Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [188]
After a few days back at the studio, they suspended production while waiting for new backgrounds. Eddie Mannix okayed a two-week vacation on December 1, and the Tracys were on the Super Chief bound for Chicago the following morning. In New York they registered at the Sherry-Netherland and, intent upon catching as many shows as possible, took in Dead End on a matinee, followed by the Ziegfeld Follies with Fannie Brice and Bobby Clark that evening. After hours at the Cotton Club, they got caught up in a mob of autograph seekers, an experience Spence likened to a scene from Fury. With no big-name comedies competing against it, Libeled Lady was a big hit at the Capitol, and Metro’s New York office had the dailies queuing up to buy Tracy lunch.
He loved the musicals—Red, Hot and Blue, On Your Toes. They saw Idiot’s Delight, Tovarich, then Stage Door on the tenth. They would have seen another that evening had Spence not caved—after first having said no—to an appearance on Rudy Vallee’s Royal Gelatin Hour (as the $1,500 fee would handily cover the cost of the trip). They dined with Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, caught Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, and were back on the train to Chicago the next afternoon. They were home on December 16 after five and a half exhilarating days on the town. Four days later, on the twentieth, Tracy celebrated one full year on the wagon.
Yvonne Beaudry was newly arrived in California, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, when, at the age of twenty-eight, she landed a job at Selznick-International. Beaudry made the daily commute to Culver City with a woman who was one of the top secretaries at nearby M-G-M. Unhappy at Selznick, where she was secretary to a dyspeptic producer, Beaudry was asked by her friend if she cared to work for an actor—“never mind who.”
“Did I!” she said. “Anything for release from my present employment. But an actor? ‘I hope it’s Spencer Tracy,’ I blurted out, considering he was the only thespian worthy of my efforts. My companion smiled mysteriously, let me off at Selznick’s, and drove on to the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. An hour later, she phoned me for lunch at the M-G-M commissary, where, I supposed, I’d meet the actor.”
Nothing happened over lunch, and Beaudry took the bus back to work in low spirits. About four o’clock, though, she had another call. “Can you come for tea in half an hour? Spencer Tracy will pick you up in his car.” Beaudry told her boss she was leaving for a job interview at Metro, and he simply nodded, anxious for the chance to hire somebody with more experience. “Evidently I’d been inspected at lunchtime and passed muster. I still wonder if Tracy hired me for my Hollywood get-up, which resembled his—a loose brown wool coat, a felt hat with the brim pulled down over one eye. Certainly he learned little about my qualifications at tea. He did all the talking, and I basked in the warmth of his presence, his smile.”
Since the release of San Francisco, Tracy told her, he was getting lots of fan mail and needed a secretary to answer letters, send out autographed photos, paste clippings in a scrapbook. The salary would be twenty-five dollars a week, and she’d be based in his dressing room until an office came available elsewhere on the lot. Her first morning at work, Beaudry opened dozens of letters piled on the floor, on easy chairs, on a large table on which sat a typewriter, stationery, rosaries, and medals sent Johnny by his father’s fans. Atheists wrote, describing