Horse of a Different Color

by Howard Waldrop

  W: And the best?

  M: Two acts. You might have run across them, since you write about this stuff for a living. Dybbuk & Wing: a guy from Canarsie and a guy from Shanghai. Novelty dance act. And the Ham Nag. A horse-suit act.

  W: I’ve seen the name on playbills.

  M: Ever notice anything about that?

  W: What?

  M: Stick with me and I will astound you later.

  W: What, exactly, made them so good?

  M: Dybbuk & Wing did, among other things, a spooky act. The theater lights would go down, and they’d be standing there in skeleton costumes—you know, black body suits with bones painted on them. Glowed in the dark. Had a scene drop that glowed in the dark, too. Burying ground—trees, tombstones, and so forth. Like in that later Disney cartoon, what was it?

  W: The Skeleton Dance?

  M: Exactly. Only this was at least twenty years before.

  W: So they were like early Melies—the magician filmmaker?

  M: No. They were Dybbuk & Wing.

  W: I mean, they used the phantasmagorical in the act. What was it like?

  M: It wasn’t like anything. It was terrific, is all I can say. You would swear the bones came apart while they were dancing. I was on bills with them on and off for years. They were the only act I know of that never took a bow. The lights didn’t come up and they take their skulls off and bow. No matter how much applause. The lights stayed down, the two disappeared, then the lights came back up for the next act. I hated to follow them; so did anyone with a quiet act. They usually put the dog stuff and acrobats on after them, if they had any.

  W: Never took a bow?

  M: Never.

  Winstead: What about the horse act?

  Marks: The Ham Nag?

  W: What did it/they do?

  M: It was just the best goddammed horse-suit act there ever was. Or ever could be. I don’t know how to begin to describe it, unless you’d say it was like a cartoon horse come to life. Right there, live, on the boards. When you were watching it you felt like you were in another world. Where there were real cartoon horses.

  W: Vaudeville was more varied than people of my generation think.

  M: It was more varied than even my generation could think. You had to see it.

  Marks: Dybbuk & Wing set the pattern. Wing—the Chinese guy—never talked. Just like those magicians. Who are they?

  Winstead: Penn & Teller?

  M: Just like them. I don’t mean just in the act, like Harpo. I mean, backstage, offstage, in real life. But I don’t think he was a mute, either. I played with them for years and never heard him speak.

  Like, one time backstage—we’d moved up to three-a-days somewhere—so we had time to kill. It may have been outside the City of Industry or somewhere. There was only one deck of cards in the whole place, and it was our turn to use them between shows.

  “Got any Nine of Cups?” I asked.

  Wing shook his head no.

  “Go Fish,” said Dybbuk.

  I mean, Wing could have said something if he’d wanted to. It was just us in the room . . .

  Marks: Okay, the Ham Nag act was, it was always trying to get the one blue apple in a whole pile of green and red ones on a cart. Things kept going wrong. Well, you’ve seen films from acts back then, like Langdon’s exploding car. For some reason, this was hilarious. The Nag made you believe the one goal in its life was to get that apple.

  Winstead: You said if I stuck with you, you’d drop a bombshell . . .

  Marks: Oh, you were paying attention, weren’t you?

  W: Bombs away.

  M: I played with Dybbuk & Wing and the Ham Nag on the Gus Sun circuit out of Chicago for at least four years. I think it was at the Arcadia Theater one afternoon when it suddenly clicked.

  You remember I told you to look at those posters in your collection? You’ll notice that on every one—don’t take my word for it—everywhere the Ham Nag played, Dybbuk & Wing were on the bill . . .

  W: You mean . . .

  M: It took me four years of being on the same bills with them every day before I figured it out. Yeah, they were the Ham Nag, too. It did not come out of their dressing room—they must have changed out in the alleys or the manager’s office or somewhere.

  That day I went on, did my act, then watched. Dybbuk & Wing were on two spots before me, then suddenly the Ham Nag was on. (The Ham Nag did take four-footed bows and would milk applause. That’s why it was called the Ham Nag.) It came offstage. I was going to follow; a chorus girl said something to me; I looked around, and the Ham Nag was gone.

