Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [146]
3 In addition, Franklin Pangborn played the title character in Poor Aubrey (1930), a Vitaphone short derived from the original one act by George Kelly.
CHAPTER 10
And Does Love Last?
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It was a measure of her despair over the winter of 1933–34 that Louise Tracy was willing to leave the children—year-old Susie and, particularly, John, the focus of her life—in Spence’s care and go off to New York with no specific plan in mind and no date set for her return. She was obviously hurting, humiliated, and maybe even a bit angry, but to all who saw her, the few friends she allowed into her life, her mother-in-law, the servants, John’s therapists and teachers, she was calm, collected, the very picture of reserve and forbearance. She had seen her own father walk away from her parents’ marriage in much the same way that Spence now seemed to be walking away from theirs. He put it on her to divorce him if she saw fit, knowing she was perfectly within her rights to do so, knowing that he himself could never take the step of divorcing her. She had never given him any cause to do so, never would. What they said in public was remarkably candid and true; what they said in private is anyone’s guess.
Louise had longed to take up polo, but Spence was against it, seemingly jealous of his time alone on the field and disapproving in general of women in the game. Then it became a discussion of Western saddle—which Louise knew—versus the lighter, hornless English saddle used in the game. It would be like learning to ride all over again and entirely too dangerous. “He said, ‘You aren’t going to do that,’ and I said, ‘Well, everybody else here is doing it.’ ” One afternoon Snowy Baker talked her into trying it, and Spence had a fit. “I can’t see any harm in stick-and-balling,” she said, employing the term for simply working out on a pony. He thought for a moment and then allowed as how he supposed not. She borrowed one of his hardwood mallets, awkward and unwieldy, and began taking lessons, marching past the grooms at the stables with as little self-consciousness as she could manage.
Louise had ridden White Sox on picnics into Mandeville Canyon, on Saturday morning rides with the children, and on moonlit outings up into the hills and across Will Rogers’ ranch. She had watched with growing envy the women who played in the mixed games on the dirt field. “Never have I seen women have as much fun at any sport—at anything—as the women I watched at Riviera,” she wrote. “There were times when I thought them nothing more than mad, and others, nothing less than goddesses. Grimy goddesses, I grant you—grimy but glowing. One can’t leave a dirt field after six or eight chukkers and still hope to resemble ‘what the well-dressed sportswoman will wear.’ At last, when I could bear it no longer, I determined, if possible, to sit with them—or play with them—upon Olympus.”
She was immediately embraced by the women who played the dirt field, who occasionally mixed it up with the men and sometimes even won. She made her best and most lasting friendships at Riviera—Lieutenant and Mrs. Gilbert Proctor, Audrey Caldwell, Walt and Lillian Disney, a Mrs. Chaffey (a full generation older and still playing), Mr. and Mrs. Carl Beal, Audrey Scott, the screenwriter Mary McCall. After a few lessons, a group of them corralled her in the office: there was a mixed handicap tournament starting, and they needed more women.
“Feeling far more mad than goddess-like,” she said, “I finally agreed to play. From the moment of the first throw-in when, as No. 1,1 I knew just enough to turn and ride toward our goal and heard the thunderous pounding of racing hoofs behind me, to the last gasping moment and I slid from my horse—Spencer’s horse—at the end of the game, it was more fun than I ever imagined.”
Spence was amused and even grudgingly pleased when he learned of Weeze’s debut on the field, and soon she had a pony of her own, a little brown horse named Blossom. And where Spence found