Tracy played his final week opposite Ethel Remey in The Family Upstairs, and she mourned his loss to Trenton as few others did:
Spencer wasn’t the average stock leading man. He wasn’t the clotheshorse. He was a very fine actor, but I think a lot of people, because he wasn’t a clotheshorse, didn’t appreciate him. They didn’t know anything about acting. They didn’t realize what a gem they had as an actor, because he wasn’t the average matinee idol of that time … When Spence left, it affected me no end. They got this average stock leading man, good looking—I suppose one would call him the matinee idol sort—but he couldn’t compare with Spencer as an actor. Yet the matinee girls thought he was totally wonderful, so there you are. It was maddening.
Louise’s father, having had a classmate at Yale who was an ear specialist in New York, wrote and urged her to go see him. One snowy morning during her last week in Plainfield—the only day she had neither a rehearsal nor a matinee to play—Louise, Johnny’s nurse, and Johnny took the train into New York. It proved to be a courtesy call, Allienne’s friend having nothing new to say about the case and no real information to add to the comparatively little she had already. However, Louise had made a second appointment with a Dr. John Page, whom she understood to be one of the best-known and most highly rated men on the East Coast.
I felt that here was to be my last stand. We were there for almost an hour. He took John’s history in minute detail. He made by far the most thorough examination ever made. Then he sat me down and talked to me. His findings were practically those of everybody else: It was nerve deafness, cause undetermined, for which there was no known treatment or cure. But, for the first time, I was told something to do about it. He told me to whom I should go [and] the names of the schools—the Wright Oral School and the Lexington Avenue School for the Deaf, both in New York City, happened to be the ones he mentioned—where I could get the information I should have. He told me some of the wonderful things [the] schools were doing. He told me that one day John would be able to talk.
It seemed as I went out that at least half the weight over my heart was gone. For the moment, at least, our troubles were negligible. I walked on air. Now I had something I could do. And one day John would talk!
Tracy rejoined the Broadway Players on February 2, 1926, when rehearsals began for Seven Keys to Baldpate. The new leading woman of the company was Helen Joy, a competent actress who would go on to a brief career in New York. Tracy didn’t fill the theater for his homecoming, but was grandly received nevertheless, a respectable crowd braving snow flurries to see him. Business was tepid the first eight weeks. Radio was cutting into stock audiences nationwide, and it was only What Price Glory—with Papa Wright’s solemn curtain speeches the week before, warning the easily shocked to stay away, and Tracy’s star turn as the battle-weary Captain Flagg—that filled the Regent on a Monday night. The following week, convinced the smaller theater would make for happier audiences, Wright announced his company’s move back to the Powers, as well as the return of Selena Royle, who would manage the transition, appearing the last week at the Regent in her father’s play The Struggle Everlasting and the first week at the Powers in an import called Stolen Fruit.
Selena raced onstage the night of April 5, her hair streaming wildly, and had to wait several minutes for the applause to subside enough for her to speak her first lines. She was, as usual, the center of the play, and when the flowers went over the footlights at the close of the third act, she was buried in them and Spence and Bill Laveau held the surplus over her head. The allegorical play—Selena played “Body” to Tracy’s “Mind” and Clifford Dunstan’s “Soul”—didn’t do well, but the Royles stayed another two weeks in Grand Rapids, Selena inaugurating a new “guest star” policy at the Powers that brought William Faversham to town the following week in her father’s greatest stage success, The Squaw Man. The move back to the Powers restored Sunday performances to the company, and Wright, hoping to get the drop on a competing troupe, moved opening nights to Sundays, something not often done in stock because of the difficulty of scaring up last-minute props and supplies on the Sabbath.
With guest stars playing one-week stands at the Powers, both Helen Joy and Tracy were relegated to supporting roles, making neither of them happy. Drag comic Tommy Martelle was followed by Nance O’Neil, Harry Beresford, Edmund Breese, and actor-playwright J. C. Nugent. Joy left after O’Neil’s two-week stay and was replaced by Peggy Conway, late of the Garrick Gaieties. Together, Tracy and Conway filled a hole in the schedule with the popular character comedy The Family Upstairs, Spence serving as the company’s “guest star” for that particular week. Edith Taliaferro came to the Powers the following week with Polly of the Circus, and when she was asked by the Sligh Furniture Company to pose for a picture with a prize-winning bedroom set, she agreed to do so only if Spence could be in the shot with her.
