Niagara Falls the First Time
Penny saw us off at Penn Station—we were headed for Buffalo, then Canada, the first time I’d ever leave the States. She stood on the platform and waved at all the passing windows, just in case someone she knew was on the other side, waving back.
“Nice girl,” I said to Rocky, hoping for some information. He shrugged, and shouldered his suitcase onto the luggage rack.
“Very nice girl,” I said again.
He nodded absentmindedly. “Listen,” he said suddenly. “I want to stop and see Niagara Falls. We’ll go?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Water running downhill,” I said. If he was bored by Penny, I was bored by some dog-legged river. “What’s the big to-do?”
“You’ll see. Don’t play jaded, kid. It doesn’t become you.”
He was right. Good God: I’d only known the Falls as part of that old bit. In real life the river poured and poured and poured, rainbows woven in at the bottom, the giant plume of mist floating up, water giving into gravity and then finding a loophole. I could see how the mere memory could drive someone insane. I felt unstable myself.
“Rocky,” I said in wonder. “Why don’t they take a breath?”
“They don’t have waterfalls in Iowa?” he asked casually.
I didn’t know the answer to that. Anyhow, it sure wasn’t Duluth.
There was a guy there who engraved drinking glasses with names. He used a pneumatic drill tipped with a diamond, and the glass chips rained down, beautiful as the diamond, beautiful as the finished glass, beautiful as the Falls themselves. I thought about getting one, but didn’t know whose name to put down. In my father’s house, there were seven ruby glass cups, souvenirs of some fair from some cousin, one for each of us living kids, our names and birth dates written on the side. By now my sisters had plenty of children whose names might be engraved in glass by a fond uncle; Annie, my dogged correspondent, had cataloged them for me. I fingered a bill in my pocket.
“C’mon,” said Rocky. “Let’s go.”
Souvenirs everywhere, mostly for the fabled visiting newlyweds and their spendthrift sentiment. I examined reverse-glass painted brooches, change purses made of tiny seashells, etched aluminum cups. We stood on the Canadian side of the border and Rocky read aloud from a pamphlet about all the people who’d ever gone over the Falls in a barrel. Not all of the barrels were barrels: one guy rode over in a giant rubber ball, another in a tin ship that crumpled like foil on the river below.
“Here’s someone,” said Rocky. “‘His capsule bounced behind the great curtain of the Falls, out of the reach of rescuers. Despite all efforts to save him, Stathakis suffocated behind the rush of water.’ ”
“Well, then he lived longer than he deserved to.”
“You wouldn’t go over?” Rocky asked. “You’d be a hero if you lived.”
I turned to him. The wind had pulled his hair into chunks. He looked at the Falls as though they were a particularly worthy adversary, and I decided not to tell him that in June of 1927 I’d lost my stomach for acts of pointless, gravity-tempting bravery. That man who starved had had a family, and they’d never forgiven him for what he’d done.
“We’re booked for weeks,” I said. “Please don’t go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.”
“Well, if that’s how you feel, I won’t. Otherwise I’d go. Coverage in all the papers whether you make it or not. Rubber. Big rubber enclosed ball. It’ll bounce, it’ll float, it’ll be watertight. Made of old girdles, maybe: nothing can get through a girdle. And can you imagine the view?”
“Yes,” I said. “I can imagine it right here where I’m standing, thanks.”
For his sake I tried to see it: the tiny enclosed ship, a single window for its single passenger. Furtively, you bring it to the top floor of the Falls. You look around for the authorities, set it in the water, and anchor it to shore. You get in. Any minute you’ll be facing your death, but right now, even though the current is knocking you around, you can think: any leaks? No. Breathe in. Pull the anchor from the shore. Shoot forward.
Stare out the window to the spot where the bottom drops out of the river. What’s that: fear? Exhilaration? Belief that God has time to save idiots like you, when everywhere people die through no fault of their own? No, He’d wash His hands of you, here was the sink He’d do it in.
What you think, just before you plummet: You know, I’m sure the view is actually much better from dry land.
Back to New York to play the boroughs. In my spare time, I picked up girls. If I ran into a girl I’d slept with, it was like I had to bed her again, to make sure she still thought I was a nice guy. The ones who’d changed their minds made me crazy, though almost none of them did. Two or three, maybe, and they’d married, and even then that didn’t seem like a good excuse. I tried flowers, songs, whatever might work. One recently wed former paramour said, “Why me? There are plenty of girls,” and I scratched my head and said, “You know? You’re right,” and let go of her hand and fairly skipped off.
That worked.
I’d always been taught that love went something like this: There is a girl out there for you, and you find her, and then you work endlessly to keep love around. “Your parents loved each other, Mose,” my father told me more than once, “better love because harder work.” And so I came to understand: love is an animal that can—with a great deal of patience—be taught to sleep in the house. That doesn’t mean it won’t kill you if you’re not careful.
