CHAPTER 1
The first time she saw him was in profile. He was seated halfway back in the car and she noticed him as he stood. His was a strong Irish face, lined and ruddy, jaw square, eyes blue, hair sandy brown, thick and jostled by the movement of the train.
There was no clue as to who he was, the work he did, or exactly what he was doing on the nearly empty Westchester bound for White Plains, the last stop on an electric line that began at the Harlem River and glided northward through the Bronx, Mount Vernon, and New Rochelle on a fifty-minute trip to the suburbs.
She collected her things from the seat beside her and was depositing her ticket in the chopper box when it occurred to them both that they were the only two people on the platform. He asked if she’d care to share a cab. And when he told her that he was headed for the Palace Theatre on Main Street, she knew at once that she had not only made an acquaintance but met a colleague as well.
The Palace was six blocks west of the station, a big barn of a place that had opened promisingly but fallen on hard times. It started with stock and traveling shows and event recitals, went through two name changes and a spell as a movie emporium, and was now home to the freshly minted stock company of one Leonard Wood, Jr.
Wood was something of a local celebrity in that he bore the name of his father, military governor of Cuba, army chief of staff, and current governor-general of the Philippines. He had worked a deal for the theater on a percentage basis, brought in Kendal Weston, the “Belasco of stock,” to direct, but then lost his leading woman to a contract dispute before the dusty seats of the Palace could be warmed by paying customers. With the company’s opening set for April 9, 1923, Weston was sent scrambling, and it was then that he put in a call for Louise Treadwell.
Louise had appeared under Weston’s direction in Manchester, where her long brown hair, expressive face, and dancer’s body enabled her to play both ingenues and character parts with equal conviction. She had a flair for comedy and a nice singing voice, and although her engagement was only for a week or two, she needed the job. Rehearsals for the four-act comedy Nice People began promptly, Louise taking the Francine Larrimore part, and Wood—who could never seem to get her name right—pronounced himself duly impressed with what he saw. “Louise Treadway,” he declared in a newspaper ad, “is a delightfully cultured girl whose personality goes right over the footlights and makes you wish you knew her personally.” As soon as Nice People opened, daytime rehearsals began on the following week’s play. She made a quick trip home to gather more clothes; stock actresses furnished their own wardrobes, and Louise, like most, was an accomplished seamstress.
The man she met on the ride back to White Plains also needed the job. Having just turned twenty-three, he had no credits to speak of, save a four-line bit in R.U.R. and six months of student productions at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He wasn’t a lead, so Weston had never seen him act, but it soon dawned on Louise that she, in fact, had. It was some two months earlier in an afternoon performance at New York’s Lyceum Theatre. “My friend was very apologetic,” she remembered. “It was a student play and she promised someone she’d come and would I come too?” The play was Knut at Roeskilde, a tragedy set in the year 1027. In the cast that day were West Phillips, Olga Brent, Bryan Lycan, and the young man she now knew to be Spencer Tracy.
Kendal Weston had expanded the company to fourteen players for the second week. The play was Jules Eckert Goodman’s The Man Who Came Back, a lurid tale of redemption in the opium dens of Shanghai. Louise would play the drug-addled Marcelle opposite Ernest Woodward, an alumnus of the American Academy who was cast in the title role. Engaged for general business, Tracy was assigned two minor parts in the show, one played almost completely out of sight of the audience. He soon disappeared, and when Louise again saw him, it was at the tiny Nut and Coffee House around the corner on Mamaroneck Avenue, where he was taking a meal that consisted in its entirety of chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream, the combination dripping with chocolate sauce. It became a familiar scene: “If you saw him twice on one day, one time or the other he was sure to be eating cake or ice cream or chocolate sauce, or all three.” At first she noticed him only during breaks, when a small group would go around the corner for doughnuts and buttermilk. They fell easily into conversation, but there was little time for more than an occasional glance.
Louise lacked formal training, but compensated with long hours and a dancer’s instincts. She moved expressively, absorbing the part as she learned her lines. Weston nurtured her over the course of a tense and uncertain week, helping her master a showy but difficult part while leaving Tracy, who had little to do, much to his own devices.
The actors were expected to learn an act a day, with Fridays given over to hair, wardrobe, and nails. On Saturday morning they played the whole thing straight through, one of only two chances they would get before opening on Monday night. The company performed Nice People eight times that week, and those who weren’t yet working ran lines, did their laundry, enjoyed the brief luxury of having their evenings to themselves. The rehearsal on Monday was particularly chaotic. Actors huddled in the lounge of the theater, mumbling their lines, while stagehands hammered the sets together and aimed the lights, a cracked canvas backdrop shimmering with wet paint. It was only after supper that they were briefly allowed onstage to try out props, find their entrances, sit in chairs. Then came time for the stage manager to call, “Half hour!”
The performance that night was before an audience that consisted chiefly of die-hards—those who wanted to be among the first to see the new play and sadists who hoped to see the actors flub their lines. The pit band offered brassy renditions of everything from “Flower of Araby” andIrving Berlin’s “Dearest” to selections from Blossom Time. Since most of the Palace’s 1,200 seats were empty, the room’s acoustics contributed a noticeable ring to the dialogue.
Taking the part created by Mary Nash in the original New York production, Louise tore into Marcelle’s big scene in Sam Shew Sing’s dingy opium joint. The dead center of the stage was defined by a circular radiance of yellow light and the walls were comprised of tattered bunks. Cornered by the man she had followed in vain from San Francisco to Shanghai, she called out to Tracy, now a dope fiend thrashing helplessly on one of the bunks: “Where are you now, Binksie?”
And from the shadows he wailed, “I’ve looked through most every star and I can’t find her! I can’t find her!”
