Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

Carmen of Beverly Hills

“Come meet someone, Mosey!” Rocky called to me one afternoon on the set of Gobs Away! He displayed with a flourish a terrible-looking little gent.

I shook the man’s hand, which took some doing, because his hands were already shaking. The guy was mostly a pair of giant blue eyes; the rest of his face seemed to have eroded like a cliff. His thin lips were sparkling wet, and his black suit looked slept in. Somebody — maybe Rocky — had already stuck a round white sailor’s hat on his head at an angle that might have appeared jaunty if the guy’s neck didn’t look in danger of bending under its weight.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

“Skipper Moran!” said Rocky. I looked confused, and he repeated the name.

“Iss goo,” said the old guy. I couldn’t tell whether drink or a foreign accent had robbed him of his consonants.

Then I remembered Rocky talking about Skipper Moran, years before, when we regularly had arguments about who was funny and who wasn’t. I said Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton, Mabel Normand. He said Fatty Arbuckle, Charley Chase, Billy Blevan, Mack Swain, and Skipper Moran, a particularly obscure Mack Sennett second banana. Moran’s specialty was getting caught in things: trash cans, fences, fat women’s décolletés. Despite the Irish name, he was a German immigrant, and once sound came in, disappeared.

Maybe the rag-bin clothes were left over from his movies, but the smell of whiskey couldn’t have been. “Funny boy,” Skipper Moran said to me warmly.

“Thanks,” I said, but maybe he was just giving me his job description.

“I’m talking to Neddy,” Rock said. Neddy was always hired to write special material for us. “We gotta get a part for this guy.” Years later, when Rock had his own problems, I wished some young comic would do the same for him.

Poor Skipper. Neddy worked up a bit of mime for him — we couldn’t let a guy with a German accent speak in such times — in a scene at some big do in this picture, a good-bye bash for sailors shipping out. Rocky and I were pulling KP duty in the kitchen and complaining, and Skipper played a geriatric gob who peeled potatoes. On the first take, he sliced open his thumb. On the second his hands trembled so they blurred.

“This is a disaster,” I said to Rocky.

“No,” he said. “Betcha a hundred bucks it won’t be.”

I just nodded.

Rocky took him off set, and when they returned five minutes later, Skipper Moran sat down at his pail of spuds with a ludicrous bandage on his thumb and was — I hate to admit it — suddenly funny. He threw the potatoes in the air and caught them on the end of his knife, he hugged the pail close to him with his legs and picked up another potato with his feet. His upper limbs got into a fight with his lower limbs, spuds everywhere, and at the end, of course, he’d gotten caught in the bucket, folded up in half, someone’s limber grandpa with a sweet, befuddled expression on his face. He asked, without a trace of an accent, “Help?”

In the next shot, I slipped a hundred bucks in Rocky’s pocket. He turned his face from the camera. “Thanks,” he said. His breath was whiskey-coated.

Rocky’s breath. I could write pages on it. In my life, I breathed in more Rocky Air than Iowan. There the guy was, breathing. I mean, not that I blame him. All those years we stood nose to nose: onstage, and closer in movies, and closer even in publicity stills so both our heads would fit in the frame. Me the stern educator, he the truant student — for those shots, like the leading man I wished to be, I stood on a box to exaggerate the height difference. (The height difference didn’t exist.) “Move in closer, boys,” the photographer would say. Normally Rocky’s breath was like anyone’s, a caffeinated meadow, though if he’d been on a bender the meadow had flooded and gone to rot overnight. It changed, though, if he were on a diet or a health kick — for Rocky, never the same thing. Fatter was funnier, but sometimes, weary of being funny, he’d decide to slim; other times, weary of being bad, he’d resolve to be good. A health kick meant fruit and water and thick steaks for protein and hard-boiled eggs that found their way into his back pocket, where he sat on them. His breath was fierce then: I think his tongue went in mourning for the bourbon. A diet meant coffee, steaks, and gin: nothing else. Then his breath smelled of juniper, with a hint of an old metal cocktail shaker behind it.

And you know, that’s one of the things I miss about him, the same way I missed Iowa thunderstorms in California, Iowa ice storms, mornings you woke up and the trees had turned to chandeliers and the roads to plate glass. It’s the bad weather you miss most.

Penny, when she heard that her husband had hired Skipper Moran, threw a fit. If he could give a job to old-time foreign has-been comics, why couldn’t he find a part, just a little part, for his own darling, talented wife? “That’s different,” Rocky told her, and she replied, “I’ll say it is,” and announced that she was going to sleep on the Ferris wheel and skulked out the door. “Be reasonable, Penn,” he said, but she wouldn’t talk to him, and so he set her in motion. She rode for nearly an hour, sitting in silence. She threw her wedding ring in the direction of his head, then she threw up and he let her down.

“The silence I can take,” he told me. “It’s the singing .”

He’d come over to my place, which he did only when he wanted to get away from Penny. He hated giving up hosting privileges. So we sat in my living room, and Rocky smoked a cigar and tapped ashes on the white rug. I tried to keep myself from thrusting an ashtray underneath.

“You love her voice,” I said.

“When she’s happy. When she’s mad it’s like being married to a bad musical. She gets furious, and then she sings . Like she’s seen so many movies, she thinks it’s real life — she’ll yell for about three seconds, get quiet, and break into song. And I swear she gets madder because I won’t sing back.”

“Maybe you should try,” I suggested.

“You ever try to reason with an angry woman?”

“Once or twice.”

“You felt like singing? If I’m going to fight with someone, I don’t want it to be like some goddamn quiz show.”

“I was thinking more opera,” I said.

“This marriage,” he said in a suddenly fierce voice, “is giving me a headache. She’s a nice girl, but who knows what she wants?”

“Ask her,” I said.

“Oh, she tells me. She wants a kid, do you believe that?”

“Sure. Another drink?”

He nodded, though of course with Rocky it was a rhetorical question. I pulled the martini cart closer to my chair.

“Imagine it,” Rocky said. “If the baby cries, how’s she going to find it? She can’t make her way down a hallway in the dark as it is. Plus I think there’s something wrong with her memory. We’ve been in the house two years already, and she’s still surprised when she opens the door. ‘Oh, look!’ she says. ‘A bathroom!’ ”

“Hire a nurse,” I said, rattling my shaker. I adored making martinis. It made me feel like a mad scientist.

“Well, of course she wants a nurse too. Make me a Gibson this time, will you?”

“No onions.”

“Just my luck,” said Rocky, though it couldn’t have been my lack of onions that made him so gloomy. “She proposed to me , I ever tell you that? What was I supposed to say, no?”

I strained the martini and handed it to him. “You married her because it would have been awkward not to marry her?”

“She lied to me. She said it was election day, and when she hustled me into the booth, there was a JP waiting. The problem is, Professor, she’s not even my type.”