Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

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 stitched 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.

I thought, without gratitude, Maybe Hattie has saved my life.

When the Carter and Sharp radio show went on the air (Tuesday nights at seven, shipped overseas via Armed Forces Radio), Penny wanted a part. Fred Allen had hired his wife, why not Rocky?

Because he’d never do anything that Fred Allen did .

Okay, then, like Jack Benny.

No, said Rocky.

I don’t know why he was so adamant, though it was true that Penny wouldn’t have been right: our sponsors, the manufacturers of Cape’s Turkish soap, wanted the show bubble light and cheerful, and Penny torch-sang everything, even “Keep Your Sunny Side Up.” Compared to Penny, Marlene Dietrich was Helen Kane.

Rocky adored radio, where you could stand with your script and the audience could recognize and love even the plainest ad-lib. My mike fright was a little better than it had been on the Vallee show. Mostly, I worried about getting the giggles, then I discovered that the audience loved it when I got the giggles. They thought that was hysterical . The only time I became incapacitated was the night our soundman showed up drunk — his wife had just left him — and for every single sound effect clattered the hoof-beat coconuts. A visitor knocks: clippety-clop. Rocky walks to the door: clippety-clop. We’re riding around in the car, and I tell him to hit the horn; Rocky extracts a kiss from the vocalist; I fall down the stairs: here comes the cavalry, every single time. I could hardly breathe after the first ten minutes, and maybe we should have sent the guy home, but it was so funny .

“Hey, Rocky,” I said, “you sound a little horse.”

“Must you always be such a naysayer?” he answered.

The radio show allowed Rocky to finally kidnap my sisters. He did it behind my back. He convinced the writers that he should be the only boy from a large family.

“Six beautiful sisters!” he said to me, breaking the news, but who was he fooling? Beautiful sisters wouldn’t be funny.

“Why can’t I keep my own sisters?”

“Because,” said Rocky, “you’re the straight man. Six sisters is a punch line, not a setup.” They even named Rocky’s fictional sisters after mine, though they changed Hattie to Betty after I insisted. Maybe I should have also insisted on changing the other names, but we did need the gags — if you came up with enough running jokes, your audience felt in cahoots with you, and they’d keep tuning in.

Rocky’s sisters loved him. They knit him six-armed sweaters. They baked him sugarless, eggless, butterless, tasteless Victory cookies that, when you bit into them, made a sound like a struck gong. Soon enough, they were as famous as he was: they got fan mail. Reporters wrote articles about them. They assumed the sisters were real. Why would someone make up siblings, just for a laugh? On the other hand, who really had six sisters? I was, radio-wise, a guy without a family. Rocky was the guy with too much, including a protective mother who hated me. “Listen, Mr. So-called Sharp,” she’d say to me, “you leave Lovey alone.” (Both halves of that sentence became catchphrases.) The fictional Mrs. Carter loved her son so much that she got in fistfights (the soundman hit the pages of an open dictionary with a damp glove) with everyone: me; Bill Thomas, our announcer; Loretta Patchett, the vocalist; and a slew of guest stars, including Lana Turner, Jack Benny, Don Ameche, and Joe Louis.

Do you have to ask who won?

I felt like I was cheating on my real sisters with another pack of girls. Their letters didn’t mention their radio counterparts. They said, simply, that they’d listened to the show, and that I was very funny. Would Pop listen, I wondered. Then I thought: Annie makes him, because one of the sisters is named Rose, that forbidden name suddenly spoken in the house again. And then, as it happened, Rose’s ill-fated marriage to the Roman Catholic met its ill fate; Quigley-less, she’d come back to Vee Jay. If you wanted to cast a spell over Rose, of course you used the radio: her name was said aloud in the parlor, and like any ghost, she was summoned back. She sent me a letter: you can write to me here, now. Picture me in the parlor, listening to you. My father forgave her, because he’d been proved right.

“Rocky!” people yelled on the street. “How are your sisters?”

“Unmarried!” he yelled back. “What are you looking for? We got ’em in all sizes.”

Undraftable and overpaid as I was, my own war was pretty glamorous, despite myself. In 1942, the year I turned thirty-one, I had money in the bank and money in my pockets. I volunteered at the Hollywood Canteen. I dated starlets and would-be starlets. Every Tuesday night at seven, people tuned in to hear my mockable, quavering voice say, “What will we do with you, Rocky, what will we do?” And in Lithuania, forty thousand Jews in the town of Vilna were killed, some shot in their homes and some taken into the Ponary Forest and exterminated there, but they were all killed, including those related to a man who had once been called Jakov Shmuel Sharensky.