James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  After ten years of service, John Tracy left Milwaukee Corrugating sometime over the summer of 1913, and the family departed Bay View for Milwaukee proper. The move must have been for the better, for the family relocated to a fashionable stretch of Grand Avenue, almost directly across from the Pabst Mansion and within blocks of the old parish at St. Rose’s, where Spencer would now return for his last two years of grade school. He had to relinquish the lamplighting job, but found work as a towel boy at the Milwaukee Athletic Club, where his father held a membership and where he would learn to box from Wisconsin middleweight Gus Christie. These were, in some ways, the most unsettled years of his young life. The household theatrics ceased, but he never lost that childlike quality, the eagerness to inhabit another skin.

  By 1916 the family was renting a Colonial Revival on a tree-lined street in the Story Hill section of Wauwatosa, a bedroom community just west of the Menomonee River. John Tracy had gone into sales as a representative for the Sterling Motor Truck Company, whose plant and offices were nearby in West Allis. The house on Woodlawn Court had three bedrooms, cherrywood floors, and a formal dining room where the Tracys did a lot of entertaining. Spence saw little of Carroll, who had finished high school and was doing clerical work for the Milwaukee Road. He entered Wauwatosa High in the fall of 1915, where, freed from the strict discipline of the Dominican nuns, he failed spectacularly. His only arguments with his father, he later confirmed, were over school. “I might have enjoyed school if I had been doing the thing I wanted to do. My trouble was not having a definite ambition or goal on which to concentrate. I wanted to be doing something that would hold my interest, but I had no idea what it would be.”

  He displayed an entrepreneurial streak, and at one point hatched a scheme with a neighbor boy to sell the water they got from a spring under the Grand Avenue viaduct at a nickel a bottle. Significantly, he was returned to St. John’s in the fall, and when his father was asked to take over the Sterling Truck office in Kansas City, Missouri, his only hesitation was over what to do about Spencer. After some inquiries, John enrolled the boy at St. Mary’s Academy, a Jesuit boarding school twenty-five miles west of Topeka, where there would be no distractions from a regimen of study, sports, and the sacraments. Life on the tall-grass prairie must have come as a shock after the comparative excitement of downtown Milwaukee. Separated from his family and friends and limited to just one movie a month, he may well have been tempted to join the boys caught gambling or flagging down cars at the edge of campus, hoping for a ride into town. He lasted just five weeks at St. Mary’s, and no credits accrued as a result of the experiment.

  In Kansas City, Spencer was placed at the Rockhurst Academy, another Jesuit institution, where he could go home to his parents at night and where, as he later acknowledged, they took the “badness” out of him “almost immediately.” The Rev. Michael P. Dowling, the school’s founder, named it Rockhurst because the grounds were stony and there was a grove of forest nearby. “I remember Rockhurst as a big building,” Tracy later told the Kansas City Star, “and I remember pursuing to the best of my capabilities the study of Latin and geometry … I also remember that there were some boys at Rockhurst and in Kansas City who were mighty good fighters.”

  Official transcripts show he passed first-year Latin, as he did English, Algebra, and Ancient History, and that he did B-level work in Religion and Bookkeeping. The Jesuits were admirable men, spiritual and rigorously educated, and there were few boys who came under their influence who weren’t inspired at some point to consider the priesthood. There was also the bustle of Union Station, fairly new at the time, and Electric Park, with its primitive thrill rides. Most important, he was “almost positive” he saw Lionel Barrymore for the first time onstage, truly a signal event, for Barrymore impressed him as no other actor ever had. He seemed, in fact, to be adapting well to Kansas City when the decision was made to close the Sterling office in the spring of 1917. The semester ended in June and the Tracys eventually returned to Story Park, where they took another house on the same block as before.

