Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [68]
They talked for a long time—about Cohan, about the theater, about the separate paths their lives had taken. “He adored this son,” Lorraine said, “but felt terribly about it. He suffered over that, feeling that somehow or other he had failed.” Chuck Sligh came to Boston, and comments Spence made to him suggest Louise’s trip to Florida may have been arranged for less than completely altruistic motives. “I think,” said Chuck, “Spence, at that time, probably was … upset … Louise had given over her life to John … He gave me the feeling that she wasn’t too attentive to his needs … I don’t like to put words in his mouth, but the feeling I got was that, ‘Gosh, I don’t know, but Louise is so cold.’ Something like that …”
Tracy came from a tradition, a teaching within the church, that sex within a marriage was solely for procreation, and that recreational sex—the act without the intent or possibility of reproduction—was immoral. “I really believe that it was a very separate part of their lives,” his cousin Jane remarked. “It wasn’t part of the warp and woof of their existence. It was not a natural, normal thing accepted with joy. And I do think, too, that the first result of the sexual act with Spencer and Louise, nine months later, was John—now I think that must have been tremendously traumatic to people of that generation with that kind of background.” Johnny’s birth had come almost nine months to the day after their marriage in Cincinnati. (“Very fast!” Johnny said one day in 1937. “You bet it was fast!” Louise agreed.) “I think that trauma must have led to: ‘Let’s not do this anymore.’ And let’s just not do THIS anymore—not let’s prevent a birth.”
That Spence and Louise still loved and respected and needed each other was obvious to the small circle of friends who knew them both, but the energies and urges normal to people in their twenties and thirties were sublimated, ignored, channeled into other avenues of thought and deed. Louise always tried to be there for him. (“When Spencer played out of town,” she once said, “he needed us with him.”) But Johnny’s schooling made it difficult, if not impossible, to pull up and go, and Spence’s work separated them for weeks at a stretch.
From Philadelphia, where blue laws prohibited Sunday performances, Tracy was able to come home for a day. John looked drawn and tired and anxious to get out of GM. Later, when he was in Chicago and Carroll was with him, John wrote the two of them about a job he was pursuing, concerned his salary demands would discourage an offer. “But I am desperate and nervous and worried so am going to work fast … I haven’t said a word to Mother yet, [but will] tell her in a few days when I know a little more.”
John Tracy, however, was too weak to work, and when Louise and Johnny left to join Spence in Chicago, they did so reluctantly. (“He was a very brave man,” Louise said of her father-in-law. “You would never have known that he suffered at any time.”) The Baby Cyclone enjoyed an eight-week stand at the Blackstone, and from there they went to Cleveland, where Spence would spend most of July playing stock. He returned to New York in late July, where he found himself assigned to the Chicago company of Cohan’s newest play, a turgid comedy called Whispering Friends. His father was wasting away, the cancer by now having metastasized to his liver, and he hated the prospect of being stuck in Chicago. Frank Tracy, John’s half brother, had died the previous month in Aberdeen at the age of sixty-seven, and the dark knowledge of John’s condition enveloped his sister Jenny. “John will be the next one,” she told her daughter Jane.
“He got sick,” Tracy said of his father.