James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  The Tracy family, Bay View, circa 1908. (SUSIE TRACY)

  With its hundreds of mill and factory workers, there was no shortage of saloons in Bay View, many of which, called “tied houses,” were exclusive (or “tied”) to the output of a particular brewery. The Globe Tavern on St. Clair Street was built of the same Cream City brick as the Romanesque school on Trowbridge, and it proudly displayed the belted globe of the Schlitz Brewing Company atop its turreted entryway. Vollmer’s Grocery Store and Saloon was due west of the Globe on Lenox. Kneisler’s White House Tavern stood boldly at the corner of Ellen and Kinnickinnic Avenue, and yet another Schlitz tavern was under construction just outside the walls of the rolling mill on South Superior. The walk to and, especially, from work became an obstacle course of temptations for a man of John Tracy’s cravings, and he didn’t always negotiate the route with complete success. An eminently convivial man, John honored the Irish tradition of the saloon as a center of the community, and he often found it impossible to pass one without stopping to pay his respects. At other times he walked a tortured path that purposely avoided all licensed establishments, a not altogether easy task, in that saloons, like stores and churches, were part of the fabric of a residential neighborhood and stood side by side with new homes, parks, and schools.

  Despite the daily challenges he faced, John Tracy won favor with Louis Kuehn, the president of Milwaukee Corrugating, and found himself promoted to traffic manager within the space of a year. Even so, he would, on occasion, fall spectacularly off the wagon and disappear without a trace. The boys had no clear understanding of what was happening; their father worked long hours and it was only their mother’s tears that told them something was dreadfully wrong. Carroll did what he could to comfort their mother, but Spencer withdrew, possibly wondering, as the children of alcoholics often do, if his father had gone off because of something his younger boy had said or done.

  What they couldn’t have known was that alcoholism ran in their grandmother’s side of the family, and that their Uncle Will Tracy was even more severely afflicted with “the creature” than was their own father. It was never discussed, a matter of unspoken shame, a sin against wife and family, a good man’s weakness. At times like these there was little Carrie could do, and a call would go out to Andrew Tracy, John’s genuinely abstentious brother, who would come to Milwaukee, find his elder sibling, clean him up, and bring him back. The process took its toll on John, whose genial nature hid a prematurely lined face and whose hair, in his mid-thirties, was already beginning to gray at the temples. It took a toll on his brother as well, for there was genuine terror in the fact that Guhin blood also ran through Andrew Tracy’s veins. “Uncle Andrew was paralyzed, afraid, of liquor,” said his niece, Jane Feely. “He just wouldn’t touch it. Not because he wouldn’t want it, but because he was so terribly afraid of it.”

  Summers for the boys were spent in Freeport, where they divided their time between the Tracy house in Liberty Division and the Brown house on upper Stephenson. Grandfather Brown’s asthma was bad, aggravated by the summer dust, and the shades were always pulled. It was dark and hot inside, all stiff and lifeless with a horsehair sofa in the sitting room and a five-octave square piano that nobody ever played. Spencer escaped whenever he could—to the circus, to the moving pictures, to the Stebbins house on Walnut Street. Warren Stebbins was the younger brother of Abbie Brown, but the family never looked forward to Spencer’s visits. “He was terrible,” said Warren’s granddaughter, Bertha Calhoun. “He was just into everything.” Bertha’s father, Clarence Forry, once described him, without affection, as “one big ugly freckle.”

  When there weren’t any horse races or baseball games at Taylor’s Park, and no kids were swimming in the river, the storefront theaters along Stephenson Street offered the best respite from the heat. The Majestic was a favorite hangout when Spencer could cadge a nickel, as was the Superba across the street. When there wasn’t money he would stand and stare at the displays out on the sidewalk, sighing extravagantly, or fix the box office with a woeful gaze until the woman at the window, a friend of his Aunt Mame’s, would say, “Oh, Spencer, go on in!” His Aunt Emma once refused him the money to see a movie about Jesse James. “You’ve got enough wild ideas without going to see those things.” He thought hard a moment, then announced The Life of Christ was playing at the other theater. “You wouldn’t want to keep me from seeing that, would you?” He got the nickel, but Emma Brown had little doubt as to which film he saw.

