Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [40]
Deep into rehearsals for The Truth, Tracy took his selection for the team in stride until Clark Graham’s letter to Franklin Sargent of the American Academy brought forth the offer of an audition in New York. At once the tour took on a whole new significance, and it was Graham who encouraged Tracy to use Sada Cowan’s two-character dialogue Sintram of Skagerrak as his tryout piece. Spence and Ethyl Williams had performed the brief one-act as a benefit for the Harwood Scholarship Fund over the Christmas holidays. Sintram’s lyrical effusions of love for the sea struck Graham as ideal for showcasing the way his student could handle difficult dialogue while managing the build in intensity that brings the play to its tragic conclusion.
On February 21, 1922, chapel period was given over to a kind of pep rally for the college debaters, Tracy earnestly urging the student body to “keep the home fires burning” while three of their number were “clashing verbally” with Eastern collegians. They left the next day in the midst of a terrific snowstorm and stopped at the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago. Lionel Barrymore was appearing in The Claw, and they all went to see it. “I remember that night Tracy emphatically saying that he was going to go on the stage,” MacDougall said. “He wanted to be an actor.”
The next morning they were off for Bloomington, where they would face Illinois Wesleyan at Amie Chapel in “Old Main,” the university’s Hedding Hall. A reception committee met them at the train and were genuinely solicitous over the course of their stay. The Wesleyan team failed to establish a case and Tracy, in his first intercollegiate debate appearance, helped win a two-to-one decision over Illinois with a strong rebuttal. “He never spoke a line that somebody, usually me, hadn’t written for him,” MacDougall said. “I wrote his main speech, and we wrote out his potential rebuttal pieces, short answers to points which we were almost certain the opposition would bring up. And, during the debate, we’d sit at the platform, and when one of those matters came up, that we thought Spence could well handle, we’d toss a slip of paper over to him as a reminder and he’d go to it brilliantly.”
Lionel Barrymore in The Claw. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
The team headed for Boston, passing through Cleveland, Buffalo, and Niagara Falls on their way to Hamilton, Ontario, where Spence and “Mac” went to church that Sunday while Bumby visited some relatives in Burlington. They spent the twenty-seventh in Montreal, their last stop before Portland, and Tracy, MacDougall remembered, “asked Bumby and me to wait while he went into the big cathedral there, where we waited and we waited and we waited. He finally came out, and he announced that the result was in the bag, that he had spent the time praying that we would win the debate at Bowdoin [College]. We went on blithely to Maine.”
The team met Bowdoin at Brunswick on March 1 and lost the decision two to one. Tracy, despite the loss, was ranked first in excellence by the judges and received special mention in the Portland newspapers. The next night they met Colby College at Waterville, where they were royally received but handed a nondecision by the judges.
Fittingly, Mac and Harold both picked up colds at Brunswick and spent a full day in Boston without leaving the hotel. Spence took in the city, walking off nervous energy, anxious and impatient to get on to New York. He caught up with Lorraine Foat, told her of