James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  I have always lived here, as you know, little comrade … In that old house just the other side of the cliff, I was born; weighed down with riches and an untarnished name. My people had intermarried closely … no strong, vital peasant’s blood ran through my veins … My mother’s bedroom faced the ocean, so the first sound which reached my ears was the moan of the sea. My mother died when I was born, so the sea became my mother and sang her lullabies to me until I fell asleep, stilled by her soft crooning…

  As Tracy spoke, Sargent scribbled notes on an evaluation form: Personality “sensitive & masculine”…Stage Presence “good (not technically)”…Voice “untrained but natural”…Pronunciation “Fair”…Reading “a little declamatory yet sincere”…Spontaneity “good”…Versatility and Characterization “passable”…Distinction “good”…Pantomime “crude but manly”…Dramatic Instinct “fair underdeveloped”…Intelligence “good”…Imagination “good.” When he finished, Sargent gave Tracy a long piercing look and said, “Yes, yes, yes.”

  He initiated a discussion of finances: tuition for the Academy’s Junior Course was $400, playbooks and makeup extra. Board in the immediate area would cost ten to twenty dollars a week, maybe more. Tracy said his father disapproved of his becoming an actor and was unlikely to cover the cost. Sargent, in turn, suggested a scholarship might be possible, something he rarely offered a first-year student. Tracy, he noted, was medium-dark in coloring, well proportioned, and in “very good” physical condition—a very masculine applicant for a program where such types were rare. At the bottom of the sheet he wrote “Acceptable Oct. Junior F.H.S.”

  There were four days left to the recreational end of the trip, but they weren’t days to be wasted in New York or Washington, D.C. Back at Ripon, Kenny Edgers had fallen desperately ill, and Tracy seized the excuse to return home at once. He found Kenny recovering, and they started walking to build up his strength, five miles a day. Spence told him about Sargent and the academy and the offer of the scholarship, as if that might swing some weight when it came to his father. And, in the end, Lorraine thought that it might: “His father, I know, finally said, ‘You can go for a year, and if at the end of that time you haven’t hit it off big, then you will come back and go into business with me.’ Spence spoke of it as something that he was being indulged in, and he was determined to show his father that he was going to be a success.”

  Tracy presided over his last fraternity meeting on March 14, 1922, and returned to Milwaukee that same day. His six months as premier had left Alpha Phi Omega with new bylaws, new ceremonials, a new constitution, and thirteen new members.

  A month after he left, Tracy won the degree of proficiency, order of debate, in Pi Kappa Delta. The announcement of his departure in Ripon College Days concluded with the words: “His ability will be sorely missed next fall.”

  Spencer Tracy entered the American Academy of Dramatic Arts during its thirty-eighth year. The junior class consisted of 142 pupils, the majority women who fancied themselves stageworthy and who, more importantly, had the tuition and wherewithal to keep the academy going. Only a small portion of its graduates ever went professional, but those who did enjoyed long and distinguished careers. Among the academy’s past students, William Powell ’13 was appearing in Bavu at the Earl Carroll Theatre, and Edward G. Robinson (also ’13) was at the Plymouth in The Deluge. Howard Lindsay, who staged To the Ladies, was an academy graduate, as was Dale Carnegie ’12, who developed his famous course immediately upon leaving the school. In England, Marion Lorne ’04 was starring in the plays of her husband, Walter C. Hackett. In California, Cecil B. DeMille ’00 was directing movies for Famous Players.

  On the faculty were playwright-director Edward Goodman; actors Lemuel Josephs, Joseph Adelman, and Philip Loeb; and actor-director Edwin R. Wolfe. George Currie taught Physical Training, Pantomime, and Life Study; Wellington Putnam, Vocal Training; James J. Murray, Fencing and Stage Dueling. All were presided over by the redoubtable Charles Jehlinger, who directed the senior plays and gave an occasional lecture. “Jehli,” as he was known to nearly everyone, had been with Franklin Sargent from the beginning in that he was in the school’s very first graduating class. Twelve years later, Jehlinger returned as faculty, concurrent with the school’s move to Carnegie Hall. He didn’t teach any of the junior classes, but his presence was felt throughout the academy, a martinet of sorts where Sargent could be gloomy and reclusive.

