Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [231]
Roark, forty-three, was a nine-goal player, Irish-born and mourned on four continents. It was the first fatal accident among the game’s high-goal players, a very public reminder of how easily even a world-class player could lean forward and put a shot across the front of his horse and get the stick momentarily caught in its legs. Roark’s horse stumbled while up against a team of international cup players, threw him heavily to the ground, then rolled over and crushed him. Spence had played that morning at Alhambra’s Midwick Country Club, and he and Louise were among the horrified crowd of five thousand when the accident occurred later that same day. Roark lingered for two days without regaining consciousness, then died from his injuries following brain surgery.
Tracy took Pat Roark’s death hard. “I think he blamed himself for it,” said David Caldwell, who was fourteen at the time and whose parents, Orville and Audrey Caldwell, were among the Tracys’ closest friends. Had Roark played opposite Tracy that morning at Midwick? Could the six periods Tracy noted in his datebook have left Roark unduly fatigued? Off his game opposite the hard-riding cavaliers of Hurlingham? Had his horse been part of the morning action? (Tracy noted in his book that he had tried three different ponies that day.) The answers are all lost to time, and the field itself has long since been given over to development. Years later, in 1972, when Jane Ardmore asked Louise why Spence had given up the game, she said it was after the death of Captain Pat Roark, “a close friend.”
He took to stick-and-balling at home with Johnny every morning, riding through the alfalfa behind the house, but grew increasingly anxious about it. He bought a life insurance policy—he was already covered for health and accident through Lloyd’s of London—but when he had dinner with a friend on the night of March 18, he was so “nervous [he] did not want to come home” and instead spent the night in a guest house. On the twenty-sixth—Passion Sunday—he went to Mass but ran late in the rain and missed lunch with the kids. That evening he visited the Flemings—Vic had assumed direction of Gone With the Wind—and stayed until midnight. “[I] thought I was nervous,” he observed in his book, “until I saw Victor. Bad shape.”
He managed seven chukkers of polo on his birthday and played in a charity game on Easter Sunday, but otherwise he didn’t go back again until May 19, after returning from his trip to Europe. He threw himself into tennis but wasn’t very good at it—Louise routinely beat him—and it didn’t counter his weight gains as effectively nor wear him out as thoroughly.2
Having Pat Elsey on location at Payette Lake helped get him through the picture, but massage could only treat the symptoms of the tension that was continually building inside of him. (“Spencer always had the motor running,” said Frank Tracy, “even as a kid.”) And being sixteen months sober meant he could no longer use booze as a release. “I was sorry to see him sell his boat,” Clark Gable remarked. “He used to work off excess steam on that. He’s a guy who needs something to help him work off excess steam.”
“It would be wonderful,” Tracy had told an interviewer that previous year, “if I could drop my worrying when I leave the set—not carry that home with me, not keep on agonizing after hours about whether a role is good or whether I’m giving it everything it could have. I don’t force my worries on other people as a rule, but I cannot escape them myself. That’s the penalty for working so hard at my job. I can’t get to sleep at night for the nerves jumping. And then I wake up in the middle of the night, thinking of something I should have done or ought to do.”
Louise said:
I saw that he was getting more and more nervous. I wanted very much for him,