James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Doing his best to convince her that he was not Joe, Tracy launched into his big speech, the concocting of a heroic death in France for a man who bore the name of her brother, selling it with all the conviction and force he could muster. “… The Jerries were getting ready for a raid of their own, so they were putting down a box barrage with light guns and howitzers and a few heavies. This officer was lying right in the middle of it. Well, all of a sudden a young fellow dashed out of a trench not far from where I was, and went for that officer … The chances were just about a million to one against him, and he must have known it, but he went out just the same … Afterward, we got what was left … the identification tag was still there … and that was the name … Joseph Anthony Paris!”

  It was a vaudeville moment, pat and heavy-handed, but Tracy managed real conviction where another actor—especially a student—might well have chewed the scenery. Lorraine tearfully withdrew, convinced (as now was the audience) that the man who was about to die was not her brother after all. He waited, and once she was out of earshot, he brought a gasp from the audience by answering from memory the verses she had just spoken to him:

  Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

  It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

  Seeing that death, a necessary end,

  Will come when it will come.

  And then, reaching for the lines:

  Cowards die many times before their death;

  The valiant never taste death but once.

  And with head held “proud and high,” he walked offstage to his date with the gallows.

  The applause was generous. “He loved to do this play,” Lorraine said, “because he was trying to keep me from finding out who he was … I did cry in [it] and they were real tears, because he was marvelous, just marvelous.” The Days review on November 1, 1921, described the attendance as “large and appreciative,” and Tracy, it said, played the part of the prisoner “in such a masterful way that the audience felt with him the emotions he portrayed.” Lorraine, it went on, “added another triumph to her long list of stage successes.”

  Abandoning any pretense of a medical career, Tracy flunked Zoology that quarter while pulling solid Bs in his English and Speech classes. Clark Graham directed the Mask and Wig productions, but it was Professor Boody who taught Dramatics at Ripon and who introduced him to the mechanics of performance. Boody gave him the process of getting into a part, the analysis of action and character, and the understanding of a play’s structure and purpose. He taught the use of the eyes as exhibited in the best motion picture acting and maintained the brow was the actor’s chief asset.2 “The response of those not talking,” he said, “is vastly more important than the actions of the person who holds the stage.” Boody’s great failing as a teacher of acting was an emphasis on imitation rather than immersion, the notion that a character was assembled from a toolbox of characteristics rather than acquired from within. “Never be yourself on stage,” he warned. “You are taking a part.”

  Boody’s suggestion that Spence and Lorraine start the Campus Players resulted in an ambitious plan to revive The Truth for a statewide tour over the Christmas recess. Elmer “Red” Wagner, functioning as the group’s road manager, laid out an itinerary of eleven towns over the space of two weeks, starting in Plymouth on December 22 and finishing up in Berlin on the evening of January 6, 1922. Rehearsals at Lorraine’s house were under way by Thanksgiving with first-year student Anna Klein serving as understudy for Ethyl Williams (who was teaching school in Neenah and could only rehearse on weekends). Lorraine remembered Spence eating his way through the entire holiday season: “He liked to go out in our kitchen to talk with my mother and eat all her doughnuts.” Mrs. Foat thought Spence likable enough, but puzzling in some respects. “Why does he always come over to go over lines at meal time?” she would ask.

  Bad weather dogged the intrepid company most nights, and they arrived in Princeton during a raging blizzard. The tour broke for Christmas, and Spence and Kenny drove down to Milwaukee, where Bill O’Brien, who was attending the Marquette College of Economics, met them. They regrouped at Ripon on the morning of the twenty-sixth and traveled to Wautoma, where Red Wagner met them at the hotel. Jim Gunderson, father of West Hall officer Coleman Gunderson, treated the cast to supper after the show. “I saw The Truth in the movies once,” he told Spence by way of a compliment, “and I think you imitated them real swell.”3

  On tour with the Campus Players of Ripon College, 1921. Left to right: Evelyn Engelbracht, Ken Edgers, Lorraine Foat, Tracy, Meta Bohlman. Seated: Ethyl Williams. (ROBERT B. EDGERS)

