Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [38]
Bad weather dogged the intrepid company most nights, and they arrived in Princeton during a raging blizzard. The tour broke for Christmas, and Spence and Kenny drove down to Milwaukee, where Bill O’Brien, who was attending the Marquette College of Economics, met them. They regrouped at Ripon on the morning of the twenty-sixth and traveled to Wautoma, where Red Wagner met them at the hotel. Jim Gunderson, father of West Hall officer Coleman Gunderson, treated the cast to supper after the show. “I saw The Truth in the movies once,” he told Spence by way of a compliment, “and I think you imitated them real swell.”3
On tour with the Campus Players of Ripon College, 1921. Left to right: Evelyn Engelbracht, Ken Edgers, Lorraine Foat, Tracy, Meta Bohlman. Seated: Ethyl Williams. (ROBERT B. EDGERS)
A sampling of the West Hall gang, Ripon College, 1922. Tracy’s arm is around his pal Kenny Edgers. (ROBERT B. EDGERS)
The next night, at Daly’s Theatre in Wisconsin Rapids, the mechanism supporting the curtain broke. It failed to drop at the climax of the play, and the actors had to improvise a graceful way of getting offstage. In Marshfield, the lights failed, throwing the house into an uproar. Tomahawk and Merrill came next, and Ken Edgers noticed that even the smallest of audiences unnerved his pal. “I remember Spence asking the person nearest him as he went on stage for his first appearance in any play to hit him hard between the shoulder blades to get him over his initial stage fright.” New Year’s Eve was spent in Antigo, the second in Wausau, the fifth in Fond du Lac. By the time they finished up on the sixth, they were no longer a group of amateurs, but the seasoned veterans of a whirlwind Chautauqua tour. “I found,” Tracy said of the experience, “that acting was good hard work as well as play.”
There was one final performance of The Truth to be mounted on January 16, a benefit for the American Legion. Anticipation ran high—those who had only heard about the commencement performance wanted to see the play for themselves, while others who were there wanted to see it again. Then there was Red Wagner’s announcement in the paper that Ethyl Williams would be making her final appearance before a Ripon audience. The show at the Armory that Monday night sold out, and while the Ripon Commonwealth dutifully found Ethyl’s performance “masterly,” it went on at length about what Tracy had done: “His quiet manner of portraying the deceived husband was characterized by such an air of strong reserved force as to be quite remarkable. If his work in other productions has not already done so, the acting he displayed Monday night deservedly places him as a leader in the dramatic circles of the present student generation.”
John and Carrie Tracy arrived for the play in their Wisconsin-built Kissel coupe and found their son talking excitedly about dramatic school. “He wants to be an actor,” John said to Kenny Edgers, barely containing his disgust. “Can you imagine that face ever being a matinee idol?” Subsequently there was a family conference with Professor Graham presiding. “As a result,” he said, “I wrote Mr. Sargent of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and he suggested that Tracy appear for a tryout.”
The timing couldn’t have been better, for the final performance of The Truth also marked the last time Spence and Lorraine would share a stage. Directly after the performance, Lorraine left for Boston, where she would spend a year at the Emerson School of Oratory. In later years she would downplay her relationship with Tracy, maintaining it was their love of theatre that had so inexorably glued them together. “He took me to a dance once in a while,” she acknowledged, never forgetting how distracted and self-absorbed he could