11

Better than a Backdrop

By 1948 Rocky and I had made a dozen and a half movies, so many that the oscillations on our careers happened very quickly. Still, we’d been on a downswing, box-office-wise, for a couple of years. We suffered—like most comedians—from the very thing that had made us. We reminded people of the war, and the war was over.

Why not take some time off? I said. Give the audience a year to miss us. Give Neddy and the studio more time with the scripts. We were saturating the market all by ourselves. I wasn’t talking retirement—we had the radio show, there were some murmurs about getting into television, we could play Vegas or London. Just no more movies for a while, no more holding my mortarboard to my head as I turned corners one-legged or jumped down a manhole. On our last picture, Slaphappy Saps, I’d been chided by wardrobe, and then the studio: Jess, a champion of all sorts of exercise (a pioneer, I think now), had presented me with a set of dumbbells for my birthday, which she installed in the corner of her studio so I could watch myself in the mirror, and by developing a couple of muscles I’d done the unthinkable and monkeyed with the Professor’s chickenhearted scrawniness. “Leave off the weights, Adonis,” a studio exec warned me, and that seemed too much to bear.

We met with Tansy to discuss the future. Tansy loved his office, where he could always be seated when people were ushered in, though to show off his prosperity he’d bought a desk that could have seated twenty for dinner, which made him look more than ever like a mouse peeping out of a hole to see if the coast was clear of cats. Even the pencil holder was enormous. Rocky paced the room; I settled into one of the huge leather armchairs for guests, which made me feel agreeably like a snagged pop fly.

“It’s not like we need the money,” I told Rocky.

“You don’t,” said Rocky. I didn’t point out that he still made sixty percent to my forty. “I need all the money I can get. We have our entire lives to slow down! Tansy,” Rocky pleaded. “Tell him: we have a contract with the studio, and—”

Tansy smiled apologetically. “I don’t think the studio’ll mind, if you lay off a little. The last few pictures . . .”

“That’s their fault,” Rocky said.

“Maybe it’s time to move along on TV, that’s all I mean,” said Tansy. “You could rest a little more. Spend time with your kids.”

“I’ll spend time with my kid when I’m retired.” Rocky frowned and tried to peek under Tansy’s blotter. “In twenty or thirty years. Meantime I’m going to make movies, with whoever wants to make them with me.”

“Go ahead,” I told him. “I’m too old for this nonsense. I’m done.”

Rocky slowly sat down on the edge of Tansy’s gargantuan desk. “You’re quitting?” he said.

Was that what I’d meant? I only knew I was done with the dumb argument that we couldn’t stop making movies because we couldn’t stop making movies. But quitting? Out of the business? Surely not, and yet—what was that I felt? Elation? Why not retire, before we ended up like Skipper Moran, with his skid-row clothes and trembling fingers. We didn’t have our dignity—that we’d sold off at the start of our careers—but at least we had all our teeth, and I had plenty of money, and three kids who’d love to roll around on the carpet with their pop.

“He’s not quitting,” said Tansy.

Rocky stared down at him, then at me. That’s why he stood up, for the height advantage. “Are you quitting?” he asked.

“I’m tired. I’m an old man.” I was thirty-seven. Rocky was forty-three.

“Toughen up!” he barked at me. “Jesus Christ. What would your father think of you, too tired to work?”

“I hate the movies we’re making,” I said. “So does the moviegoing public, apparently.”

“The next one will be better. Look,” he said, kinder now, “I know you pretty well, huh? Today you’re tired, tomorrow you’ll be fine. You’re like your old man: you don’t know how not to work. Right? Don’t give me a heart attack, Mosey. I got alimony and a kid and maybe more alimony in my future—no, I’m kidding, but who knows. I need to work, and I need you to work. I’m not ashamed to say it.” He had his hands together, fingers down, prayerlike but not too showy about it. He was taking this more seriously than I was. “Tell me you’re not quitting.”

“Rocky—”

“Tell me.”

I’d never seen him so earnest. “I’m not quitting,” I said dubiously.

“The kid’s not quitting,” said Tansy. “Sit down in a chair like a human being, would you?”

