In December the iconoclastic editors of the Smart Set, George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, bought one of her poems for publication and asked to see others. Before she could reply, she landed a key role in Edward Goodman’s revival of the John Galsworthy fantasy The Pigeon. The show started in Greenwich Village, then moved uptown to the Frazee. The part wasn’t her kind of part—a “goody-goody” as she put it—and Goodman was a rigid disciplinarian, demanding and excessively precise. She frankly thought herself “lousy” in The Pigeon, but it led to Chains of Dew for the Provincetown Players and a few weeks of stock in New Hampshire.
Emboldened by the Smart Set sale, she tried her hand at humor and sold a boardinghouse piece called “Top Floor Pests” to the New York Times. By summer, she had allowed herself to be seduced into a Chautauqua tour that took her on a string of one-nighters through Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska, most of the audiences seeing the one play, in all probability, they would see all year. The applause, she wrote, would “shame even a Belasco opening” and the experience resulted in another piece for the Times. She laid off the remainder of the year, thinking she might go to Europe, but by the time of Kendal Weston’s call, she was not only ready and willing but desperate to work.
Louise Treadwell could have been a journalist, written a book, or published more of her poems, but all she ever really wanted to be was an actress, and despite being such a hard study when it came to learning her lines, she was working with the best director she had ever had, playing some of the best things she had ever played, and at the age of twenty-six there was no place in the world she would rather be.
The company continued with Up in Mabel’s Room for the week of May 6, then Kendal Weston quarreled with Leonard Wood over the cuts Wood was making to cover expenses. He left, taking a pair of actors with him. Ray Capp, another actor-director of similar vintage, took over from Weston and the show went on as planned. The Elks Lodge attended as a body, showering the ladies of the cast with floral tributes, and the players, still basking in the success of Buddies, were guests of honor at the monthly ball of the White Plains Club. It was at such a party, on a Sunday night at the Gedney, just after Tracy had graduated to the role of Jimmy Larchmont in Mabel’s Room, that he worked up the courage to ask Louise to marry him.
Louise (center) as Ann Wellwyn in Edward Goodman’s 1922 revival of The Pigeon. Whitford Kane, who headed the original production at London’s Royalty Theatre, can be seen at the doorway. (NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY)
She had been in love before, but never with an actor, and no one had ever proposed. She always described herself as a romantic, someone who preferred to dream of the perfect mate rather than actually go out and pursue him. Having come from a broken home, she also knew a man’s devotion could be mysterious and fleeting, and the institution of marriage as much a trap as a blessing. “My father wasn’t a man you ever came to know well,” she said. “He was a shy man who tried to make up for that with this reserve. I never felt I could talk to him.”
Tracy, she observed, was a lot like her father, brusque and painfully shy around strangers, but with a joy for the art of acting that was something quite different from anything she had ever before observed in a man. They both found it easier to talk about the work than to talk about each other, since both came from families where feelings were rarely expressed. The silences between them could be deafening, but there was an urgency to everything they had to say to one another. Tracy didn’t handle the matter of proposing very well, having condescended to dance with her even though he hated dancing. Then, not being terribly romantic either, he wondered if she would marry him without his embellishing the words or setting the scene in the slightest. “I’m asking you to,” he finally said, mustering some of the intensity he could unleash onstage.
Louise was mindful of what actresses always said about marrying actors, that their egos were too huge to contain, and that no woman could ever love an actor as much as he undoubtedly loved himself. She didn’t think of Spence as an actor, though. He lacked the ego, the pose, the artifice. She couldn’t think of another one even remotely like him, and so there, amid the rolling green hills of White Plains on a crisp spring evening in May 1923, Louise Treadwell said yes.
Weston’s departure signaled a decline in the company and the quality of its productions. Business fell off, and Wood concluded that White Plains was too small to support a company of its own. In late May he announced the Wood Players were moving to Fall River, a mill town in southeastern Massachusetts known for the Lizzie Borden ax murders, and anyone who didn’t care to go had his or her two weeks’ notice. Nobody wanted to go to Fall River, but only three cast members said as much. The Wood Players gave their final performance in White Plains on June 1, 1923, and decamped the next day.
