So there I was, passing out of law school with my law degree and not wanting to practice, being uncertain of the future, and being depressed about it and about myself. And my greatest ambition in life then was the same as everyone else's - security, to have a good sound solid nine to five job. Can you imagine that? That was what I most wanted to do. Something ordinary, something that'd give me security, pay me a good-enough wage to live on. I wanted to be able to go to the ball game every once in a while or a movie when I felt like it, and read books and be like every other guy. That was the height of my ambition when I was twenty-two, twenty-three years of age.What represented the kind of job I most had in mind was something in what I think in England would be called the civil service. One time I came close to attaining one too. It was a clerical job known as a finger-print classifier working for one of the FBI's departments in Washington under J. Edgar Hoover. I put in for that. When they got my application they made enquiries about my background, and I only discovered these details forty years later when I saw my file under the Freedom of Information Act which came into force in 1975. One of my professors in law school had told the FBI agent making enquiries about me that when I was his student he didn't consider me to have been "the best type of boy." When that was reported, that sank me: my application was rejected. I've often reflected if that hadn't happened, who knows? I might have spent my life working for J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Another thought I enjoy the irony of.
Instead I got a different less sensitive job with the government. I became a lowly paid clerk in the department counting the issue of what 'were called "Baby Bonds." Then later I got to be a supervisor on one of FDR's government-sponsored unemployment surveys. It was of Omaha in Nebraska. It didn't go so far as actually going to Omaha - nothing with so much imagination in it as that - but supervising a team of young women and girls - it was always men who were supervisors and women and girls who did the donkeywork - of trawling through column after column of figures to find out which were significant and which weren't.
This was all a part of the New Deal and Roosevelt's efforts to rebuild the economy of the country after the Depression. I was a tiny cog somewhere along the line in that vast machine, I guess. But life took a significant and unexpected turn for me then. Course I didn't know it, I wasn't aware of it. One of the other supervisor guys I met and got friendly with, we found we had a great interest in common, which was theater. He was much more into it than I was: he was involved with a workers' theater group who were doing a play, a left-wing play by a writer called Clifford Odets. It was called Waiting for Lefty, you've heard of it? They'd just started their rehearsals and he asked me would I like to go along. He was the producer of it, and I said sure yes why not, so he took me. And the next thing I know I'm in the play! Someone was sick and didn't appear at rehearsal, and I'm the only guy around so they hand me the script and tell me to say the lines and then learn them - and that's it!
I'd never even thought of acting before. So there you are, that did, it altered my whole life. We did a few performances and I had one of the minor parts: but it was around the time soap operas were starting to get popular on the radio. And in the audience one night there was a guy who ran one of those serials, and he came around backstage afterwards and asked me to look him up. So I got a job in this long-running radio show. From there I got other parts offered me - usually gangsters because of the low husky menacing sort of a voice I had. Then someone took a chance on me, and one of the stations offered me my own radio show.