But I’d spooked him pretty bad. Rocky claimed not to read his own press, but I did, and a couple of months and one above-average but still lousy movie later—What, Us Haunted?—I picked up a movie magazine with an interview with Rocky.

Q. What have been the most important parts of your success?

A. Burlesque, the navy, vaudeville. My lovely wife, of course, and our son.

Q. And your partner?

A. Mike’s a nice guy.

Q. But where would you be without him?

A. Oh, probably somewhere close to where I am, but it wouldn’t be as much fun.

Maybe he was just trying to suggest to the general public that Carter was the essential ingredient of Carter and Sharp, and that, should Sharp devote himself to his family instead of show business, things could go on as they had without him. Chances are the world believed that already. But I had thought I could count on Rock as the one person who didn’t think so. Now I could practically hear him shrug me off. I was fun. Not for the audience, just for him.

I went that night to the Rock Club, with the magazine in hand; there was a painting of Hedy Lamarr looking gorgeous on the cover, her head tipped back to show off her white neck. Rocky was sitting at his favorite banquette in the corner, where Penny had thrown her legs across my lap six years before. The club was half filled. Onstage, a trio of Spanish girl singers tragically harmonized on “Enjoy Yourself—It’s Later Than You Think.” They had red roses tucked behind their ears; the girl in the center held the neck of the mike stand like she couldn’t decide whether to kiss or strangle it.

I shook the magazine at Rocky. “What’s this?”

“Hedy Lamarr,” he said.

“I’ve been reading your press,” I told him.

“Yeah? How’d it come out? The reporter got me a little drunk.” He snuffed his cigar. As though it took someone to get Rocky a little drunk.

“I’m a nice guy?” I said.

He must not have read the article; he was authentically confused. “Are you trying to establish a reputation as a son of a bitch I don’t know about yet?”

I read him the pertinent passage, then tossed the magazine down on the table, where it careened into the candle. Fine. Let the whole place burn.

“They used that, huh,” said Rock, staring at Hedy Lamarr’s throat. “That’s not so bad.”

“This success,” I said. “This is all your doing?”

He thought for a second. I assumed he was mustering up an apology. Then he looked at me. “This success? This success you’re not so impressed with? Probably not. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have had a different, possibly more interesting success without you. Why do you think I get paid more?”

“That’s a good question. That’s a very good question. Because we have a contract together. And the contract says it’s my turn to get more money. In fact, I’m long overdue. I figure, you owe me.”

The singers finished their song. Rocky clapped, still looking at me. “You know, kid,” he said, “you were more interesting when you didn’t talk about yourself so much.”

“What?”

“When I first met you. You shut up all the time. You never said anything except to ask a question.”

“And I was interesting then.”

“You were fascinating.”

“Watch me shut up,” I told him, and stalked out of the club.

He could have at least lied and said he’d been misquoted. Maybe I’d quit after all! Rocky could find one of those dime-a-dozen straight men. Just lean over and pick one up off the sidewalk, if it was that easy.

It might have been, I think now. Maybe I should have quit the team then, taken that early retirement. We could have been friends for the rest of our lives. I would have forgiven him. He was drunk. He was scared.

But at the moment it felt like Rock had been beating me at an eighteen-year game of poker. If I quit now, I’d never get even. I still had the orginal contract, the one that said that Rocky would get sixty percent more for the first ten years, and then the terms would reverse. He owed me eight years in back wages, the way I figured it. I steamed the page out of my scrapbook and took it to Tansy, who doubted it was legal. He urged me to calm down. “I’ll talk to Rock,” he said. “How’s fifty-fifty? That’s fair, right?”

“Barely,” I said.

But Rocky wouldn’t budge, and then he stopped talking to me completely.

We were shooting a racetrack picture—I played a tout, Rocky a jockey—and he only looked at me when the cameras were rolling. Then he was exuberant. The scene ended, and he walked away in disgust. It made me crazy. You do not exist, you do not exist. “Rocky, this is foolishness,” I told him. He didn’t care. Okay, then. If I didn’t exist, then he didn’t either.

