by Stephen Marlowe
[Pseudonym of Milton Lesser]
_There’s no business like show business! You do one-night stands in
one-horse villages. You sleep in flea-bitten rooming houses, eat
sandwiches three times a day, ride from town to town in creaking
busses whose springs went out with Coolidge...._
_And all the time you have your eyes on a dream that keeps slipping
over the horizon, and one day you wake up with no more bookings and
you realize that maybe you’ll never catch up to your dream. But then
you meet a dark little man who promises to make you a star without
even looking at you twice! It sounds too good to be true...._
_It sounds out of this world...._
[Illustration: Illustrator: Mort Lawrence]
I wasn’t exactly the best crooner in the business, but I could sing,
and they even told me I could make the dames’ hearts palpitate if I
tried hard enough. It wasn’t my fault that I was out of a job just now,
and not too far from trying to bum a meal.
So when I ran into Vera and Vera told me she had a job, I felt hopeful.
Vera was an old timer on the stage, and now she had begun to sag in the
wrong places--but she still insisted on lead-roles. The result was that
Vera lost more weight than a dame with six months at a slenderizing
salon behind her, and she was even hungrier than me.
“Mike,” she said, “I got a job. Placed by a new agent. I never even
heard of the guy, he comes outa nowhere. But he got me a job and the
pay’s good and I start soon.”
“Honey,” I said, “you just tell Mike all about it. Who is this guy?” I
wanted to meet him--if he could place Vera, he could place anybody.
At this point, Vera noticed I, too, could use a few vitamins, so she
bought me a hot dog. I overflowed the bun with mustard and sauerkraut,
and then I said: “Well, where do I find him?”
“He--it’s kinda a different sort of office, Mike. I’m going out there
now.”
I gulped the last chunk of bun. “Vera, you need a chaperon. Let’s go,
eh?”
Vera nodded, and I didn’t even realize that she sagged in the wrong
places. She looked beautiful.
* * * * *
It was a stupid place for an office. I wondered how the guy could do
business out here in the sticks. But I couldn’t complain. He had given
Vera the taxi fare and the trip took two hours--out into Pennsylvania
somewhere, and the place was so deserted, there wasn’t even a telegraph
pole. But this office stood out there in the middle of all that
wilderness, a big round barn of a place with a pasteboard sign out
front. The sign said: