James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Most of all, my wife, Kim Geary, made it possible for me to take the time to research and write this book. She has my gratitude for the essential role she played in its development, and my love for the essential role she plays in my life.

  James Curtis

  Brea, California

  November 2010

  CHAPTER 1

  General Business

  * * *

  The first time she saw him was in profile. He was seated halfway back in the car and she noticed him as he stood. His was a strong Irish face, lined and ruddy, jaw square, eyes blue, hair sandy brown, thick and jostled by the movement of the train.

  There was no clue as to who he was, the work he did, or exactly what he was doing on the nearly empty Westchester bound for White Plains, the last stop on an electric line that began at the Harlem River and glided northward through the Bronx, Mount Vernon, and New Rochelle on a fifty-minute trip to the suburbs.

  She collected her things from the seat beside her and was depositing her ticket in the chopper box when it occurred to them both that they were the only two people on the platform. He asked if she’d care to share a cab. And when he told her that he was headed for the Palace Theatre on Main Street, she knew at once that she had not only made an acquaintance but met a colleague as well.

  The Palace was six blocks west of the station, a big barn of a place that had opened promisingly but fallen on hard times. It started with stock and traveling shows and event recitals, went through two name changes and a spell as a movie emporium, and was now home to the freshly minted stock company of one Leonard Wood, Jr.

  Wood was something of a local celebrity in that he bore the name of his father, military governor of Cuba, army chief of staff, and current governor-general of the Philippines. He had worked a deal for the theater on a percentage basis, brought in Kendal Weston, the “Belasco of stock,” to direct, but then lost his leading woman to a contract dispute before the dusty seats of the Palace could be warmed by paying customers. With the company’s opening set for April 9, 1923, Weston was sent scrambling, and it was then that he put in a call for Louise Treadwell.

  Louise had appeared under Weston’s direction in Manchester, where her long brown hair, expressive face, and dancer’s body enabled her to play both ingenues and character parts with equal conviction. She had a flair for comedy and a nice singing voice, and although her engagement was only for a week or two, she needed the job. Rehearsals for the four-act comedy Nice People began promptly, Louise taking the Francine Larrimore part, and Wood—who could never seem to get her name right—pronounced himself duly impressed with what he saw. “Louise Treadway,” he declared in a newspaper ad, “is a delightfully cultured girl whose personality goes right over the footlights and makes you wish you knew her personally.” As soon as Nice People opened, daytime rehearsals began on the following week’s play. She made a quick trip home to gather more clothes; stock actresses furnished their own wardrobes, and Louise, like most, was an accomplished seamstress.

  The man she met on the ride back to White Plains also needed the job. Having just turned twenty-three, he had no credits to speak of, save a four-line bit in R.U.R. and six months of student productions at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He wasn’t a lead, so Weston had never seen him act, but it soon dawned on Louise that she, in fact, had. It was some two months earlier in an afternoon performance at New York’s Lyceum Theatre. “My friend was very apologetic,” she remembered. “It was a student play and she promised someone she’d come and would I come too?” The play was Knut at Roeskilde, a tragedy set in the year 1027. In the cast that day were West Phillips, Olga Brent, Bryan Lycan, and the young man she now knew to be Spencer Tracy.

  Kendal Weston had expanded the company to fourteen players for the second week. The play was Jules Eckert Goodman’s The Man Who Came Back, a lurid tale of redemption in the opium dens of Shanghai. Louise would play the drug-addled Marcelle opposite Ernest Woodward, an alumnus of the American Academy who was cast in the title role. Engaged for general business, Tracy was assigned two minor parts in the show, one played almost completely out of sight of the audience. He soon disappeared, and when Louise again saw him, it was at the tiny Nut and Coffee House around the corner on Mamaroneck Avenue, where he was taking a meal that consisted in its entirety of chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream, the combination dripping with chocolate sauce. It became a familiar scene: “If you saw him twice on one day, one time or the other he was sure to be eating cake or ice cream or chocolate sauce, or all three.” At first she noticed him only during breaks, when a small group would go around the corner for doughnuts and buttermilk. They fell easily into conversation, but there was little time for more than an occasional glance.

