CHAPTER 3
Public Speaking was the course Tracy liked best at West Division, and he perfected a direct, almost conversational way of addressing an audience. At Ripon, the class satisfied the requirement for three quarter-hours of English, which made it doubly attractive. Henry Phillips Boody, the professor of English Composition who taught the class, emphasized the structure of persuasive material as well as its delivery, and Tracy quickly learned that he could, in Boody’s words, “control the minds and emotions of a group.” Tracy threw himself into the preparation and rehearsal of his speeches with a zeal that Boody, for one, found fascinating: “I remember very vividly the occasions when we were working on problems of impression [and] his speeches would actually leave the class in tears. His dramatic instinct was shown in his surpassing ability in telling a story. There was always the proper sequence of events, the gradual rise to a climax, the carefully-chosen ending.”
Soon he was keeping steady company with Lola Schultz, an Education major who found him spellbinding. “He was the most popular man I ever met,” she said shortly before her death in 1992. “He could make the birds sing in the trees. He could tell you black was white, and even if you thought he was wrong, pretty soon he’d have you believing him … Of course, he was as homely as a mud fence.”
Spence had never been particularly conscious of his looks until he hit puberty—a late event, he once implied—and took a sudden and fervent interest in girls. Then his freckled face, lined and ruddy, became a torment when he discovered it was tough to get dates. He wasn’t movie-star handsome nor even Midwestern good-looking. Girls generally found him earnest and amusing, but callow and not the least bit romantic. Worse still, he didn’t dance. “We went on dates,” Lola Schultz allowed, “but it was not a serious romance.”
Tracy was more popular among the men, who responded to the Irish charm his father had in such abundance. Socially, he always seemed to be around, though invariably on his own terms. Ken Edgers had a dance band called the Crimson Orchestra, and Spence took an administrative title to justify his traveling with the group to parties, dances, and proms. “[He] enjoyed the trips and bull sessions between dances and during intermissions,” Edgers said. “On our Crimson Orchestra business card it said I was ‘Business Manager’ and Spence was ‘Financial Manager.’ That probably is a fair amount of ‘management’ for a group of five musicians.”
The money from the Crimson gigs came in handy as the month wore on. Both Spence and Kenny were on allowances from their parents, which made them flush the first couple of weeks. They’d dine at the City Lunch Room—invariably referred to as the “downtown beanery” or “the greasy spoon”—and proprietor Emil Reinsch was delighted to see them when they had real money in their pockets. Kenny always suggested big steaks and, knowing Spence’s Catholicism, was sometimes able to trick him into ordering one on a Friday. When he could see the plates making their way to the table, he’d casually mention something about “the game tomorrow” and then watch with undisguised glee as Tracy would dissolve into a slow burn. “You dirty dog,” he’d growl. “You knew it was Friday and you just wanted my steak!” After a flash of inner struggle, Tracy would order fish and then sit morosely and watch as Kenny devoured his steak before moving on to his own.
Generally, they’d continue to splurge until the money ran low, sometime around the third week of the month. Then they’d start going through their laundry bags, separating out the most presentable specimens and scrubbing the cuffs and the collars clean in order to make them suitable for another day’s wear. “We wore each other’s clothes,” Kenny said, “and in our case the old wheeze of ‘the first one up is the best dressed’ was true.”
It was John Davies, one of the West Hall gang, who picked up on Spence’s interest in theatre. Davies was part of the Mask and Wig, the honors society responsible for the school’s annual commencement play. He had appeared in The Witching Hour the previous winter and was planning to audition for The Truth when Tracy got wind of it. Cornering Davies one evening at West Hall, Tracy wanted to know all about the auditions—how they were conducted, who was in charge of them, whether they were open to anyone who wanted to read. Davies told him what he could, then got on the phone to Clark Graham, the faculty adviser who directed the plays.
“There’s a fellow in our house who is interested in acting,” Davies told the professor. “I believe he has real talent. He would like to try out for our next play. Could I bring him over?” Graham, a sort of utility man in the English Department, had them at his door in a matter of minutes. “Tracy was a fine looking lad,” he later recalled of the meeting, “more mature in appearance than the average freshman. I noted especially a certain decisiveness in his speech, a clipped firmness of expression indicating poise, self-control, and confidence. I was impressed and invited him to try out for our next play.”
The Truth is famously a woman’s showcase, the lead part being that of Becky, a compulsive liar whose relentless embroidery threatens her marriage to the agreeable, unquestioning Tom Warder. Taking the part of Becky would be Ethyl Williams, a star around campus who was president of Theta Alpha Phi, the dramatic fraternity, and was, by general agreement, the best actress the school had ever produced. Both Davies and Tracy read for the role of Tom, an easy skate of a part except for a tense confrontational scene at the bottom of the second act, and Tracy, to everyone’s surprise, landed it effortlessly. Ken Edgers, who covered the tryouts for the school paper, acknowledged that Tracy was new to the Ripon stage “but should prove to be one of the strongest actors in the cast if the ability revealed last Tuesday may be taken as a sample of his future work.” Edgers mercifully refrained from reporting Tracy’s first line onstage a few days later, when, focused on the playscript clutched in his hand, he backed out from the wings and tripped over a pile of band instruments, tumbling into the middle of a bass drum. “Gosh!” came the historic words. “I busted Foam Lueck’s drum!”1
Carrie and John Tracy, circa 1922. (ROBERT B. EDGERS)
Faced with the daunting task of acting the male lead in the first full-length play he had ever tackled, Tracy threw himself into the rehearsal process with an all-consuming dedication that forced him to drop all of his third-quarter classes. “He didn’t always see the sense in ‘education,’ ” Professor Boody wrote, “and in some courses he was more or less of a problem. The Dean frequently had to jack him up on attendance. But when it came to anything on the stage he was right there.” He also spent so much time running lines with Ethyl Williams, his moon-faced leading lady, that Kenny came to consider her “one of Spence’s flames.”
