Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [210]
Earlier in the month, Powell had discovered bleeding and was diagnosed with rectal cancer—the exact same disease that had taken the life of John Tracy at the age of fifty-four. Surgeons recommended complete removal of the rectum, but that meant Powell would have to evacuate into a bag for the rest of his life, something he said he just couldn’t abide. Instead, he chose the option of a “temporary” colostomy and a program of radiation. With the lower colon bypassed, the cancer was removed, but it would be six months before Powell would know if it was gone for good. He was, Tracy noted, “pretty blue and sick” that particular afternoon.
Tracy had a morbid fear of disease—cancer in particular—and the talk with Powell obviously stuck with him. The trip through the canal began pleasantly enough, but then he developed a mysterious itch (“… but good!” he wrote in his book). It worsened, and he spent his thirty-eighth birthday in agony, convinced that he, too, had rectal cancer. He could remember how his father had wasted away under the disease, the terrible sight of such a powerful and energetic man in death: “I looked at what was left—just practically nothing. I couldn’t find that big, proud, Irish son-of-a-gun in the remains. And right then and there I made plans. Anything like that ever happened to me, I’d check out … I’m scared. It’s a thing there’s no prevention for. There’s nothing you can do. We’re helpless. Sitting ducks. If it hits, it hits. And when that’s the way your father goes—or your mother—it’s only natural to live with the specter of it. Or try.”
Denny had a look at him and told him no, he didn’t think so, but that he’d arrange for treatments when they reached port. The passengers were respectful, kept their distance. “Of course, I was sick … I still walked with a cane … but they didn’t speak to me or ask for autographs. When we arrived in New York, though, boy!” At the Twenty-first Street pier Tracy was surrounded by longshoremen who wanted autographs and mobbed by a star-struck crowd of women, one of whom wanted to kiss him and was seen pleading with a cop for permission to do so. When they arrived at the Sherry-Netherland, Denny located an oncologist and Tracy had his first x-ray treatment—the same sort of radiation therapy his father endured and that Bill Powell undoubtedly had in his future. No relief. “Rectal trouble terrible,” he wrote on the twelfth. “Itch awful,” he added the next day.
They didn’t see any shows—he couldn’t sit long enough to enjoy one. Test Pilot opened at the Capitol Theatre, and the end of Lent contributed to a fabulous gate of nearly $60,000 in the first week alone. Critics generally thought the picture well done, albeit overlong, and most commented on the brevity of Tracy’s part. At the hotel he sat for a couple of interviews, calmly sipping from a glass of ginger ale, giving no indication of the turmoil within.
The Tracys went their separate ways in New York, Spence roaming the city like a wounded tiger, his posture and gait warning strangers away. Selena Royle “saw a figure coming down the street, all hunched over and with a hat over to one side in that way of his, and I knew it had to be Spence … so I went up to him and threw my arms around him and said, ‘Well, you always said you wanted to be as good as Lionel Barrymore, and now you are … and better.’ ”
The daily treatments continued, and all he wished by now was to be home again. On Saturday, April