Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [7]
Louise was staying at the Gedney Farm Hotel, a three-hundred-acre resort just outside of town, and she returned there most days for dinner. Wood traded courtesies with Edward H. Crandall, the hotel’s general manager, whose handsome son fancied himself an actor. In exchange for an occasional bit or a walk-on for Eddie Jr., the principal players of Wood’s company could rub elbows with bankers, stockbrokers, and international celebrities at boardinghouse prices.
And so one Sunday, Louise invited Spence to dinner at the nautically themed dining room of the Gedney.
Louise Ten Broeck Treadwell was born in 1896 in New Castle, Pennsylvania, where her grandfather, George Edwards Treadwell, had founded the New Castle News. Her father, Allienne Treadwell, practiced law and owned the Treadwell News Company, an agency for out-of-town newspapers. Louise was a serious, bookish child whose greatest pleasure was the company of adults. She matured into a classic beauty, milky complexion, chestnut hair, soft gray-blue eyes, one of the most popular girls in high school, a suffragist and a varsity basketball star.
Her mother, Bright Smith, was a tiny woman of high ideals who sold baked goods to make ends meet when Allienne deserted the family in 1913. The following year, Bright’s eighteen-year-old daughter announced her intention to go to New York. “Mother loved the theatre and was torn,” Louise said. “She didn’t really want me to go into the theatre, but if this was what I had to do … And it was what I had to do. Never any question. From the time I was ten, or even earlier, I was saving photos and old programs. My mother took me to the nickelodeon and to any number of good plays … touring companies of The Merry Widow and The Red Mill … I saw Elsie Janis and Montgomery and Stone … New Castle was on a good theater circuit, along the route to Chicago.”
Bright had been the soprano soloist at an Episcopal church in Pittsburgh and was afraid Louise wouldn’t get work in New York unless she knew how to sing. Loath to say anything herself that could be construed as discouraging, she consulted the local rector, an infinitely practical man, and asked him to make the case instead. “Louise has a small voice,” she confided, ticking off the challenges, both economic and moral, a young girl would surely face alone in the big city. The rector listened gravely and commiserated and did indeed speak to Louise, but, sensing her determination, couldn’t say very much to sway her.
“What it must have cost my mother to let me go!” Louise marveled. “She and my father were divorced, so it was doubly her decision. I was so naive—she knew that—and I had virtually no experience, just one little musical show in high school.” She stayed with cousins on Long Island, had her first ride on the elevated, and almost immediately got a job in vaudeville. “I could sing and I could dance, and there I was in some old theater down around Fourteenth Street singing, ‘By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea …’ The leading lady said, ‘Honey, have you ever put on makeup?’ and since I never had, she showed me how. I made quite an entrance: I tripped and fell flat at the first matinee performance, but I got up and went right on.”
The show lasted a week, then Louise’s luck dried up. Her cousins thought she should go home and teach dancing, so they staked her to a series of lessons with the Castles, where she learned the fox-trot and the two-step. Once she had a diploma, she returned to New Castle to teach ballroom dancing. She staged some children’s shows, the mothers making the costumes themselves, then enrolled in the Lake Erie College for Women. “I really had no desire to go to college,” she admitted, “but I’m glad I did. There was, for example, an excellent course in English composition, and I learned