Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [201]
Eddie Mannix couldn’t have children, so Bernice had adopted her nieces and nephews and loved having them around. They all crowded into their grandmother’s house at Somerville, where Margaret Fitzmaurice had presided over the first Catholic family to move into town. She had nine children, made her own soap, and saw that their three-story house—and all the kids—were spotless. Tracy was immediately taken with her, her quiet dignity and the fact that she made wonderful marble cake without a recipe.
The first afternoon, rubbing his hands together, Tracy said, “Grandma, what kind of ice cream would you like?”
“Oh, I think strawberry,” she said after a moment.
And so Tracy put on his hat and coat and walked down the long driveway, past a clutch of onlookers, ignoring them completely, and hied himself up the hill to a little store where he could buy a pint of strawberry ice cream. Then he took her by the hand, led her into the kitchen, and sat for the next hour, just the two of them, eating the ice cream and talking. The next day, following the funeral, he repeated the exercise, and when it came time for him and Louise to leave, he took her face in his hands and kissed her gently on both cheeks. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met,” he said softly.
As they drove away, Grandma Fitzmaurice was glowing. “What a nice man,” she said to her granddaughter Jean. “Who is he?”
Even if Eddie Mannix’s own mother-in-law didn’t know who Spencer Tracy was, millions of moviegoers did. Just a week before he left for Boston, Tracy sat for another talk with Ed Sullivan, whose dispatch the following day carried the headline NEW RAGE IS SPENCER TRACY. Sullivan wrote: “Voting contests that are being conducted throughout the country to determine the ranking cinema heroes and heroines reveal that American girls are switching from Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power, or at least the type they represent, to the more stalwart type of hero suggested by Spencer Tracy. Every poll shows that Tracy is gaining by leaps and bounds, and theater managers say that the bulk of his votes are coming from girls and women who have become a trifle wearied of gentler heroes and want their romance raw, rough, and resolute.”
The New Rage and his wife arrived in Manhattan intent on seeing a few shows and ducking the press as much as possible. They paused briefly to pay their respects to Eddie Mannix’s own family in Fort Lee, where his brother owned a bar and staged cockfights. On Broadway they saw Room Service, Golden Boy, Hurray for What! (the new Ed Wynn show), and George M. Cohan in I’d Rather Be Right. They had a nice visit with George M. after the show, and were introduced to the former governor and presidential candidate Al Smith. Spence had to get back to Los Angeles for the start of the new Fleming picture, but Louise lingered an extra week, primarily to do some Christmas shopping and see some old friends. When she returned on December 8, Spence had the news that Dr. Dennis had confirmed a hernia and that he was in for another operation after the first of the year. On the nineteenth he played his last game of polo for some time to come. (“Suffered terribly,” he wrote in his book.) Three days after that, he was fitted with a truss.
Test Pilot wasn’t a picture that either Tracy or Gable wanted to make. In Tracy’s case it collided with his plans to take his family to Europe, but he decided to do it once the studio offered to sweeten his deal. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, Nicholas Schenck bestowed a “starring contract” worth $6,000 a week—a bit of an exaggeration in that Tracy’s billing clause remained the same as before and the rate of compensation was only $4,000 a week. Still, it was a substantial bump from the $1,750 he had been getting, and he approached Test Pilot, at least at first, with a good deal of enthusiasm. In addition to Gable, he’d be appearing again with Myrna Loy and Lionel Barrymore, and Fleming, after the experience