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By Root 3514 0

“And then he got sicker. Weak. And scared. He’d look at me beggingly—as though I could help if I wanted to. I’d see him wince. Once, visiting, I heard him crying out in the other room … Nothing to do but wait and suffer and wait and wait.” Prior to opening in Chicago, Whispering Friends played a six-night stand in Newark, and Spence made the commute into town by rail. Saturday being a matinee day, he was at the theater between performances when advised of his father’s imminent passing. The news also reached Cohan in Monroe, where his own mother was near death, and at once he came, spending an entire hour alone with Spence, his hand on his shoulder, the call boy pounding insistently on the door. Back in Manhattan, Louise stayed with Mother Tracy at their hotel on East Eighty-sixth Street, stroking her hand. She spent a couple of minutes with John—he was conscious but did not speak—and then left the two of them alone. The end came peacefully at 6:15 in the evening, just as Cohan was racing to Spence’s side.2 Tracy played the performance that night as usual, and afterward found a taxi waiting outside to take him to the station.

They brought John’s body back to Freeport the following Monday, and a viewing was held in the evening at the Wiese & Temple Funeral Church on Main Street. The funeral mass was celebrated at 9:30 the next morning at St. Mary’s on Piety Hill, where John had served Mass as a child and where his father’s altar still stood. Although she and her cousin Frank didn’t have to go to the Rosary, Jane Feely would remember the awful sadness of the place, the black veils all the women wore and the crush of people, the prayers, the eating, the drinking. The cemetery was in the process of being expanded, and there was no space for John in the Tracy plot. Andrew Tracy managed to arrange a temporary grave in the middle of the grounds, and it was there that John Edward Tracy, aged fifty-four years, seven months, and five days, was buried. There would be time for laughter and remembrance afterward, but not for Spence, who had to catch up with the Whispering Friends company in Chicago and give a performance that evening.

It was a blessing for him not to have to go straight back to New York, with its familiar terrain and its constant reminders of his father’s absence. The following day, Andrew Tracy’s wife, Spence’s aunt Mame, brought Aunt Jenny and Cousin Jane in on the train to see the matinee performance of Whispering Friends. Jane was eleven at the time and thought Spence’s tiny dressing room, with its makeup mirror bordered in lightbulbs, nothing short of magnificent. “Did you really think I was any good?” he pressed the women, almost childlike in his need for reassurance, and they both told him he was just wonderful. “Talent isn’t all that you have to have,” he said sagely, echoing one of Cohan’s admonitions. “You have to have personality. That’s the thing that’s important. A good personality.” They talked about the future and where he would go next and how his life had inexorably changed with the death of his father. And then they all sat in his dressing room at the Illinois Theatre and wept.

At length he told them about the previous day, when, arriving at the theater, he saw his name in lights for the first time in his life. At considerable expense, Cohan had wired ahead and ordered star billing, which involved tearing down all the posters around town and putting up new ones that displayed the name of Spencer Tracy in ten-inch letters. The press notices and programs all had to be changed—all in tribute to John Tracy and the tradition that the show must go on and to the fact that his son was now, despite all prognostications to the contrary, a big shot.

To four generations of actors, dramatists, composers, producers, managers, scenic designers, librettists, and press agents, the heart of the Times Square theater district wasn’t Forty-second and Broadway or the Winter Garden or even the stretch of pavement between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth Streets known as Shubert Alley, but rather a six-story facade of red