Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [151]
Occasionally, she brought him to Riviera, where she would put him on Blossom or White Sox and lead him around the yard in front of the stables. “When I mounted the horse,” John wrote, “I held the saddle tightly with both of my hands and wanted to get off. I realized I was so high and was afraid that I’d surely fall off and get hurt.” His mother insisted that he keep riding, despite his fear, and gradually he progressed to the ring near one of the polo fields, staying on entirely by balance and still tethered to the lead rope. But he never developed any real confidence on a horse—with only one leg to hold on by—until they got him a Western saddle, which made for a far more comfortable and secure ride.
He reentered Hollywood Progressive School in the fall, attending only the morning sessions (to leave time for his treatments and rest periods), but now, like other children, he was starting off for school each day at 8:30 in the morning. Primarily, he studied arithmetic and made things from clay and wood. “He had needed the companionship of hearing children,” Louise wrote, “and began to make adjustments toward life which any child learns to make at school and with other children, and which were more numerous for any handicapped child.”
Lincoln Cromwell’s first year at McGill University was similarly limited, mostly anatomy and related subjects—lectures, readings, lab dissections, the gruesome humor of students learning everything they can about the composition and workings of the human body. Dutifully, Cromwell kept up a running, if largely one-sided, correspondence with his famous sponsor, reporting on exams and study groups and distinctive members of the faculty, mixing in thumbnail sketches of the other students, accounts of the weather and boardinghouse horseplay, anything that could help portray the color, the drudgery, the genuinely hard work that went with being a medical student. “Immersed as we were in the study of anatomy,” he wrote, “it never occurred to me that any descriptions of our dissections would be offensive to Spencer. And, in fact, they were not. He was always highly interested in even the most technical aspects of the study of medicine.”
Through the turmoil of that first year—which spanned almost the full extent of the Loretta Young affair, the very public separation of the Tracys, the fights, binges, extortion letters, the mediocre pictures and the loan-outs, the arrest off Sunset, and the hopes, largely dashed, of bigger things to come—Tracy had Cromwell’s letters, bright spots in a fast life that was sometimes more than he could handle. “Glad you are getting along so well,” Carroll wrote back in October 1933. “Spencer is away on location. He got a big laugh over your letter about the stiffs. Keep us posted on all you are doing.”
In December, Cromwell heard from Dr. H. O. Dennis, the man who had originally put the two of them together. Spence had read some of his letters aloud, and Denny was pleased to be able to report that Tracy was “very well satisfied with his bargain up to this time, and that he is as proud of you as you are grateful to have him as a friend.” A couple of weeks later, Tracy himself wrote, reiterating in a fatherly tone how much he enjoyed the letters. “Have just signed a new contract [meaning his third option had been taken up at Fox] so you will have no worries as far as your continuing at McGill is concerned.” Enclosed with the letter was a check for twenty-five dollars “which I want you to use for a Christmas present for yourself.”
Cromwell came home to Los Angeles over the summer of 1934, driving a 1920 Studebaker loaded with paying passengers. A few weeks after his arrival, during the early days