Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [196]
“Why, we were … nothing … We just went out and had—”
“WHY in the HELL didn’t you CALL?”
“Well,” said Louise, “I would call, Spencer. I thought you’d be in bed.”
“By God, you’ve got this girl here visiting who doesn’t even belong to us, and this boy here. God knows you could have been banged up on the highway …”
Jane struggled to get away as quickly as possible.
God, he’d worked himself into a state, probably because he didn’t have anything else to do. He was just furious. Even then, she didn’t come back at him—“Well, why didn’t you come with us?” She just calmly took it. So many times she just sort of took those tirades. Anything to keep peace. And anything not to lower herself. And that just made him madder, I think. There are always those kinds of problems in a marriage, but this one had to be lived so publicly … I think his self-esteem was very low. By the same token, I think Louise’s was not. I think she was comfortable. She knew her limitations, but the thing I don’t think she knew was how deeply hurt and vulnerable and wounded she was. I don’t think she admitted those things.
The last time Jane had visited, the Loretta Young affair was heating up and Spence had been working for Frank Borzage. Now, four years later, she found him again working for Borzage, the same meticulous approach to coverage visibly wearing on him after working for such decisive and hard-charging men as Fleming and Van Dyke. The picture was Big City, a romance of modern-day New York in which Tracy had been paired with one of Metro’s prestige properties, the German-born stage actress Luise Rainer. She had recently won the Academy Award for her role in The Great Ziegfeld, and her subsequent work in The Good Earth established her as one of the screen’s top actresses. So far, however, she had failed to catch on with the public, and Big City was an obvious attempt to commonize her.
Putting Tracy opposite Luise Rainer ensured she had someone of equal weight to play against. She was, however, showing the signs of disenchantment that would end her movie career after three short years in California, and her attitudes didn’t play well with her new costar, at least not at first. “I can remember his coming home one day in time for dinner,” Jane said. “God, it was hot and he was just wilted. He said, ‘I hauled that Viennese lump3 up and down those stairs twenty times today! God!’ I remember his saying something about talking to her about the work, Stanislavsky and the Group Theatre. He said to her, ‘Why don’t you and I go to New York and live in a garret?’ ”
Rainer, who didn’t click with Borzage and thought the picture “pretty idiotic,” kept mainly to herself. At the same time, Tracy was preoccupied with the fact that Weeze was in Good Samaritan for a biopsy, having noticed a lump on her breast. It was, as it turned out, benign, a simple cyst, but she would be in over the weekend, and Spence, relieved and fidgety, figured his costar was not so much a snob as a profoundly unhappy woman whose recent marriage to the New York–based playwright Clifford Odets was already on the rocks.
“I was married to a wonderful man, whom I dearly loved,” Rainer said, “but it wasn’t working, and, of course, it was a great heartache for me. While I was doing Big City with Spencer I had a friend-secretary, a woman, and he asked her, ‘Does Miss Rainer like sailing?’ And Hannah, my secretary, came to me and said, ‘Mr. Spencer Tracy says do you like sailing?’ I was pretty much down and out inside, so I said to her, ‘I don’t know. What kind of sailing?’ Anyway, to make a long story short, he had a boat, I think in San Pedro, and we all spent the weekend together.”
They powered out to Long Point, on the front side of Catalina, arriving around 2:30 on a Sunday morning. “He was terribly sweet and dear, but I think he was a bit shy of me, too, knowing also that I was perturbed at the time. He was sensitive to that and, moreover, I did not have the average Hollywood personality. I was more quiet—or whatever you may call it—but he was immensely kind and dear and comforting.