Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [5]
The man she met on the ride back to White Plains also needed the job. Having just turned twenty-three, he had no credits to speak of, save a four-line bit in R.U.R. and six months of student productions at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He wasn’t a lead, so Weston had never seen him act, but it soon dawned on Louise that she, in fact, had. It was some two months earlier in an afternoon performance at New York’s Lyceum Theatre. “My friend was very apologetic,” she remembered. “It was a student play and she promised someone she’d come and would I come too?” The play was Knut at Roeskilde, a tragedy set in the year 1027. In the cast that day were West Phillips, Olga Brent, Bryan Lycan, and the young man she now knew to be Spencer Tracy.
Kendal Weston had expanded the company to fourteen players for the second week. The play was Jules Eckert Goodman’s The Man Who Came Back, a lurid tale of redemption in the opium dens of Shanghai. Louise would play the drug-addled Marcelle opposite Ernest Woodward, an alumnus of the American Academy who was cast in the title role. Engaged for general business, Tracy was assigned two minor parts in the show, one played almost completely out of sight of the audience. He soon disappeared, and when Louise again saw him, it was at the tiny Nut and Coffee House around the corner on Mamaroneck Avenue, where he was taking a meal that consisted in its entirety of chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream, the combination dripping with chocolate sauce. It became a familiar scene: “If you saw him twice on one day, one time or the other he was sure to be eating cake or ice cream or chocolate sauce, or all three.” At first she noticed him only during breaks, when a small group would go around the corner for doughnuts and buttermilk. They fell easily into conversation, but there was little time for more than an occasional glance.
Louise lacked formal training, but compensated with long hours and a dancer’s instincts. She moved expressively, absorbing the part as she learned her lines. Weston nurtured her over the course of a tense and uncertain week, helping her master a showy but difficult part while leaving Tracy, who had little to do, much to his own devices.
The actors were expected to learn an act a day, with Fridays given over to hair, wardrobe, and nails. On Saturday morning they played the whole thing straight through, one of only two chances they would get before opening on Monday night. The company performed Nice People eight times that week, and those who weren’t yet working ran lines, did their laundry, enjoyed the brief luxury of having their evenings to themselves. The rehearsal on Monday was particularly chaotic. Actors huddled in the lounge of the theater, mumbling their lines, while stagehands hammered the sets together and aimed the lights, a cracked canvas backdrop shimmering with wet paint. It was only after supper that they were briefly allowed onstage to try out props, find their entrances, sit in chairs. Then came time for the stage manager to call, “Half hour!”
The performance that night was before an audience that consisted chiefly of die-hards—those who wanted to be among the first to see the new play and sadists who hoped