Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [13]
Tracy began using his days to smoke out another engagement, casually at first, then more keenly as the holiday lull settled in and the only shows casting were musicals like Kid Boots. Counting their pennies, he and Louise (who wasn’t working) allotted thirty-five cents a day for food. “I went on a rice pudding diet because it was filling,” Tracy remembered. “I could tell you every restaurant from the Bowery to the Bronx that served the stuff and tell you which gave the most cream with it and which the most raisins.”
Combing the trade papers, he used the cachet of the Barrymore name to land an interview with the Proctor Players, a struggling stock enterprise located across the Hudson in Elizabeth, New Jersey. They were short a character man for a production of Within the Law. “Can you play an old man?” the director asked. “I’m an actor,” Tracy replied. “I can play anything.”
The Proctors were on a grueling “matinees daily” policy. Hired for general business at fifty dollars a week, Tracy wasn’t permitted to draw against his salary until the play had actually opened. After rehearsing a full week, he and Louise (who was three months pregnant at the time) were reduced to splitting an egg sandwich for dinner. On opening night, December 3, he came offstage after his first scene and made a sprint to the cashier’s office. Nearly missing his second cue, he resolved to get out of the place as quickly as possible.
He remained through Christmas, and was playing a minor role in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch when a wire from Kendal Weston found him. The Belasco of Stock was inaugurating a company in Winnipeg, taking on the longest-running stock company in North America, the very aptly named Permanent Players. Tracy dropped Louise in Milwaukee and was in Manitoba by New Year’s Day. “The first week,” Tracy said, “we weren’t paid because the manager said he had to pay off the local firms to which he owed money. We got through the second week, and after the Saturday night performance we looked for the manager and found he had absconded with the two weeks’ receipts.”
They began operating on the commonwealth plan, divvying up the box office in lieu of salaries. Tracy was second man in What’s Your Wife Doing? when the leads gave notice, suddenly elevating him, after just nine months, to the status of leading man. Given the company’s rattling condition, there was only one viable choice for leading woman, and it was a done deal when the wire grandly offering her the job reached Louise in Milwaukee. “I went up,” she said, “and found the company was really on the rocks.”
Knowing she could only play a few weeks before her pregnancy would begin to show, Louise opened January 28, 1924, in Eugene Walters’ The Flapper and, in the words of the critic for the Winnipeg Free Press, “took the house by storm.” With nothing to lose and her husband playing opposite, she abandoned herself to the role in a way she might otherwise have found difficult. “Miss Treadwell made her Winnipeg debut in rather a light part,” the Press observed, “to which, nevertheless, she brought a vast amount of honest talent and evidently a good deal of careful preparation. Of her future popularity there can be no question. Her performance Monday night not only popularized her, but came very near endearing her to her auditors.” Spence’s work as her long-suffering husband, the first lead he had ever played as a professional actor, was “a rare exhibition of restraint in what might have been a frothy and wrathful role.”
When they opened in the grim crime melodrama The Highjacker on the fourth of February, they knew it would be their last week in Winnipeg. “They called us up to the office and talked,” Louise recalled, “and