Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [51]
“I did not seem to hear much of what he said at the time,” Louise later wrote, “though I remembered most of it afterwards, I think. Then, the words that kept pounding in my brain were, ‘He will never talk, he will never talk, never talk, never talk—’ Somehow, I got out of the office and home.”
In the weeks that followed, Louise made a desperate effort to be cheerful and natural when Spence was around, but she was clearly distracted, depressed, obsessed with the baby in a way that she had not been before. She remembered a time when, as a little girl, she saw two people crossing in front of her house. It looked as if they were conversing with their hands, and she turned to her grandmother and asked who they were and what they were doing. “Oh, they’re deaf and dumb, poor things,” her grandmother said, and Louise played that fleeting image from childhood over and over in her mind.
“There was nothing in life except Johnny,” said Emily Deming. “And that wasn’t quite fair to Spencer either, because he knew he came second, and with Spencer that would not have been easy to take.” Not talking somehow seemed worse to Louise than not hearing, and where before she had merely lacked the words to tell Spence that his son was deaf, she now contemplated the unfathomable—that he would never speak, either. “She was afraid to tell him,” Deming said. “She talked to me about it. She didn’t think Spencer would accept it … that was one of the few times I ever saw her weep.” Louise’s English, Scotch, and Dutch ancestry helped her keep her emotions in check, and she always remembered what her father had once told her as a child, that if she had tears she should save them for her own pillow. “I saw her with tears in her eyes many times, but I never saw her weep except that one time. She’d have him in her arms or put him down in the crib, or when she came back [and] I’d been taking care of him, she’d go and pick him up and her eyes [would be] red.”
The season at the Powers was going wonderfully well. The theater was often full on weekends and the matinees were packed with kids—little girls with starry eyes who came with their families and sat in reserved boxes holding violets they’d picked for Selena Royle. Spence got his share of attention, but it was Selena they all came to see, and although he wasn’t a small man, he always wore lifts in his shoes when he played opposite her. He worked so well with her and spent so much time at the theater—morning rehearsals, matinees, evening performances stretching to eleven o’clock or later—that rumors of an affair began to circulate.
“The dressing rooms were appalling,” Emily Deming said.
The stairwell was a circular thing with little narrow steps, and then the dressing rooms were horrid little rooms up on the upper levels, which meant that you had to race up and down to do costumes, and their dressing rooms were close together. Which was very convenient a number of times and was used a good deal. [Spencer and Selena] didn’t necessarily stay in one room. They spent a lot of time together. And when there were quick changes and we had to put a dressing room on the main floor to be close enough for me to get her dressed for the next scene, he generally stepped in for a minute or two one way or the other, not necessarily when she was fully clothed … I think Louise had a good deal of difficulty with it.
As Selena admitted in a 1969 interview: “I was in love with Spence, and I believe he was in love with me.” Yet she denied having ever slept with him. Selena considered Louise a friend, and had pushed