  Tracy found a room on West Seventy-sixth Street, around the corner from the New-York Historical Society, and reported for classes on the morning of April 3, 1922. He found himself plunged almost immediately into an intensive regimen of vocal and physical training, covering everything from hygiene and makeup to dancing, fencing, and diction. Defects in speech, projection, and posture were identified and corrective exercises prescribed. Control and resonance of the voice came next, breathing, word colorings, and accents; physical presence and poise, terminology and workmanship; the mechanics of business—standing, walking, listening.

  The building itself was a stimulating environment, Andrew Carnegie having poured $2 million—roughly nine-tenths of the total cost—into what was conceived as New York’s finest concert venue. The Main Hall was accompanied by two smaller auditoriums—a recital hall underneath and a chamber music hall adjacent. After its opening in 1891, Carnegie added two wings of studio offices and apartments above and around the structure, removing the original roof and building over it. The spaces were typically tall, with enormous windows and skylights; some studios (which often doubled as living spaces) ran the entire length of the building. Artists, such as Frederick E. Church and Edwin Blashfield, shared the building with architects, writers, photographers, dance studios, voice coaches, and the academy, which occupied the first floor of the northeast tower and parts of three upper floors. There was a large room with a raised platform on which the students were taught dancing, fencing, and how to fall gracefully down the steps. The doors to the rooms were usually left open, especially in the summer, and the sounds of piano lessons, recitals, dance workshops, and play rehearsals mingled in the hallways. Spaces were constantly being vacated and upgraded; the walls were eight feet thick in some places.

  Two months into the term, Tracy embarked on a campaign to lure Lorraine Foat to New York. He had the academy send her a catalog, then followed up with a letter: “This really is quite the place, the only place, in fact, for one who wishes to follow the stage. Look over the catalog and if there is anything you wish to know further, let me know and I’ll try to give you the dope. You had better come here, Lorraine—you won’t be sorry. The school is recognized by all theatrical people, and nearly all the present stars of the stage are graduates. I have been working mighty hard but enjoy it very much, and I have been encouraged very greatly since coming here.”

  Lorraine responded that she’d come in the fall, hesitant to risk her father’s disapproval. Of course, there was no shortage of girls at the school, and acting, if only in character, had become Tracy’s way of relating to them. Sorting through the choices, he took up with a red-haired Texan named Olga Goodman. She was more serious than a lot of the other girls, certainly more talented, but Spence, as she remembered him, was “a very ambitious student” who “actually had little time for fun, and little money.” Their dates consisted of “sandwiches made up at a delicatessen near Carnegie Hall and rides atop a Fifth Avenue bus.”

  The matter of money was a sensitive subject, Spence having no real talent for either making or preserving it. His father had agreed to cover his housing costs—no mean concession—and Carroll, who had embarked on a sales career, slipped a little “happy cabbage” into the letters he wrote. It was, however, Bill O’Brien who knew that Wisconsin legislators had authorized cash bonus payments to Badger State veterans, and that they had created an education option that paid up to $1,080 if a vet wanted to continue in school. “We began pulling wires, told the Board we couldn’t get the training we wanted in Wisconsin,” O’Brien said. Bill
had played both football and Charley’s Aunt at Marquette, and when his uncle Charlie (who managed Manhattan’s Union Club) invited both him and his mother to spend the summer of 1920 in New York City, he did so gladly and with an eye toward finding work as an actor. “I remained in New York and managed to get on in the merry-merry (a musical comedy chorus), but, after all, I knew that hipping the ballet was not going to teach me to be a Booth or a Barrett.”

  That fall, while Spence was working to complete high school at West Division, Bill auditioned for Franklin Sargent and was accepted into the program. Then, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Bill’s father fell ill and he was forced to return to Milwaukee before taking a single day of instruction. O’Brien entered the Marquette School of Economics instead, but when he heard of Tracy’s own audition and acceptance at the academy, he finished out the semester with the intention of joining Spence in New York.

