Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [264]
With Johnny attending school in Manhattan and Susie, now nine, still at Brentwood, there was little to occupy Louise beyond the running of the house. It was a gilded but solitary existence, broken only by her occasional visits with Audrey Caldwell, the former actress from Australia who was her closest friend and only true confidante. Spence was living at the Beverly Hills Hotel, making the picture, home Sundays and holidays. Carroll Tracy slipped quietly into the role of liaison between husband and wife, scheduling their times together as one might arrange meetings and conferences. With so much time on her hands, Louise began writing a book about her struggle to rear, educate, and mainstream a boy who was profoundly deaf, its purpose to give “a complete account of one family’s experiences with a deaf child, to the end that other deaf children may prosper.” The title she gave the book was The Story of John.
Louise Treadwell Tracy was a skilled and facile writer, and her words flowed with the same candor that distinguished her infrequent talks with the press. With her background in journalism, she was incapable of portraying an event inaccurately, nor could she temper her opinions in the name of diplomacy. She could avoid a subject altogether—Spence’s infidelities, for example, even though the Loretta Young affair was a matter of public record—but once she chose to tackle something—public school administrators, clueless doctors, antique attitudes on the part of the public, and baseless misconceptions—she did so with a sharpness and conviction that were startling. “Unless I write as fully, as clearly and as honestly as I am capable of doing,” she said, “my purpose has no hope of accomplishment.”
And so she began her book with these words: “He was sleeping late that afternoon, too late. He probably would not want to go asleep again that night until long after he should. I would waken him. I went out onto the porch where he slept, and as I went, I called ‘Johnny, Johnny, time to wake up.’ He did not move.”
Woman of the Year took almost nine weeks to shoot, finishing on Saturday, October 25, 1941. Louise was vacationing in Arizona, but if Spence was involved with Katharine Hepburn he didn’t note anything about it in his datebook. He was still seeing Ingrid Bergman—had dined with her on the sixteenth—and it was about this time that Bergman’s husband, Petter Lindstrom, prevented his wife from returning with Tracy to San Francisco to discuss “future roles.” When Louise did get back from Phoenix, Spence drove her down to Balboa, and they spent the day looking at houses and boats. That evening they dined at Carroll’s, where a frail Mother Tracy celebrated her sixty-sixth birthday.
Louise was in Palm Springs when Woman of the Year had its first preview on November 14. In the movie Tess and Sam are wed at a perfunctory ceremony, but the marriage veers spectacularly off course when she asks him what he’d think about having a child. He thinks, of course, that she is pregnant, only to discover that she’s adopted a Greek orphan. “Two weeks ago they made me chairman of the Greek Refugee Committee and I accepted without thinking much about it. And then while you were away they held a meeting and some idiot suggested that I should take the first one.”
The boy is already lost in the whirlwind of Tess’ life, and Sam takes pity on him when there’s no one to babysit on the night Tess is to be named America’s Outstanding Woman of the Year over a nationwide radio hookup.
“Well,” she says dismissively, “Chris will be all right, Sam. He’s old enough and, besides, we’ll be home before midnight.”
“He can do a lot of crying in four hours,” Sam shoots back.
Tracy’s “business,” Stevens observed, “is always behind his eyes. Whatever Spence does behind his eyes—if he thinks the audience should turn to his character, something takes place behind his eyes. You hear it in the sound of his voice. You