I Grab the Stage With My Feet

When Spencer Tracy was a young actor, his friends (or handlers) took him to see Laurette Taylor in “The Glass Menagerie.” They brought him up to the back row in the highest balcony, so he could hear how Taylor was able to fill the theatre with her voice, and yet not yell. Volume had always been a problem for Tracy.

When his friends took him backstage to meet Taylor, he found her in a faded dressing-gown. Her feet were in old, floppy slippers and propped up on the table. He asked her, humbly, how she accomplished her vocal power and she drew her feet out of the slippers to show him that the soles were bloody.

“That’s how,” she said. “I grab the stage with my feet and I pull all the energy I can up from the earth and out to the audience.”

(I’m quoting from memory)

-Bob Colonna, from Garson Kanin's book, Tracy and Hepburn.