James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Northwestern Military and Naval Academy, 1919. (SUSIE TRACY)

  Since Seattle was five long days away by train, Carrie told Kenny she would like to be his Wisconsin mother. John was equally impressed, convinced Ken was one of the reasons Spencer got such good grades at Northwestern. He wanted the two boys to continue into college together, but Spencer was, by Dr. Rogers’ reckoning, a full year and a half behind when Kenny graduated in June 1920. So the elder Tracy went looking for schools that would grant war credits, generously and immediately. “During the summer,” Ken said, “Spence’s father wrote to my father suggesting a small college might be advantageous for our college education. It might, he felt, require us to pay more attention to the academic than to the extracurricular activities. He sent information about Ripon College. He felt that Spence would be more anxious to go if I did. So, after considerable investigation and correspondence, our fathers made arrangements for our entrance.”

  Kenneth Barton Edgers entered Ripon in September 1920, and Tracy, with an allowance of nine quarter-hours for military service, followed in February 1921. Ripon wasn’t as small as Northwestern and lacked the dramatic lakeside setting, but it was similarly isolated, some ninety miles northwest of Milwaukee on the western edge of the Fox River Valley. The campus was dotted with intimate limestone residence halls, and Spence shared a room with Kenny (who gave him “a tremendous build-up”) on the third floor of West Hall—one of the buildings dating from the time of the school’s first commencement in 1867. He signed up for courses in English Language, History, and Zoology, declaring his major to be Medicine.

  “The idea of doing something with my hands appealed to me,” he said, “and I think I might have gone into plastic surgery if something hadn’t happened to make me change my mind.”

  * * *

  1 Daisy Spencer (1873–1963) and Carrie Brown attended Evansville Seminary and were subsequently roommates at Milwaukee College (later Milwaukee-Downer).

  CHAPTER 3

  A Sissy Sort of Thing

  * * *

  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, ci
rca 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.