Poitier tried. He walked in and asked to audition. By his own account, what followed was a humiliation. The man who heard him — an auditioner whose identity Poitier does not confirm with a name in his retellings — heard his accent and essentially told him to leave. The dismissal was swift and clear: stick to a job you can actually handle. A Bahamian dishwasher has no business on a theater stage.
Poitier went back to the kitchen.
What he carried from that audition was not, primarily, humiliation. It was a very specific and practical understanding of what he needed to work on. His accent needed to change. His reading needed to improve. He needed to be able to read a script fluently, to speak dialogue in a way that served the material, to present himself in the specific register that theatrical performance required.
He attacked the accent through the radio, which he already had. He was less sure how to attack the reading problem.
The waiter is where the story pivots.
The restaurant where Poitier worked as a dishwasher was in the New York area — Queens or Harlem, in different tellings, the specific address not pinned down in any source he or others have provided. The elderly man was a waiter, front-of-house, visible to customers in the way that dishwashers were not. He was Jewish. Poitier’s description of him in interviews over the decades is consistent: elderly, kind, patient. No name ever given — Poitier says he never knew it.
The encounter happened after the restaurant closed for the night. The question the waiter asked — what’s in the paper today? — was ordinary. The answer Poitier gave was not. He said, in the version he told Lesley Stahl in 2013: “I can’t tell you what’s in the paper because I can’t read.”