Louise leveled a bone-chilling stare at Woodward. “Binksie there made a fool of himself over a girl—a girl who wasn’t anything or anybody until Binksie came along and taught her. Then he grew tired of her, or he wanted to reform or something, and he went to her to let her know. There was a quarrel. He was nasty and perhaps she was nastier. He started to go. She swore he’d never leave her, that she’d follow him wherever he went, and he … he only laughed.”
Woodward stood frozen at the edge of the light. “Go on—,” he said softly.
“She told the truth,” Louise continued. “She took strychnine there before him and—” A strange smile came over her. “Did you ever see anyone die of strychnine poisoning? It’s a nasty way to die—body all shook to pieces, eyes grinning—and she died that way in Binksie’s arms.”
A slight pause to let the image sink in.
“Well, she followed him all right. Even the dope won’t help him to forget her, and wherever she is—in Heaven or Hell—she’s got the laugh on Binksie.”
Louise picked a bottle of rye whiskey up off the floor. “Do you mind?” she asked matter-of-factly, not really caring if he did or he didn’t. But he did mind, and gently he took it from her.
Her face turned hard, defiant. “If a man ever did a thing like that to me, I’d never kill myself that way—it’s too painful, too quick. No, I’d live … live to let him see her dying slow … body and soul rotting before his eyes …”
When the performance came to an end, the crowd gave her a rousing ovation—the loudest of the evening—and Weston came to her afterward and said, “We’re going to keep you here.”
Business improved as the week progressed, and Wood, who rarely came down from his office, took to haranguing the locals with quarter-page ads in the Daily Reporter.
Ticket sales jumped for It’s a Boy, the company’s offering for the week of April 23, but it was the musical comedy Buddies that brought the people out in droves. Louise sang Julie, the part made famous by Peggy Wood on Broadway, and the theater was nearly full on a Saturday night when kids whistled and catcalled from the balconies and seats ranged from twenty-five cents to a dollar twenty-five, plus war tax.
Tracy played a peripheral part each week, inhabiting the background while Louise drew the crowd’s attention and acclaim. His projection was good and his diction clear, and from the very start he showed he could deliver the most innocuous of lines with a startling intensity. He took the stage just ahead of Marcelle in The Man Who Came Back, and as the pipe-smoking Captain Gallon his exit line was “To hell with him!” Louise, immersed in her own role, took particular notice: “The way he did it was so effective he always got a nice little round of applause, and I remember thinking, ‘That boy has got something there.’ ”
She naturally gravitated to Tracy, whose experience was nowhere near her own, but whose enthusiasm was infectious and whose natural gifts as an actor were plain to see. She found him a fast study with an almost photographic memory. Lines were much harder for her to absorb, and he would feed her cues during breaks and prompt her when the words wouldn’t come. She, in turn, taught him how to use makeup, since he had learned in school and tended to overdo it. “You aren’t the Great Lover type,” she told him, “but you have a nice stage presence and a good voice. Some day you’ll find your particular niche and you’ll click.” Spence took to calling her “Weeze,” the pet name her mother had given her.
Louise was staying at the Gedney Farm Hotel, a three-hundred-acre resort just outside of town, and she returned there most days for dinner. Wood traded courtesies with Edward H. Crandall, the hotel’s general manager, whose handsome son fancied himself an actor. In exchange for an occasional bit or a walk-on for Eddie Jr., the principal players of Wood’s company could rub elbows with bankers, stockbrokers, and international celebrities at boardinghouse prices.
And so one Sunday, Louise invited Spence to dinner at the nautically themed dining room of the Gedney.
Louise Ten Broeck Treadwell was born in 1896 in New Castle, Pennsylvania, where her grandfather, George Edwards Treadwell, had founded the New Castle News. Her father, Allienne Treadwell, practiced law and owned the Treadwell News Company, an agency for out-of-town newspapers. Louise was a serious, bookish child whose greatest pleasure was the company of adults. She matured into a classic beauty, milky complexion, chestnut hair, soft gray-blue eyes, one of the most popular girls in high school, a suffragist and a varsity basketball star.
Her mother, Bright Smith, was a tiny woman of high ideals who sold baked goods to make ends meet when Allienne deserted the family in 1913. The following year, Bright’s eighteen-year-old daughter announced her intention to go to New York. “Mother loved the theatre and was torn,” Louise said. “She didn’t really want me to go into the theatre, but if this was what I had to do … And it was what I had to do. Never any question. From the time I was ten, or even earlier, I was saving photos and old programs. My mother took me to the nickelodeon and to any number of good plays … touring companies of The Merry Widow and The Red Mill … I saw Elsie Janis and Montgomery and Stone … New Castle was on a good theater circuit, along the route to Chicago.”
Bright had been the soprano soloist at an Episcopal church in Pittsburgh and was afraid Louise wouldn’t get work in New York unless she knew how to sing. Loath to say anything herself that could be construed as discouraging, she consulted the local rector, an infinitely practical man, and asked him to make the case instead. “Louise has a small voice,” she confided, ticking off the challenges, both economic and moral, a young girl would surely face alone in the big city. The rector listened gravely and commiserated and did indeed speak to Louise, but, sensing her determination, couldn’t say very much to sway her.
“What it must have cost my mother to let me go!” Louise marveled. “She and my father were divorced, so it was doubly her decision. I was so naive—she knew that—and I had virtually no experience, just one little musical show in high school.” She stayed with cousins on Long Island, had her first ride on the elevated, and almost immediately got a job in vaudeville. “I could sing and I could dance, and there I was in some old theater down around Fourteenth Street singing, ‘By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea …’ The leading lady said, ‘Honey, have you ever put on makeup?’ and since I never had, she showed me how. I made quite an entrance: I tripped and fell flat at the first matinee performance, but I got up and went right on.”
