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he wanted to marry Loretta Young, Tracy looked at her and asked, “What man wouldn’t?” The question of a divorce, he said, was completely in Louise’s hands. “At the moment, Mrs. Tracy is living at home with the children. I am living at the Town House with my mother. I have dinner at the house with the children every Sunday. I go out there to see them as often as I can. This morning, for instance, I had a late call at the studio. I drove out there to see the kids. Johnny hasn’t been told anything about it. Johnny believes that I am working and away, as I’ve had to be before, on location and so on. When the time comes and everything is settled one way or another, I’ll tell him the truth. He is entitled to that.”

Then there was, he said, the religious aspect, which would have to be “very seriously” considered.

I am a Catholic, you see. Loretta is a Catholic. And so, on account of all these complications it would honestly be rather ridiculous and wholly untrue for me to attempt to make a definite statement. Our personal emotions have nothing to do with what we can do. The way I feel about Loretta must be pretty obvious. We haven’t tried to hide or beat around the bush or camouflage anything. We have nothing to be ashamed of. I am free to go with whom I please, at any time I please. If I were just playing around, if this were just another “Hollywood romance,” if I were a man, recently separated from his wife and from the bonds of marriage and wanting to have a good time for myself, I would be going out with three or four different girls. There is only the one.

This is profoundly sincere with me. It is serious. It is important. It stands apart from any other experience in my not-very-experienced life. I mean, even before I was married, I was working hard, trying to get a foothold on the footlights, struggling, worrying, no time for play. Loretta is young. That attracts me, of course. I can kid her a lot. I do. We have good times together, by ourselves, in our own way … Now and again we go to the Grove or the Beverly Wilshire and dance, but for the most part we take long walks and have long arguments and a lot of fun. Loretta is fun to talk to. I, who have always especially liked and enjoyed the talk and companionship of men, get a kick out of just being with her. We always go to church together on Sunday mornings. I drive out to her place and pick her up and we go. Mrs. Tracy is not a Catholic, and so, of course, this is something I never had before.

This is, honestly, our past and our present—the future is not entirely in our hands. There is nothing we can do about it but wait—and hope.

Bottoms Up was the brainchild of the prolific Tin Pan Alley songwriter and Broadway producer B. G. “Buddy” DeSylva, who had collaborated with director David Butler on three other decidedly oddball musicals for Fox. In an industry notoriously reluctant to laugh at itself, Bottoms Up was an anomaly, a satire which not only took aim at Hollywood but specifically at the company producing it. The story concerned a Russian-born studio head, Louie Wolf, who is beholden to an East Coast banker, a Mr. Baldwin. The matinee-handsome movie star, who may well have been inspired by Tracy’s own circumstances, is a self-loathing drunkard who considers his latest picture “the most stupendous piece of junk I’ve ever seen.” Tracy’s character, a genial cigar-flourishing con man named Smoothie, is down to his last dime and determined, with nothing more than a gardenia in his lapel, to conquer the town: “Now look, Mr. Baldwin, you make 52 pictures a year, don’t you, but only twelve of them are hits. Now my idea is only to produce the twelve good ones.”

While Bottoms Up was being filmed at Fox Hills, Louise was struggling to get Johnny accepted as a morning student at the Hollywood Progressive School. Spence was in touch with her daily and appeared for an admissions conference one morning when he could get away from the set. “The superintendent at first protested that it would be too cruel to enter Johnny in a school where the children were completely