The photo was the idea of Charles R. Sligh, Jr., the twenty-year-old scion to the famous furniture builder, who had joined the firm just out of college and was looking for ways to pump up sales. Edith and Spence went out to the factory, where Taliaferro slipped between the satin sheets and Tracy, in a three-piece business suit, sat on an adjoining stool, book in hand, pretending to read to her. Chuck Sligh and Spence hit it off immediately, the Tracys not having made many friends in Grand Rapids. “He was a very nice young man,” Louise said of Chuck, who was both affable and unabashed. “They took us out to the country club and we met quite a few people.” When Wright announced a ten-week break for the Players, Spence stepped away from the company early to spend time at a cottage the Slighs had rented for the summer at Gun Lake.
Louise helped arrange Spence’s absence by stepping into the final two weeks of the season herself. The first week’s attraction was Happiness, which she had once played in Chicago, and in which she would now take the role of Jenny, the little dressmaker’s apprentice created by J. Hartley Manners for his wife, the great Laurette Taylor. The part was a formidable one—110 sides—and Taylor had played it practically in monologue. The audience wasn’t huge on opening night, but Louise so completely disappeared into the character that Clarence Dean (whose notice in the Herald ran under the headline LAURETTE TAYLOR HAS WORTHY FOLLOWER) was astonished at how someone as tall and athletic could suggest a girl so small and winsome.1
Emily, who had never before seen Louise onstage, pronounced her “an infinitely better actress” than Selena Royle. “Selena was a very pretty woman,” she said, “and she had good stage sense and a good voice and used it well, but she was not a ‘depth’ actress. Louise was. She wasn’t as pretty by any manner or means, and Selena projected herself well and Louise did not. Selena sparkled; Louise had no sparkle. She was solid business.” But like Laurette Taylor, Louise could place a whisper in the back row of the topmost gallery. “I used to have to check the house to see whether they could be heard,” Emily said. “It had a balcony beyond the balcony like all the old opera houses did. They sold the seats then … every matinee was sold out. I used to have to go check, and I never had to check her. Her voice carried.”
Louise’s second week—the company’s last—was as Peggy Fairfax, the sporty and palpitating heroine of the farce steeplechase comedy Hottentot. She was so good—and had such fun—that Papa Wright asked her to consider playing a full season opposite Spence in one of his new companies.
The Tracys relinquished their tiny apartment at the Browning, where Johnny had celebrated his second birthday, gone to his first party, tasted his first ice cream cone. They took their son to Lake Delavan, Wisconsin, where John and Carrie Tracy had a summer cottage, and where, surrounded by his grandmother, grandfather, a grandaunt, and a number of their friends, he would be spoiled shamelessly while his parents enjoyed the first genuine vacation of their married life.
It lasted all of a week.
Spence spent most of it either in the lake or on it, piloting a decrepit speedboat that seemed to absorb him endlessly. Then a telegram arrived: Selena Royle had
landed a role in a new play for George M. Cohan called Yellow, and it now looked as if there might be a part for Spence as well. This would be his third shot at Broadway. “It was a reprieve,” he said, “a message from Garcia.” And if it didn’t work out, he told Louise, he wouldn’t be going back to stock—he’d get into some “regular” business instead. “It was by far the best opportunity he had had,” Louise said, “and he was off immediately. John and I stayed on at Delavan.”
Yellow was a modernized version of Within the Law, the work of a first-time playwright named Margaret Vernon. The Shuberts, who owned the script, had just done a complicated deal with Cohan that involved the exclusive booking of all his future shows, and they reportedly invited him on as a partner for, as Variety put it, “purposes of prestige and Cohanesque treatment.” Despite a well-known flair for melodrama, Cohan had thus far limited his involvement with Yellow to casting, having assigned direction of the show to actor-playwright John Meehan. “I was over at the Lambs Club one day,” remembered Tracy, “and they called me and told me to come over. [T]hey had let a fellow go. Chester Morris was the star. Marjorie Wood and Hale Hamilton. Harry Bannister. And there was this wonderful part for a young husband in the thing … Hale lied to George—he told him he had seen me. But Selena went for me. She was the one who got me the job.”
