James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Louise and Johnny boarded the night train to New Castle, Miss Krause seeing them off at the depot. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing you are through,” the nurse told her bluntly. “John will be glad to have you. He needs his mother.” Johnny had just turned three. When they pulled away from the station and it dawned on him that he had his mother to himself once again, his face lit up with both understanding and delight, and Louise figured she had played her final engagement.

  Rehearsals for The Baby Cyclone commenced immediately, its first performance scheduled for Atlantic City on August 8, 1927. In the cast were Grant Mitchell as Joseph Meadows, a hapless banker, Natalie Moorhead, his fiancée, and Nan Sunderland, a newlywed named Jessie. Tracy played Gene Hurley, Jessie’s pugnacious husband, a man who buys his wife a Pekingese and then watches helplessly as it quickly takes first position in their marriage. One day, Hurley takes the dog for a walk and gives it away to the first woman who admires it. The ensuing argument between him and Jessie draws in Meadows, a complete stranger, and Hurley gives him a black eye for his trouble. Meadows bundles the hysterical Jessie off to his house, where he learns the woman Hurley gave the dog to was in fact Lydia, the girl he is planning to marry. And, as did Jessie, Lydia babies the dog, whose name is Cyclone because he was born in a storm.

  Cohan wrote Hurley as another side of Jimmy Wilkes, the peripheral character Tracy had played so vividly in Yellow. As was Wilkes, Hurley is an accountant, newly married, but where Wilkes’ challenges were desperate and peculiar to a newlywed, Hurley’s are patently ridiculous, and over the course of the play they afflict three generations of households. Hurley was the kind of character Cohan always took for himself—cocky, talented, bound for great things. Sam Forrest was the credited director on Baby Cyclone, but both he and Cohan were concurrently staging The Merry Malones, an elaborate musical in which Cohan was also starring, and the two men worked as a tag team throughout the rehearsal process.

  “I’ve forgotten what exactly I did,” Tracy said some thirty years later. “[I] cocked my head over or limped or some goddamn thing, and George M. said, ‘What are you doing? What have you got your head over for?’

  “I said, ‘Well, I, ah, Mr. Cohan, I thought I’d sort of, ah, characterize it.’

  “He said, ‘You’d thought you’d what?’

  “I said, ‘I thought I’d, you know, kind of characterize it.’ ”

  “Oh, oh …” said Cohan, now nodding wisely.

  “Then he took me aside and said, ‘Now you cock your head back where it was before—when I wrote this part for you. And quit walking with that club foot.’ Or whatever the hell I did. ‘If I want an actor like that I can go out on the street and get five-hundred of them for twelve dollars!’ ”

  Once Cohan had Tracy’s attention, he showed him how he himself would play the part, restlessly pacing the stage, his hat cocked down over his right eye, throwing out lines as if they were wisecracks. Mastering the text was easy for Tracy, and although he had the most lines in the play, he considered Grant Mitchell’s part the more difficult of the two. “Listening, to me, is the great art in acting,” he said in an interview.

  In five seasons of stock I’ve played a lot of leading men who talked most of the time, but never had to listen. It’s a lot easier to talk than to listen. In this play I talk a lot. Grant Mitchell does the listening … Do you think that I could possibly put over some of my long speeches if Grant Mitchell were not really listening to me? Suppose he let his mind dwell on football games, the horse races, or his supper engagement? Do you think for a moment that I would not feel it and let down unconsciously? And believe me, it would not take an audience many seconds to slump in its chairs and produce a mild bronchitis from first row to gallery top.

  Both Spence and Louise grew close to Grant Mitchell, who expressed an uncommon interest in Johnny, and who revealed one night over dinner that his own sister was deaf. “He gave us her latest letter to read,” Louise remembered. “Newsy, humorous, grammatically perfect, it obviously could not have been written by any other than an intelligent, well-educated, and altogether delightful person. I am sure he must have been amused at our amazement and, yes, excitement. To us, still so ignorant of what the future could hold, still so hungry for concrete examples and comparisons, it was manna from Heaven.”

