Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [66]
Louise and Johnny went down to Atlantic City for the first performance of The Baby Cyclone and stayed the entire week. The new show brought forth “gales of laughter and storms of applause,” but Cohan nevertheless decided it was too long. The next morning, he was back in the theater “before the janitor” (as Tracy recalled it) and had the entire play revised in the space of six hours. “If an actor didn’t ‘feel’ his lines,” said Tracy, “[Cohan] crossed ’em out and re-wrote them on the spot.”
From Atlantic City the company moved to Boston for four weeks, and Louise and Johnny followed. When Allienne Treadwell learned his daughter and grandson were going to be there, he insisted they see Dr. Harvey Cushing, a noted brain specialist and another of his Yale classmates. Dr. Cushing made a cursory examination of the boy and said he was quite sure there was no brain tumor or other condition he could possibly treat. He did, however, minister to Louise’s spirit, and one thing he said to her would stay with her for the rest of her life: “You are blessed above all mothers. Yours can be a very interesting life.”
The New York opening of The Baby Cyclone took place on September 12, 1927, the show packing snugly into Henry Miller’s 950-seat theater on West Forty-third Street. No construction crews impeded the flow of traffic, and Pat O’Brien, in the midst of a dry spell, was hard-pressed to afford a seat in the balcony. Then, having forgone the expense of a shave, he found it almost impossible to get past the backstage doorman after the show. “And I’ll admit I did look like a bum,” he said.
So [the doorman] wouldn’t pay any attention to me. But finally, he turned his back and I sneaked in. I had heard the doorman telling the boys in the tuxedos and the tails that Spencer’s dressing room was on the second floor, so I went up. But his dressing room wasn’t all I found. I discovered that the son-of-a-gun had a Japanese dresser. This Jap was posted outside the dressing room door, and when I told him to tell Mr. Tracy his pal was outside, he held up his hand in horror. “No—no—go ’way. Room full of nice mans—you go ’way.” I told him I’d start yelling “fire” if he didn’t take my message. So he went inside, shaking his head and muttering. And then you should have seen those “nice mans” come out of there. You never saw so many stiff shirts pouring out of one place in your life. When Spence heard I was there, he told them someone had called that he had to talk business with, and he herded ’em all out. Then he rushed out and grabbed me. He pulled me in and said: “Listen, you mick, what did you think of it? It’s your opinion I want to hear.”
With Grant Mitchell in The Baby Cyclone. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Pat’s opinion was the same as everyone else’s: the show was a scream, an expert farce in which the spirit of George M. Cohan loomed large over the entire affair—his words, his cast, and, in many respects, his presence in the form of an actor named Spencer Tracy. With The Baby Cyclone a hit on Broadway, Cohan brought The Merry Malones in just behind it. A trademark pastiche of sentiment, flag waving, and pure unadulterated hokum, it was crowd-pleasing, if not revolutionary, theater from a master showman. Tracy came to regard Cohan as a kind of spiritual father, a man who recognized his gifts when his own father could not, and who applauded them, at the same time helping to nurture them. “He thought the world of George M. Cohan,” Chuck Sligh said. “He was his sort of hero.”
Tracy marveled at Cohan’s energy and stamina, watching him sit at the piano for five or six hours a day, poking out tunes with one finger, playing a performance in the evening, holding court in his dressing room afterward, and then going home to draft an act in yet another new play. And Tracy’s feelings for Cohan were reciprocated; when Cohan inscribed a picture to him, he wrote, “To Spencer Tracy, A guy after my own heart.”
Deciding they needed more of a home than a hotel room could ever be,