  I went to Dybbuk & Wing’s dressing room; they were there. Wing was writing a letter and Dybbuk was reading what looked like a two-hundred-year-old book as thick as a cinder block and just as dusty. Like they’d been there all the time.

  I finally saw them one night, coming back from the alley after the Ham Nag act. Wing saw me looking at them.

  From then on, Dybbuk acted like it was no secret and that I’d known about it all along.

  I’m not telling stories out of school here: few people remember either act (though they should), and the acts have been dead half as long as I’ve been alive. They were supposed to be in that movie I made (It Goes To Show You, RKO, 1933, when Manny Marks was forty-seven years old), but they were “hot on the case” by then, as Dybbuk said.

  Winstead: What was “the case”?

  Marks: Okay. I’m approaching this as an outsider. Ever read The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot? Julius and Eliot had a mutual admiration society—they exchanged photos like International Pen Pals.

  W: We had to read it in college.

  M: Things will be easier if you go home tonight and read it again. Anyway, there’s all this grail imagery in it, and other such trayf. Only you have to work through it, even if you’re a Gentile. So where does that leave me? Julius once gave me a book Eliot took a lot of stuff from—somebody named Weston’s From Ritual To Romance. All this stuff about a wounded king—like Frazer’s The Golden Bough—look it up.

  W: And this has something to do with a horse act?

  M: And Dybbuk & Wing’s dance act, too. Trust me.

  Winstead: So what you’re saying here, at the age of 103, is that the Apocalypse may have been averted, and we didn’t know it, or something.

  Marks: Or something. No. I’m saying there was some kind of personal Apocalypse (“That which is revealed when the veil is dropped”) involving Dybbuk, Wing, the Ham Nag, a couple other vaudeville types, maybe the Vatican, perhaps Mussolini—Stalin and Hitler for all I know . . .

  W: This would have been in . . . ?

  M: 1933. When I was making It Goes To Show You. Why Dybbuk, Wing, and the Ham Nag couldn’t be in the movie.

  W: This I’d really like to hear.

  M: You will. Hand me that bottle so I can wet my whistle.

  Marks: Now you’ve got me drunk.

  Winstead: I don’t think so, Mr. Marks. I’ve seen you drunk.

  M: Where?

  W: At Walter Woolf King’s wake a few years ago.

  M: If you were there, you saw me drunk. I was the oldest drunk there. At my age, I’m the oldest drunk anywhere.

  W: You were going to tell me about the Vatican’s and Mussolini’s interest in a vaudeville horse-suit act?

  M: Was I?

  W: I think so. I can’t be sure.

  M: Okay. Is that thing still on?

  W: Yes.

  M: Here goes.

  Marks: Somewhere around 1927, Coolidge years, the Prohib, vaudeville was already dying. That October would come Jolson in The Jazz Singer. It wasn’t there yet, but soon the movies would talk, sing, and dance—everything vaudeville could do, only better, because they could spend the money, and every film house could be the Palace, every night.

  As I said, you couldn’t tell it from The Jazz Singer—cantor’s son in blackface, jumping around like a fool and disappointing his dad. I saw the play with Jessel back in ’25. Trust me, it was just perfect for the movies,
and more than perfect for Jolson.

  But I had seen the end of, as the paper’s named, variety. I knew it as soon as Jolson said “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”

  So did Dybbuk. So did Wing.

  We had to get new acts.

  So this is the context I’m talking about.

  What Dybbuk & Wing did between their acts was read and write. Wing probably wrote all the letters for them—he did to me, later—I never saw him actually reading, it was Dybbuk who always had a book open. Where he got them, I don’t know—maybe they had a secret card, good at any library anywhere. They only seemed to have one or two books with them at a time. Carrying a bunch around in their luggage would have been prohibitive and tiring, especially on the Sun circuit—if you had it good, you only moved every three days; no split-weeks, and only in the relatively bigger towns.

