Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [12]
Louise, moving up to the role of Spence’s booster, understood Walker’s reasoning, given Kirkland’s tenure with the company, but she also knew that her new husband was infinitely more talented, and she was all for the move when the fuss over Kirkland inspired Tracy to take a crack at Broadway himself. Walker, who believed it took an actor four or five years to fully develop, advised against it. But Tracy knew a place on the Upper West Side where he had lived with an old friend. “Come on,” he said to Weeze. “Mrs. Brown will give us a room. I can talk her into anything.”
Despite a steep, gloomy interior, Mrs. Brown’s had the benefit of a landlady who genuinely liked and admired struggling actors. She greeted Spence like a wayward son and made his wife feel as if she were an established star. Louise set her electric stove up in the bathroom and proceeded to familiarize her husband with the vegetables he had never before regarded as food. She cooked ground round occasionally, and when they were feeling flush they would get a couple of lamb chops.
Fifteen shows were casting, and Tracy figured a big star vehicle offered the best chance for a long run and maybe even a tour. He missed out on Walter Hampden’s revival of Cyrano de Bergerac, which had more than fifty parts to fill, but got word that producer Arthur Hopkins was casting a new comedy for Ethel Barrymore at the Plymouth. The play had sixteen speaking parts, two given over to the star and her leading man, Cyril Keighley, and three requiring the services of children. Of the eleven remaining, the four that meant anything had already been filled with Beverly Sitgreaves, Jose Alessandro, Edward G. Robinson, and Virginia Chauvent. Only the bits remained, and Tracy landed the least of those, the character of a newspaper photographer named Holt. And that night, the Tracys’ room at Mrs. Brown’s modest walk-up smelled of lamb.
Rehearsals for the Barrymore play, A Royal Fandango, were unlike anything Tracy had ever witnessed. “Arthur Hopkins,” said Edward G. Robinson, “pulled his usual stunt of leaving the actors alone for a week to find their own places and get the play on its feet. I soon discovered that Miss Barrymore—and why not?—did what came naturally to her: took the stage, filled it, and left the rest of us to stage rear.”
The actors began referring to the production as A Royal Fiasco, and when Hopkins finally appeared, Robinson asked to be let out. “I know I’m a supporting actor and Miss Barrymore’s a great star,” he told the producer, “but the way the play is staged, all the values are distorted.” Hopkins listened and understood and set about restaging the scenes, and although his improvements gave the play more vitality and pace, the production was doomed, doomed, and everyone, excepting perhaps Ethel Barrymore herself, seemed to know it.
They opened in Washington on November 6 before a capacity house that included Commander and Mrs. W. W. Galbraith and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Tracy, whom Robinson remembered as “an intense young man,” had only to walk on with a paper, but the weight of doing so while Ethel Barrymore held the stage was almost too much for him to bear. “He had one line to say,” Barrymore recalled in her autobiography, “and I saw he was very nervous, so I said to him, ‘Relax. That’s all you have to do—just relax. It’ll all be the same in a hundred years.’ ”
Tracy got through the night, as did the rest of the cast, but the man from Variety said playwright Zoë Akins had made “without a doubt