“It’s like Stonehenge,” I said.
“It’s parochial,” Rock answered. “It’s advertising. There should be a giant sign next to it saying when and where the local Rotary club meets.” (He was right, of course. It had originally been an ad for a nearby housing development of the same name.)
“Aha!” I said. “Mystery of Stonehenge solved. Odd Fellows meet here third Thursday of every month. See it, Penn? Over there?”
“I only read menus. Let’s eat,” said Penny.
“Let’s drink,” said her husband, and so we did. We went to the Trocadero, and then to the Mocambo. Rocky was looking for the brass band he assumed would welcome him to California: if we just kept looking, surely they would show up. “I’d settle for one lousy sousaphone,” he said. “A flugelhorn. Anything.” At three in the morning we went to a diner to eat ourselves sober, at least a little, and at dawn we were in yet another cab, which took us to the beach. Even Penny could see the ocean: the size of it seemed to knock her over onto the sand, where she sat in her lilac dress, the shawl wrapped several times around her head.
“How very blue.” She pointed at the sky, and then at the sea. “I’d like a dress that shade,” she said, and passed out.
“Whaddya think?” Rock asked.
I answered despite myself, “God is mighty.”
“I am mighty!” Rocky said, and began to strip off his shoes and socks and pants. Having conquered the West Coast, he’d now whip its ocean into shape. Maybe he could work Hawaii in before breakfast.
“I’ve never seen the ocean before,” I said.
“Yes, you have,” said Rocky. “I saw you see it.”
“You did?”
“The East Coast,” he said. “The East Coast.”
I laughed at my own stupidity: of course. I had seen city harbors, I had even gone across one so I could stand at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, but that wasn’t the ocean ocean. Here it was, miles of ocean ocean, the ocean blue, slapping waves on the sand and then pulling them back like a cardplayer who’s misdealt. Waves. That’s what I hadn’t seen before, the way a wave curled over and stretched and showed its underside, sea green! before it broke. I rolled up my pant legs. Rocky strode into the water in his shorts and undershirt.
Could water around your ankles make you seasick? I closed my eyes and tilted my face up; even the insides of my eyelids seemed sea-green instead of the usual hot orange. Probably I was just hungover. Despite the nausea and a pressing headache around the edges of my brain, I felt pretty terrific. For years I’d felt like I’d jumped bail in my hometown, and now I’d settled my business there and I was free and brave and in California.
We waded out farther. Suddenly Rocky dove forward and began to swim.
“Come on,” he said.
“Can’t. Don’t know how.”
He turned over in the water and wiggled his toes at me. “Everyone knows how to swim,” he said, but then he shrugged his way into a backstroke, and then a front stroke, and kept going.
Behind us on the beach, Penny slumbered next to a pile of clothing shaped like her husband. I thought about covering her with Rock’s jacket, but she looked comfortable enough.
When I turned back and scanned the horizon, Rocky was gone. I searched for a waterspout, the crook of his elbow slicing up like a shark fin, the backs of his heels making whitecaps on the waves. For eight years Rocky had been in plain sight. Where was he now? I looked up the deserted beach and down the deserted beach and back to the ocean, and I could only come to one conclusion: Rocky had drowned. He’d stumbled drunk into the Pacific and sunk to the bottom.
I’d talked him out of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, only to lose him to another body of water. Do you know: I went running farther out, the surf coming up to my hips. I swear I was ready to dive in, to start parting my hands in front of me till I found him (that’s what you did when a child got lost in a cornfield, I remembered), calling his name. Didn’t I have to save him?
Except I couldn’t. I was out to nearly my waist, the waves even higher, before I realized that swimming wasn’t something you’d pick up the first time. The newspaper article would say, one man drowned, and then another man drowned. That, too, was a familiar Iowan story, people who went leaping into flooded rivers, hoping to be heroes but ending up as corpses.
I turned to the shore and yelled Penny’s name, but she was out cold. Then I felt something brush past my ankle.
It was Rocky. He pulled me out of the water like Frankenstein with his bride, my back against the surface of the ocean. My heart had swollen so in my chest it felt rib-striped.
“Kick your legs a little,” he said. “See? You can swim.”