Tracy made his stage debut at the Ripon Municipal Auditorium on the night of June 21, 1921. The performance began promptly at 8:15, Ethyl taking the stage within a couple of minutes and exhibiting, in the words of Professor Boody, “real ability and a high degree of technique.” Spence appeared about ten minutes later, “straightforward and lovable” as the text required. As Becky schemed and manipulated, Tom steadfastly remained his trusting old self, a model of contented domesticity, completely oblivious to the web of deceit being spun around him.
Then came the second act, where Becky covered a man’s visit with a cascade of falsehoods that not even Tom could ignore. Tracy, his jaw taut, his voice getting lower, listened with mounting fury as Ethyl continued to trip herself up. “Lies!” he erupted, blowing like a long-dormant volcano. “All of it! Every word a lie. And another and another and another!”
“Tom!”
“You sent for him!”
Too frightened to speak, she frantically shook her head in a desperate attempt at denial.
“Don’t shake your head! I know what I’m talking about and for the first time with you, I believe!”
She put her hands up helplessly and backed away from him.
“I saw your note to him!” he jabbed, moving in on her. “I read it here in this room! He gave it to me before you came down!”
“The beast!”
“You’re going to misjudge him too!”
“No, Tom, I’ll tell you the truth, and all of it.”
“Naturally,” he said, spitting the words. “Now you’ve got to!”
Ethyl later confessed that Spence had truly frightened her that night, and that she had been able to channel the terror she felt into the performance she gave. “Mr. Tracy proved himself a consistent and unusually strong actor in this most difficult straight part,” the Ripon paper said in its review. “His steadiness, his reserve strength and suppressed emotion were a pleasant surprise to all who heard him as Warder.” The applause was strong and genuine, the exhilarating reward for two months of the most sustained work he had ever done in his life.
And from that night forward, his college career would be a shambles.
That summer Ethyl Williams returned to her family in Green Bay, where she would eventually give up acting and become a teacher. Spence and Kenny went west by way of the Canadian Rockies, stopping over in Banff and Lake Louise on their way to Seattle, where they spent time at Dr. and Mrs. Edgers’ cottage on Fox Island. “As we left Milwaukee,” said Kenny, “at the train station Mr. Tracy slipped me $20 so I would not run short. As we left Seattle at the end of the summer, my father said to Spence, ‘Here is an extra $20 in case you run short.’ We called it even.”
At Fox Island they swam, dug clams, fished. There were side trips by boat to Mount Rainier and out into the ocean. Spence, fired by the triumph of his performance in The Truth, spent long hours at a portable typewriter transcribing a one-act play he had found in a copy of McClure’s called The Valiant. After a week on Fox Island, they ditched their overalls and took the S.S. Rose City from Portland to San Francisco (where Spence had an aunt) and spent several days motoring around the peninsula cities of Palo Alto, Monterey, and Carmel. They returned to Wisconsin via the Grand Canyon, arriving back at Ripon in time for the campuswide mixer the Crimson Orchestra always played at the end of registration.
The “walk-around” was the first social event of the year, the ritual introduction of incoming students to the faculty, and it was customary for the upperclassmen to escort them. The best friend of Lorraine Foat, a Mask and Wig stalwart, was entering Ripon, and Lorraine prevailed upon Spence, who hated dancing, to be her friend’s escort that night. Lois Heberlein, as it turned out, was well connected: her father had attended Ripon, where one of his classmates was Silas Evans, the current president of the college. As they made their way down the reception line, Spence was complimented repeatedly on the excellence of his commencement performance, while Lois was welcomed warmly as the daughter of an active alumnus.
“My God,” Tracy said to her as they made their way to the dance floor, “I’m glad your father went to school here and that I was in that play. We at least had something to talk about to the faculty.” He danced her over toward the bandstand where Kenny was holding forth with his saxophone and nodded. “There’s my roommate,” he said, “Kenny Edgers.” Lois and Kenny exchanged glances, each taking careful note of the other. “She must be a good date if she can get you to dance,” Kenny said to Spence as they disappeared back into the crowd.
Soon they were a foursome—Kenny and Lois, Spence and Lorraine. Tracy was obsessive about acting to the degree that he talked about little else. He signed up for another quarter of Zoology, but otherwise filled his schedule with speech and drama classes. Most girls would have found him hard to take, but Olive Lorraine Foat, the petite brunette who played the flamboyant Mrs. Crespigny—all bracelets and bangles and rouge and wax pearls—in The Truth, was known campuswide as a deft comedienne who loved the theater. “I was very fond of Spence,” she said, “but not in a romantic way. He just was … I admired him so for his ability. I loved to play opposite him because you were playing against someone who was solid. I knew the things he believed in, I knew the things he had no patience with … I think some of the girls who tried out for plays that he was in hoped that he would pay attention … but I don’t remember anyone.”
Transcribing The Valiant, Fox Island, Washington, 1921. (ROBERT B. EDGERS)
Tracy involved himself with the Prom Committee and was elected premier of Alpha Phi Omega, the house fraternity at West Hall. Then Professor Boody urged him to come out for debate: “Spencer, you get in and out of more arguments than any student in this school. You belong on the debating team.” The Mask and Wig produced only two plays a year—winter and spring—and each play was good for only one or two performances. Both Spence and Lorraine wanted to do a play a month, but the others weren’t sure they could afford the time away from their studies. When they forged ahead with plans for two performances of an obscure one-act called The Dregs, the backlash wasn’t entirely unexpected.
William Vaughn Moody’s The Great Divide had been announced as the fall play, but the director would be Professor H. H. Allen, new to Ripon and not at all familiar with Tracy’s work. Spence and Lorraine made a pact: they would both try out for the leads, but if one got the lead and the other did not, then neither would do the play. Casting was announced on October 17, 1921. As expected, Lorraine got the part of Ruth Jordan, the female lead in Moody’s perennial favorite, but Spence drew only a supporting role, that of Ruth’s brother, Philip. Lorraine promptly resigned her part, a calculated act of loyalty to Spence that roiled the Mask and Wig and got everyone talking. “The Dean called me in to question my refusal, and suggested that perhaps the reason Spence didn’t get the part was because he had been neglecting his studies. That didn’t satisfy me, although I knew that Spence wasn’t too enthusiastic about studying. That was when we decided we’d have our own acting company with rehearsals at my house, and we called ourselves The Campus Players.”
