Knowing she could only play a few weeks before her pregnancy would begin to show, Louise opened January 28, 1924, in Eugene Walters’ The Flapper and, in the words of the critic for the Winnipeg Free Press, “took the house by storm.” With nothing to lose and her husband playing opposite, she abandoned herself to the role in a way she might otherwise have found difficult. “Miss Treadwell made her Winnipeg debut in rather a light part,” the Press observed, “to which, nevertheless, she brought a vast amount of honest talent and evidently a good deal of careful preparation. Of her future popularity there can be no question. Her performance Monday night not only popularized her, but came very near endearing her to her auditors.” Spence’s work as her long-suffering husband, the first lead he had ever played as a professional actor, was “a rare exhibition of restraint in what might have been a frothy and wrathful role.”
When they opened in the grim crime melodrama The Highjacker on the fourth of February, they knew it would be their last week in Winnipeg. “They called us up to the office and talked,” Louise recalled, “and of course they were going to close. Then they let down their hair and said they’d like to see us get back safe.” They paid Louise’s fare back to Milwaukee and Spence’s to New York City—the only cast members accorded such a courtesy. Five weeks later, several members of the company were still in town, reportedly working as day laborers to earn their fares back to the States.
Nineteen twenty-four wasn’t starting out well for stock. There weren’t more than a hundred companies nationwide, and only about two dozen of those were making money. One of the managers whom Tracy was following in the pages of Variety was William Henry Wright, the man in charge of Pittsburgh’s Lyceum Stock Company. Wright had been a press agent for Klaw & Erlanger, Henry W. Savage, and George Broadhurst, among others, and knew how to get people into a theater—a critical talent lacking in the vast majority of stock managers.
Emboldened by a successful summer of stock in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Wright had taken a lease on the Bijou, an old vaudeville house, renamed it the Lyceum, and opened Thanksgiving week with a policy of high-class fare at a one-dollar top scale. It was a hopeless strategy for a place like Pittsburgh, and some nights there was less than one hundred dollars in the box office when the curtain rang up. Finally coming to the realization he was playing class stuff in the wrong neighborhood, Wright closed the company on January 7, 1924, having dropped $14,000 in the space of seven weeks.
There were, however, a lot of people rooting for “Papa” Wright, a beloved figure who, in another time, had managed the lecture tours of Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and James Whitcomb Riley. He had, in fact, touched virtually every facet of show business, from playwriting to movie work, and was known for promptly paying his bills in even the darkest of hours. He took just two weeks to regroup in Pittsburgh, building a new policy on hokey melodramas at a fifty-cent top, and was open again by the end of January. “We’ll give him credit,” commented one stock executive. “It’s either guts or idiocy.”
The agent who handled Tracy’s booking with Wright told him it was “the world’s worst stock company” and that he should therefore “fit in fine.” When Wright got a look at his new leading man, Tracy was clad in the same serge suit he had worn since college. “You’ve got to get yourself a new suit,” Wright told him, and Tracy, in no position to argue the point, touched him for an advance. That next week, he began rehearsals for a topical play called The Bootleggers in a snappy blue pinstripe.
The Bootleggers was the first effort of a young drama critic named William Page, formerly of the Baltimore American, later of the Washington Post. Wright’s staging at the Lyceum constituted its stock debut and, typical for a Wright company, no reasonable expense was spared. Tracy took the part of Rossmore, the mastermind of a prosperous smuggling ring, and Wright’s leading lady, Marguerite Fields, took the role of Rossmore’s daughter.
The show was under the direction of John Ellis, a classically trained actor who had been with Wright since his first stock enterprise in Schenectady. Tracy proved adept at handling the comedy in the play as well as its tragedy, and the Monday performance played to a sizable crowd that included the playwright himself.
Wright followed The Bootleggers with a more intimate, though no less sensationalistic, drama called Her Unborn Child, and scheduled brief talks on birth control during Tuesday and Thursday “ladies only” matinees.
A splendid production of The Shepard of the Hills was followed by The Love Test, and then Wright lost his lease on the theater just as he was starting to make a little money. The house management was flooded with letters and a petition to retain the company, but it was rumored a deal had gone over to give the theater to a burlesque syndicate and there was nothing more to be done about it. The Gazette Times reported the opening performance of The Girl Who Came Back, Wright’s selection for the final week, played to “one of the largest audiences ever assembled in the Lyceum Theatre.” Floral tributes sent to the ladies each night threatened to swamp the stage, and favorites like Arthur Mack, Cliff Boyer, and Ernest Ganter were accorded standing ovations. “They used to put chairs on the stage,” Tracy recalled. “That’s how much business we did. Couldn’t get the people in the theater.”
The Lyceum closed its doors on May 9, 1924, and the Tracys left for Milwaukee the next morning.
There was much about Grand Rapids that made it a good place for stock. It was laid out on an orderly grid, the streets running east and west and the avenues north and south. There was plenty of work, Grand Rapids being known as Furniture City for the woodworking plants that clustered just north and south of the city center—Berkey & Gay, Luce, John Widdicomb, American Seating, Sligh, Robert W. Irwin. The city bustled with skilled workers and a society class comprised of the owners of the mills and furniture factories and the descendants of the Baptist missionaries and land brokers who settled the area. It was a stable, educated population with money and taste and an appreciation of good theatrics. When W. H. Wright installed his Broadway Players there in the spring of 1923, he found he had stumbled onto a largely untapped audience for middlebrow fare.
The 1924 season began on April 14 at the Powers Theatre just as Wright was opening Her Unborn Child in Pittsburgh. Honors Are Even, the first attraction, was a shaky affair, not up to the standards of the previous season, and it was to Wright’s advantage that the loss of the Lyceum freed him to focus his attention more fully on Grand Rapids. As soon as the Pittsburgh company had closed, Wright moved Halliam Bosworth, a solid character man, and director John Ellis to the Powers, and began shuffling the calendar of plays.
The Bootleggers had done extraordinarily well in Pittsburgh and was, in fact, one of the few Lyceum plays Wright thought would go over in Grand Rapids. He cabled Tracy in Milwaukee, offering him the lead in Bootleggers and the balance of the season under less specific terms, but Spence, with Louise now eight months pregnant, hesitated, not wanting to be on the other side of Lake Michigan when the baby was born. It was only at Louise’s insistence that he went, bolstered as he was by the knowledge that she was in his mother’s able care and that nothing at all could possibly go wrong.
Tracy officially joined the Broadway Players on June 10, 1924, when he began rehearsals for The Meanest Man in the World, a comedy George M. Cohan had played a few seasons back. The title role fell to Kenneth Daigneau, an able comedian and the company’s de facto leading man, leaving Tracy to the part of Carlton Childs, an idealistic young businessman. In publicity, Wright dutifully acknowledged Tracy’s status as a “well-known leading man” who would nevertheless be “classed as a juvenile” for his present engagement. Mary Remington, the critic for the Grand Rapids Press, found Tracy “convincing, well poised … natural” in a somewhat thankless part. The Herald’s Clarence Dean reported “generous applause frequently rippling through the audience and breaking out into a salvo.” Tracy, he concluded, had “captured the approval of the first night audience.”
The Meanest Man in the World c
ontinued through Sunday, June 22, and Tracy was back in Milwaukee the following Wednesday. John Tracy was now president of George H. Lutz, Inc., one of the Midwest’s leading suppliers of paving machinery, and he and Carrie had relocated to a spacious two-bedroom apartment on Prospect Avenue in the city’s historic First Ward. The Tracys fussed endlessly over Louise, who was due at any moment and miserable in the summer heat and humidity. Spence didn’t quite know what to say or do with fatherhood so close at hand, and when Louise went into labor late on the evening of June 25, it was Father Tracy who got her to St. Mary’s Hospital on North Lake Drive, some two miles away, and then stayed with his son until an eight-pound boy was delivered at 2:30 on the morning of the twenty-sixth.