“I wasn’t!” I told him. “I thought you were dead!”
“Me?” He laughed and set me on my feet. He started walking back to Penny. “If there’s one thing you shoulda noticed by now: I’m buoyant. You can’t drown me.”
“No kidding, Rock, I thought you’d drowned yourself.” Then I felt something else run past my ankle, and jumped again. “Something bit me!”
“Nothing bit you. It was probably a dead fish rushing by.”
“I’m getting out of this goddamn ocean,” I said. “Dead fish!”
He was looking at the beach, squinting at the sun. If he’d kept his underclothes on for modesty’s sake, it wasn’t working. His back was to me, his wet undershirt soaked to silk netting. He put his arms up, as if to dry them, and said, “Only their souls ascend to heaven.”
They Also Serve Who Only Dance and Sing
“The studio’s trying to find something to suit your talents,” Tansy told us, and we got antsy. All we knew was we weren’t working, though we did draw a small salary. I started to long for that brass band myself, something to show that Hollywood knew that The Boys had arrived.
Then the draft act passed. Why not draft Carter and Sharp? As it happened, there was an old army script floating around just made for a comedy team, intended for Wheeler and Woolsey, or Olsen and Johnson, or Clark and McCullough, or some other mismatched pair of guys who’d either broken up or died or gotten too old to make credible soldiers. “I got a guy who can spruce it up for you,” Tansy told the studio, and that’s how Neddy became our movie writer too. He punched up the script, took out the references to the Kaiser, stuck in a number in a USO club. A cheap and easy vehicle for its cheap and easy stars.
Red, White, and Who? was a dumb and cheerful army picture, complete with a few patriotic songs belted from the back of a jeep. Some consider it our best movie. The timing, anyhow, made it our luckiest. We played soldiers on leave from camp who accidentally fall asleep on a train and end up in New York City; for the rest of the movie we try to get back to base before our absence is noticed. An old friend of ours from vaude, Johnny Atkinson, appeared as our mean sergeant. He’d been in Hollywood awhile, playing tough guys with hearts of gold. That was Johnny, the kind of guy who smoked a stogie while pruning his rosebushes. He had a flat-nosed gangster’s face and sorrowful blue eyes.
I loved the soundstages, the prop rooms, the cameraman leaning into his camera, the booms, the cars we drove in front of movie screens full of passing scenery. I loved seeing a character who’d last played a cop in a Bette Davis flick playing an army secretary for us. I loved having someone else apply my makeup for me. “Close your eyes,” the makeup girl would say. “Now open. Now close.”
Rocky had been right, all those years before: he had to have an audience to work. We decided to play to the cameramen, the grips, the propmen, the script girl, anyone who happened to be on the soundstage. Frank Brothers, the director, tore out his hair. He needed a silent set, but we needed laughs. So we worked even louder to cover up the laughter, and the folks on the set laughed louder, and we threw our props around—guns to the ground! suitcases on the baggage racks! ourselves onto upper berths!—and together we managed.
The picture was a huge hit. You can’t imagine. We filmed it in the thirty-one days of October 1940; the st
udio released it in June of ’41; by July, we were famous. Luck. Maybe lack of it too: for the rest of our careers, we had to make movies that resembled this one. Even if we’d stumbled onto something by mistake, that was how we’d do it forever and ever, whether Carter and Sharp got in trouble in the navy or on the moon, in the Wild West or Ancient Egypt. We filmed on the same breakneck schedule, and the budgets only got bigger because our salaries did. A rock on a dude ranch reappeared three years later as a rock on Mars; an Italian nightclub became a New York nightclub with a change of tablecloths. “It’s what your fans want!” the studio said, as though the public would miss a papier-mâché boulder.
Tansy had been clever, or psychic. When we signed with the studio for a pittance, he inserted a clause in our contract that said we’d bring home a percentage of the profits of all our pictures. Nobody’d ever heard of such a thing back then, but the studio shrugged at the oddity—how many tickets could a couple of knockabout comedians sell, anyhow?—and allowed it. Plenty of other guys (the Three Stooges, for instance, no matter which Three Stooges they were at the time) made nearly nothing from their studio deals.
