Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [144]
Out from under the cloud of the kidnapping threat, Loretta and Spence went dining and dancing with Josie and Duke Wayne in the Beverly Wilshire’s exclusive Gold Room, by now a favorite haunt. Loretta was turned out in a white sailor frock—blue collar, white stars, red anchors—and Spence, equally festive, was blasted well before dinner. It fell to Duke to get him past the other diners—Winnie Sheehan, George Burns and Gracie Allen, the scenarist and playwright Edgar Allan Woolf—and up to his suite without creating too much of a fuss. “Once deposited in the room,” recalled actor William Bakewell, “Tracy became so violent in his efforts to get away that big Duke (no teetotaler himself) had no alternative but to coldcock him with a short right to the jaw, which left Spence draped on the bed for a sobering night’s sleep.”
Tracy’s first film for M-G-M, 1934. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Three days later the annual Academy Awards banquet took place at the Biltmore Hotel. Loretta had made plans to attend with Spence and the Waynes, but when the time came for him to appear, Tracy was nowhere to be found. She went without him, fighting back tears, and it was several days before she heard from him. “Spence was a darling when he was sober,” Young later told her daughter, Judy Lewis. “He was absolutely awful when he was drinking.”
Bottoms Up was released the week of March 26, hailed for its sly send-up of the movie business—the Motion Picture Herald called it “a comedy of values”—even if its musical numbers were of the kind that almost killed off the genre in the early days of sound. Now I’ll Tell finished on April 4, and Tracy took the opportunity to get out of town, going back to New York for a couple of weeks and finding no peace there either. He descended on Manhattan asking about the prospects of the Giants, wondering whether one of his polo ponies had gotten over the colic and apologizing for having taken on a few pounds since his last visit to the Big Apple. “Hollywood’s too easy a burg to live in,” he told a reporter for the American, trafficking in irony. “Polo, sunshine, fishing, and all the rest drive a guy crazy with happiness. Broadway’s good to look at from the back end of an observation car going [to] Hollywood.”
Handing a redcap his bag, Tracy passed through the gate at Grand Central and saw a crowd of onlookers being held behind a rope. “What are all these people here for?” he asked. The answer that came back was that they were all there to catch a glimpse of him. He refused to believe it until the group surged past the police line and followed him to his taxi. “Holy Moses!” he said, landing in the back seat of the cab. “I would never have thought it.” At the hotel, a telegram was awaiting him from Edwin Burke, reporting on the Pasadena preview of Now I’ll Tell. Its concluding line: YOU’RE STILL MY FAVORITE ACTOR. “Gee, that’s great of Eddie,” Tracy said. “He’s a swell guy.”
When he got back to Los Angeles, Tracy was seen out on the town with Loretta again, dining and dancing and generally behaving himself. Following Sheehan’s carefully orchestrated plan, the book Now I’ll Tell was published by Vanguard Press on May 3, 1934, and the film of the same title opened in theaters on May 11. The movie garnered generally favorable notices, even as it varied wildly from the book on which it was purportedly based. Rothstein became Golden, the Black Sox scandal became a fixed prizefight, the various showgirls with whom Rothstein consorted were rolled into the Peggy Warren character played by the Harlowesque Alice Faye.
Burke’s coaching paid off in a forceful performance that, while not Rothstein himself, hued to the spirit of the man. In her book Mrs. Rothstein recorded his first private words to her after their wedding at Saratoga: “Sweet, I had a bad day today, and I’ll need your jewelry for a few days.” She