The show lasted a week, then Louise’s luck dried up. Her cousins thought she should go home and teach dancing, so they staked her to a series of lessons with the Castles, where she learned the fox-trot and the two-step. Once she had a diploma, she returned to New Castle to teach ballroom dancing. She staged some children’s shows, the mothers making the costumes themselves, then enrolled in the Lake Erie College for Women. “I really had no desire to go to college,” she admitted, “but I’m glad I did. There was, for example, an excellent course in English composition, and I learned to do a little writing.” She developed an interest in art, took part in a couple of plays, and performed an interpretive dance program at commencement, subsequently touring under the management of Southard Harris.
Actress Henrietta Crosman was a distant cousin. “I’d heard Grandma speak of her, and I found some of her old programs. When she played Cleveland, I wrote and went to see her.” Crosman was touring Cousin Eleanor in vaudeville, and Louise was a little frightened of her. “Henrietta was sixty by then, a buxom woman, but you could see what she had been.1 She’d been a beauty, and she’d tell anyone anything with a candor that floored me. A fine old-time actress. I told her I was going to New York again, and she said frankly she had no idea what she’d be doing in the fall, but I was to let her know when I got there.”
Louise did indeed let her know and found that Crosman was about to take out a play called Erstwhile Susan. She saw the producer and the director, read, and was assigned a couple of small parts: a Mennonite girl and a debutante. When relatives offered the use of an apartment in the Bronx, Louise and her mother went off to New York. They went to visit Crosman at her estate in the country. She was gracious, but Louise was aware that she was taking stock of her. “You have nice hands,” she told Louise. “Use them.”
Louise Treadwell (foreground), circa 1916. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
They went across the country with Erstwhile Susan, making two stops in each state they crossed. Once they reached Seattle, they traveled down the coast to Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego. “You’ve got to learn to talk,” the actress told Louise one day on the train. “Avoid Pennsylvaniaisms.” Louise did a lot of listening—to Crosman, to an Englishman in the cast, to the young leading lady who spoke with a Southern lilt. “I listened, practiced, and began to realize how totally unprepared I was.”
After America entered the war in the spring of 1917 things got tough just about everywhere. Stock companies closed in record numbers. Louise hung on as long as she could, sharing quarters with four other girls she’d known in college, then she went home again in June 1918. “I went home only to reconnoiter and get some money.” She spent eight weeks working on the New Castle News, then her mother died suddenly at the age of fifty-four.
The pains came without warning sometime around midnight, and Louise summoned an ambulance. On the bumpy road to the hospital Bright’s appendix burst. Louise couldn’t go with her—no room—so she took the streetcar instead and wasn’t able to see her mother again until after the surgery, when there was really nothing more to be done. She stayed at her bedside—Bright lived several days—then, in something of a daze, she pulled together what was left of her life in New Castle. Her grandmother was still there, but her younger sister was away at school and her father had remarried and was living in California. She sold the house on Highland Avenue, keeping the third floor and furnishing it with the things that most meant home to her. She took a job teaching third grade and made plans to return to the stage.
Louise played stock in Chicago, making an impression with a small part in a play called Happiness. After a lean period, she landed a role with Eva Le Gallienne in Not So Long Ago, a romantic period piece that had only a short stay at the Booth Theatre. Late in 1920 she again wroteHenrietta Crosman, who had settled in California where her husband, Maurice Campbell, was directing the Bebe Daniels comedies for Realart. She asked what Crosman thought about her working in pictures, and Crosman replied that if she wanted to come to Los Angeles, she would find her a place to live and maybe something to do. So Louise came west in February 1921, taking a room with some people who lived next door to the Campbells on Carlos Avenue in Hollywood. Maurice Campbell gave her work as an extra, but she didn’t much care for the monotony of moviemaking. The other extras on the set were friendly and helpful, but she kept to herself, writing poetry, as she had since high school, and reading prodigiously. She got a bit part as a chorus girl in a feature directed by William DeMille, but it wasn’t fun or satisfying, and after a few months she went back to New York.
In December the iconoclastic editors of the Smart Set, George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, bought one of her poems for publication and asked to see others. Before she could reply, she landed a key role in Edward Goodman’s revival of the John Galsworthy fantasy The Pigeon. The show started in Greenwich Village, then moved uptown to the Frazee. The part wasn’t her kind of part—a “goody-goody” as she put it—and Goodman was a rigid disciplinarian, demanding and excessively precise. She frankly thought herself “lousy” in The Pigeon, but it led to Chains of Dew for the Provincetown Players and a few weeks of stock in New Hampshire.
Emboldened by the Smart Set sale, she tried her hand at humor and sold a boardinghouse piece called “Top Floor Pests” to the New York Times. By summer, she had allowed herself to be seduced into a Chautauqua tour that took her on a string of one-nighters through Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska, most of the audiences seeing the one play, in all probability, they would see all year. The applause, she wrote, would “shame even a Belasco opening” and the experience resulted in another piece for the Times. She laid off the remainder of the year, thinking she might go to Europe, but by the time of Kendal Weston’s call, she was not only ready and willing but desperate to work.
Louise Treadwell could have been a journalist, written a book, or published more of her poems, but all she ever really wanted to be was an actress, and despite being such a hard study when it came to learning her lines, she was working with the best director she had ever had, playing some of the best things she had ever played, and at the age of twenty-six there was no place in the world she would rather be.
The company continued with Up in Mabel’s Room for the week of May 6, then Kendal Weston quarreled with Leonard Wood over the cuts Wood was making to cover expenses. He left, taking a pair of actors with him. Ray Capp, another actor-director of similar vintage, took over from Weston and the show went on as planned. The Elks Lodge attended as a body, showering the ladies of the cast with floral tributes, and the players, still basking in the success of Buddies, were guests of honor at the monthly ball of the White Plains Club. It was at such a party, on a Sunday night at the Gedney, just after Tracy had graduated to the role of Jimmy Larchmont in Mabel’s Room, that he worked up the courage to ask Louise to marry him.
