On Tuesday, three days after he had written his application, Joe Carlin
received a letter from FKIP:
We have arranged a dramatic audition for you on June 22 at 2:15
P.M.
The reception clerk at the fourth floor desk will direct you to
the proper studio.
Please bring with you to read for us two or three excerpts from
plays. The selections need not exceed fifteen or twenty lines in
length and should be varied in type.
An everyday Joe Carlin, not expecting to hear from the studio for
several weeks, had taken the letter from the box on the porch. An
agitated Joe Carlin had noted the FKIP in the corner of the envelop. An
almost incoherent Joe Carlin burst into the house.
“Mother! A letter—”
“Yes, Joe.” She took it from his frantic hands.
“It’s about an audition. A radio audition.”
“That’s what it says. An audition.”
“To-morrow. An audition to-morrow.”
“I understand that.” She shook him gently. “What are you going to read?”
“Oh!” said the boy. Her calmness washed the incoherence out of him.
“I—I’m not sure,” he said and went upstairs. After that he paced his
room with a book. The sun passed over the front of the house and sent
long, slanting rays out of the west across the lawn. And still he paced.
“Joe!” his mother called. “Do radio actors bother with food?”
He ate, spoke to two shadows who were his father and his mother, and
went upstairs again. At midnight, when Tom Carlin looked into the
bedroom, he found Joe standing in front of the mirror trying to achieve
gauntness by lengthening his face and sucking in his cheeks.
“I’m reading an Abe Lincoln part,” the boy croaked. “I’m getting in the
mood.”
Tom Carlin closed the door and stared helplessly at his wife.
Kate Carlin’s laugh was pure joy. “Don’t look so tragic, Tom. This is
priceless if it doesn’t become a pose.”
Joe managed a sizable breakfast next morning, but shrank from lunch. He
came downstairs with three books under his arm.
“Shaky,” he said, his voice high and cracked. “Why should I be? Bing
Crosby, Jack Benny, Fred Allen—they all had to audition for the first
time. Why should I be shaky?”
“Nonsense!” his mother told him. “I’ve seen you with the jitters waiting
for the curtain to go up on a high-school play.”
He considered that. “You didn’t tell anybody I’m taking an audition?
Please don’t.”
His mother watched him go down the street. “Tom,” she said, “I don’t
think we need to worry about pose.”
Cold panic gripped him on the bus. The parts he had read over and over
again last night seemed bloodless and thin. He tried to call them up, to
recreate them in his mind, but panic scrambled his thoughts. If he was
bad.... That’s what gave him the shakes. An audition either started you
off or stopped you right there.
The blonde receptionist gave him a warming smile. “Your letter must have
caught them arranging an audition. Fifth floor, Studio K.”
The fifth floor had none of the ornate trappings and blue leather of the
fourth floor reception-room. This was the part of the world of radio
that did not have to put on a display for the public. There was no
glass-walled gallery looking into glass-walled studios. Joe found
himself on a barren floor of unpretentious wooden doors, plastered,
roughly painted walls, and shabby corridors that led to hidden quarters
occupied by the mechanical departments and the engineers. A door almost
at the elevator had painted on it: Studio K.
But the fifth floor was also FKIP. A speaker filled the barrenness with
“Miss America and what she’ll wear. Munson’s brings you to-morrow’s
styles.” ...
Joe sat on a hard wooden bench. The loudspeaker went on and on, the only
sound, the only evidence of life on this floor. Once the elevator
stopped and a porter carried a kit of tools into one of the corridors.
The hard, lonely bench became harder, lonelier. Joe’s legs began to
shake and twitch. Ten minutes past two, and he was still alone in this
tomb of a fifth floor. So this was radio, was it? Two-fifteen. A
trickling river of sweat ran down his back.
The elevator stopped again and two men and a girl stepped out. One of
the men was short and stout. The other was tall, lean, and brisk, with a
penciling of black mustache across his upper lip. The short stout man
took some keys from his pocket and they walked past the bench. The girl
said: “Only six scheduled for to-day.” They went into Studio K.
Joe’s heart gave a smothering thud.
The door of the studio opened again. It was the girl. “Mr. Carlin? This
way, please.”
Joe’s feet were lifeless, without feeling. Studio K might have been any
one of the smaller studios he had seen from the fourth-floor
gallery—same microphone, same chairs along the walls, same control-room
at the far end. Behind the glass front of the control-room sat the stout
man and the brisk man with the microscopic mustache. The girl joined
them, going into the little room through a door at the side. It seemed
to Joe that all three glared out at him with malice. He dropped two of
his books on a chair.
