Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [115]
It was on the train back to Northampton that it suddenly dawned on John that his mother was returning home. With a wide, dark look of fear in his eyes, he flung himself upon her. Somehow, they got through the rest of the day and that night at the hotel. By morning, when she took him back to school, the storm had passed and he marched off to Sunday school with the other children, gently swaying as he did when he walked, smiling and waving happily, and Louise watched and waved back as they dipped below a hill, two by two, and gradually out of sight.
It was the morning of October 20 when Weeze arrived back in Los Angeles. Spence was finishing Pier 13 and looking at starting another picture within days. There was a brand-new daughter waiting at home, one Louise hardly knew, and one who wanted, at least at first, nothing to do with her. With Johnny in the East, they tried to make sure he received a letter or at least a card almost every day. Mother Tracy—Mum Mum—did best. “Father and Carroll went to church and Father has gone to ride,” she wrote Johnny on October 2 while Louise was still in New York. “We are all fine and Susie is growing very fast. She has three new rattles and can hold one and shake it now. She smiles and can say, ‘Goo.’ Very funny.” Spence, who preferred wires to writing, contributed just a line or two. “Can you see the very small boat in this picture?” he carefully wrote on the illustrated stationery of the Santa Barbara Biltmore. “Show this to Mother so she may see how fine Father writes.”
Louise took over when she returned, writing to John every day or two. “Friday, Father and I rode on the horses,” she reported in her first letter. “Father rode on the black horse. His name is Whitesocks [sic]. I rode on the white horse. His name is White Cloud. They went very fast.” Then the next: “Today is Sunday. Father and I rode Whitesocks and White Cloud this morning. We rode up in the mountains. Mum Mum and Carroll are coming to dinner today. Father, Carroll, and I went to a football game yesterday. We had lots of fun.” And then: “Father is working. We cannot go for a ride on the horses today. Perhaps tomorrow we shall go. Mum Mum and I shall go to the movies today and see Father. Father says it is very terrible.”2 And: “Father and I went to a large party Saturday. There were sixty people there.”
They went out very little. Spence still didn’t mix well with strangers, and the thought of dressing up and going to the Trocadero or the Colony after a full day at the studio was profoundly unappealing. “You know how I feel about nightlife,” Spence said to his pal Mook. “I hate it. But I’m at the studio all day and I see a lot of people and have laughs, etcetera. Louise is home all day and never sees anybody. Why don’t you take her to these previews with you?” Mook did, and Tracy found that he enjoyed the solitude.
The few days he wasn’t working were spent at Riviera, where a game could likely be had on any day but Monday. Large concrete grandstands built alongside Number One Field for the Olympics now held tourists straining to catch sight of their favorites. Women played on the old dirt field, and Louise was asked repeatedly why she didn’t play too. She demurred, diplomatically at first, suggesting that, although she rode, she would never be equal to polo. “Spencer had expressed himself vigorously, a number of times, on the subject of women playing,” she later explained, “and as long as he felt that way, I had no intention of making an issue of it.”
Face in the Sky was the work of a novelist and short-story writer named Miles Connolly, who was joining Fox after stints as a supervisor at both RKO and Columbia. Connolly’s story concerned the wanderings of Joe Buck, an itinerant artist who paints lipstick ads on the sides of barns. Buck was a cut above the characters Tracy was used to portraying, a rural philosopher and a bit of a dreamer, happy with his lot in life and proud of his work. “I wouldn’t