There settled over the company a sort of grand acquiescence, as if everyone knew that it was Tracy who was keeping the play open and yet resenting him all the same. Anxious to keep their star satisfied and prove to him that he was indeed doing well, Victor Samrock had a number of standing room stubs added to the nightly till in order to bring the show to straight capacity business. The producers also bought several box seats to show a clean sheet on the statement. Tracy, in turn, kept to himself, arriving on matinee days at 2:46 for a 2:45 curtain and rarely speaking to the other members of the cast. Somewhere toward the end of the first week, he granted an interview to Eugene Kinkead of the New Yorker. “I can’t say I’m enjoying myself,” he said. “I’m gratified at my personal reception by the critics; I’m sorry they didn’t like the play. I’ve looked up the record of plays that have been panned, plays with so-called stars in them, and I’ve never seen an instance of a serious play holding up under the kind of reviews we’ve had. Still, you find standees at all performances. I’m amazed. Our audiences give us hearty, healthy applause. I’m frankly a little confused.”
He went on:
Metro wants me to come back. My next picture will be either Sea of Grass by Conrad Richter or Cass Timberlane—probably the former. I don’t know what to do. I’m terribly upset. Sherwood to me really has great integrity, and I know the fabulous figures he’s been offered to write pictures. It’s a little discouraging. I think there’s some of the finest writing in the play I’ve ever seen. I was amazed to find he was not treated with more respect by one or two of the critics. I’ve never known integrity like his. It’s damned, damned unfortunate. Anyway, I’ll stay with it until my boy John, who is flying from California soon, has seen it. He wants to see me act. I’d like to come back in another play, and in another play by Robert Sherwood.
Kinkead’s piece ran in the “Talk of the Town” section of the magazine’s issue of November 24, and the swell of organizational outrage was instantaneous. Tracy’s statements, however well intentioned, brought an immediate decline in advance sales. Sherwood also considered it “one of the very worst blows of all” in their struggle to sell the movie rights. “This, of course, was followed by numerous newspaper items indicating that Tracy might leave at any moment, and the show was marked with the stamp of doom.”
There were a few cast replacements—actors leaving for more promising jobs—and the gate started to slide as Christmas approached. Capacity at the Plymouth was $26,268 a week, but in the play’s second month the average hovered at around $20,000, dipping some weeks to below $19,000. Playing to empty seats, Tracy feared his stature in Hollywood might suffer and let it be known that he was thinking of leaving the show on January 5. Sherwood, pleading poverty, had taken a job with Sam Goldwyn writing the screenplay for a home-front picture called Glory for Me,2 and from California he appealed to Tracy to allow the play one hundred performances, which would take it into the week ending February 9, 1946. “We are still the biggest legitimate gross in town,” he stressed, “and will undoubtedly remain so through these bad two weeks then back to capacity.”
Tracy said that he might reconsider his closing date, a statement that, like the previous one, got reported in the New York Times. Reacting to the damage such uncertainty did to the advance sale, both Samrock and Sherwood pleaded again for a definite decision. “I understand your problems,” Sherwood told Tracy in a day letter, “and know that despite them you have given a magnificent performance in my play. But you must also understand, Spencer, that neither I nor the rest of the Playwrights’ Company could get away with the obvious lie that we would close the play January fifth for any reason other than the fact that you are leaving it. This is not an attempt to trap you into extending the run. It is simply the situation in which all of us are placed.”
Tracy took his heaviest blast in the press on December 23 when John Chapman of the Daily News bitterly assailed him under the headline HOLLYWOOD GO HOME: “The sooner Spencer Tracy goes back [to Hollywood], the better—and he should stay there.” When the studio put out word that Tracy’s return to Los Angeles was “imminent” and that he was wanted to play the role of President Truman in The Beginning or the End, Bob Considine’s topical story of the atomic bomb, Victor Samrock seized control of the situation. On December 27 he notified the cast that The Rugged Path would close on January 19, 1946, completing an engagement of ten weeks, if not the one hundred performances for which Sherwood had so vigorously lobbied. The same day, the wire services carried the news that Tracy, solely on the strength of Without Love, had retained his position as one of the top five stars in America in the annual Motion Picture Herald poll of box office leaders.
