Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [257]
Where Carroll was an almost constant source of frustration for his younger brother, Peggy Gough, Tracy’s secretary, was a godsend. A graduate of UCLA, she handled the job with quiet efficiency, sorting the mail, taking dictation, helping her boss cope with the weird business of being a movie star. Working out of his combination office–dressing room on the second floor of an apartment building on M-G-M’s Lot 1, she diplomatically fielded appeals for money and what Tracy called “oddments”—buttons from his jackets, locks of hair, contest prizes and the like. She ordered stills from his movies, answered fan mail, made luncheon and dinner reservations, sent out photos, turned down party invitations, delivered messages, and kept the number at the house in Encino a closely guarded secret.
Pleas for autographs were the most common, and they came in all sorts of forms. People would see him leave his car and poke hastily scrawled scraps of paper through the windows. One went so far as to scratch a name and address into the paint of his new Lincoln, which he then had to have refinished. Before going to work for Tracy, Peggy never knew how many requests a public figure could get—hundreds a month, not to mention appeals from legitimate charities, which also numbered in the hundreds. “He is a very charitable person,” she said at the time. “In fact, many of his friends call him a sucker, but he just laughs it off. You’ve no idea how much can be given away right inside the studio itself—not a day passes that some extra or old-time actor doesn’t come up with a hard luck story, and the only ones he refuses are the ones he knows are downright fakes who make a business of it, and, unfortunately, there are a good many of them.”1
There was also the matter of the fan club, a job of care and feeding for which he was profoundly unsuited. One of the earliest rackets in the movie business, clubs had been known to charge fans as much as $2.50 a year to officially admire a preening film idol and another fifty cents for a lithographed picture of same. The money went into the pockets of organizers or, in some cases, the star himself. After a vogue that lasted well into the twenties, such organizations fell into disrepute, and some studios—such as Fox—forbade them altogether. It was radio that fueled a new wave of them in the mid-thirties, and soon men like Howard Strickling saw the value in building and maintaining mailing lists so that when the sales organization had trouble selling its block into a place like Kokomo, the local fan clubs could be rallied into action. The membership of Jean Harlow’s fan club reportedly topped fifteen thousand at the time of her death.
In Tracy’s case, a club took shape after Captains Courageous but fell apart with the illness of its president, a woman known simply as Miss Barclay. When a club member wrote in, Peggy explained the situation and the woman wrote back, offering to form another on Tracy’s behalf. Mrs. Frances Rasinen of Detroit had previously run a club for singer-actor Johnnie “Scat” Davis and came well recommended for the job. With annual dues set at fifty cents, she built up a membership in short order, Tracy agreeing to sign a five-by-seven photo to each new member. The inaugural issue of the club’s quarterly newsletter, The Tracy Topper, was published in October 1940, but Mrs. Rasinen proved to be high maintenance, and in the club’s prime Peggy was responding to two or three letters a week, juggling dozens of names and addresses and trying as best she could to keep everyone happy.
There was time to talk over the summer of 1940, and cousin Frank asked Spence about acting. “I said, ‘Did you ever think about doing anything else?’ He