The following day, the school paper carried the announcement that The Dregs had been put aside in favor of The Valiant. The latter would be performed by Spencer Tracy and Lorraine Foat at the Municipal Auditorium on Thursday and Friday evenings, October 27 and 28. Working from Tracy’s own hunt-and-peck transcription, the Players began the process of nightly rehearsal. The Valiant was simple enough to stage, all the action taking place in a prison office, the warden and the chaplain trying to confirm the condemned man’s identity just as he is about to die. A girl comes to see him, thinking he may be her long lost brother, but he sends her back to her mother convinced that her brother had died a war hero. The girl’s part was meaty enough, laden as it was with stark emotion, but the play really belonged to the actor playing the mysterious prisoner who called himself Dyke.
As a boy Tracy had learned the trick of immersing himself in a part. The hours he spent in the nickelodeon were the equivalent of study, and once he had it, he could replay it in performance—not strictly as the character but the character as filtered through his own set of experiences. He now did the same with the text of the play, imprinting it so thoroughly on his memory he’d never have to reach for a line, a thought, an action. “Because possibly of his military training, perhaps through natural instinct, Tracy always manifested unusual poise,” Professor Boody said. “He could stand still, remain in character, and do nothing but act.”
Although the theater wasn’t filled to capacity as it had been for The Truth, the advance word bolstered the crowd considerably from the several hundred who typically turned out for Tom Mix and William S. Hart on Thursday nights. The set was minimal: a desk, a few straight-backed chairs, a water cooler. Jennings Page and Jack Davies, in their respective roles as the warden and the prison chaplain, provided the somber setup, Tracy making his entrance about five minutes into the action. He was calm and cynical, unashamedly guilty of the murder for which he was about to hang. (“The man deserved to be killed; he wasn’t fit to live. It was my duty to kill him, and I did it.”) And he was steadfast in his refusal to give them his true identity. Then Lorraine appeared, a seventeen-year-old girl thinking the condemned prisoner might be her long lost brother Joe, the man with whom she exchanged long passages of Shakespeare as a child.
Doing his best to convince her that he was not Joe, Tracy launched into his big speech, the concocting of a heroic death in France for a man who bore the name of her brother, selling it with all the conviction and force he could muster. “… The Jerries were getting ready for a raid of their own, so they were putting down a box barrage with light guns and howitzers and a few heavies. This officer was lying right in the middle of it. Well, all of a sudden a young fellow dashed out of a trench not far from where I was, and went for that officer … The chances were just about a million to one against him, and he must have known it, but he went out just the same … Afterward, we got what was left … the identification tag was still there … and that was the name … Joseph Anthony Paris!”
It was a vaudeville moment, pat and heavy-handed, but Tracy managed real conviction where another actor—especially a student—might well have chewed the scenery. Lorraine tearfully withdrew, convinced (as now was the audience) that the man who was about to die was not her brother after all. He waited, and once she was out of earshot, he brought a gasp from the audience by answering from memory the verses she had just spoken to him:
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
And then, reaching for the lines:
Cowards die many times before their death;
The valiant never taste death but once.
And with head held “proud and high,” he walked offstage to his date with the gallows.
The applause was generous. “He loved to do this play,” Lorraine said, “because he was trying to keep me from finding out who he was … I did cry in [it] and they were real tears, because he was marvelous, just marvelous.” The Days review on November 1, 1921, described the attendance as “large and appreciative,” and Tracy, it said, played the part of the prisoner “in such a masterful way that the audience felt with him the emotions he portrayed.” Lorraine, it went on, “added another triumph to her long list of stage successes.”
Abandoning any pretense of a medical career, Tracy flunked Zoology that quarter while pulling solid Bs in his English and Speech classes. Clark Graham directed the Mask and Wig productions, but it was Professor Boody who taught Dramatics at Ripon and who introduced him to the mechanics of performance. Boody gave him the process of getting into a part, the analysis of action and character, and the understanding of a play’s structure and purpose. He taught the use of the eyes as exhibited in the best motion picture acting and maintained the brow was the actor’s chief asset.2 “The response of those not talking,” he said, “is vastly more important than the actions of the person who holds the stage.” Boody’s great failing as a teacher of acting was an emphasis on imitation rather than immersion, the notion that a character was assembled from a toolbox of characteristics rather than acquired from within. “Never be yourself on stage,” he warned. “You are taking a part.”
Boody’s suggestion that Spence and Lorraine start the Campus Players resulted in an ambitious plan to revive The Truth for a statewide tour over the Christmas recess. Elmer “Red” Wagner, functioning as the group’s road manager, laid out an itinerary of eleven towns over the space of two weeks, starting in Plymouth on December 22 and finishing up in Berlin on the evening of January 6, 1922. Rehearsals at Lorraine’s house were under way by Thanksgiving with first-year student Anna Klein serving as understudy for Ethyl Williams (who was teaching school in Neenah and could only rehearse on weekends). Lorraine remembered Spence eating his way through the entire holiday season: “He liked to go out in our kitchen to talk with my mother and eat all her doughnuts.” Mrs. Foat thought Spence likable enough, but puzzling in some respects. “Why does he always come over to go over lines at meal time?” she would ask.
Bad weather dogged the intrepid company most nights, and they arrived in Princeton during a raging blizzard. The tour broke for Christmas, and Spence and Kenny drove down to Milwaukee, where Bill O’Brien, who was attending the Marquette College of Economics, met them. They regrouped at Ripon on the morning of the twenty-sixth and traveled to Wautoma, where Red Wagner met them at the hotel. Jim Gunderson, father of West Hall officer Coleman Gunderson, treated the cast to supper after the show. “I saw The Truth in the movies once,” he told Spence by way of a compliment, “and I think you imitated them real swell.”3
On tour with the Campus Players of Ripon College, 1921. Left to right: Evelyn Engelbracht, Ken Edgers, Lorraine Foat, Tracy, Meta Bohlman. Seated: Ethyl Williams. (ROBERT B. EDGERS)
A sampling of the West Hall gang, Ripon College, 1922. Tracy’s arm is around his pal Kenny Edgers. (ROBERT B. EDGERS)
The next night, at Daly’s Theatre in Wisconsin Rapids, the mechanism supporting the curtain broke. It failed to drop at the climax of the play, and the actors had to improvise a graceful way of getting offstage. In Marshfield, the lights failed, throwing the house into an uproar. Tomahawk and Merrill came next, and Ken Edgers noticed that even the smallest of audiences unnerved his pal. “I remember Spence asking the person nearest him as he went on stage for his first appearance in any play to hit him hard between the shoulder blades to get him over his initial stage fright.” New Year’s Eve was spent in Antigo, the second in Wausau, the fifth in Fond du Lac. By the time they finished up on the sixth, they were no longer a group of amateurs, but the seasoned veterans of a whirlwind Chautauqua tour. “I found,” Tracy said of the experience, “that acting was good hard work as well as play.”
