Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [44]
The money from the state was doled out at the rate of thirty dollars a month, which would enable the two men to survive only if they shared a room. “We darn near starved there several times,” O’Brien said. “Spence wouldn’t take any more from his family than mine could send me because he wanted us to be on an equal footing.” Bill arrived during the summer of 1922, aiming to start at the academy in October. To commemorate the occasion, he assumed the name of his paternal grandfather and became, for purposes of the stage, Pat O’Brien.
They found quarters on West End Avenue between Ninety-eighth and Ninety-ninth, one block over from Broadway on the Upper West Side. “It was two steep shaky flights up,” O’Brien wrote, “but as Spencer said, ‘It has a ceiling.’ ” Tracy took Pat to a tearoom where the students met for lunch, and in short order Pat was seeing one of Spence’s classmates, a blue-eyed gal from San Francisco named Dolores Graves.
At the academy, Tracy progressed to dramatic analysis, life study, pantomime, and vocal interpretation, playing scenes in the middle of the classroom with other hopeful and impossibly earnest young actors. The term would end with “examination plays” that would give each student at least three good opportunities before faculty to show, after twenty-four weeks of hard work, what he or she could do with a straight part, a comedy part, and a character part. The glut of one-acts came in late August, the students taking full charge of lights, makeup, and costuming, and continued unabated through the first week of September. To nobody’s surprise, Tracy was judged fit to enter the senior class and thereby join the academy stock company, as were fifteen others, among them Sterling Holloway, Kay Johnson, Muriel Kirkland, George Meeker, Monroe Owsley, Ernest Woodward, and Thelma Ritter.
The senior course was the intensive and continuous production of plays, and every week brought a new text, a new part, a new audience of students, instructors, and invited guests. The first three months were spent in the Carnegie Lyceum, the choral space under the Main Hall that Franklin Sargent commandeered upon his arrival in 1896. Seating eight hundred on two levels, it was blasted out of some of the hardest rock on earth. There were no flies, so the scenery had to be slid into place from the wings, but the Carnegie Lyceum had an intimacy few New York theaters could match. When full (which was seldom), the exchange of energy between the actors and the audience—“that breathing, panting mass creature,” as O’Brien referred to it—was extraordinary. The last three months were given over to the mounting of the best of the productions as matinees at Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum Theatre on Forty-fifth Street, where the students could get the experience of working in a major commercial theater, and where the audience would be composed of members of the general public.
In charge of it all was Jehlinger, a flinty old man with large piercing eyes and a voice that could slice through masonry. His vociferous criticisms inspired both awe and terror in his students, and occasionally even murderous impulses. (After a particularly stinging tirade, Edward G. Robinson is said to have heaved a table at him, knocking him flat.) Jehli unnerved almost everyone, yet he never got to Tracy—at least to the point where Tracy would admit as much.
There was, in fact, much in Jehlinger’s teachings that confirmed Tracy’s own instinctive technique, principal among them Jehli’s insistence that the character and the actor must always be one and the same. (“You can’t have two brains in one head or you are a monster!”) The actor was the servant of the character, Jehlinger taught, and it was up to the character to run things, to make the performance inevitable. His mantra was “give in”