Really, do you want it in your house?
Maybe I liked some of those girls better than others. A girl named Gwen, maybe, and an Italian girl named Carlotta. Maybe sometimes I was glad to get away, and other times not, but mostly I remember being full of love while lying down with every girl, and then less so when I stood up to leave, as though my brain was a bowl tilted to collect a stingy serving of something that, when I was upright, drained to my feet, where it did no good.
But before then I felt swell, I felt fine, I felt perfectly cheerful. The cure for unhappiness is happiness, I don’t care what anyone says. The guys in vaudeville, they took all sorts of cures, you only had to watch what they ran to first thing in the morning to ease the last bits of their night terrors: a bottle, a needle, a bookie, a Western Union office, a stage, a wife, a child, a giant meal, a strange pretty girl. Would we be ashamed later? Sure. These days, when shamefulness and shamelessness are both sins, I don’t know how people operate. Back then, only shamelessness was: we were ashamed, and so we buried ourselves in the thing that shamed us, because it was the only thing that might make us feel better. And then we repented. And then, flush with repentance, we sinned again.
Tansy’s Discovery
Carter and Sharp were weary. Vaudeville wheezed all around us, milking its deathbed scene worse than, well, a vaudevillian. By 1937 we played as many nightclubs as vaude houses. Summers we worked in the Catskills or out near the Minnesota lakes. It got so Rocky wouldn’t go to a movie or listen to the radio. He couldn’t stand all those guys with less talent than us who nevertheless got big breaks.
And then we met Buddy Tansy.
We were in New York again, playing a run-down theater in the Bronx that had quit booking vaude acts in the early thirties in favor of movies, and was now adding a few performers to warm up the audience before the pictures. I think we opened for The Good Earth. The dressing rooms were in the basement and smelled like one hundred years of trained-dog acts. When we walked into ours after the show, there was a tiny man sitting on the old daybed, reading a newspaper. He squinted at us when we came in.
“I’m Buddy Tansy,” he said, trying to wrestle the paper to the ground. It seemed to be getting the better of him.
“Good for you!” said Rocky.
“I want to represent you.”
“We have representation,” I said, reaching past him for my case. After the act Rock was cheerful and filled with the milk of human kindness. I was filled
with a burning need to hit the cold cream. The towel by the sink had, like the shroud of Turin, the impression of someone’s face.
“I’m better,” said the little man unconvincingly.
“So talk to us, Buddy Tansy,” said Rocky. “Tell us how you will change our life.”
“Really? You won’t be sorry. You sure?” He wrung his hands, as if this invitation was too much to bear.
Rocky and I weren’t tall men, but Tansy was minuscule. He had the exasperated dignity of a man who’d spent his life being shut up in dumbwaiters and theatrical trunks as a gag. I’d never had such leanings in my life, but even I wanted to find out what unlikely place I could cram Tansy into. His given name was Edward, and he tried to get people to call him Buddy, but everyone called him Tansy, an elf of a name for an elf of a man. He hated it. Good old Tansy. He had a small head with small features, and pointed teeth that showed when he smiled, which made him look nervous and cornered. All in all, he resembled some avid little animal, one who’d spend all its time nibbling on things it shouldn’t—the lettuce in your garden, the wiring under your house.
“I want to get you boys famous,” he said to us in that Bronx dressing room. “I want to do great things for you.”
“Yeah?” Rocky said. “How.”
Tansy bared his teeth; we didn’t know that was his smile. He hopped off the daybed and sat on the counter in front of the mirror. “I know some people. I could get you in a Broadway show.”
“Really,” I said.
“I don’t know about Broadway,” Rocky said. “Right now, we can work all year round if we want. That’s secure. A Broadway show closes, and we’re out of a job.”
“Nothing’s secure,” said Tansy. “But I could get you a thousand a week.”
“We get that,” said Rocky.
“Apiece,” said Tansy. “You’d each get a thousand.”
No, I thought, I’d get eight hundred and Rocky would get twelve. Still, it was quite a bit more than we had been making—which, by the way, was not a thousand dollars. Well, as far as I knew, it wasn’t.
“Minus ten percent,” said Rocky.
Tansy showed us his alarming teeth again. “I have to eat.” He looked at me. “But I’ll earn you more than the extra ten. I’m good.”
“Yes,” I said.
Rocky turned and looked at me—what was I doing, making a decision? Rocky handled those, and career ambition, and nearly everything. For the first time I saw something he’d left out, something he’d failed to aspire to.
“Broadway,” I said helplessly. I hadn’t realized it until this very second, but I’d always wanted to play Broadway. I’d only dreamt of vaudeville because it seemed possible. There hadn’t been Broadway in Iowa.
Rocky whistled. “Broadway, huh? Okay, little one.” He patted Tansy’s shoulder. “Whatever jobs you find us, ten percent.”
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 o
n 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.