CHAPTER 4
It was to Michigan that Spencer Tracy returned as Selena Royle’s leading man in the summer of 1924. But his ultimate destination, the one always front and center in his mind, was New York. Playing with actors of Selena’s caliber kept him on his game, and, happily, Mr. Wright had plans to sustain the Broadway Players during the winter hiatus in Grand Rapids when the Powers Theatre was given over to touring shows and holiday pageants.
In the days just after the turn of the century, when Wright was press agent for Henry W. Savage, the New York borough of Brooklyn had a reputation as an extraordinarily good stock town, supporting as it did both the Spooner family of actors at the Park Avenue Theatre and Corse Payton’s renowned company, which originated the ten-twenty-thirty scale of pricing and gave two shows a day at Payton’s Lee Avenue theater. The Spooners and Payton were long gone by 1924, but the reputation lingered and attracted Wright to the notion of leasing the Montauk Theatre on Livingston Street and moving his company to Brooklyn until the Powers was once again available.
In recent times, the Montauk had housed road attractions and actor Walter Hampden in repertory. Two competing companies, the Alhambra Players (at the Loew’s house of the same name) and the James Carroll Players at the Fifth Avenue, were already established, but Wright was banking on Selena Royle’s undeniable appeal to trump the competition. He limited his initial commitment for the shuttered Montauk to four weeks, but held an option on the balance of the season if Selena and the company got over as hoped.
The Broadway Players closed in Grand Rapids on September 15, 1924, ending their twenty-one-week season with a net loss of about $7,000—half of which was borne by Harry G. Sommers, who held the long-term lease on the theater. Tracy, Selena Royle, Arthur Kohl, and the other remaining players left for New York the next morning, where they would have less than a week to get the first play of the new season on its feet.
Renamed the Montauk Players, the company opened on Monday, September 22, but it wasn’t until the second week of the stand that they got much attention. Selena took star billing in Anna Christie opposite Frank Shannon (from the original Broadway production) and Tracy played the relatively minor role of a longshoreman in Johnny the Priest’s waterfront saloon. As was now typical for a Wright company, the production was exemplary (“a credit to dramatic stock,” as Billboard put it) and Selena’s handling of the part was everything it was supposed to be, widely praised and fervently applauded.
After a couple of weeks, Louise, who had stopped off in New Castle, arrived in Brooklyn with the baby. She found Spence, used to lead roles, biding his time as Wright did everything possible to draw patrons to the Montauk.
Selena signed on to a Broadway tryout as Wright knew she might, given that she had refused to play the winter in Grand Rapids (or any stock for that matter) and his choice of Brooklyn had been in part an accommodation in creating for her a New York showcase. The crowds weren’t there as they had been in Grand Rapids, though, and so when her four-week guarantee expired, she stepped away under the most diplomatic of terms, promising to return if the new play failed to work out as she hoped.
The following week, Tracy was back playing leads, first in Chicken Feed, which had been a modest hit on Broadway the previous season, then in Seven Keys to Baldpate, the old George M. Cohan warhorse, and finally in The Bat, which proved so popular it was held a second week, all opposite Selena’s replacement, actress Georgia Backus. As the season wore on, the Tracys grew to appreciate Brooklyn as a place were they could live as a family, Spence working long hours but without the travel and the financial insecurities that were routinely part of a young actor’s life. They were, in fact, so contented in Brooklyn they never once crossed the bridge into Manhattan the entire time they were there. Louise stayed home with Johnny, just coming to the theater on Mondays to see the new play. “I [was] a hard critic,” she said. “At night when he was in stock, after we were married, he’d go through scenes at home. I’d cue him and I was always honest. I had to be. I’d tell him what I didn’t like and why. His reaction? He’d get mad, but I know I helped him in many instances, [because] he’d change a characterization. I was ahead of him in experience, but he went up very fast.”
Thanksgiving week, when most companies were playing “old boys” (Way Down East and The Old Homestead and other cheap or royalty-free properties), Wright gamely programmed The First Year, Frank Craven’s hit comedy, then followed it with Cohan’s A Prince There Was and The Breaking Point, a new play by Mary Roberts Rinehart, the author of The Bat. For Christmas, he revived Uncle Tom’s Cabin, augmenting the production with “pickaninnies, jubilee singers, and dancers,” all of whom paraded daily down Livingston Street. Nothing in the way of ballyhoo seemed to work for very long though, and by the first week of January, Wright was papering the town with twofers and looking ahead to March and the company’s return to Grand Rapids.
In all, it was a bruising season, costly and unprofitable, but when the Montauk Players closed on March 7, 1925, they had played all twenty-two weeks of their commitment, something of which everyone in the company was justifiably proud. Varietysubsequently ran an item summarizing the extraordinary season and its various participants under the headline BROOKLYN NO LONGER MECCA FOR STOCK.
Mercifully, there was considerably more time to make the jump back to Grand Rapids, Wright having set their opening at the Powers for Easter week, giving his company a well-earned interval after forty-three weeks of continuous work. The Tracys went back to Milwaukee, where they could stop with John and Carrie and go easy on their finances. “I don’t think either of us were too good with the money,” Louise admitted, thinking back on that period. “If I have a dollar, I can live on it. If I have a dollar to spend, I’ll spend it … We were always broke after a run. There was never enough.” Moreover, salaries were flat in Grand Rapids, where another company had entrenched itself during Wright’s six-month absence.
The Washington Players specialized in broad melodramas at popular prices, but it was beginning to look as if the Wright company was facing a cruel replay of the Brooklyn debacle on their home turf, and prices were held to a top of $1.10 to counter the competition. There was also the matter of Selena Royle, who demanded a “general utilitywoman” as part of her deal for another season with Papa Wright. To hold the line on costs, the first few shows would be repeats of the most popular plays of the Montauk season, all using scenery trucked in from Brooklyn. The Tracys settled back in at the Browning, and Spence, now officially leading man for the company, was looking forward to a relatively carefree summer. “My salary was steady,” he said, “and it seemed things had opened up for us at last.” He was in rehearsals for the first play of the new season the day Louise, having put the baby down for a nap, made a horrifying discovery.
She and Spence were going out that night, and after a while it occurred to her that if Johnny napped too long, the babysitter might have trouble getting him to sleep. “I went out on the sleeping porch, calling to him,” she said. “Accidentally as I went through, the door slammed. John never moved. I stopped right where I was and called him again. Took a few steps closer. Called again.” She couldn’t say what prompted her, for at other times she had touched his crib, gently, unconsciously, or him, and watched him awaken. Now she stood motionless beside his crib, and purposely she did not touch it. “Johnny,” she said softly, soberly. No response. “Johnny,” she said, now with more volume and intensity. Again no response. “Johnny!” she shouted, and still no movement. “Then I touched him and he opened his eyes and smiled at me.
“I knew, of course, our child was deaf.”
She was, she said, terror-stricken at first, then a curious wave of relief swept over her. “It was rather like awakening from a nightmare,” she wrote.
Such a thing could not be. There was no reason. One reads about such things, but they did not happen to people one knew. I knew of no deafness ever having existed in either my husband’s family or my own. More substantial arguments rushed to mind. John had a perfectly natural laugh and cry. I remembered he had had all the tiny baby’s first cooing, chirping sounds—those heavenly little early morning sounds. He would lie there, gurgle, wiggle his whole body ecstatically after each effort, then suddenly burst forth again, adding an extra note or quaver in an effort to top the last one. And, as I looked down now into those clear, bright blue eyes and that smiling little face, it did not seem possible that he could not hear. But I could not still the cold, dispassionate voice within me which replied, “All these are but hopes, the straws at which drowning people clutch. He is deaf.”