In Fall River, Wood worked the local papers, building anticipation for the town’s first season of summer stock, and when the company opened with Getting Gertie’s Garter on June 11, 1923, all 1,900 seats were filled and some two hundred people were turned away. The town’s goodwill didn’t extend much past opening night, and Wood switched from comedies to thrillers. By the third week, the Players were performing four matinees a week with a two-for-one admission policy on Monday nights. Louise grew to loathe the place: “Nobody was interested in the theatre. I don’t know how in the world they ever thought they could make it go there, and it didn’t go.”
When Wood moved the company to the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he promoted Tracy to second business and bumped his rate to fifty dollars a week. Louise went along, but only for a couple of days and with no intention of playing there. Spence wired his parents in Milwaukee, and almost immediately his older brother arrived to give Louise the once-over. Carroll Tracy was the same age as Louise, a bigger, beefier version of his younger brother, infinitely more quiet. He didn’t ask many questions, so Louise volunteered the things she thought he’d want to know. “I had no intention in the world of giving up the theatre,” she said. She talked about her people, her education, her writing. “Apparently he decided I was all right … I was invited to go to Milwaukee.”
Tracy stayed in Lancaster, intent on finding something better, while Louise returned to New Castle to tell what family she still had there—her grandmother and a few cousins—that she was going to get married. Wood’s company churned continuously, but Tracy, easily the most opinionated member of the company, was out of favor. It wasn’t a good time to be looking for work, and it took the better part of a month to land a job with a company in Cincinnati. Stuart Walker’s renowned stock company was a considerable step up in prestige, if not necessarily in compensation. Elated, Tracy gave notice in Lancaster and advised his fiancée they could be married in September.
Louise traveled to Chicago in late August, and Spence’s father, John Edward Tracy, met her at the station. A small but powerfully built man with shimmering white hair and blue-gray eyes, John Tracy was vice president and general manager of the Parker Motor Truck Company. His son Carroll towered over him, but it was John Tracy’s solid demeanor and ready smile that instantly drew Louise into the family. “He was just so natural and so easy,” she remembered, “the nice little light in his eyes, the humor …”
In Milwaukee, the Tracys’ comfortable wood frame house stood on a tree-lined street on the upper East Side. Down the block was Lake Park and a spectacular view of the Lake Michigan shoreline. Spence’s mother welcomed Louise with a warmth and generosity she had never known in her own family. Carrie Tracy was, at age forty-nine, a beautiful woman who was indulged in every possible way by her doting husband. “She was the kind of person who’d give you anything,” Louise said. “I was very fond of her, and I quickly felt much closer to him than I had ever felt toward my own father. He was a very warm, dear man … You couldn’t help but like them, you couldn’t help feeling you’d known them all your life.”
The Gypsy Trail would mark Spencer Tracy’s first appearance in Cincinnati—not that there was m
uch for him to rehearse. He had been cast in the utilitarian role of the house man, Stiles, and the extent of his duties was to appear occasionally, answer the phone or open the door, and say things like “Who is speaking, please?” and “I will inquire.”
Walker’s roster now consisted of sixty-seven players, among them Blanche Yurka, Albert Hackett, Spring Byington, and Beulah Bondi. His civilized practice of resting his actors from week to week made a slot in Cincinnati one of the most coveted in stock.
Louise had hopes of joining the Walker company, but her immediate goal was to make a good impression on the Tracys. She feared an awkward silence over the matter of religion, as she was an Episcopalian while Spence embraced his father’s Catholicism. Then she learned that Spence’s mother was a Presbyterian and all her anxieties fell away. John Tracy, in fact, laughed out loud when she confessed her fear of being asked to convert. “There’s no use in doing that!” he exclaimed, and Louise, relieved, chimed in, “No, no use at all!” The next thing she knew, Spence’s dad was taking her downtown to pick out a ring. “There was nothing like the present,” she said of his direct, almost impulsive nature. “You don’t wait around for anything—you do it now.” When Spence called to ask what they thought of her, his father was typically plainspoken: “If you don’t marry this girl, you’re a bigger fool than I thought you were when you went on the stage!”