Louise (center) as Ann Wellwyn in Edward Goodman’s 1922 revival of The Pigeon. Whitford Kane, who headed the original production at London’s Royalty Theatre, can be seen at the doorway. (NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY)
She had been in love before, but never with an actor, and no one had ever proposed. She always described herself as a romantic, someone who preferred to dream of the perfect mate rather than actually go out and pursue him. Having come from a broken home, she also knew a man’s devotion could be mysterious and fleeting, and the institution of marriage as much a trap as a blessing. “My father wasn’t a man you ever came to know well,” she said. “He was a shy man who tried to make up for that with this reserve. I never felt I could talk to him.”
Tracy, she observed, was a lot like her father, brusque and painfully shy around strangers, but with a joy for the art of acting that was something quite different from anything she had ever before observed in a man. They both found it easier to talk about the work than to talk about each other, since both came from families where feelings were rarely expressed. The silences between them could be deafening, but there was an urgency to everything they had to say to one another. Tracy didn’t handle the matter of proposing very well, having condescended to dance with her even though he hated dancing. Then, not being terribly romantic either, he wondered if she would marry him without his embellishing the words or setting the scene in the slightest. “I’m asking you to,” he finally said, mustering some of the intensity he could unleash onstage.
Louise was mindful of what actresses always said about marrying actors, that their egos were too huge to contain, and that no woman could ever love an actor as much as he undoubtedly loved himself. She didn’t think of Spence as an actor, though. He lacked the ego, the pose, the artifice. She couldn’t think of another one even remotely like him, and so there, amid the rolling green hills of White Plains on a crisp spring evening in May 1923, Louise Treadwell said yes.
Weston’s departure signaled a decline in the company and the quality of its productions. Business fell off, and Wood concluded that White Plains was too small to support a company of its own. In late May he announced the Wood Players were moving to Fall River, a mill town in southeastern Massachusetts known for the Lizzie Borden ax murders, and anyone who didn’t care to go had his or her two weeks’ notice. Nobody wanted to go to Fall River, but only three cast members said as much. The Wood Players gave their final performance in White Plains on June 1, 1923, and decamped the next day.
In Fall River, Wood worked the local papers, building anticipation for the town’s first season of summer stock, and when the company opened with Getting Gertie’s Garter on June 11, 1923, all 1,900 seats were filled and some two hundred people were turned away. The town’s goodwill didn’t extend much past opening night, and Wood switched from comedies to thrillers. By the third week, the Players were performing four matinees a week with a two-for-one admission policy on Monday nights. Louise grew to loathe the place: “Nobody was interested in the theatre. I don’t know how in the world they ever thought they could make it go there, and it didn’t go.”
When Wood moved the company to the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he promoted Tracy to second business and bumped his rate to fifty dollars a week. Louise went along, but only for a couple of days and with no intention of playing there. Spence wired his parents in Milwaukee, and almost immediately his older brother arrived to give Louise the once-over. Carroll Tracy was the same age as Louise, a bigger, beefier version of his younger brother, infinitely more quiet. He didn’t ask many questions, so Louise volunteered the things she thought he’d want to know. “I had no intention in the world of giving up the theatre,” she said. She talked about her people, her education, her writing. “Apparently he decided I was all right … I was invited to go to Milwaukee.”
Tracy stayed in Lancaster, intent on finding something better, while Louise returned to New Castle to tell what family she still had there—her grandmother and a few cousins—that she was going to get married. Wood’s company churned continuously, but Tracy, easily the most opinionated member of the company, was out of favor. It wasn’t a good time to be looking for work, and it took the better part of a month to land a job with a company in Cincinnati. Stuart Walker’s renowned stock company was a considerable step up in prestige, if not necessarily in compensation. Elated, Tracy gave notice in Lancaster and advised his fiancée they could be married in September.
Louise traveled to Chicago in late August, and Spence’s father, John Edward Tracy, met her at the station. A small but powerfully built man with shimmering white hair and blue-gray eyes, John Tracy was vice president and general manager of the Parker Motor Truck Company. His son Carroll towered over him, but it was John Tracy’s solid demeanor and ready smile that instantly drew Louise into the family. “He was just so natural and so easy,” she remembered, “the nice little light in his eyes, the humor …”
In Milwaukee, the Tracys’ comfortable wood frame house stood on a tree-lined street on the upper East Side. Down the block was Lake Park and a spectacular view of the Lake Michigan shoreline. Spence’s mother welcomed Louise with a warmth and generosity she had never known in her own family. Carrie Tracy was, at age forty-nine, a beautiful woman who was indulged in every possible way by her doting husband. “She was the kind of person who’d give you anything,” Louise said. “I was very fond of her, and I quickly felt much closer to him than I had ever felt toward my own father. He was a very warm, dear man … You couldn’t help but like them, you couldn’t help feeling you’d known them all your life.”
The Gypsy Trail would mark Spencer Tracy’s first appearance in Cincinnati—not that there was much for him to rehearse. He had been cast in the utilitarian role of the house man, Stiles, and the extent of his duties was to appear occasionally, answer the phone or open the door, and say things like “Who is speaking, please?” and “I will inquire.”
Walker’s roster now consisted of sixty-seven players, among them Blanche Yurka, Albert Hackett, Spring Byington, and Beulah Bondi. His civilized practice of resting his actors from week to week made a slot in Cincinnati one of the most coveted in stock.
