James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  In New York he had an escape clause inserted into his contract, giving him an out during the first three weeks of performances and another during the New York run of the play. He had, he explained, full confidence in Sherwood’s work; it was the lead actor who gave him pause. Could he still manage the sustained concentration he’d need to carry a play? Could he achieve the same level of purity he had learned to put forth on film? “Once,” Kate remembered, “I asked Spencer some such foolish question like, ‘How did you like my play acting?’ and he stared at me for a moment and said, ‘That’s the strangest remark I ever heard. What is play acting? Do you mean the tricks some people pull on stage? If that’s supposed to be acting, I don’t like it.’ ”

  Rehearsals for The Rugged Path commenced on the stage of the Barrymore Theatre on September 3, 1945. Johnny, in the hospital, had a telegram from his father the next day:

  EVERYTHING WENT WELL EXCEPT I AM SCARED.

  In Morey Vinion, Sherwood had fashioned a character as fitted to Tracy as a second skin—a career journalist, outwardly happy yet inwardly brooding and dissatisfied in his role as the “embattled liberal” in an otherwise conservative newspaper. “He’s never been really happy,” his wife admits. “Well—not since the first few months, and I sometimes wonder about how he really felt even then. When he got down to work in Europe, he began to take everything to heart as though he were personally involved, instead of just being an American reporter.”

  She asks him: “Do you want to get out of here, Morey?” And he tells her no, he doesn’t, that he just wants to “stay put” for a change. “I want to have my own home in my own country. I told you I wanted my own home, and I meant it.” Actress Martha Sleeper played Morey’s frustrated wife, married to a man “incurably restless by nature,” a “damned good newspaperman,” which meant, as his father-in-law told him, “you’ll be a damned poor husband.”

  MOREY

  Oh, we got along all right, Harriet, despite all reports to the contrary.

  HARRIET

  Yes, we’ve got along. Because we’ve both had good manners.

  “One of the banes of the existence of any playwright or director,” said Garson Kanin,

  is the actor, especially the star, who doesn’t really know his part. They sort of know it. In the Broadway theatre, I think it’s more common for a player to know his part. In films [it’s], “Oh, I’ll take a shot at it.” But Spencer was absolutely meticulous about learning his part, and learning it way ahead of time, and learning it so accurately. I used to kid him sometimes; I’d say, “Spencer, you even learn the typographical errors.” He learned it absolutely exactly as written. Of course, after 15 years his theatre machine was a bit rusty and he was aware of that, but it didn’t take him long—three or four days—and he was absolutely in there like a stage actor who had acted every night on the stage for 15 years.

  Nearly three weeks into rehearsals, Tracy’s contract with the Playwrights’ Company remained unsigned. He now wanted, it seemed, a 25 percent stake in the show but was unwilling to put in any of his own money, M-G-M’s Rubin having advised him that an investment on his part would likely put him in “an unfavorable tax position.” Victor Samrock, the company’s business manager, took up the matter with Carroll Tracy one morning, saying they were in no position to grant a 25 percent share of the profits without a commensurate investment in the show. Tracy was, moreover, being offered the exact same terms accorded the Lunts and Katharine Cornell and Helen Hayes. Carroll said how sorry he was that the matter had not been settled in California and he assured Samrock that everything would be all right “in time.” Later that afternoon, after conferring with his brother, Carroll again sat opposite Samrock and said, “Well, if you can’t agree to Spencer’s request, then you better get somebody else.”

