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.
“You doubted me,” he said.
“We never doubted you,” said Rocky.
“You doubted me,” Tansy repeated. He was trying his best to look downtrodden, but he giggled. In fact, he couldn’t stop.
“What is it, little one?” Rocky asked.
Tansy was steering his steak around his plate with a fork. “Broadway,” he managed to squeak out. “A revue. In the spring.”
Rocky reached out with his own fork and stopped Tansy’s steak. They sat there a moment, fork to fork, and Rocky gave a whoop, and speared the steak and brought it to his own plate, where in celebration he began to carve it in thirds the way a dreaming general slices a map of enemy territory.
“Tansy!” I said, because it was all I could think of. “Tansy!” My first instinct was to run to the phone and call — well, who? Annie. Miriam. My father. Hattie, who would have been flat-out stunned. It was the first sudden success I’d ever had that didn’t involve a girl.
Rocky said to Tansy, one hand over his heart, “We never doubted you.” He put a piece of meat on my plate and a piece on Tansy’s and began eating what was left, as though through this ritual he and I, like the little man with the pointed teeth, would be able to see into the future.
How We Became The Boys
The Money Show, like our Grossinger’s appearance, was a burlesque-style review — one of those shows that was like Hellzapoppin’ but wasn’t Hellzapoppin’. Some dancing, some singing, a couple of knockabout comedians. We had two bits, a comic skit and a song-and-dance number in which I played a cop trying to arrest a comely young lady who was, of course, Rocky in drag, trying to escape a couple of mobsters. Rocky didn’t like the song we were given, so he rewrote the lyric. It was called, “Stop! You’re Under Arrest.” I still sing it around the house:
ROCKY: But aren’t you married?
MIKE: Aw, she’s an old battle-ax.
I’ll keep you in diamonds
I’ll keep you in Cadillacs
I’ll keep you in caviar
Up to your elbas.
ROCKY: What, no dessert?
MIKE: A dozen peach melbas!
ROCKY: Officer, darling,
You’re sweet, I’ll confess,
But I’m spoken for—
MIKE: —Stop!
You’re under arrest!
Plenty was different, now that we were in a show with actual backers, but the best of it were the costumes. My cop’s uniform was real, not a dark suit dressed up with silver buttons. Rocky’s dress was heavy cotton accented with black lace. Beneath it he wore a kind of padded union suit to make him curvy.
“Wouldn’t you marry me?” he asked, swooning at himself in the mirror. Though he’d already applied his giant red lipstick and his giant red wig, all he wore was his voluptuous undersuit.
“Well,” I said, “I’m thinking it over. No.”
He put down his powder puff. “Why not?” he asked, hurt.
“Because you’re too good for me, sweetheart.”
He blew me a kiss.
How long had it been since either of us had stayed anywhere for more than a month? What luxury, to really live somewhere. We got apartments in the same building on East Sixty-fourth Street — nothing grand, just one-room places in a turn-of-the-century building with a view of the river. I unpacked my suitcase, went to see movie matinees, ordered telephone service in my own name. By now Penny and Rocky were an absolute item. She came backstage after the show every night, trying to find Rock. It must have been an unpleasant surprise for Penny to make out, down the hall, the blurred figure of a dowager, only to discover upon her arrival that it was in fact her steady beau. “I don’t like you like this,” she said.
“Why not, darling?” Rocky put his arm around her and patted his sizable bosom. “You scared? Just rest your head here and tell me all about it.” He kissed her cheek. She scowled and tried to scrub the lipstick off with her knuckles.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “I thought you liked female imps. You liked Eltinge, didn’t you?”