Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [75]
When playing, Spence was earning as much as $400 a week, but with layoffs and rehearsals factored in, his earnings came closer to $150 a week. So when Mother Tracy raised the subject as forcefully as she could, the best answer her son could give her was “Louise said she’d leave me if I quit the theatre.” Late in life, Louise wasn’t so sure she had ever put it exactly that way. “I don’t remember saying quite that,” she said, “but I might have, because I felt that Spence must do the thing he could do so well.” In 1942 Pat O’Brien recalled witnessing the exchange, which was sparked, as he remembered it, by his suggestion, during a particularly lean period, that both he and Spence call it quits and go back home to Milwaukee and settle down.
Louise flamed. She was always a good actress, but she never put as much emotion into any role as she did in her reply to my suggestion. “No!” she blazed to Spence, ignoring me. “If you give up the theatre I’ll leave you. You’re not a good actor, you’re a great actor! I don’t mind going hungry. I don’t mind doing our laundry. I don’t mind any sacrifice because you have something not one actor in ten-thousand has, and the day will come when you’ll be acclaimed the finest actor on the stage! I’m not only willing but eager to do anything I can to help you toward that day. But DON’T QUIT. You CAN’T.” It isn’t often a man finds someone with that much confidence in him.
After the folding of Dread, Tracy was out of work a full three weeks before he picked up a job replacing Henry Hull in a Jazz Age tragedy titled Veneer. Hull, the nominal star, had decided to leave the show in favor of A. A. Milne’s new comedy Michael and Mary; Tracy stepped into the role of a smooth-talking braggart with less than a week’s rehearsal. Nobody expected it to last very long, but a deal was afoot for the Shuberts to buy in and take the show to Chicago, where fresh casting, slick staging, and a new title might possibly save it. Louise, who read all of Spence’s plays, thought Veneer “an unpleasant play, though very moving at times.” It gave Tracy a chance to wear—and pay for—the expensive wardrobe he had bought for Dread. It was a star part, and for the first time in New York his name would appear in lights on a theater marquee. Most important, it was a job at a time when nearly a third of all the theaters on Broadway were dark, and the new slogan along the big street was “Got change for a match?”
Hull played his final performance on Saturday, November 30, and Tracy stepped into the role of Charlie Riggs two days later. He played a week, then followed the show into an Equity-approved layoff, the Shuberts guaranteeing salaries while they moved the physical production to Chicago’s Garrick Theatre. It opened there on December 20 under the title Blue Heaven and was largely savaged by the critics.
Back in New York, things were particularly grim, with nearly a score of houses lacking legitimate plays. The few genuine hits—Strictly Dishonorable, June Moon, It’s a Wise Child, Berkeley Square—were gobbling up much of the available business, and the holiday spirit was so lacking along the street that the “merchandise” men who supplied wet goods to the Times Square theater district were forced to accept installment payments to move inventory. That Tracy was able to get himself cast in a new play titled All the World Wondered was something of a miracle. The play wasn’t promising—an all-male cast in a decidedly raw portrait of life on death row. They played three days in Hartford, where the audiences were, in Tracy’s words, “as cold as the Yukon.” He wasn’t in a particularly hopeful mood when his pals at the Lambs