Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [274]
Tracy worked most of Saturday at the studio—“pretty upset,” as Peggy Gough recalled—then left for Nevada at five that afternoon. He drove six straight hours, arriving in Vegas at eleven that night. Gable was composed but hadn’t slept, hollow-eyed with grief. Tracy sat with him, Howard Strickling, and the others, said little, remained at hand. The charred bodies were recovered from the wreckage, wrapped in army blankets, and taken down the mountain by horseback. Tracy remained at the hotel with Gable until 8:30 the next evening, then returned to Los Angeles, where he was due back on the set of Tortilla Flat. The funeral, in Glendale on the afternoon of the twenty-first, was private and strictly limited to immediate family and friends. Gable, hidden from view in an alcove reserved for the family, said nothing during the course of the service, which consisted of a few readings and a simple affirmation of faith. It was over in ten minutes. “Clark, beyond consolation, would talk only to Fieldsie, Carole’s great friend and manager, Madalynne Fields,” said Myrna Loy, one of the very few marquee names invited to attend. “He wouldn’t talk to anyone else, no matter who it was.”
Spence was there with Louise, but his mind was focused elsewhere—on his mother, who had suffered another stroke that day and was, as he noted in his book, “very low.” He worked only until noon the following day, a Thursday, then went to be at Carrie’s side. She appeared to recognize Carroll and him, smiled at them faintly and clasped hands. Apparently she did not speak, although according to family lore she said to Spencer, “Take care of Carroll.” The next day, January 23, 1942, she had yet another stroke and died very quietly at the age of sixty-six. She did not, according to Spence’s entry in his datebook, seem to suffer.
The next day, Spence, Carroll, Louise, and Dorothy accompanied Carrie Tracy on her final trip home, fourteen years after her husband had been laid to rest in Freeport’s Calvary Cemetery. The train was met at Dixon by a hearse from the Eichmeier & Becker funeral home, while Spence and Carroll and their wives were collected by their sad-eyed uncle Andrew and driven into town. The scene at the Hotel Freeport was chaotic—news of the great star’s impending arrival had been published in the Journal Standard—and the lobby was packed with the morbid and the merely curious. “People were clustered around him, probably bodyguards, and they were trying to whisk him through,” recalled Marie Barcellona, the hotel’s longtime desk clerk. “But he was very gracious—he took time out to stop and talk to someone he apparently knew or someone that knew his mother. He looked much more youthful and thinner in person.”
The townspeople remembered the gentle, white-haired woman who occasionally came to Freeport to visit her sister, a chauffeur-driven limousine carrying them through the streets of town with a stately grace. Some longtime residents could think back to the days when she was still Carrie Brown of Stephenson Street, Ed Brown’s younger daughter and one of the most beautiful women in a hundred-mile radius. Spence had time to venture out, as if avoiding the pending business at hand, and he paid a call on Elmer Love, who was briefly a classmate of his at the Union School on South Chicago Avenue. “He was just as common as he could be,” said Josephine Love, Elmer’s widow, “and had such a wonderful personality. You wouldn’t think he was a big famous star. He talked about his old school chums. ‘Whatever happened to so and so?’ he would ask. He and Elmer had quite a conversation. He laughed when he told Elmer that his wife was a little jealous of his leading lady,