Carter and Sharp, on the other hand, got filthy rich.
Red, White, and Who? was still playing when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Good box office, plus a war: like plenty of guys Rocky and I wore uniforms almost nonstop in the early forties. We just returned them to wardrobe at the end of the day. Gobs Away!, Fly Boys, Navy Blues, We’re in the Army, Carter and Sharp on the High Seas (our first title billing!), Wrong Way Rocky: endless, those pictures. We churned ’em out four a year, and I pretty much couldn’t tell one from the other, though as I recall Fly Boys was the best of the lot, and We’re in the Army, essentially a retread of Red, White, and Who?, the worst. None of the movies made reference to a particular war or enemy. The War raged; the Enemy would be defeated. Sometimes nonsense that sounded like Hitler or Tojo squawked out of a radio. Maybe those pictures had distinct plots; all I remember is Carter and Sharp blundering about like fools, while various second leads bounded into heroism. Sometimes Rocky got to act heroic, too, mostly by accident. I hid under a lot of beds in those pictures.
If you judge history by Carter and Sharp movies, it was a pretty glamorous war. All girls had time to style their hair perfectly for their WAC caps; all soldiers were broad shouldered and brave (with two top-billed exceptions, of course). Everyone could dance. For any battle, there were five parties, and no one ever, ever died on-screen. Battle wounds made soldiers stronger. Orphans were adopted. The jeep was invented because it made such a good little stage: it’s hard to do a musical number in a closed car. Once our radio show started, we’d joke about rationing—the Professor might try to get Rocky to invest a pound of hamburger in a surefire meat-loaf deal—but in our movies, we never mentioned a lack of anything.
Days off, I called my sisters in Des Moines and got the news. Annie had planted a Victory garden; Abe and Sadie were hoping that their clothing store had been rationed enough pairs of leather shoes (Abe thought plastic disastrous for growing feet); everyone argued about how much to tell the children. My father, said Annie, refused to talk about the war at all, though whether this was old age or old sorrow, she didn’t know. The WACs were headquartered at Fort Des Moines, and marched down Grand Avenue downtown, dozens of women in heavy shoes, and while some of them might have been beautiful in other circumstances, as they passed by the Savery Hotel, they looked like what they were: soldiers who happened to wear skirts. (Even so, Des Moines became a fabled place on U.S. Army bases: all those single women! Soldiers wanted to transfer to Fort Des Moines, meet a nice WAC, and get her drunk at Babe’s. Des Moines, City of Romance!)
Rocky and I didn’t save tin foil or plant gardens, but we joined the war effort. We went on bond drives, first locally, and then cross-country. A city had to promise a million-dollar subscription to get us to stop and perform. Eighty cities came up with the cash, and we hit them all in thirty days. Vaudeville at high speed: we’d dash from the airport to the high school auditorium, do “Why Don’t You Sleep?” or some other bit, heckle the audience into buying bonds, and dash back to the airport. Starlets could bribe with kisses; we made our pitch into a giant gamble, me choosing one half the room, Rocky the other. “You gonna let that side of the room beat you?” Rocky would say. “Come on!” We set records that way.
Now when people talked about The Boys, they didn’t mean us. The Boys were who we drummed up money for. The Boys were who we entertained at army bases and navy camps, who’d laugh at any groaning joke about KP or WACs or WAVEs. We were happy to do our part, though in this we were no better than Bugs Bunny, another bond salesman.
You could argue that I did plenty of good making upbeat films in which I impersonated a serviceman—think of the young men who would realize, while watching, Sure, I’m scared, but who’s as bad as that guy? Sometimes I had my doubts: Annie wrote of the kids in Valley Junction who’d joined up, and I sensed some rebuke in her letters. Finally, at a bond drive on the Santa Monica boardwalk, I was climbing the stairs onto a bandstand when I heard a woman’s voice at my ankles.
She said, unmistakably, “Slacker!”
Then it was a filthy name: a slacker was a coward, a man willing to sacrifice other men’s lives for his own comfort. Ahead of me, Rocky was already skipping around the stage, waiting for me to stroll on and tell him to hold still. But I was on the stairs, looking for the owner of the voice. There she was. Her hair was an artificial russety orange-blond—judging by her eyebrows, it had once been black-brown—and her small round blue hat was sliding into one dark, belligerent eye. Her lipstick made her mouth look extra puckered.