Tracy joined rehearsals on September 9, 1926, the day he signed an Equity contract with Eddie Dunn, Cohan’s longtime press agent and general factotum, calling for a salary of $175 a week. “I rehearsed; John Meehan directed it. And it was about a week before George M. came in.” The first public performance was scheduled for the night of September 13. “George would never fully direct his shows,” actor-playwright Jack McGowan said. “Sam Forrest or Julian Mitchell or Johnny Meehan would block them out and then George would take over, sometimes as late as two days before the opening, and give it his special touch.”
Tracy had performed six Cohan plays in stock—and had actually played Cohan’s parts in two of them—but the mere thought of shaking hands with the greatest living figure in American theater had him terrified. One morning, Cohan strolled onto the stage and greeted all twenty-two members of the cast individually. When he came to Tracy, he turned to Meehan, grinned, and said, “I don’t believe I have met this gentleman.” Then, said Tracy, came the “terrible moments” when they rehearsed for him. Cohan didn’t say a lot; his manner was curt and snappy. “Taught me to keep my hands out of my pockets. Oh, yes. Don’t be a lazy actor. Don’t start hiding your hands, so you’ll never know what to do with them.”
Louise left Johnny in Milwaukee and met the company in Buffalo, where Yellow was set to open a week’s stand at the Shubert-Teck Theatre. “I was scared to death,” Tracy said. “Christ, I thought I was going to get canned any minute. In those days they could fire you anytime up to ten days.” Tracy’s character, Jimmy Wilkes, was obvious business, a newlywed who serves as Chester Morris’ best friend, getting him out of scrapes long after the audience has given up on him. He had only two good scenes in the entire play, only one of which really gave him the chance to make an impression. In stock, he could simply “glance through his lines” (as Louise put it) and then run through them a couple of times with the rest of the cast. He was, in other words, used to holding back in rehearsal, but now with Cohan out front, that was no longer an option. The final dress—practically an all-nighter—took place in Buffalo, and the mood was decidedly tense. Cohan had a reputation for knowing all of the parts in all of his plays, and Tracy had somehow convinced himself that the Prince of Broadway would only use him up until opening and then go on in his place.
“During rehearsals,” said Selena Royle, “George M. sat in the front row of the orchestra pit, his feet high in the air crossed on the railing in front of him, his mouth down to one side in its perpetual characteristic lopsided grin, and as he gave you a direction his upper foot pointed the way he wished you to go … Spencer was rehearsing a scene when suddenly George M.’s feet came down from the railing with a bang and he sat up straight. Through his tight lips out of the side of his mouth he barked, ‘Tracy, you’re the best goddamned actor I’ve ever seen! Go ahead!’ His feet went back to their crossed blades position and he relaxed again on the tip of his spine.”
As an actor, Cohan had grown up admiring the amiable Nat Goodwin, whose expressive face and dry manner of delivery had taken him from vaudeville to light comedy and eventually to Shakespeare. Then he saw the versatile French actor Lucien Guitry: “I couldn’t imagine any actor better than Nat Goodwin, but here he was. The same ease and command of presence Nat had, but something else. A deeper reserve. Guitry never opened up, but you always knew he had plenty to open up with if he so wanted. I don’t understand a word of French, but I knew everything Guitry was saying because he was saying it with his eyes and his posture and the way he listened to his fellow actors.”
