We only got fired once. This was 1934, and we’d finally been booked in New York, but first we had to play Providence, Rhode Island. Rock and I were having a conversation backstage about a certain dancer in a flash act that I had just taken out between shows. There was a list posted by the stage door of all the words you weren’t allowed to say inside the theater, backstage, onstage, anywhere. The manager, a hatchet-nosed high-waisted college boy, was a stickler. He had knocked on dressing-room doors after the first show with a list of changes: the aforementioned dancer had to replace her flesh-colored stockings. The monologist had to cut a joke about a softball game between the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of Columbus. Rocky and I never worked blue; the manager warned us to keep it that way. This may have been why Rocky, in full sight of this kid, loudly asked me a question that he should have known I’d never answer.
“Did you fuck her?”
“Rocky,” I said. I was a rogue, but I was a gentleman.
“Educate me, Professor,” he said. “I’m a young man trying to make my way in this world. In this particular world. Did you fuck her?”
I saw the manager scowling at us, tapping his foot in a near parody of disapproval. A kid that young ought to know not to fasten his belt that tight. “Listen,” I said to Rock, “ixnay on the uckfay.”
The manager advanced on us. We’d shown our lack of class at last, he thought. Some in-one act was playing, so there were layers of velvet and canvas and comics between us and the house. “Gentlemen,” he said, and Rocky said, amiably, “I’m just asking my associate Professor Sharp, who is keeping company with a young lady—that young lady”—he found her flexing her shoulders in the wings, warming up, and pointed—“whether or not—and I think you’ll find the answer educational too—he fucked her.”
“Out,” said the manager. “I don’t care how funny you sons of bitches are supposed to be.”
“Such language,” said Rocky, tipping his prop hat.
“We’ll go to the club,” he told me, once we’d sent our stuff to the hotel in one taxi and climbed into a second. (I was always shocked by his willingness to hail a cab. Why not a streetcar? Why not a bracing walk? “Because we make enough money,” he’d say, his fingers already on their way to his mouth for a whistle.)
“What club?” I asked. We passed a distant ostentatious white-domed building. I missed the flash-act dancer, a sweet nonsensical Polish girl who did not wear underwear of any kind; the manager had only worried about her flesh-colored stockings because he lacked imagination. She had a beautiful habit of pronouncing “think” as “sing”: I sing you are handsome. I sing you are funny. In bed, in the coarsest language possible, she repeatedly demanded that I do to her what I thought I was already doing anyhow. We weren’t at the theater, so she didn’t get in trouble. I’d planned a week of meeting her between shows.
“The club,” said Rocky. “My club. The Swans. What, you think we got canned by accident? I’m thirsty.”
We’d been fired around 10:30; now it was 11:00. Even if I had to sleep alone, bed did not sound like such a bad idea. “Next time you get fired on purpose, could you ask me?”
“Relax. It’s Providence. Next week we’re in New York, and who’ll care about Rhode Island?”
“I guess.”
“Don’t guess,” he said. “Believe.”
The club was a local chapter of some kind of vaudeville fraternity, one of those dark-doored joints with no windows, filled with smoke and drink and an exhausting forced hilarity. Some of the guys I recognized from the circuit, but Rocky seemed to be bosom pals with every last one. “This is Mike Sharp,” he said, dragging me by the neck. “Be nice.”
“I’m always nice,” I said, and everyone laughed.
“We aren’t,” said some guy in a chalk-striped suit. There was a game of billiards going, and I watched and realized that Ed Dubuque could have made a fortune here. Also there was a cat, the president of the club I was told, and when the cat jumped up on the billiard table the game had to stop until he felt like getting down. It was a club with rules like that. Now I can say it: I never really cared for theater people. Theater men, anyhow. I was fond of merry oddballs like Jack Robertson the monopede dancer, or quiet geniuses like Walter Cutter. Essentially I didn’t like comedians, except Rocky. I thought he was the funniest guy in the world, and there was nothing I liked less than watching him in a room full of funny guys, trying to claim his title.