There was one final performance of The Truth to be mounted on January 16, a benefit for the American Legion. Anticipation ran high—those who had only heard about the commencement performance wanted to see the play for themselves, while others who were there wanted to see it again. Then there was Red Wagner’s announcement in the paper that Ethyl Williams would be making her final appearance before a Ripon audience. The show at the Armory that Monday night sold out, and while the Ripon Commonwealth dutifully found Ethyl’s performance “masterly,” it went on at length about what Tracy had done: “His quiet manner of portraying the deceived husband was characterized by such an air of strong reserved force as to be quite remarkable. If his work in other productions has not already done so, the acting he displayed Monday night deservedly places him as a leader in the dramatic circles of the present student generation.”
John and Carrie Tracy arrived for the play in their Wisconsin-built Kissel coupe and found their son talking excitedly about dramatic school. “He wants to be an actor,” John said to Kenny Edgers, barely containing his disgust. “Can you imagine that face ever being a matinee idol?” Subsequently there was a family conference with Professor Graham presiding. “As a result,” he said, “I wrote Mr. Sargent of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and he suggested that Tracy appear for a tryout.”
The timing couldn’t have been better, for the final performance of The Truth also marked the last time Spence and Lorraine would share a stage. Directly after the performance, Lorraine left for Boston, where she would spend a year at the Emerson School of Oratory. In later years she would downplay her relationship with Tracy, maintaining it was their love of theatre that had so inexorably glued them together. “He took me to a dance once in a while,” she acknowledged, never forgetting how distracted and self-absorbed he could be. “We’d dance once, and he’d say, ‘Let’s go in the balcony,’ and we’d go up there and sit and watch everybody else dance. He wouldn’t dance. It was too much effort. And he’d say, ‘Let’s go down to the greasy spoon and get some food.’ And I put up with that because I liked to be in the plays with him. But I didn’t date him; I dated other people—boys who danced!”
Clearly there was more to the relationship than just acting; in Lorraine’s old age (she lived to be ninety-three) the spark was still there. She was pretty, smart, and Protestant—three things that would always attract him—and she was serious about acting. “I think Spence thought that I was talented,” she allowed, “and he liked to play opposite me because we were both very intense about it. He was always Spence, but he also never steered off the track.”
She and Tracy had real potential together, but he was never focused on girls so much as his work, and the excitement of finding something he could do well and with unbridled enthusiasm was greater than any sexual attraction. He was also careless in his manner of dress and oblivious to the interests of others. “He had a sweater,” she said, “and I think it was the same sweater that he wore all the time—it was always out in the elbows. He didn’t look very tidy on campus. He didn’t need [to look like that], but he was so independent … He didn’t care whether anyone else liked him or not. He really didn’t ever seem to crave the attention of people there in college.”
It wasn’t Spence her parents objected to so much as the idea of his being an actor. Lorraine’s father was a carryover from the days when boardinghouses routinely posted signs reading NO ACTORS and traveling theatrical companies were regarded as if they were roving bands of Gypsies. Certainly the stage was no place for a respectable young woman, and Spence, it was feared, would drag her in that direction. Then Lorraine got to the meat of it: “My family had a very strong feeling … we were not Catholics, and my dad wouldn’t feel that it was a proper marriage. At that time there were very few people who crossed over. You think nothing of it now, but …”
And so it was. A week after Lorraine’s departure for Emerson, Spencer Tracy was elected to Theta Alpha Phi and simultaneously called an end to the Campus Players. He never acted on a Ripon stage again.
Though he came to Ripon as a “flunk-out”—arriving two or three weeks into the second quarter—Tracy quickly earned a reputation as a ringleader of sorts, taking a key role in West Hall initiation rites and bolstering the school’s well-earned reputation for hazing. (“Frosh! Go upstairs and warm a toilet seat for me!”) As premier of Alpha Phi Omega, he once put the owner of a pet rabbit on trial for paternity. Another time, he indulged a newfound taste for cigars by proposing a series of “smokers” between rival houses, permitting freshmen to provide both eats and smokes while upperclassmen feted the likes of Silas Evans and Clark Graham. He generally spoke on such occasions, ribbing the guests, deadpan, and picking arguments with some of the more academically talented students.
Tracy’s zeal for one-upmanship found a constructive outlet in Professor Boody’s debate class, where it soon dawned on him that debate was just another facet of performance. He joined Pi Kappa Delta, and when tryouts were announced for the intercollegiate season, he went after a spot on the Eastern team as aggressively as he would pursue the lead in a play. “There were two places to be filled,” Curtis MacDougall, a West Hall journalism major, recalled, “and competition was quite severe. The candidates were grouped into teams of three, and there was really a tournament with judging. My team had on it Tracy and Newton Jones, another fraternity brother. We won. We went undefeated, we beat everybody else. And I’m sure a great deal of the reason was Tracy’s platform performance.”
Boody had come to the college in 1915 with a mandate to raise its forensic profile. He did so by quadrupling the number of annual debates and building an admirable record of “strong colleges met.” He needed three men for a home team, but the most coveted slots were those for a tour of Eastern campuses, debating the Veterans’ Adjusted Compensation Bill then before Congress. Given the press attention the team would draw, they were also the slots in which he wanted his most able performers. On December 2, 1921, Boody announced his choices: J. Harold Bumby, who had been opener for Ripon the previous two seasons, Curtis MacDougall, and Tracy, whose “forceful presentation” and complementary stage experience won him a place on the team despite the dean’s concerns over his grades.