  Louise lacked formal training, but compensated with long hours and a dancer’s instincts. She moved expressively, absorbing the part as she learned her lines. Weston nurtured her over the course of a tense and uncertain week, helping her master a showy but difficult part while leaving Tracy, who had little to do, much to his own devices.

  The actors were expected to learn an act a day, with Fridays given over to hair, wardrobe, and nails. On Saturday morning they played the whole thing straight through, one of only two chances they would get before opening on Monday night. The company performed Nice People eight times that week, and those who weren’t yet working ran lines, did their laundry, enjoyed the brief luxury of having their evenings to themselves. The rehearsal on Monday was particularly chaotic. Actors huddled in the lounge of the theater, mumbling their lines, while stagehands hammered the sets together and aimed the lights, a cracked canvas backdrop shimmering with wet paint. It was only after supper that they were briefly allowed onstage to try out props, find their entrances, sit in chairs. Then came time for the stage manager to call, “Half hour!”

  The performance that night was before an audience that consisted chiefly of die-hards—those who wanted to be among the first to see the new play and sadists who hoped to see the actors flub their lines. The pit band offered brassy renditions of everything from “Flower of Araby” and Irving Berlin’s “Dearest” to selections from Blossom Time. Since most of the Palace’s 1,200 seats were empty, the room’s acoustics contributed a noticeable ring to the dialogue.

  Taking the part created by Mary Nash in the original New York production, Louise tore into Marcelle’s big scene in Sam Shew Sing’s dingy opium joint. The dead center of the stage was defined by a circular radiance of yellow light and the walls were comprised of tattered bunks. Cornered by the man she had followed in vain from San Francisco to Shanghai, she called out to Tracy, now a dope fiend thrashing helplessly on one of the bunks: “Where are you now, Binksie?”

  And from the shadows he wailed, “I’ve looked through most every star and I can’t find her! I can’t find her!”

  Louise leveled a bone-chilling stare at Woodward. “Binksie there made a fool of himself over a girl—a girl who wasn’t anything or anybody until Binksie came along and taught her. Then he grew tired of her, or he wanted to reform or something, and he went to her to let her know. There was a quarrel. He was nasty and perhaps she was nastier. He started to go. She swore he’d never leave her, that she’d follow him wherever he went, and he … he only laughed.”

  Woodward stood frozen at the edge of the light. “Go on—,” he said softly.

  “She told the truth,” Louise continued. “She took strychnine there before him and—” A strange smile came over her. “Did you ever see anyone die of strychnine poisoning? It’s a nasty way to die—body all shook to pieces, eyes grinning—and she died that way in Binksie’s arms.”

  A slight pause to let the image sink in.

  “Well, she followed him all right. Even the dope won’t help him to forget her, and wherever she is—in Heaven or Hell—she’s got the laugh on Binksie.”

  Louise picked a bottle of rye whiskey up off the floor. “Do you mind?” she asked matter-of-factly, not really caring if he did or he didn’t. But he
did mind, and gently he took it from her.

  Her face turned hard, defiant. “If a man ever did a thing like that to me, I’d never kill myself that way—it’s too painful, too quick. No, I’d live … live to let him see her dying slow … body and soul rotting before his eyes …”

  When the performance came to an end, the crowd gave her a rousing ovation—the loudest of the evening—and Weston came to her afterward and said, “We’re going to keep you here.”

  Business improved as the week progressed, and Wood, who rarely came down from his office, took to haranguing the locals with quarter-page ads in the Daily Reporter.

  Ticket sales jumped for It’s a Boy, the company’s offering for the week of April 23, but it was the musical comedy Buddies that brought the people out in droves. Louise sang Julie, the part made famous by Peggy Wood on Broadway, and the theater was nearly full on a Saturday night when kids whistled and catcalled from the balconies and seats ranged from twenty-five cents to a dollar twenty-five, plus war tax.

