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 ba
nd 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 Advocate found 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 in
finitely 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.”
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