  The way he remembered it, Tracy first met Bill O’Brien when the two were employed at a Milwaukee lumber yard. “I started for two bucks and a half a week, piling lumber after school,” he said. O’Brien, on the other hand, thought they had met as students at Marquette Academy, and that they stacked wood only on Saturdays. “One of the clearest recollections I have of Spence is of the two of us in dirty overalls and jumpers sitting in the dining room of what was, in those days, Milwaukee’s swankiest apartment hotel. We were stowing away a modest breakfast of grapefruit, ham and eggs, toast, jelly, and milk. At the end of the meal, Spence airily scrawled his signature across the bill and we left.” The Tracys, back from Kansas City, were stopping at the Stratford Arms Hotel, adjacent to the campus of Marquette University. “We worked in a lumber yard to pick up a couple of iron men so we could roister around on Saturday nights. Our breakfasts usually cost more than we made during the day, but Spence’s father paid for them.”

  The academy stood on a hill at Tenth and State Streets. It was a block over from the massive Pabst brewing complex, and the smell of hops hung in the air. The location led to the students being referred to as “hilltoppers,” a name that has stuck ever since. “All of us Catholics wanted to enter Marquette Academy,” O’Brien wrote in his autobiography, “but the cost made our parents sigh.” Bill, on a scholarship, was five months older than Spence, taller, darker, rounder, more of a match for Carroll Tracy than for his younger brother. But O’Brien, like Tracy, was “infected” with a love of the stage, and they found time to see such beloved figures as Jane Cowl, David Warfield, Otis Skinner, Lenore Ulric, James O’Neill, and Maude Adams—usually from high in peanut heaven. The great vaudeville attractions of the day came through Milwaukee by way of Chicago—McIntyre and Heath, Harry Houdini, Bert Williams, whose expressive pantomimes were models of economy. A particular thrill came in May 1918 when Madame Sarah Bernhardt headlined at the Majestic and necessitated multiple visits by playing Du théâtre au champ d’honneur during the week and La dame aux camélias on the weekend.

  Spence held on to the things that comforted and excited him, and although he was fascinated by vaudeville, his interest in the stage wasn’t reawakened until he and Bill met and they started seeing plays together. The boys may even have arranged their own performances, for E. R. Moak, then city editor on the Milwaukee Free Press (and later a Variety staffer) remembered the first time he met Tracy was when the two of them came to enlist the paper’s support for an “amateur dramatic enterprise” they were promoting. Though Spencer’s grades weren’t as stellar as they had been at Rockhurst, O’Brien was unquestionably a good influence. “Spence and I were a combination,” he said. “He was an introvert and I was an extrovert.” O’Brien went out for sports—baseball, football, basketball—and carried a full load of classes. Tracy worked, played some casual baseball, and eventually took on a class load equal to what Bill himself was tackling. O’Brien went to Mass each Sunday, an acolyte when Spence had long since given it up. Both were restless young men with a war going on, and however much the academy meant to their parents, they had a hard time keeping their minds on their studies.

  “I was itching for a chance to go and see some excitement,” Tracy said, and he tried enlisting when the school year was scarcely half over. “I knew very well where there was a U.S. Marines recruiting station, for I’d seen it lots of times before.” He walked up and down Wells Street a dozen times, then went inside. “I want to join the Marines,” he told the gray-haired officer behind the desk, his voice cracking. The man took down his name, address, the answers to a few questions, then asked his age. “I’d been all ready to say, ‘Twenty, sir.’ But he was looking me right in the eye. I stammered out, ‘Seventeen years and eight months, sir.’ The recruiting officer put the form aside, stood, and held out his hand. “Thanks for trying, youngster,” he said.

  Spence left the office, as he later put it, “feeling like a chum
p,” and he said nothing to his family about it. When he celebrated his eighteenth birthday, he was immersed in Greek, Latin, third-year English, History, and Geometry. On April 13, 1918, a hundred thousand spectators lined the curbs as a three-hour parade in support of the third Liberty Loan marched down the center of America’s most German city. The next day, the Whitehouse Theatre on Third Street began a week-long engagement of The Kaiser—The Beast of Berlin (“The Photoplay That Made New York Cheer Like Mad”), kicking off a naval recruitment competition with Chicago that was, by early May, delivering seventy-five recruits a day. The campaign reached its zenith on Mother’s Day weekend, when Lieutenant John Philip Sousa arrived in town with his 250-member “Jackie” band from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. The city seemed to be crawling with sailors, and a half-page ad in the Sunday paper bore the headline: THE NAVY NEEDS YOU! YOU NEED THE NAVY! As Bill O’Brien put it, “The bands played, the drill parades started, the Liberty Bond drives were on, and Spence and myself and some others left school one afternoon and went downtown to the enlistment headquarters of the Navy.”