Deep into rehearsals for The Truth, Tracy took his selection for the team in stride until Clark Graham’s letter to Franklin Sargent of the American Academy brought forth the offer of an audition in New York. At once the tour took on a whole new significance, and it was Graham who encouraged Tracy to use Sada Cowan’s two-character dialogue Sintram of Skagerrak as his tryout piece. Spence and Ethyl Williams had performed the brief one-act as a benefit for the Harwood Scholarship Fund over the Christmas holidays. Sintram’s lyrical effusions of love for the sea struck Graham as ideal for showcasing the way his student could handle difficult dialogue while managing the build in intensity that brings the play to its tragic conclusion.
On February 21, 1922, chapel period was given over to a kind of pep rally for the college debaters, Tracy earnestly urging the student body to “keep the home fires burning” while three of their number were “clashing verbally” with Eastern collegians. They left the next day in the midst of a terrific snowstorm and stopped at the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago. Lionel Barrymore was appearing in The Claw, and they all went to see it. “I remember that night Tracy emphatically saying that he was going to go on the stage,” MacDougall said. “He wanted to be an actor.”
The next morning they were off for Bloomington, where they would face Illinois Wesleyan at Amie Chapel in “Old Main,” the university’s Hedding Hall. A reception committee met them at the train and were genuinely solicitous over the course of their stay. The Wesleyan team failed to establish a case and Tracy, in his first intercollegiate debate appearance, helped win a two-to-one decision over Illinois with a strong rebuttal. “He never spoke a line that somebody, usually me, hadn’t written for him,” MacDougall said. “I wrote his main speech, and we wrote out his potential rebuttal pieces, short answers to points which we were almost certain the opposition would bring up. And, during the debate, we’d sit at the platform, and when one of those matters came up, that we thought Spence could well handle, we’d toss a slip of paper over to him as a reminder and he’d go to it brilliantly.”
Lionel Barrymore in The Claw. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
The team headed for Boston, passing through Cleveland, Buffalo, and Niagara Falls on their way to Hamilton, Ontario, where Spence and “Mac” went to church that Sunday while Bumby visited some relatives in Burlington. They spent the twenty-seventh in Montreal, their last stop before Portland, and Tracy, MacDougall remembered, “asked Bumby and me to wait while he went into the big cathedral there, where we waited and we waited and we waited. He finally came out, and he announced that the result was in the bag, that he had spent the time praying that we would win the debate at Bowdoin [College]. We went on blithely to Maine.”
The team met Bowdoin at Brunswick on March 1 and lost the decision two to one. Tracy, despite the loss, was ranked first in excellence by the judges and received special mention in the Portland newspapers. The next night they met Colby College at Waterville, where they were royally received but handed a nondecision by the judges.
Fittingly, Mac and Harold both picked up colds at Brunswick and spent a full day in Boston without leaving the hotel. Spence took in the city, walking off nervous energy, anxious and impatient to get on to New York. He caught up with Lorraine Foat, told her of the American Academy audition and all it meant to him. “I know at the time his father thought it was disgusting. A sissy sort of thing to do…[But] Spence was so determined to do it, even if he didn’t have a cent. He was going to go to New York, he was going to make something [of himself]…He wanted to get ahead.”
Tracy’s first glimpse of New York City was the cavernous interior of Grand Central Terminal and the vaulted blue ceiling of the main concourse. Stepping out into the crisp night air at Forty-second and Vanderbilt, he could see the electric white glow of the Times Square theater district four blocks to the west. Marilyn Miller was in Sally at the New Amsterdam that night. Six Cylinder Love was at the Sam H. Harris, and Helen Hayes was appearing in To the Ladies at the Liberty. Other theaters on other streets held Roland Young, Estelle Winwood, Alice Brady, Blanche Yurka,Frank Fay, Laurette Taylor, Florence Eldridge, Lenore Ulric, Fred Astaire, Lynne Overman, Violet Heming, and Henry Hull.
At Spence’s insistence, the boys took a four-dollar room at the Waldorf-Astoria and got directions to a nearby speakeasy. The fare was Italian, the air stifling, the service poor. Spence delighted in the widened eyes of his small-town teammates, neither of whom had ever been outside the state of Wisconsin. It was the first time Mac, for instance, had ever seen a woman smoke a cigarette, and he was so scandalized by the experience he couldn’t enjoy his meal. A lot of walking got done that weekend amid the orange juice and hot dog stands that populated Broadway in the wake of Prohibition, the off-the-arm cafeterias, the phony auction parlors, the medicine shows and two-bit photographers, the cut-rate haberdasheries, the drugstores and bookstores that lined both sides of the street between Forty-second and Fifty-third. Through it all, Tracy’s mind was never far from his appointment with Franklin Sargent on Monday, and he insisted that Bumby accompany him.
The entrance to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts was at the northeast corner of Carnegie Hall, Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, a modest portal alongside the grand Italianate entrance to America’s preeminent concert hall. The president’s office was on the first floor, as it had been since the academy’s move to the hall in 1896. Franklin Haven Sargent had founded the AADA as the Lyceum School of Acting in 1884, the first institution in the United States created expressly for the purpose of dramatic instruction. Now sixty-six, Sargent was still at the helm, personally passing on all admissions and teaching the course in Classic Drama that was the cornerstone of the school’s curriculum. A taciturn man, Sargent asked Tracy if he had brought “anything like a skit.” Tracy produced his copy of Sintram, and when he suggested the passage would work best with two actors, Sargent agreed to read the lines of Gunhilde. Bumby settled back to watch as Tracy assumed the posture of the brooding Sintram, frail and listless.