Over the next few days she tested him incessantly, and each day strengthened her conviction that he heard nothing. She didn’t tell Spence, wanting to spare him the news as long as possible. Besides, she could think of no gentle way of telling him. “Perhaps, when it became necessary to do so, I would know of something that could be done—some treatment, an operation. At least I hoped to have more control over my emotions and some philosophy worked out which might help to soften for him that first shock.”
The Broadway Players began their third season at the Powers on the night of April 12, 1925, the house “packed as it has been packed but few times the past season.” Tracy was greeted warmly as he took the stage in the title role of The Nervous Wreck, as were William Laveau, Halliam Bosworth, and Herbert Treitel, all favorites from the 1924 season. (Director John Ellis, familiar from numerous character parts, slipped so seamlessly into his role that he went completely unnoticed.) Reporting that Tracy had the audience in “constant roars” from his first entrance, Clarence Dean went on to suggest that twenty-two weeks in Brooklyn had knocked the rough edges off a particularly promising newcomer: “Mr. Tracy has gained in poise, in ease, and natural utterance since last seen here, and is therefore more convincing. It is plain to be seen that Mr. Tracy is going to be a big favorite.” The same issue of the Grand Rapids Herald carried an item that said the Washington Players were initiating a policy at the Isis Theatre of giving away “groceries and things.”
Spence unwound after the show, usually at the Greek’s, a little coffee place that served exquisite popcorn, or occasionally at the local speakeasy, a blind pig near Campau Square that kept him out long past midnight. “No amount of arguing could get him into the Pantland Hotel, then the town’s top-ranking after-theatre spot,” said his friend Al Rathbone, who went by “A.D.” and who, along with actor George Fleming, formed the nucleus of a group. “He hated the idea of walking into a public place and having people point him out as their leading man.” Going out was a way of connecting with other men; it was fun, routine, a release after the pressure of a demanding performance. A drink made him more comfortable around other people—women especially—but he was the son of an alcoholic, the grandson of another.
Growing up, alcohol, like sex, was never part of the family discussion, and both held a mysterious allure. There was no rite of passage when Spence had his first pint in his dad’s company. And then, of course, in being Irish—even half-Irish—drinking was expected, part of the identity of all adult males. If one indulged to the point of drunkenness, it was not so much frowned upon as thought natural and, to a degree, celebrated. Where Spence got in trouble was when he drank before a performance, when sociability wasn’t a motivating factor but steadying the nerves was—and what little drinking he did made him wildly unpopular. “I think the naughtiest thing he ever did was take Halliam Bosworth’s toupee off onstage one time,” said Emily Deming, newly installed as Selena Royle’s nineteen-year-old dresser. “Of course, it was supposed to be an accident, but I saw him do it. Halliam never forgave him … That was one of the times when he’d had a little too much to drink.”
His cutting up onstage embarrassed Louise, who couldn’t abide unprofessional behavior. She also wanted him home at night after the show, though it was typically hours before he could get to sleep. “I remember once when he was really drunk on stage,” said Deming, recalling the opening performance of Grounds for Divorce, the second play of the season. “He and Louise had a flaming row, and he got blind drunk, really. He was good with his lines, but he blew up that night a couple of times.” Selena, Deming remembered, was boiling mad “because he ‘went up’ and spoiled her lines. Once badly. That was one of the times I was pressed in as cue.” The Powers was an old opera house dating from the 1870s, and Emily had to throw cues from the prompter’s box down front of the stage. The crowd noticed, as did Dean, the Herald’s unfailingly diplomatic reviewer, who said Tracy had made much of his role of an eminent divorce lawyer “in spite of a very inconvenient indisposition.”
Louise confided her fear of Johnny’s deafness to Emily, who occasionally babysat for the Tracys and who urged her to have him examined at the Blodgett Home for Children, an orphanage in the East Hills neighborhood of Grand Rapids. The pediatrician who saw the boy was unwilling to say much—the baby was only ten months old—and suggested she take him to a specialist. Louise made frequent trips across Lake Michigan so the Tracys could dote on their new grandchild, and she realized it would be hard to get Johnny examined in Milwaukee without Mother Tracy knowing about it. (“She was with us almost constantly.”) Then, unexpectedly, within days of her discovery, Carrie solved the problem herself. She was feeding the baby his lunch—one of her favorite things to do—and Louise was sitting just inside the next room. “I don’t believe John hears very well,” she said quietly.
Louise’s heart raced. “No,” she said, “I don’t think he does. I have been thinking I would take him to some specialist here.”
“Yes,” said Carrie. “Do.”
“I’m sure she knew that afternoon as well as I knew,” Louise wrote. “Perhaps she had suspected longer. I never asked her. We never talked about it much at first. It was easier.” Carrie gave her the name of a prominent otologist, and Louise made an appointment.
The doctor wasn’t encouraging. He listened to Louise’s story, asked a few questions, examined the baby’s ears for abnormalities. Then he made a few simple tests, trying to attract Johnny’s attention with a variety of noises, including those made by a bell and a tuning fork. Finally, he said he couldn’t be sure because Johnny was too young to test conclusively.
“But,” Louise persisted, “if he is deaf, what could be the cause? What could be done?”
“It would be nerve deafness from an indeterminable cause. If the nerve merely has been impaired it may come back, but if it has been killed, it cannot come back. In either case, there is nothing we can do about it.”
But there was something she still had to know. “And if he is deaf,” she asked, “will he ever be able to talk?”
The question hung in the air a moment. “Well,” he slowly replied, “I don’t see how. While apparently there is nothing wrong with his vocal apparatus, a baby learns to talk through hearing, by imitation.” He tried to be cheery, and told Louise of a deaf boy who lived near him who was about twelve years old and got along very well. He often saw him riding his bicycle around the neighborhood and he seemed perfectly happy. After all, he said, John was still very young, and she really couldn’t take anything for granted just yet.
“I did not seem to hear much of what he said at the time,” Louise later wrote, “though I remembered most of it afterwards, I think. Then, the words that kept pounding in my brain were, ‘He will never talk, he will never talk, never talk, never talk—’ Somehow, I got out of the office and home.”
In the weeks that followed, Louise made a desperate effort to be cheerful and natural when Spence was around, but she was clearly distracted, depressed, obsessed with the baby in a way that she had not been before. She remembered a time when, as a little girl, she saw two people crossing in front of her house. It looked as if they were conversing with their hands, and she turned to her grandmother and asked who they were and what they were doing. “Oh, they’re deaf and dumb, poor things,” her grandmother said, and Louise played that fleeting image from childhood over and over in her mind.
“There was nothing in life except Johnny,” said Emily Deming. “And that wasn’t quite fair to Spencer either, because he knew he came second, and with Spencer that would not have been easy to take.” Not talking somehow seemed worse to Louise than not hearing, and where before she had merely lacked the words to tell Spence that his son was deaf, she now contemplated the unfathomable—that he would never speak, either. “She was afraid to tell him,” Deming said. “She talked to me about it. She didn’t think Spencer would accept it … that was one of the few times I ever saw her weep.” Louise’s English, Scotch, and Dutch ancestry helped her keep her emotions in check, and she always remembered what her father had once told her as a child, that if she had tears she should save them for her own pillow. “I saw her with tears in her eyes many times, but I never saw her weep except that one time. She’d have him in her arms or put him down in the crib, or when she came back [and] I’d been taking care of him, she’d go and pick him up and her eyes [would be] red.”
