Ike: Son, if you’ve got a smoke ball and you don’t need a surveying party to show you where the plate is—
The man with the advertising lay-outs left.
“All right, Joe.” Tony Vaux chuckled jovially. “Let’s you and me play some baseball.” He mumbled Ike Totten’s opening lines, feeding them merely as careless cues.
Joe picked up the part. Wylie, hearing him read the first time, had ripped his first sentence apart with a fiery tongue. Tony, offering no criticism, kept mumbling dialogue. The audition went on to the script’s end, one person doing no more than making sounds, the other trying to breathe character and atmosphere and feeling into words.
“You almost make me feel you’re a green rookie,” Tony chuckled. “But not a scared rookie. Get the point, Joe? You’ve never been off the farm. You’re a big, husky, corn-fed kid; you’re scared and you’re homesick. You’re not going to let anybody see you’re scared. You play tough. Not too tough. Some of the scare peeping through the toughness. Let’s try it that way.”
They went through the script again.
“Better, Joe. You pick up fast. Now, a little more uncertainty in the toughness. Remember your first audition? FKIP, wasn’t it? I’ll lay a bet you were a lost pup. Well, Joe, this time it’s baseball, not radio. Once more.”
They read the script five times. Tony was always a bland, kindly mentor sugaring his criticism with a chuckle. There was no hair-tearing, no stricken horror, no mortal agony. The telephone tinkled. Tony said: “Ask him to wait,” and mumbled Ike Totten’s lines for the sixth time. Joe began to vision two systems. Tony Vaux got results, too. But no Tony Vaux show, he suspected, would have the passionate perfection of minor details, the small refinements of a Vic Wylie show.
“That’s reading,” Tony pronounced mellowly. “You get it over.” He shook hands.
Joe thought with a quick, tingling lift of the heart: “This part’s mine.” It would be the beginning. He’d be on the air. He reached the fan-shaped reception-room; and there, all in a moment, the tingling uplift oozed out of him.