Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [145]
In a city where interest in Rothstein still ran high, Now I’ll Tell filled the Roxy as no Tracy film had been able to do. The film went on to do well in urban centers, less well in rural and neighborhood houses where gangster stories never fully caught on. Fox’s efforts to position it as a biographical picture as well as a crime melodrama went nowhere, and it ended up, like so many other Fox titles on Tracy’s résumé, posting a loss by the time it was played out.
Tracy and Loretta Young at the Cocoanut Grove, June 14, 1934. Their very public relationship would end later that same evening. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
As the studio readied the oft-delayed Marie Galante for Sheehan’s latest enthusiasm, a French import named Ketti Gallian, Tracy made the papers by trouncing a producers’ polo team 9 to 3 and accepting a handsome trophy from Carole Lombard at Uplifters Field.
He and Loretta took to going to Confession together on Saturday afternoons, and Loretta was shaken when one of the priests at Good Shepherd refused to give her absolution. She was seeing a married man, she was told, a Roman Catholic who had been married in the church. She knew, she later said, that if she left the church that day without absolution, she might never come back. Desperate, she walked across the aisle to the other box and told that priest the whole story. He eventually said that he would give her absolution only if she would agree to come back every Friday thereafter for counseling. When she got outside, she told Spence what had transpired—he apparently never told her if he was given absolution—and he understood her crisis of faith, just as she seemed to understand his and the role it played in his drinking. “I am sure the pressure and the soul-searching had something to do with it,” she said, “but gradually we faced the fact that there was nothing we could do.”
On June 8, 1934, Loretta went to her regular Friday night counseling session at Good Shepherd. Then, sometime over the next few days, she sat down and composed a handwritten letter that began with the words “My darling” and ended with the word “Me.” She admitted that when she was with him she had no logic, common sense, or resistance, and that after prayer and counseling, she knew the only way they could go on would be in an entirely platonic relationship. It would be enough for her, she said, just to be with him and to hear his voice, and they would be without sin, but she knew that she would need his help. He would have to decide if he could handle it, and, were it impossible, she would understand. She signed off with the words “I love you.” It reached him in a plain envelope addressed to “Mr. Spencer Tracy.”
On June 14, the couple was photographed together at the Cocoanut Grove, Loretta’s unseasonable mink coat casually draped over the back of her chair, a wide-brimmed summer hat framing her pale face, Spence’s wedding ring still plainly in view.
That night at the Grove was the last time they were seen out on the town together. Within hours Tracy had disappeared into his suite at the Beverly Wilshire, and when he emerged nearly two weeks later, it was to board an ambulance that would take him to a hospital.
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1 Lee Tracy, whose drinking was the stuff of legend in Hollywood, was accused of insulting a member of the Mexican Cadet Corps during a Revolution Day parade. Accounts differ as to exactly what he was supposed to have done, but the most common version of the story has him urinating off a hotel balcony. Later it was surmised that the growing strength of organized labor in Mexico had much to do with the resulting uproar over the incident.
2 Minnesota banker Edward G. Bremer had been kidnapped by the Barker-Karpis