Wylie glared. “Would you like to produce this show?”
“He heard something to-day that hit him hard.”
“We all hear things that hit us hard.”
Stella said: “He got the truth about Pop Bartell.”
“I see,” Vic Wylie said slowly. Madness went out of him. He picked up Joe’s discarded script, folded it once, and ran a fingernail along the crease. When he spoke his voice was quiet. “That’s all.”
Joe was bleak. Show business had a code, a stern, rigid code. “The show must go on.” Generations of actors had lived that code, but he had failed. Stella was walking toward the outer office. Wylie’s voice halted him.
“Come back, kid.”
Joe went back.
Vic Wylie’s deep-set eyes brooded. “Kid, you have imagination. You feel deeply. That’s a blessing and a curse. You’re the kind’ll run into things in show business that’ll make you feel sick inside. It isn’t all music and lights and twinkling toes. That’s the mask. Every so often the mask slips, and you see behind it, and that’s when you’ll get sick inside. The old Pop Bartells make you want to cry. How about the young Pop Bartells? You had a bit in the I Want Work platter. That was about the best cast you could assemble in this city. The best, kid. There isn’t one of them averages more than twenty-two dollars a week for the year. Some earn less than that. If they have a family, then there’s somebody to take care of them when they get sick. If they’re holed up in some shabby furnished room, they end up in the charity ward of a hospital.”
Joe thought of the gay, light-hearted gathering in the producer’s outer office. His lips were stiff. “But they’re so—so—”