  They must have been reading and writing for years before I ever met them. They were on the trail of something. No telling who they corresponded with, or what attention they attracted.

  I believe we were playing the Priory Theater in Zion, Illinois, when Pinky Tertulliano joined the bill. He was an albino comic acrobat—like that guy on Broadway now? (1990—ed.)

  Winstead: Bill Irwin?

  M: That’s him. Anyway, since the Flying Cathar Family was already on the bill, they put him between Edfu Yung and Dybbuk & Wing. Edfu Yung was a Sino-Egyptian bird imitator; quite an act. And he threw his call offstage, like Bergen or Señor Wences. You’d swear the stage flies were full of birds. I don’t know that Yung and Wing ever talked over their common heritage, since Wing never talked.

  Anyway, Tertulliano—who had a very weird act even for vaudeville—and I’m not kidding—was off before Dybbuk & Wing went on, which is the important thing here.

  We found out later he’d come straight over from Italy to the Sun circuit in the Midwest, which was unusual unless Gus Sun was your uncle or something—usually you played whatever you could get on the East Coast—unless you were some real big act brought over by an impresario—Wilson Mizener once said an impresario is someone who speaks all languages with a foreign accent—and if that were the case, what’s he doing going on between Edfu Yung and Dybbuk & Wing in Zion?

  Anyway, things went swimmingly for a week or two, and the whole bill moved to some other town.

  I remember things happened on Friday the Thirteenth—it must have been in May, because a couple of weeks later Lindy made his hop—Dybbuk & Wing came off and stuff had been messed with in their dressing room.

  Nothing goes through a theater faster than news that there’s a sneak thief around. Suddenly keys are needed for the locks on the doors, and people watch each other’s places while they’re on. Like with the army, where barracks thieves aren’t tolerated; if they’re found, there’s some rough justice dealt out. Signs go up and things get tense.

  They never said what was messed with or taken; they just filed with the theater, Equity, and Gus Sun himself, and spread the word.

  Nobody ever proved anything. Tertulliano left the bill about the time Lindbergh took off for France. Nobody else’s stuff was ever taken.

  Sometime in June, Wing got a letter with lots of odd stamps and dago-dazzler forms all over it; after he read it he gave it to Dybbuk, who told me: “Never act on a bill with Tertulliano; he’s trouble.”

  That’s all he said. Fortunately, I nor anyone else ever had to. Far as I know Pinky left vaudeville and went back to Italy. Which is strange, since he had such a good weird act, like the Flying Cathars all rolled into one.

  Marks: . . . so I started noticing stuff about both their acts. Like, in the skeleton dance. I told you there were glow-in-the-dark tombstones and things. One was a big sarcophagus, like in those New Orleans cemeteries. On the side of it was the phrase “Et in Arcadia ego”—“And I too am in Arcadia” is the usual translation, and people think it means death, too, was in pastoral, idyllic settings. I think it was just an ancient “Kilroy was here,” myself.

  And the horse-suit act, the Ham Nag. “Why is it always trying to get a blue apple?” I asked. Like something out of Magritte. Who ever heard of a blue apple? (Magritte’s favorites were of course green.) Dybbuk didn’t say anything; he just handed me what turned out to be the thickest, driest book I had ever tried to read in my life. Honest, I tried.

  Wing didn’t say anything, of course, he just nodded.

  Marks: A week later I brought the book back to them.

  “If this is what you guys do for fun,” I said, “I think you guys should get out to a movie more often, maybe buy an ice-cream cone.

  “You asked,” said Dybbuk. “That book explains most of it.”

  “That book explains my six-day headache,” I said. “It’s like trying to read Spengler. Better than any Mickey Finn at bedtime. Two paragraphs and I’m sleeping like a baby.”

  “Sorry,” said Dybbuk.

  “Besides,” I said, “I came from a whole other background. I don’t even try to keep trayf for the holidays. I’m not a practicing Jew—much less a Christian. People really believe that stuff? The fight between the Catholics and the Freemasons?”

