Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [39]
Clearly there was more to the relationship than just acting; in Lorraine’s old age (she lived to be ninety-three) the spark was still there. She was pretty, smart, and Protestant—three things that would always attract him—and she was serious about acting. “I think Spence thought that I was talented,” she allowed, “and he liked to play opposite me because we were both very intense about it. He was always Spence, but he also never steered off the track.”
She and Tracy had real potential together, but he was never focused on girls so much as his work, and the excitement of finding something he could do well and with unbridled enthusiasm was greater than any sexual attraction. He was also careless in his manner of dress and oblivious to the interests of others. “He had a sweater,” she said, “and I think it was the same sweater that he wore all the time—it was always out in the elbows. He didn’t look very tidy on campus. He didn’t need [to look like that], but he was so independent … He didn’t care whether anyone else liked him or not. He really didn’t ever seem to crave the attention of people there in college.”
It wasn’t Spence her parents objected to so much as the idea of his being an actor. Lorraine’s father was a carryover from the days when boardinghouses routinely posted signs reading NO ACTORS and traveling theatrical companies were regarded as if they were roving bands of Gypsies. Certainly the stage was no place for a respectable young woman, and Spence, it was feared, would drag her in that direction. Then Lorraine got to the meat of it: “My family had a very strong feeling … we were not Catholics, and my dad wouldn’t feel that it was a proper marriage. At that time there were very few people who crossed over. You think nothing of it now, but …”
And so it was. A week after Lorraine’s departure for Emerson, Spencer Tracy was elected to Theta Alpha Phi and simultaneously called an end to the Campus Players. He never acted on a Ripon stage again.
Though he came to Ripon as a “flunk-out”—arriving two or three weeks into the second quarter—Tracy quickly earned a reputation as a ringleader of sorts, taking a key role in West Hall initiation rites and bolstering the school’s well-earned reputation for hazing. (“Frosh! Go upstairs and warm a toilet seat for me!”) As premier of Alpha Phi Omega, he once put the owner of a pet rabbit on trial for paternity. Another time, he indulged a newfound taste for cigars by proposing a series of “smokers” between rival houses, permitting freshmen to provide both eats and smokes while upperclassmen feted the likes of Silas Evans and Clark Graham. He generally spoke on such occasions, ribbing the guests, deadpan, and picking arguments with some of the more academically talented students.
Tracy’s zeal for one-upmanship found a constructive outlet in Professor Boody’s debate class, where it soon dawned on him that debate was just another facet of performance. He joined Pi Kappa Delta, and when tryouts were announced for the intercollegiate season, he went after a spot on the Eastern team as aggressively as he would pursue the lead in a play. “There were two places to be filled,” Curtis MacDougall, a West Hall journalism major, recalled, “and competition was quite severe. The candidates were grouped into teams of three, and there was really a tournament with judging. My team had on it Tracy and Newton Jones, another fraternity brother. We won. We went undefeated, we beat everybody else. And I’m sure a great deal of the reason was Tracy’s platform performance.”
Boody had come to the college in 1915 with a mandate to raise its forensic profile. He did so by quadrupling the number of annual debates and building an admirable record