Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [57]
The photo was the idea of Charles R. Sligh, Jr., the twenty-year-old scion to the famous furniture builder, who had joined the firm just out of college and was looking for ways to pump up sales. Edith and Spence went out to the factory, where Taliaferro slipped between the satin sheets and Tracy, in a three-piece business suit, sat on an adjoining stool, book in hand, pretending to read to her. Chuck Sligh and Spence hit it off immediately, the Tracys not having made many friends in Grand Rapids. “He was a very nice young man,” Louise said of Chuck, who was both affable and unabashed. “They took us out to the country club and we met quite a few people.” When Wright announced a ten-week break for the Players, Spence stepped away from the company early to spend time at a cottage the Slighs had rented for the summer at Gun Lake.
Louise helped arrange Spence’s absence by stepping into the final two weeks of the season herself. The first week’s attraction was Happiness, which she had once played in Chicago, and in which she would now take the role of Jenny, the little dressmaker’s apprentice created by J. Hartley Manners for his wife, the great Laurette Taylor. The part was a formidable one—110 sides—and Taylor had played it practically in monologue. The audience wasn’t huge on opening night, but Louise so completely disappeared into the character that Clarence Dean (whose notice in the Herald ran under the headline LAURETTE TAYLOR HAS WORTHY FOLLOWER) was astonished at how someone as tall and athletic could suggest a girl so small and winsome.1
Emily, who had never before seen Louise onstage, pronounced her “an infinitely better actress” than Selena Royle. “Selena was a very pretty woman,” she said, “and she had good stage sense and a good voice and used it well, but she was not a ‘depth’ actress. Louise was. She wasn’t as pretty by any manner or means, and Selena projected herself well and Louise did not. Selena sparkled; Louise had no sparkle. She was solid business.” But like Laurette Taylor, Louise could place a whisper in the back row of the topmost gallery. “I used to have to check the house to see whether they could be heard,” Emily said. “It had a balcony beyond the balcony like all the old opera houses did. They sold the seats then … every matinee was sold out. I used to have to go check, and I never had to check her. Her voice carried.”
Louise’s second week—the company’s last—was as Peggy Fairfax, the sporty and palpitating heroine of the farce steeplechase comedy Hottentot. She was so good—and had such fun—that Papa Wright asked her to consider playing a full season opposite Spence in one of his new companies.
The Tracys relinquished their tiny apartment at the Browning, where Johnny had celebrated his second birthday, gone to his first party, tasted his first ice cream cone. They took their son to Lake Delavan, Wisconsin, where John and Carrie Tracy had a summer cottage, and where, surrounded by his grandmother, grandfather, a grandaunt, and a number of their friends, he would be spoiled shamelessly while his parents enjoyed the first genuine vacation of their married life.
It lasted all of a week.
Spence spent most of it either in the lake or on it, piloting a decrepit speedboat that seemed to absorb him endlessly. Then a telegram arrived: Selena Royle had landed a role in a new play for George M. Cohan called Yellow, and it now looked as if there might be a part for Spence as well. This would be his third shot at Broadway. “It was a reprieve,” he said, “a message from Garcia.” And if it didn’t work out, he told Louise, he wouldn’t be going back to stock—he’d get into some “regular” business instead. “It was by far the best opportunity he had had,” Louise said, “and he was off immediately. John and I stayed on at Delavan.”
Yellow was a modernized version of Within the Law, the work of a first-time playwright named Margaret Vernon. The Shuberts, who owned the script, had just done a complicated deal with Cohan that involved the exclusive