Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [47]
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1 Clemens E. “Foam” Lueck was the college bandmaster.
2 Tracy, headstrong, went his own way when Boody’s admonitions failed to suit him. “He never used make-up,” Ken Edgers remembered, “because of the deep lines in his forehead, even at 20. Also, his eyebrows did not seem to be in the right place for eyebrow accent.”
3 The moving picture version of The Truth was filmed in 1920 by Samuel Goldwyn. Madge Kennedy played the part of Becky Warder and Tom Carrigan played Tom.
CHAPTER 4
The Best Goddamned Actor
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It was to Michigan that Spencer Tracy returned as Selena Royle’s leading man in the summer of 1924. But his ultimate destination, the one always front and center in his mind, was New York. Playing with actors of Selena’s caliber kept him on his game, and, happily, Mr. Wright had plans to sustain the Broadway Players during the winter hiatus in Grand Rapids when the Powers Theatre was given over to touring shows and holiday pageants.
In the days just after the turn of the century, when Wright was press agent for Henry W. Savage, the New York borough of Brooklyn had a reputation as an extraordinarily good stock town, supporting as it did both the Spooner family of actors at the Park Avenue Theatre and Corse Payton’s renowned company, which originated the ten-twenty-thirty scale of pricing and gave two shows a day at Payton’s Lee Avenue theater. The Spooners and Payton were long gone by 1924, but the reputation lingered and attracted Wright to the notion of leasing the Montauk Theatre on Livingston Street and moving his company to Brooklyn until the Powers was once again available.
In recent times, the Montauk had housed road attractions and actor Walter Hampden in repertory. Two competing companies, the Alhambra Players (at the Loew’s house of the same name) and the James Carroll Players at the Fifth Avenue, were already established, but Wright was banking on Selena Royle’s undeniable appeal to trump the competition. He limited his initial commitment for the shuttered Montauk to four weeks, but held an option on the balance of the season if Selena and the company got over as hoped.
The Broadway Players closed in Grand Rapids on September 15, 1924, ending their twenty-one-week season with a net loss of about $7,000—half of which was borne by Harry G. Sommers, who held the long-term lease on the theater. Tracy, Selena Royle, Arthur Kohl, and the other remaining players left for New York the next morning, where they would have less than a week to get the first play of the new season on its feet.
Renamed the Montauk Players, the company opened on Monday, September 22, but it wasn’t until the second week of the stand that they got much attention. Selena took star billing in Anna Christie opposite Frank Shannon (from the original Broadway production) and Tracy played the relatively minor role of a longshoreman in Johnny the Priest’s waterfront saloon. As was now typical for a Wright company, the production was exemplary (“a credit to dramatic stock,” as Billboard put it) and Selena’s handling of the part was everything it was supposed to be, widely praised and fervently applauded.
After a couple of weeks, Louise, who had stopped off in New Castle, arrived in Brooklyn with the baby. She found Spence, used to lead roles, biding his time as Wright did everything possible to draw patrons to the Montauk.
Selena signed on to a Broadway tryout as Wright knew she might, given that she had refused to play the winter in Grand Rapids (or any stock for that matter) and his choice of Brooklyn had been in part an accommodation in creating for her a New York showcase. The crowds weren’t there as they had been in Grand Rapids, though, and so when her four-week guarantee expired, she stepped away under the most diplomatic of terms, promising to return if the new play failed to work out as she hoped.
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