Tracy opened at the George B. Cox Memorial Theatre on September 10, 1923, and while he rated a mention in the lukewarm review that appeared the next day in the Post, the display ads accounted for his presence in the cast with the words “… and others.” Louise and the Tracys arrived by train on Tuesday afternoon, John and Carrie taking a room at the Hotel Gibson on Fountain Square, Louise putting up at the elegant Sinton a block away. The next afternoon, Spence played the Wednesday matinee, finishing just after 4:30 p.m. He then grabbed a cab to St. Xavier, a neighborhood parish some five blocks to the east, where he met his parents, his brother, and his bride-to-be.
Louise was wearing a dark blue suit over a patterned silk blouse with matching hat and shoes. The pastor of the church, Father Joseph P. De Smidt, had agreed to marry them, but there would be no mass with the ceremony. “I was lucky to get in the back door,” Louise commented. “We had a special dispensation and got married in the Priest’s study.” There were readings from the Old and New Testaments, a homily of sorts (considering the priest didn’t know either one of them), and the vows were exchanged. Carroll, the best man, stepped forward and handed Louise’s ring to the priest, who blessed it and passed it to the groom, who placed it on her finger in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. After the Lord’s Prayer and a blessing, they returned to the Gibson, where Stuart Walker joined them for a quick celebratory dinner. At 7:30 p.m., Walker and the newest member of his esteemed company took a cab back to the Cox, where the evening performance of The Gypsy Trail got under way at 8:20 p.m.
Walker went easy on Tracy during his brief stay in the Queen City. He did not cast him in Time, the following week’s play, which meant that Spence had his days free to roam the city with his new wife. Then rehearsals got under way for Seventeen, a perennial for Walker, and this time Tracy had a showier part in the boisterous George Cooper, the thickheaded nineteen-year-old who has designs on Miss Lola Pratt. His key scene, an awkward exchange of rings toward the end of the third act, brought an audible hush from the audience, but it was Walker’s newest discovery, William Kirkland, who, as Willie Baxter, dominated the show. The role of Willie had made a Broadway star of Gregory Kelly, and when Seventeen ended Walker’s twenty-eight-week season at the Cox, it was Kirkland who was announced as one of the leads when Walker took Time to Broadway.
Louise, moving up to the role of Spence’s booster, understood Walker’s reasoning, given Kirkland’s tenure with the company, but she also knew that her new husband was infinitely more talented, and she was all for the move when the fuss over Kirkland inspired Tracy to take a crack at Broadway himself. Walker, who believed it took an actor four or five years to fully develop, advised against it. But Tracy knew a place on the Upper West Side where he had lived with an old friend. “Come on,” he said to Weeze. “Mrs. Brown will give us a room. I can talk her into anything.”
Despite a steep, gloomy interior, Mrs. Brown’s had the benefit of a landlady who genuinely liked and admired struggling actors. She greeted Spence like a wayward son and made his wife feel as if she were an established star. Louise set her electric stove up in the bathroom and proceeded to familiarize her husband with the vegetables he had never before regarded as food. She cooked ground round occasionally, and when they were feeling flush they would get a couple of lamb chops.
Fifteen shows were casting, and Tracy figured a big star vehicle offered the best chance for a long run and maybe even a tour. He missed out on Walter Hampden’s revival of Cyrano de Bergerac, which had more than fifty parts to fill, but got word that producer Arthur Hopkins was casting a new comedy for Ethel Barrymore at the Plymouth. The play had sixteen speaking parts, two given over to the star and her leading man, Cyril Keighley, and three requiring the services of children. Of the eleven remaining, the four that meant anything had already been filled with Beverly Sitgreaves, Jose Alessandro, Edward G. Robinson, and Virginia Chauvent. Only the bits remained, and Tracy landed the least of those, the character of a newspaper photographer named Holt. And that night, the Tracys’ room at Mrs. Brown’s modest walk-up smelled of lamb.
