Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [131]
The relationship with Loretta Young was an almost spiritual melding of two souls, its intensity something Tracy had never before encountered. He talked a lot about his kids—John especially, who was, she decided, the most important person in his life. He talked less about Louise, but always with tremendous feeling and respect. Gretchen was different—more delicate, more beautiful, more sensitive. Seventeen years younger, she wasn’t as well educated as Louise, nor was she as good an actress. There was nothing even remotely insightful about her, yet she was pure and magical and full of life. She could give him her complete attention in a way Louise never could, and there was, of course, the common bond of their faith.
Jane Feely (center) could sense there was something between her cousin and his costar. (JANE FEELY DESMOND)
“He was not a devout Catholic,” his cousin Jane said,
and he was often not a practical one either. I would call him a spiritual Catholic. I would say he understood what the law of love was, what Christianity teaches, what the Catholic Church teaches, and what we live by and what we believe. I can remember one thing that kind of struck me. We were at Louise’s, we were at the house, and he and Carroll came home from somewhere—he was living at home at that time—and he said, “You know, Aunt Jenny, I went by this church over in Beverly Hills, and there were all these people. Mass was over, and they brought out the Host in a big monstrance.” And my mother said, “Spencer, it’s the 40 hours. You remember the 40-hour devotion.” And he said, “Forty hours? Oh, yeah … I guess I forgot.” The point was that he made a big issue about being there, so that she would know he had been to Mass. It was very obvious he knew what they were doing.
When it came time for Jenny and Jane to return to Aberdeen, a veil of sadness descended over the family. Carrie Tracy would miss Jenny’s spark, her laugh, her sense of shared experience. Spencer’s relationship with Loretta Young had turned into a very public event, and Louise was clearly mortified. “In the family,” said Jane, “those were the things you pulled the lace curtains for—not that it wasn’t true, but you didn’t talk about it. Ever.” Before she left, Aunt Jenny broached the subject with Spencer just long enough to say, “I hope you’re not going to drag the Tracy name through the divorce courts!”
They had talked about marriage, Spence and Gretchen, but she never asked him to get a divorce, partly because she knew they could never marry in the church, and partly because she knew deep in her heart that he would never divorce Louise. “I really don’t think I could,” Tracy told his friend Bogart. “What could I say to Johnny? How could I make a nine year old little boy understand that I’m leaving his mother?”
His drinking accelerated, and he was arrested for public drunkenness one night while attempting to back out of a driveway in the 8400 block of Sunset Boulevard. The address was on a strip of county land across the street from a clutch of notorious businesses. The House of Francis, an apartment building that housed one of the town’s priciest brothels, was at 8439 Sunset, and Milton Farmer’s Clover Club, a fancy after-hours restaurant and bar where casino-style gambling was available in the back room, was at 8469. Tracy’s private behavior and his public image converged in the press that next day.
“Securely held with handcuffs and leg straps, Spencer Tracy, portrayer of ‘he-man’ roles on the screen, yesterday spent two hours in the county jail after he had been booked as drunk,” began a four-inch item in the Examiner that carried the headline SPENCER TRACY BOOKED IN JAIL. “Tracy last year played the starring role in the film Twenty Years in Sing Sing [sic], a motion picture showing prison life based on actual events in the New York penitentiary.”
“You see,” Tracy later said by way of explanation,
I’d never known anything of this sort. My life has been so completely different, so distant from this