Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [273]
He marked three years and eight months of sobriety as the new year began. The first days of 1942 were filled with work and news of war. He had a rare day off on January 6—Fleming was ill—and spent it playing tennis at the ranch with Louise. The next day he attended a bachelor luncheon thrown by L. B. Mayer for Mickey Rooney, who, at the age of twenty-one, was marrying starlet Ava Gardner. Ribald advice was offered the bridegroom by the likes of Clark Gable and Robert Taylor, then Tracy struck a more ominous note when he told the story of the sink and the marbles: “You’ll never have a year like your first year. Every time you make love to her then, you put a marble in the sink. After that, every time you make love to her, you take a marble out. But Mickey, you know what? You’ll never empty the sink.”
Tortilla Flat was behind schedule, the rushes listless and uninspired. Tracy was looking forward to being free of it when, on January 11, he formally accepted the chairmanship of the Motion Picture Committee for Celebration of the President’s Birthday, an event that kicked off the yearly door-to-door fund drive of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis— commonly known as the March of Dimes. Without mentioning his own son’s battle with poliomyelitis, he posed for photos with Bette Davis, enlisting her help for a national radio appeal and the traditional birthday ball to be held in Washington at the end of the month. “We of America may well be thankful that we may pause amid this world conflict to hear the pleas of these little sufferers,” Tracy said in a statement for the cameras. “We are their only hope.”
His work for the foundation was interrupted less than a week later when, on a windy Friday night, Carole Lombard disappeared in the air over southern Nevada. She and Clark Gable had married in March 1939—as soon as his divorce from Ria Gable became final—and for the first time in his life Gable married for something other than the furtherance of his career. “They’re suited to each other,” Tracy said approvingly at the time of their first anniversary. “They’re two regular people. And from where I sit, it looks like love.”
And indeed it did—in spite of Gable’s continued philandering. The couple bought and refurbished Raoul Walsh’s Encino spread, a two-story Connecticut farmhouse on twenty acres of land about five minutes from the Tracy ranch. They all golfed together, Carole gamely lugging her own clubs, Eddie Mannix usually completing the foursome, and socialized occasionally—holiday parties and the like. Lombard was genuinely solicitous of Spence, sensitive to his predicament amid the free-flowing scotch of the Gable household. “Carole Lombard was a very big star in her own right,” said Adela Rogers St. Johns, “much loved by Hollywood. But everybody who went to the rambling white house overlooking the San Fernando Valley knew it was Clark’s house. Carole had created and maintained it to suit him. It was the most joyous house I was ever in.”
Tracy liked Lombard, liked her sense of humor and her ability to make Gable laugh. It was as if her appeal stood completely apart from the fact that she was also a world-class beauty, a gifted comedienne, and a fine dramatic actress. She made the ideal home for her husband, doing what he did, liking what he liked. Lombard had been east selling U.S. Series E Savings Bonds—now widely being referred to as war bonds—and had reportedly raised $2.5 million in her home state of Indiana when, eager to return west to her husband and a new picture, she muscled her way onto a TWA Skysleeper bound for Burbank, accompanied by her mother and M-G-M publicist Otto Winkler. After an unscheduled refueling stop in Las Vegas, the plane took off in clear skies on the last—and reputedly easiest—leg of an eighteen-hour trip that had begun in Indianapolis at four in the morning. All authorities had to go on were eyewitness accounts of an explosion and flames along the steep eastern face of Mt. Potosi, thirty-two