The season at the Powers was going wonderfully well. The theater was often full on weekends and the matinees were packed with kids—little girls with starry eyes who came with their families and sat in reserved boxes holding violets they’d picked for Selena Royle. Spence got his share of attention, but it was Selena they all came to see, and although he wasn’t a small man, he always wore lifts in his shoes when he played opposite her. He worked so well with her and spent so much time at the theater—morning rehearsals, matinees, evening performances stretching to eleven o’clock or later—that rumors of an affair began to circulate.
“The dressing rooms were appalling,” Emily Deming said.
The stairwell was a circular thing with little narrow steps, and then the dressing rooms were horrid little rooms up on the upper levels, which meant that you had to race up and down to do costumes, and their dressing rooms were close together. Which was very convenient a number of times and was used a good deal. [Spencer and Selena] didn’t necessarily stay in one room. They spent a lot of time together. And when there were quick changes and we had to put a dressing room on the main floor to be close enough for me to get her dressed for the next scene, he generally stepped in for a minute or two one way or the other, not necessarily when she was fully clothed … I think Louise had a good deal of difficulty with it.
As Selena admitted in a 1969 interview: “I was in love with Spence, and I believe he was in love with me.” Yet she denied having ever slept with him. Selena considered Louise a friend, and had pushed John’s perambulator along the streets of Brooklyn during their days together at the Montauk. “Acting gave us everything we needed,” she said, “without the usual playing around.”
When Wright tried extending the season into the fall, proposing to continue well into 1926, he learned that Harry G. Sommers’ twenty-year lease on the theater was coming to an end. Meanwhile, the million-dollar Regent, a new brick-and-stone palace on Crescent Street, had been given over to moving pictures. William Wurzburg, the Regent’s managing director, coveted the stability and prestige of a resident stock company, and had been thinking of starting one of his own when Sommers’ abandonment of the Powers lease got out and he was able to make a deal for Papa Wright’s company instead. The significance of the move to the new theater for Tracy and the other cast members was that the Regent could continue playing movies on Sundays and, with the addition of a Friday matinee, the Broadway Players could finally afford the luxury of a six-day work week.
Unfortunately, the move to the Regent came concurrently with the announcement of Selena Royle’s departure. The Green Hat was playing a shakedown engagement in Chicago prior to Broadway, and Selena had been offered the chance to replace Ann Harding in the role of Venice Pollen opposite Katharine Cornell. Leaving was something she regarded with mixed emotions. The audiences and the new surroundings were wonderful, yet Spence was becoming a constant irritant with his ad-libs and his willingness to break character when something suddenly struck him as funny.
As the hysterical Annabelle in The Cat and the Canary, the last play of her engagement, Selena was required to step behind a screen and change into nightclothes toward the end of the second act. Emily, who had fashioned a lovely pair of black satin pyjamas for the occasion, wanted to put elastic in the waist, but Selena, in thinking through the dialogue and physical business that would attend the change, decided on a drawstring instead. One night, she made the change, tied the drawstring, and played the rest of the scene as written, fainting dead away when a body came tumbling out of a hidden panel at curtain. She began the third act with Spence placing her on a couch, still clad in the pyjamas, the other cast members surrounding them. “As I came out of the faint and arose to walk across stage, I heard an audible gasp from the audience. Spence, who could break up on stage over any small deflection, started to grin and giggle, and I looked down. My pyjamas had dropped around my feet.
“Thank goodness, having changed on stage, I was fully underclothed. So hissing at Spence, ‘Shut up, you damn fool!’ I reached down, pulled up the pyjamas, retied them, and went on with the scene to a resounding round of applause.” The audience clapped and clapped; Selena took bows, Spence took bows, they bowed to each other. Yet it was hard to stay mad at him when he misbehaved so. “There was no one I wanted to act with so much as Spence, and I know he felt the same way. We had our ups and downs, of course, but they were always resolved by good sense and the pride we both had in doing the best job possible.”
She may also have been aware that Spence was involved with the company’s ingenue, a pretty brunette named Betty Hanna, and that when Louise sensed an affair, she mistakenly assumed that Selena was the culprit. Having Sundays off gave him more time to spend at home, but getting Weeze out of the apartment was a chore. “I think if she had been the emotionally ‘in-love’ type, he would have driven her stark staring mad,” Emily Deming said. “Once, when I was babysitting, when they came back they were arguing. And I got out as fast as I could. But I think I was changing Johnny … I had to stay for a few minutes … I was upset by what was happening, and I thought as I went out the door, ‘I’d smash a plate over your head if you were my husband.’ That was the only time I ever heard him [yell at her]. I didn’t hear her voice at all.”
There was an amusement park at Reed’s Lake on the east side of town, and Spence liked to spend Sunday evenings there, munching popcorn and riding the rides. There was a skating rink, a Ferris wheel, bumper cars, a shooting gallery, and a huge carousel whose riders were serenaded by a trio of band organs. A trip on the Derby Racer, the park’s roller coaster, cost a dime. “He used to love all the crazy things,” Louise said. “If he went crazy, he really went crazy.”
Weeze did her best to be a spirited companion, but the burden of her secret and the certainty that Spence could never accept Johnny’s deafness had, after three long months, grown intolerable. “She seemed to have lost her interest in everything except the baby,” Spence recounted. “But even that was not a happy interest. She would sit and watch him and brood. For weeks I kept asking her to tell me what was the matter. But it was always the same answer, ‘Nothing.’ One Sunday morning I went in the baby’s room and found her sobbing as though her heart would break. I insisted that she tell me. She didn’t answer at first. She went and bathed her eyes and straightened her hair and then came back and sat down in a rocker. She sat there a minute, staring into space, rocking and rocking. I’ve never seen such tragedy on a human face. Suddenly she said, very quietly, ‘Johnny can’t hear. He’s deaf.’ ”
The news hit him like nothing else he had ever heard in his life. As Louise remembered it, “he just broke down.” He buried his face in his hands, and then, after a moment, he said brokenly, “He’ll never be able to say Daddy.” At that, Louise was suddenly able to do for him what she had been unable to do for herself. “Words of encouragement came tumbling out. Thoughts of which I had never before been conscious rushed into speech. How much closer he would be to us, how much more we could do for him, how much more we had to work for, the miracles of science doctors constantly were performing, what was unheard of today might in twenty years be as simple as breathing. Hope, hope, hope, I poured into his ears, and hope crept into my heart, never to leave. We wept uncontrollably for a few moments and were strangely comforted.”
They decided at last that they couldn’t let it spoil all three of their lives, and Spence said, “Let’s see if we can get Emily to sit with John. Let’s go down to the park.” They spent that night convincing themselves that Johnny’s deafness didn’t matter, that he was still an intelligent, happy baby who was otherwise in perfect health, and that they would somehow find a way to see that he lived a normal life. But privately, spiritually, Spence needed to make sense of it, what had happened to his son and why. “You could never pin him down to just what he believed,” Louise said. “He never liked to talk about the church, but he believed it. He had grown up that way, and he [was] settled [in his faith]…I felt that [his father] was more flexible in some ways, that he had a little broader [interpretation] where my husband took it as it was and didn’t discuss it. And what he thought, I don’t know. He never talked about those things, excepting the general thing that he didn’t see how anybody could say there wasn’t a God.”