  Tracy played a peripheral part each week, inhabiting the background while Louise drew the crowd’s attention and acclaim. His projection was good and his diction clear, and from the very start he showed he could deliver the most innocuous of lines with a startling intensity. He took the stage just ahead of Marcelle in The Man Who Came Back, and as the pipe-smoking Captain Gallon his exit line was “To hell with him!” Louise, immersed in her own role, took particular notice: “The way he did it was so effective he always got a nice little round of applause, and I remember thinking, ‘That boy has got something there.’ ”

  She naturally gravitated to Tracy, whose experience was nowhere near her own, but whose enthusiasm was infectious and whose natural gifts as an actor were plain to see. She found him a fast study with an almost photographic memory. Lines were much harder for her to absorb, and he would feed her cues during breaks and prompt her when the words wouldn’t come. She, in turn, taught him how to use makeup, since he had learned in school and tended to overdo it. “You aren’t the Great Lover type,” she told him, “but you have a nice stage presence and a good voice. Some day you’ll find your particular niche and you’ll click.” Spence took to calling her “Weeze,” the pet name her mother had given her.

  Louise was staying at the Gedney Farm Hotel, a three-hundred-acre resort just outside of town, and she returned there most days for dinner. Wood traded courtesies with Edward H. Crandall, the hotel’s general manager, whose handsome son fancied himself an actor. In exchange for an occasional bit or a walk-on for Eddie Jr., the principal players of Wood’s company could rub elbows with bankers, stockbrokers, and international celebrities at boardinghouse prices.

  And so one Sunday, Louise invited Spence to dinner at the nautically themed dining room of the Gedney.

  Louise Ten Broeck Treadwell was born in 1896 in New Castle, Pennsylvania, where her grandfather, George Edwards Treadwell, had founded the New Castle News. Her father, Allienne Treadwell, practiced law and owned the Treadwell News Company, an agency for out-of-town newspapers. Louise was a serious, bookish child whose greatest pleasure was the company of adults. She matured into a classic beauty, milky complexion, chestnut hair, soft gray-blue eyes, one of the most popular girls in high school, a suffragist and a varsity basketball star.

  Her mother, Bright Smith, was a tiny woman of high ideals who sold baked goods to make ends meet when Allienne deserted the family in 1913. The following year, Bright’s eighteen-year-old daughter announced her intention to go to New York. “Mother loved the theatre and was torn,” Louise said. “She didn’t really want me to go into the theatre, but if this was what I had to do … And it was what I had to do. Never any question. From the time I was ten, or even earlier, I was saving photos and old programs. My mother took me to the nickelodeon and to any number of good plays … touring companies of The Merry Widow and The Red Mill … I saw Elsie Janis and Montgomery and Stone … New Castle was on a good theater circuit, along the route to Chicago.”

  Bright had been the soprano soloist at an Episcopal church in Pittsburgh and was afraid Louise wouldn’t get work in New York unless she knew how to sing. Loath to say anything herself that could be construed as discouraging, she consulted the local rector, an infinitely practical man, and asked him to make the case instead. “Louise has a small voice,” she confided, ticking off the challenges, both economic and moral, a young girl would surely face alone in the big city. The rector listened gravely and commiserated and did indeed speak to Louise, but, sensing her determination, couldn’t say very much to sway her.

  “What it must have cost my mother to let me go!” Louise marveled. “She and my father were divorced, so it was doubly her decision. I was so naive—she knew that—and I had virtually no experience, just one little musical show in high school.” She stayed with cousins on Long Island, had her first ride on the elevated, and almost immediately got a job in vaudeville. “I could sing and I could dance, and there I was in some old theater down around Fourteenth Street singing, ‘By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea …’ The leading lady said, ‘Honey, have you ever put on makeup?’ and since I never had, she showed me how. I made quite an entrance: I tripped and fell flat at the first matinee performance, but I got up and went right on.”

