“No good.”
“A dollar?”
“No, no good. I know you, you force me to insult you again so I don’t charge you again. Oh, no. I’m wise to you, Don Tally. No cigar but close.”
“The expression is ‘close, but no cigar,’ my friend. I’ll be glad to give you slang lessons.”
“I will be glad to give you lessons. The difference between gourmet and gourmand.”
“Watch it, pal. You’re getting close to the insult. Very close. You better go elsewhere or you’ll be insulting me into another free meal.”
Don Tally nearly always worked. He could sing and dance, he could read lines in a way to please both director and author, he was cast as a jolly fat man or as a sinister fat man, he could play a little piano and tenor saxophone, and he was a member of the Society of American Magicians. He had been fat all his life; as a roly-poly kid in movie shorts; as a bit player in silent and talking pictures of college life at institutions called Haleton U and Calford U and Midwest State. In the days of stage presentations at the Balaban & Katz chain, when there would be a name band and a tap dancing team and a singer who was always known to the side-men as That Girl (no matter who she was, the musicians referred to her as That Girl), Don Tally would often be on the bill. It infuriated the dancing team when he got into their act, usually during their “challenge” dance, and accomplished the same steps that they worked so hard on. They got nowhere, because the producer of the stage show was well aware that the audiences got a big laugh out of seeing a fat slob do a nerve-roll and a cartwheel as well as the bone-thin hoofers whose act he was crabbing. All over the United States and Canada there were dancers and torch singers and roller skaters who hated Don Tally. The mention of his name was enough to provoke them to rude noises and vile epithets, and some of the performers would gladly have killed him. But they were afraid of him. If a hoofer lost his temper enough to attack him, Tally would swing his whole hefty arm, rather like a tennis-player doing a backhand volley, and send the hoofer sprawling and hurt. Tally would not use his fists: he saved his hands for the musical instruments, the card tricks, and the scene-stealing gestures in straight dramatic parts. Once in Detroit he was having trouble with a hoofer, a single whose split Tally had copied. Out loud, in front of Ted FioRito’s band and the stagehands, the hoofer called Tally an incestuous name. Tally walked slowly toward the hoofer, who wanted to fight and took a punch at Tally’s face. The punch landed, but Tally kept moving forward until his belly was up against the hoofer’s. Then, using his body as a battering-ram Tally pushed the hoofer until his back was to the naked brick wall. Tally had the man pinned against the wall and laughed at him and called him other unpleasant names, while the man tried to throw hooks at Tally’s face. Then when he had insulted the man as grievously as he knew how, Tally raised his right foot and with the weight of his 300 pounds brought his heel down on the hoofer’s instep. The hoofer was unable to finish out the week’s booking. Threats of a lawsuit came to nothing; Tally had the entire stage crew and two dozen musicians as witnesses to testify that the fight had been started by the hoofer.
He always worked, although his salary varied from three hundred a week to a thousand, sometimes from one week to the next. He had to have money to eat, and he had to eat more than most men. The thousand-dollar jobs were, of course, short-lived and he was not always available for them. They were second-billing jobs at the two-reeler movie studios in Brooklyn and Harlem and Fort Lee. Stars like Ruth Etting and Lee Wiley would carry the pictures, but they needed a man like Don Tally to feed them lines. He was careful not to antagonize the real stars, and they helped him get work. But steady employment in a Broadway show or a stage-show policy movie house often made it impossible to take work in movie shorts, and his thousand-dollar jobs were rare. Still, he was able to consider himself a $50,000-a-year man, and all through the thirties and forties—his own and the century’s—he ate and drank and spent money on the dolls, and if the dolls were not as high-class as the food and the booze, they were young and shapely and not too proud. A star, or a really ambitious young actress, would never be seen alone with him; he was good for some laughs in a party of four or more, but he offered nothing to the hard little girls on the way up or to the nervous women who wanted to stay on top. There were also some stories about him and his relations with women that could get a girl identified with his peculiarities, and he was not important enough to make that risk worthwhile. All the Broadway crowd knew that there were stories about him, but they did not know just what the stories were. You only had to look at him to surmise that there would be stories about him.
