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By Root 3642 0

herself from the Encino ranch, either with trips to Arizona or Palm Springs, or her frequent visits to New York, where Johnny was once again a student at the Wright Oral School. Spence was on the wagon, working constantly, home, at times, for tennis and swimming, occasionally for dinner out or a movie in the company of friends. They attended the premiere of Disney’s Fantasia at the Carthay Circle and caught up with Citizen Kane some four months after its release. On a day-to-day basis they were leading separate lives—purposely, it would seem, for when Louise was in residence, Spence usually was not, and when he was around, Louise often was elsewhere, leaving the children in his care and the care of the help—Miss Lystad, Susie’s Norwegian nurse; Margaret, the family cook; Hughie, who took care of the horses and lived out back of the property. Spence’s presence at the dinner table became something of an event, and Susie would later remember his palming quarters (“What’s that behind your ear?”) as the last vestige of his childhood magic act.

“I could see a change over the years,” said Chuck Sligh, whose business occasionally brought him to Los Angeles.

When I first went to California in ’34 or ’35 I stayed at their house … they certainly seemed very happy and everything was fine. And [then] I was at the ranch maybe twice. The first time I went, I remember specifically because Louise said, “Spence isn’t going to be here because he’s making a movie and he has to get in for makeup and everything very early in the morning. It’s a lot easier for him to stay at the hotel and be there in the morning instead of driving way into there from here. So why don’t you just take his room and stay there?” So I did. And I looked in the closet and there were, oh, four or five or six suits … but the next time I went out there and stayed in Spence’s room, I opened the closet door and there was practically nothing.

Tracy was also distancing himself from his brother Carroll, whom he blamed for getting him into “deep trouble” with the Internal Revenue Service. At one point, as he later told it, he was sure he was going to jail, and a man from the IRS actually appeared at the studio to audit his records.

“I keep seeing the name Feely,” the man said. “Jenny Feely, Aberdeen, South Dakota. Who is that?”

“That’s my aunt.”

“I see regular payments …”

“Yes, that’s right. You can ask her. I send checks to her.”

“And she lives on Washington Street in Aberdeen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well,” said the man, “I know Jenny Feely who lives on Washington Street in Aberdeen, South Dakota. My name is Walter Higginbottom, and I was born and brought up two blocks up the street from her.” He closed the file lying in front of him on the table. “That’s all right, Mr. Tracy.”

Spence’s cousin Frank was out over the summer of 1940, and the tension between the two brothers was palpable. “It was a period,” said Frank,

of two or three months—two or three months—that he and Carroll did not speak. He didn’t even look at him. He’d sit by the pool (and the kids were in Hawaii with Louise, or somewhere) and he’d talk to me and he wouldn’t even LOOK at Carroll. Carroll usually picked me up at the hotel and drove me out there. We’d sit around for a couple of hours, have lunch, and [Spence would] never talk to him. Never even look at him. He wasn’t even there … surely there must have been some business points they had to discuss, or SOMETHING … Carroll never opened his mouth. That went on for a couple of months. And then when the ice finally broke, it just barely broke. It was like “pass the salt” or something. Matter of fact, most of the time I was out there, they didn’t speak.

One night Spence and Frank were driving to the studio to see a picture. It was just the two of them, and Spence began to ruminate on the matter of his big brother. “I don’t know what the hell to do with Carroll,” he said. “Christ, he’s been out here seven years and he still doesn’t do anything. I pay him $250 a week … he’s always on the golf course, when I want him I can’t find him, or when I want him