David Abraham Lincoln Berne is the most interesting man I know--a statement which covers quite a few interesting men. A lawyer. A lawyer, furthermore, whose principal employ is with the movie companies. He was not always a lawyer.... Dave was born over a delicatessen, in Madison, Wisconsin, of serious minded, musically gifted, orthodox Jewish parents in the winter of 1906, the fourth child of eight, and no culls in the lot. As soon--he says--as he could pound with his porringer, they gave him a violin. But--again, according to him--he swiftly saw that he was going to be only a semiprodigy, so he turned to other fields. He did well in school. One of his playmates, a Milwaukee realtor nowadays, who liked Dave in spite of his personal limitations, long ago told me about that--and succinctly: "Some of those bastard Jews are born with a high school education!" Dave finished at fifteen--and took an extra year to grow in, working nights at the delicatessen and reading, for entertainment, philosophy. He has a remarkable memory. He might not be able to recall his laundry mark when he was in Virginia. But no one who knows him well would bet even on that. A compact guy who--because he is loose-jointed--seems anything but solid. Indeed, his flexibility is such that he could probably learn a yogin's basic postures in one sitting. Everybody liked him in Madison. This was not true in Virginia. He majored in psychology and went out for football. He'd played on his high school team. The backfield coach was impressed equally by the length of his accurate passes and the fact that he mastered the signals in one night's concentrated study. Letter-perfect and reflex-fast. But a pair of racially pure Nordic behemoths from Minnesota, sent proudly to the team by scouting old grads, decided that, although they had nothing personal against the yid, no yid would call their signals. In Dave's first game they managed to break both his legs. Dave got the idea. He let his uniform hang there, the next year--when he'd got off crutches. He made the newspaper--but not the fraternity he'd set his heart on. He made _summa cum laude_. He went next to Pennsylvania--tutoring, tending furnaces, minding babies, mowing lawns, as usual--and took both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in psychology. He got a job teaching it to pre-med students in Iowa. His thesis on "Formulations of Subjective Sexuality in Man" almost landed him the thing he wanted--a psycho-sociological research position with a big foundation. They wrote him, however, that they felt certain group attitudes (outrageous, but there they are!) would prejudice his fact-gathering efforts. A Gentile took over the project. Several of America's brilliant young men in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis are former students of Dave. A Dr. Wiswell was put over him in Iowa. That was when he began to read law. He took the New York Bar exams in 1935 and went to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that year.