But in 1952 all that had gone before became subject to the amicable review that is called the second guess.
He was playing a comic butler in a second-rate musical comedy, pulling down $600 a week and beginning to wonder when the notice would go up that would announce the closing of the show. Business had fallen off badly after the benefit performances had run out, and the show was on two-fers. At such times Don Tally invariably relaxed. Other performers might begin to cut corners, to go less frequently to the expensive places, to drink a cheaper brand of booze; but Don Tally had never worried about any future, immediate or remote. Literally a holiday mood would come over him when a show was about to close; he was like a kid who liked school but welcomed vacation.
The week that the notice went up he was in all his usual haunts, and one night after the show he was with a doll and another couple in an East Side night club, laughing and scratching and making with the wisecracks. Two tables away from him sat Nigel Whaley, the English director who strangely had never before worked in New York or Hollywood. “Who is the rather portly gentleman?” said Whaley to his companion.
“That’s a fellow named Don Tally,” said Al Canton, the New York agent.
“Show biz, obviously, but what does he do?” said Whaley.
“A little of everything. Sings, dances, card tricks. Never very big. He’s in a show that’s just about to fold.”
“Been noticing his hands,” said Whaley. “What was her name, in the old silent films. Began with a zed. Za-Su Pitts! She was about your time, Al.”
“How do you like that? My time. She was just as much your time.”
“Mr. Tally’s never been in films?”
“He started in pictures as a kid, sort of Our Gang comedies. But since then he’s only been in some shorts, that I know of.”
“An unattractive picture, Mr. Tally in shorts. In fact, an unattractive man, don’t you think? But he might be useful. Could you have the studio gather up some of those shorts of his and run them for me in the next day or two?”
“Hell, they’d run The Birth of a Nation for you right now,” said Canton.
“No need for that. I’ve seen it six times. Just see if they can get some prints of Mr. Tally’s shorts.”
Three days later Don Tally was introduced to Nigel Whaley by Al Canton, who then excused himself so that the director and the performer could talk private.
“I saw you were in town,” said Tally. “On your way to the Coast, I gather.”
“Yes, my first film in Hollywood, although I’ve done one or two for American companies at home. Tell me, Mr. Tally, where did you learn to use your hands? I caught your show last night, and it’s quite extraordinary that you’re still alive.”
“Why so?”
“Well, if I were the Wayne girl, or What’s-His-Name-Williams, I’d have had you poisoned months ago. You’re really a very naughty man—but you know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but they don’t,” said Don Tally. “They haven’t been around long enough to know what goes on up there. She’s an ex-band singer and he’s a Hollywood re-ject. They don’t know from nothin’.”
“I’m sure of that,” said Whaley. “You’re closing Saturday week, if I’m not mistaken. Not to beat about the bush any further, there’s a part for you in this film of mine.”
“I knew you had something in mind, but I can’t see what I’d be doing in your picture. I read the book when it came out, and I don’t remember any part that I’d be right for.”
“In the book there was nothing, you’re quite correct. But we’ve been known to take liberties with novels and plays, and there is a part for you. The question is, could we work together? You and I. The part is a good one, Mr. Tally, but not an awfully big one, and I’d be very unhappy to find that you were holding up production because you wanted to do things your way and I preferred mine. You see, I do know about acting, Mr. Tally. I’ve done a little, and I have a theatrical background, at least three generations of it. So the question is, would you behave yourself? I put it to you this frankly, because I become very impatient once we start shooting, and on the set I’m king. A despot, and not a benevolent one.”
“You wouldn’t have to worry about me. If the money was right, the guarantee and so forth. But I have to know this much from you. It isn’t a comedy part, is it?”
“Most definitely not a comedy part.”
“Then we’re in business. I want to get away from comedy parts. Not entirely, but I’m fifty-two years of age, and I’m tired of doing pratfalls.”
“Done and done. Have your agent see Mr. Lipson tomorrow and let them haggle over terms. I know you used to get a thousand a week in films, but I’m sure Mr. Lipson can do better than that now.”
“You’re bloody well right he can,” said Don Tally.
