Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [50]
Growing up, alcohol, like sex, was never part of the family discussion, and both held a mysterious allure. There was no rite of passage when Spence had his first pint in his dad’s company. And then, of course, in being Irish—even half-Irish—drinking was expected, part of the identity of all adult males. If one indulged to the point of drunkenness, it was not so much frowned upon as thought natural and, to a degree, celebrated. Where Spence got in trouble was when he drank before a performance, when sociability wasn’t a motivating factor but steadying the nerves was—and what little drinking he did made him wildly unpopular. “I think the naughtiest thing he ever did was take Halliam Bosworth’s toupee off onstage one time,” said Emily Deming, newly installed as Selena Royle’s nineteen-year-old dresser. “Of course, it was supposed to be an accident, but I saw him do it. Halliam never forgave him … That was one of the times when he’d had a little too much to drink.”
His cutting up onstage embarrassed Louise, who couldn’t abide unprofessional behavior. She also wanted him home at night after the show, though it was typically hours before he could get to sleep. “I remember once when he was really drunk on stage,” said Deming, recalling the opening performance of Grounds for Divorce, the second play of the season. “He and Louise had a flaming row, and he got blind drunk, really. He was good with his lines, but he blew up that night a couple of times.” Selena, Deming remembered, was boiling mad “because he ‘went up’ and spoiled her lines. Once badly. That was one of the times I was pressed in as cue.” The Powers was an old opera house dating from the 1870s, and Emily had to throw cues from the prompter’s box down front of the stage. The crowd noticed, as did Dean, the Herald’s unfailingly diplomatic reviewer, who said Tracy had made much of his role of an eminent divorce lawyer “in spite of a very inconvenient indisposition.”
Louise confided her fear of Johnny’s deafness to Emily, who occasionally babysat for the Tracys and who urged her to have him examined at the Blodgett Home for Children, an orphanage in the East Hills neighborhood of Grand Rapids. The pediatrician who saw the boy was unwilling to say much—the baby was only ten months old—and suggested she take him to a specialist. Louise made frequent trips across Lake Michigan so the Tracys could dote on their new grandchild, and she realized it would be hard to get Johnny examined in Milwaukee without Mother Tracy knowing about it. (“She was with us almost constantly.”) Then, unexpectedly, within days of her discovery, Carrie solved the problem herself. She was feeding the baby his lunch—one of her favorite things to do—and Louise was sitting just inside the next room. “I don’t believe John hears very well,” she said quietly.
Louise’s heart raced. “No,” she said, “I don’t think he does. I have been thinking I would take him to some specialist here.”
“Yes,” said Carrie. “Do.”
“I’m sure she knew that afternoon as well as I knew,” Louise wrote. “Perhaps she had suspected longer. I never asked her. We never talked about it much at first. It was easier.” Carrie gave her the name of a prominent otologist, and Louise made an appointment.
The doctor wasn’t encouraging. He listened to Louise’s story, asked a few questions, examined the baby’s ears for abnormalities. Then he made a few simple tests, trying to attract Johnny’s attention with a variety of noises, including those made by a bell and a tuning fork. Finally, he said he couldn’t be sure because Johnny was too young to test conclusively.
“But,” Louise persisted, “if he is deaf, what could be the cause? What could be done?”
“It would be nerve deafness from an indeterminable cause. If the nerve merely has been impaired it may come back, but if it has been killed, it cannot come back. In either case, there is nothing we can do about it.”
But there was something she still had to know. “And if he is deaf,” she asked, “will he ever be able to talk?”
The question