Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [56]
I felt that here was to be my last stand. We were there for almost an hour. He took John’s history in minute detail. He made by far the most thorough examination ever made. Then he sat me down and talked to me. His findings were practically those of everybody else: It was nerve deafness, cause undetermined, for which there was no known treatment or cure. But, for the first time, I was told something to do about it. He told me to whom I should go [and] the names of the schools—the Wright Oral School and the Lexington Avenue School for the Deaf, both in New York City, happened to be the ones he mentioned—where I could get the information I should have. He told me some of the wonderful things [the] schools were doing. He told me that one day John would be able to talk.
It seemed as I went out that at least half the weight over my heart was gone. For the moment, at least, our troubles were negligible. I walked on air. Now I had something I could do. And one day John would talk!
Tracy rejoined the Broadway Players on February 2, 1926, when rehearsals began for Seven Keys to Baldpate. The new leading woman of the company was Helen Joy, a competent actress who would go on to a brief career in New York. Tracy didn’t fill the theater for his homecoming, but was grandly received nevertheless, a respectable crowd braving snow flurries to see him. Business was tepid the first eight weeks. Radio was cutting into stock audiences nationwide, and it was only What Price Glory—with Papa Wright’s solemn curtain speeches the week before, warning the easily shocked to stay away, and Tracy’s star turn as the battle-weary Captain Flagg—that filled the Regent on a Monday night. The following week, convinced the smaller theater would make for happier audiences, Wright announced his company’s move back to the Powers, as well as the return of Selena Royle, who would manage the transition, appearing the last week at the Regent in her father’s play The Struggle Everlasting and the first week at the Powers in an import called Stolen Fruit.
Selena raced onstage the night of April 5, her hair streaming wildly, and had to wait several minutes for the applause to subside enough for her to speak her first lines. She was, as usual, the center of the play, and when the flowers went over the footlights at the close of the third act, she was buried in them and Spence and Bill Laveau held the surplus over her head. The allegorical play—Selena played “Body” to Tracy’s “Mind” and Clifford Dunstan’s “Soul”—didn’t do well, but the Royles stayed another two weeks in Grand Rapids, Selena inaugurating a new “guest star” policy at the Powers that brought William Faversham to town the following week in her father’s greatest stage success, The Squaw Man. The move back to the Powers restored Sunday performances to the company, and Wright, hoping to get the drop on a competing troupe, moved opening nights to Sundays, something not often done in stock because of the difficulty of scaring up last-minute props and supplies on the Sabbath.
With guest stars playing one-week stands at the Powers, both Helen Joy and Tracy were relegated to supporting roles, making neither of them happy. Drag comic Tommy Martelle was followed by Nance O’Neil, Harry Beresford, Edmund Breese, and actor-playwright J. C. Nugent. Joy left after O’Neil’s two-week stay and was replaced by Peggy Conway, late of the Garrick Gaieties. Together, Tracy and Conway filled a hole in the schedule with the popular character comedy The Family Upstairs, Spence serving as the company’s “guest star” for that particular week. Edith Taliaferro came to the Powers the following week with Polly of the Circus, and when she was asked by the Sligh Furniture Company to pose for a picture with a prize-winning bedroom