Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

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!)

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.