The baby was named John Ten Broeck Tracy, Ten Broeck being the maiden name of Louise’s maternal grandmother, Louisa Smith. “I was very much afraid of him at first,” Louise admitted. “What do you do when you give him a bath? How [do] you hold him in there? I hadn’t been around a small baby, well, in years and years. I just didn’t know anything about it.” And Spence, of course, wasn’t any help. “He was crazy about him, but he didn’t know what to do with a small baby either.” Home from the hospital, Louise was installed in the guest room on Prospect, where the new grandparents could scarcely get their fill of little Johnny. Spence stayed as long as he could—ten days, through the Independence Day festivities—then took the ferry back across Lake Michigan to Muskegon, his father having staked him to the fare, and then the twenty-five miles inland by bus to Grand Rapids.
Wright’s makeover of the Broadway Players hadn’t ended with the addition of Spencer Tracy. Actress Geneva Harrison made her final Grand Rapids appearance in Meanest Man in the World, and the following week saw the arrival of a new leading lady, a genuine star of both stock and Broadway named Selena Royle. The nineteen-year-old daughter of playwright Edwin Milton Royle, she was just in from New York, where she had played the previous week alongside Helen Hayes, Elsie Ferguson, and Pauline Lord in a Players Club staging of She Stoops to Conquer. Landing her for the Broadway Players was something of a coup, but John Ellis had known her since she was a baby. In 1905, when she was less than a year old, Ellis had appeared in the first English production of her father’s most famous play, The Squaw Man, and the two men had remained friends over the years.
For Selena’s debut at the Powers, Ellis and Wright selected the Harvard Prize drama Common Clay, an evergreen in stock that gave Jane Cowl one of her signature roles. A statuesque blonde, Royle towered over the men in the cast, and as Ellen Neal, a poor girl wrongly accused of murder, she commanded the stage. “She is beautiful, she is youthful, she has a rich, low-pitched voice that chimes like sweet bells,” Clarence Dean raved in the Herald. “She has depth of feeling that gets right under the skin, and she is perfectly natural, easy and unaffected. There is no effort apparent, no straining for effect, but a sure touch that misses no points.”
Selena Royle was a hit with Grand Rapids audiences, and Wright vowed to hang on to her as long as he possibly could. For her second week, he indulged her with the stock premiere of the Vincent Lawrence comedy In Love with Love, which had run three months on Broadway with Lynn Fontanne, and for which Wright paid the highest royalty he had ever paid for a play. Those facts, which were widely reported in the press, and solid word-of-mouth for Selena Royle brought the Broadway Players their strongest week to date. Royle was playing Maugham’s Too Many Husbands the week Tracy returned and managed to fill all 1,400 seats for both the Friday and Saturday evening performances. She was considered a surefire asset for The Bootleggers, which had both Tracy and William Laveau repeating their roles from Pittsburgh, and hopes were high for yet another hit.
Tracy was ready to settle in with a good company—at least for a while—and knew a good week for The Bootleggers would put him in line for a lead by the end of the season. The production was, in some ways, better than in Pittsburgh, Selena bringing undeniable star power to the role of Nina. But the gritty realism and violence of the play didn’t go in a town that routinely turned out for comedy and romance and whose entertainment choices were made chiefly by women. The Bootleggers wasn’t a disaster but it ended the week in the red, and the following week Tracy found himself demoted to general business. Demoralized and homesick, he withdrew from the Broadway Players, insisting he would play only leads in the future, and left for Milwaukee to spend time with his wife and his month-old son.
The respite lasted all of three weeks.
Charley’s Aunt with Selena Royle and Ken Daigneau proved so popular that a Friday matinee was added to accommodate the demand. Cornered and Mary’s Ankle proved equally popular, but then Daigneau gave notice to go into a play on Broadway. Wright, with just three weeks left to the season, lacked a leading man. “A lack,” Royle said, “which could not be corrected in Grand Rapids, which could hardly be said to abound in theatrical talent. It was an expensive thing to send to New York for another actor, pay his fare both ways, and give him a salary commensurate with his two weeks’ expenses.”
