“Then I said, ‘I guess if there was anything that I would like to do, it would be to have a little nursery school where children and their mothers could learn together.’
“ ‘Do it!’ he said.”
Dr. Markovin asked her to give a talk at the workshop banquet. When Louise wondered what she’d say, he told her just to tell them what she had told him. “You tell them this story,” he said, and she said that she would try.
Putting aside The Story of John, Louise worked up a speech and read it to Spence, who was preparing to start Keeper of the Flame. He thought it was great. “It was just about John and the difficulty of being deaf,” she said. “I know I was scared stiff.” She talked about coping with her son’s deafness, her struggle to find help, her realization that a deaf child could be taught. State schools for the deaf didn’t admit children until the age of six; who was supposed to teach them before six? “Maybe a dozen of us had heard about this program and Dr. Markovin had rounded them up. [We] had our punch and talked about the possibility of doing something. These were mostly mothers of young children. That was quite a step forward because somebody had to take the lead, and Dr. Markovin kept pushing me. He said, ‘Can’t we all meet someplace? Can’t we meet at your house?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll set a date …’ ”
The meeting took place on July 18, 1942, when fifty mothers crowded into the modest Tracy ranch house on White Oak. Louise called the meeting to order and introduced a speaker from the California Society of Crippled Children, who told the mothers that it was up to the parents of a handicapped child to see that things were done for him or her. Most parents, he said, wanted to pass their cares on to somebody else. An organization of parents could accomplish more than a single person. A Mrs. Richard Simon of San Francisco sent a plan for the formation of such an organization, its goals centering on prevention, education, rehabilitation, and employment. A roundtable discussion touched on matters of doctor education, audiometer tests for schoolchildren, and a lessening of the dependence on private schools, “because each school believes the way they teach is the right way.”
A motion was made for Louise to take the chairmanship.
I finally got my wits about me and I said I didn’t know what I could do. They were looking at me. “The only thing I have is a correspondence course from the Wright Oral School. If we can form kind of a group and start meeting together, maybe we can do something.” So we started, and our first meeting was at the Biltmore Hotel. They let us have [a meeting room] for five dollars. It was just at the beginning of the war; transportation was going to be difficult. I think we started to meet every two weeks … Dr. Markovin popped up again and said, “Why don’t you go down to the [university]?” He was head of a reading clinic and he said, “We have a little back porch.” It was really makeshift. We had one meeting there, and then Dr. Markovin said we could go in the office there, which had been a living room, at a certain time of day.
We had to look for a teacher. She was very nice and smart, but she had no idea about talking to parents. She gave lists of books they could read, but they wanted something that you could do right now. After about four meetings, I said, “Well, this is pretty bad.” In the meantime, I must have been looking around. I had heard of the parent-teacher leaders—there were about 14 of them—engaged by the Department of Education. They got this program going and met on a Saturday … I never envisioned having children coming to the clinic. It was simply to pool our experiences, [but] they brought these children along with them. It was an all-day meeting. Each mother was given one child—not her own—to observe so they could look objectively, and the teacher gave them a thing to look for. The teacher got all the mothers together and talked to them about child development, and she asked them what they had observed.
There were just twelve mothers to start—thirteen counting Louise—and still attendance lagged. “We hung on by a thread,” she said. In September Dr. Rufus von Kleinschmid, the president of USC, offered the use of a two-story cottage at 924 West Thirty-seventh Street. The first meeting of the Mothers of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children took place at the newly acquired “Mothers’ Clinic” on October 17, 1942. A course on child guidance was announced, and Mrs. Florence Browne offered to give whatever spare time she had to the testing of children for hearing disorders. Louise reported that two checks had been received: one for five dollars and the other for $1,000. She asked that members donate as much furniture as possible so that the money could be spent on equipment, and she called upon each mother to give at least one day a month to act as “hostess.”
The call went out for volunteers to paint floors, and officer elections were held. “We got some furniture … we got some carpeting … we did some painting.” Once they had a telephone and some letterhead, Louise felt emboldened enough to hire a secretary. When she settled on a candidate, she told the woman it wasn’t much of a job “but someday it might be.” As they all worked toward an official opening, she hung a shingle over the door of the plain mustard-yellow house at the edge of the campus. It read
JOHN TRACY CLINIC
· · ·
In the year following the rousing reception for Woman of the Year, there was only Tortilla Flat to keep the Tracy name in front of some 80 million domestic moviegoers, and even the kindest of critics greeted that picture with muted enthusiasm. He was announced for a film with Wallace Beery, an immigration epic for King Vidor, and a Byron Morgan story called By the People. Betty Rogers let it be known that he was her personal choice to play her late husband in Warners’ planned biography of Will Rogers—a prospect Tracy privately found horrifying—and Fox was anxious to borrow him to play A. J. Cronin’s gentle priest in Keys of the Kingdom. The Yearling remained a possibility, and he at one point shot a test with Roddy McDowall replacing the rapidly growing Gene Eckman as Jody, but all the studios, not just M-G-M, were being pressured to increase their war content in the months immediately following Pearl Harbor, and an outdoor fable set in the 1870s would now have to wait for peacetime.
Tracy rejoined Hepburn in New York, where he was once again reported as taking a “rest cure” at a local hospital. When Keeper of the Flame opened there in February 1943, Kate was just finishing her run in Without Love and glad to be rid of it. The play had been profitable, but it was far from playing to capacity business and a credit to no one. Keeper continued a bleak streak for Hepburn, a good picture that could have been great without the meddling of Victor Saville and Leon Gordon and the rigid dictates of the Breen office. The notices were mixed, most offering up praise for Spence, indifference for Kate. (“Miss Hepburn is Hepburn,” the advance review in Variety noted, “with the usual mannerisms and studied delivery of lines.”) That her artificiality stemmed, in part, from her confusion over her character’s innocence or guilt at any given moment in the story was lost on everyone, save Tracy, Cukor, and, of course, Hepburn herself. All that she would allow, somewhat disingenuously, was that she was proud of Metro for not turning it into a “routine garden-variety love story.”
Donald Ogden Stewart, seemingly indifferent to the damage done to the third act of his screenplay, proclaimed Keeper of the Flame one of Hollywood’s “most important productions,” hailing an industry “which is now grown up and has begun to mature politically, with a full consciousness of present-day problems.” Stewart’s good-natured reception of the picture may have been due in part to Kate’s diligent fence mending, having belatedly come to the realization that the screenwriter had left Culver City hating her. She wrote him a desperate letter of explanation, expressing both affection and admiration and recounting how she had successfully seen Woman of the Year through the scripting process “[b]ut only after horrible scenes with everyone and his brother in all the conferences and everyone loathing me even though they used the stuff and would have been badly off without it.” She admitted that on Keeper of the Flame she was “as wrong as wrong” and supremely sorry for it.
Tracy and Hepburn in Keeper of the Flame (1943). (SUSIE
TRACY)
“I was guilty as far as you were concerned of the great crime of that lot—lack of enthusiasm and excitement. May I add to this that for the first time in my life I am humbly—sweetly—desperately in love—was then, and frantically trying to understand this feeling and to become a woman rather than a working automaton which I have been for years—Don—try to understand and to forgive me—”
In later years Don Stewart embraced a story that had Louis B. Mayer witnessing the film for the first time at the Radio City Music Hall and storming out in a fury when he realized what the picture was really about. “I can’t vouch for it,” he said cheerfully, “but I’d be very happy if it were true.” Ironically, Keeper of the Flame managed to better the Music Hall’s first-week figures for Woman of the Year, confirming the box-office potency of the Tracy-Hepburn combination. A weak draw in rural playoffs, the picture nevertheless managed to outgross its predecessor, and work on the next Tracy-Hepburn collaboration began immediately.
Tracy, in the meantime, went into a wartime ghost story titled A Guy Named Joe. Producer Everett Riskin, the elder brother of screenwriter Robert Riskin, had been responsible for a number of Columbia’s upper-tier productions, including Theodora Goes Wild, The Awful Truth, and, most recently, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, a hit picture with a similar premise. It was Riskin’s notion to pair Tracy with Irene Dunne, his star from Theodora and Awful Truth, and it was at his behest that Dunne, one of the industry’s most prominent freelancers, was brought to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on a two-picture deal.
Tracy and Dunne knew each other casually—they were godparents to Pat O’Brien’s adopted son, Terry—but they had never before worked together. For her part, Dunne said that she admired Tracy’s work and was looking forward to the assignment. Tracy, who by now was rarely talking to the press, said nothing. Filming began on February 15 with Victor Fleming directing a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo. It was the fifth picture together for Tracy and Fleming—sixth counting the aborted Yearling—and the two men were typically chummy while Dunne, who had never before worked at M-G-M, sat quietly off to one side, knitting as the crew bustled around her. She was now forty-four years of age—old by Hollywood standards—and would soon slip into character parts. Fleming, she recalled, was not well, and nobody seemed terribly happy. It didn’t help that he scheduled an angry exchange between Dunne and Tracy as the very first scene to be shot. “It was winter,” she said, “it was dark and raining and the whole set was gloomy.”
Tracy’s relationship with Hepburn was common knowledge, and Dunne began work on A Guy Named Joe convinced he had wanted Kate for the picture, not her. Having started taking Dexedrine—in part to counter the dopey effects of the Nembutal he was now routinely gulping at bedtime—Tracy’s mood on the set was uncharacteristically buoyant. Dunne plainly thought him obnoxious: “The first few days, Spence was VERY difficult, testing me out. He badgered the director, Vic Fleming, and behaved badly until I told him to settle down.”
Tracy’s inclination to joke about his age put her on the defensive, given she was seventeen months his senior and acutely conscious of it. When he went up—blew a line—he said, “I guess I’m just getting too old. I might as well play character parts and stop kidding myself.” Similarly, Dalton Trumbo could remember watching some early rushes in the company of Fleming, Everett Riskin, and Eddie Mannix: “As the star appeared on the screen with his leading lady, a voice rumbled back from the darkness of the front row: ‘Look at that pair of overage destroyers!’ It was, of course, the incomparable Tracy in a moment of discontent.”
Dunne was also thrown by Tracy’s refusal to rehearse. “I don’t particularly like to rehearse a lot,” she said, “but I don’t like not rehearsing at all.” Fleming wasn’t terribly sympathetic, making it difficult for her to get her bearings. “We had trouble understanding each other,” she said of Tracy. “He was my hero. Then, when we started working, he got the idea that I thought he wasn’t a hero anymore. Which was not true. But he had this big mental thing, and there was even talk of taking me off the film. That’s one thing I’ll always say about L. B. Mayer. I knew they were going to be looking at some film, and I made up my mind I was going to be my best—my best, my best, my very best. So they came out of the projection room and Mayer said, ‘If we’re going to replace anybody, let’s replace Tracy.’ Which they never would have done, of course. But I’ll always remember that. And we ironed everything out, Tracy and I.”
Said Emily Torchia, “Victor Fleming was always boss on the set and Tracy was macho. It didn’t take a week before both of them were bringing tea for Irene and waiting on her. She’s a perfect example of the soft-spoken woman who turns men on more than sexpots.” Dunne would later recall the picture as her “most difficult,” not simply because of Tracy, but also because of the almost constant shifts in personnel. “I enjoyed working with Tracy,” she said in retrospect, “but physically we had a lot of problems like changing hairdressers and different makeup people. Cameramen. We had to change cameramen. All those things tend to make the thing not run smoothly.”
At first glance Fleming was as unlike Tracy as any man could be. Tall and spare with nervous gray eyes, he was, Eddie Lawrence remembered, a great cook, a real gourmet with fifty or sixty different recipes for bouillabaisse alone. “He’d taken a walking trip around the Mediterranean and up through France and every place he got a recipe.” Yet Fleming said at the time that he thought Tracy probably the only guy in the world who really understood him. “We’re alike: bursting with emotions we can’t express; depressed all the time because we feel we could have done our work better. When we were making A Guy Named Joe we had many differences of opinion, Spence and I. Many times he came into the office here, mad as the devil about something. He’d just sit on that divan over there and we’d tremble at each other for five minutes without saying a word. Then he’d get up and walk out, and we’d both feel better.”
