Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  Despite the fact that we never made a good picture, they nevertheless over the years got even worse. A little research reveals that most people who’ve wasted time thinking about it would rate Red, White, and Who; Marry Me, Barry; and Ghost of a Chance as our best pictures, all of them made in the first six of our Hollywood years. Problem is, we kept going. We’d always done ghost stories, but after a while our scripts got less and less realistic, probably because the shtick was always to get us in trouble with some unforgiving group, and we’d already antagonized every possible demographic of our time on this earth. So the writers went looking elsewhere: how about pirates? Yo Ho Ho. Mummies? The aforementioned For He’s a Jolly Good Pharaoh. Men from Mars? Elves? Naughty children?

  Carter and Sharp Meet Mother Goose was our second color picture. Personally I thought it was pandering, but then our kid fans never particularly cottoned to me, just another grown-up flitting around that large child, Rocky. Rocky played the Piper’s son, Bobby Shaftoe, Little Jack Horner, and Jack Spratt; I appeared as the Piper, Jack Horner’s father, and—in my only drag screen roles—both Mrs. Spratt and Mother Goose herself. Tansy claimed the picture tanked because it came out the same year as Hans Christian Andersen, with Danny Kaye playing so sugary and pure you wanted to bop him in the nose and steal his wooden shoes. But our movie was awful, and we knew it, before we’d even finished filming. Our budget was nothing. I still remember sitting on a hill overlooking a fake lake on the studio back lot; Rocky was

  wearing his Bobby Shaftoe outfit, not actually silver buckles slightly below his actual knees. He said to me, “I should have been a silent comedian.”

  I said, “What?”

  “I would have been famous.”

  “You are famous.”

  “I would have been great.”

  “You are—” I began.

  “Like Chaplin,” said Rocky. “Great like that. I’m a B comic. A kid’s comic. I should never have opened my big goddamn mouth.”

  But what could have kept him quiet? Nothing. I knew the guy: nothing. Okay, maybe imagine he worked harder, was born a few years earlier, hitchhiked to Hollywood in the teens and talked his way onto a set and then into a movie and then into a scene: All right, the director says, give the kid five minutes of film, let’s see what he can do. The movie’s set in a department store, and Rocky tangos with a tailor’s dummy. Across town, there are men trying to figure out, by means of science, how to make people speak from the screen. For now the fat kid is silent, but dancing. He wants to tell you everything, but he can’t.

  And then somehow he does.

  The fact is, if Rocky Carter had made it to Hollywood before the invention of sound movies, he would have invented sound movies by force of will. Suddenly, a miracle. Dateline New York City, Duluth, Valley Junction: today in movie theaters across the nation, the image of a comic actor suddenly looked at the camera and therefore the audience, and spoke. “Some stuff, huh?” the comic said, as the audience searched the seats for a ventriloquist. “No, up here, it’s me: I’m the one.” No sliding dialogue card trimmed in white lilies, just the voice, his celluloid co-stars still mute and damp-eyed and milk-skinned.

  But for now Rocky adjusted his sailor’s hat. It had a pom-pom on top, like Buster Brown’s. “Who’ll remember me?” he asked. Then he sighed. “It’s okay. I like kids. They just don’t remember anything.”

  “There’s no music in silent movies,” I said. Carter and Sharp Meet Mother Goose was a putative musical. We wanted to do a real one; all around us glorious musicals were being made, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain. I do not believe in reincarnation, but if it exists, please, God, let me come back as Gene Kelly.

  “Silent movies are all music,” said Rocky.

  “Local music.” I tried to sneer. “The lady organist from the Lutheran church. The idiot cousin of the theater manager.”

  “But music,” said Rocky. He got up. His silver buckles were made of tin foil. He walked back to the artificial lake, where he would later be bitten by one of the bad-mannered geese in residence there. Rocky always had bad luck with animals.