The stout man spoke from the control-room through the two-way mike.
“What are you going to give us, Mr. Carlin?”
“A bit from—”
“The other side of the mike, please. You’re on the dead side.”
A badly confused Joe Carlin crossed over. “A bit—”
“A little closer. Don’t be nervous.”
But Joe’s nerves were tight clamoring strings. He opened the book and
found his page. “Robert Sherwood’s _Abe Lincoln in Illinois_.” He tried
desperately for control. “Abe is at the cabin of Mentor, the
school-teacher. Mentor remarks that Abe seems to do a lot of thinking
about death. Abe replies—” Joe struggled to create a drawling twang:
“‘I’ve had to, because it has always seemed to be so close to
me—always—as far back as I can remember. When I was no higher
than this table, we buried my mother. The milksick got her, poor
creature. I helped Paw make the coffin—whittled the pegs for it
with my own jackknife. We buried her in a timber clearing beside
my grandmother, old Betsy Sparrow. I used to go there often and
look at the place—used to watch the deer running over her grave
with their little feet. I never could kill a deer after that.
One time I catched hell from Paw because when he was taking aim
I knocked his gun up.’”[1]
Joe closed his copy of the play.
In the control-room the stout man said impatiently: “What does a kid of
his age know about death? Why do they come in here and try to read stuff
crammed with emotion? They’re not mature enough.” He pressed a button
and at once the two-way mike was open so that Joe could hear what was
said in the control-room. “Anything else, Mr. Carlin?”
“Deval’s _Tovarich_,” said Joe, “adapted by Mr. Sherwood.” This was more
like his own voice. He brought another book to the mike. “Mikail and
Tatiana, formerly chamberlain and lady-in-waiting at the Russian court,
are in Paris without a franc. Tatiana has suggested that they go into
domestic service as butler and housemaid. Mikail speaks in excitement:
“‘My sainted darling! I believe it is possible! I see myself
again, throwing open the windows of the Imperial Palace and
announcing: “Majesty, there is snow”—and then, with perfect
grace, presenting belt and tunic to Nicholas Alexandrovitch. And
you doing the fair hair of Her Imperial Highness, fetching her
gloves, telling poor Frederiks that her Majesty will not be
visible to-day. We were good servants, Tatiana. We will be good
servants again! I must find my boots!’”[2]
The stout man sighed and touched the button. “Haven’t you anything a
little more juvenile?”
Joe said an uncertain: “Well—” Evidently he hadn’t been so hot. He went
over to the wall and brought back another book.
“How is he?” the brisk man with the thin mustache asked in the
control-room.
John Dennis, director of programs for FKIP, shrugged.
Joe was back at the mike. “A twenty-two-year-old boy has inherited a
factory. But he finds the factory closed as the result of a trade war. A
friendly old lawyer advises him to sell it for what he can get. The boy
speaks:
“‘I inherited a property worth $35,000. Can I get $35,000 for
it? No. Why? Because one man says I can’t have its value. One
man says he’ll leave me penniless if I try to create its value.
A dollar isn’t worth a dollar up here; it’s only worth what Jake
Grimmer says it’s worth. I can’t swallow anything like that.
Maybe I’m a fool for not accepting $7,000 for the plant and
letting them short-change me out of $28,000—$7,000 would be
better than nothing. But if I took that $7,000, for the rest of
my life I’d be licked. A shadow would be walking at my side day
and night and talking to me. What about Eastport? Why had I let
them kick me out and refuse me what was mine? Don’t you see, Mr.
Graves? I wouldn’t be selling the factory for $7,000. I’d be
selling my self-respect.’”
In the control-room John Dennis said: “There you are, Amby. That was
much better: he wasn’t shooting at rôles out of his reach. A good voice
when he doesn’t strain it.”
Ambrose Carver’s interest quickened. “Think he has something, John?”
“I have a show in mind. I may be able to use him.”
Mr. Carver became avid. “Is his letter here? What’s he ever done? Let me
get a line on him.” He read Joe’s letter rapidly.
The program director touched the button. “Thank you, Mr. Carlin.” That
was all.
The girl came out of the little room of fate and led Joe to the door. A
middle-aged man now sat on the wooden bench. The girl said: “Mr.