Actor Van Johnson joined the company in early March, playing Ted Randall, the young airman who becomes Irene Dunne’s love interest in the wake of Tracy’s death. At twenty-six, Johnson found himself cast in the awkward role of swain to a woman old enough to be his mother. It took Fleming’s sensitive but no-nonsense direction to put their relationship across in a way that wasn’t jarring—nor even particularly noticeable—to the audience. “I finished the first take,” Johnson remembered, “and Mr. Fleming said, ‘Print that.’ I looked to Tracy for approval. He said, ‘Is that the way you’re going to play it?’ Well, I shriveled. He was joking, of course.”
Director Victor Fleming (right, with his back to the camera) looks on as Tracy and Irene Dunne dance to the strains of “Wonderful One” for A Guy Named Joe. Note the makeshift corral that keeps the two stars in focus. (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy recalled that Johnson had once asked for his autograph outside Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills, and he was naturally disposed to taking younger actors under his wing. “He liked young actors,” said Barry Nelson, who was playing a featured role in the picture, “and he tried to help them—not so much in telling you how to read anything, but he certainly was a role model. He came on always perfectly prepared—long speeches, whatever. You would think he’d been out carousing all night or something, and he had that way about him on the set as if nothing mattered too much, but you knew that he’d worked very hard the night before. He was not only letter perfect but interpretation prefect.”
Production moved at Fleming’s usual deliberate pace until the night of March 31, 1943, when Van Johnson was critically injured while driving a group of friends to the studio to run off a print of Keeper of the Flame. Broadsided at the intersection of Venice and Clarington, just a block north of the main gate, he was thrown from the car and ended up with his head braced by the curb. “My face was wet,” he said, “and I thought it was raining, but it was blood … My nose was up against my eyes, and my scalp had come unstuck. They lifted it up like a flap and poured in handfuls of sulfa.”
At the hospital Johnson
overheard a doctor say, “He’ll never work in pictures again, even if he does live.” Down three quarts of blood, he was only able to survive, it was theorized, because regular donations at the Red Cross had conditioned his system. Reportedly, Tracy was the first person from the studio permitted to see him. “Van Johnson is so sick from that automobile accident,” Sheilah Graham reported in her column of April 7, “that his doctors are afraid to operate.”
Fleming shut down the picture because Johnson, playing a young recruit under Tracy’s ghostly tutelage, was in almost every scene. As discussions centered on whom they’d get to replace him, Tracy went to Irene Dunne and urged a show of solidarity. “I was in the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, all packed in ice, and the eye was closed, and they put a plate in my head,” said Johnson, “and that was when Irene Dunne and Spencer Tracy went to Mr. Mayer and said, ‘Let us wait for Van.’ That gave me a goal, it gave me sunlight at the end of the tunnel, because everybody said, ‘He won’t photograph …’ ” Eddie Lawrence remembered the gesture as a measure of the regard Tracy had for a young actor who considered him a mentor. “Now that was really something to do,” he said, “because that was a [matter] of time commitments. And Spence went down there to see Van practically every day until Van came back. They stopped the picture because of Spence. For Van Johnson, they wouldn’t stop the picture. Spencer had to put his weight in there because they wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”
They resumed filming with a double on April 13, but there was only so much work they could do without showing the young flier’s face or hearing his voice. Within a week, A Guy Named Joe was shut down indefinitely.
The official opening of John Tracy Clinic took place on the evening of February 1, 1943. After introductions at Norris Hall on the USC campus, the nearly three hundred attendees were invited to tour the old clapboard house on West Thirty-seventh, where classes on child psychology were ongoing and where a new series of Saturday morning talks would focus on the formation and development of the elementary sounds of speech. A correspondence course, based on a long-discontinued one from the Wright Oral School, was in its early stages of development, and a nursery school observation group had just been added. On prominent display was the clinic’s first publication, Suggestions to the Parents of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children by Louise Treadwell Tracy. At the open house, Doris Jackson, who would soon fill the role of secretary to Mrs. Tracy, observed the founder’s husband keeping very much to himself and doing his best to go unnoticed amid the festivities of the open house. “I can remember Mr. Tracy—him rubbing his hand down the woodwork saying, ‘This is nice …’ ”
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