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which he has ruthlessly discarded from his conscious memory.
But you see on the day we talked Spencer was celebrating a kind of personal triumph.
It was exactly a year, that afternoon, since he had tasted so much as a drop of liquor . . . and I came away with his permission to write this part of his life so long as I deleted a name or two.
THERE'S no accounting
for the accident to brain and personal chemistry that occurs sometimes to a man. Spencer, having filled his lifetime with physical adventures but with only one of the heart, found himself suddenly lost in a new, inexplicable sensation. •
He was in love, or thought he was, with one of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood.
He didn't know what to do about it, at first. Naturally the emotion was one to be fought, he told himself; he must be nuts to look at another woman when he still had Louise and the kids. The deep, intimate affection — the genuine love — he
had always felt for his wife was still there, of course.
But this new thing was on a different plane, synthesized from a portion of his psychology that he had never known existed. Probably the reason was that it was forbidden, and therefore incredibly glamorous.
Nothing would have happened, though; the whole thing would have been a secret impulse in his own mind, soon forgotten, if he hadn't discovered that the beautiful, young actress was in love with him, too.
"And that cinched it," Spencer told me. "The idea that such a gorgeous person — so sophisticated, so capable of having any man in the world she wanted — should prefer me. It was just too much."
So he left the lazy valley ranch, with its quiet home aura and its scratching chickens and its trees, and stepped directly into a kind of existence which always before had been entirely foreign to his cleancut, unassuming nature. He went Hollywood — and berserk.
He [ PLEASE TURN TO PAGE 105 )
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