Westfall? This way please.” The door of Studio K closed.
Joe Carlin laid the three books on the wooden bench and mopped his face.
He was tired and weary, discouraged and whipped. You read a rôle, and
eyes glared at you from the control-room, and you didn’t have the
slightest idea whether you were good, bad or indifferent. Nobody
bothered to tell you. “Thank you, Mr. Carlin.” They might just as well
tell you to get out and let it go at that. Get out and let the next
victim come in. Didn’t they have any heart in radio? Didn’t they know
what an audition meant—the worry, the nervous, sick all-goneness, the
strain? Didn’t radio care?
The door of Studio K opened with a hasty rattle of the knob. “Mr.
Carlin.”
Joe swung about.
The man with the shadow of black mustache shook hands warmly. “I was
afraid you’d get away before I got out here. Congratulations. I wasn’t
surprised and John Dennis shouldn’t have been, either. That was the
stout man—director of programs. Great friend of mine, Dennis. I told him
you’d wow them.”
Joe knew an unbelievable, an incredible warmth. “You mean I was good?”
“Ambrose Carver don’t call them wrong. Last week I saw you at Northend
High in—in—” Mr. Carver snapped annoyed fingers. Why couldn’t he
remember that letter?
Joe said eagerly: “_The Prince Laughs Last_.”
“When you see shows, shows, shows, titles get away from you,” Amby
Carver said ruefully. A nice touch, he assured himself; just
matter-of-fact enough. “I spotted you before the first-act curtain.”
Joe’s lips parted.
“I came to tell Dennis to call you in for an audition and there was your
letter on his desk. I told him here was a kid he wasn’t going to keep
waiting; it had to be now. Well, wasn’t it? Weren’t you in there to-day?
That’s record speed for an audition. Ambrose Carver’s telling you.”
Yes, Joe thought, he’d been in Studio K to-day—and all at once he was
living the bleakness of his discouraged walk back to the wooden bench.
“Did Mr. Dennis like me?”
“He thinks you’re tops.”
“He didn’t say so.”
“You don’t know radio. They never say so. If they like you, some day you
may get a call. If they think you smell, you’re never sent for. Get the
picture?”
Joe didn’t.
“Suppose you come in for an audition and Dennis says you’re colossal.”
Amby Carver was brisk. “Your father and mother tell the neighbors—FKIP
says you’re colossal. Down the street some family thinks its daughter is
colossal. They send her in, and all Dennis gives her is a ‘Thank you.’
So what? Anybody can write that answer; that’s no _Information, Please_.
The girl’s mother, father, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and nieces
all gang up on FKIP. Now do you see why everybody gets a ‘Thank you’ and
no more? Dennis steps softly and keeps FKIP out of trouble. That’s
radio.”
The memory of heartache in Studio K was gone from Joe, and the warmth in
him grew and swelled. “Are you with FKIP?”
“Well—not officially.” Amby Carver’s voice took on a vast tolerance.
“Why tie up with even a 50,000-watt station? Why cramp myself? I’m a
discoverer. Actors, singers, bands, script-writers, gag men—that’s my
field. Talent. I find it and market it. We all make money.”
Joe caught it. “An agent?”
One of the man’s hands made a flourish. “Mr. Carlin—”
The boy said: “My name’s Joe.”
“Mine’s Amby. Let’s go where we’ll be more comfortable and talk
business.”
Joe gripped the books. He had read about agents and the part they played
in show business. No actor could get any place without an agent; but no
agent would bother with an actor unless the actor was good. His head
swam.
They rode down to the lights and the ebb and flow of visitors, to the
cheerfulness and blue leather of the fourth floor. The receptionist
looked questioningly at Joe; he put his hands together and shook them.
The blonde seemed pleased. The loudspeaker gave them Lucille Borden
tough-girling through another episode of _Years of Danger_.
Amby Carver led the way to one of the blue window-seats. “You’re
eighteen, Joe?”
“Yeah.”
“How would you like me to handle you?”
Joe said a fervent: “What could be sweeter?”
“Not much,” Amby admitted without hesitation. “When Ambrose Carver says
he’s putting a man over, that man’s over. You’re going to be a
headliner, Joe; I’ll have your name in lights. I’ll have you playing
coast-to-coast chain shows. I’ll—Is your father home nights?”
“Except Wednesdays. That’s bowling night.”
“I’ll drop in and see him to-night. About eight.”
