Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [166]
John Tracy on the field at Riviera, circa 1935. (SUSIE TRACY)
Gable’s pursuit of her became an all-consuming goal that bordered on an obsession, and Wellman was so annoyed with his behavior, slowing progress on the picture as it did, that he made a very public issue of it. “I called him for it,” Wellman said, “which I shouldn’t have done in front of my company.” Sometime during the making of the picture, Gable made his move and Loretta soon discovered that she was pregnant. After finishing a role in a minor film called Shanghai, she fled to Europe in the company of her mother. It wasn’t unusual for an unmarried actress to hide a pregnancy, but it was uncommon to carry one to term and remain unmarried. The common remedy—abortion—wasn’t an option for a practicing Catholic, and revealing the father as a married man would have amounted to professional suicide. Upon her return, the actress went into seclusion, illness and fatigue the official reasons.
There was, of course, a lot of talk, and it quickly got through to Tracy that for all the bum publicity he had endured over the course of their ten-month relationship, it was Gable, completely unfettered by Catholic chivalry, who had gotten her into the kip. He called and went to see her, her condition now more or less an open secret. Word of the baby’s birth on November 6, 1935, spread like wildfire. With Whipsaw in the can, Tracy was seen out on the town, sometimes with Louise but usually stag, most often at Billy Wilkerson’s Cafe Trocadero on the Sunset Strip. The food was expensive and not very good, but it was a handy hangout for a good many stars, much like a private club, and he could always count on seeing somebody he knew.
Tracy frequented comedian Frank Fay’s Sunday night programs there and could be seen in wire photos greeting thirteen-year-old Judy Garland after her appearance as one of Fay’s “undiscovered stars.” When John Barrymore emerged from seclusion after fleeing nineteen-year-old Elaine Barrie, it was in Tracy’s company at the Troc. And it was at Wilkerson’s place on a Tuesday night in early December 1935 where Tracy overheard a reference to Loretta and a “baby with big ears” and shot to his feet. “Who said that?” he demanded and turned to find Wellman, on whose watch Gable’s conquest had occurred.
Dottie Wellman was upstairs at the time and heard about the remark her husband made only after the two men had been separated. “He shouldn’t have said that,” she acknowledged. “Bill had a chip on his shoulder, especially when he was drinking.” Tracy delivered a punch to Wellman’s ribs, which the director countered, according to news reports, with a left to the ear. “He and I just didn’t like each other,” Wellman later said of Tracy. “We had a lot of fistfights, and I always beat him because he’d start talking and I didn’t talk.”1
Mutual friends interceded, and those two punches were the only ones landed that night. By the time their altercation made the papers, they were both minimizing the incident, seemingly bewildered by all the commotion. “We had a little misunderstanding, and the others in the place seem to have made quite a fight out of it,” Tracy innocently told the Examiner. “There were no hard feelings, and we’ve laughed about it since.” Added Wellman, laying it on a bit thick: “We’ve been friends a long, long time and made a couple of pictures together. It was merely a case of misunderstanding which has all been straightened out, and I can’t for the life of me understand why so much fuss is being made about it.”
Neither would confirm the name of the actress involved, but the story made the wire services and at least one of the New York dailies ran both her name and photo alongside Tracy’s and capped them with