Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [2]
John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles maintains an astonishing archive representing its history—as nothing appears ever to have been thrown away. It is possible to visit the basement in the main building on Adams Boulevard and find the original enrollment cards to the clinic’s first summer session filed neatly in the appropriate cabinet. For complete and unfettered access to the clinic’s records, I am grateful to Mary Ann Bell, Jack Cooper, and Dottie Blake. Mrs. Mary Wales, one of the clinic’s original mothers, spent several hours on the phone with me from Arkansas, describing the early days in the cottage on West 37th Street and the evolution of the clinic over the ensuing years. For giving me a vivid understanding of what it was like to be a child in those early days at the clinic, I am grateful also to Carol Lee Barnes, Mrs. Wales’ daughter, and to Chuck Watson.
Jane Kesner Ardmore was a veteran freelancer for such national magazines as McCall’s and Good Housekeeping and the author or coauthor of several books, among them Eddie Cantor’s memoir Take My Life. In 1972 she began interviewing Louise Tracy and her associates for a ghosted autobiography proposed by M-G-M’s erstwhile publicity chief Howard Strickling. When that project died a quiet death, Louise refusing to discuss her husband’s relationship with Katharine Hepburn, Ardmore’s notes and interview transcripts were filed away and subsequently donated, along with her other papers, to the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills. I am grateful to Barbara Hall, who, with the able assistance of Jenny Romero, made these transcripts, as well as materials from a number of other special collections, available to me during the early days of this project.
From Seattle, Robert B. Edgers supplied a copy of his parents’ unpublished 1968 memoir, “The Spencer Tracy We Knew.” Bob and his late wife, Terry, were also wonderful hosts on a visit to the Emerald City, during which he shared data and photographs from his father’s Ripon scrapbooks and his own detailed memories of Northwestern Military and Naval Academy. Joan Kramer and David Heeley, the award-winning documentarians responsible for, among many others, Katharine Hepburn: All About Me, generously allowed me to view unedited interview footage shot in 1985 for The Spencer Tracy Legacy. In Moraga, California, Larry Swindell was a gracious host, discussing work on his groundbreaking 1969 Tracy biography. From England, Kevin Brownlow kindly supplied me with excerpts from Sidney Franklin’s unpublished autobiography regarding the aborted filming of The Yearling. By phone from Mequon, Wisconsin, John Ehle shared his boyhood memories of Daisy Spencer. And in New York, Gino Francesconi took me on an unforgettable backstage tour of Carnegie Hall, showing me the spaces likely occupied by the American Academy of Dramatic Arts during Tracy’s tenure there in 1922 and 1923.
Ned Comstock, as usual, came through way beyond the call of duty in identifying and locating files from the indispensable M-G-M and 20th Century-Fox script collections at the University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library. Ned’s expert help, his interest and enthusiasm, have long been essential to me and countless others during his lengthy tenure at USC. In Florida, Patricia Mahon generously made her incomparable collection of photographs of Spencer and Louise Tracy available to me, as well as letters and clippings dating back to the early 1970s. Marvin Paige was unfailingly helpful in getting me to several people who had memories of working with Spencer Tracy, most significantly the late Jean Simmons. Karl Thiede, as he has with past books, opened the files of his singular research library, providing reliable profit-and-loss data I could never have found anywhere else. At the Hollywood facilities of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Jere Guldin ran the archive’s nitrate print of Society Girl for Susie Tracy and me. And in Milwaukee,