  John Tracy sent a dollar a week to be split between the boys. What Carroll did with his share was a mystery, but Spencer, noting the economic divide between the Tracy and Brown households, always seemed to be broke. “At that time you could buy a bag full of candy for ten cents,” said Frank Tracy, the son of Andrew and Mary Tracy. “My mother said that very often, Spence would come home with a loaf of bread and give it to his grandma. ‘That’s for us.’ Probably eight or nine cents a loaf at that time. Another time he was helping Grandma Tracy in the kitchen, and she had a paring knife and it was dull, wasn’t working right. So the next time he got his fifty cents, he went over to Woolworth’s and he bought a paring knife for his grandmother. My mother was telling me this and she said, ‘He was always very generous.’ He did other little things like that around the house, things Carroll would never think of doing.”

  Spencer hated the tradition of the Saturday night bath, and the task of getting him to take one fell to his Aunt Mary. “She’d try to round him up and get him in the tub,” Frank said. “Spencer was always pretty hard to find. She’d literally have to push him to the bathroom, and then she wouldn’t hear anything. She’d ask Spencer, ‘Are you taking a bath in there?’ He’d say yes, but he’d be sitting on the floor fully clothed—even his hat still on his head—splashing the water with his hands.” Even when he actually got into the tub, he wouldn’t shampoo his hair, and his grandmother would invariably say, “Your hair stinks!” Finally, it was decided the boys would do better under the no-nonsense supervision of Grandmother Brown, and Spencer wore a collection of scapular medals for the occasion.

  “What are all these things?” she demanded, yanking at them.

  “Don’t take ’em off my neck!” he exclaimed. “You can’t take those off! They’re holy!” Her expression must have told him she thought he was crazy, for he took them out and started to explain: “Well, this is so you won’t get drowned … and this is so you won’t get killed … and this one is so you won’t commit a sin …”

  “You certainly won’t drown in that bathtub!”

  Thoroughly scrubbed, his hair washed and teeth brushed, Spencer and his brother would be returned to Grandma Tracy so that they could serve Mass at St. Mary’s the next morning. With her husband dead and her daughter Jenny now married, Mary Guhin Tracy sought the solace of the bottle (“a drop o’ th’ cratur”), and her son-in-law’s gift to her each Christmas was a case of beer and a jug of good Irish whiskey. “She would always specify that it be delivered after dark,” her granddaughter Jane remembered, “so the neighbors wouldn’t see.”

  “From the time Spencer was a tiny lad,” recalled Carrie Tracy, “Carroll appointed himself as special guardian. He worried more about Spencer than the rest of the family put together.” Carroll had an almost pathological fixation on his brother, as if hovering over him and getting him out of scrapes was in some way compensation for their father’s absences. He had the example of Andrew Tracy and his palliative visits to Milwaukee when times got bleak, the sober brother who could always be relied upon in times of distress. Try as he might, Carroll’s dogged oversight was never much of a substitute for a father’s attention, and the family’s proximity to the Trowbridge Street campus did little to improve the boy’s performance. “I never would have gone back to school,” Spencer once said, “if there had been any other way of learning to read the subtitles in the movies.”

  He discovered the Comique, a storefront theater that showed split-reel movies on Kinnickinnic Avenue.
“Spencer was always punished by depriving him of things he liked,” Carrie said. “Motion pictures formed a great type of discipline, because refusing to allow him to attend broke his heart.” It was impossible to keep his clothes clean, he rarely wiped his nose, and there were the usual schoolyard fights. “A tough kid,” said Joe Bearman, who lived down the street, “but a good one. Ran with the hard-boiled gang of the neighborhood.”

  They tried sending him to Freeport, where he was put to work in the family feed store and enrolled for a short time at the Union Street School. Spencer was kept on a short leash, working at the store before and after class, and it was the structured life in Freeport that likely convinced John and Carrie he would benefit from a more disciplined educational environment. Sometime around 1909—the records no longer go back that far—they turned him over to the Dominican nuns at St. John’s Cathedral, where the consequences of a wayward disposition would carry considerably more weight. He had, by then, started going to Confession and fasting before receiving Holy Communion, and understanding what sin, repentance, and forgiveness were all about. He had also come to see his father’s disappearances as something to emulate, an old suitcase in hand, food, such as it was, filched from the ice box when nobody was looking. He’d get a few blocks out and get hungry, then go a few more blocks and suddenly realize he was out of food.

