The Remarkable Story of Spencer Tracy's Wife

The Life of Louise Tracy

The story of the husband is well known: Spencer Tracy was a major Hollywood star, a magnificent Oscar-winning actor and a towering, charismatic screen presence. The story of his wife and her magnificent life's work, championing the cause of the education of deaf children, is not so well known.

Her name was Louise Treadwell. She was an exceptional woman, and this is her story.

A Seemingly Ideal Partnership

The Tracys' marriage was seemingly perfect. Spencer met Louise Treadwell, also an actress, at the start of his career, when she was actually better known than him. They married in 1923 and had two children, John and Susan. In 1935, as Tracy began his meteoric rise through Hollywood, they moved to a ranch in Encino, California, where they lived for 19 years.

The photographs of the time show a happy, united family and a devoted husband-and-wife team. The reality was different.

Spencer Tracy the Womaniser

Spencer Tracy was an alcoholic and a serial adulterer. He was renowned in Hollywood circles for dating his leading ladies, and his name was linked with Loretta Young, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, Gene Tierney and many others.

For the last 25 years of his life, he conducted an affair with actress Katharine Hepburn. The couple lived together but kept separate residences for the sake of appearances. Tracy never divorced his wife, partly for religious reasons and partly for the sake of his children.

For the entire length of the marriage, although dealing with great personal misfortune, Louise Treadwell-Tracy pursued her own ambitions. She kept a dignified silence about her husband's self-indulgence and disloyalty.

Louise Tracy's Early Life

She was born Louise Ten Broeck Treadwell on July 31, 1896, in a comfortable middle-class home. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager. After graduating from Lake Erie College, she embarked on a theatrical career, and she spent several years gaining experience touring with stock companies around America.

By early 1923, Louise was the leading actress at the Leonard Wood Players in White Plains, New York.

It was whilst travelling by train in New York that she first met Spencer Tracy, who at that time, was a junior actor with a Grand Rapids stock company. She was 27 and he was 23, and they married in September 1923. Their first child, John, was born nine months later in June 1924.

A Deaf Son

When John was 10 months old, Louise noticed that he did not react when a door loudly slammed and shook the house. She was given the diagnosis by doctors that he was nerve deaf. At that time, deafness and dumbness went together automatically. It was a traumatic event for Louise and changed her life irrevocably. From that time on, she devoted her life to improving the future life choices and life chances of her son.

Learning to Lip Read

Doctors advised Louise and Spencer to send John, when he was old enough, to a special education state school to help him learn to cope with his deafness, but Louise developed other ideas. In 1926 she met a deaf woman who had learned to lip read so well that it was difficult to tell that she was deaf.

It gave Louise the germ of an idea. Maybe she could teach her son not only to lip read but to talk as well and lead a normal life. It is difficult nowadays to realise what a revolutionary concept this was in the 1920s.

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The Wright Oral School

Louise made it her goal in life to learn everything she could about the rearing and education of deaf children. She and Spencer spoke to John, read and sang to him every day, and in 1927, she enrolled John into the Wright Oral School for the deaf. He was just three years old and the youngest child they had ever taken. In the same year, he said his first word out loud. It was "Mama."

In 1929, as John approached first school age, Louise retired from acting in order to devote herself full time to his education. It was a difficult step to take, as Spencer was still a minor stock company actor on small wages, but she was determined to give John every advantage she could.

Spencer's Burgeoning Career and Affairs

The following year Spencer Tracy hit the big time. He had a major Broadway hit with The Last Mile and received an offer from director John Ford to film in Hollywood for Fox Film Corporation. Later in the year, Tracy made Up the River with Humphrey Bogart, and his prolific film career was underway.

Being the sole provider for his wife and son was certainly a great motivator in Tracy's career. Over the next five years alone he made 25 films, and for the rest of his life, he was a generous provider for his family. By 1932 he had two children. In July 1932, the Tracys' daughter, Susie, was born.

But Tracy could not shake off his physical addictions—to chocolates, sweets, alcohol and beautiful actresses. Whilst Louise was travelling back and forth between the East and West coast of America, consulting specialists and signing their son up with specialist schools in Boston and New York, Tracy continued to romance his costars.

It began with rumours about the relatively unknown actresses working for touring stock companies, Selena Royle and Betty Hanna, then in 1933, he began a passionate affair with his co-star in Man's Castle, fellow Catholic Loretta Young, even discussing marriage with her.

Spencer Tracy Oscars and Superstardom

The Tracy's marriage was beginning to unravel but Spencer was unwilling to divorce Louise. He was a staunch Catholic, unlike Louise, who came from an Episcopalian family. Tracy was racked with guilt all his life for his treatment of his wife, and he refused to end the marriage.

It was at this time that his drinking became uncontrolled. He had the alcoholic's gift of not appearing to be drunk and he was perfectly able to act after a few drinks but he was rarely seen on set without a drink in his hand.

Nevertheless, Tracy's career went into overdrive, and within a few years, he achieved superstar status with brilliant performances for MGM in movies such as Captains Courageous in 1937 and Boys Town in 1938 (for which he won back-to-back Oscars for Best Actor).

He was later nominated for San Francisco, Father of the Bride, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Old Man and the Sea, Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg. He became, along with Humphrey Bogart, Clarke Gable, Cary Grant and James Stewart, one of the pre-eminent actors in the Hollywood firmament.

The John Tracy Clinic

In the meantime Louise continued to devote her life to her son's education, consulting specialists, teaching him to talk and lip read and do anything a hearing person can do. She gradually became an expert, in her own right, in the education of deaf children.

In 1942 she made a speech, the first of many, at the University of Southern California at a dinner to raise money for the National Workshop of Social Workers and teachers and Parents of the Hard of Hearing. She spoke passionately about her experience of raising and educating a deaf child. She began to tour the country, making speeches and raising awareness of the need for an improvement in educational facilities and support for deaf children and, crucially, their parents. She was asked by other parents to start a school that would educate and offer emotional support to families such as theirs. The University of Southern California (USC) allowed the group to use a cottage on campus for its meetings. Initially, no children were part of the program, only weekly classes for parents were offered, taught by a teacher of the deaf but soon full scale education for chidren was brought into the program. Louise insisted that the school's facilities and services should be free of charge.

The Institution was named The John Tracy Clinic, after her son.

Spencer Tracy gave Louise his full financial, if not emotional support, and it was his money which got the Clinic off the ground initially. He turned the world premiere of one of his films, 'Father's Little Dividend', in 1951, into a fundraiser for the clinic and, as a wealthy man, he continued to support it all his life, donating more than a half a million dollars to the Clinic's work.

Katharine Hepburn

The affair between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn was an open secret in Hollywood. They were lovers for more than 26 years, and co-stars in nine Hollywood romances to which they brought an onscreen chemistry believed by many to be the most convincing in movie history.

They met in 1941 on the set of their first movie together, 'Woman of the Year'. Their acting styles complemented each other perfectly and the gossip columns were soon in full cry speculating about their relationship off-camera. It became generally accepted that the two were an item, although they could never marry due to Tracy’s Catholic determination never to divorce.

Tracy was as unfaithful to Katharine as he had been to Louise, having relationships with other actresses, such as Gene Tierney and Ingrid Bergman, while Hepburn was filming elsewhere. He continued to drink excessively and obsessively.