It was a blessing for him not to have to go straight back to New York, with its familiar terrain and its constant reminders of his father’s absence. The following day, Andrew Tracy’s wife, Spence’s aunt Mame, brought Aunt Jenny and Cousin Jane in on the train to see the matinee performance of Whispering Friends. Jane was eleven at the time and thought Spence’s tiny dressing room, with its makeup mirror bordered in lightbulbs, nothing short of magnificent. “Did you really think I was any good?” he pressed the women, almost childlike in his need for reassurance, and they both told him he was just wonderful. “Talent isn’t all that you have to have,” he said sagely, echoing one of Cohan’s admonitions. “You have to have personality. That’s the thing that’s important. A good personality.” They talked about the future and where he would go next and how his life had inexorably changed with the death of his father. And then they all sat in his dressing room at the Illinois Theatre and wept.
At length he told them about the previous day, when, arriving at the theater, he saw his name in lights for the first time in his life. At considerable expense, Cohan had wired ahead and ordered star billing, which involved tearing down all the posters around town and putting up new ones that displayed the name of Spencer Tracy in ten-inch letters. The press notices and programs all had to be changed—all in tribute to John Tracy and the tradition that the show must go on and to the fact that his son was now, despite all prognostications to the contrary, a big shot.
To four generations of actors, dramatists, composers, producers, managers, scenic designers, librettists, and press agents, the heart of the Times Square theater district wasn’t Forty-second and Broadway or the Winter Garden or even the stretch of pavement between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth Streets known as Shubert Alley, but rather a six-story facade of red brick and limestone on West Forty-fourth Street, across from the Hudson and Belasco Theatres, that marked the marble-columned fold of the Lambs. In 1927 the membership numbered some 1,700 individuals—an all-time high—and the clubhouse served as both home and office to virtually every major name associated with the stage—Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, W. C. Fields, Fred Astaire, Eddie Foy, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Will Rogers, David Belasco, and John Philip Sousa, to name but a few.
When actor John Cumberland offered to propose Pat O’Brien for membership in the fall of 1926, the mere suggestion of the honor caught him up short. “I thought you had to spend at least five to ten years on Broadway before this happened,” he said. And when O’Brien, in turn, proposed his pal Tracy little more than a year later, the gesture was no less a matter of gravity. Spence had been Pat’s guest at the clubhouse, had entered the grillroom with its stone floor, its rough-hewn oak tables, its dark-paneled walls, and its huge marble fireplace, and had sensed what it was like to be, in Pat’s words, “A club man, an actor among fellow actors.” He became a duly elected member of the Lambs on December 15, 1927, and managed to scrape together the $200 entrance fee, semiannual dues of $23.33, and 10 percent war tax only with considerable difficulty and Louise’s patient indulgence. And so it was not by virtue of his performance in The Baby Cyclone that Spencer Tracy “arrived” as a Broadway player, but rather by his acceptance into the Lambs as a member, professional class.
When the Midwest tour of Whispering Friends petered out, Tracy returned to New York. Louise was now immersed in Johnny’s studies at the Wright Oral School, so Spence retreated to the Lambs, where he spent his days writing letters and working the phones, a bank of which lined the north wall of the reception corridor. By edict of incorporation, the Lambs never closed. The bar officially served tea and apple juice, but the premium stuff—whiskey, sherry, champagne—was always around, tucked away in someone’s locker or available for purchase from the night doorman. “Dry times or wet, the bar of the Lambs was never raided,” Pat O’Brien said, recalling that the mayor of the city of New York, the honorable James J. Walker, was a loyal member. “We had political power.”
Idle in the midst of a new season, Tracy’s natural bent toward melancholia deepened to the point where he suffered wicked bouts of depression. His self-loathing over his son’s deafness surged at times of inactivity, and his grief over the loss of his father swept over him in waves. One weekday afternoon it took hold of him as he began a routine note to his mother. “Mother dear,” he wrote, “your lovely wire made us so happy, dear. We were going to wire you—thought of it several times—but didn’t know where to send it … We had a dandy dinner and a wonderful time at Ray’s. Spoke of you & dear Dad so much.” And then the pen began to race—page after page—as the pent-up feelings suddenly spilled over.