Whaley looked at him. “By the way, Mr. Tally, you play an American. Please don’t change your accent on my account.”
“Righty-ho, governor.”
“Frightful, perfectly frightful,” said Whaley.
They got along splendidly thereafter, and when Whaley saw the performance he was getting out of Don Tally he was enthusiastically generous with his praise. “Just wait till you see Don Tally,” he told interviewers before the premiere. “It’s what you people call an Academy-award performance.”
“Is it true that you’ve signed him to a personal contract?”
“No, it is not. But I intend to use him whenever I can.”
“You really think he’ll get the Academy award?”
“I didn’t say that, did I? But they could do a great deal worse, and they often have.”
Back once again in New York, wearing one of the town’s largest double-breasted blazers with a set of gold buttons bearing the crest of one of the Stewarts (his mother was a Stewart), Don Tally was the unofficial, unpaid advance man for the new Nigel Whaley film. As premiere time approached, he was put back on salary to wangle publicity in the press and on the air. For two weeks he talked about Whaley’s picture to the radio people and the lesser lights of metropolitan journalism—the foreign language reporters, the high school editors, the odd creatures from the neighborhood papers. The important reporters were being saved for Nigel Whaley and the stars of the picture, but Don Tally was delighted to get the build-up from the smallies. “I’ve been in every zeitung and on every fifty-watter from here to Hackensack,” he told his agent, Miles Mosk. “I didn’t know there were that many papers around.”
“Well, you never know,” said Miles Mosk. “I bet you could go in the El Morocco some night and like take a poll. See how many of them ever heard of Red Foley.”
“You mean Grand Old Opry Red Foley?”
“Nashville, Tennessee,” said Miles Mosk. “I bet you wouldn’t find six people in Morocco that ever heard of Foley. But I just as soon have him as Sinatra.”
“No you wouldn’t,” said Don Tally.
“Damn near. There’s people drive a thousand miles—drive—a thousand miles one way to catch the Red Foley show. He sells a couple million records a month.”
“Are you softening me up for a booking in East Garter Belt, South Dakota. If so, pal, you’re wasting your time.”
“What am I? A cluck? You’re hot. But I’m just telling you, get all the publicity you can out of this. I don’t care if it’s Turkish or what it is. Get it. Those are the kind of people do the screaming at the premeer, not your white-tie-and-tails El Morocco set.”
“Why do you think I’ve been letting them blow garlic in my kisser the last two weeks?”
“I thought you like garlic.”
“When I’m eating it,” said Don Tally. “Not second-hand from somebody else.”
“You got those magazine notices I sent you,” said Mosk. “From the Newsweek and the Time?”
“I know them by heart. I’m supposed to be a combination of Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, the Time one said. Not bad company, uh?”
“That’s cockeyed, though. We’re taking some ads in the trade publications and I’m not saying a word about Lorre or Greenstreet. We make like you passed them years ago.”
“Yeah, but be sure you give Whaley all the credit.”
“That’s the whole ad, you thanking Nigel Whaley for the opportunity of working with him in his latest triumph, et cetera. You and Whaley. Thanks for the opportunity, but dignified. Not like some of them ads, sloppy from gratitude. You hear any more from him about his next picture? Who plays the Nazi colonel?”
“I asked him, and he said he thought Leo G. Carroll. He never even considered me.”
“Why, the limey bastard, he as much as promised it to you.”
“No, you promised it to me, only you never got around to letting Whaley in on your secret. Let’s face it, pal, the closest you ever got to Nigel Whaley was the day I introduced you to him. He didn’t seem to realize that you used to handle Fink’s Mules.”
“I never had nothing to do with that act. Nothing.”
“Well, some of those acrobats and xylophone players I used to see in your office.”
“You know what you sound like, Don? You sound like a client that was getting ready to go over to another agency. Am I anywhere near correct?”
“Not so near. You got me work when I wouldn’t go out and hustle a buck myself. But you gotta remember this, Miles. Nigel Whaley saw me one night in a joint, the kind of a joint you don’t frequent because you’re such a slow man with a buck. Nigel Whaley wouldn’t know you if he walked in here this minute. You got me booked into some of those night spots in Oyster Shell, New Jersey, and Duck Feathers, Long Island. I took the money—after you made your deduction. But you never got me the right dough for those five shows a day with B. & K. You always took their first offer.”
