Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [65]
Rehearsals for The Baby Cyclone commenced immediately, its first performance scheduled for Atlantic City on August 8, 1927. In the cast were Grant Mitchell as Joseph Meadows, a hapless banker, Natalie Moorhead, his fiancée, and Nan Sunderland, a newlywed named Jessie. Tracy played Gene Hurley, Jessie’s pugnacious husband, a man who buys his wife a Pekingese and then watches helplessly as it quickly takes first position in their marriage. One day, Hurley takes the dog for a walk and gives it away to the first woman who admires it. The ensuing argument between him and Jessie draws in Meadows, a complete stranger, and Hurley gives him a black eye for his trouble. Meadows bundles the hysterical Jessie off to his house, where he learns the woman Hurley gave the dog to was in fact Lydia, the girl he is planning to marry. And, as did Jessie, Lydia babies the dog, whose name is Cyclone because he was born in a storm.
Cohan wrote Hurley as another side of Jimmy Wilkes, the peripheral character Tracy had played so vividly in Yellow. As was Wilkes, Hurley is an accountant, newly married, but where Wilkes’ challenges were desperate and peculiar to a newlywed, Hurley’s are patently ridiculous, and over the course of the play they afflict three generations of households. Hurley was the kind of character Cohan always took for himself—cocky, talented, bound for great things. Sam Forrest was the credited director on Baby Cyclone, but both he and Cohan were concurrently staging The Merry Malones, an elaborate musical in which Cohan was also starring, and the two men worked as a tag team throughout the rehearsal process.
“I’ve forgotten what exactly I did,” Tracy said some thirty years later. “[I] cocked my head over or limped or some goddamn thing, and George M. said, ‘What are you doing? What have you got your head over for?’
“I said, ‘Well, I, ah, Mr. Cohan, I thought I’d sort of, ah, characterize it.’
“He said, ‘You’d thought you’d what?’
“I said, ‘I thought I’d, you know, kind of characterize it.’ ”
“Oh, oh …” said Cohan, now nodding wisely.
“Then he took me aside and said, ‘Now you cock your head back where it was before—when I wrote this part for you. And quit walking with that club foot.’ Or whatever the hell I did. ‘If I want an actor like that I can go out on the street and get five-hundred of them for twelve dollars!’ ”
Once Cohan had Tracy’s attention, he showed him how he himself would play the part, restlessly pacing the stage, his hat cocked down over his right eye, throwing out lines as if they were wisecracks. Mastering the text was easy for Tracy, and although he had the most lines in the play, he considered Grant Mitchell’s part the more difficult of the two. “Listening, to me, is the great art in acting,” he said in an interview.
In five seasons of stock I’ve played a lot of leading men who talked most of the time, but never had to listen. It’s a lot easier to talk than to listen. In this play I talk a lot. Grant Mitchell does the listening … Do you think that I could possibly put over some of my long speeches if Grant Mitchell were not really listening to me? Suppose he let his mind dwell on football games, the horse races, or his supper engagement? Do you think for a moment that I would not feel it and let down unconsciously? And believe me, it would not take an audience many seconds to slump in its chairs and produce a mild bronchitis from first row to gallery top.
Both Spence and Louise grew close to Grant Mitchell, who expressed an uncommon interest in Johnny, and who revealed one night over dinner that his own sister was deaf. “He gave us her latest letter to read,” Louise remembered. “Newsy, humorous, grammatically perfect, it obviously could not have been written by any other than an intelligent, well-educated, and altogether delightful person. I am sure he must have been amused at our amazement and, yes, excitement. To us, still so ignorant of what the future could hold,