Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [9]
In December the iconoclastic editors of the Smart Set, George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, bought one of her poems for publication and asked to see others. Before she could reply, she landed a key role in Edward Goodman’s revival of the John Galsworthy fantasy The Pigeon. The show started in Greenwich Village, then moved uptown to the Frazee. The part wasn’t her kind of part—a “goody-goody” as she put it—and Goodman was a rigid disciplinarian, demanding and excessively precise. She frankly thought herself “lousy” in The Pigeon, but it led to Chains of Dew for the Provincetown Players and a few weeks of stock in New Hampshire.
Emboldened by the Smart Set sale, she tried her hand at humor and sold a boardinghouse piece called “Top Floor Pests” to the New York Times. By summer, she had allowed herself to be seduced into a Chautauqua tour that took her on a string of one-nighters through Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska, most of the audiences seeing the one play, in all probability, they would see all year. The applause, she wrote, would “shame even a Belasco opening” and the experience resulted in another piece for the Times. She laid off the remainder of the year, thinking she might go to Europe, but by the time of Kendal Weston’s call, she was not only ready and willing but desperate to work.
Louise Treadwell could have been a journalist, written a book, or published more of her poems, but all she ever really wanted to be was an actress, and despite being such a hard study when it came to learning her lines, she was working with the best director she had ever had, playing some of the best things she had ever played, and at the age of twenty-six there was no place in the world she would rather be.
The company continued with Up in Mabel’s Room for the week of May 6, then Kendal Weston quarreled with Leonard Wood over the cuts Wood was making to cover expenses. He left, taking a pair of actors with him. Ray Capp, another actor-director of similar vintage, took over from Weston and the show went on as planned. The Elks Lodge attended as a body, showering the ladies of the cast with floral tributes, and the players, still basking in the success of Buddies, were guests of honor at the monthly ball of the White Plains Club. It was at such a party, on a Sunday night at the Gedney, just after Tracy had graduated to the role of Jimmy Larchmont in Mabel’s Room, that he worked up the courage to ask Louise to marry him.
Louise (center) as Ann Wellwyn in Edward Goodman’s 1922 revival of The Pigeon. Whitford Kane, who headed the original production at London’s Royalty Theatre, can be seen at the doorway. (NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY)
She had been in love before, but never with an actor, and no one had ever proposed. She always described herself as a romantic, someone who preferred to dream of the perfect mate rather than actually go out and pursue him. Having come from a broken home, she also knew a man’s devotion could be mysterious and fleeting, and the institution of marriage as much a trap as a blessing. “My father wasn’t a man you ever came to know well,” she said. “He was a shy man who tried to make up for that with this reserve. I never felt I could talk to him.”
Tracy, she observed, was a lot like her father, brusque and painfully shy around strangers, but with a joy for the art of acting that was something quite different from anything she had ever before observed in a man. They both found it easier to talk about the work than to talk about each other, since both came from families where feelings were rarely expressed. The silences between them could be deafening, but there was an urgency to everything they had to say to one another. Tracy didn’t handle the matter of proposing very well, having condescended to dance with her even though he