Louise had hopes of joining the Walker company, but her immediate goal was to make a good impression on the Tracys. She feared an awkward silence over the matter of religion, as she was an Episcopalian while Spence embraced his father’s Catholicism. Then she learned that Spence’s mother was a Presbyterian and all her anxieties fell away. John Tracy, in fact, laughed out loud when she confessed her fear of being asked to convert. “There’s no use in doing that!” he exclaimed, and Louise, relieved, chimed in, “No, no use at all!” The next thing she knew, Spence’s dad was taking her downtown to pick out a ring. “There was nothing like the present,” she said of his direct, almost impulsive nature. “You don’t wait around for anything—you do it now.” When Spence called to ask what they thought of her, his father was typically plainspoken: “If you don’t marry this girl, you’re a bigger fool than I thought you were when you went on the stage!”
Tracy opened at the George B. Cox Memorial Theatre on September 10, 1923, and while he rated a mention in the lukewarm review that appeared the next day in the Post, the display ads accounted for his presence in the cast with the words “… and others.” Louise and the Tracys arrived by train on Tuesday afternoon, John and Carrie taking a room at the Hotel Gibson on Fountain Square, Louise putting up at the elegant Sinton a block away. The next afternoon, Spence played the Wednesday matinee, finishing just after 4:30 p.m. He then grabbed a cab to St. Xavier, a neighborhood parish some five blocks to the east, where he met his parents, his brother, and his bride-to-be.
Louise was wearing a dark blue suit over a patterned silk blouse with matching hat and shoes. The pastor of the church, Father Joseph P. De Smidt, had agreed to marry them, but there would be no mass with the ceremony. “I was lucky to get in the back door,” Louise commented. “We had a special dispensation and got married in the Priest’s study.” There were readings from the Old and New Testaments, a homily of sorts (considering the priest didn’t know either one of them), and the vows were exchanged. Carroll, the best man, stepped forward and handed Louise’s ring to the priest, who blessed it and passed it to the groom, who placed it on her finger in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. After the Lord’s Prayer and a blessing, they returned to the Gibson, where Stuart Walker joined them for a quick celebratory dinner. At 7:30 p.m., Walker and the newest member of his esteemed company took a cab back to the Cox, where the evening performance of The Gypsy Trail got under way at 8:20 p.m.
Walker went easy on Tracy during his brief stay in the Queen City. He did not cast him in Time, the following week’s play, which meant that Spence had his days free to roam the city with his new wife. Then rehearsals got under way for Seventeen, a perennial for Walker, and this time Tracy had a showier part in the boisterous George Cooper, the thickheaded nineteen-year-old who has designs on Miss Lola Pratt. His key scene, an awkward exchange of rings toward the end of the third act, brought an audible hush from the audience, but it was Walker’s newest discovery,William Kirkland, who, as Willie Baxter, dominated the show. The role of Willie had made a Broadway star of Gregory Kelly, and when Seventeen ended Walker’s twenty-eight-week season at the Cox, it was Kirkland who was announced as one of the leads when Walker took Time to Broadway.
Louise, moving up to the role of Spence’s booster, understood Walker’s reasoning, given Kirkland’s tenure with the company, but she also knew that her new husband was infinitely more talented, and she was all for the move when the fuss over Kirkland inspired Tracy to take a crack at Broadway himself. Walker, who believed it took an actor four or five years to fully develop, advised against it. But Tracy knew a place on the Upper West Side where he had lived with an old friend. “Come on,” he said to Weeze. “Mrs. Brown will give us a room. I can talk her into anything.”
Despite a steep, gloomy interior, Mrs. Brown’s had the benefit of a landlady who genuinely liked and admired struggling actors. She greeted Spence like a wayward son and made his wife feel as if she were an established star. Louise set her electric stove up in the bathroom and proceeded to familiarize her husband with the vegetables he had never before regarded as food. She cooked ground round occasionally, and when they were feeling flush they would get a couple of lamb chops.
Fifteen shows were casting, and Tracy figured a big star vehicle offered the best chance for a long run and maybe even a tour. He missed out on Walter Hampden’s revival of Cyrano de Bergerac, which had more than fifty parts to fill, but got word that producer Arthur Hopkins was casting a new comedy for Ethel Barrymore at the Plymouth. The play had sixteen speaking parts, two given over to the star and her leading man, Cyril Keighley, and three requiring the services of children. Of the eleven remaining, the four that meant anything had already been filled with Beverly Sitgreaves, Jose Alessandro, Edward G. Robinson, and Virginia Chauvent. Only the bits remained, and Tracy landed the least of those, the character of a newspaper photographer named Holt. And that night, the Tracys’ room at Mrs. Brown’s modest walk-up smelled of lamb.
Rehearsals for the Barrymore play, A Royal Fandango, were unlike anything Tracy had ever witnessed. “Arthur Hopkins,” said Edward G. Robinson, “pulled his usual stunt of leaving the actors alone for a week to find their own places and get the play on its feet. I soon discovered that Miss Barrymore—and why not?—did what came naturally to her: took the stage, filled it, and left the rest of us to stage rear.”
The actors began referring to the production as A Royal Fiasco, and when Hopkins finally appeared, Robinson asked to be let out. “I know I’m a supporting actor and Miss Barrymore’s a great star,” he told the producer, “but the way the play is staged, all the values are distorted.” Hopkins listened and understood and set about restaging the scenes, and although his improvements gave the play more vitality and pace, the production was doomed, doomed, and everyone, excepting perhaps Ethel Barrymore herself, seemed to know it.
They opened in Washington on November 6 before a capacity house that included Commander and Mrs. W. W. Galbraith and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Tracy, whom Robinson remembered as “an intense young man,” had only to walk on with a paper, but the weight of doing so while Ethel Barrymore held the stage was almost too much for him to bear. “He had one line to say,” Barrymore recalled in her autobiography, “and I saw he was very nervous, so I said to him, ‘Relax. That’s all you have to do—just relax. It’ll all be the same in a hundred years.’ ”
Tracy got through the night, as did the rest of the cast, but the man from Variety said playwright Zoë Akins had made “without a doubt the most impossible and ridiculous attempt at a satire that this scribe has seen in a long time.” The New York opening on the twelfth wasn’t much better received, and only two of the sixteen Manhattan dailies saw any future to it at all. The closing notices went up by the beginning of the second week, and Miss Barrymore was, according to Robinson, “indignant.”