I have always lived here, as you know, little comrade … In that old house just the other side of the cliff, I was born; weighed down with riches and an untarnished name. My people had intermarried closely … no strong, vital peasant’s blood ran through my veins … My mother’s bedroom faced the ocean, so the first sound which reached my ears was the moan of the sea. My mother died when I was born, so the sea became my mother and sang her lullabies to me until I fell asleep, stilled by her soft crooning…
As Tracy spoke, Sargent scribbled notes on an evaluation form: Personality “sensitive & masculine”…Stage Presence “good (not technically)”…Voice “untrained but natural”…Pronunciation “Fair”…Reading “a little declamatory yet sincere”…Spontaneity “good”…Versatility and Characterization “passable”…Distinction “good”…Pantomime “crude but manly”…Dramatic Instinct “fair underdeveloped”…Intelligence “good”…Imagination “good.” When he finished, Sargent gave Tracy a long piercing look and said, “Yes, yes, yes.”
He initiated a discussion of finances: tuition for the Academy’s Junior Course was $400, playbooks and makeup extra. Board in the immediate area would cost ten to twenty dollars a week, maybe more. Tracy said his father disapproved of his becoming an actor and was unlikely to cover the cost. Sargent, in turn, suggested a scholarship might be possible, something he rarely offered a first-year student. Tracy, he noted, was medium-dark in coloring, well proportioned, and in “very good” physical condition—a very masculine applicant for a program where such types were rare. At the bottom of the sheet he wrote “Acceptable Oct. Junior F.H.S.”
There were four days left to the recreational end of the trip, but they weren’t days to be wasted in New York or Washington, D.C. Back at Ripon, Kenny Edgers had fallen desperately ill, and Tracy seized the excuse to return home at once. He found Kenny recovering, and they started walking to build up his strength, five miles a day. Spence told him about Sargent and the academy and the offer of the scholarship, as if that might swing some weight when it came to his father. And, in the end, Lorraine thought that it might: “His father, I know, finally said, ‘You can go for a year, and if at the end of that time you haven’t hit it off big, then you will come back and go into business with me.’ Spence spoke of it as something that he was being indulged in, and he was determined to show his father that he was going to be a success.”
Tracy presided over his last fraternity meeting on March 14, 1922, and returned to Milwaukee that same day. His six months as premier had left Alpha Phi Omega with new bylaws, new ceremonials, a new constitution, and thirteen new members.
A month after he left, Tracy won the degree of proficiency, order of debate, in Pi Kappa Delta. The announcement of his departure in Ripon College Days concluded with the words: “His ability will be sorely missed next fall.”
Spencer Tracy entered the American Academy of Dramatic Arts during its thirty-eighth year. The junior class consisted of 142 pupils, the majority women who fancied themselves stageworthy and who, more importantly, had the tuition and wherewithal to keep the academy going. Only a small portion of its graduates ever went professional, but those who did enjoyed long and distinguished careers. Among the academy’s past students, William Powell ’13 was appearing in Bavu at the Earl Carroll Theatre, and Edward G. Robinson (also ’13) was at the Plymouth in The Deluge.Howard Lindsay, who staged To the Ladies, was an academy graduate, as was Dale Carnegie ’12, who developed his famous course immediately upon leaving the school. In England, Marion Lorne ’04 was starring in the plays of her husband, Walter C. Hackett. In California, Cecil B. DeMille ’00 was directing movies for Famous Players.
On the faculty were playwright-director Edward Goodman; actors Lemuel Josephs, Joseph Adelman, and Philip Loeb; and actor-director Edwin R. Wolfe. George Currie taught Physical Training, Pantomime, and Life Study; Wellington Putnam, Vocal Training; James J. Murray, Fencing and Stage Dueling. All were presided over by the redoubtable Charles Jehlinger, who directed the senior plays and gave an occasional lecture. “Jehli,” as he was known to nearly everyone, had been with Franklin Sargent from the beginning in that he was in the school’s very first graduating class. Twelve years later, Jehlinger returned as faculty, concurrent with the school’s move to Carnegie Hall. He didn’t teach any of the junior classes, but his presence was felt throughout the academy, a martinet of sorts where Sargent could be gloomy and reclusive.
Tracy found a room on West Seventy-sixth Street, around the corner from the New-York Historical Society, and reported for classes on the morning of April 3, 1922. He found himself plunged almost immediately into an intensive regimen of vocal and physical training, covering everything from hygiene and makeup to dancing, fencing, and diction. Defects in speech, projection, and posture were identified and corrective exercises prescribed. Control and resonance of the voice came next, breathing, word colorings, and accents; physical presence and poise, terminology and workmanship; the mechanics of business—standing, walking, listening.
The building itself was a stimulating environment, Andrew Carnegie having poured $2 million—roughly nine-tenths of the total cost—into what was conceived as New York’s finest concert venue. The Main Hall was accompanied by two smaller auditoriums—a recital hall underneath and a chamber music hall adjacent. After its opening in 1891, Carnegie added two wings of studio offices and apartments above and around the structure, removing the original roof and building over it. The spaces were typically tall, with enormous windows and skylights; some studios (which often doubled as living spaces) ran the entire length of the building. Artists, such as Frederick E. Church and Edwin Blashfield, shared the building with architects, writers, photographers, dance studios, voice coaches, and the academy, which occupied the first floor of the northeast tower and parts of three upper floors. There was a large room with a raised platform on which the students were taught dancing, fencing, and how to fall gracefully down the steps. The doors to the rooms were usually left open, especially in the summer, and the sounds of piano lessons, recitals, dance workshops, and play rehearsals mingled in the hallways. Spaces were constantly being vacated and upgraded; the walls were eight feet thick in some places.
Two months into the term, Tracy embarked on a campaign to lure Lorraine Foat to New York. He had the academy send her a catalog, then followed up with a letter: “This really is quite the place, the only place, in fact, for one who wishes to follow the stage. Look over the catalog and if there is anything you wish to know further, let me know and I’ll try to give you the dope. You had better come here, Lorraine—you won’t be sorry. The school is recognized by all theatrical people, and nearly all the present stars of the stage are graduates. I have been working mighty hard but enjoy it very much, and I have been encouraged very greatly since coming here.”
