Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [365]
When Tracy arrived in New York to shoot exteriors for The People Against O’Hara, he found the entire troupe laid up with the flu. He had time for Mass at St. Patrick’s, a walk in Central Park, shopping for shoes at Abercrombie and Fitch. The producer of NBC’s The Big Show, a weekly all-star extravaganza, asked him to do a guest shot, and he agreed to go by the theater to “listen to it and see how they do it” but emphasized that he didn’t think he wanted to appear. “Radio is the bane of my life,” he groaned to Frank Tracy, who was in New York at the time and managed to meet up with him. “I can’t handle it. I can’t stand in front of that goddamn stick and emote. I can’t do that. No good at it.”
On March 6, he and Kate—who had just concluded her tour in Rochester—saw Claude Rains in Darkness at Noon and were spotted by one of Dorothy Kilgallen’s informants. He was in Chicago on the tenth, headed back to Hollywood, when he drove down to Freeport to visit his aunt Mum in the hospital, where she had just undergone surgery for breast cancer. He saw his uncle Andrew and aunt Mame and was back in Chicago that same evening.
He still saw his friends at the Boys’ Club but not with the frequency that he once had. Cagney was spending more time at Martha’s Vineyard, Pat O’Brien was working nightclubs, and Frank McHugh was planning a return to New York City, where he could find work in the theater and on television. With Hepburn determinedly sustaining their relationship, Tracy had gradually become part of her social circle, uncomfortable with old friends who knew him from when he was still out and around with Louise. “When he came [to the Boys’ Club dinners], which was rarely, he would not really join in,” said actor Jimmy Lydon, who was invited into the group sometime in the mid-1940s. “He’d have a couple of knocks and he would just kind of sit and enjoy listening to everybody else.”
In place of Joe Mankiewicz, Frank Borzage, Walt Disney, and Vic Fleming, Tracy was now spending his time with George Cukor, Constance Collier, Irene Selznick, and the Kanins. “I’ve never been able to see the Spence I knew so well participating in that group,” Mankiewicz said of the shift.
I used to go to the fights with him. He lived the life of a sportswriter, a sort of New York sportswriter—really tough. He liked going to the fights. He liked reading. We used to spend evenings together, reading. It was an extremely close relationship, so close that Spence was my eldest son’s godfather, but after Kate enfolded him I saw nothing of him. He used to keep sending the same doll to Chris, his godson, when the boy was well into the age of puberty. Everything just stopped between us and I didn’t see Spence at all. I think I got a phone call when I hit the jackpot—I got four Academy Awards or something1—and Kate called and said how pleased they were but Spence never got on the phone.
So it came as something of a surprise when Tracy learned that Pat O’Brien was having trouble finding work. Having finished off a seven-year contract at RKO, Pat found there was no work in features for a whole class of actor that populated films in the 1930s and ’40s—when the major studios were routinely making forty to fifty pictures a season. Averages had dropped in the years following the war, and budgets had tightened. “During several discussions at dinner of the Boys’ Club,” said Frank McHugh, “it was concluded that the picture business, as we knew it, was on the wane.” Major names like George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, Mickey Rooney, and Don Ameche were working in independent productions or, more frequently, on television, where the schedules were brutal and the money light. Pat sustained an average of two pictures a year, even into the fifties, but had three households