The membership at the Swans had armies of ants in their pants. Every story, every bit, involved springing up at the very least, and possibly balancing on a chair or the bar or the billiard table. You had to grab sleeves or shirtfronts or pant seats; you had to feign anger or terror or a fainting spell. This crowd fainted more often than a cotillion of corseted debutantes. I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
“Siddown!” said the ham-faced bartender. “Sweet Jesus, you lot are up and down like a whore’s nightgown.” They all applauded. He must have said this every night.
Late in the evening Rocky, pink cheeked with drink, rolled up his shirtsleeves. He leaned in and grabbed my shoulder. His breath had that gin smell, rotten sentimental flowers.
“I am going to teach you how to tango,” he said.
I said, “Rocky, I hardly know you.”
“Nevertheless.” He suddenly scratched his nose with the flat of one palm, and then shouted, “Somebody give me a rose!” For half a second he attempted to hold a pool cue between his teeth. On the bar, the club president napped in a furry ball on top of a discarded newspaper, the tip of his tail schoolmarmishly tapping a headline. Rocky removed him—surely a breach of the club charter!—and commandeered the paper. He rolled up a sheet and artfully tore one end into petals: a rose.
“Tastes terrible,” Rocky said, giving it a nibble. And then he began to dance by himself. We all pom-pommed in an Argentinean way. At first it was a joke, and then it wasn’t. Rocky held the air, and you knew exactly what his imagined partner weighed. Small, especially compared to him, and so he was deferential; he danced on his toes, his feet back, to give her room. You even knew that she tried to get away from him, and then she got more forgiving and passionate. He loved her; she had a temper, she was still making up her mind. Well, I thought, this was worth getting fired for.
He tilted her into a dip. I swear I could see her hand wrinkling the back of his shirt.
Later, he showed me how to cultivate that newspaper flower. I hadn’t noticed that the actual fashioning of it was part of the trick, like Charlie Chaplin making do with a shoe for dinner, two dinner rolls on forks for entertainment, a gag he’d stolen from Fatty Arbuckle anyhow. “Here,” Rocky said to me. He inclined his head toward the rose that emerged from the local editorial, petal by petal, his face undisturbed, curious, watching it bloom.
The All-Girl Cure
Middling success gets exhausting, take my word for it. Rocky ate more, drank more. Fatter was funnier, so he claimed, but really he was just hungry. He couldn’t get enough. He’d clean off his plate and then look at mine, hopeful. At first it was a request, but soon enough it might as well have been written into the contract: once he’d demolished his meal, he got to eat whatever was left of mine. Sometimes he ordered two meals at once, the only man for whom the fried-clam platter was a side dish. You passed an ice-cream shop with Rocky, and two doors down you suddenly realized you were walking alone. Go back, peer through the window, and there he was, instructing the help on how to lay on the whipped cream, the maraschino cherries, like a pharaoh overseeing a pyramid.
As for me, I became a ladies’ man. I’d discovered the secret, which was mostly just deciding to be one. Wasn’t Rocky right? I needed the practice for the act. The more girls I saw offstage, the more my timing improved: I learned the uses of the long look, the pause, the sudden twinkling smile. How could I think I knew anything about comedy, back when I knew nothing about sex? Waiter, another girl please, we’re booked in Chicago next week and I have a piece of business I need to polish. Wh
at the hell, I’ll take all the girls in the house. Girls like that never harmed anyone.
I spent my money on clothes, slick plaid jackets and light wool pants. In other words, I became a dandy, a religious affiliation I still cling to. I took up smoking, so I could carry a lighter and a case. I wore my hat at angles that my father would have considered a thumb in the eye of society: the way you wore your hat was not a joke. Nothing, thought my father, was more serious.
