“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.