  The money from the state was doled out at the rate of thirty dollars a month, which would enable the two men to survive only if they shared a room. “We darn near starved there several times,” O’Brien said. “Spence wouldn’t take any more from his family than mine could send me because he wanted us to be on an equal footing.” Bill arrived during the summer of 1922, aiming to start at the academy in October. To commemorate the occasion, he assumed the name of his paternal grandfather and became, for purposes of the stage, Pat O’Brien.

  They found quarters on West End Avenue between Ninety-eighth and Ninety-ninth, one block over from Broadway on the Upper West Side. “It was two steep shaky flights up,” O’Brien wrote, “but as Spencer said, ‘It has a ceiling.’ ” Tracy took Pat to a tearoom where the students met for lunch, and in short order Pat was seeing one of Spence’s classmates, a blue-eyed gal from San Francisco named Dolores Graves.

  At the academy, Tracy progressed to dramatic analysis, life study, pantomime, and vocal interpretation, playing scenes in the middle of the classroom with other hopeful and impossibly earnest young actors. The term would end with “examination plays” that would give each student at least three good opportunities before faculty to show, after twenty-four weeks of hard work, what he or she could do with a straight part, a comedy part, and a character part. The glut of one-acts came in late August, the students taking full charge of lights, makeup, and costuming, and continued unabated through the first week of September. To nobody’s surprise, Tracy was judged fit to enter the senior class and thereby join the academy stock company, as were fifteen others, among them Sterling Holloway, Kay Johnson, Muriel Kirkland, George Meeker, Monroe Owsley, Ernest Woodward, and Thelma Ritter.

  The senior course was the intensive and continuous production of plays, and every week brought a new text, a new part, a new audience of students, instructors, and invited guests. The first three months were spent in the Carnegie Lyceum, the choral space under the Main Hall that Franklin Sargent commandeered upon his arrival in 1896. Seating eight hundred on two levels, it was blasted out of some of the hardest rock on earth. There were no flies, so the scenery had to be slid into place from the wings, but the Carnegie Lyceum had an intimacy few New York theaters could match. When full (which was seldom), the exchange of energy between the actors and the audience—“that breathing, panting mass creature,” as O’Brien referred to it—was extraordinary. The last three months were given over to the mounting of the best of the productions as matinees at Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum Theatre on Forty-fifth Street, where the students could get the experience of working in a major commercial theater, and where the audience would be composed of members of the general public.

  In charge of it all was Jehlinger, a flinty old man with large piercing eyes and a voice that could slice through masonry. His vociferous criticisms inspired both awe and terror in his students, and occasionally even murderous impulses. (After a particularly stinging tirade, Edward G. Robinson is said to have heaved a table at him, knocking him flat.) Jehli unnerved almost everyone, yet he never got to Tracy—at least to the point where Tracy would admit as much.

  There was, in fact, much in Jehlinger’s teachings that confirmed Tracy’s own instinctive technique, principal among them Jehli’s insistence that the character and the actor must always be one and the same. (“You can’t have two brains in one head or you are a monster!”) The actor was the servant of the character, Jehlinger taught, and it was up to the character to run things, to make the performance inevitable. His mantra was “give in” and he repeated it again and again: “Don’t worry, just yield. It will all handle itself if you surrender … Human impulse is the only thing that counts, not stage directions … Give in to your instincts. Instinct must rule in performance, not judgment … So long as your mind is on acting instead of the thoughts of the character, you make no progress …Obey your impulses… It is better to be crude by overdoing than to be negative. Obey your impulses at any cost. Don’t fear mistakes. Be fearless! Yield! Obey!”

  Tracy’s first appearance before a New York audience took place on October 20, 1922, when he acted in a curtain-raiser called The Wedding Guests at the Carnegie Lyceum. Three days later, on October 23, Lorraine came for her tryout and found that he was still keyed up: “Here was Spence, pacing up and down in front, watching. Why was I late? ‘You can’t afford to miss this time that was all set up for you.’ And when I got out of this taxi, ‘It must have cost you a fortune! You should have come on the streetcar!’ So we went right up and had the audition. I remember where I sat … I was kind of nervous about that. And then [Mr. Sargent] said, ‘Do this scene,’ and we did the whole play.” The play, of course, was The Valiant, and once again came the tension and the desperate seeking, and once again came the tears. Sargent didn’t have to pretend; he was genuinely impressed. He wrote “good” for most every line item on Lorraine’s audition sheet. It was, in fact, an altogether better evaluation than Tracy himself had received some seven months earlier. She was acceptable for the January course, Sargent affirmed, and he said, in fact, that he would like to meet the man who trained such outstanding prospects.