  “Some more than others,” said Dybbuk. Wing nodded.

  “So why put that stuff in the act if it’s so important and so secret?”

  And Dybbuk said, “If it’s fun, why do it?”

  Marks: I had troubles of my own during all this time, by the way. They tried to slip me down the bill at the next tank town. I needed a new act. The comedy was fine; the dancing and singing never were much, but for vaudeville, it was a wow.

  Then I met Marie, who as you know later became Susie Cue.

  (Like Burns and Allen, Marks and Susie Cue were a double for the next forty years—in vaudeville, the movie It Goes To Show You, in radio and television—anywhere they could work.—ed.)

  She was part of a sister act—the only good part. I laid eyes on her and that was it. I was forty-one years old in ’27, she was maybe twenty. In two weeks we were a double, and her sisters were on the way back to Saskatoon.

  So my extracurricular interests changed dramatically. So did the finances, thanks to Susie. We became virtually a house-act on the Keith-Albee circuit and did a couple of the last (real) Follies before Ziegfeld croaked, and things got pretty peachy—even with the Crash. Fortunately, as George S. Kaufman said, all my money was tied up in cash, so I came through it okay.

  Meanwhile I heard from Julius that my brothers, except for Milton, were making movies, out in Astoria, of their stage plays. I wished them lots of luck.

  But that was just another indication variety was dying. I mean, you have a play run for two years on Broadway and you still gotta make movies to make any more money. The movies, now that they talked—for a while there they talked but didn’t move much—see Singin’ in the Rain for that—were raiding everything—plays, novels, short stories, poems, radio—for that matter, radio was raiding right back—in an effort to get what little money people still had left. Movies did it all the time for a dime; vaudeville did it three times a day for fifty cents. Something had to give.

  It was me and Susie Cue, and we went into radio.

  Meanwhile, Dybbuk & Wing—I supposed it was Wing—were writing to us.

  Winstead: So this was . . . ?

  Marks: We went into radio in late 1931. So did everybody else. We’d tried three formats before we found the right one.

  W: My Gal Susie Cue?

  M: My Gal Susie Cue. The idea was, it was like having lizards live in your vest and I tried to deal with it.

  W: Didn’t Dybbuk & Wing appear on it?

  M: Exactly twice. Tap dance doesn’t come across on radio, especially if there’s no patter. Even with a live audience all you hear are the taps—a sound-effect man with castanets can do that—and the oohs and ahhs from the audience.

  W: What about the Ham—

  M: Even they knew a silent horse-suit act wouldn’t work on radio. That would have to wait for Toast of the Town on TV, but by then the
y were gone. I don’t even know if there’s any film of the horsey act. I once asked them how they did it so well.

  Dybbuk gave the classic answer I’ve seen attributed to other people. He said: “I’m the front of the horse suit, and I act a whole lot. Wing just acts natural.”

  Marks: I’m getting ahead of myself. While we were in the Follies and they were still out in the sticks, they wrote me. Letters about other acts, their acts, how bad variety was getting. I did what I could for them, got them a few New York gigs, mostly in olios before movies, that kind of thing. We got together when they were in town. I think they both had crushes on Susie Cue. (Who wouldn’t?)

  Anyway, when they were on the road they wrote me about their researches, too. It was all too arcane and esoteric for me (those are my two new words of the week from Wordbuilder), but it seemed to keep them happy. They also made noises about “Pinky types” and “priests with tommy-guns” which I took at the time to be hyperbole (my new word from last week), but now I’m not so sure.

  The trouble with paranoia (as Pynchon and others—yes, I do read the moderns) said, is the deeper you dig, the more you uncover, whether it’s there or not. It’s the ultimate feedback system—the more you believe, the more you find to believe. I’m not sure, but I think Dybbuk & Wing may have been in the fell clutch of circumstances of their own making.

  That was about the gist of the letters—I haven’t looked at them since the late ’50s—the century’s, not mine—in the late 1950s I was seventy—I was drunk one day and dug them out of an old White Owl box I keep them in. Susie Cue came in and found me crying.