Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [165]
Loy was on her way to becoming a big star, and Tracy covered his nervousness with banter. “He’d keep contrasting me to Jean, telling me what a good sport she was, what a prima donna I was, and how her Victrola had cheered them up on the set,” the actress said in her autobiography. “In self-defense, I finally took the hint. That began his long torch-carrying: I was running and Spence was running after me. He would go out to [Riviera] and call my friend [and stand-in] Shirley Hughes to find out where I was. ‘What difference does it make?’ Shirley told him. ‘She isn’t going to see you.’ Which I never did. I liked him, but not enough.”
They completed Whipsaw in twenty-six days, and Tracy went back to polo, from which he had refrained during the course of production. Over the summer, Johnny had started to ride in the gymkhanas held every month at Riviera, entering the trotting and potato races, the flag relays, and the autograph races that required the participants to dismount and sign their names before remounting and galloping off toward the finishing line. He was watching the last chukker of a mixed game on Thanksgiving Day when his father rode up and told him to get out on the field and play. “I was very much surprised, as it seemed to me all of a sudden. I rode nervously onto the field and only trotted along with the players. Finally, about the middle of the chukker, I hit a ball two or three times for the first time while walking. Obviously, other players waited generously and let me do the job. I was very much excited and felt proud.”
Tracy’s contract with Metro required him to make one radio appearance in support of each film he did for the studio, and his first came up on November 29 when he and Harlow performed scenes from Riffraff on Louella Parsons’ Hollywood Hotel. It was a national hookup, unusual for the time, as most network shows originated in either Chicago or New York City. Parsons used her muscle as columnist for the Hearst syndicate to get the industry’s biggest stars to appear for little more in compensation than a case of Campbell’s soup. The exposure was usually worth it, but for some film personalities the cost came in the terror of broadcasting live for an audience of some 20 million listeners. Tracy, for one, disliked the experience, but it wasn’t what sent him off on another bender in the days that followed.
In the eighteen months since Loretta Young ended their relationship, she had starred or costarred in five motion pictures, including The Crusades for Cecil B. DeMille. Prior to making the DeMille picture she had gone on location to Mount Baker, Washington, for a film adaptation of the famed Jack London novel Call of the Wild. It was a rugged shoot, made all the more so by the volatile mix of personalities at its core. Jack Oakie was in the cast, as boisterous as he was on Looking for Trouble, and directing it, as he had that aforementioned film, was William A. Wellman. Something of a coup for 20th Century was Young’s leading man—Clark Gable, borrowed from M-G-M. Then, of course, there was the flirtatious, semivirginal Loretta herself, now all of twenty-two years old.
Gable was married to a wealthy Houston socialite seventeen years his senior. (It was a “step-up” marriage, as his first wife—his acting coach—put it.) Ria Gable, a matronly fifty-one, was the lingering wife of Hollywood’s biggest male star (and one of its most notorious cocksmen). With an Academy Award looming in his immediate future, Gable had already decided to seek a divorce when he left for Bellingham with Wellman’s company in January 1935. Immediately, he fixed Loretta in his crosshairs, and the blizzard conditions