  They didn’t join that day, but they came plenty close. In the O’Brien household on Fourteenth Street, cooler heads prevailed and Bill was persuaded to finish the school year before enlisting. Spence, however, had no wish to continue at Marquette, and the prospect of losing an entire semester’s credits didn’t seem to bother him in the least. That night, as Carroll remembered it, he marched into the kitchen, wearing “that crooked one-sided grin” that had become something of a trademark, and said to his mother, “I’ve enlisted in the Navy.” Carrie instantly burst into tears, but John Tracy “was sort of proud of the kid.” As for Carroll: “I was out of the house and down the street before anyone could stop me. I enlisted too, not so much for patriotic motives, mind you, but because of my desire to be near Spence and to keep an eye on him.” It was Monday, May 13, and naval records show that Carroll Edward Tracy, in one of the few impulsive acts of his life, did indeed sign up for service that day. What he didn’t know was that his brother was merely floating the idea, eager to gauge their parents’ reaction, and that he hadn’t yet done what he said he had done. Once Carroll made his move, though, Spence’s bluff had been called, and he quietly and somewhat sheepishly joined the navy the following day, Tuesday, May 14, 1918.

  Navy seaman, age eighteen. (SUSIE TRACY)

  Enrolled as a “Landsman for Electrician (Radio),” he went straight to school and bypassed boot camp. After vaccinations for cowpox and typhoid, he was sent to the Naval Training Station in North Chicago, where he gallantly spent the rest of the war in a classroom. “The training, the discipline, and the healthy life not only did me good physically,” he said, “but mentally as well. I realized for the first time that a man must make his own way in life, that he must assume certain responsibilities, and that a man can’t receive too much education, because the Navy demands alert minds.”

  On the rare weekend when he could get away on leave, Tracy headed home to Woodlawn Court, where, on at least one occasion, he was accompanied by “six of the toughest-looking sailors” Carrie had ever seen. “They were decidedly not what you would call polite specimens of manhood. They apparently were so stunned by our mode of living that they asked Spencer if Mr. Tracy was a bootlegger, and each of them ended up the weekend visit by borrowing $25 from Mr. Tracy. In fact, John used to say it cost him $100 a month, as well as the government its share, to keep Spencer in the service.” After the Armistice, he was sent to Hampton Roads, where Carroll, who spent most of his stretch in Detroit, thought he had some sort of an ordnance job. “I didn’t sleep very well at night because of worrying about him, until I heard through a mutual friend that Spence was doing okay; he was acting as an aide or some such cushy job for an officer.” Bill O’Brien, who waited until August to enlist, never made it out of training.

  “When I got into the Navy,” Tracy said, “the least I expected was to see the world through a porthole. As it was, I wound up in a training station at Norfolk, Virginia, looking eastward to the sea and considering myself lucky if they let me go cruising in a whaleboat.” He once made a veiled reference to wild liberties in Norfolk, but remembered the people there with considerable fondness. “They turned that city over to a group of young men who had traveled thousands of miles from home. They made us feel that it was our home. It got us into a couple of rows with authorities, but they understood that it was all in good spirit and never complained. The difficulties weren’t serious, but they would have meant demerits if the Naval authorities had heard of them. They never did.”