  A sampling of the West Hall gang, Ripon College, 1922. Tracy’s arm is around his pal Kenny Edgers. (ROBERT B. EDGERS)

  The next night, at Daly’s Theatre in Wisconsin Rapids, the mechanism supporting the curtain broke. It failed to drop at the climax of the play, and the actors had to improvise a graceful way of getting offstage. In Marshfield, the lights failed, throwing the house into an uproar. Tomahawk and Merrill came next, and Ken Edgers noticed that even the smallest of audiences unnerved his pal. “I remember Spence asking the person nearest him as he went on stage for his first appearance in any play to hit him hard between the shoulder blades to get him over his initial stage fright.” New Year’s Eve was spent in Antigo, the second in Wausau, the fifth in Fond du Lac. By the time they finished up on the sixth, they were no longer a group of amateurs, but the seasoned veterans of a whirlwind Chautauqua tour. “I found,” Tracy said of the experience, “that acting was good hard work as well as play.”

  There was one final performance of The Truth to be mounted on January 16, a benefit for the American Legion. Anticipation ran high—those who had only heard about the commencement performance wanted to see the play for themselves, while others who were there wanted to see it again. Then there was Red Wagner’s announcement in the paper that Ethyl Williams would be making her final appearance before a Ripon audience. The show at the Armory that Monday night sold out, and while the Ripon Commonwealth dutifully found Ethyl’s performance “masterly,” it went on at length about what Tracy had done: “His quiet manner of portraying the deceived husband was characterized by such an air of strong reserved force as to be quite remarkable. If his work in other productions has not already done so, the acting he displayed Monday night deservedly places him as a leader in the dramatic circles of the present student generation.”

  John and Carrie Tracy arrived for the play in their Wisconsin-built Kissel coupe and found their son talking excitedly about dramatic school. “He wants to be an actor,” John said to Kenny Edgers, barely containing his disgust. “Can you imagine that face ever being a matinee idol?” Subsequently there was a family conference with Professor Graham presiding. “As a result,” he said, “I wrote Mr. Sargent of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and he suggested that Tracy appear for a tryout.”

  The timing couldn’t have been better, for the final performance of The Truth also marked the last time Spence and Lorraine would share a stage. Directly after the performance, Lorraine left for Boston, where she would spend a year at the Emerson School of Oratory. In later years she would downplay her relationship with Tracy, maintaining it was their love of theatre that had so inexorably glued them together. “He took me to a dance once in a while,” she acknowledged, never forgetting how distracted and self-absorbed he could be. “We’d dance once, and he’d say, ‘Let’s go in the balcony,’ and we’d go up there and sit and watch everybody else dance. He wouldn’t dance. It was too much effort. And he’d say, ‘Let’s go down to the greasy spoon and get some food.’ And I put up with that because I liked to be in the plays with him. But I didn’t date him; I dated other people—boys who danced!”

  Clearly there was more to the relationship than just acting; in Lorraine’s old age (she lived to be ninety-three) the spark was still there. She was pretty, smart, and Protestant—three things that would always attract him—and she was serious about acting. �
��I think Spence thought that I was talented,” she allowed, “and he liked to play opposite me because we were both very intense about it. He was always Spence, but he also never steered off the track.”

  She and Tracy had real potential together, but he was never focused on girls so much as his work, and the excitement of finding something he could do well and with unbridled enthusiasm was greater than any sexual attraction. He was also careless in his manner of dress and oblivious to the interests of others. “He had a sweater,” she said, “and I think it was the same sweater that he wore all the time—it was always out in the elbows. He didn’t look very tidy on campus. He didn’t need [to look like that], but he was so independent … He didn’t care whether anyone else liked him or not. He really didn’t ever seem to crave the attention of people there in college.”

