Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [164]
A woman from the Gough School came to Van Nuys for a month over the summer of 1935 and worked with Johnny for three hours a day. At the end of summer, just as Spence was beginning work on Riffraff, she said that she was sure he heard enough to make residual training worthwhile. He had worked hard, and his speech showed considerable improvement. Louise, however, was not convinced the psychological effect had been good.
In the first place, John started out—perhaps we all did—with too much optimism. But, of course, we adults had understood the limitations both of John’s hearing and of the instrument, and were experienced in disappointments. John had confidently expected the impossible. He was too young to appreciate the amount of intense and protracted work necessary to gain small results, although I do believe that the long uphill struggle with his leg, and his great patience and cooperation there, had given him an insight and philosophy beyond his years. Still, I am sure the labor must have seemed to him out of all proportion to any apparent gain, and his disappointment, as week followed week and no great change in his hearing took place, must have been keen.
It was a case of overdoing a good thing, and the whole experience, with all its attendant anxieties, left him apathetic and rebellious and unwilling to continue with even the short daily periods his mother attempted into the fall. When Johnny’s tutor came back into the picture, she would have none of the hearing aid and consigned it to the closet. She said it was too much to fuss with in the scant ninety minutes they had together each day, and that John had too little hearing to make any work with a hearing aid worthwhile. When Johnny wrote his autobiography in 1946, he made no mention of it.
By September they knew that they liked the San Fernando Valley, its open spaces, its solitude, its decidedly rural way of life. However hot the days were, the nights were cool enough for blankets. “We also knew,” said Louise, “we wanted a home with more ‘outside’ than ‘inside,’ call it a ranch, farm, or just ‘place.’ ” Spence, now faced with a thirty-mile drive to the studio, stayed at the Beverly Wilshire during the week, coming home to Van Nuys on Sundays or whenever he wasn’t shooting a picture in Culver City. They planted a vegetable garden, added three dogs (including a mate for Pat named Queenie), more chickens, and a thoroughbred mare in foal. Casually, they also began looking for property to buy.
Having worked in support to Jean Harlow for two solid months, Tracy was now returned to Harry Rapf for a picture called Whipsaw. Again he was cast in support of a big name, Myrna Loy, who had made a terrific hit as Nora Charles opposite William Powell in The Thin Man. After being paired again with Powell in a second picture and then loaned very profitably to both Columbia and Paramount, Loy fled to Europe, feeling exploited and unwilling to return until her compensation had been brought into line with that of her costar. The ensuing standoff took almost a year to resolve; when Loy returned to M-G-M in September 1935, she had been offscreen for nine months.
Whipsaw was a caper movie, based on a story by James Edward Grant that had appeared in Liberty magazine. Loy was an international jewel thief, Tracy the undercover G-man trying to win her confidence. The script was all thrust and parry, the kind of dialogue at which Loy had proven so adept in her pictures with Powell. Tracy lacked Powell’s elegance—the picture was first conceived with Powell in mind—but made up for it with an earthiness