  Having achieved the rank of seaman second class, Tracy was released from active duty on February 19, 1919, given a sixty-dollar discharge bonus, and sent home to Milwaukee. He later remembered going to work for his father, who was still with Sterling Truck at the time, and it is known that he drove in truck convoys before and probably after the war. “He was a handful when he was a teenager and a little bit older,” his cousin Jane said,

  and that was when he was driving these caravans of trucks across the country … He came to Aberdeen the summer I was born, 1917. He said this on many occasions: “If it wasn’t for me she wouldn’t be alive.” Because my mother couldn’t feed me and [when] it was found that I couldn’t tolerate formula, I was sent to the wet nurse. My father had bought a Mitchell car in celebration [of my birth]—because we had all this money from the farms that later collapsed—but nobody could drive the car and he refused to learn. (Eventually, I guess, he figured my mother would learn to drive.) Somehow, they got ahold of Spencer and he came. Of course, he was the car driver and the truck driver in the family. Spencer would drive me to the wet nurse every four hours to be fed.

  Neither Tracy nor Bill O’Brien would return to Marquette in the fall of 1919. O’Brien tried law school, but found football more engaging. Spence seemed perfectly happy ferrying trucks across the country, and could have done so indefinitely had his father not wanted a college degree for at least one of his boys. Carroll’s career had ended abruptly in 1917 when he dropped out of Dartmouth, but Spencer, who had excelled in radio school at Great Lakes, still had to get through high school before he could even think of college. He applied to Northwestern Military and Naval Academy with the intention of completing his senior year, and the fact that Dr. Henry H. Rogers, the school’s principal, was willing to take on such an indifferent student was a testament to the academy’s declining enrollment.

  Spencer made the connection between Milwaukee and Springfield by rail, traveling on to the city of Lake Geneva via stage. The first look he got of Davidson Hall, the neoclassical edifice which fronted the lake, was from the steamer that connected the city to the academy’s wooded grounds on the opposite shore.

  The academic year began on the afternoon of September 24, 1919, as Dr. Rogers began the hellish task of gathering credits from the other schools Tracy had attended. The returns were not heartening. And Rogers was getting conflicting accounts of what exactly the plan was to be after high school. Spencer told him his father had left the “college question” entirely up to him, while John told him he wanted Spencer to go to the University of Wisconsin “at least for the first year.” John, Carrie, and Carroll came for Thanksgiving dinner, but the topic of college was scrupulously avoided. The Christmas furlough was similarly harmonious. Still, Spencer’s grades, while not exemplary, were the best of his life, and after the first of the year, his father was encouraged to aim higher than Madison. He applied to Marquette for war credits to cover the semester left incomplete when his son enlisted in the navy, then wrote Colonel Royal Page Davidson, superintendent of the academy: “Assuming that Spencer applies himself diligently until June and then remains at Northwestern for the summer course, would he be able to establish enough credits to enter the Wharton course at Pennsylvania University?”

  At the end of the 1919–20 school year, he had only ten credits toward the sixteen necessary for graduation. John pulled him out of Northwestern and brought him
back to Milwaukee, where he arranged for him to do some work at St. Rose’s. What happened that summer is no longer a matter of record, but when Spencer entered Milwaukee’s West Division High School in September, scarcely three months later, he had acquired two additional credits. That fall, he began his senior year in English and Economics, took a Sales course, and excelled at Public Speaking.

  By all accounts, Tracy emerged from Northwestern an adult, confident and disciplined. The academy’s geographical isolation and its twin emphases on personal responsibility and scholastic achievement hastened the maturing process. As with Bill O’Brien, he also responded to the influence of a close friend, in this case his roommate, a slender kid from Seattle named Ken Edgers. Two years younger than Spence, Kenny was a friendly sort, uncomplicated and funny, a good student whose interests and habits rubbed off on the more rough-hewn Tracy. The two went ice skating on the mirrorlike surface of the lake, played basketball, spent long hours in study hall. Kenny, a tenor, went out for glee club, while Spence played bass tuba in the school band. Neither was heavy enough for football, although Tracy managed some time in uniform as a substitute. John and Carrie met Ken for the first time when they came to campus on Thanksgiving and were so impressed they invited him to spend the Christmas holidays in Milwaukee.