Tracy had committed adultery—emotionally, if not carnally, with Selena, and physically, it would seem, with Betty Hanna. And possibly with others over the long months of Louise’s pregnancy. It was not something he could ever take lightly, given his Catholic upbringing, and he may, in fact, have given some account of his behavior in confession. The guilt he felt was corrosive in its effect on his mind and his sense of well-being. It was something he couldn’t discuss with Louise, something he couldn’t let out of himself, something he carried with him at all times. The Irish stream of Catholicism being so severe and demanding, he was keenly aware of how easily the gifts of God could be forsaken, their goodness traduced through the ever-present threat of sin. But that the greatest gift of all, his son, could be so afflicted was something he could never understand or justify, and something for which he could never forgive himself.
Spence passed the rest of the season in alternating fits of acceptance and denial, convinced Johnny would never speak and yet blindly hopeful that a miracle of either science or faith would somehow intervene. Lacking guidance, or even a definitive diagnosis, he and Louise settled into a pattern of treating Johnny as if he were perfectly normal in every respect. “We talked to him,” Louise said, “just exactly as we would have done if he had heard … I told him nursery rhymes, I sang to him, we did everything which, of course, was just right, but I just fell into that because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”
Selena left The Green Hat at the end of its Chicago run, unhappy with the part, and returned to Grand Rapids to holiday at Camp Lake, north of town, with her parents and her sister, the actress Josephine Royle. It was there the idea was hatched to premiere her father’s new play, a tragedy of modern Washington titled Set Free, at the Regent with Spence in the role of an idealistic young senator and Selena as the political operative he loves but can never marry. Tracy put off a tonsillectomy to do the show, and Selena saw that a change had come over him in the six weeks since she had last seen him. His sober mood suited the dark circumstances of Set Free (which ended with the suicide of Selena’s character) and the opening on August 3rd was a major event. The house was sold out, quite a stunt for a 1,700-seat theater on a Monday night. Several New York producers were in town to see the play, among them Earle Boothe, who was riding high as producer of the big Broadway comedy success Is Zat So? Boothe didn’t think much of Set Free, and although Selena was the recipient of all the floral tributes—great banks of flowers draped over the footlights to honor her homecoming—it was Tracy’s earnest performance as the straight-arrow politico that impressed him.
After the show they talked; Boothe and his partners, actors James Gleason and Ernest Truex, were unhappy with the work of Paul Kelly, who was set to play the juvenile lead in a new Broadway-bound western called The Sheepman. It wasn’t the material that appealed to Tracy, even though the play had emerged from Harvard’s famed 47 Workshop. It was the stark validation of a Broadway role that excited him, and the chance to get off the treadmill of stock, where, for the sake of security, a lot of good actors frittered their best years away in places like Pittsburgh and Grand Rapids. The two men shook hands, and Tracy went off to Milwaukee to have his tonsils removed. Upon his return to work a week later, he tendered his notice.
They left Johnny with his grandparents and made their way east to New York, where rehearsals for The Sheepman were already in progress. The announcement of Tracy’s resignation did not sit well with the Broadway Players. “It shook everybody up,” said Emily Deming. “It was a scene you could remember for a long time. Nobody was very happy except Spencer. Of course, he was leaving to do what he wanted to do. He had no consideration for the person who had given him his start, looked after him, kept him on.” Louise would always remember Papa Wright’s reaction: “That good-for-nothing! I took him practically out of the gutter with his one blue suit—which he is still wearing!”
The Sheepman wasn’t worth the trouble. The playwright was a first-time author named Charlotte Chorpenning, who would later find her dramatist’s voice as the author of children’s plays. Her only work for adults was overlong, obvious, dull, and when Louise was finally able to read the thing—too late to talk Spence out of it—she thought it very poor indeed. The first break-in performance took place in Stamford, Connecticut, on October 9, 1925, and ran upwards of three hours. The reviewer in the Stamford Advocatefound it “gripping” and Tracy “likable” as the sheepman’s supposed son, Jack Roberts, but a more savvy notice in Variety thought it dreadful. Drastic surgery and a week’s stand in New Haven failed to improve it, and after twelve performances the new producing team of Boothe, Gleason, and Truex summarily pulled the plug.
Back in New York—“close to bedrock” as Louise put it—they landed stock leads in companies under the management of New Jersey theater magnate Walter Reade—Spence in Trenton, Louise in Plainfield. The arrangement wasn’t ideal—fifty miles separated them—but there was no economic incentive to be picky, and they figured they could see each other on Sundays, train schedules permitting. His leading lady was Ethel Remey, who had spent her entire stage career in stock and bonded instantly with Louise. When Louise left for Plainfield, Spence began taking his meals at the boardinghouse where Ethel was living, the home cooking infinitely preferable to hotel fare.
The Trent Stock Company opened its winter season on November 3 with the David Gray–Avery Hopwood comedy The Best People, and continued on the ninth with George M. Cohan’s The Song and Dance Man. It was the Cohan play that showed local audiences what Spencer Tracy could do with a dramatic role, albeit one as hokey as the “hick trouper” created on Broadway by Cohan himself. Ethel thought he acted the part “magnificently” and the Trenton Times reported an “exactness that several times brought him rounds of applause from a fair-sized first night audience.”
There followed the usual jumble of stock titles, some of which he had played before (Buddies, The First Year, The Mad Honeymoon) and many of which were new, if not particularly challenging. “I never saw any evidence of a temper at all,” said Ethel Remey, who found him a joy to play with. “He was very placid, and very easy to get along with. And no drinking, no drinking at all, possibly because he had too much responsibility.”
Once Louise was settled in Plainfield, the Tracys and a nurse brought Johnny east, and Spence came up on a Sunday so that they could all be together. Louise wrote: “Fortunately for John and for us, in those days, despite our constantly broke condition, there was always help in the offing. Spencer’s father thought, and with reason, that selling trucks was a much more substantial occupation than acting.” It was in Plainfield that Johnny had his tonsils and adenoids out because a doctor in Milwaukee had told Carrie Tracy their removal occasionally helped hard-of-hearing children. “The doctor who did it was not optimistic,” Louise said, “but he said he would remove them if we wished it.”
Not long after Christmas, when Spence found himself playing a gimmicky show called Shipwrecked, he heard from Mr. Wright, who was in the process of setting up new companies in Saginaw and Flint, and who said, as Louise remembered it, “Come on out to Grand Rapids again. We need you out here.” He didn’t need much persuading. It was practically impossible to get between Trenton and Plainfield by rail on a Sunday, and he only saw Louise and Johnny when he could persuade someone to drive him. Louise was fed up as well: “It was no kind of a life. We might as well have been 300 miles apart.”
