Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [61]
“Billy,” said Spence, “I’ve got to tell you,” and he went on to relate how Johnny would wait up for him at night, standing patiently in his crib, his hands gripping the rails, his eyes wide with anticipation. The previous day had been a matinee day, a long day, and when Spence came trudging through the door at a little before midnight, he went straight to bed. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “It was one of those things … In the middle of the night—God knows what time it was—I awoke, and I always leave the door open into the little room with the crib, and I looked in and Johnny was standing in his crib. I’d forgotten to kiss him goodnight.” The ordinary child, he explained, would call “Daddy,” but Johnny couldn’t. “You see, Billy, Johnny can neither hear nor speak.”
Spence scooped the baby up in his arms, hugged him and kissed him extravagantly, handed him his teddy bear and put him back in his crib, where he fell promptly and soundly to sleep. The image stayed with him though, haunted him through the rest of the night.
“God knows,” he said, “how long he’d been standing there.”
Yellow continued through the rest of the year, averaging houses of around $14,000 a week—pretty good considering the discouraging location. (By way of comparison, Broadway, the big nonmusical hit of the season, was averaging $23,000 a week at a theater almost exactly the same size and at the same top price of $3.30 a seat.) Sales began to drop off toward Christmas, then word came down in January that the show would close after a respectable run of seventeen weeks. Having been cast in a Cohan play, Tracy picked up an agent, a Harvard-educated producer and sometime actor named Chamberlain Brown.2 It was Brown who not only saw to it that Tracy had another job within the space of a week, but that he made considerably more money than Cohan would ever pay.
Ned McCobb’s Daughter was the work of the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sidney Howard, a shrewd comedy frankly designed as a vehicle for Howard’s wife, the actress Clare Eames. The Theatre Guild was playing it in repertory with The Silver Cord when actor-manager John Cromwell (who had staged The Silver Cord) set about establishing a second company in Chicago. The plum part of Carrie Callahan, the dowdy sea captain’s daughter, fell to actress Florence Johns, with Cromwell himself taking the part of Babe, the genial bootlegger who also happens to be Carrie’s brother-in-law. Tracy found himself cast in the role of Carrie’s thieving, dim-witted husband George, a part played in New York by Earle Larimore. Commanding the princely rate of $225 a week, Tracy dutifully mailed Chamberlain Brown a twenty-five-dollar money order the first Monday after the opening, enthusing over the quality of the material and making note of the reviews in the Chicago dailies. “I was very happy over mine,” he wrote Brown, “because of the vast difference in this part and the one I played in Yellow. It should mean something for me.”
With Florence Johns in the Chicago company of Ned McCobb’s Daughter, 1927. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
As in New York, the play drew considerably more critical than commercial attention. “Business is only fair,” Tracy advised his agent the following week, “and I do not look for a long engagement. Cromwell is very much discouraged and disgusted. It would be too bad to flop in face of the splendid notices we received.”
With Spence in Chicago, Louise was again approached by W. H. Wright, who had the idea of hiring the two of them as leads in one of his nine companies. “He never believed in this before, but he said, ‘I’ll try it.’ Would the two of us come to Lima and play?” Lima was 230 miles east of Chicago in northwest Ohio, a center of agriculture and heavy industry and, for a brief while, oil. On the circuits,