"When Tracy won Best Actor for his turn in Captains Courageous in 1938, he was unable to attend the ceremony. MGM said he was recovering from a hernia, which was the 1940s way of saying 'hospitalized for exhaustion,' if you’re picking up what I’m putting down. The studio arranged for Tracy’s wife to accept the award in his stead, as a gesture towards the supposed strength of their marriage. With all the audience fully aware of how Tracy had neglected and mistreated her, Mrs. Tracy walked the stage. But the Academy had a sense of humor: the award was inscribed not to Spencer, but to Dick Tracy. ROUGH. MGM would periodically force Tracy to 'dry out' after massive benders — not out of kindness, but so that they could force him to do his next film. During this period, he was living at the Beverly Wilshire and constantly on the prowl — one MGM exec purportedly claimed that 'No one gets more sex than Spencer Tracy.....except Joan Crawford.'" [The Hairpin]