Tracy began using his days to smoke out another engagement, casually at first, then more keenly as the holiday lull settled in and the only shows casting were musicals like Kid Boots. Counting their pennies, he and Louise (who wasn’t working) allotted thirty-five cents a day for food. “I went on a rice pudding diet because it was filling,” Tracy remembered. “I could tell you every restaurant from the Bowery to the Bronx that served the stuff and tell you which gave the most cream with it and which the most raisins.”
Combing the trade papers, he used the cachet of the Barrymore name to land an interview with the Proctor Players, a struggling stock enterprise located across the Hudson in Elizabeth, New Jersey. They were short a character man for a production of Within the Law. “Can you play an old man?” the director asked. “I’m an actor,” Tracy replied. “I can play anything.”
The Proctors were on a grueling “matinees daily” policy. Hired for general business at fifty dollars a week, Tracy wasn’t permitted to draw against his salary until the play had actually opened. After rehearsing a full week, he and Louise (who was three months pregnant at the time) were reduced to splitting an egg sandwich for dinner. On opening night, December 3, he came offstage after his first scene and made a sprint to the cashier’s office. Nearly missing his second cue, he resolved to get out of the place as quickly as possible.
He remained through Christmas, and was playing a minor role in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch when a wire from Kendal Weston found him. The Belasco of Stock was inaugurating a company in Winnipeg, taking on the longest-running stock company in North America, the very aptly named Permanent Players. Tracy dropped Louise in Milwaukee and was in Manitoba by New Year’s Day. “The first week,” Tracy said, “we weren’t paid because the manager said he had to pay off the local firms to which he owed money. We got through the second week, and after the Saturday night performance we looked for the manager and found he had absconded with the two weeks’ receipts.”
They began operating on the commonwealth plan, divvying up the box office in lieu of salaries. Tracy was second man in What’s Your Wife Doing? when the leads gave notice, suddenly elevating him, after just nine months, to the status of leading man. Given the company’s rattling condition, there was only one viable choice for leading woman, and it was a done deal when the wire grandly offering her the job reached Louise in Milwaukee. “I went up,” she said, “and found the company was really on the rocks.”
Knowing she could only play a few weeks before her pregnancy would begin to show, Louise opened January 28, 1924, in Eugene Walters’ The Flapper and, in the words of the critic for the Winnipeg Free Press, “took the house by storm.” With nothing to lose and her husband playing opposite, she abandoned herself to the role in a way she might otherwise have found difficult. “Miss Treadwell made her Winnipeg debut in rather a light part,” the Press observed, “to which, nevertheless, she brought a vast amount of honest talent and evidently a good deal of careful preparation. Of her future popularity there can be no question. Her performance Monday night not only popularized her, but came very near endearing her to her auditors.” Spence’s work as her long-suffering husband, the first lead he had ever played as a professional actor, was “a rare exhibition of restraint in what might have been a frothy and wrathful role.”
When they opened in the grim crime melodrama The Highjacker on the fourth of February, they knew it would be their last week in Winnipeg. “They called us up to the office and talked,” Louise recalled, “and of course they were going to close. Then they let down their hair and said they’d like to see us get back safe.” They paid Louise’s fare back to Milwaukee and Spence’s to New York City—the only cast members accorded such a courtesy. Five weeks later, several members of the company were still in town, reportedly working as day laborers to earn their fares back to the States.
Nineteen twenty-four wasn’t starting out well for stock. There weren’t more than a hundred companies nationwide, and only about two dozen of those were making money. One of the managers whom Tracy was following in the pages of Variety was William Henry Wright, the man in charge of Pittsburgh’s Lyceum Stock Company. Wright had been a press agent for Klaw & Erlanger, Henry W. Savage, and George Broadhurst, among others, and knew how to get people into a theater—a critical talent lacking in the vast majority of stock managers.
Emboldened by a successful summer of stock in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Wright had taken a lease on the Bijou, an old vaudeville house, renamed it the Lyceum, and opened Thanksgiving week with a policy of high-class fare at a one-dollar top scale. It was a hopeless strategy for a place like Pittsburgh, and some nights there was less than one hundred dollars in the box office when the curtain rang up. Finally coming to the realization he was playing class stuff in the wrong neighborhood, Wright closed the company on January 7, 1924, having dropped $14,000 in the space of seven weeks.
There were, however, a lot of people rooting for “Papa” Wright, a beloved figure who, in another time, had managed the lecture tours of Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and James Whitcomb Riley. He had, in fact, touched virtually every facet of show business, from playwriting to movie work, and was known for promptly paying his bills in even the darkest of hours. He took just two weeks to regroup in Pittsburgh, building a new policy on hokey melodramas at a fifty-cent top, and was open again by the end of January. “We’ll give him credit,” commented one stock executive. “It’s either guts or idiocy.”
The agent who handled Tracy’s booking with Wright told him it was “the world’s worst stock company” and that he should therefore “fit in fine.” When Wright got a look at his new leading man, Tracy was clad in the same serge suit he had worn since college. “You’ve got to get yourself a new suit,” Wright told him, and Tracy, in no position to argue the point, touched him for an advance. That next week, he began rehearsals for a topical play called The Bootleggers in a snappy blue pinstripe.
The Bootleggers was the first effort of a young drama critic named William Page, formerly of the Baltimore American, later of the Washington Post. Wright’s staging at the Lyceum constituted its stock debut and, typical for a Wright company, no reasonable expense was spared. Tracy took the part of Rossmore, the mastermind of a prosperous smuggling ring, and Wright’s leading lady, Marguerite Fields, took the role of Rossmore’s daughter.