  Conferring with Captain Garson Kanin and playwright Robert Emmet Sherwood during preparations for The Rugged Path, 1945. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  Tracy was ready to bolt, his confidence undermined by the fractious rehearsal process that comes with any new, untried work. Samrock tried laughing the thing off, repeating the gist of their earlier discussion and ticking off the costs associated with a production on the grand scale of The Rugged Path. “Carroll was quite friendly about it all,” Samrock recalled, “and finally suggested, ‘Well, I think I’ll go up to Rubin’s office and have him call John Wharton [co-director and general counsel for the Playwrights’ Company] and maybe the two of them can settle it.’ ”

  If the role of Morey cut too close at times, Tracy’s discomfort—his projection of temperament—came out in his dealings with Samrock and Wharton, where Carroll could serve as both mouthpiece and whipping boy. In rehearsals Kanin found him “imaginative, resourceful, malleable”—a revelation. What he achieved was a clarity of interpretation that stretched beyond the intelligence, personality, and stamina he typically brought to a role. “His whole approach,” said Darryl Hickman, “was to externalize as little as possible.”

  Driven by an abhorrence of artifice and a natural terror of monotony, Tracy was constantly distilling the character to its essential elements, his stage effects coming wholly from within, all clean, sharp lines, lucid and completely free of the tricks “some people pull on stage.” When a scene required him to emerge from the ocean after five days of being shipwrecked, he told Kanin he would not wear an appliance designed to simulate a growth of beard.

  “It’ll look ridiculous,” Kanin argued. “It’ll bother the audience.”

  “No, it won’t,” countered Tracy.

  “Why won’t it?”

  “Because I’ll act unshaven.”

  The company was large, the production unwieldy, the script unready and better suited to the conventions of the screen. The first public perfor-mance of The Rugged Path was set to take place in Providence on the night of September 28, 1945. Recalling his abrupt dismissal from the Albee Players in 1928, Tracy relished a triumphant return to the city. “The play was sold out all three nights,” he said, still harboring a grudge against the Albee stock’s old general manager, Foster Lardner, “and I’ve always hoped the bastard tried to get in and couldn’t get a ticket.”1 Kate, who was in constant attendance throughout rehearsals, appeared on the arm of Arthur Hopkins. The Metropolitan was a big auditorium, plain and thoroughly unsuited to the demands of live drama. Tracy filled all three thousand seats, and at intermission it seemed as if all three thousand patrons wanted a close look at Hepburn, who had placed herself on display in the front row. “I felt,” said John Wharton, who observed the procession, “that it was not calculated to increase interest in the soul-searching of the character Tracy was portraying. But this was minor. What was major was the inexplicable aura of failure that began to settle over the play. Except for the one scene where the men abandoned ship, the aura increased.”

  It was nearly 11:15 when Tracy took his curtain line. “I’m not worried about you fellers,” he told his ragtag band of guerrilla fighters as they faced certain death in a Philippine jungle. “I wouldn’t trade you for the best they had at Valley Forge or Gettysburg or the Normandy beach-heads. You may not have much to fight with, but you know what you’ve got to fight for. That gives you dignity. And if the rest of the world—all the people back home who see the war only as a lot of little arrows on little maps—if they don’t realize what you’ve fought for, and don’t achieve it, then I say God damn them—God damn them—God damn them to all Eternity.”

  “Spencer was superb,” said S. N. Behrman, “a marvelously sustained performance, very quiet, intensively felt. By that time Bob’s reputation had reached a pitch approaching infallibility. In the intermission a well-known lady expressed her disappointment: ‘Sherwood builds up a crisis for the hero which he solves by giving him a job on a destroyer where he fries eggs.’ I left the theater with Arthur Hopkins, a meditative man. He said: ‘No playwright should be given as much power as Bob has been given. It distracts him from his true vocation—writing plays.’ ”

 
The Variety notice lauded the play’s missionary intent while bemoaning the sight lines and the wretched acoustics of the hall, factors that doubtless informed the audience’s tepid response. There was also the vague feeling among the out-of-towners that they had seen it all before—trademark Sherwood with a coating of Hollywood star power. “Sherwood,” said Wharton, “knew something was amiss; he never fooled himself. But this time he couldn’t find the way to fix it. Tracy became worried; there was talk of closing out of town. Indeed, Miss Hepburn, whom I had known for years, made a comment one day which astonished me. She said, ‘John, I think it will take a lot of courage to open in New York, and Spencer hasn’t got that kind of courage.’ ”

  “Desperate changes” were made between Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., where The Rugged Path was set to open a two-week stand at the National Theatre on Monday, October 1. Rehearsals grew tense as Tracy wrestled with all the new material, and when Kanin one day said to him, “We’ll iron this out tomorrow, Spence, okay?” Tracy reportedly threw back, “If I’m still here tomorrow!” as he stalked out of the theater. The fact that he hadn’t yet signed his Equity contract put the whole enterprise on a precarious footing, and Samrock, for one, was certain that disaster would accompany the Washington opening.

