Several weeks into production, Loretta brought Spencer home for lunch. He charmed everyone, but that didn't stop Gladys from getting him off to the side, inquiring about his family, and establishing the fact that he was a Catholic and already married in the church. After he left, she warned Loretta not to let the relationship get serious.
It already had. Loretta had fallen in love within the first few days of shooting. Tracy had a way of focusing his attention on Loretta that glowingly satisfied a deep need within her, which she had been trying to meet since early childhood. He treated her like she was the only one who mattered in the world and all the more appealing to Loretta was the way he did it. It was as if, in spite of himself, he was being drawn to her, everything she did was so amusing, everything about her was so captivating, that deep down, he couldn't resist being totally crazy about her. And, when he would allow himself to be openly vulnerable, he'd tell her that he couldn't imagine that anyone as beautiful as she could be in love with a guy like him.
****** one year later ........
What was different for Tracy this time was that his relationship with Loretta was steeped in the kind of innocence that appealed to his Irish heart and soul. At age thirty-three he was recapturing a sense of first love, the kind where you play ping pong at your girl's house with her sisters, and, on Sunday afternoons, you sit down at her mother's table for roast beef dinner in good conscience, because you've yet to sleep with her daughter. Couples in love, practicing restraint, and not "going all the way" was fairly conventional behavior, fitting the mores of that time. As sexually frustrating as this must have been for a man of Spencer's worldly experience, he must have yearned for Loretta all the more, idealizing her beyond measure. How different she was from the likes of Joan Bennett, who had had the "audacity", he once confided to Loretta, "to wear red toenail polish!"