A month earlier, Clarence Dean had watched Tracy play the bootlegger king alongside Selena Royle and suggested that Tracy “would indeed be a fitting man to play opposite so fine an actress as Miss Royle.” After conferring with his new star and John Ellis, who thought Tracy talented but cocky, Wright cabled Milwaukee and asked Tracy to come back in the role he wanted—as Selena Royle’s leading man.
Tracy quit a job selling pianos—something he admittedly wasn’t any good at—and returned to Grand Rapids with Louise and Johnny. They set up housekeeping at the Browning, an apartment hotel about seven blocks from the theater. Spence and Selena played a classic farce, Are You a Mason?, for their first week as a team, and although the pacing flagged on opening night and more than a few cues got dropped amid all the horseplay, a natural chemistry—the sheer fun of performing together—won the crowd over, and the week finished in the black.
Selena Royle, circa 1923. (NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY)
A far better test of the Tracy-Royle combination came the week of September 1. The company performed the intimate George Broadhurst drama Bought and Paid For, with Selena in the role of the social-climbing Virginia and Tracy as Stafford, the alcoholic millionaire she marries not for love, but status. The play was old (1911) but potent in its simplicity and its quiet moments, and both Tracy and Royle attacked their roles with subtlety and intelligence. The cast had the luxury of a matinee for the first performance—it was Labor Day—and had settled into their roles when Louise witnessed the 8:30 performance that evening.
The play gripped her as few did, with Stafford’s drunken rages reflected in Virginia’s desperation and terror. Tracy was chilling at the bottom of the second act when Selena locked herself in her bedroom and Spence, bent on spousal rape, grabbed the poker from the fireplace and beat the door in like a madman. A troubled hush fell over the auditorium.
The third act was devoted to Virginia’s determination to leave her husband, now sober and remorseful, and Tracy’s performance, all eagerness and resolve with a shading of doom, found a poignance largely missing in the text. Ignoring all his promises and his extravagant gifts, Selena placed her ring on the table at the end of the act and exited for good. Louise sat mesmerized as Spence at first stood motionless, unable to comprehend what had finally and inevitably happened to his marriage, and then, after what seemed an eternity, he picked the ring up and read the inscription softly to himself: “From Robert to Virginia with eternal love.”
His silences were astonishing in their power. No artificiality, no grand gestures, no playing to the gallery. He scarcely moved; it was all in his eyes and the way he held himself. Subdued, natural, he was the character in all of its subtle shadings. He demanded the crowd’s attention, dared them not to feel what he was feeling, not to think what he was thinking. He was unlike any actor they had ever seen before, not merely because he underplayed a fragile moment that could easily have drawn groans, but because he did it all from within.
“I suppose it might have taken two minutes,” Louise said, thinking back on the scene, “but the whole thing, the expression, the way he looked … was so moving. It was a beautiful moment, and I could see the lights on the marquee. And in my mind I said, ‘He is going to be a star. A really great star.’ ”
* * *
1 Actually, Crosman was fifty when Louise met her, but must have seemed older.
CHAPTER 2
A Born Actor
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It was an enclave, insular and, in a city known for brewing and bratwurst, predominantly Irish; a company town in some respects, working-class but by no means poor. The Catholic parish, St. Rose of Lima, counted nineteen millionaires, including the Millers of brewing fame, among its congregants, and its charismatic pastor, Father Patrick H. Durnin, was one of the city’s best-connected and most effective fund-raisers. Along West Clybourn Street were dentists, barbers, a cobbler, a druggist, four grocery stores, a plumber, hardware, and a men’s shop. The names on the businesses spoke for themselves: Corrigan, Curley, O’Leary.
Merrill Park didn’t start out that way. The original plat fell south of the estates along Grand Avenue at the west end of Milwaukee. Sherburn S. Merrill, general manager of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, built his Victorian mansion on Grand at Thirty-third Street, then gathered up the land along three sides, from Thirtieth to Thirty-fifth Streets and back to the edge of the Menomonee Valley. Merrill’s company, meanwhile, acquired nearly half a square mile of marshland in the valley itself, and in 1879 began work on the Shops of West Milwaukee, where the rolling stock of the state’s largest railroad would be manufactured and maintained.
James Curtis Page 4