James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Graduation portrait, American Academy of Dramatic Arts. (AADA)

  There was a matinee in Queens to play the day the academy’s graduation exercises took place, and Tracy regretfully missed the experience of having his diploma personally handed him by Franklin Sargent. The scholarship Sargent had arranged for Tracy had brought a young man from promising amateur to trained professional, someone who was now prepared to earn a shaky living on the stage and who, with time, luck, and development, might one day become a star. Some forty years later, when asked to sum up what the AADA had done for him, Tracy responded with the following: “I shall always be grateful to the American Academy for what I was taught there—by Mr. Jehlinger and the other teachers—the value of sincerity and simplicity, unembellished and unintellectualized.”

  Pat O’Brien was still at the academy, the junior course having another month yet to run, when Spence began scanning the papers on a daily basis. R.U.R. was a job, but it was hardly acting, and Tracy needed to consider his next move. Time and again he had been told the best education for a young actor was to land a spot in a stock company, mastering a play a week and acting all manner of roles. It was demanding, unforgiving, lowly paid work, but those who could do it and flourish and eventually rise above it were literally ready for anything. March was early for summer companies, which usually got under way in June, but the trades were carrying items about a new company going into White Plains, a mere thirty miles outside of New York City, where the long-shuttered Palace Theatre had been taken by Leonard Wood, son of the famous general. As R.U.R. began its last week on the subway circuit, Tracy took the bold step of wiring the new manager—collect.

  “I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Leonard Wood, Jr.,” he later said. “He is the only man I ever knew who would answer a collect telegram, and one asking for a job at that. He wired me back to report at White Plains, New York, and started me at $20.”

  * * *

  1 Clemens E. “Foam” Lueck was the college bandmaster.

  2 Tracy, headstrong, went his own way when Boody’s admonitions failed to suit him. “He never used make-up,” Ken Edgers remembered, “because of the deep lines in his forehead, even at 20. Also, his eyebrows did not seem to be in the right place for eyebrow accent.”

  3 The moving picture version of The Truth was filmed in 1920 by Samuel Goldwyn. Madge Kennedy played the part of Becky Warder and Tom Carrigan played Tom.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Best Goddamned Actor

  * * *

  It was to Michigan that Spencer Tracy returned as Selena Royle’s leading man in the summer of 1924. But his ultimate destination, the one always front and center in his mind, was New York. Playing with actors of Selena’s caliber kept him on his game, and, happily, Mr. Wright had plans to sustain the Broadway Players during the winter hiatus in Grand Rapids when the Powers Theatre was given over to touring shows and holiday pageants.

  In the days just after the turn of the century, when Wright was press agent for Henry W. Savage, the New York borough of Brooklyn had a reputation as an extraordinarily good stock town, supporting as it did both the Spooner family of actors at the Park Avenue Theatre and Corse Payton’s renowned company, which originated the ten-twenty-thirty scale of pricing and gave two shows a day at Payton’s Lee Avenue theater. The Spooners and Payton were long gone by 1924, but the reputation lingered and attracted Wright to the notion of leasing the Montauk Theatre on Livingston Street and moving his company to Brooklyn until the Powers was once again available.

  In recent times, the Montauk had housed road attractions and actor Walter Hampden in repertory. Two competing companies, the Alhambra Players (at the Loew’s house of the same name) and the James Carroll Players at the Fifth Avenue, were already established, but Wright was banking on Selena Royle’s undeniable appeal to trump the competition. He limited his initial commitment for the shuttered Montauk to four weeks, but held an option on the balance of the season if Selena and the company got over as hoped.

  The Broadway Players closed in Grand Rapids on September 15, 1924, ending their twenty-one-week season with a net loss of about $7,000—half of which was borne by Harry G. Sommers, who held the long-term lease on the theater. Tracy, Selena Royle, Arthur Kohl, and the other remaining players left for New York the next morning, where they would have less than a week to get the first play of the new season on its feet.

  Renamed the Montauk Players, the company opened on Monday, September 22, but it wasn’t until the second week of the stand that they got much attention. Selena took star billing in Anna Christie opposite Frank Shannon (from the original Broadway production) and Tracy played the relatively minor role of a longshoreman in Johnny the Priest’s waterfront saloon. As was now typical for a Wright company, the production was exemplary (“a credit to dramatic stock,” as Billboard put it) and Selena’s handling of the part was everything it was supposed to be, widely praised and fervently applauded.

  After a couple of weeks, Louise, who had stopped off in New Castle, arrived in Brooklyn with the baby. She found Spence, used to lead roles, biding his time as Wright did everything possible to draw patrons to the Montauk.

  Selena signed on to a Broadway tryout as Wright knew she might, given that she had refused to play the winter in Grand Rapids (or any stock for that matter) and his choice of Brooklyn had been in part an accommodation in creating for her a New York showcase. The crowds weren’t there as they had been in Grand Rapids, though, and so when her four-week guarantee expired, she stepped away under the most diplomatic of terms, promising to return if the new play failed to work out as she hoped.