  In the books about us, Rock’s praised for his pantomime, those moments he dummies up and dances with a mop, savors a single grape as though it was his mother’s home-cooked pot roast. Once he speaks, you can tell that he’s a smart man who knows more than he’ll admit to, miming foolishness and sweetness and hope because they’re funnier than all the education of all the professors—real or imagined—in the wide world. Remember, I was married to a ballerina. People who move beautifully will tell you a million things, they will convey notions with one tilt of the wrist that you can’t imagine successfully hinting at in a ten-page letter. Watching, you will echo their gestures with a hand across your mouth or at the back of your neck, and every single minute, every ankle turn, chin point, elbow tuck, they will be keeping secrets from you.

  He had to speak. Still, I wish he’d stayed black and white. Color was bad for Rocky; it’s why we managed to do okay in television when our movies were bombing. In black and white, a guy in his late forties could look like a guy of no age at all, acting like a ten-year-old—round, fretful, slightly slowed. In color, you could see that his double chin had lost some of its bounce; his eyes looked less like buttons and more like metal snaps about to pop. The flush on his face showed through his makeup, which is to say that you could also clearly see his makeup. We switched back into black and white for our next picture, and he looked better. More substantial, less real. Perfect for a baggy-pants comedian.

  That was the last picture we made: The Great Stocking Caper.

  Certainly there was a part of me that wanted to say, when he dreamed of out-Chaplining Chaplin, but what about me? Where would I have been? I was not a physical comedian. All the laughs I ever got on-screen were through double talk, handy with a malaprop if not an actual prop. I couldn’t have been even the least significant Keystone Kop, the one who runs and stumbles around corners only because the assistant director says, “You guys in the back, just follow the guys in the front.”

  As if I would have gone to Hollywood without Rocky. As if the worst thing that could have happened to me is becoming an obscure comedian instead of a famous one. It’s completely possible that had Freddy Fabian waited another night to overdrink, Rocky would have found some other straight man, and I would have spent the rest of my life, one way or the other, behind a cash register, in Valley Junction, in Chicago, wherever my dreams of fame finally died. My children would still have had photographs, they would tell their friends, their future husbands and wives, my old man was in show business, once.

  There ought to be a law. There ought to be an act of Congress blocking the rebroadcast of Carter and Sharp Meet Mother Goose and Carter and Sharp Meet Santa Claus. Those are the movies that you’ve most likely seen, because they appeal to kids. More people on this earth have seen them than have seen City Lights. Don’t think I’m proud: more people have seen Buster Keaton as an elderly man impersonating Buster Keaton in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini than the real brilliant thing in The General or Steamboat Bill, Jr. More people can do a Charlie Chaplin impression than have ever seen a Charlie Chaplin movie. If you’re a comedian, all you hope for is that some bit of your act sticks to the shoe of history: a twirled cane, a bent-over walk, a three-word catchphrase. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up a Halloween costume, a rubber mask, a bigheaded statue, the kind of two-bit impression anyone can do.

  Slowly I Turned

  I’d hoped the TV show would let us go out on a high note—not Mother Goose, but laughing onstage surrounded by flung pies and smashed vases. But it took us only months to run out of material. Worse, Rocky started showing up for broadcasts pretty well plastered. Not falling-down drunk, just distractible, and he tried to laugh off missed cues the way we laughed off any mistake—live television, folks! No telling what’ll happen! Now that he lived alone, there was no one to tell him to stop drinking, and so he never did. His face had turned an alcoh
olic red; Neddy said, “It’s a shame the way Carter’s gone prematurely crimson.”

  Rocky, like plenty of show-biz types, was two people: the guy he played, and the guy he was out in the world. I was two people myself, the Professor on-screen, and my wife’s husband back at the house, a family man, an Iowan, and a Jew. (I didn’t give much thought to the Professor’s background, but I knew he wasn’t Jewish.) In the real world, Rocky was a bully, a man about town, a bluff and hearty barker of commands. And then there was the patsy he played in the movies, a big baby in too-small clothes who’d take anything, pies to the face and blows across the head, who only wanted love and ice cream and good cheer from more manly men.

