Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [255]
There was the little tilt-top table that had belonged to Louise’s great-grandmother, as had the chairs on either side of it. And there was the sideboard—the old pine dresser with the new matching top—but everything else was contemporary maple, some pieces, like the dining set, built to order, while others came directly from the showroom floor. All serviceable, comfortable, but hardly showplace rare or extravagant by the standards of even small-town America. Louise wondered why any magazine would want to take pictures, much less publish them, but Mook was an old friend and had drawn an assignment for yet another intimate look at Spencer Tracy and his family.
The ranch itself made for better photo ops, and the same magazine, Screenland, had run a pictorial spread a few months earlier, all exterior shots made by an M-G-M photographer showing Spence and the kids out among the animals, pitching hay, working the fields, drinking from the garden hose, and nuzzling the dogs. The headline was “Tracy Takes It Easy,” but what it showed was an increasingly rare event, a day spent at home where Spence was indeed at rest, his wife and kids enjoying the air, the sun, the dust kicked up by the horses and the cars, the notion that this was as far away from the studio as one could get and still earn the extraordinary living he had come to expect from his position as a genuine star of the movies.
A rare day together on the ranch, as captured by a studio photographer, 1939. (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy wasn’t there the day Mook showed up; he was shooting Edison, the Man, and so Louise gamely showed Dick around, poking into Spence’s modest room, where the desk was piled high with scripts and mail and random scraps of paper, notes he had written himself and stuffed in his pockets. Two wastebaskets had come from an old lady who made them both herself—one pictured Stanley, the other Livingstone, and both arrived accompanied by a bill for sixteen dollars. A globe sat to one side, to the other a bookcase that held a model of the Carrie B (which Mook always referred to as “Tracy’s Folly”). The other rooms were similarly plain, though homey and obviously lived in. There were no formal areas nor guest rooms, nothing set aside for company or otherwise off limits to the kids and the dogs.
They strolled out back, past the pool and the tennis court and the onetime bunkhouse, to where the horses were kept, White Sox, Johnnie, four or five racehorses, none on the level of Man o’ War nor ready even for Santa Anita but all right for the lesser tracks. “At least we think they are,” Louise said. She pointed out a small horse, a yearling, which they had entered in a breeder’s sale. “What a shame to sell her,” Mook, the Tennessee horseman, remarked. “No,” Louise said. “We’ve had our fun with her while she was growing up. Racehorses are an expensive proposition. We’d better get our money out of her if we can. We’ll probably sell the other racers, too, when we can, and only keep the polo ponies.”
It was a crisp, windy day, and with the kids in school and Spence off making a picture, the place seemed quiet and empty and Louise somewhat subdued, as if she had everything she could possibly ask of life except happiness and a sense of purpose beyond John and the job of being Mrs. Spencer Tracy—a role that qualified her, in the opinion of many, as a candidate for sainthood. At the age of forty-three she was no longer playing competitive polo, no longer in the swim of things at Riviera. Her friend Audrey Caldwell once allowed as how Louise should never have given up the stage, but it had been nearly twelve years since that abbreviated season at Lima, where she had last appeared before an audience as leading woman in a company of actors.
“That’s all there is—there isn’t any more,” she said to Mook, wryly echoing Ethel Barrymore’s famous curtain line. “Are we going to see you again soon, or are you going to go on ignoring us?”
If Louise knew of Spence’s relationship with Ingrid Bergman, she never let on. If anything, she made it easier for him by absenting