With Robert Keith onstage in The Rugged Path. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
The closing announcement triggered a recap in the January 2 issue of Variety, where Tracy’s departure, the paper said, would not only mean “plenty of red for the Playwrights’ Co., but a loss of employment by supporting actors.” The star’s desire not to continue, the item went on, was responsible for the fold. “It cost $75,000 to produce Path and the loss at this time is placed at more than $40,000. Show is costly to operate and virtually no profit was earned out of town. Grosses at the Plymouth have been exceptional, and it was figured Path could play well into the spring.” The paper laid the blame squarely at Tracy’s feet, suggesting the show had depended on the star’s “whims” from the start.
No mention was made of Sherwood’s negative reviews, which would have doomed the play with most any other star, nor Tracy’s positive reviews, which were practically unanimous. Variety published on a Wednesday, and Carroll called Victor Samrock the same day to say that Spence was in “quite an uproar” about it. “Am seeing the great man tonight,” Samrock promptly advised Sherwood in a letter, “but now that the play has announced its closing, I am not worried about Spencer’s innermost feelings, nor will I try to assuage his soul-searching doubts. On second thought, I will do these things if he promises to buy the moving picture rights for Metro.”
Howard Dietz called editor Abel Green and arranged for Variety mugg Arthur Bronson to meet Tracy in his suite at the Waldorf Astoria and hear his side of the story. “I take the theatre seriously,” Tracy told Bronson. “My record is good in it. The people I worked for—Herman Shumlin, the late George M. Cohan, and Sam Harris—they would have vouched for me.” He denied that he was “running out” on the play and said the show was closing “for a simple, old-fashioned reason—it wasn’t doing business.” He pointed out that five other actors had already left and that Sherwood himself was out working in California. It had, in fact, been Sherwood who insisted on bringing the play into New York when it wasn’t yet in shape. “If I had left,” he said, “the play wouldn’t have come in.” Truthfully, he told Bronson that it was the producers who gave him—and the other actors—notice, and not the other way around. He then suggested to Bronson that he had never threatened to quit—a baldfaced lie.
Samrock was disappointed that there was no spike in business when the closing notice went up. He estimated the week of January 7 at $18,500 and felt the following week would be a little better. “I frankly thought the announcement would increase business,” he said to Sherwood in a letter,
but even so, I constantly have to catch myself up by realizing that $18,000 and $19,000 is still a lot of business in any country for any play. I would like to add that the lack of increase in business has hurt Mr. Tracy’s pride (if he has any left). He has been constantly asking me to have you make a statement that the company is closing the play because of lack of business, and I have constantly been pointing out to him that while the play is not selling out, it is still doing good business, which shows that he is a draw, and I see no reason for making any statement at this stage of the game because it would only serve to create animosities.
Garson Kanin had gone off to direct his own play, Born Yesterday, and actor Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who replaced Rex Williams in the part of Gil Hartnick, one of Vinion’s co
lleagues on the paper, marveled at the spectacle of Tracy giving the actors notes after every performance. “Despite his notable achievements, he aroused little respect from our cast by insisting that all the actors maintain an artificially high pitch and level of performance,” Zimbalist wrote in his autobiography. “When he slipped in comfortably underneath everybody else, the audience would say, ‘He’s so natural!’ His notes comprised a list of those whose energy level was dropping (almost to normal). We all knew what his game was but were helpless to do anything about it.”
When the last performance took place on the night of January 19, Samrock reported to Sherwood that the cast felt miserable “because the full impact of what can happen conveyed itself to them only after the last performance. It was sad and a little more than depressing.” A letter of thanks over Sherwood’s signature was distributed to the cast: “As a kind of final curtain on my relationship with Spencer, I must tell you that all his talk the last few days was, ‘Where did I go wrong?’ The only other note worth mentioning is that he fully promised me, without any prodding on my part, that he was returning to Hollywood and would proceed with all that was in him to sell the moving picture rights of The Rugged Path.”