  The first-night audience was studded with big names, including Justice and Mrs. Felix Frankfurter, Senator and Mrs. Arthur Vandenberg, and General and Mrs. Alexander D. Surles, yet it was Kate’s appearance, hair upswept, in a long red evening wrap, that set the most necks craning. She attended with her friend Laura Harding, the American Express heiress, and when the curtain went up, she could plainly see that Spence was nervous. “Now he was never nervous,” she said. “Never nervous. And the thing hadn’t been going too well, and I thought, ‘Oh dear, is he going to sort of … take that road?’ And Laura Harding said to me, ‘Is he nervous?’ And, of course, I said, ‘Oh, no, of course he’s not nervous.’ But he finally overcame it. But when you are aware that the material that you’re playing is not of great interest to an audience, it’s tough sometimes to keep from being nervous.”

  All the reservations Tracy had about his own capabilities—voice, technique, mastering an ever-changing part—proved to be completely without merit. Kate, in a letter to M-G-M makeup artist Emil Levigne, described his performance as brilliant: “[H]e really delivers the goods—easy, funny & moving—& I think the audience is positively bewildered by his naturalness—& he can be heard in the very last row—I know this because my usual spot is standing in the back …” Irene Selznick, escorted that evening by New York Post publisher George Backer, did not expect to see Tracy in the Sherwoods’ suite after the opening, but she took the absence of Garson Kanin as an ominous sign. “Curiously,” she wrote, “there seemed to be a party going on; several of Bob’s friends, Washington celebrities of that period, were on hand—all very interesting, except that nothing constructive was happening. The play had problems, but not anything that couldn’t be solved, and I thought it had a great chance.” She watched as Anderson, Rice, and designer Jo Mielziner waited to confer—“twiddling their thumbs”—and Sherwood, all aglow, drifted into a spirited rendition of “Red, Red Robin”—a sure sign that nothing substantive would get discussed that evening.

  Tracy fell ill with grippe in Washington, alternately dripping with sweat and then trembling with chills, knowing the first performance he missed, however sick he might legitimately be, would be laid to booze. Loading up on sulfa drugs, he struggled to the theater eight times a week, vomiting in the wings and, in Kate’s words, looking back on his life at Metro “as a paradise which he didn’t appreciate.”

  The show limped into Boston, where the Hub critics laid it out extravagantly. Louise trained up from New York and was dismayed by what she saw. “It didn’t amount to anything,” she said. “He didn’t want to stay there. He always said, ‘Should I get out of it?’ It wasn’t up to what he had hoped, and he just wanted to get back.” Kate, of course, was in Boston as well, and it was her constant bucking up that kept him with the show, even when it was apparent that Sherwood wouldn’t be able to fix the play’s most fundamental faults. At the hotel, the author and his partners spent four hours trying to talk Tracy out of quitting; Sam Zolotow reported in the New York Times that he would be leaving the show on October 27, causing the vigorous advance sale in New York to come to a dead halt. Through Carroll, Tracy told Victor Samrock that he would stay with the play only if he could give a two-week notice at any time during its Broadway run, and Samrock, desperate to get the show into New York at any cost, had little choice but to agree. On October 22, his stamina gone, Tracy wired Samrock:

  TWO WEEKS CONTRACT SATISFACTORY. OPENING NEW YORK NOVEMBER 10TH.

  After nearly four months of back-and-forth, he had finally signed his Equity contract.

