Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [409]
Tracy boarded the Andrea Doria on October 2 and was at sea when he got the news that the Giants had prevailed over Cleveland to win the world championship.
The voyage was smooth at first, the weather warm and clear, and he was able to limit his drug intake to a couple of Demerols. The water got considerably rougher the fourth day out, and he gobbled five Seconals on top of the pain medication, upsetting his stomach and keeping him confined to quarters for much of the following day. That evening, he laid off the barbiturates altogether and took some wine with his dinner. The next day he tried mixing a couple of Seconals with brandy to predictable results.
In 1977 King Vidor remembered back to a doctor he met aboard the steamer on its next crossing to Naples: “He’d been on the trip before, with Spencer, and he’s had to stay up each night talking with him, drinking with him. When Spencer got off at Genoa, he wouldn’t get off … he came right back on the same boat. So this doctor took another trip to rest up from Spence keeping him up at night the trip before!”
Tracy consulted a doctor who prescribed the spa cure at Montecatini Terme. He spent the next three weeks at the historic Tuscan baths, making day trips to Piza, Civitella, and Florence, seeing Michelangelo’s David and unfinished Pietà and losing himself in Will Durant’s book The Renaissance. Kate arrived on October 25, and they spent their days driving through the mountains and hill towns, picnicking on the beach, touring the countryside. By November 1, his use of Seconal was down to three capsules a night and he was sleeping more soundly. When he left for Rome on the eighth, he was completely drug-free for the first time in years.
From his rejuvenative Italian sojourn, Tracy returned to a world of aggravation in California. While in Montecatini, he had spoken with Louise by phone and learned that his estranged daughter-in-law, the one Johnny had announced his intention of divorcing, was in fact pregnant.
“Perfect!” he said.
Nobody was happy about it, least of all John. “I was there when Nadine told John that she was pregnant,” recalled Susie Tracy. “He just looked at her and said nothing. And then he turned and went back to his room. I think he was stunned.”
Louise had been house hunting, the State Highway Commission having routed the new Ventura Freeway through the property on White Oak. She hated the thought of moving after nearly twenty years on the ranch, even though Spence thought it time: “He had said for several years, ‘It’s a wonderful place, but it is not practical. Susie is growing … nobody is going to come out here to see her. It’s no good either from the standpoint of friends for John—everybody is over on the other side.’ They didn’t want to move, but he said it would be much better for the children. And then he said also the Clinic was quite a trek for me.”
Tracy was sure that Bad Day at Black Rock would be a disaster—a commercial long shot and a stinker to boot. Schary ran it for him just days after production closed, and an opening reminiscent of High Noon got the film off to a listless start. “Bad picture?” Tracy wrote in his datebook. “Nothing—mediocre. Grade B.”
Nothing the studio was offering promised to be any better. John Houseman wanted to pair Tracy and Montgomery Clift in a union drama called Bannon. Another picture, a western called Jeremy Rodock, had script and casting problems. The far more interesting action was coming from other studios. At Paramount, he had committed to The Mountain, based on a novel he had tried to option himself. William Wyler had proposed The Desperate Hours opposite Humphrey Bogart, and though Tracy wasn’t keen on the story, he took six weeks to say no, laying the blame to billing problems. Sol Siegel was offering The Captain’s Table, a broad comedy based on the novel by England’s Richard Gordon. And there was, of course, The Old Man and the Sea, for which Hemingway