Lorraine responded that she’d come in the fall, hesitant to risk her father’s disapproval. Of course, there was no shortage of girls at the school, and acting, if only in character, had become Tracy’s way of relating to them. Sorting through the choices, he took up with a red-haired Texan named Olga Goodman. She was more serious than a lot of the other girls, certainly more talented, but Spence, as she remembered him, was “a very ambitious student” who “actually had little time for fun, and little money.” Their dates consisted of “sandwiches made up at a delicatessen near Carnegie Hall and rides atop a Fifth Avenue bus.”
The matter of money was a sensitive subject, Spence having no real talent for either making or preserving it. His father had agreed to cover his housing costs—no mean concession—and Carroll, who had embarked on a sales career, slipped a little “happy cabbage” into the letters he wrote. It was, however, Bill O’Brien who knew that Wisconsin legislators had authorized cash bonus payments to Badger State veterans, and that they had created an education option that paid up to $1,080 if a vet wanted to continue in school. “We began pulling wires, told the Board we couldn’t get the training we wanted in Wisconsin,” O’Brien said. Bill had played both football and Charley’s Aunt at Marquette, and when his uncle Charlie (who managed Manhattan’s Union Club) invited both him and his mother to spend the summer of 1920 in New York City, he did so gladly and with an eye toward finding work as an actor. “I remained in New York and managed to get on in the merry-merry (a musical comedy chorus), but, after all, I knew that hipping the ballet was not going to teach me to be a Booth or a Barrett.”
That fall, while Spence was working to complete high school at West Division, Bill auditioned for Franklin Sargent and was accepted into the program. Then, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Bill’s father fell ill and he was forced to return to Milwaukee before taking a single day of instruction. O’Brien entered the Marquette School of Economics instead, but when he heard of Tracy’s own audition and acceptance at the academy, he finished out the semester with the intention of joining Spence in New York.
The money from the state was doled out at the rate of thirty dollars a month, which would enable the two men to survive only if they shared a room. “We darn near starved there several times,” O’Brien said. “Spence wouldn’t take any more from his family than mine could send me because he wanted us to be on an equal footing.” Bill arrived during the summer of 1922, aiming to start at the academy in October. To commemorate the occasion, he assumed the name of his paternal grandfather and became, for purposes of the stage, Pat O’Brien.
They found quarters on West End Avenue between Ninety-eighth and Ninety-ninth, one block over from Broadway on the Upper West Side. “It was two steep shaky flights up,” O’Brien wrote, “but as Spencer said, ‘It has a ceiling.’ ” Tracy took Pat to a tearoom where the students met for lunch, and in short order Pat was seeing one of Spence’s classmates, a blue-eyed gal from San Francisco named Dolores Graves.
At the academy, Tracy progressed to dramatic analysis, life study, pantomime, and vocal interpretation, playing scenes in the middle of the classroom with other hopeful and impossibly earnest young actors. The term would end with “examination plays” that would give each student at least three good opportunities before faculty to show, after twenty-four weeks of hard work, what he or she could do with a straight part, a comedy part, and a character part. The glut of one-acts came in late August, the students taking full charge of lights, makeup, and costuming, and continued unabated through the first week of September. To nobody’s surprise, Tracy was judged fit to enter the senior class and thereby join the academy stock company, as were fifteen others, among them Sterling Holloway, Kay Johnson, Muriel Kirkland, George Meeker, Monroe Owsley, Ernest Woodward, and Thelma Ritter.
The senior course was the intensive and continuous production of plays, and every week brought a new text, a new part, a new audience of students, instructors, and invited guests. The first three months were spent in the Carnegie Lyceum, the choral space under the Main Hall that Franklin Sargent commandeered upon his arrival in 1896. Seating eight hundred on two levels, it was blasted out of some of the hardest rock on earth. There were no flies, so the scenery had to be slid into place from the wings, but the Carnegie Lyceum had an intimacy few New York theaters could match. When full (which was seldom), the exchange of energy between the actors and the audience—“that breathing, panting mass creature,” as O’Brien referred to it—was extraordinary. The last three months were given over to the mounting of the best of the productions as matinees atDaniel Frohman’s Lyceum Theatre on Forty-fifth Street, where the students could get the experience of working in a major commercial theater, and where the audience would be composed of members of the general public.
In charge of it all was Jehlinger, a flinty old man with large piercing eyes and a voice that could slice through masonry. His vociferous criticisms inspired both awe and terror in his students, and occasionally even murderous impulses. (After a particularly stinging tirade, Edward G. Robinson is said to have heaved a table at him, knocking him flat.) Jehli unnerved almost everyone, yet he never got to Tracy—at least to the point where Tracy would admit as much.
There was, in fact, much in Jehlinger’s teachings that confirmed Tracy’s own instinctive technique, principal among them Jehli’s insistence that the character and the actor must always be one and the same. (“You can’t have two brains in one head or you are a monster!”) The actor was the servant of the character, Jehlinger taught, and it was up to the character to run things, to make the performance inevitable. His mantra was “give in” and he repeated it again and again: “Don’t worry, just yield. It will all handle itself if you surrender … Human impulse is the only thing that counts, not stage directions … Give in to your instincts. Instinct must rule in performance, not judgment … So long as your mind is on acting instead of the thoughts of the character, you make no progress …Obey your impulses… It is better to be crude by overdoing than to be negative. Obey your impulses at any cost. Don’t fear mistakes. Be fearless! Yield! Obey!”
Tracy’s first appearance before a New York audience took place on October 20, 1922, when he acted in a curtain-raiser called The Wedding Guests at the Carnegie Lyceum. Three days later, on October 23, Lorraine came for her tryout and found that he was still keyed up: “Here was Spence, pacing up and down in front, watching. Why was I late? ‘You can’t afford to miss this time that was all set up for you.’ And when I got out of this taxi, ‘It must have cost you a fortune! You should have come on the streetcar!’ So we went right up and had the audition. I remember where I sat … I was kind of nervous about that. And then [Mr. Sargent] said, ‘Do this scene,’ and we did the whole play.” The play, of course, was The Valiant, and once again came the tension and the desperate seeking, and once again came the tears. Sargent didn’t have to pretend; he was genuinely impressed. He wrote “good” for most every line item on Lorraine’s audition sheet. It was, in fact, an altogether better evaluation than Tracy himself had received some seven months earlier. She was acceptable for the January course, Sargent affirmed, and he said, in fact, that he would like to meet the man who trained such outstanding prospects.
