Show Business: How To Be Rich Though a Pencil

(2 of 2)

Not by Bread Alone. Yet Swift is not willing to live by bread alone (not even Tip-Top, Braun, Stroehmann or Taystee —all Swift clients). Above all, he considers himself an actor, and he has forsaken thousands in commercials to appear for $45 a week in off-Broadway's adaptation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He does three roles, and since he is ordinary looking, few in the audience are aware that the same actor is Father Dolan, an old Franciscan monk, and the president of the university. Offstage, when Swift is not changing his makeup for a new role, he is busy sending telegrams to producers, begging them to come see him and—who could resist?—hire him for a Broadway show.

Marvelous as they are, Swift's multiple voices do not sell themselves. Swift does that, as when he auditioned for the role of a pencil. The advertising man whose job it was to select the voice of the pencil had two ulcers flaring with Angst. Do or die, the ad man was determined to come up with the best pencil that ever gave a speech. He had already heard 50 human applicants, but none sounded like a pencil. "Can you do a pencil?" he said desperately as Swift-entered the room.

Swift saw the situation and answered reassuringly in a soft urban fog made more casual by the experienced slur of a 55-year-old. "Is it a lead pencil or a mechanical pencil?" he asked. At least 3,000 tons of worry visibly lifted from the ad man's forehead. "Is it round or hexagonal?" Swift went on gently. "Does it have an eraser?" He got the job. And what did the pencil finally sound like? "Literate," recalls Swift, "—and thin."