  Louise and Johnny went down to Atlantic City for the first performance of The Baby Cyclone and stayed the entire week. The new show brought forth “gales of laughter and storms of applause,” but Cohan nevertheless decided it was too long. The next morning, he was back in the theater “before the janitor” (as Tracy recalled it) and had the entire play revised in the space of six hours. “If an actor didn’t ‘feel’ his lines,” said Tracy, “[Cohan] crossed ’em out and re-wrote them on the spot.”

  From Atlantic City the company moved to Boston for four weeks, and Louise and Johnny followed. When Allienne Treadwell learned his daughter and grandson were going to be there, he insisted they see Dr. Harvey Cushing, a noted brain specialist and another of his Yale classmates. Dr. Cushing made a cursory examination of the boy and said he was quite sure there was no brain tumor or other condition he could possibly treat. He did, however, minister to Louise’s spirit, and one thing he said to her would stay with her for the rest of her life: “You are blessed above all mothers. Yours can be a very interesting life.”

  The New York opening of The Baby Cyclone took place on September 12, 1927, the show packing snugly into Henry Miller’s 950-seat theater on West Forty-third Street. No construction crews impeded the flow of traffic, and Pat O’Brien, in the midst of a dry spell, was hard-pressed to afford a seat in the balcony. Then, having forgone the expense of a shave, he found it almost impossible to get past the backstage doorman after the show. “And I’ll admit I did look like a bum,” he said.

  So [the doorman] wouldn’t pay any attention to me. But finally, he turned his back and I sneaked in. I had heard the doorman telling the boys in the tuxedos and the tails that Spencer’s dressing room was on the second floor, so I went up. But his dressing room wasn’t all I found. I discovered that the son-of-a-gun had a Japanese dresser. This Jap was posted outside the dressing room door, and when I told him to tell Mr. Tracy his pal was outside, he held up his hand in horror. “No—no—go ’way. Room full of nice mans—you go ’way.” I told him I’d start yelling “fire” if he didn’t take my message. So he went inside, shaking his head and muttering. And then you should have seen those “nice mans” come out of there. You never saw so many stiff shirts pouring out of one place in your life. When Spence heard I was there, he told them someone had called that he had to talk business with, and he herded ’em all out. Then he rushed out and grabbed me. He pulled me in and said: “Listen, you mick, what did you think of it? It’s your opinion I want to hear.”

  With Grant Mitchell in The Baby Cyclone. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  Pat’s opinion was the same as everyone else’s: the show was a scream, an expert farce in which the spirit of George M. Cohan loomed large over the entire affair—his words, his cast, and, in many respects, his presence in the form of an actor named Spencer Tracy. With The Baby Cyclone a hit on Broadway, Cohan brought The Merry Malones in just behind it. A trademark pastiche of sentiment, flag waving, and pure unadulterated hokum, it was crowd-pleasing, if not revolutionary, theater from a master showman. Tracy came to regard Cohan as a kind of spiritual father, a man who recognized his gifts when his own father could not, and who applauded them, at the same time helping to nurture them. “He thought the world of George M. Cohan,” Chuck Sligh said. “He was his sort of hero.”

  Tracy marveled at Cohan’s energy and stamina, watching him sit at the piano for five or six hours a day, poking out tunes with one finger, playing a performance in the evening, holding court in his dressing room afterward, and then going home to draft an act in yet another new play. And Tracy’s feelings for Cohan were reciprocated; when Cohan inscribed a picture to him, he wrote, “To Spencer Tracy, A guy after my
own heart.”

  Deciding they needed more of a home than a hotel room could ever be, Louise persuaded Spence to take a four-room apartment on East Ninety-eighth Street at the southern edge of Harlem—the first they had ever had. For help in furnishing the place, she appealed to the elder Tracys, who had some of their things shipped out from Milwaukee, and to Chuck Sligh, their one lasting friend from the furniture metropolis of Grand Rapids. They moved into their new home on October 10, and presently took delivery of a sturdy new Sligh bedroom set, Chuck having given them the wholesale price—$200. Still, they had to break up the payments to manage the purchase.

