Elizabeth McCracken: Niagara Falls All Over Again

“You a straight man?” the tapping guy asked.

“Sure,” I said. Of course I was. I was whatever he needed. If he’d been short a poodle for his trained-dog act, I would have dropped to the ground and wagged my tail.

“You know the Swiss Cheese Bit?”

I nodded.

He continued to tap my shoulder. Suddenly I reached up and snagged the offending finger with one fist. I was an Iowa boy. I knew how to catch pests. I could feel his finger wiggle in my hand, trying to tickle my lifeline.

“You’ll do,” he said.

“I’ll do what?” I asked.

Then I saw that beyond all that pie-brown makeup, his dark eyes shone like the rich, sweet filling in a Danish pastry: poppy seed, or prune. He gave me a lopsided smile, as though he already believed I was funny, and right then I began to believe it myself. At least we both knew my reflexes were quick. Rocky Carter, I would find out soon enough, was one of those people who could will light into his eyes, make them gleam and twinkle and shine and glint and sparkle, any number of otherwise indescribable clichés, a knack I now think of as nearly the definition of charisma.

Later, in the cartoon credits of our movies, they always drew me much taller, but that’s because he slumped and I wore lifts. We were about the same height, which is to say short. I let go of his hand, and he snatched the red wig off my head and stuffed it behind the rolled-up photos already in my pocket.

“I’m Rocky Carter,” he said.

I’d studied the bill. I knew who he was. “I’m Mike Sharp.”

“You are not . What’s your real name, son?”

“Sharp,” I said. “Mose Sharp.”

“We’re old friends already,” he declared. “So I’ll call you Mose. Do you drink, Mose Sharp?”

“No,” I lied.

Clearly he heard the deceit in my voice, because he smiled pretty wide when he said, “Wrong answer.”

Carter and Fabian — Freddy Fabian was the guy vomiting into the purse — weren’t the headliners, but they were better off than I was. I tried not to think of this as my big break. I’d had that thought too many times over the past two years, ever since I’d left Valley Junction, Iowa, for what turned out to be the big lights of Duluth, Davenport, Toledo and Wichita, any number of two-bit towns with two-bit theaters. Minneapolis was a step up. By 1931, I’d done everything: acrobatics, eccentric dancing, juggling, ventriloquism. I’d played both juvenile and geriatric roles in tabloid shows, full-length plays cut down to size for the vaude circuit. I’d appeared as a woman and a little boy; I’d tried on accents of every nationality. And I’d told the truth to the first question Rocky ever asked me. I’d been a straight man for a couple dozen acts: a group of hard-boiled kids, a frail old-time comic whose arthritic pratfalls caused the audience to gasp in horror, a temperamental seal, a pair of French brothers, and, for an entire season, a troublesome nineteen-year-old Dumb Dora comedienne named Mimi with whom I’d been horribly in love. I’d thought she’d been in love with me too. When Mimi — her real name was Miriam — handed me my pictures, I thought about getting off the circuit and going home to run my father’s clothing store. Instead, I kept plugging away.

It’s not something that people understand so much these days, how a comedian needs a straight man. They see one funny guy, and then another guy who isn’t so funny. They don’t realize that the comic (Rock, for instance, his pants so baggy they drape like an opera gown) needs a straight man (me, for instance, in my tweeds and mortarboard) standing still, telling him to act right. Getting him into the right kind of trouble. Making him look so dopey he’s adorable. Most people in this world want to be the comic, and why not? You get laughs and love and attention. You get all the best catchphrases. Used to be that a good straight man could get the lion’s share of the salary, sixty — forty, a little money to salve his ego and keep him in the act. I was nobody when I joined up with Rock, so with us it was the other way around. Not that I was thinking of money that first night in Minneapolis. I just followed the guy out onto the dark stage, rubbing my painted freckles off with my thumb, happy I had somewhere to go. The light hit us like a bucket of water, and I said my first line—“Here’s what you do”—and we were off.

It’s like this: Rocky has just been hired at a cheese factory. He’s in charge of making the holes in the Swiss, but he doesn’t know how. I’m the foreman, I say, A hole is nothing! You’re bothering me now about nothing? (Maybe it doesn’t sound funny on the page, but Beethoven on the page is just black dots.) Rocky gets nervous, and more nervous, and downright panicked about the holes, the nothing.

Onstage with Rocky, I was handsomer, funnier. If anyone in the audience recognized the Dutch comic made over into the fierce foreman, they forgave me. The crowd was no longer a squawk box worked by a crank — turn that crank harder! — but what they were: a bunch of gorgeous people who happened to find us very, very funny. Then suddenly Rocky ad-libbed in a big way: he jumped into my arms, all the way off the floor, so I was cradling him. Oof . Like a lady scared of a mouse, and so I said, “What are you, a man or a mouse?”

“Mouse,” he said in his squeakiest voice.

“You’re a mouse in a cheese factory,” I told him. “You’re living the life of Reilly.” I didn’t put him down. I was twenty years old, I could lift anything if an audience was involved.

“I’m scared,” he said.

“Oh, Rocky,” I said dotingly. “Poor Rocky. Shall I sing you a song?”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

So I started Brahms’s lullaby.

“Not that one,” he said.

“Okay.” I tried Rockabye Baby.

“No!” He thumped me on the chest.

Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody? No. Beautiful Dreamer? Worse. You Made Me Love You? Out of the question. Abba-Dabba Honeymoon?

A sly nod, a settling in.

It’s almost impossible to hold on to 180 pounds of snuggling comic, but I managed. “You better sing with me, folks,” I told the audience, “or we’ll be here all night.” So they joined in, and that night five hundred people sang Rocky Carter to sleep for the first time. That’s the bit we became famous for: Why Don’t You Sleep? We did it a million times, in the movies, on radio, on TV. Veronica Lake sang Rocky to sleep, and Dan Dailey, and Bing Crosby. Always a different ridiculous song. Rocky said it was our funniest bit. Rock was educated — Harvard, he said sometimes, Princeton others, School of the Street, he told reporters. Anyhow, he studied things. What made Chaplin great? Keaton? A kind of tenderness and need, he said, not like these jokers everywhere. Why Don’t You Sleep would be how people remembered us, he said. It would be our signature.

He was right, of course, but mostly I think he just liked being sung to.

After we got off — four curtain calls, the real thing, no milking — Rocky used the house manager’s phone to call up Freddy Fabian at his hotel. Midnight; Fabian was probably in the middle of the start of his hangover. Rock stuck a finger in his free ear, as though the applause was still deafening, and swiveled at the waist to wink at me.

“Freddy,” said Rocky. “Freddy: remember how you said your father wanted you to take over the grocery store?”

12:30 A.M.

“To us!” Rocky said.

“To you!” he said.

“To me!” he said.

“Especially to me!”

12:45 A.M.

“Look,” said Rocky. “I want you to listen. Are you listening? Pay attention. This is very important. Stop laughing! No, I mean it! Okay, laughing boy. Keep on laughing.”