Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [15]
The Lyceum closed its doors on May 9, 1924, and the Tracys left for Milwaukee the next morning.
There was much about Grand Rapids that made it a good place for stock. It was laid out on an orderly grid, the streets running east and west and the avenues north and south. There was plenty of work, Grand Rapids being known as Furniture City for the woodworking plants that clustered just north and south of the city center—Berkey & Gay, Luce, John Widdicomb, American Seating, Sligh, Robert W. Irwin. The city bustled with skilled workers and a society class comprised of the owners of the mills and furniture factories and the descendants of the Baptist missionaries and land brokers who settled the area. It was a stable, educated population with money and taste and an appreciation of good theatrics. When W. H. Wright installed his Broadway Players there in the spring of 1923, he found he had stumbled onto a largely untapped audience for middlebrow fare.
The 1924 season began on April 14 at the Powers Theatre just as Wright was opening Her Unborn Child in Pittsburgh. Honors Are Even, the first attraction, was a shaky affair, not up to the standards of the previous season, and it was to Wright’s advantage that the loss of the Lyceum freed him to focus his attention more fully on Grand Rapids. As soon as the Pittsburgh company had closed, Wright moved Halliam Bosworth, a solid character man, and director John Ellis to the Powers, and began shuffling the calendar of plays.
The Bootleggers had done extraordinarily well in Pittsburgh and was, in fact, one of the few Lyceum plays Wright thought would go over in Grand Rapids. He cabled Tracy in Milwaukee, offering him the lead in Bootleggers and the balance of the season under less specific terms, but Spence, with Louise now eight months pregnant, hesitated, not wanting to be on the other side of Lake Michigan when the baby was born. It was only at Louise’s insistence that he went, bolstered as he was by the knowledge that she was in his mother’s able care and that nothing at all could possibly go wrong.
Tracy officially joined the Broadway Players on June 10, 1924, when he began rehearsals for The Meanest Man in the World, a comedy George M. Cohan had played a few seasons back. The title role fell to Kenneth Daigneau, an able comedian and the company’s de facto leading man, leaving Tracy to the part of Carlton Childs, an idealistic young businessman. In publicity, Wright dutifully acknowledged Tracy’s status as a “well-known leading man” who would nevertheless be “classed as a juvenile” for his present engagement. Mary Remington, the critic for the Grand Rapids Press, found Tracy “convincing, well poised … natural” in a somewhat thankless part. The Herald’s Clarence Dean reported “generous applause frequently rippling through the audience and breaking out into a salvo.” Tracy, he concluded, had “captured the approval of the first night audience.”
The Meanest Man in the World continued through Sunday, June 22, and Tracy was back in Milwaukee the following Wednesday. John Tracy was now president of George H. Lutz, Inc., one of the Midwest’s leading suppliers of paving machinery, and he and Carrie had relocated to a spacious two-bedroom apartment on Prospect Avenue in the city’s historic First Ward. The Tracys fussed endlessly over Louise, who was due at any moment and miserable in the summer heat and humidity. Spence didn’t quite know what to say or do with fatherhood so close at hand, and when Louise went into labor late on the evening of June 25, it was Father Tracy who got her to St. Mary’s Hospital on North Lake Drive, some two miles away, and then stayed with his son until an eight-pound boy was delivered at 2:30 on