Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [46]
Tracy made his professional debut on the night of January 1, 1923, when he stepped onstage at the Frazee Theatre and wordlessly decorated the third act of R.U.R., a fantasy of mechanized society whose title stood for “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” Within days, Pat had become a super as well: “Spence and I were two of the guys who just stood there in the play while some other guy cried out in stentorian tones, ‘We are the masters of the world.’ And then he said, ‘March,’ and that’s all we did.” After a few weeks, Tracy was given a line to read and his salary was raised to twenty dollars a week. “This was a definite step up to wealth,” said Pat. “It sure aided the exchequer.”
Baseball and theater entrepreneur Henry H. Frazee had assumed management of R.U.R. when it moved to his eponymous theater on Forty-second Street in November 1922, and he planned to tour it on the subway circuit after it had played itself out. There was, however, still life in the show when Frazee was forced to close on February 17, 1923, to make way for another play. With a $9,000 week in the till—the Frazee was a small house—R.U.R. began weeklong stands at theaters such as the Bronx Opera House and Teller’s Shubert, where popular prices and daily matinees enabled him to wring every last remaining dollar from the play. Cast changes were inevitable, and when Domis Plugge stepped away from his role as the first robot, Tracy moved up, garnering four lines and a twenty-five-dollar increase in salary. “Boy, I thought I was really hot stuff when I got that first raise,” he said. “I gave the doorman of the theater a dollar tip on the way out that night. Many times later I wished I could get my hands on it.”
Graduation portrait, American Academy of Dramatic Arts. (AADA)
There was a matinee in Queens to play the day the academy’s graduation exercises took place, and Tracy regretfully missed the experience of having his diploma personally handed him by Franklin Sargent. The scholarship Sargent had arranged for Tracy had brought a young man from promising amateur to trained professional, someone who was now prepared to earn a shaky living on the stage and who, with time, luck, and development, might one day become a star. Some forty years later, when asked to sum up what the AADA had done for him, Tracy responded with the following: “I shall always be grateful to the American Academy for what I was taught there—by Mr. Jehlinger and the other teachers—the value of sincerity and simplicity, unembellished and unintellectualized.”
Pat O’Brien was still at the academy, the junior course having another month yet to run, when Spence began scanning the papers on a daily basis. R.U.R. was a job, but it was hardly acting, and Tracy needed to consider his next move. Time and again he had been told the best education for a young actor was to land a spot in a stock company, mastering a play a week and acting all manner of roles. It was demanding, unforgiving, lowly paid work, but those who could do it and flourish and eventually rise above it were literally ready for anything. March was early for summer companies, which usually got under way in June, but the trades were carrying items about a new company going into White Plains, a mere thirty miles outside of New York City, where the long-shuttered Palace Theatre had been taken by Leonard Wood, son of the famous general. As R.U.R. began its last week on the subway circuit, Tracy took the bold step of wiring the new manager—collect.
“I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Leonard Wood, Jr.,