Tracy played his final week opposite Ethel Remey in The Family Upstairs, and she mourned his loss to Trenton as few others did:
Spencer wasn’t the average stock leading man. He wasn’t the clotheshorse. He was a very fine actor, but I think a lot of people, because he wasn’t a clotheshorse, didn’t appreciate him. They didn’t know anything about acting. They didn’t realize what a gem they had as an actor, because he wasn’t the average matinee idol of that time … When Spence left, it affected me no end. They got this average stock leading man, good looking—I suppose one would call him the matinee idol sort—but he couldn’t compare with Spencer as an actor. Yet the matinee girls thought he was totally wonderful, so there you are. It was maddening.
Louise’s father, having had a classmate at Yale who was an ear specialist in New York, wrote and urged her to go see him. One snowy morning during her last week in Plainfield—the only day she had neither a rehearsal nor a matinee to play—Louise, Johnny’s nurse, and Johnny took the train into New York. It proved to be a courtesy call, Allienne’s friend having nothing new to say about the case and no real information to add to the comparatively little she had already. However, Louise had made a second appointment with a Dr. John Page, whom she understood to be one of the best-known and most highly rated men on the East Coast.
I felt that here was to be my last stand. We were there for almost an hour. He took John’s history in minute detail. He made by far the most thorough examination ever made. Then he sat me down and talked to me. His findings were practically those of everybody else: It was nerve deafness, cause undetermined, for which there was no known treatment or cure. But, for the first time, I was told something to do about it. He told me to whom I should go [and] the names of the schools—the Wright Oral School and the Lexington Avenue School for the Deaf, both in New York City, happened to be the ones he mentioned—where I could get the information I should have. He told me some of the wonderful things [the] schools were doing. He told me that one day John would be able to talk.
It seemed as I went out that at least half the weight over my heart was gone. For the moment, at least, our troubles were negligible. I walked on air. Now I had something I could do. And one day John would talk!
Tracy rejoined the Broadway Players on February 2, 1926, when rehearsals began for Seven Keys to Baldpate. The new leading woman of the company was Helen Joy, a competent actress who would go on to a brief career in New York. Tracy didn’t fill the theater for his homecoming, but was grandly received nevertheless, a respectable crowd braving snow flurries to see him. Business was tepid the first eight weeks. Radio was cutting into stock audiences nationwide, and it was only What Price Glory—with Papa Wright’s solemn curtain speeches the week before, warning the easily shocked to stay away, and Tracy’s star turn as the battle-weary Captain Flagg—that filled the Regent on a Monday night. The following week, convinced the smaller theater would make for happier audiences, Wright announced his company’s move back to the Powers, as well as the return of Selena Royle, who would manage the transition, appearing the last week at the Regent in her father’s play The Struggle Everlasting and the first week at the Powers in an import called Stolen Fruit.
Selena raced onstage the night of April 5, her hair streaming wildly, and had to wait several minutes for the applause to subside enough for her to speak her first lines. She was, as usual, the center of the play, and when the flowers went over the footlights at the close of the third act, she was buried in them and Spence and Bill Laveau held the surplus over her head. The allegorical play—Selena played “Body” to Tracy’s “Mind” and Clifford Dunstan’s “Soul”—didn’t do well, but the Royles stayed another two weeks in Grand Rapids, Selena inaugurating a new “guest star” policy at the Powers that brought William Faversham to town the following week in her father’s greatest stage success, The Squaw Man. The move back to the Powers restored Sunday performances to the company, and Wright, hoping to get the drop on a competing troupe, moved opening nights to Sundays, something not often done in stock because of the difficulty of scaring up last-minute props and supplies on the Sabbath.
With guest stars playing one-week stands at the Powers, both Helen Joy and Tracy were relegated to supporting roles, making neither of them happy. Drag comic Tommy Martelle was followed by Nance O’Neil, Harry Beresford, Edmund Breese, and actor-playwright J. C. Nugent. Joy left after O’Neil’s two-week stay and was replaced by Peggy Conway, late of the Garrick Gaieties. Together, Tracy and Conway filled a hole in the schedule with the popular character comedy The Family Upstairs, Spence serving as the company’s “guest star” for that particular week. Edith Taliaferro came to the Powers the following week with Polly of the Circus, and when she was asked by the Sligh Furniture Company to pose for a picture with a prize-winning bedroom set, she agreed to do so only if Spence could be in the shot with her.
The photo was the idea of Charles R. Sligh, Jr., the twenty-year-old scion to the famous furniture builder, who had joined the firm just out of college and was looking for ways to pump up sales. Edith and Spence went out to the factory, where Taliaferro slipped between the satin sheets and Tracy, in a three-piece business suit, sat on an adjoining stool, book in hand, pretending to read to her. Chuck Sligh and Spence hit it off immediately, the Tracys not having made many friends in Grand Rapids. “He was a very nice young man,” Louise said of Chuck, who was both affable and unabashed. “They took us out to the country club and we met quite a few people.” When Wright announced a ten-week break for the Players, Spence stepped away from the company early to spend time at a cottage the Slighs had rented for the summer at Gun Lake.
Louise helped arrange Spence’s absence by stepping into the final two weeks of the season herself. The first week’s attraction was Happiness, which she had once played in Chicago, and in which she would now take the role of Jenny, the little dressmaker’s apprentice created by J. Hartley Manners for his wife, the great Laurette Taylor. The part was a formidable one—110 sides—and Taylor had played it practically in monologue. The audience wasn’t huge on opening night, but Louise so completely disappeared into the character that Clarence Dean (whose notice in the Herald ran under the headline LAURETTE TAYLOR HAS WORTHY FOLLOWER) was astonished at how someone as tall and athletic could suggest a girl so small and winsome.1
Emily, who had never before seen Louise onstage, pronounced her “an infinitely better actress” than Selena Royle. “Selena was a very pretty woman,” she said, “and she had good stage sense and a good voice and used it well, but she was not a ‘depth’ actress. Louise was. She wasn’t as pretty by any manner or means, and Selena projected herself well and Louise did not. Selena sparkled; Louise had no sparkle. She was solid business.” But like Laurette Taylor, Louise could place a whisper in the back row of the topmost gallery. “I used to have to check the house to see whether they could be heard,” Emily said. “It had a balcony beyond the balcony like all the old opera houses did. They sold the seats then … every matinee was sold out. I used to have to go check, and I never had to check her. Her voice carried.”
Louise’s second week—the company’s last—was as Peggy Fairfax, the sporty and palpitating heroine of the farce steeplechase comedy Hottentot. She was so good—and had such fun—that Papa Wright asked her to consider playing a full season opposite Spence in one of his new companies.
The Tracys relinquished their tiny apartment at the Browning, where Johnny had celebrated his second birthday, gone to his first party, tasted his first ice cream cone. They took their son to Lake Delavan, Wisconsin, where John and Carrie Tracy had a summer cottage, and where, surrounded by his grandmother, grandfather, a grandaunt, and a number of their friends, he would be spoiled shamelessly while his parents enjoyed the first genuine vacation of their married life.
It lasted all of a week.
Spence spent most of it either in the lake or on it, piloting a decrepit speedboat that seemed to absorb him endlessly. Then a telegram arrived: Selena Royle had landed a role in a new play for George M. Cohan called Yellow, and it now looked as if there might be a part for Spence as well. This would be his third shot at Broadway. “It was a reprieve,” he said, “a message from Garcia.” And if it didn’t work out, he told Louise, he wouldn’t be going back to stock—he’d get into some “regular” business instead. “It was by far the best opportunity he had had,” Louise said, “and he was off immediately. John and I stayed on at Delavan.”
