Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [35]
“The beast!”
“You’re going to misjudge him too!”
“No, Tom, I’ll tell you the truth, and all of it.”
“Naturally,” he said, spitting the words. “Now you’ve got to!”
Ethyl later confessed that Spence had truly frightened her that night, and that she had been able to channel the terror she felt into the performance she gave. “Mr. Tracy proved himself a consistent and unusually strong actor in this most difficult straight part,” the Ripon paper said in its review. “His steadiness, his reserve strength and suppressed emotion were a pleasant surprise to all who heard him as Warder.” The applause was strong and genuine, the exhilarating reward for two months of the most sustained work he had ever done in his life.
And from that night forward, his college career would be a shambles.
That summer Ethyl Williams returned to her family in Green Bay, where she would eventually give up acting and become a teacher. Spence and Kenny went west by way of the Canadian Rockies, stopping over in Banff and Lake Louise on their way to Seattle, where they spent time at Dr. and Mrs. Edgers’ cottage on Fox Island. “As we left Milwaukee,” said Kenny, “at the train station Mr. Tracy slipped me $20 so I would not run short. As we left Seattle at the end of the summer, my father said to Spence, ‘Here is an extra $20 in case you run short.’ We called it even.”
At Fox Island they swam, dug clams, fished. There were side trips by boat to Mount Rainier and out into the ocean. Spence, fired by the triumph of his performance in The Truth, spent long hours at a portable typewriter transcribing a one-act play he had found in a copy of McClure’s called The Valiant. After a week on Fox Island, they ditched their overalls and took the S.S. Rose City from Portland to San Francisco (where Spence had an aunt) and spent several days motoring around the peninsula cities of Palo Alto, Monterey, and Carmel. They returned to Wisconsin via the Grand Canyon, arriving back at Ripon in time for the campuswide mixer the Crimson Orchestra always played at the end of registration.
The “walk-around” was the first social event of the year, the ritual introduction of incoming students to the faculty, and it was customary for the upperclassmen to escort them. The best friend of Lorraine Foat, a Mask and Wig stalwart, was entering Ripon, and Lorraine prevailed upon Spence, who hated dancing, to be her friend’s escort that night. Lois Heberlein, as it turned out, was well connected: her father had attended Ripon, where one of his classmates was Silas Evans, the current president of the college. As they made their way down the reception line, Spence was complimented repeatedly on the excellence of his commencement performance, while Lois was welcomed warmly as the daughter of an active alumnus.
“My God,” Tracy said to her as they made their way to the dance floor, “I’m glad your father went to school here and that I was in that play. We at least had something to talk about to the faculty.” He danced her over toward the bandstand where Kenny was holding forth with his saxophone and nodded. “There’s my roommate,” he said, “Kenny Edgers.” Lois and Kenny exchanged glances, each taking careful note of the other. “She must be a good date if she can get you to dance,” Kenny said to Spence as they disappeared back into the crowd.
Soon they were a foursome—Kenny and Lois, Spence and Lorraine. Tracy was obsessive about acting to the degree that he talked about little else. He signed up for another quarter of Zoology, but otherwise filled his schedule with speech and drama classes. Most girls would have found him hard to take, but Olive Lorraine Foat, the petite brunette who played the flamboyant Mrs. Crespigny—all bracelets and bangles and rouge and wax pearls—in The Truth, was known campuswide as a deft comedienne who loved the theater. “I was very fond of Spence,” she said, “but not in a romantic way. He just was … I admired him so for his ability. I loved to play opposite him because you were playing against someone who was solid. I knew the things he believed in, I knew