  The following week, Tracy was back playing leads, first in Chicken Feed, which had been a modest hit on Broadway the previous season, then in Seven Keys to Baldpate, the old George M. Cohan warhorse, and finally in The Bat, which proved so popular it was held a second week, all opposite Selena’s replacement, actress Georgia Backus. As the season wore on, the Tracys grew to appreciate Brooklyn as a place were they could live as a family, Spence working long hours but without the travel and the financial insecurities that were routinely part of a young actor’s life. They were, in fact, so contented in Brooklyn they never once crossed the bridge into Manhattan the entire time they were there. Louise stayed home with Johnny, just coming to the theater on Mondays to see the new play. “I [was] a hard critic,” she said. “At night when he was in stock, after we were married, he’d go through scenes at home. I’d cue him and I was always honest. I had to be. I’d tell him what I didn’t like and why. His reaction? He’d get mad, but I know I helped him in many instances, [because] he’d change a characterization. I was ahead of him in experience, but he went up very fast.”

  Thanksgiving week, when most companies were playing “old boys” (Way Down East and The Old Homestead and other cheap or royalty-free properties), Wright gamely programmed The First Year, Frank Craven’s hit comedy, then followed it with Cohan’s A Prince There Was and The Breaking Point, a new play by Mary Roberts Rinehart, the author of The Bat. For Christmas, he revived Uncle Tom’s Cabin, augmenting the production with “pickaninnies, jubilee singers, and dancers,” all of whom paraded daily down Livingston Street. Nothing in the way of ballyhoo seemed to work for very long though, and by the first week of January, Wright was papering the town with twofers and looking ahead to March and the company’s return to Grand Rapids.

  In all, it was a bruising season, costly and unprofitable, but when the Montauk Players closed on March 7, 1925, they had played all twenty-two weeks of their commitment, something of which everyone in the company was justifiably proud. Variety subsequently ran an item summarizing the extraordinary season and its various participants under the headline BROOKLYN NO LONGER MECCA FOR STOCK.

  Mercifully, there was considerably more time to make the jump back to Grand Rapids, Wright having set their opening at the Powers for Easter week, giving his company a well-earned interval after forty-three weeks of continuous work. The Tracys went back to Milwaukee
, where they could stop with John and Carrie and go easy on their finances. “I don’t think either of us were too good with the money,” Louise admitted, thinking back on that period. “If I have a dollar, I can live on it. If I have a dollar to spend, I’ll spend it … We were always broke after a run. There was never enough.” Moreover, salaries were flat in Grand Rapids, where another company had entrenched itself during Wright’s six-month absence.

  The Washington Players specialized in broad melodramas at popular prices, but it was beginning to look as if the Wright company was facing a cruel replay of the Brooklyn debacle on their home turf, and prices were held to a top of $1.10 to counter the competition. There was also the matter of Selena Royle, who demanded a “general utilitywoman” as part of her deal for another season with Papa Wright. To hold the line on costs, the first few shows would be repeats of the most popular plays of the Montauk season, all using scenery trucked in from Brooklyn. The Tracys settled back in at the Browning, and Spence, now officially leading man for the company, was looking forward to a relatively carefree summer. “My salary was steady,” he said, “and it seemed things had opened up for us at last.” He was in rehearsals for the first play of the new season the day Louise, having put the baby down for a nap, made a horrifying discovery.

  She and Spence were going out that night, and after a while it occurred to her that if Johnny napped too long, the babysitter might have trouble getting him to sleep. “I went out on the sleeping porch, calling to him,” she said. “Accidentally as I went through, the door slammed. John never moved. I stopped right where I was and called him again. Took a few steps closer. Called again.” She couldn’t say what prompted her, for at other times she had touched his crib, gently, unconsciously, or him, and watched him awaken. Now she stood motionless beside his crib, and purposely she did not touch it. “Johnny,” she said softly, soberly. No response. “Johnny,” she said, now with more volume and intensity. Again no response. “Johnny!” she shouted, and still no movement. “Then I touched him and he opened his eyes and smiled at me.

  “I knew, of course, our child was deaf.”

  She was, she said, terror-stricken at first, then a curious wave of relief swept over her. “It was rather like awakening from a nightmare,” she wrote.

  Such a thing could not be. There was no reason. One reads about such things, but they did not happen to people one knew. I knew of no deafness ever having existed in either my husband’s family or my own. More substantial arguments rushed to mind. John had a perfectly natural laugh and cry. I remembered he had had all the tiny baby’s first cooing, chirping sounds—those heavenly little early morning sounds. He would lie there, gurgle, wiggle his whole body ecstatically after each effort, then suddenly burst forth again, adding an extra note or quaver in an effort to top the last one. And, as I looked down now into those clear, bright blue eyes and that smiling little face, it did not seem possible that he could not hear. But I could not still the cold, dispassionate voice within me which replied, “All these are but hopes, the straws at which drowning people clutch. He is deaf.”

  Over the next few days she tested him incessantly, and each day strengthened her conviction that he heard nothing. She didn’t tell Spence, wanting to spare him the news as long as possible. Besides, she could think of no gentle way of telling him. “Perhaps, when it became necessary to do so, I would know of something that could be done—some treatment, an operation. At least I hoped to have more control over my emotions and some philosophy worked out which might help to soften for him that first shock.”