Now I was seeing lots of girls, chorines and dramatic actresses and tumblers and hoofers and soubrettes. Not all of them were as eager as the Indian Rubber Maid to come back to my room, but plenty were. Lots and lots of girls. This one smells like roses and that one smells like cake. This one knows the words to the Iowa fight song and will sing them; this one likes to drink; this shy one will surprise you by slipping the cigar from your hand and taking a puff. This one is just your size; this one is smaller; this one outweighs you in a pleasant, daunting way.
I had a lot of fun. What can I say? I made them laugh.
Rocky, though he’d seen it happen, could not understand. He loved women, but he was inept, so romantically amateurish he’d ask anyone for advice. Sometimes I watched him trying to talk to a girl. If he was sober, he came off too brisk and busy. Drunk, he bumbled, overaffectionate, a dog wanting nothing but to lay its head in your lap. He’d go to kiss a girl’s hand, and she’d end up damp to the elbow. He spent endearments like nickels, called everyone Baby and Sweetheart and Darling and Little Friend and Cutie. This worked until he called the bartender Doll Baby, and the girl he had his eye on suspected that Rock’s affection was for the world at large, not her in particular.
“There must be some tricks you’re not telling me,” Rocky would beg.
“What can I tell you?” I’d answer. “It’s love.”
Not that I didn’t have my methods. Ever since the start of the world, girls have been told by their mothers: a certain kind of man is only after one thing. A suspicious mother is almost always right. Some guys (Rocky, for instance) believed that this meant a guy on the make should act innocent, interested only vaguely in the girl’s company, and not at all in the One Thing. But girls didn’t care. All you had to do was convince a girl that it was Her One Thing that you were angling for, hers and hers alone, surrounded as it was by all her charms. Of course you wanted to sleep with her—how will you ever get there if you don’t make that clear?—it’s you, my darling brunette, my beloved redhead, my most glorious bottle blonde. You with the three brothers, or the father with the butcher shop, or a love of Bach. Let me kiss you, because your butcher father writes you letters that quote Tennyson. Come back to my room, because you love Bach.
So you find your girl and sit down next to her between shows, in a restaurant, or a sitting room, or best of all a park, on a bench. Courtesy and courage. You rest your right elbow on the back of the bench, near her shoulder, make a bow of your arms, hands clasped in front, your left elbow pointing at your left hip. Maybe a bow of your legs, too, your ankle crossed on your knee. Smile as though she has just told nine tenths of a long joke that promises to be the funniest thing you ever heard, you can taste the punch line. Don’t touch her, but keep close. Ask her questions. Look her in the eyes, sure, but look away, down to her lap, at her shoulder—you’re either a confident man made shy by her beauty, or an emboldened shrinking violet; either transformation’ll charm her. If you hold still enough, she will be the one to put her hand on your nearby knee, and then slide it closer to your hip, and then, on a good day, she will spread her overcoat across your laps. Better still, a newspaper, which will rattle but is disposable, and makes more sense as a prop. You are theatrical people, after all. Tabloids are too small: you need something respectable and full sized. You are only sitting with your girl, reading the paper together—is the right movie playing at the right theater—and you look at the paper, and then at your girl, your free hand holding your side of the daily news, and hers hers. The prim pigeons will fly away, but squirrels are worse perverts than old ladies, and will loiter. One set of her garters has come undone (Oh, you men who care nothing for fashion, let me tell you a story about the days before pantyhose!) and the pale stocking has fallen around her pale shoe on the dark grass like a ring around the moon. If you are a good actor, and a quiet careful polite boy brought up in a houseful of girls, only those local squirrels will wonder why you don’t run a finger along the newsprint, why the far left columns crumple in your grip, why she folds the horoscope nearly in half, her thumb threading it between her fingers, her tongue between her teeth. Why it takes so long for the two of you to fold the paper up, neatly, as though you are making the bed.
6
Ah! It’s You!
We were playing the Casino Theater at Coney Island when Rocky became enamored of a nearsighted chanteuse named Penny O’Hanian, a pretty girl with a great deal of nut-brown hair who specialized in love-gone-wrong songs. Maybe she was just a good singer, but despite a thin voice she sounded like she meant every stepped-on word. Her eyesight was so bad (she refused to wear glasses) that she had to sidle stage right and feel for the curtain with her fingers. Then she whipped it around herself like a cape—that was her exit—and whipped it back for her bow. Sometimes in the whirlwind of velvet, she nearly toppled over.
