Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [37]
Doing his best to convince her that he was not Joe, Tracy launched into his big speech, the concocting of a heroic death in France for a man who bore the name of her brother, selling it with all the conviction and force he could muster. “… The Jerries were getting ready for a raid of their own, so they were putting down a box barrage with light guns and howitzers and a few heavies. This officer was lying right in the middle of it. Well, all of a sudden a young fellow dashed out of a trench not far from where I was, and went for that officer … The chances were just about a million to one against him, and he must have known it, but he went out just the same … Afterward, we got what was left … the identification tag was still there … and that was the name … Joseph Anthony Paris!”
It was a vaudeville moment, pat and heavy-handed, but Tracy managed real conviction where another actor—especially a student—might well have chewed the scenery. Lorraine tearfully withdrew, convinced (as now was the audience) that the man who was about to die was not her brother after all. He waited, and once she was out of earshot, he brought a gasp from the audience by answering from memory the verses she had just spoken to him:
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
And then, reaching for the lines:
Cowards die many times before their death;
The valiant never taste death but once.
And with head held “proud and high,” he walked offstage to his date with the gallows.
The applause was generous. “He loved to do this play,” Lorraine said, “because he was trying to keep me from finding out who he was … I did cry in [it] and they were real tears, because he was marvelous, just marvelous.” The Days review on November 1, 1921, described the attendance as “large and appreciative,” and Tracy, it said, played the part of the prisoner “in such a masterful way that the audience felt with him the emotions he portrayed.” Lorraine, it went on, “added another triumph to her long list of stage successes.”
Abandoning any pretense of a medical career, Tracy flunked Zoology that quarter while pulling solid Bs in his English and Speech classes. Clark Graham directed the Mask and Wig productions, but it was Professor Boody who taught Dramatics at Ripon and who introduced him to the mechanics of performance. Boody gave him the process of getting into a part, the analysis of action and character, and the understanding of a play’s structure and purpose. He taught the use of the eyes as exhibited in the best motion picture acting and maintained the brow was the actor’s chief asset.2 “The response of those not talking,” he said, “is vastly more important than the actions of the person who holds the stage.” Boody’s great failing as a teacher of acting was an emphasis on imitation rather than immersion, the notion that a character was assembled from a toolbox of characteristics rather than acquired from within. “Never be yourself on stage,” he warned. “You are taking a part.”
Boody’s suggestion that Spence and Lorraine start the Campus Players resulted in an ambitious plan to revive The Truth for a statewide tour over the Christmas recess. Elmer “Red” Wagner, functioning as the group’s road manager, laid out an itinerary of eleven towns over the space of two weeks, starting in Plymouth on December 22 and finishing up in Berlin on the evening of January 6, 1922. Rehearsals at Lorraine’s house were under way by Thanksgiving with first-year student Anna Klein serving as understudy for Ethyl Williams (who was teaching school in Neenah and could only rehearse on weekends). Lorraine