Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [469]
“She would say, ‘I am so tired,’ ” Jane remembered. “She was overwhelmed with how big the institution had become. I think she felt inadequate to it because she hadn’t had a formal education. She had had to not only establish and work on this clinic, she had to educate herself in this field and she had become an expert, but it had taken a lot out of her. A lot more than I think anyone, maybe even she, realized.”
In 1954 Dr. Edgar L. Lowell was recruited from Harvard to assume the role of administrator, freeing Louise from the day-to-day responsibilities of management. As director in charge, she still oversaw the clinic’s core services—consultations, hearing tests, parent classes, the demonstration nursery school, the correspondence course, and the summer sessions—while Dr. Lowell started research and teacher-training programs. From everything he had heard, Edgar Lowell was surprised to find that Spencer Tracy was as interested in the clinic’s business as he apparently was.
“I was always very gratified,” he said,
that he read my reports. I’m a great one for writing things out. Numerable times Mrs. Tracy would say, “Mr. Tracy would like to know what did you mean by that?” I said, “Well, at least I know someone is reading my report.” I remember one time when he was in France making The Mountain we had a series of delayed conversations because he would call one night and I would get the message the next time I saw her…[W]hen we had the first big league ball game in Los Angeles, a benefit for the Tracy Clinic at Wrigley Field, Baltimore and Chicago played the first big league game. Mr. Tracy showed up, but he showed up about the second inning, when everyone was looking straight ahead, and left about the eighth inning so there wasn’t a big spotlight on him in their box that would detract from her.
There were the tentative overtures Spence would make to become more involved with the clinic, but Louise held him at a careful distance, the clinic being the one distinct thing in their lives that she could genuinely call her own. “He felt it did absorb my life,” she said,
and it did. Once you got into it, it was so big and it was so demanding…[T]wo or three times he said, I think sincerely, “Could I learn enough about that clinic that I could go out and talk some about it?” He said that many times. “Could I?” he said. “I would like to do that.” “Well,” I said, “you have to really work, you have to have learned an awful lot—much more, you know. A lot of work goes into it. You don’t know why, you don’t understand this and that. You really have to study…[T]hey ask you questions and you can’t get up before people and not really know.” “No,” he said, “I suppose not, but you know, I’d like to do that.” [He] could never get down to all the little things about the details.
In the end, Tracy’s participation was limited to the funding he could so readily provide. “They used to call him and tell him how much it was,” Dr. Lowell said, “and he would write the check for that amount.”
In December 1960 writer-director George Seaton and a group of supporters gave a recognition dinner in Louise’s honor at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Y. Frank Freeman, the retired president and chairman of Paramount Pictures, served as chair of the sponsoring committee, which was comprised of a number of civic and business leaders, Mr. and Mrs. Justin Dart, Dr. and Mrs. Norman Topping, Leonard Firestone, Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, and Walt Disney among them. Close to one thousand guests jammed the