  It wasn’t Spence her parents objected to so much as the idea of his being an actor. Lorraine’s father was a carryover from the days when boardinghouses routinely posted signs reading NO ACTORS and traveling theatrical companies were regarded as if they were roving bands of Gypsies. Certainly the stage was no place for a respectable young woman, and Spence, it was feared, would drag her in that direction. Then Lorraine got to the meat of it: “My family had a very strong feeling … we were not Catholics, and my dad wouldn’t feel that it was a proper marriage. At that time there were very few people who crossed over. You think nothing of it now, but …”

  And so it was. A week after Lorraine’s departure for Emerson, Spencer Tracy was elected to Theta Alpha Phi and simultaneously called an end to the Campus Players. He never acted on a Ripon stage again.

  Though he came to Ripon as a “flunk-out”—arriving two or three weeks into the second quarter—Tracy quickly earned a reputation as a ringleader of sorts, taking a key role in West Hall initiation rites and bolstering the school’s well-earned reputation for hazing. (“Frosh! Go upstairs and warm a toilet seat for me!”) As premier of Alpha Phi Omega, he once put the owner of a pet rabbit on trial for paternity. Another time, he indulged a newfound taste for cigars by proposing a series of “smokers” between rival houses, permitting freshmen to provide both eats and smokes while upperclassmen feted the likes of Silas Evans and Clark Graham. He generally spoke on such occasions, ribbing the guests, deadpan, and picking arguments with some of the more academically talented students.

  Tracy’s zeal for one-upmanship found a constructive outlet in Professor Boody’s debate class, where it soon dawned on him that debate was just another facet of performance. He joined Pi Kappa Delta, and when tryouts were announced for the intercollegiate season, he went after a spot on the Eastern team as aggressively as he would pursue the lead in a play. “There were two places to be filled,” Curtis MacDougall, a West Hall journalism major, recalled, “and competition was quite severe. The candidates were grouped into teams of three, and there was really a tournament with judging. My team had on it Tracy and Newton Jones, another fraternity brother. We won. We went undefeated, we beat everybody else. And I’m sure a great deal of the reason was Tracy’s platform performance.”

  Boody had come to the college in 1915 with a mandate to raise its forensic profile. He did so by quadrupling the number of annual debates and building an admirable record of “strong colleges met.” He needed three men for a home team, but the most coveted slots were those for a tour of Eastern campuses, debating the Veterans’ Adjusted Compensation Bill then before Congress. Given the press attention the team would draw, they were also the slots in which he wanted his most able performers. On December 2, 1921, Boody announced his choices: J. Harold Bumby, who had been opener for Ripon the previous two seasons, Curtis MacDougall, and Tracy, whose “forceful presentation” and complementary stage experience won him a place on the team despite the dean’s concerns over his grades.

  Deep into rehearsals for The Truth, Tracy took his selection for the team in stride until Clark Graham’s letter to Franklin Sargent of the American Academy brought forth the offer of an audition in New York. At once the tour took on a whole new significance, and it was Graham who encouraged Tracy to use Sada Cowan’s two-character dialogue Sintram of Skagerrak as his tryout piece. Spence and Ethyl Williams had performed the brief one-act as a benefit for the Harwood Scholarship Fund over the Christmas holidays. Sintram’s lyrical effusions of love for the sea struck Graham as ideal for showcasing the way his student could handle difficult dialogue while managing the build in intensity that brings the play to its tragic conclusion.

  On February 21, 1922, chapel period was given over to a kind of pep rally for the college debaters, Tracy earnestly urging the student body to “keep the home fires burning” while three of their number were “clashing verbally” with Eastern collegians. They left the next day in the midst of a terrific snowstorm and stopped at the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago. Lionel Barrymore was appearing in The Claw, and they all went to see it. “I remember that night Tracy emphatically saying that he was going to go on the stage,” MacDougall said. “He wanted to be an actor.”

  The next morning they were off for Bloomington, where they would face Illinois Wesleyan at Amie Chapel in “Old Main,” the university’s Hedding Hall. A reception committee met them at the train and were genuinely solicitous over the course of their stay. The Wesleyan team failed to establish a case and Tracy, in his first intercollegiate debate appearance, helped win a two-to-one decision over Illinois with a strong rebuttal. “He never spoke a line that somebody, usually me, hadn’t written for him,” MacDougall said. “I wrote his main speech, and we wrote out his potential rebuttal pieces, short answers to points which we were almost certain the opposition would bring up. And, during the debate, we’d sit at the platform, and when one of those matters came up, that we thought Spence could well handle, we’d toss a slip of paper over to him as a reminder and he’d go to it brilliantly.”

