Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [71]
John Tracy had found such joy in his four-year-old grandson, his little victories and pleasures and the sounds he made to represent words. Around the house, Johnny had names for the people he loved, vocal labels that derived from the words he could say. Mumum was his name for Grandmother Tracy, Mum (pronounced “Moom”) for his grandaunt Emma. One was his teddy bear. His nurse came again in November, the one who had been with him in Grand Rapids and at Lake Delavan, and although her name was Eleanor Lystad, she became Sss at first, then Sis.
Eleanor’s arrival, along with the costs of the Wright Oral School, put yet another burden on the family finances. Spence scared up a week of stock on Long Island, but was forced to borrow $1,000 from his mother until he could find steadier work. He gave her an IOU at 6 percent interest, but the whole matter upset Carrie so greatly she worried that Spencer would be unable to support his family. Then Johnny broke his leg, the result of a fall while playing in the park, and was in the hospital for six straight weeks. Arrangements had to be made for one of his teachers to go to his bedside for a short period each day to keep up his speech and lipreading, which otherwise would have suffered sharp relapses.
Pat O’Brien saw enough of Spence at the Lambs—too much, for he too was out of work—to know the spiritual toll unemployment was taking on his old friend. “An unemployed actor becomes a different person,” he said. “His morale sags, he wears a haunted look. The burden of the ages sits on his shoulders as he gossips with other unemployed actors.” When Lester Bryant, a brother Lamb who was married to actress Edna Hibbard, announced one day that he was going to organize a new stock company, Pat walked him around the clubhouse until he had engaged practically his entire company—William Boyd, Frank McHugh, O’Brien himself, Tracy, of course. Spence had sworn he wouldn’t play stock again that winter—had, in fact, turned down a season with the George Cukor company in Rochester—but he was plainly out of options and desperate for income. O’Brien, McHugh, and he performed in the Lambs Kid Gambol on December 16, then passed the hat for traveling money and entrained to Baltimore, where the Auditorium Players would open Christmas Eve in a gangster melodrama called Tenth Avenue.
Nineteen twenty-eight had been a rough year, but 1929 would be rougher still. The run of the Auditorium Players lasted just three weeks. (“But,” said Frank McHugh, “it was a rip-roaring three weeks!”) Leaving Baltimore put Tracy on a seemingly endless rotation of two- and three-week stands, unsure of where his next job would come from, breathing life into mediocre material and occasionally making it sing. Returning home to New York, he wired his mother in Freeport and said that he had “several things in view,” and did in fact land a part in a play called Scars on February 6.
With Albert Van Dekker in Conflict, 1929. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Backed by New York retailer Hiram Bloomingdale and authored by Warren Lawrence, the brother of Boston golf crack and playwright Vincent Lawrence, Scars ran the arc of an American serviceman’s career from draftee to flight commander to peacetime has-been. Out of town, the lead actor had been a toothy twenty-seven-year-old named Clark Gable. He was well received, giving, in the words of one critic, “a true-to-life picture of a man who hit heights of glory and then slid to the bottom of the pile.” The play was choppy, though, full of awkward stage waits that undercut the psychology of the piece. “I didn’t like my part,” Gable later said. “I hadn’t been able to get anything out of it. In Springfield I handed in my notice; I wanted to leave just as soon as they could get another actor up from New York to take my place—and it couldn