Yellow was a modernized version of Within the Law, the work of a first-time playwright named Margaret Vernon. The Shuberts, who owned the script, had just done a complicated deal with Cohan that involved the exclusive booking of all his future shows, and they reportedly invited him on as a partner for, as Variety put it, “purposes of prestige and Cohanesque treatment.” Despite a well-known flair for melodrama, Cohan had thus far limited his involvement with Yellow to casting, having assigned direction of the show to actor-playwright John Meehan. “I was over at the Lambs Club one day,” remembered Tracy, “and they called me and told me to come over. [T]hey had let a fellow go. Chester Morris was the star. Marjorie Wood and Hale Hamilton. Harry Bannister. And there was this wonderful part for a young husband in the thing … Hale lied to George—he told him he had seen me. But Selena went for me. She was the one who got me the job.”
Tracy joined rehearsals on September 9, 1926, the day he signed an Equity contract with Eddie Dunn, Cohan’s longtime press agent and general factotum, calling for a salary of $175 a week. “I rehearsed; John Meehan directed it. And it was about a week before George M. came in.” The first public performance was scheduled for the night of September 13. “George would never fully direct his shows,” actor-playwright Jack McGowan said. “Sam Forrest or Julian Mitchell or Johnny Meehan would block them out and then George would take over, sometimes as late as two days before the opening, and give it his special touch.”
Tracy had performed six Cohan plays in stock—and had actually played Cohan’s parts in two of them—but the mere thought of shaking hands with the greatest living figure in American theater had him terrified. One morning, Cohan strolled onto the stage and greeted all twenty-two members of the cast individually. When he came to Tracy, he turned to Meehan, grinned, and said, “I don’t believe I have met this gentleman.” Then, said Tracy, came the “terrible moments” when they rehearsed for him. Cohan didn’t say a lot; his manner was curt and snappy. “Taught me to keep my hands out of my pockets. Oh, yes. Don’t be a lazy actor. Don’t start hiding your hands, so you’ll never know what to do with them.”
Louise left Johnny in Milwaukee and met the company in Buffalo, where Yellow was set to open a week’s stand at the Shubert-Teck Theatre. “I was scared to death,” Tracy said. “Christ, I thought I was going to get canned any minute. In those days they could fire you anytime up to ten days.” Tracy’s character, Jimmy Wilkes, was obvious business, a newlywed who serves as Chester Morris’ best friend, getting him out of scrapes long after the audience has given up on him. He had only two good scenes in the entire play, only one of which really gave him the chance to make an impression. In stock, he could simply “glance through his lines” (as Louise put it) and then run through them a couple of times with the rest of the cast. He was, in other words, used to holding back in rehearsal, but now with Cohan out front, that was no longer an option. The final dress—practically an all-nighter—took place in Buffalo, and the mood was decidedly tense. Cohan had a reputation for knowing all of the parts in all of his plays, and Tracy had somehow convinced himself that the Prince of Broadway would only use him up until opening and then go on in his place.
“During rehearsals,” said Selena Royle, “George M. sat in the front row of the orchestra pit, his feet high in the air crossed on the railing in front of him, his mouth down to one side in its perpetual characteristic lopsided grin, and as he gave you a direction his upper foot pointed the way he wished you to go … Spencer was rehearsing a scene when suddenly George M.’s feet came down from the railing with a bang and he sat up straight. Through his tight lips out of the side of his mouth he barked, ‘Tracy, you’re the best goddamned actor I’ve ever seen! Go ahead!’ His feet went back to their crossed blades position and he relaxed again on the tip of his spine.”
As an actor, Cohan had grown up admiring the amiable Nat Goodwin, whose expressive face and dry manner of delivery had taken him from vaudeville to light comedy and eventually to Shakespeare. Then he saw the versatile French actor Lucien Guitry: “I couldn’t imagine any actor better than Nat Goodwin, but here he was. The same ease and command of presence Nat had, but something else. A deeper reserve. Guitry never opened up, but you always knew he had plenty to open up with if he so wanted. I don’t understand a word of French, but I knew everything Guitry was saying because he was saying it with his eyes and his posture and the way he listened to his fellow actors.”
And now Cohan saw the same qualities in Spencer Tracy, whose big scene that Sunday night came toward the end of the third act. Figuring he had nothing to lose, Tracy invested a tight, almost negligible exchange between himself and Marjorie Wood with all the animation and gravity he could muster, holding nothing back but remaining at all times in absolute command of the role. Tracy’s young husband, boisterous and lusty, gave Cohan a lift toward the end of a particularly long and grueling night, and George M. may well have overreacted. Certainly Tracy thought as much. “Spencer looked startled,” as Selena recounted it, “and, to us who were watching, turned slightly pale. After the scene was over, he came over to me and said, ‘What did he mean?’ I laughed. It’s like an actor never to believe or remember the good notices. You can’t forget the bad. ‘You silly fool,’ I explained, ‘he meant it.’ ”
With Marjorie Wood in George M. Cohan’s production of Yellow, 1926. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Spence played the rest of the rehearsal in something of a daze. “That was a wonderful night,” Louise recalled. “He didn’t get back to the hotel until very late—four or five in the morning. I was in bed. He just couldn’t get over it. He sat on the bed and said, ‘Listen what happened …’ He told me all about it…[He said,] ‘I thought I was going to be sacked.’ He always thought that. I think it was one of the highlights of his career.”
For its out-of-town opening, Yellow was accorded a warm reception by what Louise described as a “Cohan-minded audience.” The advance notice in Variety was an outright rave: “Loaded with nervous theatrical dynamite, it sent the hard-boiled local first-nighters out raving with frazzled nerves, wet handkerchiefs, and wilted collars.” In New York the show was hampered by the fact that the street out front of the National Theatre was under construction, as were the avenues at each end of its block. Patrons had to drive over loose planks or stumble through muddy, unpaved walkways, unlighted and treacherous, to reach the lobby. Consequently, Yellow was reviewed almost exclusively by the second-string critics, only a couple of whom truly liked it. Most thought it convoluted, poorly structured, and overlong.
“It is easy to perceive the role that delighted the heart of George M.,” L.W. M’Laren wrote perceptively in the New York Journal. “It is that of the bank clerk with a small flat and a wife, played well by Spencer Tracy. One suspects that Cohan broadened it considerably. Certain it is that his smile of satisfaction was broad as Tracy went through the part last night.”
John Tracy was proud of his grandson and rarely missed an opportunity to show him off. Johnny was a beautiful child, with long auburn curls, exquisite skin, and, in Louise’s words, “a sweetly grave expression” that rarely failed to attract attention. While at Lake Delavan, the elder Tracy frequently ran “errands” to a particular drugstore known for its malted milks, and he generally found an excuse to take the boy with him. It was on one such expedition that a woman spoke to Johnny. She remarked on what a handsome child he was, but he did not turn. She spoke again, then looked at John: “He is hard of hearing, isn’t he?”
As he hesitated, not knowing quite what to say, the woman introduced herself as Matie E. Winston, a teacher for the Wright Oral School in New York City. A native of Wisconsin, Miss Winston was home on vacation when she noticed all the obvious signs and concluded that Johnny must be either very hard of hearing or completely deaf. Then, when she heard the name “Tracy,” she remembered having answered Louise’s recent letter to the school.
