Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [54]
Spence passed the rest of the season in alternating fits of acceptance and denial, convinced Johnny would never speak and yet blindly hopeful that a miracle of either science or faith would somehow intervene. Lacking guidance, or even a definitive diagnosis, he and Louise settled into a pattern of treating Johnny as if he were perfectly normal in every respect. “We talked to him,” Louise said, “just exactly as we would have done if he had heard … I told him nursery rhymes, I sang to him, we did everything which, of course, was just right, but I just fell into that because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”
Selena left The Green Hat at the end of its Chicago run, unhappy with the part, and returned to Grand Rapids to holiday at Camp Lake, north of town, with her parents and her sister, the actress Josephine Royle. It was there the idea was hatched to premiere her father’s new play, a tragedy of modern Washington titled Set Free, at the Regent with Spence in the role of an idealistic young senator and Selena as the political operative he loves but can never marry. Tracy put off a tonsillectomy to do the show, and Selena saw that a change had come over him in the six weeks since she had last seen him. His sober mood suited the dark circumstances of Set Free (which ended with the suicide of Selena’s character) and the opening on August 3rd was a major event. The house was sold out, quite a stunt for a 1,700-seat theater on a Monday night. Several New York producers were in town to see the play, among them Earle Boothe, who was riding high as producer of the big Broadway comedy success Is Zat So? Boothe didn’t think much of Set Free, and although Selena was the recipient of all the floral tributes—great banks of flowers draped over the footlights to honor her homecoming—it was Tracy’s earnest performance as the straight-arrow politico that impressed him.
After the show they talked; Boothe and his partners, actors James Gleason and Ernest Truex, were unhappy with the work of Paul Kelly, who was set to play the juvenile lead in a new Broadway-bound western called The Sheepman. It wasn’t the material that appealed to Tracy, even though the play had emerged from Harvard’s famed 47 Workshop. It was the stark validation of a Broadway role that excited him, and the chance to get off the treadmill of stock, where, for the sake of security, a lot of good actors frittered their best years away in places like Pittsburgh and Grand Rapids. The two men shook hands, and Tracy went off to Milwaukee to have his tonsils removed. Upon his return to work a week later, he tendered his notice.
They left Johnny with his grandparents and made their way east to New York, where rehearsals for The Sheepman were already in progress. The announcement of Tracy’s resignation did not sit well with the Broadway Players. “It shook everybody up,” said Emily Deming. “It was a scene you could remember for a long time. Nobody was very happy except Spencer. Of course, he was leaving to do what he wanted to do. He had no consideration for the person who had given him his start, looked after him, kept him on.” Louise would always remember Papa Wright’s reaction: “That good-for-nothing! I took him practically out of the gutter with his one blue suit—which he is still wearing!”
The Sheepman wasn’t worth the trouble. The playwright was a first-time author named Charlotte Chorpenning, who would later find her dramatist’s voice as the author of children’s plays. Her only work for adults was overlong, obvious, dull, and when Louise was finally able to read the thing—too late to talk Spence out of it—she thought it very poor indeed. The first break-in performance took place in Stamford, Connecticut, on October 9, 1925, and ran upwards of three hours. The reviewer in the Stamford Advocate found it “gripping” and Tracy “likable” as the sheepman’s supposed son, Jack Roberts, but a more savvy notice in Variety thought it dreadful. Drastic surgery and a week’s stand in New Haven failed to improve it, and after twelve performances the new