Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [45]
Tracy’s first appearance before a New York audience took place on October 20, 1922, when he acted in a curtain-raiser called The Wedding Guests at the Carnegie Lyceum. Three days later, on October 23, Lorraine came for her tryout and found that he was still keyed up: “Here was Spence, pacing up and down in front, watching. Why was I late? ‘You can’t afford to miss this time that was all set up for you.’ And when I got out of this taxi, ‘It must have cost you a fortune! You should have come on the streetcar!’ So we went right up and had the audition. I remember where I sat … I was kind of nervous about that. And then [Mr. Sargent] said, ‘Do this scene,’ and we did the whole play.” The play, of course, was The Valiant, and once again came the tension and the desperate seeking, and once again came the tears. Sargent didn’t have to pretend; he was genuinely impressed. He wrote “good” for most every line item on Lorraine’s audition sheet. It was, in fact, an altogether better evaluation than Tracy himself had received some seven months earlier. She was acceptable for the January course, Sargent affirmed, and he said, in fact, that he would like to meet the man who trained such outstanding prospects.
Tracy was relieved, even jubilant, and to celebrate they joined up with Pat and Dolores and went to 790 West End for hot dogs. “We didn’t have anything very fancy,” Lorraine recalled. “We had to climb a flight of stairs to get to this apartment these two boys were living in, and they did use the gas flame in the gas lights to cook their hot dogs. They didn’t have a regular stove. I was so impressed with these two fellows trying to cook a meal for us. We had a wonderful time talking; Pat was fun to be with.”
They took her back to the train with the expectation that she would be back after the first of the year, when she would see Spence onstage at the Lyceum and aspire to the same thing for herself. Pat started at the academy just as Spence was rehearsing The Wooing of Eve, a full-length play in which he had been assigned the second male lead. In quick succession, he did The Importance of Being Earnest (with Sterling Holloway in the lead); Milne’s Wurzel-Flummery, a whimsical one-act; and Knut at Roeskilde, a two-act tragedy. O’Brien, meanwhile, immersed himself in the junior course, drawing on Spence’s prior experience and his availability to run lines. “Pat and I used to read lines to each other, rearrange the furniture and pace back and forth doing bits of business as if we were in front of the footlights,” Tracy recounted. “The other roomers used to yell at us to shut up.”
The total immersion demanded by the program was only intensified by a profound lack of money. “That $30 a month didn’t go very far,” Tracy said. “I was broke several days before the end of each month. So I studied dramatics as I’d never studied anything before in my life. Always in the back of my mind was the idea that I’d never have enough money to finish the course, and that I’d better learn all I could as fast as possible.”
Times became especially desperate toward Christmas, when Pat and Spence made the decision to forgo food altogether in order to see John Barrymore in Hamlet. They went a total of four times. “Dear God,” said Pat, “what an actor!” Tracy once told actor Robert Ryan he would wait near the stage door of the Broadhurst Theatre just to watch Lionel Barrymore leave at the end of the evening. “He couldn’t afford to see him act on stage,” as Ryan remembered it, “but at least he could watch and see him walk out of the theater.”
After missing