The following day, Louise and Johnny called on Miss Winston. “As I rang the doorbell and waited for someone to appear, my heart thumped against my ribs, my hands were clammy, and I felt the same quivering in the pit of my stomach that I always felt on an opening night. In a moment, I would be able to talk to someone who, not in the vernacular, but in reality, knew all the answers. All the questions I had been carrying around for so long, I thought in a moment were to be exchanged for facts. How will he talk? When will he talk? How will his voice compare with ours? Will he be able to carry on a conversation? Now I would know. It was almost like meeting God.”
Matie Winston was a cheerful, forthright woman in her mid-forties, enthusiastic and knowledgeable. She asked all the basic questions and wanted to know what Louise and her husband were doing for their son. She listened intently as Louise told her, in as much detail as she could muster. Then she said, “Fine, as far as it goes, but you ought to do more. He is old enough to start sense training.” She meant differences and likenesses—colors to start. She suggested blocks of two different colors, separating them by color, letting him do it, making a game out of it. Then, once he caught on, adding more colors to the pile. It sounded too simple. “I craved something hard,” Louise said. When Spence left for New York, she continued working with the blocks, and by the time she left to join him in Buffalo, Johnny was walking unaided, finally mustering the courage—and the balance—to try it alone.
It was exciting for Spence and Louise to be back in New York, especially at a time when neither one of them had to look for work. They could see old friends, shop, and take in an occasional show. After the first night, ticket sales were respectable, if not spectacular, and although Yellow was not a genuine hit, there was enough demand to keep it running awhile—which meant Louise had to find an apartment. “Eventually we went to a small ‘family’ hotel in the West Seventies, and, with the permission of the management, my well-worn electric stove of pre-marriage date—the same which more than once had put out the hotel lights in Detroit and points west—came out of the bottom drawer of my trunk and went on duty in the bathroom.”
Johnny arrived the last of September, his grandparents taking a temporary apartment not far from the hotel. Father Tracy had been ill and, prior to coming east, had resigned his position as president and treasurer of the Frankenberg Refrigerating Machinery Company. “I think he knew he might not be here long,” Louise said, “and he wanted to spend as much of the time as possible near his namesake.”
Spence’s relationship with Johnny had always been tentative, conflicted, but the boy and his grandfather were utterly devoted to one another and their example seemed to ease his burden. “I saw Spencer with Johnny when I visited their apartment,” Ethel Remey said, “and he was very affectionate and tender with the little boy. And very relaxed.” Tracy, however, always clung to the notion that Johnny’s condition could somehow be fixed, and that he could not truly bond with his son until he had undone the horrible thing he had wrought. “He was very disturbed one minute,” said Louise, “the next minute he was reassuring me that everything was going to be fine. I was the one who could do it. But I didn’t know enough. And he didn’t know how to talk to John. He did antics, he put on makeup, all sorts of silly things. He loved to show off what John could do, but he couldn’t get down to the brass tacks of what the learning problem was.”
Tracy didn’t tell many people about Johnny’s deafness, and Pat O’Brien found out only when he could no longer hold it in. “I think,” said Pat, “he was like any father, you know? You’re trying to solve a problem and you want to blame yourself for it. And I imagine Spence probably blamed himself for John’s trouble.” O’Brien was in Henry—Behave at the Nora Bayes at the same time Tracy was appearing in Yellow. “We’d meet every night after the theatre and walk to a restaurant for griddle cakes and coffee. Well, this particular night I noticed he was under some emotional strain, and he actually started to cry.” Did they close the show? Had he been fired? Finally O’Brien stopped and asked, “What’s the matter?”
“Billy,” said Spence, “I’ve got to tell you,” and he went on to relate how Johnny would wait up for him at night, standing patiently in his crib, his hands gripping the rails, his eyes wide with anticipation. The previous day had been a matinee day, a long day, and when Spence came trudging through the door at a little before midnight, he went straight to bed. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “It was one of those things … In the middle of the night—God knows what time it was—I awoke, and I always leave the door open into the little room with the crib, and I looked in and Johnny was standing in his crib. I’d forgotten to kiss him goodnight.” The ordinary child, he explained, would call “Daddy,” but Johnny couldn’t. “You see, Billy, Johnny can neither hear nor speak.”
Spence scooped the baby up in his arms, hugged him and kissed him extravagantly, handed him his teddy bear and put him back in his crib, where he fell promptly and soundly to sleep. The image stayed with him though, haunted him through the rest of the night.
“God knows,” he said, “how long he’d been standing there.”
Yellow continued through the rest of the year, averaging houses of around $14,000 a week—pretty good considering the discouraging location. (By way of comparison, Broadway, the big nonmusical hit of the season, was averaging $23,000 a week at a theater almost exactly the same size and at the same top price of $3.30 a seat.) Sales began to drop off toward Christmas, then word came down in January that the show would close after a respectable run of seventeen weeks. Having been cast in a Cohan play, Tracy picked up an agent, a Harvard-educated producer and sometime actor named Chamberlain Brown.2 It was Brown who not only saw to it that Tracy had another job within the space of a week, but that he made considerably more money than Cohan would ever pay.
Ned McCobb’s Daughter was the work of the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sidney Howard, a shrewd comedy frankly designed as a vehicle for Howard’s wife, the actress Clare Eames. The Theatre Guild was playing it in repertory with The Silver Cordwhen actor-manager John Cromwell (who had staged The Silver Cord) set about establishing a second company in Chicago. The plum part of Carrie Callahan, the dowdy sea captain’s daughter, fell to actress Florence Johns, with Cromwell himself taking the part of Babe, the genial bootlegger who also happens to be Carrie’s brother-in-law. Tracy found himself cast in the role of Carrie’s thieving, dim-witted husband George, a part played in New York by Earle Larimore. Commanding the princely rate of $225 a week, Tracy dutifully mailed Chamberlain Brown a twenty-five-dollar money order the first Monday after the opening, enthusing over the quality of the material and making note of the reviews in the Chicago dailies. “I was very happy over mine,” he wrote Brown, “because of the vast difference in this part and the one I played in Yellow. It should mean something for me.”
With Florence Johns in the Chicago company of Ned McCobb’s Daughter, 1927. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
As in New York, the play drew considerably more critical than commercial attention. “Business is only fair,” Tracy advised his agent the following week, “and I do not look for a long engagement. Cromwell is very much discouraged and disgusted. It would be too bad to flop in face of the splendid notices we received.”
With Spence in Chicago, Louise was again approached by W. H. Wright, who had the idea of hiring the two of them as leads in one of his nine companies. “He never believed in this before, but he said, ‘I’ll try it.’ Would the two of us come to Lima and play?” Lima was 230 miles east of Chicago in northwest Ohio, a center of agriculture and heavy industry and, for a brief while, oil. On the circuits, its Klan-cheering populace was known as one of the toughest audiences in vaudeville, and the old joke “First prize, one week in…/ Second prize, two weeks in …” was supposedly coined about Lima. Spence hated the idea of going back to stock again—the longer hours and shorter pay—and held off giving an answer. Then Wright sweetened the offer with a percentage just as Ned McCobb’s Daughter took a dive at the box office. The third week’s gross was a paltry $6,000 and it looked as if they would close when Cromwell, emboldened by the emphatic critical support, announced an extension—another three weeks—with the cast taking a 25 percent cut.