Tracy was relieved, even jubilant, and to celebrate they joined up with Pat and Dolores and went to 790 West End for hot dogs. “We didn’t have anything very fancy,” Lorraine recalled. “We had to climb a flight of stairs to get to this apartment these two boys were living in, and they did use the gas flame in the gas lights to cook their hot dogs. They didn’t have a regular stove. I was so impressed with these two fellows trying to cook a meal for us. We had a wonderful time talking; Pat was fun to be with.”
They took her back to the train with the expectation that she would be back after the first of the year, when she would see Spence onstage at the Lyceum and aspire to the same thing for herself. Pat started at the academy just as Spence was rehearsing The Wooing of Eve, a full-length play in which he had been assigned the second male lead. In quick succession, he did The Importance of Being Earnest (with Sterling Holloway in the lead); Milne’s Wurzel-Flummery, a whimsical one-act; and Knut at Roeskilde, a two-act tragedy. O’Brien, meanwhile, immersed himself in the junior course, drawing on Spence’s prior experience and his availability to run lines. “Pat and I used to read lines to each other, rearrange the furniture and pace back and forth doing bits of business as if we were in front of the footlights,” Tracy recounted. “The other roomers used to yell at us to shut up.”
The total immersion demanded by the program was only intensified by a profound lack of money. “That $30 a month didn’t go very far,” Tracy said. “I was broke several days before the end of each month. So I studied dramatics as I’d never studied anything before in my life. Always in the back of my mind was the idea that I’d never have enough money to finish the course, and that I’d better learn all I could as fast as possible.”
Times became especially desperate toward Christmas, when Pat and Spence made the decision to forgo food altogether in order to see John Barrymore in Hamlet. They went a total of four times. “Dear God,” said Pat, “what an actor!” Tracy once told actor Robert Ryan he would wait near the stage door of the Broadhurst Theatre just to watch Lionel Barrymore leave at the end of the evening. “He couldn’t afford to see him act on stage,” as Ryan remembered it, “but at least he could watch and see him walk out of the theater.”
After missing eight meals in a row, Tracy decided he had to do something. “I didn’t know how to go about getting a stage job, though I’d have taken anything. I hit every agent on Broadway, and just about every showhouse in town. Then, the afternoon of the third day, I went down to the Theatre Guild and applied for a job. I must have looked like a deserving cause, for the directors gave me a chance. I was to be a $15 a week robot in the play R.U.R. and I drew $1 eating money in advance. I went out and bought the thickest steak I could find.”
Tracy made his professional debut on the night of January 1, 1923, when he stepped onstage at the Frazee Theatre and wordlessly decorated the third act of R.U.R., a fantasy of mechanized society whose title stood for “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” Within days, Pat had become a super as well: “Spence and I were two of the guys who just stood there in the play while some other guy cried out in stentorian tones, ‘We are the masters of the world.’ And then he said, ‘March,’ and that’s all we did.” After a few weeks, Tracy was given a line to read and his salary was raised to twenty dollars a week. “This was a definite step up to wealth,” said Pat. “It sure aided the exchequer.”
Baseball and theater entrepreneur Henry H. Frazee had assumed management of R.U.R. when it moved to his eponymous theater on Forty-second Street in November 1922, and he planned to tour it on the subway circuit after it had played itself out. There was, however, still life in the show when Frazee was forced to close on February 17, 1923, to make way for another play. With a $9,000 week in the till—the Frazee was a small house—R.U.R. began weeklong stands at theaters such as the Bronx Opera House and Teller’s Shubert, where popular prices and daily matinees enabled him to wring every last remaining dollar from the play. Cast changes were inevitable, and when Domis Plugge stepped away from his role as the first robot, Tracy moved up, garnering four lines and a twenty-five-dollar increase in salary. “Boy, I thought I was really hot stuff when I got that first raise,” he said. “I gave the doorman of the theater a dollar tip on the way out that night. Many times later I wished I could get my hands on it.”
Graduation portrait, American Academy of Dramatic Arts. (AADA)
There was a matinee in Queens to play the day the academy’s graduation exercises took place, and Tracy regretfully missed the experience of having his diploma personally handed him by Franklin Sargent. The scholarship Sargent had arranged for Tracy had brought a young man from promising amateur to trained professional, someone who was now prepared to earn a shaky living on the stage and who, with time, luck, and development, might one day become a star. Some forty years later, when asked to sum up what the AADA had done for him, Tracy responded with the following: “I shall always be grateful to the American Academy for what I was taught there—by Mr. Jehlinger and the other teachers—the value of sincerity and simplicity, unembellished and unintellectualized.”
Pat O’Brien was still at the academy, the junior course having another month yet to run, when Spence began scanning the papers on a daily basis. R.U.R. was a job, but it was hardly acting, and Tracy needed to consider his next move. Time and again he had been told the best education for a young actor was to land a spot in a stock company, mastering a play a week and acting all manner of roles. It was demanding, unforgiving, lowly paid work, but those who could do it and flourish and eventually rise above it were literally ready for anything. March was early for summer companies, which usually got under way in June, but the trades were carrying items about a new company going into White Plains, a mere thirty miles outside of New York City, where the long-shuttered Palace Theatre had been taken by Leonard Wood, son of the famous general. As R.U.R. began its last week on the subway circuit, Tracy took the bold step of wiring the new manager—collect.
“I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Leonard Wood, Jr.,” he later said. “He is the only man I ever knew who would answer a collect telegram, and one asking for a job at that. He wired me back to report at White Plains, New York, and started me at $20.”
1 Clemens E. “Foam” Lueck was the college bandmaster.
2 Tracy, headstrong, went his own way when Boody’s admonitions failed to suit him. “He never used make-up,” Ken Edgers remembered, “because of the deep lines in his forehead, even at 20. Also, his eyebrows did not seem to be in the right place for eyebrow accent.”
3 The moving picture version of The Truth was filmed in 1920 by Samuel Goldwyn. Madge Kennedy played the part of Becky Warder and Tom Carrigan played Tom.