Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [147]
Tracy relished his time on the polo field but thought the game too dangerous for women. (SUSIE TRACY)
She played furiously that fall and in January announced that she and Audrey Caldwell, a former actress, like herself, who had married an actor, would give California the first women’s polo association in the United States. Teams from San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Fullerton, San Pedro, and Long Beach were expected to throw in, and Snowy Baker opined that the better female players were equal to the one-goal players on the men’s teams.2
Louise began writing a play as well, a caustic comedy in three acts about a philandering husband having a very public affair aboard an ocean liner bound for Honolulu. Titled That Broader Outlook, it gave her a chance, via the character of Jane Stafford, to explain herself, to show the world what she was up against. It also contained a wry portrait of Mother Tracy, appalled by her son’s behavior but sure Jane’s mishandling of the situation was part of the problem. When the ship’s doctor suggests her son is a great deal like his father, always a good fellow, open and aboveboard, Abigail Stafford replies, “In most ways he is. He’d be more so if … if he had been managed differently. There’s no use talking, women aren’t the wives they used to be.”
Assertive and opinionated, Mother Stafford takes Jane to task for sitting “like a bump on a log” while Mrs. Darling beguiles her husband “into all kinds of foolishness without raising your hand to stop it.” She warns Jane, “He’ll fall in love with her if you’re not careful.”
JANE
Oh, no, I think not.
ABIGAIL
Well that’s all you know about it. He kisses her.
JANE
No doubt. It requires no beguiling for Jack to kiss pretty women. I don’t suppose there is room on this steamer, steerage and lifeboats included, to hold all the women Jack has kissed in the last ten years, and his yearly average is decidedly on the increase.
Jane is patient because she knows she shares the blame, but not quite in the way her mother-in-law thinks. “I haven’t a doubt,” she says, “that I’ve failed in many ways to be a good wife. That is only another reason I do not feel qualified to dictate Jack’s code of behavior.”
JANE
In the first place, I’m not losing Jack’s love, and I would lose it if I nagged and made scenes. Jack hates unpleasantness, he simply runs from it. If I made our relations quarrelsome or unpleasant, he would begin at once to deceive me, and I prefer to have his confidence, even when it hurts, than to be contentedly deceived.
ABIGAIL
Confidence? I guess confidence isn’t what it used to be, any more than love is. Do you mean to tell me that Jack has confided to you all the times he has kissed this Darling woman?
JANE
Not in detail, I’ll admit. He didn’t come down last night and say, “Well, I kissed Mrs. Darling thirty-seven times.” But he indicated that her romantic intensity was well sustained. He said, as I remember, that she was a handful. His endurance is never alarming. He will be relieved when she goes on and we stop in Honolulu. You see, in Jack’s code of behavior, flirting is a pastime and has no bearing on our real loyalty as man and wife.
To his mother, Jack explains his tomcat ways in terms of compatibility, much as Louise had put it to Dick Mook.
JACK
Jane and I understand each other all right. You don’t realize people look at things differently than they used to. Jane’s no end highbrow and prosy. Now don’t misunderstand what I mean—I wouldn’t have any other wife in the world, and she’s a wonderful mother; you know that. But we have each got to interest ourselves in our own way. We’re an institution, not a jail.
Louise got just twelve single-spaced pages into That Broader Outlook before giving