On January 24, Sherwood addressed both Samrock and press representative William Fields in acknowledging what both men had gone through in the interests of the play and their friendships with him. “I appreciate it very deeply, and I bitterly regret the initial mistake that I made when I first put my faith, and the fruits of long labors, in one who had proved, over and over again, that he possesses the morals and scruples and integrity and human decency of a louse. This, unfortunately, has not been merely one of those irritating experiences that one can laugh off and quickly forget. There certainly was an ugly kind of poison which spread to all of us and it is no easy task to get rid of it. I know we will get rid of it but, speaking for myself, it will not be forgotten.”
* * *
1 He needn’t have bothered; Lardner died in 1934.
2 Released as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).
CHAPTER 22
State of the Union
* * *
The first meeting of the newly installed board of John Tracy Clinic took place on the evening of November 18, 1943. A new demonstration nursery was several weeks into its thirty-six-week session and hot lunches were being prepared daily by a rotation of volunteer mothers. Spence was fighting off a cold, eager to get the last shots for A Guy Named Joe in the can, but Walt Disney, otherwise immersed in the production of war propaganda at his Burbank studio, was interested in seeing firsthand how the clinic worked. It was when Louise was showing him around a few days later that they came upon the kids during nap time.
“Don’t they have cots?” he asked.
“No,” Louise told him. “They just sleep on mats on the floor.”
The next day there were cots and, at Christmas time, a truckload of gifts—puppets and toys, all Disney-licensed, that could be used in teaching.
The service report at the February 1944 meeting was a succession of modest statistics: thirty-one children in the summer course, eight in nursery school, four in a weekly afternoon class. One hundred and seven families were enrolled in the correspondence course, twenty-five mothers were taking adult classes in child psychology and speech, some four hundred other families were assisted in some way via the mails. Granted its federal tax exemption status on June 19, 1944, the clinic had three full-time instructors. In February 1945 the original cottage was extended in the front, creating an annex and an entrance hall that displayed a map of the world on which colored pins marked all the places to which copies of the free correspondence course had been sent.
Collier’s devoted three pages to the clinic in its issue of July 14:
Little wonder the parents flock to this unique clinic with their handicapped offspring. They have heard how Mrs. Spencer Tracy, wife of the movie star, helped her born-deaf son, John, “to hear”—to find his normal place in everyday life through heightened observation, lip reading, and speech. John Tracy, now twenty, acts as natural and rugged as if he had been born with hearing. He drives his own station wagon through traffic, is a talented cartoonist, and plays tennis and polo. His training was no miracle. It was the result of long, patient years of faithful, sympathetic experimenting and persistence on the part of his mother. In gratitude, Mrs. Tracy now devotes her zeal and experience to developing this progressive clinic, in her son’s name, for other deaf children all over the country.
Pictures surrounding the text showed Louise serving lunch to a trio of curly-haired moppets; Miss Hattie Harrell, formerly of the Rochester School for the Deaf, holding a boy’s hand to her cheek as headphones amplify her voice; other instructors in group exercises as parents look on; and a lineup of giggling children arrayed along the rustic front porch of the clinic, some three, some four, one four and a half. Throughout, Louise preached the gospel of “normalcy,” the importance of treating the child as if he or she could hear. “He must be talked to and played with and must be shown that he is loved and wanted.” Though the annual cost of a family’s participation in the demonstration nursery program had been set at $950, Louise was able, by simplifying the sense-training material, to get the cost of the correspondence course down to fifty-five dollars. “Today there is a long waiting list of parents eager for the home training instruction of the Tracy Clinic,” the article concluded. “But they will have to wait until further facilities are available. Funds are urgently needed for more space, personnel, and material.”
