Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [43]
The building itself was a stimulating environment, Andrew Carnegie having poured $2 million—roughly nine-tenths of the total cost—into what was conceived as New York’s finest concert venue. The Main Hall was accompanied by two smaller auditoriums—a recital hall underneath and a chamber music hall adjacent. After its opening in 1891, Carnegie added two wings of studio offices and apartments above and around the structure, removing the original roof and building over it. The spaces were typically tall, with enormous windows and skylights; some studios (which often doubled as living spaces) ran the entire length of the building. Artists, such as Frederick E. Church and Edwin Blashfield, shared the building with architects, writers, photographers, dance studios, voice coaches, and the academy, which occupied the first floor of the northeast tower and parts of three upper floors. There was a large room with a raised platform on which the students were taught dancing, fencing, and how to fall gracefully down the steps. The doors to the rooms were usually left open, especially in the summer, and the sounds of piano lessons, recitals, dance workshops, and play rehearsals mingled in the hallways. Spaces were constantly being vacated and upgraded; the walls were eight feet thick in some places.
Two months into the term, Tracy embarked on a campaign to lure Lorraine Foat to New York. He had the academy send her a catalog, then followed up with a letter: “This really is quite the place, the only place, in fact, for one who wishes to follow the stage. Look over the catalog and if there is anything you wish to know further, let me know and I’ll try to give you the dope. You had better come here, Lorraine—you won’t be sorry. The school is recognized by all theatrical people, and nearly all the present stars of the stage are graduates. I have been working mighty hard but enjoy it very much, and I have been encouraged very greatly since coming here.”
Lorraine responded that she’d come in the fall, hesitant to risk her father’s disapproval. Of course, there was no shortage of girls at the school, and acting, if only in character, had become Tracy’s way of relating to them. Sorting through the choices, he took up with a red-haired Texan named Olga Goodman. She was more serious than a lot of the other girls, certainly more talented, but Spence, as she remembered him, was “a very ambitious student” who “actually had little time for fun, and little money.” Their dates consisted of “sandwiches made up at a delicatessen near Carnegie Hall and rides atop a Fifth Avenue bus.”
The matter of money was a sensitive subject, Spence having no real talent for either making or preserving it. His father had agreed to cover his housing costs—no mean concession—and Carroll, who had embarked on a sales career, slipped a little “happy cabbage” into the letters he wrote. It was, however, Bill O’Brien who knew that Wisconsin legislators had authorized cash bonus payments to Badger State veterans, and that they had created an education option that paid up to $1,080 if a vet wanted to continue in school. “We began pulling wires, told the Board we couldn’t get the training we wanted in Wisconsin,” O’Brien said. Bill had played both football and Charley’s Aunt at Marquette, and when his uncle Charlie (who managed Manhattan’s Union Club) invited both him and his mother to spend the summer of 1920 in New York City, he did so gladly and with an eye toward finding work as an actor. “I remained in New York and managed to get on in the merry-merry (a musical comedy chorus), but, after all, I knew that hipping the ballet was not going to teach me to be a Booth or a Barrett.”
That fall, while Spence was working to complete high school at West Division, Bill auditioned for Franklin Sargent and was accepted into the program. Then, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Bill’s father fell ill and he was forced to