  Except, in Rocky’s case, it was like this second guy, the childish one, followed him wherever he went. He couldn’t shake himself. He went out to his club and turned around; there was the fat guy in the tight suit, his hat in his hand, tagging along and smiling. And so Rocky began to bully himself, throwing first food and then glasses of liquor and then lit cigarettes and cigars, and then ashtrays and filled bottles and entire tables of food and silverware, and still the fat man stood, smiling, ready for more. You had to hate a guy who took abuse like that and kept his feet. You wanted to see what would knock him to the floor. And so Rocky ate and drank and smoked, trying to smack himself down. But the fat guy couldn’t take a hint! There he was again, swaying, but on his feet! He won’t fall down.

  We lost our TV spot in 1953. Audiences got a whiff of the whiskey over the ether, is what I think: no charming feigned harmless drunk, but the real thing.

  Forced retirement. Rocky wouldn’t rest. He cooked up an idea for a situation comedy. Lots of comics just transferred their radio shows to TV—Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Eve Arden—but our radio show really had no plot. So Rocky strung something together. Gas station attendants, I think, who lived across the hall from each other. Nice wives. Maybe some kids.

  “A change of pace,” said Rocky.

  “I don’t want one,” I told him.

  What I wanted was out. We had plenty of money; I’d invested pretty well over the years. I was getting too old—correction, I’d gotten—though I’d dive through a store window for old times’ sake, and I could still stand next to a table, then suddenly jump on top of it. In fact, under the iron hand of my health-nut wife, I was in fine physical condition: I just thought a man of forty-two should find more dignified work. I didn’t tell Rocky this; he’d take it as an insult, since he was even older, and even sillier.

  And besides, something had to change. The guy was destroying himself.

  Well, then, why didn’t I save him?

  I couldn’t have.

  Why didn’t I try?

  Good question. Now it seems obvious: I just should have said something. As it was, I spent hours in bars and restaurants with him, always a fraction of a second from saying, You know, Rocky, that you drink too much.

  And then I’d imagine what he’d say in return.

  I know. (Still, he takes a gulp of his fresh drink.)

  Come on, move in with us, stay in the guest suite. We’ll keep you busy. Jess will whip you into shape in no time. Spinach, deep knee bends—

  Sounds great. (He takes another gulp.)

  You’ll love it.

  No really, says Rocky, his finger in the ice cubes at the bottom of his now empty glass, it sounds terrific. But I’d rather die.

  And I couldn’t watch. I wanted no part of it.

  I believed then—as almost everyone believed—that if one of us went on to have a solo career, it wouldn’t be me. Sometimes, when I thought of stepping down, I imagined the comeback we’d make later, staid, cleverer. A sophisticated double act. Other times I thought that without the Professor hectoring him, Rocky could finally become, as he wanted, great. A guy who could speak that many languages could do something with his own, once he had to, write movies, become an auteur. Go abroad, hang out with brooding comic Englishmen—he loved The Lavender Hill Mob. Hang up the damn striped shirt and act his age, in other words. I believed that I’d have to orphan the on-screen childish Rocky to push him out into the world. Okay, I’d be selfless and walk away. Like many a guardian, I tried to leave in degrees. Like many a juvenile delinquent, he clung and misbehaved, longing for attention and punishment.

  Six years before, I’d threatened to quit the act, but waffled. This time I stood my ground: I wanted to take a break, at the very least. Jake was ten, Nathan nine, and Gilda three. Betty would have been seven. Rocky called all the time to twist my arm. The last time was March 17, 1954. The kids and Jess and I were in her studio, watching Jake practice a Western dance—he had a cowboy outfit he loved, with chaps and a holster and a hat he wore slung back on his shoulders, its string across the hollow of his throat. I could hear the phone ring in the house. By that time we had no live-in help to answer, just a maid who came in the mornings and a cook who came at night. Normally I would have let it alone, but my sister Sadie’s husband, Abe, had been sick, and I worried she might be calling with bad news. I took the call in my study, so if we needed to fly to Des Moines for a funeral I could check my calendar to see what I’d have to cancel.

  “I want to talk about this television thing,” Rocky said without prelude.