Our first major falling out. After a while, it was almost like we weren’t mad with each other, just shy. We declared nothing. We just stopped talking. For our radio show, we picked up our scripts; for the picture, we hit our marks and said our lines. I don’t think the audience noticed the difference. Everyone was on my side, but everyone humored Rock. Jessica told me I should apologize, if not for me, then for our kids, who missed him.

“What am I apologizing for? Making less money? Being a sucker?”

“We have all the money we need,” she said. “You know Rocky. He won’t apologize. Don’t drag your heels just to punish him.”

“That sounds very wise,” I said, “but I’m not going to roll over. I do it for every single other thing.”

She sighed. “He’s an unhappy man. If a little money makes him happier—”

“It isn’t the money,” I insisted.

“So you keep saying, dear, and then you explain how it is.”

Those couple of months were our first silence: not the longest one, but the deepest. Once you’ve stopped speaking to someone, no matter how sincerely you then make up, there’s a new chance that you’ll stop speaking again. Every time, though, is different: sometimes you’re furious and sometimes merely peevish; sometimes you struggle not to call the other person up in the middle of the night to yell or apologize, and sometimes it’s just something that you do, like the morning crossword or calisthenics. After that first time it was easy: mad? Stop talking.

But that time, of course, we made it up.

Baby in Bright Water

Where was I? At the studio. I figured it out later, I mean, I wrote down everywhere I’d gone that day, and at just what time, accounting for travel, for conversations in hallways, for visits to the canteen and the men’s room. I was sitting in one of those canvas-backed director’s chairs that civilians believe movie people spend all their time in, my name stenciled across the back. We were posing for stills. The most hackneyed shot in the world, both of us leaning back, one careful elbow hooked over the canvas so that we would not obscure our names or the little drawings—mortarboard on my chair, Rocky’s striped shirt (empty of Rocky) on his. In real life we hadn’t spoken to each other in a month, but in publicity photos we were the best of friends, smiling at the camera, our elbows nearly touching. It was supposed to look as though the photographer, strolling up behind us, had said, “Heya, boys!” and snapped the picture. That took two hours.

Then I went to Musso’s with Neddy. We ate tongue sandwiches; that’s what I remember. (Tongue was one of the only things Rocky would not eat. “I only like human tongues in my mouth,” he said, “but past that I’m not particular.”)

“He’ll cool down,” said Neddy. “He never stays mad for long.”

“Maybe I won’t cool down. How come nobody ever worries about that?”

Neddy got the look on his face that meant that if he were a laughing man, by now he’d be in hysterics. He gestured at my sandwich with his sandwich. “Bite your tongue. Because you’ve always cooled down. What do you think is the secret of Carter and Sharp? You’re the only son of a bitch who can take him. You’re the only one who’ll never walk out.”

“That’s all?” I said. “Good God, Neddy, I’d like to think that’s not it. I’d like to think I had some talent. I’d like to think—”

And then the waiter came to our table, and handed me the phone, and it was Jessica saying, “Come home.”

“What is it?” I asked, and she said, “The Baby,” and hung up.

She hung up because she could not bear me asking for specifics. The specifics were this: my beautiful family was in its beautiful home. They had everything they could want, including, behind the house, that heart-shaped swimming pool with the wrought-iron fence. Jessica was the only one who swam; I still didn’t know how. She complained about the shape. You could not travel one long line across the heart without bumping into a point or a curve. Every morning, nearly, she dove into the pool for a few irregular laps, and then she’d get out, and she’d shut the iron gates.

Maybe sometimes she forgot to shut them.

The baby had wandered out of the house. Look: a beautiful shimmering heart in the backyard, glittering romance to a baby girl. There were always little wavelets in our pool, the water holding coins of light between its fingers. The baby doesn’t know the difference between water and light, unless it’s on her skin: one is cold, and the other warm, but how can you tell if you don’t touch? So she tries to touch. She is a magpie; she steals all the shiny things in the house and hides them in her bed, butter knives and costume jewelry and the foil from packs of cigarettes. She walks to the edge of the pool. She doesn’t look around. She doesn’t know this is forbidden. She leans over the water, and now the flash is beyond her reach, so she leans farther, and she is so small there is no splash, and she is so round that she floats, and she is so surprised that she does nothing, nothing at all, and when her mother finds her—only minutes later, says the doctor—she is still floating, little jellyfish, greedy little jellyfish, her hands empty and her face, when they turn her over, disappointed.

