Mammy's Little Nelson

Manhattan's Copacabana is a Scotch and watering place for Broadway's well-heeled show folk, who come regularly to pay homage to such distinguished comics as Jimmy Durante and Joe E. Lewis. Last week many of the regulars appeared as usual, but among them were scattered plenty of newcomers: moviegoers of the '30s who had turned up because the name in the newspaper ads read ''Nelson Eddy." He had been away a long time; they wanted to make sure he was the same old Nelson.

They soon found out. Onstage, in a brisk walk, came 52-year-old Baritone Eddy, his blond-tinted grey hair brushed to wavy perfection. When he began singing, the crowd knew for sure that he had not changed at all; his big voice had not lost a bit of its old boom, or, for that matter, its slight nasal tone. There was Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, Rose Marie, I'll See You Again, At the Balalaika, Indian Love Call (with a pretty blonde, Gale Sherwood, dressed in an unlikely, scantie-type Indian costume). There was also, of course, the Eddy specialty, Short'nin' Bread. For this last song, Eddy prepared a light-hearted parody which set out to prove, successfully, that the words to the song are pretty ridiculous. In all, he sang 13 songs, and most of them brought thunders of applause. The response, as Eddy himself admitted, was "electrifying."

For fans who are puzzled by Eddy's disappearance from cinema, radio and TV, Eddy has the answers. For one thing, his last two romantic pictures, Knickerbocker Holiday (1944) and Northwest Outpost (1947), were box-office flops. "The movie people told me that the cycle of light romantic operas was at an end," he says. "The war had made people want realism." Nevertheless, he felt that Naughty Marietta, his first of nine films with Jeanette MacDonald, had the right formula. "We should have made more obvious sequels to that one--such as Son of Naughty Marietta."

Eddy kept busy on the radio until 1949; then, instead of launching into TV, he went back to his first career: well-paid concert tours.

Although he has a fairly solid repertory in recital music and some grand opera (he once sang Modernist Alban Berg's Wozzek under Stokowski), Eddy knows on which side his short'nin' bread is buttered. His nightclub and concert audiences would rather hear Short'nin' Bread than Schubert. And as Eddy himself sings in his parody: "Mammy's little Nelson loves short'nin' bread."

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