Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [8]
Actress Henrietta Crosman was a distant cousin. “I’d heard Grandma speak of her, and I found some of her old programs. When she played Cleveland, I wrote and went to see her.” Crosman was touring Cousin Eleanor in vaudeville, and Louise was a little frightened of her. “Henrietta was sixty by then, a buxom woman, but you could see what she had been.1 She’d been a beauty, and she’d tell anyone anything with a candor that floored me. A fine old-time actress. I told her I was going to New York again, and she said frankly she had no idea what she’d be doing in the fall, but I was to let her know when I got there.”
Louise did indeed let her know and found that Crosman was about to take out a play called Erstwhile Susan. She saw the producer and the director, read, and was assigned a couple of small parts: a Mennonite girl and a debutante. When relatives offered the use of an apartment in the Bronx, Louise and her mother went off to New York. They went to visit Crosman at her estate in the country. She was gracious, but Louise was aware that she was taking stock of her. “You have nice hands,” she told Louise. “Use them.”
Louise Treadwell (foreground), circa 1916. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
They went across the country with Erstwhile Susan, making two stops in each state they crossed. Once they reached Seattle, they traveled down the coast to Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego. “You’ve got to learn to talk,” the actress told Louise one day on the train. “Avoid Pennsylvaniaisms.” Louise did a lot of listening—to Crosman, to an Englishman in the cast, to the young leading lady who spoke with a Southern lilt. “I listened, practiced, and began to realize how totally unprepared I was.”
After America entered the war in the spring of 1917 things got tough just about everywhere. Stock companies closed in record numbers. Louise hung on as long as she could, sharing quarters with four other girls she’d known in college, then she went home again in June 1918. “I went home only to reconnoiter and get some money.” She spent eight weeks working on the New Castle News, then her mother died suddenly at the age of fifty-four.
The pains came without warning sometime around midnight, and Louise summoned an ambulance. On the bumpy road to the hospital Bright’s appendix burst. Louise couldn’t go with her—no room—so she took the streetcar instead and wasn’t able to see her mother again until after the surgery, when there was really nothing more to be done. She stayed at her bedside—Bright lived several days—then, in something of a daze, she pulled together what was left of her life in New Castle. Her grandmother was still there, but her younger sister was away at school and her father had remarried and was living in California. She sold the house on Highland Avenue, keeping the third floor and furnishing it with the things that most meant home to her. She took a job teaching third grade and made plans to return to the stage.
Louise played stock in Chicago, making an impression with a small part in a play called Happiness. After a lean period, she landed a role with Eva Le Gallienne in Not So Long Ago, a romantic period piece that had only a short stay at the Booth Theatre. Late in 1920 she again wrote Henrietta Crosman, who had settled in California where her husband, Maurice Campbell, was directing the Bebe Daniels comedies for Realart. She asked what Crosman thought about her working in pictures, and Crosman replied that if she wanted to come to Los Angeles, she would find her a place to live and maybe something to do. So Louise came west in February 1921, taking a room with some people who lived next door to the Campbells on Carlos Avenue in Hollywood. Maurice Campbell gave her work as an extra, but she didn’t much care for the monotony of moviemaking. The other extras on the set were friendly and helpful,