O Mother dear—I never let you know and never will again how much I miss my wonderful dad. I have come home at night and stood and cried before his picture in our front room. I talk to him many times. He was so good to me—and I know you won’t mind—nor will Carroll—but I always felt he was closer to me than anyone—except you, of course, Dear. He understood me so well, and was so kind and always forgave. Sometimes I want to go with him—I know I’d be all right where he is—and when that time comes, I’ll hate to leave anyone behind but I won’t be afraid, and I’ll be glad because I’m going to see my dad. But we must be cheerful—and I will, Dear. Forgive me for writing this letter, but sometimes I feel I just gotta see Pop—or I’ll go crazy.
It was as naked an expression of inner feelings as he ever permitted himself, but talk of suicidal grief and going crazy could well frighten his mother, and he obviously fought to control the words he was now putting down on the page. “But he is happy now,” he continued, reining himself in, “and he is watching us and taking care of us, and he wants us to do our best and be happy—and we will, Dear. We have lots to live for. Excuse all this, darling Mother, but I guess I’m still yours and Pop’s little boy, and sometimes I get sad—and cry—just like my little boy.”
John Tracy had found such joy in his four-year-old grandson, his little victories and pleasures and the sounds he made to represent words. Around the house, Johnny had names for the people he loved, vocal labels that derived from the words he could say. Mumum was his name for Grandmother Tracy, Mum (pronounced “Moom”) for his grandaunt Emma. One was his teddy bear. His nurse came again in November, the one who had been with him in Grand Rapids and at Lake Delavan, and although her name was Eleanor Lystad, she became Sss at first, then Sis.
Eleanor’s arrival, along with the costs of the Wright Oral School, put yet another burden on the family finances. Spence scared up a week of stock on Long Island, but was forced to borrow $1,000 from his mother until he could find steadier work. He gave her an IOU at 6 percent interest, but the whole matter upset Carrie so greatly she worried that Spencer would be unable to support his family. Then Johnny broke his leg, the result of a fall while playing in the park, and was in the hospital for six straight weeks. Arrangements had to be made for one of his teachers to go to his bedside for a short period each day to keep up his speech and lipreading, which otherwise would have suffered sharp relapses.
Pat O’Brien saw enough of Spence at the Lambs—too much, for he too was out of work—to know the spiritual toll unemployment was taking on his old friend. “An unemployed actor becomes a different person,” he said. “His morale sags, he wears a haunted look. The burden of the ages sits on his shoulders as he gossips with other unemployed actors.” When Lester Bryant, a brother Lamb who was married to actress Edna Hibbard, announced one day that he was going to organize a new stock company, Pat walked him around the clubhouse until he had engaged practically his entire company—William Boyd, Frank McHugh, O’Brien himself, Tracy, of course. Spence had sworn he wouldn’t play stock again that winter—had, in fact, turned down a season with the George Cukor company in Rochester—but he was plainly out of options and desperate for income. O’Brien, McHugh, and he performed in the Lambs Kid Gambol on December 16, then passed the hat for traveling money and entrained to Baltimore, where the Auditorium Players would open Christmas Eve in a gangster melodrama
called Tenth Avenue.
Nineteen twenty-eight had been a rough year, but 1929 would be rougher still. The run of the Auditorium Players lasted just three weeks. (“But,” said Frank McHugh, “it was a rip-roaring three weeks!”) Leaving Baltimore put Tracy on a seemingly endless rotation of two- and three-week stands, unsure of where his next job would come from, breathing life into mediocre material and occasionally making it sing. Returning home to New York, he wired his mother in Freeport and said that he had “several things in view,” and did in fact land a part in a play called Scars on February 6.