  Tracy entered radio about this time, for he mentioned working as an announcer for Standard Oil in a couple of early interviews. Radio money would have come in handy, for concurrent with the New York opening of The Baby Cyclone, they enrolled Johnny—at the age of three years and three months—in the toddlers’ program at the Wright Oral School. In the morning session, he joined a group of four other children who were learning to lace and tie their shoes and to sort colored yarn. That same month, Louise made a list of thirty-three words the boy was able to lip-read, among them arm, ball, hat, shoe, soap, pillow, chair, and mouth. A spelling list included nineteen words, and after a little time in school, a list of words he could actually say began with mama, thumb, and lamb. She watched as he would stroke his arm from shoulder to wrist and say arm, then stretch it out toward the coffeepot, withdrawing it suddenly, his eyes full of mischief as he shouted “ot!” (The h would come later.) Over time, pineapple became a favorite word (although it sounded a lot like apple pie). The word fish came out sounding like foosh, and on Fridays Spence took to murmuring, “Ah, foosh for dinner!”

  In February 1928 Johnny developed a bad case of the measles, and Spence, upon his recovery, suggested that Weeze take him to Florida. “Florida!” she exclaimed. “He’s in school and he shouldn’t miss any.”

  “You can teach him,” he said, urging her along. “He’s so young. The change will do John good and his health comes first. Besides, you should have a trip.”

  Louise and John spent most of their days at Miami Beach. “John was crazy about the water,” she said, “and had we stayed another week or two, I think he would have been swimming.”

  As his namesake was growing and learning to talk and understand spoken English, John Tracy was slowly fading away. The curious illness that had overtaken him in Milwaukee had been diagnosed as rectal cancer, and the crude radiation treatments of the day were taking their toll on a vibrant and generous man. He worried endlessly about money and his ability to make ends meet. In New York he took a position with General Motors, assigned to the National Account Division, but he suffered bouts of weakness and fatigue, and they were as unhappy with him as he was with them. At the same time he grew enormously proud of his son’s success in New York and his association with the great George M. Cohan. (“He was a long time coming around,” Spence marveled, “but—”) Now practically a Broadway insider, he would stand at the back of Henry Miller’s Theatre every night at 8:25 and count the house. And after the performance the two men would go to supper, arm in arm.

  Cohan sold the movie rights to The Baby Cyclone and sent the play out on the road, first to Boston, then to Philadelphia. John regarded Spencer’s absence with melancholy, but Carrie seized the opportunity to fix up the kids’ new place. “I suppose Mother is up at your apartment by this time,” he wrote one morning in a letter. “No doubt she will be busy there for a while, and you won’t know the place … Am going to keep off my feet as much as possible today. I have rather an uncomfortable sensation where the trouble is, and it may be due to too much walking or a reaction from the treatments I have taken recently.” He added: “Don’t forget your Easter duty while in Boston.”

  The play’s return to Boston lasted only a week, but Spence took advantage of Louise’s absence to bring Lorraine Foat backstage on opening night. Lorraine had last heard from him in the days leading up to his marriage, when he urged her to come to Cincinnati and apply for a spot with the Stuart Walker company. (“Spence told me to get some pictures and send them along … My grandmother, my darling little grandmother, thought I should have gone, but I didn’t.”) Now Mrs. John Foster Holmes, Lorraine was proud of Spence’s success and anxious to see him.

  They talked for a long time—about Cohan, about the theater, about the separate paths their lives had taken. “He adored this son,” Lorraine said, “but felt terribly about it. He suffered over that, feeling that somehow or other he had failed.” Chuck Sligh came to Boston, and comments Spence made to him suggest Louise’s trip to Florida may have been arranged for less than completely altruistic motives. “I think,” said Chuck, “Spence, at that time, probably was … upset … Louise had given over her life to John … He gave me the feeling that she wasn’t too attentive to his needs … I don’t like to put words in his mouth, but the feeling I got was that, ‘Gosh, I don’t know, but Louise is so cold.’ Something like that …”

  Tracy came from a tradition, a teaching within the church, that sex within a marriage was solely for procreation, and that recreational sex—the act without the intent or possibility of reproduction—was immoral. “I really believe that it was a very separate part of their lives,” his cousin Jane remarked. “It wasn’t part of the warp and woof of their existence. It was not a natural, normal thing accepted with joy. And I do think, too, that the first result of the sexual act with Spencer and Louise, nine months later, was John—now I think that must have been tremendously traumatic to people of that generation with that kind of background.” Johnny’s birth had come almost nine months to the day after their marriage in Cincinnati. (“Very fast!” Johnny said one day in 1937. “You bet it was fast!” Louise agreed.) “I think that trauma must have led to: ‘Let’s not do this anymore.’ And let’s just not do THIS anymore—not let’s prevent a birth.”

