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By Root 3490 0

week, Tracy was back playing leads, first in Chicken Feed, which had been a modest hit on Broadway the previous season, then in Seven Keys to Baldpate, the old George M. Cohan warhorse, and finally in The Bat, which proved so popular it was held a second week, all opposite Selena’s replacement, actress Georgia Backus. As the season wore on, the Tracys grew to appreciate Brooklyn as a place were they could live as a family, Spence working long hours but without the travel and the financial insecurities that were routinely part of a young actor’s life. They were, in fact, so contented in Brooklyn they never once crossed the bridge into Manhattan the entire time they were there. Louise stayed home with Johnny, just coming to the theater on Mondays to see the new play. “I [was] a hard critic,” she said. “At night when he was in stock, after we were married, he’d go through scenes at home. I’d cue him and I was always honest. I had to be. I’d tell him what I didn’t like and why. His reaction? He’d get mad, but I know I helped him in many instances, [because] he’d change a characterization. I was ahead of him in experience, but he went up very fast.”

Thanksgiving week, when most companies were playing “old boys” (Way Down East and The Old Homestead and other cheap or royalty-free properties), Wright gamely programmed The First Year, Frank Craven’s hit comedy, then followed it with Cohan’s A Prince There Was and The Breaking Point, a new play by Mary Roberts Rinehart, the author of The Bat. For Christmas, he revived Uncle Tom’s Cabin, augmenting the production with “pickaninnies, jubilee singers, and dancers,” all of whom paraded daily down Livingston Street. Nothing in the way of ballyhoo seemed to work for very long though, and by the first week of January, Wright was papering the town with twofers and looking ahead to March and the company’s return to Grand Rapids.

In all, it was a bruising season, costly and unprofitable, but when the Montauk Players closed on March 7, 1925, they had played all twenty-two weeks of their commitment, something of which everyone in the company was justifiably proud. Variety subsequently ran an item summarizing the extraordinary season and its various participants under the headline BROOKLYN NO LONGER MECCA FOR STOCK.

Mercifully, there was considerably more time to make the jump back to Grand Rapids, Wright having set their opening at the Powers for Easter week, giving his company a well-earned interval after forty-three weeks of continuous work. The Tracys went back to Milwaukee, where they could stop with John and Carrie and go easy on their finances. “I don’t think either of us were too good with the money,” Louise admitted, thinking back on that period. “If I have a dollar, I can live on it. If I have a dollar to spend, I’ll spend it … We were always broke after a run. There was never enough.” Moreover, salaries were flat in Grand Rapids, where another company had entrenched itself during Wright’s six-month absence.

The Washington Players specialized in broad melodramas at popular prices, but it was beginning to look as if the Wright company was facing a cruel replay of the Brooklyn debacle on their home turf, and prices were held to a top of $1.10 to counter the competition. There was also the matter of Selena Royle, who demanded a “general utilitywoman” as part of her deal for another season with Papa Wright. To hold the line on costs, the first few shows would be repeats of the most popular plays of the Montauk season, all using scenery trucked in from Brooklyn. The Tracys settled back in at the Browning, and Spence, now officially leading man for the company, was looking forward to a relatively carefree summer. “My salary was steady,” he said, “and it seemed things had opened up for us at last.” He was in rehearsals for the first play of the new season the day Louise, having put the baby down for a nap, made a horrifying discovery.

She and Spence were going out that night, and after a while it occurred to her that if Johnny napped too long, the babysitter might have trouble getting