was, of course, a lot of talk, and it quickly got through to Tracy that for all the bum publicity he had endured over the course of their ten-month relationship, it was Gable, completely unfettered by Catholic chivalry, who had gotten her into the kip. He called and went to see her, her condition now more or less an open secret. Word of the baby’s birth on November 6, 1935, spread like wildfire. With Whipsaw in the can, Tracy was seen out on the town, sometimes with Louise but usually stag, most often at Billy Wilkerson’s Cafe Trocadero on the Sunset Strip. The food was expensive and not very good, but it was a handy hangout for a good many stars, much like a private club, and he could always count on seeing somebody he knew.
Tracy frequented comedian Frank Fay’s Sunday night programs there and could be seen in wire photos greeting thirteen-year-old Judy Garland after her appearance as one of Fay’s “undiscovered stars.” When John Barrymore emerged from seclusion after fleeing nineteen-year-old Elaine Barrie, it was in Tracy’s company at the Troc. And it was at Wilkerson’s place on a Tuesday night in early December 1935 where Tracy overheard a reference to Loretta and a “baby with big ears” and shot to his feet. “Who said that?” he demanded and turned to find Wellman, on whose watch Gable’s conquest had occurred.
Dottie Wellman was upstairs at the time and heard about the remark her husband made only after the two men had been separated. “He shouldn’t have said that,” she acknowledged. “Bill had a chip on his shoulder, especially when he was drinking.” Tracy delivered a punch to Wellman’s ribs, which the director countered, according to news reports, with a left to the ear. “He and I just didn’t like each other,” Wellman later said of Tracy. “We had a lot of fistfights, and I always beat him because he’d start talking and I didn’t talk.”1
Mutual friends interceded, and those two punches were the only ones landed that night. By the time their altercation made the papers, they were both minimizing the incident, seemingly bewildered by all the commotion. “We had a little misunderstanding, and the others in the place seem to have made quite a fight out of it,” Tracy innocently told the Examiner. “There were no hard feelings, and we’ve laughed about it since.” Added Wellman, laying it on a bit thick: “We’ve been friends a long, long time and made a couple of pictures together. It was merely a case of misunderstanding which has all been straightened out, and I can’t for the life of me understand why so much fuss is being made about it.”
Neithe
r would confirm the name of the actress involved, but the story made the wire services and at least one of the New York dailies ran both her name and photo alongside Tracy’s and capped them with the headline FAIR LORETTA’S KNIGHT. As columnist Jimmy Starr wrote the next day, “The beaut that caused the fistic row between Bill Wellman and Spencer Tracy is certainly getting more than her share of nasty talk. Why doesn’t Hollywood leave her alone?”
Whipsaw, released on December 6, was sold almost entirely on the strength of Myrna Loy’s return to the screen. It took a dive in New York, but did better elsewhere, pulling in nearly $1 million in rentals on an investment of $238,000. By pairing him first with Loy, then with Harlow—Riffraff hadn’t yet been released—Metro was getting audiences used to seeing Tracy with top-tier female stars. The next step would be to put their top male stars alongside him—Gable, Powell, and maybe Beery as well. It was a strategy Tracy could appreciate, one that Fox never could have embarked upon, even had it occurred to somebody to try. For Christmas, everyone in the extended family got a card from Spence and a check for fifty dollars, the studio’s return address and Carroll’s careful handwriting on the envelope. (“Fifty dollars in the 1930s was a helluva Christmas,” said Frank Tracy.) Louise made a pitch of her own for a gift when she suggested that Spence give up drinking altogether. “I just think it would be better for you all around, don’t you?”
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