With Albert Van Dekker in Conflict, 1929. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Backed by New York retailer Hiram Bloomingdale and authored by Warren Lawrence, the brother of Boston golf crack and playwright Vincent Lawrence, Scars ran the arc of an American serviceman’s career from draftee to flight commander to peacetime has-been. Out of town, the lead actor had been a toothy twenty-seven-year-old named Clark Gable. He was well received, giving, in the words of one critic, “a true-to-life picture of a man who hit heights of glory and then slid to the bottom of the pile.” The play was choppy, though, full of awkward stage waits that undercut the psychology of the piece. “I didn’t like my part,” Gable later said. “I hadn’t been able to get anything out of it. In Springfield I handed in my notice; I wanted to leave just as soon as they could get another actor up from New York to take my place—and it couldn’t be too soon to please me.” Tracy stepped into the role of Richard Banks with little rehearsal and suddenly the play, no masterpiece but with flashes of near-brilliance, began working as never before. Retitled Conflict, it was brought to the Fulton Theatre on March 6, where critics saw an uneven but sincere piece of work, elevated by Tracy’s masterful performance and supported by an exceptionally capable cast consisting of Edward Arnold, Frank McHugh, George Meeker, and Albert Van Dekker. “The final impression,” J. Brooks Atkinson wrote in the Times, “is of a genuine character portrait surrounded with disenchanting chromoes. What Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Tracy have done with Richard Banks deserves a more harmonious setting.”
No one thought the play a disaster, but the fact that it needed work was indisputable. Tracy thought Banks the strongest part he had yet played before a New York audience, and when the author announced his intention to revise the play over a Holy Week recess, Spence joined him in making the rounds of the various dailies, going from one drama critic to the next, notices in hand. Conflict hit the boards again on Monday, April 1, and the critics were invited to come take another look. Regrettably, the play wasn’t much better than before, but virtually every critic gave it a kinder notice. Trade improved slightly, but the company managed to survive only on cut rates.
Conflict closed on April 27, 1929, and Tracy went almost immediately into rehearsals for an ill-fated comedy titled Salt Water. They tried it out in Mamaroneck, where it was well received, then moved it to Atlantic City, where, despite sterling reviews, the play’s coauthor, actress Jean Dalrymple, concluded her lead actor had “no sense of comedy.” She pushed director John Golden to replace him with actor Frank Craven. “So there we all were, down in Atlantic City, and the show went very well. But, of course, Tracy was really heavy in the part, and afterwards Frank Craven said, ‘Oh, I could really play that part. I could play the hell out of that part.’ So Golden closed the show and let Spencer go.”
Smarting from such a summary dismissal, Tracy returned to Manhattan in a surly mood. Broadway had suffered its worst season in nine years, due largely to the proliferation of talking pictures. Dramatic stock wasn’t doing any better against the onslaught of amplified dialogue. Two years earlier Tracy had advised Chamberlain Brown he was playing Lima strictly for the money. “Next season,” he said, “I should have a nice bankroll, and I hope this will be the last time I have to do stock—unless it’s a real good one.” Now, miraculously, a real good one presented itself, almost on cue.
Selena Royle had settled into a pattern of playing summers with the Albee stock of Providence, Rhode Island, one of the top two or three companies in all of North America. When the company’s leading man, Walter Gilbert, quit early in the season, she naturally thought of Spence. “By this time,” she said, “we had played together so often that we automatically knew what to expect of the other on stage—a great advantage in stock, especially in Providence, where we played five matinees a week … So, on my recommendation, Spencer was sent for.” Tracy settled in for the remainder of the season, taking a house for the summer that would give Johnny the experience of having a yard of his own. His debut at Providence was in a four-act mystery called The Silent House, and while he was universally well received, nobody mistook him for a traditional leading man.
(SUSIE TRACY)
“There is nothing stagy about him,” the critic for the Providence Journal declared. “No makeup—none to speak of—no tricks whatever; just an unassuming, easy manner that gets him about the stage without your quite knowing how he does it. He belongs to that school of acting—if it is a school—which doesn’t want you to think it is acting. It is acting, though, of a very high order, forceful, reserved, artistic.”
It looked as if the season at Providence would be a triumph, and Louise happily settled into the relaxing routine of managing her own house. “Upstairs and down, outdoors and in, John would trot. The freedom of it all was a constant wonder and delight after hotels and apartments and Central Park, with its KEEP OFF signs dotting its hundreds of acres of grass and its policemen whose main job seemed to be to enforce those warnings.” The ensuing weeks brought The Second Man and Night Hostess and Skidding, and while Tracy was always a hit with both audiences and reviewers, an uneasiness crept into the atmosphere of the company, as if there was a subtle malfunction that nobody could quite place a finger on. It was likely Tracy’s spoof of John Barrymore in The Royal Family that sealed his fate.