  The school was directly behind the historic church near downtown Milwaukee, a no-nonsense structure of native brick with floor-to-ceiling windows facing east toward the lake. The commute from Bay View was three miles by streetcar, and missing opening prayers would have been unthinkable. Come, O Holy Ghost, enlighten the hearts of the faithful… the Lord’s Prayer, the Angelical Salutation, the Apostle’s Creed. Glory be to the Father. O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee. Two hundred minutes a week were devoted to the study of Christian doctrine and Bible history; only reading, as a subject, was accorded more time. Geography, arithmetic. Penmanship. Composition and recitation, phonics and hymns. There were prayers before and after meals, prayers at the end of the day. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but graciously hear and grant my prayer… “He remembered this nun,” said his cousin Frank. “He said, ‘If you did anything wrong, out with the ruler—bang!—across your hands. If you said anything, you’d get another one. You feared those nuns. They were tough.”

  He made no secret of his love for the movies, but it was the church that gave him his first taste of performance. Serving Mass, the phonetic Latin and ritual movements of the altar boy, donning costume in the sacristy, starched collar and lace surplice. “I couldn’t keep an unlit taper in the house,” Carrie Tracy told an interviewer. “Directly after school, Spencer would race home and arrange the candles in every room. Then he would practice lighting and extinguishing them for hours.” He caught the five-cent show at the Union Theater, where the proprietor seated his patrons on ordinary chairs and the ticket girl sang and played the piano. At a capacity of 275, the Union, which offered “high class vaudeville” and a change of program every Monday and Friday, was intimate enough for card tricks and coin manipulations, and it may well have been at one of the Union’s hour-long shows that young Tracy got his first exposure to the art of magic.

  “He was a great magician as a child,” his cousin Jane said. “Whenever anyone went to Milwaukee, Spencer did his magic act. Always in the family you did your number, and then you went to your bedroom. He was very good, according to my mother.” He began staging shows in the cramped basement of the family’s rented duplex on Estes, admitting audience members through the cellar door and seating them among the coal bins, the furnace, and the laundry. “Admission was a few pins,” said Forrest McNicol, whose mother ran a grocery store at the corner of Ellen and East Russell. “I guess you’d have to say that was the beginning of the little theater movement in Bay View.” Over time, Spence learned how to manage an audience’s expectations, usually by downplaying the impact of a particular illusion. One safety pin, Carrie Tracy remembered, had the same value as two straight pins, and ofttimes Spencer was accused of overcharging.

  Spencer, age twelve. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  Soon the wonders of downtown Milwaukee no longer seemed so distant. The grandest of the new movie emporiums was the Princess on North Third Street, which boasted private boxes, a $5,000 pipe organ, and seating for nine hundred patrons. Ads offered a variegated program of comedies and dramas, accompanied by travel talks, scenic views, illustrated songs, and a five-piece pit band billed as “the famous Princess orchestra.” Movies were going uptown and so were the admission prices: the Princess was the first of the Milwaukee movie theaters to charge ten cents’ admission. The following year, the Butterfly—so known because of the huge terra cotta butterfly that loomed over Grand Avenue—went the Princess one better, installing a $10,000 pipe organ and a ten-piece house orchestra. Fortunately, most of Milwaukee’s picture parlors were still nickelodeons, dark and primitive, and it wasn’t hard to find a chase picture or some crude knockabout at half the price the fancy places were charging.

  Carroll would soon be starting high school, and John’s bouts with the bottle were growing less frequent. Obsessed with kicking the habit for the good of the marriage as well as his own health, John Tracy moved the family to a duplex on Kenesaw, scarcely two blocks from work, where the floorplan offered no more room than any of their previous locations—two bedrooms, front sitting room, dining area, commodious kitchen—but where the stroll to Bay Street was mercifully unimpeded by the presence of a saloon. Just to the north were wetlands where kids would hang out, marshlands that surrounded an old European-style fishing village at Jones Island. The mill whistles blew at seven and nine-thirty in the morning, noon, twelve-thirty, and five in the evening, and the entire sky lit up when the furnaces were charged.

