Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [10]
Louise was mindful of what actresses always said about marrying actors, that their egos were too huge to contain, and that no woman could ever love an actor as much as he undoubtedly loved himself. She didn’t think of Spence as an actor, though. He lacked the ego, the pose, the artifice. She couldn’t think of another one even remotely like him, and so there, amid the rolling green hills of White Plains on a crisp spring evening in May 1923, Louise Treadwell said yes.
Weston’s departure signaled a decline in the company and the quality of its productions. Business fell off, and Wood concluded that White Plains was too small to support a company of its own. In late May he announced the Wood Players were moving to Fall River, a mill town in southeastern Massachusetts known for the Lizzie Borden ax murders, and anyone who didn’t care to go had his or her two weeks’ notice. Nobody wanted to go to Fall River, but only three cast members said as much. The Wood Players gave their final performance in White Plains on June 1, 1923, and decamped the next day.
In Fall River, Wood worked the local papers, building anticipation for the town’s first season of summer stock, and when the company opened with Getting Gertie’s Garter on June 11, 1923, all 1,900 seats were filled and some two hundred people were turned away. The town’s goodwill didn’t extend much past opening night, and Wood switched from comedies to thrillers. By the third week, the Players were performing four matinees a week with a two-for-one admission policy on Monday nights. Louise grew to loathe the place: “Nobody was interested in the theatre. I don’t know how in the world they ever thought they could make it go there, and it didn’t go.”
When Wood moved the company to the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he promoted Tracy to second business and bumped his rate to fifty dollars a week. Louise went along, but only for a couple of days and with no intention of playing there. Spence wired his parents in Milwaukee, and almost immediately his older brother arrived to give Louise the once-over. Carroll Tracy was the same age as Louise, a bigger, beefier version of his younger brother, infinitely more quiet. He didn’t ask many questions, so Louise volunteered the things she thought he’d want to know. “I had no intention in the world of giving up the theatre,” she said. She talked about her people, her education, her writing. “Apparently he decided I was all right … I was invited to go to Milwaukee.”
Tracy stayed in Lancaster, intent on finding something better, while Louise returned to New Castle to tell what family she still had there—her grandmother and a few cousins—that she was going to get married. Wood’s company churned continuously, but Tracy, easily the most opinionated member of the company, was out of favor. It wasn’t a good time to be looking for work, and it took the better part of a month to land a job with a company in Cincinnati. Stuart Walker’s renowned stock company was a considerable step up in prestige, if not necessarily in compensation. Elated, Tracy gave notice in Lancaster and advised his fiancée they could be married in September.
Louise traveled to Chicago in late August, and Spence’s father, John Edward Tracy, met her at the station. A small but powerfully built man with shimmering white hair and blue-gray eyes, John Tracy was vice president and general manager of the Parker Motor Truck Company. His son Carroll towered over him, but it was John Tracy’s solid demeanor and ready smile that instantly drew Louise into the family. “He was just so natural and so easy,” she remembered, “the nice little light in his eyes, the humor …”
In Milwaukee, the Tracys’ comfortable wood frame house stood on a tree-lined street on the upper East Side. Down the block was Lake Park and a spectacular