In the small audience that night was Bernie Ling, a twenty-seven-year-old, third-string publicity man for Warner Brothers who was in Pittsburgh to see what kind of free space he could get for a new and terrible film that could lose his studio a lot of money. Ling had only contempt for motion pictures, but he liked plays. They had real people saying real words and Ling could lose himself in the story while still noting with pleasure the nuances of gesture and diction and what he liked to refer to as stage presence.
When the twenty-one-year-old Donald Cubbin strode out onto the stage, Ling stirred in his seat a little. It was not Cubbin’s looks that made him stir. There was a surplus of good-looking youngsters in Hollywood. There always would be. But still, the kid was all right, about six foot tall, not too heavy, maybe 160 or 170, with a hell of a good head of hair, black, straight and thick, and features that a tough chin ransomed from prettiness. He would age well, Ling thought, and then decided that there was still something else, some other quality that had struck him. Not the voice, although it was good, almost too good, a deep, hard baritone equipped with what seemed to be natural projection that rolled it out over the audience. Somebody had taught him that, Ling decided before settling back to watch the play and search for the word that would describe just what it was that the kid had. By the end of the second act Ling thought he knew what it was. Dignity. The kid had dignity, the kind that is usually the small reward of those who at age forty or fifty, having scraped at the bottoms of their souls, survive the revulsion and are never thereafter much dismayed by the awfulness of others.
Whatever it was, Ling thought it was salable so he left the play before the third act was over and took a taxi to the all night Postal Telegraph office and sent a telegram to his uncle who was a producer at Warner Brothers.
“SPOTTED POSSIBLE YOUNG MALE LEAD PITTSBURGH STOP STRONGLY URGE SCREENTEST BERNIE,” the telegram read after Ling and the Postal Telegraph man argued for a while about whether “screentest” was one word or two. They finally agreed that it was one word after Ling gave the man two tickets to the rotten picture that was opening at a downtown theater the following day.
Donald Cubbin didn’t meet Bernie Ling until two days later, after he had returned from his father’s funeral in Youngstown, bringing his mother back with him because she had no other place to go. Between them, Cubbin and his mother had $21.35. He moved her into the room next to his at the boardinghouse and then took the streetcar to the business school where he told Asa Pettigrew, its owner, director, and founder, that he was quitting.
“Can’t you hang on for three weeks until you get your certificate?” Pettigrew asked.
“No, I can’t hang on. I have to get a job.”
“I can’t refund any of your tuition, you know.”
“I know.”
Considerably mollified, Pettigrew said, “Well, I got a call this morning.”
“About what?”
“About a job. They want a male secretary who can do bookkeeping. It’s not a regular company and it might be only temporary and the reason they want a male is that they do a lot of swearing and dirty talking.”
“Where is it?” Cubbin said.
“I don’t know if you want to get mixed up with this bunch. They’re some kind of labor union. Probably reds.”
“I need a job, Mr. Pettigrew.”
“Might not last long.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
“They’ll probably be run out of town and you along with them.”
“I’ll have to take that chance.”
“They’re dirty talking. They said so themselves.”
“Fine.”
“Pays twelve-fifty a week.”
“Good.”
Pettigrew handed Cubbin a slip of paper. “You call this man here. Tell him I recommended you.”
“Thanks, Mr. Pettigrew.”
Pettigrew shrugged. “I told ’em they could get a girl for ten bucks who’d put up with their dirty talking, but they said they wanted a man, but that they didn’t want any nance. You know what a nance is, don’t you?”
Cubbin nodded. “I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
He got the job, of course. The Good Old Man himself hired Cubbin in the shabby, one-room office that was located in the heart of what they later called Pittsburgh’s golden triangle. “Let’s see what you can do, son,” he said.
Cubbin nodded, sat down in a chair, and took out his pencil and a stenographer’s notebook.
“Dear Sir and Brother,” the Good Old Man began. He was not so old then, not quite forty-five in 1932, but already he dictated his letter as if delivering a short speech to an audience of a thousand or more, reaching his roaring peroration in the next to last paragraph and ending each letter with a heartfelt and whispered “Fraternally yours.”
Cubbin took it all down in Pitman at around eighty words per minute and typed it up on the office L. C. Smith at a steady sixty-five words per minute. After the Good Old Man read it, he looked up at Cubbin and smiled, “I don’t have much education, son, but I’m not stupid. I put a couple of little grammatical errors in on purpose. You took ’em out. Why?”
“They weren’t bad enough to leave in,” Cubbin said.
The Good Old Man nodded. “That’s a pretty fair answer,” he said after a while. “You say you can also keep a simple set of books?”
“Yes, I can do that.”
“All right, you’re hired. Be here tomorrow at eight. You know anything about unions?”
“No.”
“Good. You can learn about ’em my way.”
When Cubbin got back to his boardinghouse to tell his mother that he had landed a job, he found a tall, thin young man waiting for him on the front porch. The tall, thin young man introduced himself as “Bernie Ling of Warner Brothers.”
Cubbin heard the Warner Brothers but discounted it as part of some kind of a sales pitch. “I’m sorry,” he said, starting to brush by Ling, “but I can’t afford one right now.”
“I’m not selling,” Ling said. “I’m making you an offer.”
“Of what?”
“A screen test. In L.A.”
“Bullshit,” Cubbin said and started past Ling again.
“Here,” Ling said, taking a telegram from his pocket. “Read this.”
The telegram was from Ling’s producer uncle, a man who enjoyed some partly manufactured notoriety for his unwillingness to squander words. The telegram read, “BUS FARE ONLY LOVE FISHER.”
“I don’t get it,” Cubbin said.
“Fisher. That’s Arnold Fisher, a producer. My uncle. At Warner Brothers. I’m with their publicity department. I saw you the other night in the play. I wired my uncle and they’re willing to pay your bus fare to L.A, for a test. No shit.”
“You saw me?” Cubbin said, thinking a message to his father: Why did you have to go and die and be out of a job?
“I think you might make it out there,” Ling said. “I mean really make it.”
Cubbin slowly handed back the telegram. “Sorry, but it’s just not possible right now.”
“Christ, all you have to do is get on a bus.”
There was a moment for Cubbin when it was all possible, better than possible, it had all happened, the bus ride, the screen test, the instant fame, and the gigantic salary. He had it all for one impossibly fine moment until he remembered his mother, the new widow, waiting alone upstairs, waiting for the only person she knew in Pittsburgh to come home and tell her how she was going to live for the rest of her life. I’ll send for you, Mother, he thought, but told Bernie Ling, “My father’s just died and I can’t leave my mother.”