And now Cohan saw the same qualities in Spencer Tracy, whose big scene that Sunday night came toward the end of the third act. Figuring he had nothing to lose, Tracy invested a tight, almost negligible exchange between himself and Marjorie Wood with all the animation and gravity he could muster, holding nothing back but remaining at all times in absolute command of the role. Tracy’s young husband, boisterous and lusty, gave Cohan a lift toward the end of a particularly long and grueling night, and George M. may well have overreacted. Certainly Tracy thought as much. “Spencer looked startled,” as Selena recounted it, “and, to us who were watching, turned slightly pale. After the scene was over, he came over to me and said, ‘What did he mean?’ I laughed. It’s like an actor never to believe or remember the good notices. You can’t forget the bad. ‘You silly fool,’ I explained, ‘he meant it.’ ”
With Marjorie Wood in George M. Cohan’s production of Yellow, 1926. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Spence played the rest of the rehearsal in something of a daze. “That was a wonderful night,” Louise recalled. “He didn’t get back to the hotel until very late—four or five in the morning. I was in bed. He just couldn’t get over it. He sat on the bed and said, ‘Listen what happened …’ He told me all about it…[He said,] ‘I thought I was going to be sacked.’ He always thought that. I think it was one of the highlights of his career.”
For its out-of-town opening, Yellow was accorded a warm reception by what Louise described as a “Cohan-minded audience.” The advance notice in Variety was an outright rave: “Loaded with nervous theatrical dynamite, it sent the hard-boiled local first-nighters out raving with frazzled nerves, wet handkerchiefs, and wilted collars.” In New York the show was hampered by the fact that the street out front of the National Theatre was under construction, as were the avenues at each end of its block. Patrons had to drive over loose planks or stumble through muddy, unpaved walkways, unlighted and treacherous, to reach the lobby. Consequently, Yellow was reviewed almost exclusively by the second-string critics, only a couple of whom truly liked it. Most thought it convoluted, poorly structured, and overlong.
“It is easy to perceive the role that delighted the heart of George M.,” L.W. M’Laren wrote perceptively in the New York Journal. “It is that of the bank clerk with a small flat and a wife, played well by Spencer Tracy. One suspects that Cohan broadened it considerably. Certain it is that his smile of satisfaction was broad as Tracy went through the part last night.”
John Tracy was proud of his grandson and rarely missed an opportunity to show him off. Johnny was a beautiful child, with long auburn curls, exquisite skin, and, in Louise’s words, “a sweetly grave expression” that rarely failed to attract attention. While at Lake Delavan, the elder Tracy frequently ran “errands” to a particular drugstore known for its malted milks, and he generally found an excuse to take the boy with him. It was on one such expedition that a woman spoke to Johnny. She remarked on what a handsome child he was, but he did not turn. She spoke again, then looked at John: “He is hard of hearing, isn’t he?”
As he hesitated, not knowing quite what to say
, the woman introduced herself as Matie E. Winston, a teacher for the Wright Oral School in New York City. A native of Wisconsin, Miss Winston was home on vacation when she noticed all the obvious signs and concluded that Johnny must be either very hard of hearing or completely deaf. Then, when she heard the name “Tracy,” she remembered having answered Louise’s recent letter to the school.
The following day, Louise and Johnny called on Miss Winston. “As I rang the doorbell and waited for someone to appear, my heart thumped against my ribs, my hands were clammy, and I felt the same quivering in the pit of my stomach that I always felt on an opening night. In a moment, I would be able to talk to someone who, not in the vernacular, but in reality, knew all the answers. All the questions I had been carrying around for so long, I thought in a moment were to be exchanged for facts. How will he talk? When will he talk? How will his voice compare with ours? Will he be able to carry on a conversation? Now I would know. It was almost like meeting God.”
Matie Winston was a cheerful, forthright woman in her mid-forties, enthusiastic and knowledgeable. She asked all the basic questions and wanted to know what Louise and her husband were doing for their son. She listened intently as Louise told her, in as much detail as she could muster. Then she said, “Fine, as far as it goes, but you ought to do more. He is old enough to start sense training.” She meant differences and likenesses—colors to start. She suggested blocks of two different colors, separating them by color, letting him do it, making a game out of it. Then, once he caught on, adding more colors to the pile. It sounded too simple. “I craved something hard,” Louise said. When Spence left for New York, she continued working with the blocks, and by the time she left to join him in Buffalo, Johnny was walking unaided, finally mustering the courage—and the balance—to try it alone.
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