Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [14]
Nineteen twenty-four wasn’t starting out well for stock. There weren’t more than a hundred companies nationwide, and only about two dozen of those were making money. One of the managers whom Tracy was following in the pages of Variety was William Henry Wright, the man in charge of Pittsburgh’s Lyceum Stock Company. Wright had been a press agent for Klaw & Erlanger, Henry W. Savage, and George Broadhurst, among others, and knew how to get people into a theater—a critical talent lacking in the vast majority of stock managers.
Emboldened by a successful summer of stock in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Wright had taken a lease on the Bijou, an old vaudeville house, renamed it the Lyceum, and opened Thanksgiving week with a policy of high-class fare at a one-dollar top scale. It was a hopeless strategy for a place like Pittsburgh, and some nights there was less than one hundred dollars in the box office when the curtain rang up. Finally coming to the realization he was playing class stuff in the wrong neighborhood, Wright closed the company on January 7, 1924, having dropped $14,000 in the space of seven weeks.
There were, however, a lot of people rooting for “Papa” Wright, a beloved figure who, in another time, had managed the lecture tours of Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and James Whitcomb Riley. He had, in fact, touched virtually every facet of show business, from playwriting to movie work, and was known for promptly paying his bills in even the darkest of hours. He took just two weeks to regroup in Pittsburgh, building a new policy on hokey melodramas at a fifty-cent top, and was open again by the end of January. “We’ll give him credit,” commented one stock executive. “It’s either guts or idiocy.”
The agent who handled Tracy’s booking with Wright told him it was “the world’s worst stock company” and that he should therefore “fit in fine.” When Wright got a look at his new leading man, Tracy was clad in the same serge suit he had worn since college. “You’ve got to get yourself a new suit,” Wright told him, and Tracy, in no position to argue the point, touched him for an advance. That next week, he began rehearsals for a topical play called The Bootleggers in a snappy blue pinstripe.
The Bootleggers was the first effort of a young drama critic named William Page, formerly of the Baltimore American, later of the Washington Post. Wright’s staging at the Lyceum constituted its stock debut and, typical for a Wright company, no reasonable expense was spared. Tracy took the part of Rossmore, the mastermind of a prosperous smuggling ring, and Wright’s leading lady, Marguerite Fields, took the role of Rossmore’s daughter.
The show was under the direction of John Ellis, a classically trained actor who had been with Wright since his first stock enterprise in Schenectady. Tracy proved adept at handling the comedy in the play as well as its tragedy, and the Monday performance played to a sizable crowd that included the playwright himself.
Wright followed The Bootleggers with a more intimate, though no less sensationalistic, drama called Her Unborn Child, and scheduled brief talks on birth control during Tuesday and Thursday “ladies only” matinees.
A splendid production of The Shepard of the Hills was followed by The Love Test, and then Wright lost his lease on the theater just as he was starting to make a little money. The house management was flooded with letters and a petition to retain the company, but it was rumored a deal had gone over to give the theater to a burlesque syndicate and there was nothing more to be done about it. The Gazette Times reported the opening performance of The Girl Who Came Back, Wright’s selection for the final week, played to “one