Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [136]
Back in Los Angeles, Carroll called her late one night and told her that Spence was drinking and refusing to eat. He was sure that she was mad at him, Carroll said, sure he had lost her for good, but if she would come down to the hotel and personally ask him to, Spence said that he would stop.
Loretta was skeptical, unwilling to be seen in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire at one in the morning asking for Mr. Tracy’s room, but Carroll thought it might somehow work. He sent a limo for her and met her at the hotel’s basement elevator. Upstairs, she found Spence sitting on the floor, propped in a corner, his pajamas askew and barely coherent. He told her he was sure he wouldn’t be this way if only they were able to get married. And as she put her arms around him, he leaned into her and began to cry.
Back at Fox, Tracy went into a musical comedy called Bottoms Up and was soon being linked in the gossip columns with the film’s leading lady, a petite British import named Pat Paterson. “If the off-set scenes of Pat Paterson, English beauty brought here by Winfield Sheehan, and Spencer Tracy were put into one picture you might see the beginning of a romance,” Louella Parsons wrote. “These two are in the same picture, but that doesn’t necessitate lunching together, talking together, and seeing each other at every possible moment. Maybe Spence is just trying to make Loretta Young jealous, or maybe it’s a lovers’ quarrel, but all the Fox studio is agog over his attentions to Pat Paterson, who is as blond as Loretta and the same type.” At twenty-three, Paterson was three years older than Loretta, getting used to a new country and clearly on the make. After an initial flurry of attention from Tracy, she met actor Charles Boyer at a studio gathering and was Mrs. Boyer within the space of a few weeks.
Spence and Loretta were back out in public again by the first of the year, going to films together and attending industry functions. On New Year’s Eve they went to a movie—“a lousy movie,” Tracy emphasized—and stopped at a hamburger stand on the way home. For Loretta’s twenty-first birthday they celebrated in grand style with Duke and Josie Wayne. The following weekend, they accompanied the Waynes to Palm Springs. A few years earlier, when Duke was under contract to Fox, there was talk of teaming the two of them. “It’s a good thing you’re good looking,” Spence would say, “because you can’t act your way out of a paper bag.” The affable Wayne would just laugh and say, “That’s right, Fats. I’ll catch on, then you watch out!”
The one time Loretta met Mother Tracy, Carrie was as cold as a Milwaukee winter, and it dawned on her that she was regarded by Spence’s mother as her son’s mistress. Shortly thereafter, Tracy agreed to an interview with journalist Gladys Hall for a piece in Movie Mirror magazine “if it would protect Loretta—I want to protect Loretta in this.” The assumption around town, of course, was that Loretta Young was responsible for the breakup of the Tracy marriage, when, as Spence always insisted, it in no way concerned her.
How could it? I mean, how could it because—as a matter of recorded and verifiable fact—and the register of the Chateau Elysée plus the starting date of our picture, Man’s Castle, will bear me out—I was registered at the Elysée here in Hollywood three weeks before I ever set foot on the first set of Man’s Castle. If anyone is sufficiently interested or sufficiently skeptical to want to check me on this, the data is available. And before I started to work on that picture, I had never done more than lay eyes on Loretta Young a couple of times, here and there around town. I had never exchanged four words with her. I don’t suppose that I had ever so much as passed a remark about her.
When Hall asked if