Niagara Falls All Over Again (17 page)

A marriage of convenience. What marriage isn't? Penny and Rocky, getting hitched in New York. My father marrying my mother so the neighbors don't talk. Love is inconvenient; marriage makes it less so. Years later, me and Jessica, my fancy dancer, as Rocky called her: I wanted to marry Jessie so that in the morning, when we woke up, there we'd be, married, convenient, sufficient. Rose on the highway with Quigley at the wheel, Rose leaving Iowa. Marry your driver, girls, and you'll get where you're going faster.

“What next?” Penny said now, which is what she always said. Once it meant she was looking forward to the next adventure; this time it sounded as though she was addressing a punishing God.

“What indeed?” said Rocky, not catching the tone. “What heights shall we soar to now?”

8

The Boys in Hollywood

By 1939, when I arrived, Hollywood had already made plenty of pictures about Midwestern bumpkins such as myself who came to the land of sunshine and either triumphed or lost their minds. We were cheerful gawkers, one hand on our cardboard grips, one holding our hats to the crowns of our heads. I was set to strike that pose, but Rock's first act in Los Angeles—we were standing on the platform of the station—was to light a cigar and suggest getting drunk.

“All right,” Penny said amiably. She'd tucked herself under Rock's arm, so she wouldn't get lost. “But where are the oranges?”

Rocky pulled her closer. “What oranges, my love?”

“Oranges,” she explained. “Whenever I pictured myself in California, I always had an orange in my hand.”

“You thought they doled them out at the border?”

“Maybe.”

“They only take away your old fruit,” said Rocky. “They don't give you replacements.”

“We should have oranges,” said Penny. “And honey. And—what do they drink here? Is there such a thing as an orange julep?”

“I'll invent them for you,” said Rocky. “Orange juleps, honey juleps, milk-and-honey juleps, grape juleps. Name your julep.”

“Honey,” she answered, shivering in her lilac Swiss-dotted frock, part of her California trousseau. She had a diaphanous shawl that she pulled around her shoulders, though it didn't look like it could warm a wax dummy.

The studio had arranged a couple of neighboring bungalows for us on Melrose Avenue, and Rocky directed a taxi to take our luggage to them: Penny had packed so many trunks we couldn't have ridden along even if we'd wanted to.

In any case, she insisted on sight-seeing before drinking, though with her vision that meant dropping to a squat in the front of Grauman's Chinese so she could trace Norma Shearer's tiny footprints with her fingers. The movie palaces themselves were red-and-gold smudges to her, and she could not see the letters on Mount Lee that in those days still read
HOLLYWOODLAND
.

“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 studio 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!)