You cannot save the dead, though I’d spent years in dreams trying, catching Hattie and catching Hattie and every morning she was still dead. Now, I dreamt I dove into the pool until I remembered that this was a good way to kill myself as well, and then I thought that wasn’t such a bad idea: it didn’t count as suicide if it was accidental, did it? Then I told myself, uncertainly, that I did not want to kill myself. I had responsibilities, so then I tried out other rescues: the net on the long pole that the pool man used to fish out flotsam. A call for help. Too long. Eventually, over and over, I merely locked the gate, with a giant padlock on a chain like a sunken treasure chest.

“If the gate was locked,” I said to Jessica. This was cruelty, I knew even as I said it. Those days after the accident—the gates now actually locked—I wept, and she didn’t. She curled up on the sofa with the boys, or walked into the kitchen, or sat on the floor cross-legged. My slight wife dwindled. She looked as though she’d wandered into another person’s closet to dress, someone bigger and more optimistic. I regret to say that she grew oddly more beautiful: the few pictures I have from those days prove it. Skinny, too skinny to live, but gorgeous.

As for me, I wept, nearly all the time. It’s come to this, I thought: I’d believed that as I got older I got more sentimental, but really I was losing my mind day by day, and this blow knocked me right out of it. “Mike Sharp’s Tragedy,” said the newspapers and magazines. “Tears of a Funnyman.” Documentation everywhere, and well-meaning but horrific bouquets of flowers. Soon the florists knew to deliver to the local hospitals instead. All these years later, I can imagine how it would have been for Jessica, this great interest from the outside world in how I felt, what I had lost, as though by not being famous her own grief was not so compelling. Then, though, I agreed. My grief was as engrossing, as vivid, as unremitting as a hallucination.

I’d fallen into a pool once. I could have drowned! And yet I’d had one installed, I’d never learned to swim, I ignored everything.

Tell us what to do, my sisters said, in telegrams and phone calls. Say the word. I told them to stay home, that Jessica and I were doing our best for the boys now, and that a whole houseful of mourning grown-ups would only make things worse. My sisters agreed: that was how we’d been raised. But Jessica’s brother, Joseph, arrived without warning; he’d heard the news on the radio and drove straight to the airport and once in Hollywood talked his way past the maid, who’d been instructed not to let anyone in. He was the one who arranged the burial—we had no funeral—and bought a plot in Forest Lawn at Babyland, which (I learned this later, though I still have never been by the grave) is a heart-shaped plinth of grass in the center of the park, a place in every way so tasteful that it’s tasteless beyond imagining.

The maid was a poor guard dog. The day after the accident—Joseph already at the Forest Lawn—we had another visitor who slipped past.

“Mosey,” Rock said as he stood in the door of my den, and I burst into tears and threw myself into his arms. I’d been crying by myself for so long. “Ah, sweetheart,” he said to me. “Oh, babe.”

We never officially made up, unless you call me weeping in his arms making up. Ask anyone: a tragedy will drive two people apart or together. In my case both things happened.

The first thing Rocky did was get me drunk. Terrible man, you think, but no, it was exactly what I needed. We sat in my study on the leather sofa Lillian, Rocky’s decorator wife, had talked me into—if you napped on it, you woke up red faced and button printed—and he handed me glass after glass of brandy until I stopped weeping and could talk. The brandy slowed me down. Drunk, I could almost think. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been drunk. Surely it had been with Rocky, him pressing drinks on me, talking me into just one more.

“Just one more,” I said now, and handed him back the glass.

“What can I do for you?” he asked. “What do you need?”

“I don’t know.”

The sofa made a fussy noise as he rearranged his weight. He wasn’t drinking himself. “You know what I think? You need to get back to work.”

