Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [127]
Johnny was a constant presence, delighted to have visitors around. As Jane recalled,
He practiced speaking and watching you, learning how to read your lips. After a while, it was no problem talking to him because he was pretty good. He was a very sunny, happy little kid. He was lonely, though. There was nobody around to play with. He hadn’t gotten into a school where he had any kind of association with children. [Louise] was determined that he would be mainstreamed immediately. He was not going to be placed among deaf children. He was going to be made to speak. All of us were told, “When he comes into the room, we all stop and we speak to John first.” When he would come in he would say, “Mother, what talk?” And she would explain what we were talking about. And she would impress on all of us that we should speak slowly and include him in the conversation. I guess you could say she had this overpowering sense of direction and protection, that this was her life’s work.
There were no outward signs of trouble; the Tracys were an extraordinarily demonstrative family. “Everybody kissed everybody when they came in and when they left. Much outward affection among all of them then. Carroll and Dorothy and Spencer and Louise would go and kiss Mother Tracy before they left and when they came in. Everybody was very affectionate.” Louise and Spencer also seemed perfectly comfortable with one another. “Good-natured. They kind of bantered a little bit. I don’t remember there being any harshness or any anger between them at that time. I didn’t notice it. I think there probably was an undercurrent; must have been at that time, but it was not evident to me.”
When Spence moved to the Chateau, a huge, Normandy-themed castle a few blocks from the Columbia lot, no one seemed to notice. Louise took it in stride, focused as she was on Johnny and her plan to establish a private school for the deaf. The Chateau, however, was a high-profile venue. There were a lot of tenants employed in the industry, so his comings and goings were observed to a degree unthinkable at the Riviera. When he sat down for lunch with a writer from Modern Screen, the subject naturally got raised: two Hollywood divorces had broken that same day, and two others had come to light the previous week—including the headline-grabbing separation of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.
“The day Louise and I stood up,” Tracy told the man, a freelancer named Carter Bruce, “we were just two half-scared—and also half-starved—young stock actors who had felt mutual attraction, part mental but a greater part sex. Marriage came to us over a period of years during which we shared each other’s life. Those years weren’t any too fat either. When I married Louise, I thought she was a pretty girl and about the best actress I had ever seen. But I didn’t know then that she was the kind who could laugh on an empty stomach, who could kid away the tough sledding and never care that she wore the same dress day in and day out months at a time.”
He dismissed the rumors that he and Louise were separating. “They make me laugh. They’re too silly to even deny. I don’t think anyone could ever say enough words between us to dissolve the amount of marriage we’ve experienced—long before Hollywood and her standards happened to us.”
Ironically, by the time the article appeared, word of a Tracy “separation” was, in fact, old news. The Examiner carried an item about it on August 30, the same day Man’s Castle wrapped at Columbia. “If there is any blame to be attached, it is mine,” Tracy told a reporter. “If our friends will only let us alone, I think we can work out our problems.” He attributed the separation to growing incompatibility and nothing more. “Mrs. Tracy and I are still excellent friends, and perhaps living apart for a while will lead to a reunion.”
Louise made no statement, preferring to let Spence do all the talking, yet it was her idea to publicly confirm a trial separation. “The papers forced us into it,” she later explained to their friend Mook. “They found