  Over the summer of 1910, Spencer was sent to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where his Aunt Jenny had married a gentle Irishman named Patrick Feely. “He went and played with the wrong kids,” said his cousin Jane, who was Pat and Jenny’s daughter. “He got on the wrong side of the tracks, so it was good to get him away.” Spencer was a spindly kid, delicate and undersized from not eating well. Stepping down from the train, he was greeted by his aunt and her son Bernard, not quite three, who was wrapped around a lamppost and intently staring up at him. “Oh, Mama,” he exclaimed, “he ain’t so homely!”

  Over the summer, he also spent time in Ipswich, a one-street town roughly thirty miles due west of Aberdeen, where Frank J. Tracy was editor of the Edmunds County Democrat. Not long after Spencer’s return from Aberdeen, the Tracys moved yet again, this time to lower Bay View. Immaculate Conception was just a block north, at the intersection of Russell and Kinnickinnic, and Humbolt Park, with its playground and clay tennis courts and pond for boating, was four blocks to the west.

  The years on Logan Avenue were among the most memorable of Spencer’s childhood, and practically the only ones of which he spoke in later years. He joined the Boy Scouts (“I made a good one”) and kept to his studies. Winters were spent skating, summers playing marbles and baseball. John’s work at Milwaukee Corrugating was secure and valued, and the binges came to a complete halt with the brutal realization that he could never drink moderately. The need never openly manifested itself, but John was always waging the battle, cut off as he was from the society of the tavern. He tried limiting himself to a pint, nursing it as one would a highball, but it was never enough, and all too easy to fall for another. So he cut himself off entirely, strictly limiting himself to work and family and indulging an accelerated taste for sweets. It was a restrictive yet necessary way to live. At times a furious pacing of the floor betrayed the struggle within, and not even Carrie could find a way to comfort him.

  Performance, by now, had become routine for Spencer, something absorbing and fun and as natural as breathing. He was involved with the Christmas show at St. John’s in 1911, and at home in Bay View the magic act gave way to more elaborate
entertainments “enacting scenes I’d seen in movies.” He staged his first play—a murder mystery—before an audience of neighbors in the living room of the house on Logan in 1912. Having lost himself at the movies, watching the same subjects over and over, he now put himself in the hero’s shoes and imagined himself in the middle of the action. In his own childish way, he was becoming the character he had seen on the screen, and the representation came forth without effort or artifice. “How many times we have told people of that show,” one of Carrie’s friends enthused in a 1931 letter, “proving Spencer was a born actor starting as a child.”

  Tracy rarely spoke of these early performances, and although he freely admitted to being fascinated by moving pictures, it is impossible to say just how much live drama he consumed as a kid. Neither of his parents was a dedicated theatregoer, and the legitimate playhouses—the Shubert and the Davidson—charged as much as $1.50 a ticket to see the likes of Ethel Barrymore and Otis Skinner in weeklong stands. The Pabst Theatre, designed on the order of a European opera house, offered German-language programming almost exclusively. The Crystal, Empress, and Majestic were all vaudeville houses, although it was possible to see someone like Mme. Bertha Kalich headlining in a one-act play. The Gaiety was given over to burlesque, leaving the Saxe, Juneau, and Columbia to the ten-twenty-thirty tradition of stock. The plays were things like The Little Homestead and Mrs. Temple’s Telegram and Caught with the Goods, blood-and-thunder melodramas where a seat in the balcony could be had for a dime.

  Spencer welcomed his twelfth birthday with particular enthusiasm because it made him eligible for a permit to engage in street trades. Most kids distributed handbills or sold newspapers—the Milwaukee Journal, the Evening Wisconsin, the Leader—but sensing, perhaps, too much competition in the hustling of papers, he managed instead to snag a lamplighter’s route when he was, as his brother put it, “scarcely tall enough to reach the lamps with a burning taper.” Using the tip of a five-foot pole to open the valve on a light, he would hold a match aloft to ignite the gas. “He had about 50 lamps to light each night and to extinguish each morning,” Carroll said. “He also had to see to it that the wicks were in good order, and on Saturdays he had to clean the globes with old newspapers. For this job he received around $3.50 a week, if I remember correctly.”