Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [378]
It was Saturday, May 3, 1952, and the clinic’s new $250,000 complex at 806 West Adams was in the process of being dedicated. A crowd of 250 jammed the new auditorium—really a multipurpose room—and more clustered at the doorways, straining to get a look. Louise, her hands calmly folded in front of her, said the clinic was “as much a movement as it is a place, and wherever you find parents gathered together and helping their children, you find John Tracy Clinic.” Then Spence, who had always determinedly remained in the background, was dragged into the meeting and spoke, as the Los Angeles Times reported, about a hundred words. According to the paper, the statement he begins in the film continued as follows: “—board of directors, and all of the others who have worked for it, the mothers and fathers of the children and all of the others who have helped.” He was loath to acknowledge the money he had personally given over the course of the previous decade, even though the clinic would not have survived its first five years without his support. “I didn’t do anything much,” he once told his cousin Jane. “I gave them a few bucks to get started.”
The building drive, when initiated in 1946, expanded the clinic’s reach and established a broader fund-raising network than Louise had ever thought possible. In 1950, she was able to announce the purchase of one and a half acres of land near the USC campus after a substantial bequest from the estate of William Melvin Davey. And while the clinic was no longer dependent upon Spence’s M-G-M income for its survival, he still gave $20,000 to $30,000 a year, a measure of redemption for which he was truly grateful. “This method of getting deaf children mainstreamed and educated early is really something new that Louise is doing,” he said proudly, “and it is remarkable. It is ground-breaking.”
He was in the midst of Plymouth Adventure and needed a reminder as to why he sometimes did the things he did on screen. Could he have gone freelance? Undoubtedly. Could he have exercised greater control over the pictures he made? Absolutely. But could he have managed the guaranteed income that made his support of the clinic possible? Not quite so likely—at least not so that he could see. Metro paid him an annual salary of $300,000. To make that kind of money as an independent, he’d have to make two or three pictures a year—more than he was currently averaging—and when he laid off, there would be nothing at all coming in. Further, he really didn’t know what he could ask on the open market and tended to devalue his own worth in comparison to others.
At the dedication of John Tracy Clinic’s new Adams Boulevard complex with longtime wardrobe man Larry Keethe and daughter Susie Tracy. (SUSIE TRACY)
“Katharine Hepburn’s best-kept secret will join her in London soon.” It was Dorothy Kilgallen’s lead item on June 5, 1952, and, of course, Kilgallen was correct as far as Tracy’s intent was concerned. He had a date to fly east with Clarence Brown on the eighteenth and was sure of making a June 20 sailing of the S.S. America (on which Larry Weingarten had also booked passage). He declared on his passport application he would be gone four months, visiting England, France, Italy, and Sweden “for the combined purpose of business and pleasure” and told Louella Parsons he intended to rent a car and tour the continent. By the time he actually did set sail, however, he was on the Queen Elizabeth, not the America, it was July 1, not June 20, and his plan was to stay for no more than a month. On the ship were Walt Disney and his family, and Lewis W. Douglas and his wife Peg. Tracy, in a jocular mood, joined the Disneys one night for drinks. “Dad was kidding him about some woman who was chasing him all over the ship,” Diane Disney, who was eighteen at the time, remembered. “At one point, he turned to me and started telling me about Susie and all the things she was doing. He was obviously very proud of her.”
Tracy and the Douglases