Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

And then somehow he does.

The fact is, if Rocky Carter had made it to Hollywood before the invention of sound movies, he would have invented sound movies by force of will. Suddenly, a miracle. Dateline New York City, Duluth, Valley Junction: today in movie theaters across the nation, the image of a comic actor suddenly looked at the camera and therefore the audience, and spoke. “Some stuff, huh?” the comic said, as the audience searched the seats for a ventriloquist. “No, up here, it’s me: I’m the one.” No sliding dialogue card trimmed in white lilies, just the voice, his celluloid co-stars still mute and damp-eyed and milk-skinned.

But for now Rocky adjusted his sailor’s hat. It had a pom-pom on top, like Buster Brown’s. “Who’ll remember me?” he asked. Then he sighed. “It’s okay. I like kids. They just don’t remember anything.”

“There’s no music in silent movies,” I said. Carter and Sharp Meet Mother Goose was a putative musical. We wanted to do a real one; all around us glorious musicals were being made, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain . I do not believe in reincarnation, but if it exists, please, God, let me come back as Gene Kelly.

“Silent movies are all music,” said Rocky.

“Local music.” I tried to sneer. “The lady organist from the Lutheran church. The idiot cousin of the theater manager.”

“But music,” said Rocky. He got up. His silver buckles were made of tin foil. He walked back to the artificial lake, where he would later be bitten by one of the bad-mannered geese in residence there. Rocky always had bad luck with animals.

In the books about us, Rock’s praised for his pantomime, those moments he dummies up and dances with a mop, savors a single grape as though it was his mother’s home-cooked pot roast. Once he speaks, you can tell that he’s a smart man who knows more than he’ll admit to, miming foolishness and sweetness and hope because they’re funnier than all the education of all the professors — real or imagined — in the wide world. Remember, I was married to a ballerina. People who move beautifully will tell you a million things, they will convey notions with one tilt of the wrist that you can’t imagine successfully hinting at in a ten-page letter. Watching, you will echo their gestures with a hand across your mouth or at the back of your neck, and every single minute, every ankle turn, chin point, elbow tuck, they will be keeping secrets from you.

He had to speak. Still, I wish he’d stayed black and white. Color was bad for Rocky; it’s why we managed to do okay in television when our movies were bombing. In black and white, a guy in his late forties could look like a guy of no age at all, acting like a ten-year-old — round, fretful, slightly slowed. In color, you could see that his double chin had lost some of its bounce; his eyes looked less like buttons and more like metal snaps about to pop. The flush on his face showed through his makeup, which is to say that you could also clearly see his makeup. We switched back into black and white for our next picture, and he looked better. More substantial, less real. Perfect for a baggy-pants comedian.

That was the last picture we made: The Great Stocking Caper .

Certainly there was a part of me that wanted to say, when he dreamed of out-Chaplining Chaplin, but what about me? Where would I have been? I was not a physical comedian. All the laughs I ever got on-screen were through double talk, handy with a malaprop if not an actual prop. I couldn’t have been even the least significant Keystone Kop, the one who runs and stumbles around corners only because the assistant director says, “You guys in the back, just follow the guys in the front.”

As if I would have gone to Hollywood without Rocky. As if the worst thing that could have happened to me is becoming an obscure comedian instead of a famous one. It’s completely possible that had Freddy Fabian waited another night to overdrink, Rocky would have found some other straight man, and I would have spent the rest of my life, one way or the other, behind a cash register, in Valley Junction, in Chicago, wherever my dreams of fame finally died. My children would still have had photographs, they would tell their friends, their future husbands and wives, my old man was in show business, once .

There ought to be a law. There ought to be an act of Congress blocking the rebroadcast of Carter and Sharp Meet Mother Goose and Carter and Sharp Meet Santa Claus . Those are the movies that you’ve most likely seen, because they appeal to kids. More people on this earth have seen them than have seen City Lights . Don’t think I’m proud: more people have seen Buster Keaton as an elderly man impersonating Buster Keaton in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini than the real brilliant thing in The General or Steamboat Bill, Jr. More people can do a Charlie Chaplin impression than have ever seen a Charlie Chaplin movie. If you’re a comedian, all you hope for is that some bit of your act sticks to the shoe of history: a twirled cane, a bent-over walk, a three-word catchphrase. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up a Halloween costume, a rubber mask, a bigheaded statue, the kind of two-bit impression anyone can do.

Slowly I Turned

I’d hoped the TV show would let us go out on a high note — not Mother Goose, but laughing onstage surrounded by flung pies and smashed vases. But it took us only months to run out of material. Worse, Rocky started showing up for broadcasts pretty well plastered. Not falling-down drunk, just distractible, and he tried to laugh off missed cues the way we laughed off any mistake — live television, folks! No telling what’ll happen! Now that he lived alone, there was no one to tell him to stop drinking, and so he never did. His face had turned an alcoholic red; Neddy said, “It’s a shame the way Carter’s gone prematurely crimson.”

Rocky, like plenty of show-biz types, was two people: the guy he played, and the guy he was out in the world. I was two people myself, the Professor on-screen, and my wife’s husband back at the house, a family man, an Iowan, and a Jew. (I didn’t give much thought to the Professor’s background, but I knew he wasn’t Jewish.) In the real world, Rocky was a bully, a man about town, a bluff and hearty barker of commands. And then there was the patsy he played in the movies, a big baby in too-small clothes who’d take anything, pies to the face and blows across the head, who only wanted love and ice cream and good cheer from more manly men.

Except, in Rocky’s case, it was like this second guy, the childish one, followed him wherever he went. He couldn’t shake himself. He went out to his club and turned around; there was the fat guy in the tight suit, his hat in his hand, tagging along and smiling. And so Rocky began to bully himself, throwing first food and then glasses of liquor and then lit cigarettes and cigars, and then ashtrays and filled bottles and entire tables of food and silverware, and still the fat man stood, smiling, ready for more. You had to hate a guy who took abuse like that and kept his feet. You wanted to see what would knock him to the floor. And so Rocky ate and drank and smoked, trying to smack himself down. But the fat guy couldn’t take a hint! There he was again, swaying, but on his feet! He won’t fall down .

We lost our TV spot in 1953. Audiences got a whiff of the whiskey over the ether, is what I think: no charming feigned harmless drunk, but the real thing.

Forced retirement. Rocky wouldn’t rest. He cooked up an idea for a situation comedy. Lots of comics just transferred their radio shows to TV — Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Eve Arden — but our radio show really had no plot. So Rocky strung something together. Gas station attendants, I think, who lived across the hall from each other. Nice wives. Maybe some kids.