Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [73]
Tracy blamed Albee’s general manager—a man called Foster Lardner—whose sense of material was seemingly infallible but whose ideas of what actors were suited to what parts were rigidly traditional. Tracy was a fine actor, Lardner acknowledged, but lacked the profile of a leading man. “The women don’t want to come to see you at the matinee,” he told Tracy in letting him go, “but it wouldn’t surprise me if someday you became a great motion picture star.”
“How the hell can I do that,” Tracy responded, “if I don’t have any sex appeal?”
He was terminated with two weeks’ salary and spent much of August at liberty, waiting for the new season to come together in New York. He spent his afternoons at the Lambs, saw Johnny principally at dinner and on Sundays. All sorts of projects took shape at the club—ideas for plays, songs that needed writing, schemes to keep working. A year earlier, Jack McGowan had formed a loose partnership with Joe Santley, who was secretary of the club, and Theodore Barter, to produce their own plays and the plays of brother Lambs. In October they had signed Tracy to appear in a postwar tragicomedy McGowan was writing called Nigger Rich. Spirits ran high until the first production of Santley, Barter & McGowan hit the boards, a melodrama from Johnny Meehan titled The Lady Lies. It lasted twenty-four performances, putting a quick end to plans for the McGowan play until Lee Shubert embraced it the following summer.
Retitled Parade, it had a week at Greenwich, where Chamberlain Brown had a stock company. Shubert thought the play had potential, but butted heads with the author over its provocative original title. Unilaterally, Shubert changed the title to True Colors, a move which so incensed McGowan that he threatened to withdraw it. Shubert backed down, but the staging of the play by its headstrong author was, by common agreement, careless at best. After one invitation-only preview, during which the crowd’s mood went from hope to despair, it premiered at the Royale to largely negative reviews and was yanked after eight days—something of a record for the distinguished members of Cohan’s inner circle.
Tracy had plans to step away from Nigger Rich before the white slip appeared on the call board, as Sam Harris had contracted him for a play called Dread. The work of Owen Davis, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of nearly a hundred plays, Dread was the aptly titled study of a young man’s disintegration into madness, a graphic look at how the caustic effects of fear and a guilty conscience can do both emotional and physical damage to a man. Tracy, with the highest of hopes for the role, began rehearsals under the author’s direction on September 30, Madge Evans, Miriam Doyle, and Frank Shannon working in support. The first performance took place at Washington’s Belasco Theatre on the night of October 20.
There were no real heroes in Dread, only the amoral Perry Crocker and a pair of willing victims. On the eve of Crocker’s wedding to the frail Olive Ingram, he declares his love for Olive’s younger sister, Marion. Then Crocker’s wife appears at the door and tells Olive of her son by him and his subsequent desertion of the family. The shock of it all brings on a heart attack. Olive’s dying words to Perry: “You’ll—never—have—my—sister—living or dead. I’ll stop you—some way—some how—you—can’t—have—Marion!” Then, clutching his wrist, she