Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [41]
Tracy’s first glimpse of New York City was the cavernous interior of Grand Central Terminal and the vaulted blue ceiling of the main concourse. Stepping out into the crisp night air at Forty-second and Vanderbilt, he could see the electric white glow of the Times Square theater district four blocks to the west. Marilyn Miller was in Sally at the New Amsterdam that night. Six Cylinder Love was at the Sam H. Harris, and Helen Hayes was appearing in To the Ladies at the Liberty. Other theaters on other streets held Roland Young, Estelle Winwood, Alice Brady, Blanche Yurka, Frank Fay, Laurette Taylor, Florence Eldridge, Lenore Ulric, Fred Astaire, Lynne Overman, Violet Heming, and Henry Hull.
At Spence’s insistence, the boys took a four-dollar room at the Waldorf-Astoria and got directions to a nearby speakeasy. The fare was Italian, the air stifling, the service poor. Spence delighted in the widened eyes of his small-town teammates, neither of whom had ever been outside the state of Wisconsin. It was the first time Mac, for instance, had ever seen a woman smoke a cigarette, and he was so scandalized by the experience he couldn’t enjoy his meal. A lot of walking got done that weekend amid the orange juice and hot dog stands that populated Broadway in the wake of Prohibition, the off-the-arm cafeterias, the phony auction parlors, the medicine shows and two-bit photographers, the cut-rate haberdasheries, the drugstores and bookstores that lined both sides of the street between Forty-second and Fifty-third. Through it all, Tracy’s mind was never far from his appointment with Franklin Sargent on Monday, and he insisted that Bumby accompany him.
The entrance to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts was at the northeast corner of Carnegie Hall, Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, a modest portal alongside the grand Italianate entrance to America’s preeminent concert hall. The president’s office was on the first floor, as it had been since the academy’s move to the hall in 1896. Franklin Haven Sargent had founded the AADA as the Lyceum School of Acting in 1884, the first institution in the United States created expressly for the purpose of dramatic instruction. Now sixty-six, Sargent was still at the helm, personally passing on all admissions and teaching the course in Classic Drama that was the cornerstone of the school’s curriculum. A taciturn man, Sargent asked Tracy if he had brought “anything like a skit.” Tracy produced his copy of Sintram, and when he suggested the passage would work best with two actors, Sargent agreed to read the lines of Gunhilde. Bumby settled back to watch as Tracy assumed the posture of the brooding Sintram, frail and listless.
I have always lived here, as you know, little comrade … In that old house just the other side of the cliff, I was born; weighed down with riches and an untarnished name. My people had intermarried closely … no strong, vital peasant’s blood ran through my veins … My mother’s bedroom faced the ocean, so the first sound which reached my ears was the moan of the sea. My mother died when I was born, so the sea became my mother and sang her lullabies to me until I fell asleep, stilled by her soft crooning…
As Tracy spoke, Sargent scribbled notes on an evaluation form: Personality “sensitive & masculine”…Stage Presence “good (not technically)”…Voice “untrained but natural”…Pronunciation “Fair”…Reading “a little declamatory yet sincere”…Spontaneity “good”…Versatility and Characterization “passable”…Distinction “good”…Pantomime “crude but manly”…Dramatic Instinct “fair underdeveloped”…Intelligence “good”…Imagination “good.” When he finished, Sargent gave Tracy a long piercing look and said, “Yes, yes, yes.”
He initiated a discussion of finances: tuition for the Academy