  Lionel Barrymore in The Claw. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  The team headed for Boston, passing through Cleveland, Buffalo, and Niagara Falls on their way to Hamilton, Ontario, where Spence and “Mac” went to church that Sunday while Bumby visited some relatives in Burlington. They spent the twenty-seventh in Montreal, their last stop before Portland, and Tracy, MacDougall remembered, “asked Bumby and me to wait while he went into the big cathedral there, where we waited and we waited and we waited. He finally came out, and he announced that the result was in the bag, that he had spent the time praying that we would win the debate at Bowdoin [College]. We went on blithely to Maine.”

  The team met Bowdoin at Brunswick on March 1 and lost the decision two to one. Tracy, despite the loss, was ranked first in excellence by the judges and received special mention in the Portland newspapers. The next night they met Colby College at Waterville, where they were royally received but handed a nondecision by the judges.

  Fittingly, Mac and Harold both picked up colds at Brunswick and spent a full day in Boston without leaving the hotel. Spence took in the city, walking off nervous energy, anxious and impatient to get on to New York. He caught up with Lorraine Foat, told her of the American Academy audition and all it meant to him. “I know at the time his father thought it was disgusting. A sissy sort of thing to do…[But] Spence was so determined to do it, even if he didn’t have a cent. He was going to go to New York, he was going to make something [of himself]…He wanted to get ahead.”

  Tracy’s first glimpse of New York City was the cavernous interior of Grand Central Terminal and the vaulted blue ceiling of the main concourse. Stepping out into the crisp night air at Forty-second and Vanderbilt, he could see the electric white glow of the Times Square theater district four blocks to the west. Marilyn Miller was in Sally at the New Amsterdam that night. Six Cylinder Love was at the Sam H. Harris, and Helen Hayes was appearing in To the Ladies at the Liberty. Other theaters on other streets held Roland Young, Estelle Winwood, Alice Brady, Blanche Yurka, Frank Fay, Laurette Taylor, Florence Eldridge, Lenore Ulric, Fred Astaire, Lynne Overman, Violet Heming, and Henry Hull.

/>   At Spence’s insistence, the boys took a four-dollar room at the Waldorf-Astoria and got directions to a nearby speakeasy. The fare was Italian, the air stifling, the service poor. Spence delighted in the widened eyes of his small-town teammates, neither of whom had ever been outside the state of Wisconsin. It was the first time Mac, for instance, had ever seen a woman smoke a cigarette, and he was so scandalized by the experience he couldn’t enjoy his meal. A lot of walking got done that weekend amid the orange juice and hot dog stands that populated Broadway in the wake of Prohibition, the off-the-arm cafeterias, the phony auction parlors, the medicine shows and two-bit photographers, the cut-rate haberdasheries, the drugstores and bookstores that lined both sides of the street between Forty-second and Fifty-third. Through it all, Tracy’s mind was never far from his appointment with Franklin Sargent on Monday, and he insisted that Bumby accompany him.

  The entrance to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts was at the northeast corner of Carnegie Hall, Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, a modest portal alongside the grand Italianate entrance to America’s preeminent concert hall. The president’s office was on the first floor, as it had been since the academy’s move to the hall in 1896. Franklin Haven Sargent had founded the AADA as the Lyceum School of Acting in 1884, the first institution in the United States created expressly for the purpose of dramatic instruction. Now sixty-six, Sargent was still at the helm, personally passing on all admissions and teaching the course in Classic Drama that was the cornerstone of the school’s curriculum. A taciturn man, Sargent asked Tracy if he had brought “anything like a skit.” Tracy produced his copy of Sintram, and when he suggested the passage would work best with two actors, Sargent agreed to read the lines of Gunhilde. Bumby settled back to watch as Tracy assumed the posture of the brooding Sintram, frail and listless.