The show was under the direction of John Ellis, a classically trained actor who had been with Wright since his first stock enterprise in Schenectady. Tracy proved adept at handling the comedy in the play as well as its tragedy, and the Monday performance played to a sizable crowd that included the playwright himself.
Wright followed The Bootleggers with a more intimate, though no less sensationalistic, drama called Her Unborn Child, and scheduled brief talks on birth control during Tuesday and Thursday “ladies only” matinees.
A splendid production of The Shepard of the Hills was followed by The Love Test, and then Wright lost his lease on the theater just as he was starting to make a little money. The house management was flooded with letters and a petition to retain the company, but it was rumored a deal had gone over to give the theater to a burlesque syndicate and there was nothing more to be done about it. The Gazette Times reported the opening performance of The Girl Who Came Back, Wright’s selection for the final week, played to “one of the largest audiences ever assembled in the Lyceum Theatre.” Floral tributes sent to the ladies each night threatened to swamp the stage, and favorites like Arthur Mack, Cliff Boyer, and Ernest Ganter were accorded standing ovations. “They used to put chairs on the stage,” Tracy recalled. “That’s how much business we did. Couldn’t get the people in the theater.”
The Lyceum closed its doors on May 9, 1924, and the Tracys left for Milwaukee the next morning.
There was much about Grand Rapids that made it a good place for stock. It was laid out on an orderly grid, the streets running east and west and the avenues north and south. There was plenty of work, Grand Rapids being known as Furniture City for the woodworking plants that clustered just north and south of the city center—Berkey & Gay, Luce, John Widdicomb, American Seating, Sligh, Robert W. Irwin. The city bustled with skilled workers and a society class comprised of the owners of the mills and furniture factories and the descendants of the Baptist missionaries and land brokers who settled the area. It was a stable, educated population with money and taste and an appreciation of good theatrics. When W. H. Wright installed his Broadway Players there in the spring of 1923, he found he had stumbled onto a largely untapped audience for middlebrow fare.
The 1924 season began on April 14 at the Powers Theatre just as Wright was opening Her Unborn Child in Pittsburgh. Honors Are Even, the first attraction, was a shaky affair, not up to the standards of the previous season, and it was to Wright’s advantage that the loss of the Lyceum freed him to focus his attention more fully on Grand Rapids. As soon as the Pittsburgh company had closed, Wright moved Halliam Bosworth, a solid character man, and director John Ellis to the Powers, and began shuffling the calendar of plays.
The Bootleggers had done extraordinarily well in Pittsburgh and was, in fact, one of the few Lyceum plays Wright thought would go over in Grand Rapids. He cabled Tracy in Milwaukee, offering him the lead in Bootleggers and the balance of the season under less specific terms, but Spence, with Louise now eight months pregnant, hesitated, not wanting to be on the other side of Lake Michigan when the baby was born. It was only at Louise’s insistence that he went, bolstered as he was by the knowledge that she was in his mother’s able care and that nothing at all could possibly go wrong.
Tracy officially joined the Broadway Players on June 10, 1924, when he began rehearsals for The Meanest Man in the World, a comedy George M. Cohan had played a few seasons back. The title role fell to Kenneth Daigneau, an able comedian and the company’s de facto leading man, leaving Tracy to the part of Carlton Childs, an idealistic young businessman. In publicity, Wright dutifully acknowledged Tracy’s status as a “well-known leading man” who would nevertheless be “classed as a juvenile” for his present engagement. Mary Remington, the critic for the Grand Rapids Press, found Tracy “convincing, well poised … natural” in a somewhat thankless part. The Herald’s Clarence Dean reported “generous applause frequently rippling through the audience and breaking out into a salvo.” Tracy, he concluded, had “captured the approval of the first night audience.”
The Meanest Man in the World continued through Sunday, June 22, and Tracy was back in Milwaukee the following Wednesday. John Tracy was now president of George H. Lutz, Inc., one of the Midwest’s leading suppliers of paving machinery, and he and Carrie had relocated to a spacious two-bedroom apartment on Prospect Avenue in the city’s historic First Ward. The Tracys fussed endlessly over Louise, who was due at any moment and miserable in the summer heat and humidity. Spence didn’t quite know what to say or do with fatherhood so close at hand, and when Louise went into labor late on the evening of June 25, it was Father Tracy who got her to St. Mary’s Hospital on North Lake Drive, some two miles away, and then stayed with his son until an eight-pound boy was delivered at 2:30 on the morning of the twenty-sixth.
The baby was named John Ten Broeck Tracy, Ten Broeck being the maiden name of Louise’s maternal grandmother, Louisa Smith. “I was very much afraid of him at first,” Louise admitted. “What do you do when you give him a bath? How [do] you hold him in there? I hadn’t been around a small baby, well, in years and years. I just didn’t know anything about it.” And Spence, of course, wasn’t any help. “He was crazy about him, but he didn’t know what to do with a small baby either.” Home from the hospital, Louise was installed in the guest room on Prospect, where the new grandparents could scarcely get their fill of little Johnny. Spence stayed as long as he could—ten days, through the Independence Day festivities—then took the ferry back across Lake Michigan to Muskegon, his father having staked him to the fare, and then the twenty-five miles inland by bus to Grand Rapids.
Wright’s makeover of the Broadway Players hadn’t ended with the addition of Spencer Tracy. Actress Geneva Harrison made her final Grand Rapids appearance in Meanest Man in the World, and the following week saw the arrival of a new leading lady, a genuine star of both stock and Broadway named Selena Royle. The nineteen-year-old daughter of playwright Edwin Milton Royle, she was just in from New York, where she had played the previous week alongside Helen Hayes, Elsie Ferguson, and Pauline Lord in a Players Club staging of She Stoops to Conquer. Landing her for the Broadway Players was something of a coup, but John Ellis had known her since she was a baby. In 1905, when she was less than a year old, Ellis had appeared in the first English production of her father’s most famous play, The Squaw Man, and the two men had remained friends over the years.