  That Spence and Louise still loved and respected and needed each other was obvious to the small circle of friends who knew them both, but the energies and urges normal to people in their twenties and thirties were sublimated, ignored, channeled into other avenues of thought and deed. Louise always tried to be there for him. (“When Spencer played out of town,” she once said, “he needed us with him.”) But Johnny’s schooling made it difficult, if not impossible, to pull up and go, and Spence’s work separated them for weeks at a stretch.

  From Philadelphia, where blue laws prohibited Sunday performances, Tracy was able to come home for a day. John looked drawn and tired and anxious to get out of GM. Later, when he was in Chicago and Carroll was with him, John wrote the two of them about a job he was pursuing, concerned his salary demands would discourage an offer. “But I am desperate and nervous and worried so am going to work fast … I haven’t said a word to Mother yet, [but will] tell her in a few days when I know a little more.”

  John Tracy, however, was too weak to work, and when Louise and Johnny left to join Spence in Chicago, they did so reluctantly. (“He was a very brave man,” Louise said of her father-in-law. “You would never have known that he suffered at any time.”) The Baby Cyclone enjoyed an eight-week stand at the Blackstone, and from there they went to Cleveland, where Spence would spend most of July playing stock. He returned to New York in late July, where he found himself assigned to the Chicago company of Cohan’s newest play, a turgid comedy called Whispering Friends. His father was wasting away, the cancer by now having metastasized to his liver, and he hated the prospect of being stuck in Chicago. Frank Tracy, John’s half brother, had died the previous month in Aberdeen at the age of sixty-seven, and the dark knowledge of John’s condition enveloped his sister Jenny. “John will be the next one,” she told her daughter Jane.

  “He got sick,” Tracy said of his father. “And then he got sicker. Weak. And scared. He’d look at me beggingly—as though I could help if I wanted to. I’d see him wince. Once, visiting, I heard him crying out in the other room … Nothing to do but wait and suffer and wait
and wait.” Prior to opening in Chicago, Whispering Friends played a six-night stand in Newark, and Spence made the commute into town by rail. Saturday being a matinee day, he was at the theater between performances when advised of his father’s imminent passing. The news also reached Cohan in Monroe, where his own mother was near death, and at once he came, spending an entire hour alone with Spence, his hand on his shoulder, the call boy pounding insistently on the door. Back in Manhattan, Louise stayed with Mother Tracy at their hotel on East Eighty-sixth Street, stroking her hand. She spent a couple of minutes with John—he was conscious but did not speak—and then left the two of them alone. The end came peacefully at 6:15 in the evening, just as Cohan was racing to Spence’s side.2 Tracy played the performance that night as usual, and afterward found a taxi waiting outside to take him to the station.

  They brought John’s body back to Freeport the following Monday, and a viewing was held in the evening at the Wiese & Temple Funeral Church on Main Street. The funeral mass was celebrated at 9:30 the next morning at St. Mary’s on Piety Hill, where John had served Mass as a child and where his father’s altar still stood. Although she and her cousin Frank didn’t have to go to the Rosary, Jane Feely would remember the awful sadness of the place, the black veils all the women wore and the crush of people, the prayers, the eating, the drinking. The cemetery was in the process of being expanded, and there was no space for John in the Tracy plot. Andrew Tracy managed to arrange a temporary grave in the middle of the grounds, and it was there that John Edward Tracy, aged fifty-four years, seven months, and five days, was buried. There would be time for laughter and remembrance afterward, but not for Spence, who had to catch up with the Whispering Friends company in Chicago and give a performance that evening.