  The Broadway Players began their third season at the Powers on the night of April 12, 1925, the house “packed as it has been packed but few times the past season.” Tracy was greeted warmly as he took the stage in the title role of The Nervous Wreck, as were William Laveau, Halliam Bosworth, and Herbert Treitel, all favorites from the 1924 season. (Director John Ellis, familiar from numerous character parts, slipped so seamlessly into his role that he went completely unnoticed.) Reporting that Tracy had the audience in “constant roars” from his first entrance, Clarence Dean went on to suggest that twenty-two weeks in Brooklyn had knocked the rough edges off a particularly promising newcomer: “Mr. Tracy has gained in poise, in ease, and natural utterance since last seen here, and is therefore more convincing. It is plain to be seen that Mr. Tracy is going to be a big favorite.” The same issue of the Grand Rapids Herald carried an item that said the Washington Players were initiating a policy at the Isis Theatre of giving away “groceries and things.”

  Spence unwound after the show, usually at the Greek’s, a little coffee place that served exquisite popcorn, or occasionally at the local speakeasy, a blind pig near Campau Square that kept him out long past midnight. “No amount of arguing could get him into the Pantland Hotel, then the town’s top-ranking after-theatre spot,” said his friend Al Rathbone, who went by “A.D.” and who, along with actor George Fleming, formed the nucleus of a group. “He hated the idea of walking into a public place and having people point him out as their leading man.” Going out was a way of connecting with other men; it was fun, routine, a release after the pressure of a demanding performance. A drink made him more comfortable around other people—women especially—but he was the son of an alcoholic, the grandson of another.

  Growing up, alcohol, like sex, was never part of the family discussion, and both held a mysterious allure. There was no rite of passage when Spence had his first pint in his dad’s company. And then, of course, in being Irish—even half-Irish—drinking was expected, part of the identity of all adult males. If one indulged to the point of drunkenness, it was not so much frowned upon as thought natural and, to a degree, celebrated. Where Spence got in trouble was when he drank before a performance, when sociability wasn’t a motivating factor but steadying the nerves was—and what little drinking he did made him wildly unpopular. “I think the naughtiest thing he ever did was take Halliam Bosworth’s toupee off onstage one time,” said Emily Deming, newly installed as Selena Royle’s nineteen-year-old dresser. “Of course, it was supposed to be an accident, but I saw him do it. Halliam never forgave him … That was one of the times when he’d had a little too much to drink.”

  His cutting up onstage embarrassed Louise, who couldn’t abide unprofessional behavior. She also wanted him home at night after the show, though it was typically hours before he could get to sleep. “I remember once when he was really drunk on stage,” said Deming, recalling the opening performance of Grounds for Divorce, the second play of the season. “He and Louise had a flaming row, and he got blind drunk, really. He was good with his lines, but he blew up that night a couple of times.” Selena, Deming remembered, was boiling mad “because he ‘went up’ and spoiled her lines. Once badly. That was one of the times I was pressed in as cue.” The Powers was an old opera house dating from the 1870s, and Emily had to throw cues from the prompter’s box down front of the stage. The crowd noticed, as did Dean, the Herald’s unfailingly diplomatic reviewer, who said Tracy had made much of his role of an eminent divorce lawyer “in spite of a very inconvenient indisposition.”

  Louise confided her fear of Johnny’s deafness to Emily, who occasionally babysat for the Tracys and who urged her to have him examined at the Blodgett Home for Children, an orphanage in the East Hills neighborhood of Grand Rapids. The pediatrician who saw the boy was unwilling to say much—the baby was only ten months old—and suggested she take him to a specialist. Louise made frequent trips across Lake Michigan so the Tracys could dote on their new grandchild, and she realized it would be hard to get Johnny examined in Milwaukee without Mother Tracy knowing about it. (“She was with us almost constantly.”) Then, unexpectedly, within days of her discovery, Carrie solved the problem herself. She was feeding the baby his lunch—one of her favorite things to do—and Louise was sitting just inside the next room. “I don’t believe John hears very well,” she said quietly.

  Louise’s heart raced. “No,” she said, “I don’t think he does. I
have been thinking I would take him to some specialist here.”

  “Yes,” said Carrie. “Do.”

  “I’m sure she knew that afternoon as well as I knew,” Louise wrote. “Perhaps she had suspected longer. I never asked her. We never talked about it much at first. It was easier.” Carrie gave her the name of a prominent otologist, and Louise made an appointment.

  The doctor wasn’t encouraging. He listened to Louise’s story, asked a few questions, examined the baby’s ears for abnormalities. Then he made a few simple tests, trying to attract Johnny’s attention with a variety of noises, including those made by a bell and a tuning fork. Finally, he said he couldn’t be sure because Johnny was too young to test conclusively.

  “But,” Louise persisted, “if he is deaf, what could be the cause? What could be done?”

  “It would be nerve deafness from an indeterminable cause. If the nerve merely has been impaired it may come back, but if it has been killed, it cannot come back. In either case, there is nothing we can do about it.”