Tracy blamed Albee’s general manager—a man called Foster Lardner—whose sense of material was seemingly infallible but whose ideas of what actors were suited to what parts were rigidly traditional. Tracy was a fine actor, Lardner acknowledged, but lacked the profile of a leading man. “The women don’t want to come to see you at the matinee,” he told Tracy in letting him go, “but it wouldn’t surprise me if someday you became a great motion picture star.”
“How the hell can I do that,” Tracy responded, “if I don’t have any sex appeal?”
He was terminated with two weeks’ salary and spent much of August at liberty, waiting for the new season to come together in New York. He spent his afternoons at the Lambs, saw Johnny principally at dinner and on Sundays. All sorts of projects took shape at the club—ideas for plays, songs that needed writing, schemes to keep working. A year earlier, Jack McGowan had formed a loose partnership with Joe Santley, who was secretary of the club, and Theodore Barter, to produce their own plays and the plays of brother Lambs. In October they had signed Tracy to appear in a postwar tragicomedy McGowan was writing called Nigger Rich. Spirits ran high until the first production of Santley, Barter & McGowan hit the boards, a melodrama from Johnny Meehan titled The Lady Lies. It lasted twenty-four performances, putting a quick end to plans for the McGowan play until Lee Shubert embraced it the following summer.
Retitled Parade, it had a week at Greenwich, where Chamberlain Brown had a stock company. Shubert thought the play had potential, but butted heads with the author over its provocative original title. Unilaterally, Shubert changed the title to True Colors, a move which so incensed McGowan that he threatened to withdraw it. Shubert backed down, but the staging of the play by its headstrong author was, by common agreement, careless at best. After one invitation-only preview, during which the crowd’s mood went from hope to despair, it premiered at the Royale to largely negative reviews and was yanked after eight days—something of a record for the distinguished members of Cohan’s inner circle.
Tracy had plans to step away from Nigger Rich before the white slip appeared on the call board, as Sam Harris had contracted h
im for a play called Dread. The work of Owen Davis, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of nearly a hundred plays, Dread was the aptly titled study of a young man’s disintegration into madness, a graphic look at how the caustic effects of fear and a guilty conscience can do both emotional and physical damage to a man. Tracy, with the highest of hopes for the role, began rehearsals under the author’s direction on September 30, Madge Evans, Miriam Doyle, and Frank Shannon working in support. The first performance took place at Washington’s Belasco Theatre on the night of October 20.
There were no real heroes in Dread, only the amoral Perry Crocker and a pair of willing victims. On the eve of Crocker’s wedding to the frail Olive Ingram, he declares his love for Olive’s younger sister, Marion. Then Crocker’s wife appears at the door and tells Olive of her son by him and his subsequent desertion of the family. The shock of it all brings on a heart attack. Olive’s dying words to Perry: “You’ll—never—have—my—sister—living or dead. I’ll stop you—some way—some how—you—can’t—have—Marion!” Then, clutching his wrist, she falls back in the chair, her fingers locked in a death grip, Perry unable to pry himself free. He lies to Marion, tells her Olive has blessed their union, but Marion knows better. “When I go with you—and I am going—I will be as degraded as you are.” Perry is tormented by Olive’s death, her vow to him, the memory of her cold, rigid hand refusing to let him go. He flinches at sounds in the house, sees Olive’s form in the shadows, deteriorates into a pale, quivering shadow of his former self.
Great things were expected of Dread, the most ambitious play Davis had written since Icebound, the one that had won him the Pulitzer. The Post’s John Daly hailed the playwright’s return to melodrama, the boldness of his contrivances, the stunning fact that the old master’s theatrics “spit fire and cause squirmings in the orchestra chairs just as his earlier works did when they played on the old Stair and Haviland circuit in the ‘ten-twent-thirt’ days … Mr. Tracy stands up nobly under the punishment, a villain who makes you want to shoot him in the back or kick him in the trousers every time he turns around—so that by the end of the night you expect to hear hisses.”
James Curtis Page 16