Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [16]
The baby was named John Ten Broeck Tracy, Ten Broeck being the maiden name of Louise’s maternal grandmother, Louisa Smith. “I was very much afraid of him at first,” Louise admitted. “What do you do when you give him a bath? How [do] you hold him in there? I hadn’t been around a small baby, well, in years and years. I just didn’t know anything about it.” And Spence, of course, wasn’t any help. “He was crazy about him, but he didn’t know what to do with a small baby either.” Home from the hospital, Louise was installed in the guest room on Prospect, where the new grandparents could scarcely get their fill of little Johnny. Spence stayed as long as he could—ten days, through the Independence Day festivities—then took the ferry back across Lake Michigan to Muskegon, his father having staked him to the fare, and then the twenty-five miles inland by bus to Grand Rapids.
Wright’s makeover of the Broadway Players hadn’t ended with the addition of Spencer Tracy. Actress Geneva Harrison made her final Grand Rapids appearance in Meanest Man in the World, and the following week saw the arrival of a new leading lady, a genuine star of both stock and Broadway named Selena Royle. The nineteen-year-old daughter of playwright Edwin Milton Royle, she was just in from New York, where she had played the previous week alongside Helen Hayes, Elsie Ferguson, and Pauline Lord in a Players Club staging of She Stoops to Conquer. Landing her for the Broadway Players was something of a coup, but John Ellis had known her since she was a baby. In 1905, when she was less than a year old, Ellis had appeared in the first English production of her father’s most famous play, The Squaw Man, and the two men had remained friends over the years.
For Selena’s debut at the Powers, Ellis and Wright selected the Harvard Prize drama Common Clay, an evergreen in stock that gave Jane Cowl one of her signature roles. A statuesque blonde, Royle towered over the men in the cast, and as Ellen Neal, a poor girl wrongly accused of murder, she commanded the stage. “She is beautiful, she is youthful, she has a rich, low-pitched voice that chimes like sweet bells,” Clarence Dean raved in the Herald. “She has depth of feeling that gets right under the skin, and she is perfectly natural, easy and unaffected. There is no effort apparent, no straining for effect, but a sure touch that misses no points.”
Selena Royle was a hit with Grand Rapids audiences, and Wright vowed to hang on to her as long as he possibly could. For her second week, he indulged her with the stock premiere of the Vincent Lawrence comedy In Love with Love, which had run three months on Broadway with Lynn Fontanne, and for which Wright paid the highest royalty he had ever paid for a play. Those facts, which were widely reported in the press, and solid word-of-mouth for Selena Royle brought the Broadway Players their strongest week to date. Royle was playing Maugham’s Too Many Husbands the week Tracy returned and managed to fill all 1,400 seats for both the Friday and Saturday evening performances. She was considered a surefire asset for The Bootleggers, which had both Tracy and William Laveau repeating their roles from Pittsburgh, and hopes were high for yet another hit.
Tracy was ready to settle in with a good company—at least for a while—and knew a good week for The Bootleggers would put him in line for a lead by the end of the season. The production was, in some ways, better than in Pittsburgh, Selena bringing undeniable star power to the role of Nina. But the gritty realism and violence of the play didn’t go in a town that routinely turned out for comedy and romance and whose entertainment choices were made chiefly by women. The Bootleggers wasn’t a disaster but it ended the week in the red, and the following week Tracy found himself demoted to general business. Demoralized and homesick, he withdrew from the Broadway Players, insisting he would play only leads in the future, and left for Milwaukee to spend time with his wife and his month-old son.
The respite lasted