“Don’t tell me any more, Mr. Tally. I know the routine from here on. How I was afraid to go to bat for you because I had other acts I wanted to sell. Who’s after you? M.C.A.?”
“Everybody is after me.”
“Sure. Now they are. But five years ago, ten years ago, you were eating that chocolate ice cream with the Kirsch on it. From jobs M.C.A. got you, or I got you? Where was the Morris office when you got that kid in trouble in Pittsburgh? Mr. Don Tally, I got a nice home in Great Neck, a boy serving his internship at Mount Sinai Hospital, another boy studding law his second year at Columbia Law School. And I got annuities besides, to take care of Mrs. Mosk and I the rest of our natural lives. This I got from my ten percent of you and many’s another talented artist I kept working steady. A person willing to work steady, I had the experience and the know-how and the numerous personal contacts whereby I pick up the long distance telephone and inside of three-four minutes I got a deal. Why do I take the first offer? Because the party at the other end of the line has this much respect for Miles Mosk that I’m gonna be in business next year or two years or three years, and if they don’t treat me fair and square I remember that little fact when my client moves up the ladder of fame. I got the top dollar always, and I don’t lose friends.”
“What are we leading up to, Miles?”
“This we are leading up to. Namely, you going over to another agent will not deprive my eldest of a new stethoscope or my younger son of a legal volume
. Mrs. Mosk will not be deprived either. If she wished to take in a show, I get her house seats, the hottest ticket in town, wearing her mutation mink I gave her for her birthday. No good table at your El Morocco. But they don’t know Red Foley, either. Who could buy and sell seventy-five percent of your El Morocco people.”
“So you’re rich and you’re in business for the fun of it, and you don’t need me.”
“Correction, please. Not rich. But comfortable. The other statements are correct. I never solicited a client and I never hung on to one that wished to sever the relationship. Here’s ten dollars for my cup of coffee. And don’t you call me—I’ll call you. You should live so long.”
“I’ll send you the change of the ten-dollar bill,” said Don Tally.
He had not anticipated such an early show-down with Miles Mosk, but it was as inevitable as other changes in his private and professional life. Miles Mosk had only fairly recently stopped wearing a wing collar to work, and he was more at home in the Hunting Room of the Astor than in Sardi’s. He had never flown to Hollywood or anywhere else, although his religious orthodoxy was so nearly complete that he tried to avoid travel on Saturdays, and the airplane offered advantages in that respect. He was old-fashioned and the kind of cornball that probably enjoyed Red Foley even though he was not a client. Don Tally had been a Mosk client for nearly twenty years but had never laid eyes on Mrs. Mosk or the Mosk children. In the world that Don Tally was now entering, an agent like Miles Mosk was as out of place as a Franklin sedan. Don Tally had ordered a Bugatti, and was sorry it could not be delivered in time for the premiere.
He was dissuaded from wearing white tie and tails only by the information that Nigel Whaley, the male star, the producer of the film, and the British consul general would be wearing dinner jackets. Another problem which he need not have worried about was what lady to invite to accompany him to the opening. The amiable hookers whom he usually took out for an evening on the town were more or less automatically disqualified. He was informed a week before the opening that the publicity department had already decided that he was to escort Mrs. Townsend Bishop. He had never met Mollie Bishop, but he knew vaguely that she was a society broad who went to openings of everything—plays, movies, ballet, art exhibitions, fashion shows, the fall meetings at Belmont, the opera, and promisingly chic restaurants. She had money of her own and a substantial divorce settlement from Asa Bishop, the yachtsman and former racquets champion, who had retired to his farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to spend the third third of his life training Labradors in Chesapeake country. Mollie Bishop was no beauty and never had been, but she was able to spend $30,000 a year on clothes, and she was an authentic socialite whose name and wardrobe dressed up the occasions which attracted her presence. It was said of her that she had originated the expression, “fun party,” although she denied having used it to describe the San Francisco opening of the United Nations.