Joe’s hands made an impatient gesture. “Life. Something you can feel. The McCoy.” Vic Wylie might have been speaking.
“Something—dramatic?” the man asked with a shrewd glance.
Joe went blank. He didn’t want to say anything about this until he saw how it worked out. Mr. Fairchild took a book down from a shelf; the telephone rang, and he had to go to the office. Joe made his escape, winking at the clerks as he passed out toward the street.
The next three days were busy days. He was making a show. A book to read and one particular scene to be picked for dramatization. What scene? Chapter Eight offered a scene tense and climactic. But the action called for four characters. Four were too many—a twenty-dollar cast. There was a scene in Chapter Two between the lead and the heavy. Was it strong enough? He walked the floor of his room, reading the passage aloud. Perhaps that run in Chapter Nine with three characters.... Sometimes his brain grew bewildered. He thought of Curt Lake sweating, and swearing, and knocking out a new script under pressure the day his throat had gone bad.
There were interruptions—lunch, the Sue Davis broadcast, the family dinner in the evening. But even as he described Sonny Baker or told of Amby Carver’s rout, his mind was upstairs with the book. It would have to be the scene from Chapter Two.
He worked behind the closed door of his room and rattled a portable typewriter. He knew the mechanics of writing script, and the dialogue of the scene was before him on the printed pages. The first two sheets of script spun out of the typewriter. Then Joe ran into a passage in the book that analyzed the thought passing through a character’s mind. How did you get a character’s thoughts into a script? Radio had to be dialogue. He wrote, and tore up what he had written, and wrote again. He gave up in despair and fooled with a cross-word puzzle. He pushed that aside and went back to writing. Nothing would jell. He tried talking the scene aloud.
Kate Carlin cried: “Joe, are you all right?”
Sure, he was all right. He was swell. Curt Lake could have script-writing—he wanted no part of such a headache. Why couldn’t he find the words? It shouldn’t be so hard to express a thought. Just about two sentences. Inspiration came to him from whatever void it is that gives birth to inspiration. He went back to the typewriter.
Thursday night he finished the script in an exultation of authorship. Nine pages—that’s how long a Curt Lake script ran for a fifteen-minute show. Now he had to have a signature that would mark the start of every program, and he had to have an opening plug and a closing plug.
A rough idea for a distinctive signature came Friday morning. He put it down: