Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [276]
Hepburn had little time to devote to Tracy. Being what she described as a “one track Charlie,” she poured all her energies into the hopeless task of making the play work. They saw each other when they could, generally late at night, but it wouldn’t do for him to be haunting rehearsals and he scrupulously stayed away. He saw shows: Maurice Evans’ Macbeth, Cheryl Crawford’s revival of Porgy and Bess. On the nineteenth he fulfilled a commitment to Garson Kanin, now with the Division of Information in Washington, to record the narration for a one-reel subject titled Ring of Steel. (“I am the American soldier … the ring of steel around democracy.”) Then, with little else to do in New York City, he asked his seventeen-year-old son to spend the weekend with him at the River House, a swank art deco club and apartment complex at the eastern terminus of Fifty-second Street. There were squash and tennis courts, a swimming pool, a floating dock for pleasure craft. The weather was beautiful, but Johnny was reticent about staying alone with his father and all they managed to do was play a lot of tennis. “The boy had told me he wanted to talk to me,” Tracy said to Matie Winston, principal of the Wright Oral School, “but then he withheld any closeness of communication. Why?”
Johnny had been home for the holidays, but his father hadn’t been around much. The children were reared Episcopalians, so there hadn’t been the critical bonding that Spence had enjoyed with his own father. And whenever Tracy saw his son, Louise was always there as if to act as interpreter. At school Johnny was one of fifteen boarders, and, for almost the first time in his life, he began reading on his own, using a dictionary to expand his vocabulary and focus his mind. Miss Winston tried explaining, tactfully, that maybe Johnny’s reticence came from a desire to have more regular interaction with his dad, a greater sense of companionship and exchange. Louise wasn’t writing as regularly as before and Spence hardly ever wrote at all—even postcards. The boy rightly felt abandoned, and then there was his father’s habit of bringing his hand to his mouth when he spoke, which made the reading of his lips impossible.
“He can’t see your lips!” Louise would scold, and he would say, “Oh, yes, yes…,” and then two minutes later he’d be doing it again. “He went through life with his hand over his mouth,” Louise said. “It was one of his firmest habits, and he couldn’t break it. He tried very hard.” At an age when a young man naturally yearns for the company of his father, a very basic disconnect separated Johnny and his dad, and the boy sometimes got to see more of his father on screen than in person. “John was always a little overwhelmed by his father,” his mother said. “[Spence] expected a great deal of him, and John always felt he was not up [to it], I think … Their conversations were always like ‘talking times.’ He would [sometimes] get down to something that was serious, but they never really discussed things as men might.”
And so Tracy continued to ask, “Why won’t the boy talk to me?” but he could never fully grasp the reasons. He spent the rest of the day glumly knocking about the city. That night, he and a ravenous Kate managed a late supper at Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club, where they sat for a time with Lieutenant Jimmy Stewart and actress Phyllis Brooks. In an AP wirephoto that circulated the next day, Tracy could be seen to the right of