  On the morning the show moved into New York, Garson Kanin came across Hepburn scrubbing the bathroom floor in the star dressing room. He wrote: “In the ten days prior to the New York opening all the important working relationships had deteriorated. Spencer was tense and unbending, could not, or would not take direction, which amounted to the same thing.” With a Life magazine cover story pending that would focus national attention on the show, Tracy approached the New York opening as if preparing to face a firing squad. “I was a basket case,” he remembered. “A basket case!”

  Kate had taken him to see Laurette Taylor’s gut-wrenching performance in The Glass Menagerie and he had come away regarding Taylor, whom he had never met, as “the greatest actor I ever saw and the greatest this country ever produced.” (As Hepburn said, “She and Spencer had a tremendous amount in common, because they never drove a part—they just let it happen.”) The day of November 10, his stomach in knots, Tracy left for the theater resentful of Kanin, Samrock, Sherwood, and the whole fraternity of critics who were doubtless planning to flay him alive. “When I came into my dressing room to get ready to go on, there was a little carnation stuck with a black pin and a little note written on tissue paper that said, ‘Dear Mr. Tracy: I have always been a great fan of yours. Welcome home. Laurette Taylor.’ She had stopped on her way to the theater and left it. So I said, ‘Boys, if the lights go out now I still win. Fuck it.’ I was relaxed that night, opening night.”

  Kate had been hovering, hoping he could concentrate. “It touched him so,” she said of Taylor’s thoughtful gesture. “He was so thrilled, because he had wild admiration for her, and he just put it in his button hole. When he came on, I thought, ‘Ooh. Well. Never saw that [carnation]. I wonder who sent that?’ But it certainly made him feel absolutely there.” With the company thoroughly demoralized, Kanin thought the performance promising: “Spencer rose to the occasion and gave an overwhelmingly magnetic performance, but somewhere, about halfway through, the dramatic line failed to sustain. The play lost the audience and disintegrated.”

  “No newspaper man could ask for a better model than Mr. Tracy,” averred Lewis Nichols of the Times. “Leisurely and assured, he is one of the most likable members of the fourth estate and whatever estate it is to which actors belong. His Morey Vinion is an honest man, an able editor, and a quizzical cynic; the performance is indeed fine. But Morey Vinion is almost the only cleanly-written part.” Of the play itself, Nichols lamented its lack of power, Sherwood having abandoned the role of prophet and “forceful advocate” for that of historian, permitting the flashback structure to drain it of all passion. “To get the bleak news over immediately: Robert E. Sherwood’s first play in five years has not been written with his best pencil.”

  The story was the same all over town. The Herald Tribune: “Robert E. Sherwood has mistaken a stage for a podium. The Playwrights’ Company’s offering emerges as a series of animated editorials rather than a challenging play.” P.M.: “It is most palpably not a good play … It is not even at this moment in time a very provocative commentary on the issues confronting the world … Tracy’s acting is likable, natural, and not unconvincing.” Time: “One trouble with Th
e Rugged Path is that it is not dynamic enough to avoid seeming emotionally dated.” The Sun: “The new play is lacking in dramatic progression. It is more message than it is good theatre … Tracy … gives a solid, tender, biting performance.” Andrew Tracy, writing his son Frank in China, summarized the reviews by reporting that the play seemed out of its time. “It’s what they call, in the movie business, a turkey,” he carefully explained.

  Unlike Louise, who considered the gradual evolution of a character one of the great creative pleasures of the stage, Tracy, after fifteen years of working solely before the lens of a camera, could no longer welcome the audience into the process. Used to settling a performance and then moving on to the next shot or the next scene, he was effectively done with Morey Vinion by the end of the first week. “I couldn’t say the same goddamn lines over and over and over again every night,” he later groused to a friend. “I’d forgotten how boring that could be, how deathly boring that was. I wasn’t creating anything. At least every day is a new day for me in films. Every day is new and when I get through with this film I’ll go right into another one, and that’s new. But this thing—every day, every day, over and over again.”