Joe couldn’t figure that. “What for?”
“You’re a minor. I’ll bring a contract for your father to sign.
Everything open and above-board.”
A real contract, legal and binding, with a real agent! Joe’s cup was
full.
A man came like the wind from the glass-walled studio. Joe saw a wild
disorder of reddish hair, a tan raincoat trailing along the ground from
one arm, a brief-case only partly closed. Somebody cried “Vic!” and the
raincoat was jerked up from the ground. The hidden voice went on: “You
forgot that script.” A hand went into the brief-case, came out with a
mass of papers, and waved them impatiently. Somebody came running from
the direction of the glass-walled studios.
“Know him?” Amby Carver asked.
Joe didn’t. “I saw him rehearsing a show.”
“Then,” Mr. Carver said with brisk conviction, “you saw the best
producer in the city in action. That’s Vic Wylie. Great friend of mine.
Won’t work for any station—produces independently. A great pal.”
The producer was again on his way toward the elevators. His eyes were
the eyes of a man with fifty things to do and an hour to do them in.
Amby Carver’s voice throbbed with good fellowship. “Hi, Vic! How’s the
boy?”
Vic Wylie looked around, saw who had called the greeting, glanced at Joe
and back to Carver—and grunted. The elevator took him down.
“A great kidder,” Amby Carver said jovially. “A rich kidder. You’ve got
to understand a guy like Vic. Dramatizes himself. Gets up in the morning
and puts on a rôle with his collar. Plays it all day. I’ll bet he’s
doing a show with a hard heavy; he’ll be a Simon Legree until the show’s
in the bag. To-morrow, if he’s producing a Pollyanna, he’ll be smiling
like an angel and God-blessing everybody. A great guy. A great pal.”
Another elevator carried them down. FKIP was now broadcasting baseball
from Chicago. The speaker in the car said: “Right over the dish, but too
low. Ball two.” The lobby speaker roared. “There it goes—goes—and it’s
gone. Mac hits into the right field bleachers—” They passed out into
Royal Street.
“Amby,” said Joe, “are you Sonny’s agent?”
“Who?”
“Sonny Baker?”
Amby’s laugh rolled out, mellow and deep. “Joe, that’s funny. A great
friend of mine, Sonny, but you can’t stay in this agency racket on
friendship. You got to have winners. Also-rans don’t pay off.”
“But isn’t Sonny—”
“A winner? Momentarily, Joe; momentarily. He had no competition last
season. He happened to be the only available juvenile who had anything
on the ball. That happens in radio sometimes, when you get away from the
big broadcasting centers like New York, Chicago, and Hollywood. The
parts were there and he fell into them. One was a good, fat part. Next
season when he auditions for a show, he’ll find somebody named Joe
Carlin reading script.”
“The fat part,” said Joe, “was that in _City Boy_.”
“That was it.”
“You—” Joe had to wait a moment. “You think I’ll have a chance for some
parts?”
“A chance?” The agent rolled his eyes skyward. “You think Ambrose Carver
goes out to the Northend because he feels like taking a bus ride? To-day
you wouldn’t have a chance, but to-day isn’t September. By September
I’ll have had you under my wing for three months. You and Sonny won’t
belong in the same league. That’s how I do it.”
Joe’s blood ran fire.
Amby Carver’s hand made a flourish. “Eight to-night, Joe.”
Joe Carlin bought a _Journal_ at the corner and waited for a Northend
bus. His brain built golden, gleaming air castles. Next September he
might have Sonny Baker’s fat part in _City Boy_. And there’d be other
shows, other parts. Or perhaps some new sponsor would come along with a
new five-a-week and he wouldn’t try out for the part in _City Boy_. He
felt sorry for Sonny. It would be tough to play a part one season and
lose it the next.
There were plenty of empty seats on the bus. Money? Next fall he ought
to roll in money. He opened the _Journal_ to the radio page. A column of
gossip and comment carried a short, routine paragraph:
Sonny Baker, local radio star, left this morning for the coast
to play in summer stock. There’s a whisper that Hollywood talent
scouts engineered the engagement.
Hollywood? Talent scouts? That could mean only a possible moving-picture
contract. Perhaps another Mickey Rooney in the making. Fame. The real
money.
Joe Carlin thought in dizzy happiness: “And Amby says I’m going to be a
better actor than Sonny.”
-----
Footnote 1:
Reprinted by permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Footnote 2:
Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.