“I have decided to accept Wright’s proposition for the summer,” Tracy advised Chamberlain Brown, “which is a good one. Louise and I playing joint leads, and in addition he is giving me ten percent of the gross over $4000. He claims we will do as high as $5000 nearly every week. I am doing this to get on my feet. Cromwell thinks I am wise to do it, and has definitely set me for his new play and also Sidney Howard’s for next season. I should return in August with a nice little bankroll and get out of the financial rut in which I have been.” He added: “I hope this will be the last time I’ll have to do this, but feel it won’t hurt me any and I need the money.”
When Louise arrived with Johnny to read for a part with Cromwell, Spence had a small apartment waiting near Lincoln Park, having abandoned a room at the swanky Allerton Club when the salary cut took effect. There was a Murphy bed (one of the hardest Louise ever slept on), a room scarcely large enough for Johnny’s crib, a bath, a tiny kitchen, and something akin to a breakfast nook. It was in the kitchen that Johnny’s habitual jabbering filled the air. “One evening,” Louise said, “while I was cooking the dinner and he was playing near me, out of a ribbon of meaningless sounds came suddenly, ‘Mama, mama, mama’ over again, sing-song fashion. He had hit upon the combination—strange he had not done so before, as it is one of the most natural—and, perhaps liking the feel of it, continued to say it. A perfectly clear and beautiful ‘mama.’ ”
Louise immediately dropped what she was doing and grabbed him. He smiled up at her. “Yes, yes!” she said, trembling with excitement. “Mama, mama!”
As he watched my moving lips, realization slowly dawning on his face, he repeated with me, “Mama, mama.” At last he knew that something went with those strange movements we made with our lips, movements of which he was growing more and more aware, movements requiring him to wave his hand when he or someone else went away—he even took it upon himself occasionally to do this now without waiting for the lips—to drink his milk, to wipe his mouth, and lots of other things. He did not know what he had done, or how he had done it, but he found he could do it again and again; he did not know what it meant, but he knew it pleased that person who seemed so very necessary to him, and somehow her laughing and dancing around and kissing him created a very pleasant feeling inside him, and I am sure, from a certain something in his expression, and from the renewed gusto and assurance with which he attacked what he was doing, he felt as though he had done something pretty smart.
Spence closed in Ned McCobb’s Daughter after six discouraging weeks, and he and Louise arrived in Lima on April 9, 1927. The calm and methodical Miss Krause accompanied them, caring for Johnny again as she had in Plainfield. They settled into a large apartment at Moreland Manor, within walking distance of the theater, and rehearsals for the first play of the season, the raucous Laff That Off, began the following Monday. Papa Wright had a habit of moving players around like pieces on a chessboard, and he assembled from his various companies a wildly uneven supporting cast of nine, the only familiar face from Grand Rapids being the dour character man Porter Hall. The schedule was weighted heavily with plays Spence had already done; director Harry Horne’s habit of starting the week with a full read-through of the script—unusual in stock—struck him as unnecessary.
Having not worked since August, Louise enjoyed Lima. Horne’s quiet style (“I try,” he said, “to avoid thunder and lightning interference and dogmatism”) suited her, and she liked the idea of the weekly read-throughs around the table. She sat for an interview with the Lima News on her first Tuesday in town, trim and tailored in a brown velvet frock, and dismissed the widely held notion that the theater wasn’t a proper vocation for a career-minded young woman. “How many bankers, lawyers, physicians, and other professional men become known outside of their home town or state?” she reasoned.
The profile ran that same day, stimulating matinee sales for Laff That Off, but Louise fell ill toward the end of the week and was unable to open with Spence the following Sunday (which happened to be Easter). Her understudy, Geraldine Browning, went on in her place, and the News reported “large audiences” in its notice the next evening. Browning played out the week, Louise focusing on rehearsals for The Patsy instead and spending as much time as possible with Johnny. She loved the stimulation and challenge of a lead character, and the wisecracking Patsy became one of her favorites.
“Miss Louise Treadwell, leading lady of the company, makes her debut to Lima audiences this week in the title role,” a notice in the News reported. “She possesses charm, vivacity, and ability seldom found on the stock stage.” Playing opposite Spence was fun, too, especially in a spirited comedy, and it was a great help to be onstage with someone so thoroughly in command of the text. “[E]very once in a while he threw me a line,” she said. “He knew lines were difficult for me to learn in stock, especially, [and] once in a while I would go blank when he was on stage. All I had to do was look at him and he’d mumble something that would give me a clue.”
Louise had started the Wright Oral School’s correspondence course in November, but had little time to devote to Johnny and his lessons with rehearsals most every morning, three matinees a week, and nightly performances. Miss Krause carried on as best she could, adding skeins of colored yarn to the blocks he had gotten so good at separating, and commencing with lipreading lessons. In time, he not only knew what to do when he saw his mother say, “Wipe your mouth,” but he also came to know what the individual words wipe, your, and mouth meant. Auricular exercises—ear training—were less productive, for, unlike most children who were hard of hearing to varying degrees, Johnny was as close to stone deaf as it was possible to get, and no amount of testing would ever suggest otherwise.
The 1,200-seat Faurot Opera House was rarely filled to capacity, effectively negating Spence’s percentage, but the $300 a week the Tracys pulled down as a team helped pay off a lot of old bills. By the middle of May, Tracy was able to send Chamberlain Brown all the back commissions he owed, a total of seventy-five dollars. “Things are running along here as well as could be expected,” he said, “but frankly I don’t like it and would like to break away in about six more weeks. Next season my plans remain the same as far as I know. I am to begin rehearsals August first withJohn Cromwell’s new play, and Sidney Howard’s is to be done later. All of which is fine, but at the same time I don’t want to let anything slip by. Something better might come up in the meantime. I have hopes of doing something for George Cohan. If he or anyone else should want me, or if anything good comes up, please let me know and I will give my notice.”
Toward the end of the month, a contract arrived from Cromwell which specified $175 a week for the juvenile lead in What the Doctor Ordered, a farce comedy set to open mid-August. Lacking anything else in the way of offers, Tracy impulsively signed the contract and returned it. Less than a week later, a wire arrived from Cohan, offering him a “specially written part” in his new play, The Baby Cyclone. Spence and Louise opened The Cat and the Canary that Sunday—Memorial Day weekend—and the house, for a change, was sold out for both performances. Tracy played the show in a miasma of exhilaration and dread, delighted to have the Cohan offer in hand but now worried as to how Cromwell might react.
Brown settled the contract with Cohan at the end of the following week. “It is the lead in his new play and written for himself,” Brown advised his client. “You’ve never heard of such a wonderful part. It has everything. He is giving $200 which is the best he will do, but worth it. He thinks a lot of you and you are surrounded by a great cast. I am very happy over it all. Rehearsals are July 11th and the opening is August 4th in Atlantic City … You will have to finish there July 9th and then we can take up all the details about Cromwell on your return.”
Tracy thought the news wonderful, more than he had dared to hope for. “It means the big chance,” he told Brown, “and if we make good, both of us should benefit.”
1 Laurette Taylor was five feet five—a good height for the stage, she said, because she could make herself look tall or short as a part required. Louise was an inch shorter.
2 Chamberlain Brown, together with Wales Winter and the Packard Agency, handled most of the casting for stock companies nationwide. As a rule, however, Tracy got jobs in stock through referrals or by making his own contacts.