Even backstage, she made noise: she sang under her breath so people would know she was coming. Years later, when I heard about the way bats navigate, I thought of Penny, singing out as she groped her way through life. She fixed on her face a standoffish expression because she didn’t want to smile at strangers, and you could get quite close to her before she could make out your features, and this was her charm. The minute you came into focus, Penny would suddenly look delighted, relieved, nearly heartsick. Just the person I was longing to see! She’d grab you by the forearm. She wouldn’t let go.
You had to love Penny for that, and Rocky did. He never noticed that she did it to everyone she knew.
“She’s adorable,” he told me.
“She is,” I answered, and I thought, Right up until she opens her mouth. I found her—forgive me, Penny, I didn’t know you well then—maddening. Completely. She couldn’t shut up. Spending time with Penny was like walking into a crowd of chickens: that noisy and that meaningful. Or like she’d been having a conversation with herself all day, and there was no way you’d catch up. Rocky, no mean talker himself, watched her babble, happily shaking his head. He started keeping company with her. At least I think he did. It was hard to tell. Maybe I was keeping company with her. All I knew was that for a week at the Casino, followed by a week at Loew’s Majestic in the Bronx, then finally in Manhattan at the Eltinge (named after the famous female impersonator), she was around all the time, at dinners, in taverns. She’d reach out and snag one of our forearms and say, brightly, “Where will we dine tonight, boys?” I’m still not convinced that Penny wasn’t just desperate for a couple of seeing-eye friends. It must have been a great relief to her not to totter into a burlesque house thinking it was a department store.
For instance: at a midtown chop house, Rocky was telling a story about Julian Eltinge, the theater’s namesake: he’d once punched Rocky in the nose.
“Why?” I asked.
“He thought I made a comment about his virility.”
“Did you?”
Rocky looked theatrically sheepish. “No. No words were exchanged at all.”
“So why did he hit you?”
“I patted him on the keester. I thought it was a compliment, from one professional to another.”
“What a beautiful dress,” Penny said.
We had manners, we were game: we looked around to see what dress Penny meant.
“The one I saw Eltinge in,” she said. “He was fat already, but, my God! I wish I looked that good.” Then she said to Rocky, “I mean, you’ve never patted my keester.”
“I’m a gentleman,” Rock explained. “That was my problem: so was Eltinge.”
“I could use a nice dre
ss.” Penny sighed. “I like blue.” Then, moments later, “I like cut flowers in a vase.” She sensed movement in the room, and called out to the man who was approaching our table, “I could use a fresh napkin.”
The guy in question was a tall blond young man in a tan suit with oversized shoulder pads and a dizzying checked yellow tie. The waiters, on the other hand, were all puny Jewish fellows in short red jackets and black bow-ties. “Couldn’t we all?” the guy said amiably, and kept on going toward the Gents’.
“Was that the maître d’?” Penny asked.
I laughed. “For Pete’s sake, Penny, why don’t you get glasses?” Maybe I was just a glasses snob, having gotten my first pair at age twenty-five. I admired myself in the mirror constantly, though I don’t know whether that was because they suited me or because I hadn’t clearly seen my own face for several years. Or because I had also just purchased my first toupee, and I was working on not noticing it.
“I don’t need them,” Penny said. Then, to Rocky, as if I’d suggested she should wear a mask to cover her puss, she said, “Mike thinks I should get glasses!”
He said, “Not till we’re married, sweetheart,” and slapped me heartily on the back.
That was a joke, I was sure. He thought she was pretty sweet—it was all he could do to resist picking her up and carrying her around so she wouldn’t bump into things—but he wasn’t even sleeping with her. I thought he should give it a try. Penny was so eccentric, not to mention free with her fingers, that it would at least have been an interesting experience.