“Tell me, you,” she said, “why do you let boys better than you fight? And die? What’s wrong with you, you don’t enlist? You—”
Already I’d started to bend down to take her white-gloved hand, to explain myself. All my life, my only defense—against angry women, or anyone—had been my charm. But charm was not patriotic, and maybe this woman believed that in order to save my own life I’d used my Hollywood savoir faire and slipped free of the draft. She stuck her own hands behind her back so I couldn’t touch her.
“My son died,” she said, “to save the likes of you.” I didn’t know whether she meant fancy movie stars or Jews, though either way I was afraid she was about to spit at me. Except to spit she’d have to break her gaze, and that she’d never do.
“My son died,” she said again, and I thought sadly, but didn’t say, Dear lady, lots of people have died. Let’s you and I sit and talk and discuss all of them—
“Sister,” said an old bald man standing next to her, “he’s one of the good guys.” That didn’t help, of course: her problem was she was surrounded by chumps who had the good luck to be alive, while the one person who deserved to be was dead. All I could do was shrug, stand back up, and join Rocky—4F because of his weight—at the microphone.
I couldn’t shake her, though. Even the misguided dye job seemed brave to me: I imagined her with the peroxide bottle, weeping for her son and washing the color from her hair. My sisters would have clucked at all that artifice, the losing battle to stay young and glamorous, but I was with that lady: when someone dies, it only makes sense to do desperate things to stop the clock and then wrestle it into the other direction. And besides, I believed her: here I was, well paid, useless, a slacker.
Rocky poked me in the ribs. “Wake up!” he said. “We’re fighting for our country here!” and the crowd cheered.
All through that appearance, all the way home, all that night: I argued with myself. Don’t be stupid, I said, and then, That’s like saying, Don’t be brave. You’re not a slacker, you’re a morale booster. You’re not a morale booster, you’re a coward. You could be killed. Rocky would kill you—imagine quitting the business when things are going so well!
By six in the morning, I couldn’t stand myself. All I wanted was a uniform that didn’t come out of the wardrobe department, that didn’t say, on its stitche
d name tag, Buzz or Flash or Percival or any of my foolish movie names. M. Sharp. Private. That’d be fine. I went to the local draft board on Cuyoga Boulevard and stood in line with all the other young men who’d been up talking to themselves or their loved ones and had jumped to the same conclusion. I didn’t get far.
“Let me get this straight,” the doctor said. He sat on a rolling stool in front of my chair and took my forearms and lifted my wrists so I could get a good look. “You think you can be a soldier with these?” He coughed a little, and tried to cover his mouth with his elbow. “You’d keep dropping things. All the jobs we have are for guys who don’t drop things.”
Ah. My wrists. They’d ached for fifteen years, ever since Hattie’s fall not-quite-into my arms. I’m still not sure whether the Valley Junction doctor had botched setting them. Watch me smoke a cigarette in a movie, and you’ll see: I lift my whole arm to my mouth, my elbow up and my cigarette dangling. I’m not trying to be debonair, I just don’t bend like other smokers.
I explained to the doctor that my wrists were oddly strong, locked as they were: didn’t I hold up Rocky pretty well? The doctor laughed. He bounced my sore wrists on his knees. “Make more funny movies,” he said. “That’s your part.”
In our pictures, when the Professor got drafted, he’d pull any kind of lamebrain stunt at his inspection to get out of it: he sat on a radiator in hopes of sweating off enough pounds to be underweight; he applied an iron to flatten the soles of his feet. The movie doctor would give him the bad news: “4-A! Next!” But this doctor knew he was giving me bad news by denying me. He looked over the top of his thick glasses, and I thought: lousy eyes, 4F, as though there were some comfort in stamping him defective too. But he was in a hurry: there were plenty of guys waiting to see him and a newsreel crew outside, because some matinee idol—not me—was supposed to enlist later. “Good of you to come,” the doctor said.
Niagara Falls All Over Again Page 16
