James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  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 Cord when 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, m
ama’ 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 with John 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.

  CHAPTER 5

  Dread

  * * *

  I am sure Cromwell will be the first to tell me to go ahead and good luck,” Tracy said in a letter to Chamberlain Brown. “He seems genuinely interested in me and would be glad for my chance. But, he has been very nice to me and I wouldn’t want to hurt him—that’s why I wanted the Cohan thing settled so I could let him know.” Cromwell, Tracy assured Brown, would understand and know that to pass up an offer from George M. Cohan would be crazy. “If necessary,” he added, “I will pay Cromwell two weeks salary, which will break any contract, but I know that won’t be necessary. Cromwell isn’t that kind.” Mr. Wright, he said, felt that as long as he was leaving Lima so early, he would rather have him go right away so that he could save some money by bringing over a man from his company in Pontiac, which would be closing the following week. “Mrs.
T. is going on a visit, and I shall come right into N[ew] Y[ork].”

  Not realizing his client had actually signed a contract with John Cromwell, Brown advised Tracy not to inform Cromwell of their deal with Cohan. “I sent your wire to Cohan,” Brown explained, “and he did not want Cromwell to hear of this, so that’s why I said so in the wire. He feels it might cause a lot of trouble for him, so be sure you don’t mention it. Of course, there is nothing set with Cromwell so you are protected.” By the time Brown more fully understood the situation, the damage had been done. Tracy was keeping quiet, as instructed, when an item in one of the New York dailies announced the casting of Grant Mitchell, a Cohan favorite, as the star of The Baby Cyclone. “By the way,” Tracy wrote Brown, “this clipping also mentioned me, so I hope Mr. Cromwell doesn’t see it and wonder why I haven’t notified him. However, guess I can explain.”

  As it turned out, he couldn’t explain. Cromwell was furious when he saw the news and threatened actions against both Tracy and Cohan. Tracy was unable to mollify him and blamed Brown for the falling out. “After the terrible mess of this year’s contract, which has upset me terribly, lost me one man’s friendship, and nearly lost both jobs, I feel you have too much to do to handle all my troubles exclusively,” he told Brown, distancing himself. “I should like and hope to do business with you as an agent—and will pay [the] same commission as in [the] past.”1