Rehearsals for the Barrymore play, A Royal Fandango, were unlike anything Tracy had ever witnessed. “Arthur Hopkins,” said Edward G. Robinson, “pulled his usual stunt of leaving the actors alone for a week to find their own places and get the play on its feet. I soon discovered that Miss Barrymore—and why not?—did what came naturally to her: took the stage, filled it, and left the rest of us to stage rear.”
The actors began referring to the production as A Royal Fiasco, and when Hopkins finally appeared, Robinson asked to be let out. “I know I’m a supporting actor and Miss Barrymore’s a great star,” he told the producer, “but the way the play is staged, all the values are distorted.” Hopkins listened and understood and set about restaging the scenes, and although his improvements gave the play more vitality and pace, the production was doomed, doomed, and everyone, excepting perhaps Ethel Barrymore herself, seemed to know it.
They opened in Washington on November 6 before a capacity house that included Commander and Mrs. W. W. Galbraith and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Tracy, whom Robinson remembered as “an intense young man,” had only to walk on with a paper, but the weight of doing so while Ethel Barrymore held the stage was almost too much for him to bear. “He had one line to say,” Barrymore recalled in her autobiography, “and I saw he was very nervous, so I said to him, ‘Relax. That’s all you have to do—just relax. It’ll all be the same in a hundred years.’ ”
Tracy got through the night, as did the rest of the cast, but the man from Variety said playwright Zoë Akins had made “without a doubt the most impossible and ridiculous attempt at a satire that this scribe has seen in a long time.” The New York opening on the twelfth wasn’t much better received, and only two of the sixteen Manhattan dailies saw any future to it at all. The closing notices went up by the beginning of the second week, and Miss Barrymore was, according to Robinson, “indignant.”
Tracy began using his days to smoke out another engagement, casually at first, then more keenly as the holiday lull settled in and the only shows casting were musicals like Kid Boots. Counting their pennies, he and Louise (who wasn’t working) allotted thirty-five cents a day for food. “I went on a rice pudding diet because it was filling,” Tracy remembered. “I could tell you every restaurant from the Bowery to the Bronx that served the stuff and tell you which gave the most cream with it and which the most raisins.”
Combing the trade papers, he used the cachet of the Barrymore name to land an interview with the Proctor Players, a struggling stock enterprise l
ocated across the Hudson in Elizabeth, New Jersey. They were short a character man for a production of Within the Law. “Can you play an old man?” the director asked. “I’m an actor,” Tracy replied. “I can play anything.”
The Proctors were on a grueling “matinees daily” policy. Hired for general business at fifty dollars a week, Tracy wasn’t permitted to draw against his salary until the play had actually opened. After rehearsing a full week, he and Louise (who was three months pregnant at the time) were reduced to splitting an egg sandwich for dinner. On opening night, December 3, he came offstage after his first scene and made a sprint to the cashier’s office. Nearly missing his second cue, he resolved to get out of the place as quickly as possible.
He remained through Christmas, and was playing a minor role in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch when a wire from Kendal Weston found him. The Belasco of Stock was inaugurating a company in Winnipeg, taking on the longest-running stock company in North America, the very aptly named Permanent Players. Tracy dropped Louise in Milwaukee and was in Manitoba by New Year’s Day. “The first week,” Tracy said, “we weren’t paid because the manager said he had to pay off the local firms to which he owed money. We got through the second week, and after the Saturday night performance we looked for the manager and found he had absconded with the two weeks’ receipts.”
They began operating on the commonwealth plan, divvying up the box office in lieu of salaries. Tracy was second man in What’s Your Wife Doing? when the leads gave notice, suddenly elevating him, after just nine months, to the status of leading man. Given the company’s rattling condition, there was only one viable choice for leading woman, and it was a done deal when the wire grandly offering her the job reached Louise in Milwaukee. “I went up,” she said, “and found the company was really on the rocks.”
James Curtis Page 3