“Bring it out,” said Amby. “I keep it around to get young talent acclimated. Let them be around a mike long enough, even a dead mike, and they’ll never get mike fright. Just one of my little tricks.” There had been several letters pushed under the office door. The agent opened them and became absorbed.
Joe lifted the microphone to the center of the floor. The instrument was unwired, unconnected, dead; and yet the feel of it, the look of it, sent electric currents through his nerves. He lost himself completely in its magic spell, and Amby’s shabby office faded and was gone. He began to whisper bits from The Prince Laughs Last, feeling the part again as he had felt it on the stage of Northend High. A door slammed somewhere on the floor and Joe came back to the McCoy Building with a start. Amby, delicately fingering the suspicion of a black mustache, was staring at him.
“I’m coming in a door,” Amby said without preamble. “You greet me as though you’re overjoyed to see me. All right; let me hear you. Remember, you’re overjoyed.”
Joe tried to call up a mental picture of the scene. He cried with ringing gaiety: “Amby! If I’m not glad—”
“No, no,” said Amby. “Just ‘Hello.’ And into the mike. You got to talk, talk into the mike so that it becomes instinct.”
Joe tried again.
Amby’s finger tapped his upper lip. “Not quite overjoyed—just glad. You do not like me when I come in. Give me a hate ‘Hello.’”
Joe spoke a thin, cold: “Hello.”
“Better. If you speak ten words and two are sour, you still have eight words to put you over. But with only one word, it must be everything on that one word. When you can do it with one word, you are acting. Hate, scorn, love, doubt, fear: you do it all with one word. ‘Hello.’ You get me, Joe?”
This, Joe thought, was real coaching, coaching that went tirelessly into minute details, the professional stuff. He said: “I get it.”