  The show lasted a week, then Louise’s luck dried up. Her cousins thought she should go home and teach dancing, so they staked her to a series of lessons with the Castles, where she learned the fox-trot and the two-step. Once she had a diploma, she returned to New Castle to teach ballroom dancing. She staged some children’s shows, the mothers making the costumes themselves, then enrolled in the Lake Erie College for Women. “I really had no desire to go to college,” she admitted, “but I’m glad I did. There was, for example, an excellent course in English composition, and I learned to do a little writing.” She developed an interest in art, took part in a couple of plays, and performed an interpretive dance program at commencement, subsequently touring under the management of Southard Harris.

  Actress Henrietta Crosman was a distant cousin. “I’d heard Grandma speak of her, and I found some of her old programs. When she played Cleveland, I wrote and went to see her.” Crosman was touring Cousin Eleanor in vaudeville, and Louise was a little frightened of her. “Henrietta was sixty by then, a buxom woman, but you could see what she had been.1 She’d been a beauty, and she’d tell anyone anything with a candor that floored me. A fine old-time actress. I told her I was going to New York again, and she said frankly she had no idea what she’d be doing in the fall, but I was to let her know when I got there.”

  Louise did indeed let her know and found that Crosman was about to take out a play called Erstwhile Susan. She saw the producer and the director, read, and was assigned a couple of small parts: a Mennonite girl and a debutante. When relatives offered the use of an apartment in the Bronx, Louise and her mother went off to New York. They went to visit Crosman at her estate in the country. She was gracious, but Louise was aware that she was taking stock of her. “You have nice hands,” she told Louise. “Use them.”

  Louise Treadwell (foreground), circa 1916. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  They went across the country with Erstwhile Susan, making two stops in each state they crossed. Once they reached Seattle, they traveled down the coast to Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego. “You’ve got to learn to talk,” the actress told Louise one day on the train. “Avoid Pennsylvaniaisms.” Louise did a lot of listening—to Crosman, to an Englishman in the cast, to the young leading lady who spoke with a Southern lilt. “I listened, practiced, and began to realize how totally unprepared I was.”

  After America entered the war in the spring of 1917 things got tough just about everywhere. Stock companies closed in record numbers. Louise hung on as long as she could, sharing quarters with four other girls she’d known in college, then she went home again in June 1918. “I went home only to reconnoiter and get some money.” She spent eight weeks working on the New Castl
e News, then her mother died suddenly at the age of fifty-four.

  The pains came without warning sometime around midnight, and Louise summoned an ambulance. On the bumpy road to the hospital Bright’s appendix burst. Louise couldn’t go with her—no room—so she took the streetcar instead and wasn’t able to see her mother again until after the surgery, when there was really nothing more to be done. She stayed at her bedside—Bright lived several days—then, in something of a daze, she pulled together what was left of her life in New Castle. Her grandmother was still there, but her younger sister was away at school and her father had remarried and was living in California. She sold the house on Highland Avenue, keeping the third floor and furnishing it with the things that most meant home to her. She took a job teaching third grade and made plans to return to the stage.

  Louise played stock in Chicago, making an impression with a small part in a play called Happiness. After a lean period, she landed a role with Eva Le Gallienne in Not So Long Ago, a romantic period piece that had only a short stay at the Booth Theatre. Late in 1920 she again wrote Henrietta Crosman, who had settled in California where her husband, Maurice Campbell, was directing the Bebe Daniels comedies for Realart. She asked what Crosman thought about her working in pictures, and Crosman replied that if she wanted to come to Los Angeles, she would find her a place to live and maybe something to do. So Louise came west in February 1921, taking a room with some people who lived next door to the Campbells on Carlos Avenue in Hollywood. Maurice Campbell gave her work as an extra, but she didn’t much care for the monotony of moviemaking. The other extras on the set were friendly and helpful, but she kept to herself, writing poetry, as she had since high school, and reading prodigiously. She got a bit part as a chorus girl in a feature directed by William DeMille, but it wasn’t fun or satisfying, and after a few months she went back to New York.