Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [319]
Kate had taken him to see Laurette Taylor’s gut-wrenching performance in The Glass Menagerie and he had come away regarding Taylor, whom he had never met, as “the greatest actor I ever saw and the greatest this country ever produced.” (As Hepburn said, “She and Spencer had a tremendous amount in common, because they never drove a part—they just let it happen.”) The day of November 10, his stomach in knots, Tracy left for the theater resentful of Kanin, Samrock, Sherwood, and the whole fraternity of critics who were doubtless planning to flay him alive. “When I came into my dressing room to get ready to go on, there was a little carnation stuck with a black pin and a little note written on tissue paper that said, ‘Dear Mr. Tracy: I have always been a great fan of yours. Welcome home. Laurette Taylor.’ She had stopped on her way to the theater and left it. So I said, ‘Boys, if the lights go out now I still win. Fuck it.’ I was relaxed that night, opening night.”
Kate had been hovering, hoping he could concentrate. “It touched him so,” she said of Taylor’s thoughtful gesture. “He was so thrilled, because he had wild admiration for her, and he just put it in his button hole. When he came on, I thought, ‘Ooh. Well. Never saw that [carnation]. I wonder who sent that?’ But it certainly made him feel absolutely there.” With the company thoroughly demoralized, Kanin thought the performance promising: “Spencer rose to the occasion and gave an overwhelmingly magnetic performance, but somewhere, about halfway through, the dramatic line failed to sustain. The play lost the audience and disintegrated.”
“No newspaper man could ask for a better model than Mr. Tracy,” averred Lewis Nichols of the Times. “Leisurely and assured, he is one of the most likable members of the fourth estate and whatever estate it is to which actors belong. His Morey Vinion is an honest man, an able editor, and a quizzical cynic; the performance is indeed fine. But Morey Vinion is almost the only cleanly-written part.” Of the play itself, Nichols lamented its lack of power, Sherwood having abandoned the role of prophet and “forceful advocate” for that of historian, permitting the flashback structure to drain it of all passion. “To get the bleak news over immediately: Robert E. Sherwood’s first play in five years has not been written with his best pencil.”
The story was the same all over town. The Herald Tribune: “Robert E. Sherwood has mistaken a stage for a podium. The Playwrights’ Company’s offering emerges as a series of animated editorials rather than a challenging play.” P.M.: “It is most palpably not a good play … It is not even at this moment in time a very provocative commentary on the issues confronting the world … Tracy’s acting is likable, natural, and not unconvincing.” Time: “One trouble with The Rugged Path is that it is not dynamic enough to avoid seeming emotionally dated.” The Sun: “The new play is lacking in dramatic progression. It is more message than it is good theatre … Tracy … gives a solid, tender, biting performance.” Andrew Tracy, writing his son Frank in China, summarized the reviews by reporting that the play seemed out of its time. “It’s what they call, in the movie business, a turkey,” he carefully explained.
Unlike Louise, who considered the gradual evolution of a character one of the great creative pleasures of the stage, Tracy, after fifteen years of working solely before the lens of a camera, could no longer welcome the audience into the process. Used to settling a performance and then moving on to the next shot or the next scene, he was effectively done with Morey Vinion by the end of the first week. “I couldn’t say the same goddamn lines over and over and over again every night,” he later groused to a friend. “I’d forgotten how boring that could be, how deathly boring that was. I wasn’t creating anything. At least every day is a new day for me in films. Every day is new and when I get through with this film I’ll go right into another