  Tracy was relieved, even jubilant, and to celebrate they joined up with Pat and Dolores and went to 790 West End for hot dogs. “We didn’t have anything very fancy,” Lorraine recalled. “We had to climb a flight of stairs to get to this apartment these two boys were living in, and they did use the gas flame in the gas lights to cook their hot dogs. They didn’t have a regular stove. I was so impressed with these two fellows trying to cook a meal for us. We had a wonderful time talking; Pat was fun to be with.”

  They took her back to the train with the expectation that she would be back after the first of the year, when she would see Spence onstage at the Lyceum and aspire to the same thing for herself. Pat started at the academy just as Spence was rehearsing The Wooing of Eve, a full-length play in which he had been assigned the second male lead. In quick succession, he did The Importance of Being Earnest (with Sterling Holloway in the lead); Milne’s Wurzel-Flummery, a whimsical one-act; and Knut at Roeskilde, a two-act tragedy. O’Brien, meanwhile, immersed himself in the junior course, drawing on Spence’s prior experience and his availability to run lines. “Pat and I used to read lines to each other, rearrange the furniture and pace back and forth doing bits of business as if we were in front of the footlights,” Tracy recounted. “The other roomers used to yell at us to shut up.”

  The total immersion demanded by the program was only intensified by a profound lack of money. “That $30 a month didn’t go very far,” Tracy said. “I was broke several days before the end of each month. So I studied dramatics as I’d never studied anything before in my life. Always in the back of my mind was the idea that I’d never have enough money to finish the course, and that I’d better learn all I could as fast as possible.”

  Times became especially desperate toward Christmas, when Pat and Spence made the decision to forgo food altogether in order to see John Barrymore in Hamlet. They went a total of four times. “Dear God,” said Pat, “what an actor!” Tracy once told actor
Robert Ryan he would wait near the stage door of the Broadhurst Theatre just to watch Lionel Barrymore leave at the end of the evening. “He couldn’t afford to see him act on stage,” as Ryan remembered it, “but at least he could watch and see him walk out of the theater.”

  After missing eight meals in a row, Tracy decided he had to do something. “I didn’t know how to go about getting a stage job, though I’d have taken anything. I hit every agent on Broadway, and just about every showhouse in town. Then, the afternoon of the third day, I went down to the Theatre Guild and applied for a job. I must have looked like a deserving cause, for the directors gave me a chance. I was to be a $15 a week robot in the play R.U.R. and I drew $1 eating money in advance. I went out and bought the thickest steak I could find.”

  Tracy made his professional debut on the night of January 1, 1923, when he stepped onstage at the Frazee Theatre and wordlessly decorated the third act of R.U.R., a fantasy of mechanized society whose title stood for “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” Within days, Pat had become a super as well: “Spence and I were two of the guys who just stood there in the play while some other guy cried out in stentorian tones, ‘We are the masters of the world.’ And then he said, ‘March,’ and that’s all we did.” After a few weeks, Tracy was given a line to read and his salary was raised to twenty dollars a week. “This was a definite step up to wealth,” said Pat. “It sure aided the exchequer.”

  Baseball and theater entrepreneur Henry H. Frazee had assumed management of R.U.R. when it moved to his eponymous theater on Forty-second Street in November 1922, and he planned to tour it on the subway circuit after it had played itself out. There was, however, still life in the show when Frazee was forced to close on February 17, 1923, to make way for another play. With a $9,000 week in the till—the Frazee was a small house—R.U.R. began weeklong stands at theaters such as the Bronx Opera House and Teller’s Shubert, where popular prices and daily matinees enabled him to wring every last remaining dollar from the play. Cast changes were inevitable, and when Domis Plugge stepped away from his role as the first robot, Tracy moved up, garnering four lines and a twenty-five-dollar increase in salary. “Boy, I thought I was really hot stuff when I got that first raise,” he said. “I gave the doorman of the theater a dollar tip on the way out that night. Many times later I wished I could get my hands on it.”