Pasternak addressed her. "Do you sing?" he asked.
Mary modestly admitted she did—a little.
Pasternak asked to hear her. Mary was unprepared. He said he might leave town next day. So he asked Lombardo to let her try a number with the orchestra.
When Mary got there, she didn't even bother to talk the song over with the piano player. Confidentially, she had rehearsed it with him earlier in the day, framing up the whole thing for Pasternak's visit.
She sang two songs.
Pasternak later admitted she was no world-beater as a thrush. And he had caught on to the game.
"I decided that any girl with that much gall had a hell of a chance in pictures," he told Lombardo.
So he signed her to a contract—that night—without a screen test.
Pasternak, who also discovered the charming and talented Kathryn Grayson, has flirted successfully with Fate more than once. His own stunning wife was, before meeting him, a chorus girl who, in her teens, had been around Broadway so long she was considered "an old face" and practically washed up.
So she joined a touring line of rumba dancers. Far from New York, Pasternak saw her in a night club, asked to meet her, whipped out his fountain pen and a contract and shipped her to Universal, at which studio he then labored.