Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [324]
John had gone through a flirtation with hearing devices in the early forties, first the stationary Phipps-Unit, with which he could hear “pretty well,” then a Western Electric portable that enabled him to discern “low tones” from people up to five feet away. “Pretty soon, however, I got tired of the hearing aid. I didn’t care much to wear it. I thought it drove me crazy. It puzzled and annoyed me. It made me feel nervous and impatient. Soon, I got in the habit of not wearing it anymore.” The unit was so bulky it took a vest to hold it in place, and the battery alone was the size of a beer can. In April 1943 one of the Phipps-Units came home with John for a short while. “I could hear with it all right, but all I could distinguish was the lowness and highness of sounds … I tried my best to be patient when Mother insisted that I work with it. I just sat down and listened, that’s all. I followed Mother with sounds she made through a microphone. It seemed very difficult to me.”
He went on to work three days a week in a Beverly Hills studio, but after the summer of 1943 he stopped using amplification altogether. “Hearing sounds drives me nuts,” he said, “and that’s the truth. I cannot stand words. I like things when they are quiet and when they make me feel patient. Sounds annoy me. I should hear some to make better speech, but I feel it is too late to get into the habit of hearing speech or sounds. After all, I am happy and more comfortable the way things are—quiet.”
In April 1946 Helen Keller visited John Tracy Clinic in the company of her secretary, Polly Thomson. “Encourage your child’s desire to speak,” she urged the mothers on duty that morning. Asked whether blindness or deafness was the greater handicap, Keller, without hesitation, replied that being deaf was the greater handicap because the blind “had more contact with their fellow man.”
Tracy’s return to M-G-M was as likely motivated by money as disappointment in Sherwood’s play. There was general agreement among the critics in Washington, Boston, and New York that The Rugged Path was a personal triumph, albeit a qualified one. Yet the day after it opened on Broadway, Tracy advised Benny Thau that he wished to report back to the studio in ninety days, a condition of the leave-of-absence granted by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Despite the business the show was doing, appearing in it cost him well in excess of $150,000, and the most he could afford to give the Playwrights’ Company for something less than a masterpiece was three months. And even that, as it turned out, was too much. When he reported back to Culver City on February 4, 1946, he was immediately placed back on salary, even though the picture they had waiting for him couldn’t start until Kate had finished with a thriller called Undercurrent, which was then only three weeks into production.
Their next picture together, The Sea of Grass, had been in the pipeline since 1937, the year Conrad Richter’s lyrical tale of the changing Southwest was published by Knopf. The studio had it covered in galleys, the reader describing it as “the BEST story in its genre that I know of; it is beautiful, moving, dramatic, quick and subtle in turn, and has some of the most astounding characterizations to be found in any of the modern novels; acting it will be a privilege, directing and producing it a labor of love.”
Bud Lighton took an early interest, and the picture was earmarked for Tracy and Myrna Loy in the days immediately following the completion of Test Pilot. “Its Western setting and pioneer flavor, similar to my own background, promised the kind of role I’d always wanted to play,” Loy wrote. “They kept postponing it, however, and when they finally announced a starting date without informing me, I called Benny Thau and raised