I shook my head. But what I said was “Yes.” My father’s cure: keeping busy. Who knew more about such things than my father? We’d wrap the racetrack pic, which was nearly done—that’s why we’d been posing for stills—and there was the radio show on Thursday night. They’d already arranged for Eddie Cantor to replace me. There would have been jokes about all of Rocky’s mythical sisters and Cantor’s very real daughters: he had five. “Five daughters,” I said to Rocky on the sofa, the way he used to say, Six sisters! He just patted my back. Maybe he thought I was making plans for the future.

“Work,” he said to me. “It’s not a cure, but it will help.”

That first radio show was torture, not funny in the least. You will find it on no tape of The Best of Carter and Sharp. Cantor showed up anyhow, just in case I couldn’t go on. The script seemed especially stupid to me, but radio work was perfect for the state I was in: I could sit down when they didn’t need me, just listen to Loretta sing her ballad, sounding ready to burst into tears herself. The writers hadn’t changed anything; they probably should have given her something upbeat. On the other hand, that might have been worse, sniffling through “The Sunny Side of the Street.”

The audience gave me a standing ovation. The papers marveled at my bravery, as though my greatest duty in the world was entertaining people (not that I was the least bit entertaining that night: I flubbed my lines, I stepped on cues). I was a trooper, like the soldier I’d once thought I should be, charging ahead despite my fear. The only people who didn’t admire me were Jessica and Joseph. When I got home that night, Joseph said, “Your wife needs you.” He looked like he was working on his resemblance to Mahler.

I shrugged, and started for our room.

“Not now,” he said. “She needed you to be home. Now she’s asleep.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m glad she can sleep.”

“The doctor gave her a sedative,” he told me. I remembered when I thought he had liked me, and then finding out that he didn’t. He was eating this up. See, he seemed to say, what my sister needs is me. You, she’s not even related to.

“Where are the boys?”

“Everyone’s asleep.”

“Didn’t they listen to the show?” They always listened to the show.

“No,” he said. “They weren’t in the mood for comedy.”

“Me neither. Sometimes you have to force yourself.”

“Forced laughter,” said Joseph, “is no kind of laughter at all.”

When we were kids, Hattie and I sometimes talked about what our mother had been like before we were born. Annie would tell us to remember the babies that had died. We couldn’t understand why Annie was so bitter, when she was the lucky one, the firstborn, before our mother started all that grieving: Annie in her arms. Full of love in those days, surely. Full of health and dumb rhymes, ready for anything that might happen. Ordinary, in other words. Six dead children would change any woman. Hattie and I hadn’t forgotten those siblings, but we hadn’t forgiven them either. They had been bad for Mama. They were ancestors who had never done anything. I never understood it fully, until the accident. A lost child means—in a way a living child never does—a little less love for those who are left. A dead baby is a bank failing: you’ll never get that particular fortune back.

Maybe my own youngest child, Gilda, wonders what it would have been like to know her mother and me before Betty. She’s such a good girl, Gilda. (Girl! She’s in her late forties.) She runs the Carter and Sharp fan club, and wrote a book about my career that mentions nearly none of my faults and sold nearly no copies. Probably it makes sense that of all of the children, she was the one who tied up her life with Carter and Sharp: she needed to believe in partnerships.

“It’s different for me!” I yelled at Jessica the week after Betty died. She looked at me. “Because I’ve lost everybody!”

“Oh? And who am I? And who,” she said, the orphaned girl who’d been spirited away from home by a wandering husband, “haven’t I lost?”

She wanted to fill in the swimming pool. I refused, though we drained it. This, too, might have been cruelty, might have been me wanting her to look at her mistake every day. But I couldn’t bear the idea of men coming to throw dirt into that impractical heart, as though we wanted to pretend that it never existed. Of course it existed. Why bury the baby twice? I imagined that even if we’d planted it over, like a curse some sign of it would always remain: grass would refuse to grow right, a brown heart, worse than a swimming pool ever was.

“It’s dangerous,” Jessica said, and I said, “Not if you lock the gates.”