The Collier’s piece brought a flood of new inquiries but no comparable flow of donations, and when Spence made the financial concessions for his return to the stage, the ever-increasing needs of the clinic could not have been far from his thoughts. In October, as the first troubled performances of The Rugged Path were taking place, John Tracy Clinic was granted the use of a second building on the SC campus, a small house next door to the original where two additional tutors could be located. That same month, a parents’ auxiliary was formed and Louise began taking on speaking engagements, spending long hours away from the ranch. The drive from Encino took nearly an hour, and with John now a full-time student at Pasadena Junior College, Susie was left largely to her own devices.
The Tracy property was surrounded by the alfalfa fields of the Ador Dairy Farm, and during the war an army camp was directly across the street. Susie was never bored at the ranch; there was always something to do and she never felt she was stuck there. She rode her chestnut mare, Missy, to Encino Elementary, and Hughie would be waiting for her every day after school. At home, Margaret Hunt, the Tracys’ cook-housekeeper, would have crackers and peanut butter and cold milk waiting. The closest businesses were on Ventura Boulevard, half a mile away, and Susie occasionally would go to a drugstore on Ventura to look through the movie magazines.
“She was a very happy, self-sufficient sort of child,” her mother said. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, I don’t need to worry about you.’ ” People sometimes assumed that Susie was neglected by her parents, given Louise’s relentless focus on her brother, but Susie could never remember feeling that way. When John was home, she’d go to his room and watch him get out his paper. Occasionally he’d take her and a friend to the movies. “Susie was a good lip reader,” Louise commented. “She once said, ‘I can lip read…,’ and I just looked at her. I said something without voice, and she told me exactly what I had said. She had watched him. John could always understand her, too. Susie always looked right at him when she talked.”
John had gone through a flirtation with hearing devices in the early forties, first the stationary Phipps-Unit, with which he could hear “pretty well,” then a Western Electric portable that enabled him to discern “low tones” from people up to five feet away. “Pretty soon, however, I got tired of the hearing aid. I didn’t care much to wear it. I thought it drove me crazy. It puzzled and annoyed me. It made me feel nervous and impatient. Soon, I got in the habit of not wear
ing it anymore.” The unit was so bulky it took a vest to hold it in place, and the battery alone was the size of a beer can. In April 1943 one of the Phipps-Units came home with John for a short while. “I could hear with it all right, but all I could distinguish was the lowness and highness of sounds … I tried my best to be patient when Mother insisted that I work with it. I just sat down and listened, that’s all. I followed Mother with sounds she made through a microphone. It seemed very difficult to me.”
He went on to work three days a week in a Beverly Hills studio, but after the summer of 1943 he stopped using amplification altogether. “Hearing sounds drives me nuts,” he said, “and that’s the truth. I cannot stand words. I like things when they are quiet and when they make me feel patient. Sounds annoy me. I should hear some to make better speech, but I feel it is too late to get into the habit of hearing speech or sounds. After all, I am happy and more comfortable the way things are—quiet.”
In April 1946 Helen Keller visited John Tracy Clinic in the company of her secretary, Polly Thomson. “Encourage your child’s desire to speak,” she urged the mothers on duty that morning. Asked whether blindness or deafness was the greater handicap, Keller, without hesitation, replied that being deaf was the greater handicap because the blind “had more contact with their fellow man.”
Tracy’s return to M-G-M was as likely motivated by money as disappointment in Sherwood’s play. There was general agreement among the critics in Washington, Boston, and New York that The Rugged Path was a personal triumph, albeit a qualified one. Yet the day after it opened on Broadway, Tracy advised Benny Thau that he wished to report back to the studio in ninety days, a condition of the leave-of-absence granted by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Despite the business the show was doing, appearing in it cost him well in excess of $150,000, and the most he could afford to give the Playwrights’ Company for something less than a masterpiece was three months. And even that, as it turned out, was too much. When he reported back to Culver City on February 4, 1946, he was immediately placed back on salary, even though the picture they had waiting for him couldn’t start until Kate had finished with a thriller called Undercurrent, which was then only three weeks into production.
James Curtis Page 70