Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

Tansy nodded seriously. “I’ll send you the paperwork. You won’t be sorry. You want movies?” he said, as though offering coffee.

“Sure,” said Rocky, as though offered coffee while longing for something stronger.

Within a week Tansy asked us out to dinner at his favorite joint, a dark Italian restaurant in midtown called DelGizzi’s, famous for a series of bloodred murals of fairy-tale characters done by a hungry artist who’d always been short of cash. Tansy was already at a booth in the back when we came in. He’d made sure to arrive early; he probably figured he looked taller when he was sitting down, and he was the one man in the world for whom this might be true. He’d chosen the wrong painting to sit in front of, though: Cinderella seemed about to snuff him out with the heel of her glass slipper. “Over here, boys,” Tansy said. “Sit down, sit down, this meal’s on me. So. There’s a Broadway show, maybe. What I want to do is book you into Grossinger’s as part of a revue. Money’s not great, but the backers of the Broadway revue will see you there, and by October you’ll make your debut in the legitimate theater.”

Rock perused the menu like it was his family tree. “If I wanted to play the Catskills for no money,” he said, “I could book myself.”

“Aw, come on!” said Tansy. “Fellas! Don’t you trust me?”

“I do,” I told him.

“See?” he said to Rock. “The kid trusts me.”

Rocky shook his head and gave me a dirty look. Clearly I was drunk with power. “What’s the Broadway show?”

“Oh, they don’t even know yet. The Grossinger’s revue’s kind of an old burlesque thing. Up your alley, right? Old times, right? And here’s how sure I am,” said Tansy, looking more terrified than competent, “if it goes wrong, I’ll give you back my commission. I’ll write you a check.”

Rock tossed his menu to the far side of the table. “How’s about this: We don’t pay you in the first place, and if it goes okay, we write you a check.”

“Oh,” said Tansy.

“No,” I said, thinking Broadway, Broadway! “Rocky, we’ll do it. Tansy, we’ll do it.”

“If it goes wrong,” said Rocky, “you’re both writing me a check.”

It was just as Tansy foretold: we played Grossinger’s and important people saw us. Now, instead of being ignorant of the act, they were merely skeptical.

Radio people said we were too visual. Movie people said we were too verbal. Broadway backers declared our comedy too low. Low comedy, two words I despise. The only thing worse is light entertainment. Still, we got a reputation in the city, which meant we could work nightclubs exclusively. Mayor La Guardia had been closing the burlesque houses, and dozens of comedians were out of work. We couldn’t play the clubs forever. We didn’t know what would happen to us.

But the guy who booked the Rudy Vallee radio show thought we might have something. Vallee went up against Kate Smith, the First Lady of Radio, who’d recently cozied up to Abbott and Costello (after having been burned by Bert Lahr, who’d flattened her with his ad libs). Vallee’s booker didn’t like low comics himself, but he saw how they went over with the audience, both live and listening in — Vallee’s show had introduced Joe Penner, of Wanna buy a duck? fame, though Penner’s fame had pretty much peaked by 1937.

We were summoned for another dinner at DelGizzi’s. This time when we walked in, Tansy was already sitting next to a giant man who wore a pair of tiny glasses. What a bad idea, I thought, to have such a fleshy face with those glasses: they looked ready to sproing off his face if he raised his eyebrows. His hair was already sproinging, his pomade no match for his cowlicks. Lucite wouldn’t have been a match for Neddy Jefferson’s cowlicks. He looked like a cartoon of FDR, with a face bunched up between the wide plains of his jaw and forehead.

“This is Neddy,” Tansy says. “He’s your writer.”

Who knew we had a writer? Who knew we needed one?

Neddy was the most neurotic guy I ever met, which is saying something. A smaller guy might have ripped handkerchiefs and scraps of paper to bits; Neddy destroyed steno notebooks and entire packs of cigarettes in seconds, tearing them apart. He was always turning something to confetti. He didn’t laugh. If you told a joke he thought was a keeper, he nodded. “That’s good,” he’d say. “That’ll go over.” He and Tansy were great pals, both similarly obsessed with comedy without either one having a visible knack for it. They talked about the big laugh the way Pierre and Marie Curie must have discussed radium. Together, they looked like an old portrait of an inbred Spanish king and the court dwarf. They were with us till the end, those two. I miss them both.

Neddy was a scholar. He owned every joke book ever written, from Joe Miller to Clason’s Budget Book, and his talent was for rewriting jokes and bits. With Neddy on the payroll, Carter and Sharp hit the boards with comedy unseen since the sixteenth century. “Nobody’s ever played it in pants,” was how Neddy put it, if asked if a sketch was brand new.

How could we complain? Though ad-libbing was giddy fun, doing the same bits over and over was only good if you were obscure. What if we were a hit and Vallee asked us back? We wanted to go on with “Why Don’t You Sleep?” but Neddy convinced us it was too visual. Instead we went with a sketch we’d been doing for years called “Love Advice,” in which Rocky had broken up with a girl and I tried to talk him into getting back on the horse, so to speak. Neddy shored it up for us.

PROF: So your girl left you. What do you want to do?

ROCKY: What I’d like to do is: put on my best coat—

PROF — yes—

ROCKY: A nice pair of shoes.

PROF — yes—

ROCKY: Some swell cologne.

PROF: Of course.

ROCKY: And climb under a rock and die.

PROF: That’s no good. What do you want? You want your girl to come back in town some day and say, “Hey. I wonder whatever happened to Rocky,” and have somebody tell her, “See that well-dressed, sweet-smelling boulder over there? Lift it up and you’ll see.”

ROCKY: Depends. What does she say after that?

Other than the complaints about not being able to tell our voices apart, we were a hit, and got asked back in two weeks, and we did “Why Don’t You Sleep?” despite Neddy’s misgivings. Rudy Vallee, the Vagabond Lover, sang, “Let’s Put Out the Lights and Go to Bed” (except of course he had to change “bed” to “sleep” for the censors). Leaning over the mike, Rocky added a few percussive, national snores. Me, I kept quiet. I suffered from terrible mike fright, worse than any stage fright I ever had, because where was my voice going? I imagined it swelling electric wires all the way to Valley Junction, where it would switch on the radio like a poltergeist and demand to be heard. “Mose?” my father would say, but my voice — now separate from my body and making its own bad decisions — would dial up the volume and natter on.

Still, radio was easy. All I had to carry were my script and my nerves. “Don’t flutter,” Vallee said to me kindly while the announcer did a commercial for Fleischmann’s yeast; Vallee’s show was The Fleischmann’s Hour . I thought he meant that somehow my shaking body was audible over the airwaves, but he pointed at my script. That was good: something to concentrate on.

Pretty soon we were regulars on the Vallee show, we who’d never done anything regularly in our lives. And soon after that, we were called into DelGizzi’s again, this time to a booth in front of the three little pigs, pink bellied and blithe despite the smell of seasoned pork chops in the air. Tansy played dumb for the first half of dinner, but then he couldn’t contain himself.