Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [390]
Spence’s views were similarly conflicted, informed as they were by his own deep feelings of responsibility. “I only saw him and his son once,” said Seymour Gray. “And his reaction—he sort of laughed, he was laughing at himself. He said, ‘Oh my God.’ He looked at the sky and all that. [I said,] ‘What’s the matter with you? This is a handsome, well-adjusted boy. What difference does it make?’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. It’s my fault. I did it.’ Yeah. That set him, made the drinking even worse, because he had tremendous guilt related to this boy.”
John’s first view of Nadine was on horseback, and they were soon playing foot polo on Sundays, recruiting Nadine’s half-sister, Eveline, and a neighbor boy, Don Elderson, to create a foursome. On December 20, 1951, the bride’s family went ahead with a prenuptial compliment at the Carr home, twenty guests celebrating the prospect of a June wedding. Louise was aghast, unable to prevent her adult son from marrying, Joe Carr and his family seemingly happy to facilitate their daughter’s entry into a rich movie star’s family, even though she was underage and had yet to finish her schooling. When June came and went, Louise hoped the matter had blown over.
“I went to Las Vegas with them,” Susie Tracy recounted.
They asked me to go and I thought, “Well, I would rather be with them than to be here when they call to say what they’ve done.” Because I knew that my mother was going to be upset, to say the least. So I thought I’d better be there. I went also because I wanted to be sure that everything went the way it should. And that I thought I should be there in order to send them off … I think she was pushing for it, because he went back and forth about it—“Shall I, shall I not?” John’s friend Jim Marsters, who had been with him at Wright Oral School, tried to talk him out of it, and our cousin George Payson said the whole idea was “ludicrous at best.” I felt they should have at least waited until she graduated—April to June isn’t so very long—but, you know, we were kids. We didn’t know what we were doing…
Nadine called [my mother], I remember that, and then she put me on the phone. Thanks a lot. I mean, my mother was not happy from the very beginning. I don’t know what I said to her. She wanted to know why I didn’t stop it, and why I ended up going with them. Later, I wondered if they would have gone through with it had I told them I wasn’t coming … Then they were married legitimately—legally—at the church the following day. We drove to Las Vegas, came back, and then they were married again the next afternoon. We were crossing the parking lot, going into the Episcopal church in Encino, and that was when my uncle Carroll made the classic line: “Well, Suze, never a dull moment in this outfit!”
John’s father wasn’t any happier than his mother, but what he had to say on the matter was never set down anywhere. His notes in his date-book abruptly stopped a few days before his son’s wedding, but his agitation was on full display in an April 13 telegram he sent from New York to Ruth Gordon:
STILL HERE. LEG NEEDS WATCHING. SHOULD FLY COAST FAST. FROM CUKOR TODAY WORST NEW TITLE: FATHER AND THE ACTRESS. THIS, RUTH, I PROMISE [I WILL] FIGHT WITH LIFE’S BLOOD. THAT MAY BE THE LAST PICTURE I EVER MAKE THERE, BUT IT WILL GO OUT [UNDER] THAT TITLE AND BAD DUBBING GEORGE DESCRIBES OVER L[ARRY] W[EINGARTEN]’S DEAD AND MY TORN BODY.
Gottfried Reinhardt returned from Paris infinitely more enthused about Flight to the Islands than when he had left, Kanin practically having written a whole new script. But Tracy had always been the one pushing it, and most of the work and money put into it had been at his behest. It was difficult stuff, a drama of the mind, an excursion from within, and breaking the back of the story, figuring out how it could be done in filmic