Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [114]
There was, above all, the camaraderie of the field, nourishing because it had nothing whatsoever to do with the industry. To the fore came Will Rogers, who was one of the prime movers in the establishment of the club, and whose 224-acre ranch—originally a weekend retreat—sat just north of Riviera in an adjoining canyon. Rogers was one of the first people Tracy met when he came to Fox, and it was Rogers who seconded John Cromwell’s enthusiasm for the game of polo. Frank Borzage played, as did Dick Powell, Darryl Zanuck, Raymond Griffith, Johnny Mack Brown, Jack Warner, Jimmy Gleason, Charlie Farrell, Frank Lloyd, Jack Holt, and producer Walter Wanger.
Rogers became a role model of sorts, a man of genuine humility whose loyalties and charities were legion. Tracy lunched most days at Rogers’ corner table in the Café de Paris, where the Oklahoma-born humorist was surrounded by friends. “Only people he liked were invited to sit at that table,” Tracy said, “and no one who sat there ever paid a check.” Rogers considered the restaurant his club, and if he wasn’t filming, he was there in boots, overalls, maybe a sweater or a leather jacket. “He was first to the café,” said Douglas Churchill, who covered Hollywood for the New York Times, “and in the parade that paused at his table were some of the great and near-great of the world. Every visitor to the lot, if in the position to demand such a thing, wanted to meet Rogers.”
Over the summer of 1932, Riviera played host to the cavalries of the Tenth Olympic Games, and Tracy got to know a few of the participants, particularly Baron Takeichi Nishi, a first lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army. Nishi, with his excellent command of English and a taste for sporty convertibles, became a favorite of the Hollywood set. In early June, Tracy played host to the entire Japanese Olympic team at a luncheon on the Fox lot. The next night, he and Louise gave a dinner in honor of Baron Shino, the head of the team, and were present in August when Nishi won the gold medal for show jumping, Japan’s only Olympic medal in an equestrian event. Having said goodbye to him aboard the M.S. Chichibu Maru, they were surprised to find him back at their door the very next evening. Nishi had forgotten Louise’s birthday, and had flown back from San Francisco to present her with a box of candy. He then returned north by plane in time to catch the ship for Yokohama.
Louise was six weeks in the East, first to get John settled at the Clarke School in Northampton, then to New York for three weeks, then back to Clarke for a final check before returning home to California. She found the school’s spare, institutional interiors chilling, and sensed the administration’s lack of interest in John’s special needs—the physical therapy his leg still required and the fact that he was behind most of the other children in vocabulary and comprehension. John liked the idea of rooming with two other boys. (“Three!” he kept chortling as he noted the other pieces of furniture in the room.) For Louise, however, it took some getting used to.
She suppressed her concerns, bothered though she was, and kept quiet when she saw the children on the playground making no effort whatsoever to speak. “Speech had been left in the school building,” she wrote, “and in its place were gestures and grimaces. These children, evidently, either never had acquired the speech and lip reading habit at home or had lost it here, for lack of encouragement. A kind of helpless terror engulfed me. I saw John look anxiously from one child to another. He tried to talk to them. He had words or phrases, if not sentences, for some of the haphazard and unsupervised games they were trying to play. They looked as blankly at John as he did at them. He came over to me several times and shook his head at this strange state of affairs.”
In Springfield a specialist recommended by Dr. Wilson did a muscle test that showed a slight difference was developing in the boy’s two legs. At the time, John’s right leg was an eighth- to a quarter-inch shorter—hardly measurable