Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [312]
Dietz managed to whisper instructions to Weiss, whose subsequent departure Tracy didn’t seem to notice.
I got Tracy up to his suite on the seventh floor and worked on him. I finally got him to agree to go back to California. “But only if you come too,” he said. We took a limousine to LaGuardia, and the three of us, Tracy, Weiss, and I boarded the plane. Tracy’s consciousness was sketchy, so I left him in the hands of Milton, who gave instructions to the pilot to go west after I had climbed out. The plane took gracefully to the air, and I sank into a gratefully relieved sigh and headed for home and bed. The phone rang at midnight. It’s your guess who was on the wire. “You thought you were rid of me,” the voice said. “Well, I’ll meet you in the bar at the Sherry-Netherland at nine o’clock. You’d better relieve Milton, he needs some sleep.” Tracy was calling from Chicago.
Without Hepburn to contain him, Tracy ran amok in New York for the better part of a week, sometimes in the company of Charles Newhill, who was devoted to him, sometimes not. Agent Harold Rose’s abiding image of him came from this period, when a cab rolled up to the Sherry-Netherland and Tracy came tumbling out of the back seat in the company of an obvious prostitute. Whitey Hendry, M-G-M’s chief of police, was dispatched to New York, and it was Hendry and a few elite members of his studio constabulary who arranged for Tracy, fighting mad and struggling wildly against a set of camisole restraints, to be admitted to Doctors Hospital in the early morning hours of May 11, 1945.
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1 It is unlikely, however, that Tracy was hospitalized for a period of six weeks. In August 1944 Jack Lait of Variety, subbing for Walter Winchell, reported that Tracy had spent “two weeks in a Chicago hospital, incognito,” and this is probably closer to the truth.
CHAPTER 21
The Rugged Path
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When Tracy was moved the following day, it was to a private room on a restricted floor where, under the name of Charles Newhill, there would be little chance of a Winchell or a Kilgallen catching wind of it. There he began the grueling process of cold-turkey detox, restrained, restless, hallucinating at all hours. Fed a liquid diet of milk, eggs, and fruit juice, he was given daily injections of thiamine chloride and turned every two hours like a premium side of beef.
He strained at the jacket, talking loudly and incoherently and tossing about furiously. He was incontinent, obstreperous, and when they removed the arm restraints, he struck out at the nurses. He thought he saw strange men hiding in the corners of the room and comely young women seated at the side of his bed. Sodium Luminal was administered at eight-hour intervals to promote sleep, and the patient alternated spells of confused drowsiness with fitful, often violent periods of rest.
By the morning of the thirteenth he was quieter, less restive, and said that he had been on a “big drunk” and was having terrible nightmares. He would cry uncontrollably for minutes on end, begging for cigarettes and then talking expansively of getting better. The doctor visited one afternoon and ordered his restraints removed. At once he started smoking and talking cheerfully of California. By the first of the week he was bathed, shaved, and welcoming visitors. “Very pleasant and friendly,” the chart read. There were quiet conversations with the evening nurses, but still there were prolonged episodes of weeping. When plagued by intervals of restlessness and loud moaning, he was ordered off caffeinated beverages—coffee and Coca-Cola—and his sleeping briefly improved. Soon, though, he was fearful and restless again, and the medications no longer seemed to be working. He fell into a pattern of asking to be sedated just so he could get a little sleep, but then he was rarely out for more than two or three hours at a stretch.