  “You never rest,” I said.

  “You hang around the house enough as it is.” He said this like it was a new argument, though we’d been having it since 1943. Used to persuade me.

  “We’ve been working for almost twenty-five years steady,” I said. “Don’t you want to take some time off?”

  That was a stupid question.

  He said, “How much time?”

  I pretended to think carefully. “Three years.”

  “In three years,” Rocky said, “every jerk’s going to have a show. In three years, Tansy’ll have a program. Live, from Hollywood: the Buddy Tansy Hour. He’ll look at the camera and bare his teeth and pull down millions.”

  “I’ll be happy for him. All that thwarted promise, finally realized.”

  “But it should be us.” He tried to appeal to the actor in me. “Same character, every week. You can develop it. You’ll be married. Hey,” he said, and lowered his voice, “—I bet we could swing it so Jess can play your wife, and your kids can play themselves. How about that?”

  Once upon a time this might have sounded swell to me. In the early days of our radio show, I listened to our competitors—at home, of course, never around Rock—and got jealous. Not of the laughs: of the on-air marriages. George Burns, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Goodman Ace, Fibber McGee—those guys got to work with their wives, got to broadcast to the country that they were married, even if they didn’t play married. I loved to hear Portland Hoffa on the Fred Allen program say, in her slightly stiff, slightly boop-oop-a-doop voice, “Oh, Mister A-a-a-allen.” He’d answer, and the audience would applaud, as though both he and the people in the studio had had no idea she’d show up that night. I knew that an on-air romance resembles an off-mike one only in the names, but through the radio it sounded wonderful.

  But now Jess had a job: she’d just started choreographing variety-show dance numbers at the networks. She had no interest in being in front of the camera. Besides, I couldn’t think of anything worse, my whole family on TV. “I’m not putting my kids to work,” I said. “Who am I, Fagin?”

  “I was thinking Ozzie Nelson,” said Rocky, “but okay. We’ll get kid actors.”

  “No, Rock. I don’t want to do this.”

  “Tell me why, and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.”

  My den was in the back of our house, on the first floor so I could shuffle papers without being disturbed. The window looked out on a little patch of foliage. Fifteen years in California, and I still couldn’t identify the flora. I wished I could see Jess’s studio, though I thought I could hear Gilda and Nate and Jessica applauding Jake. Yes, there was Nate, yelling in his oddly husky voice, “Brava,” which was what I called out to his mother when she danced. Jess must have correc
ted him, because now he yelled, “Bravo, Bravo, Braveeeeessssssimo!” How had I come up with a kid so smart? I thought about telling Rock this story, but he was after business and it had been years—I realized with a start—since I’d told him such things. It felt like bragging.

  “Two guys, two wives,” I said instead, “one guy, one wife. What’s the difference? Call it The Rocky Carter Show. Who’ll notice that I’m gone?”

  He said, brusquely, “If that’s the way you want it,” and hung up.

  Two hours later he drove over. He found us in the yard. Jake was on his back, idly firing his toy guns in the air; Nathan, our critic, was telling his mother a long story about a little girl at school who liked to lick other people’s sandwiches. Gilda had put on Jake’s hat and was rattling it around on her head. Everyone but me wore blue jeans. The Mike Sharps at Home, the picture in a movie magazine would have said, though we hadn’t posed for any such stories since Betty died. Before then, we did a couple, plus a newsreel piece of Jake’s fourth birthday party, Rocky standing by the heart-shaped pool and waving, me threatening fiercely to push him into the pool, then kissing him on the cheek.

  “Mike,” said Rocky, which gave me a shock—he never called me Mike. “Spare a moment?”

  “Hey!” said Jake, still Rocky’s particular favorite.

  “Howdy pardner,” Rock said with no real enthusiasm. “Mike?”

  So we went inside the house.

  “I need to talk to you about this TV thing,” he said.

  “I thought it was settled. The Rocky Carter Show. Solo billing. Hundred percent of the salary. Nice TV wife—get a single girl and maybe marry her off-camera too.”