For Selena’s debut at the Powers, Ellis and Wright selected the Harvard Prize drama Common Clay, an evergreen in stock that gave Jane Cowl one of her signature roles. A statuesque blonde, Royle towered over the men in the cast, and as Ellen Neal, a poor girl wrongly accused of murder, she commanded the stage. “She is beautiful, she is youthful, she has a rich, low-pitched voice that chimes like sweet bells,” Clarence Dean raved in the Herald. “She has depth of feeling that gets right under the skin, and she is perfectly natural, easy and unaffected. There is no effort apparent, no straining for effect, but a sure touch that misses no points.”
Selena Royle was a hit with Grand Rapids audiences, and Wright vowed to hang on to her as long as he possibly could. For her second week, he indulged her with the stock premiere of the Vincent Lawrence comedy In Love with Love, which had run three months on Broadway with Lynn Fontanne, and for which Wright paid the highest royalty he had ever paid for a play. Those facts, which were widely reported in the press, and solid word-of-mouth for Selena Royle brought the Broadway Players their strongest week to date. Royle was playing Maugham’s Too Many Husbands the week Tracy returned and managed to fill all 1,400 seats for both the Friday and Saturday evening performances. She was considered a surefire asset for The Bootleggers, which had both Tracy and William Laveau repeating their roles from Pittsburgh, and hopes were high for yet another hit.
Tracy was ready to settle in with a good company—at least for a while—and knew a good week for The Bootleggers would put him in line for a lead by the end of the season. The production was, in some ways, better than in Pittsburgh, Selena bringing undeniable star power to the role of Nina. But the gritty realism and violence of the play didn’t go in a town that routinely turned out for comedy and romance and whose entertainment choices were made chiefly by women. The Bootleggers wasn’t a disaster but it ended the week in the red, and the following week Tracy found himself demoted to general business. Demoralized and homesick, he withdrew from the Broadway Players, insisting he would play only leads in the future, and left for Milwaukee to spend time with his wife and his month-old son.
The respite lasted all of three weeks.
Charley’s Aunt with Selena Royle and Ken Daigneau proved so popular that a Friday matinee was added to accommodate the demand. Cornered and Mary’s Ankle proved equally popular, but then Daigneau gave notice to go into a play on Broadway. Wright, with just three weeks left to the season, lacked a leading man. “A lack,” Royle said, “which could not be corrected in Grand Rapids, which could hardly be said to abound in theatrical talent. It was an expensive thing to send to New York for another actor, pay his fare both ways, and give him a salary commensurate with his two weeks’ expenses.”
A month earlier, Clarence Dean had watched Tracy play the bootlegger king alongside Selena Royle and suggested that Tracy “would indeed be a fitting man to play opposite so fine an actress as Miss Royle.” After conferring with his new star and John Ellis, who thought Tracy talented but cocky, Wright cabled Milwaukee and asked Tracy to come back in the role he wanted—as Selena Royle’s leading man.
Tracy quit a job selling pianos—something he admittedly wasn’t any good at—and returned to Grand Rapids with Louise and Johnny. They set up housekeeping at the Browning, an apartment hotel about seven blocks from the theater. Spence and Selena played a classic farce, Are You a Mason?, for their first week as a team, and although the pacing flagged on opening night and more than a few cues got dropped amid all the horseplay, a natural chemistry—the sheer fun of performing together—won the crowd over, and the week finished in the black.
Selena Royle, circa 1923. (NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY)
A far better test of the Tracy-Royle combination came the week of September 1. The company performed the intimate George Broadhurst drama Bought and Paid For, with Selena in the role of the social-climbing Virginia and Tracy as Stafford, the alcoholic millionaire she marries not for love, but status. The play was old (1911) but potent in its simplicity and its quiet moments, and both Tracy and Royle attacked their roles with subtlety and intelligence. The cast had the luxury of a matinee for the first performance—it was Labor Day—and had settled into their roles when Louise witnessed the 8:30 performance that evening.
The play gripped her as few did, with Stafford’s drunken rages reflected in Virginia’s desperation and terror. Tracy was chilling at the bottom of the second act when Selena locked herself in her bedroom and Spence, bent on spousal rape, grabbed the poker from the fireplace and beat the door in like a madman. A troubled hush fell over the auditorium.
The third act was devoted to Virginia’s determination to leave her husband, now sober and remorseful, and Tracy’s performance, all eagerness and resolve with a shading of doom, found a poignance largely missing in the text. Ignoring all his promises and his extravagant gifts, Selena placed her ring on the table at the end of the act and exited for good. Louise sat mesmerized as Spence at first stood motionless, unable to comprehend what had finally and inevitably happened to his marriage, and then, after what seemed an eternity, he picked the ring up and read the inscription softly to himself: “From Robert to Virginia with eternal love.”
His silences were astonishing in their power. No artificiality, no grand gestures, no playing to the gallery. He scarcely moved; it was all in his eyes and the way he held himself. Subdued, natural, he was the character in all of its subtle shadings. He demanded the crowd’s attention, dared them not to feel what he was feeling, not to think what he was thinking. He was unlike any actor they had ever seen before, not merely because he underplayed a fragile moment that could easily have drawn groans, but because he did it all from within.
“I suppose it might have taken two minutes,” Louise said, thinking back on the scene, “but the whole thing, the expression, the way he looked … was so moving. It was a beautiful moment, and I could see the lights on the marquee. And in my mind I said, ‘He is going to be a star. A really great star.’ ”
1 Actually, Crosman was fifty when Louise met her, but must have seemed older.