13

Live from Hollywood

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome—

(FANFARE)

It’s the Carr Oil Comedy Hour!

(FANFARE)

Starring this week’s hosts—

(DOUBLE FANFARE)

Rocky Carter and Mike Sharp—

with their guests

(HORNS)

Don Ameche!

Martha Raye!

The Dove City Dancers!

And now, ladies and gentlemen—

(HORNS)

Carter and Sharp!

(THE BAND BREAKS INTO “MY DARLING LIVES IN DES MOINES”)

(THE CAMERA SHOWS AN EMPTY STAGE, A CRUDELY PAINTED BACKDROP OF A PARK)

Carter and Sharp!

(HORNS. BAND STARTS AGAIN)

Where are those guys!

(A WHISTLE FROM THE HOUSE)

ROCKY: Camera three! Over here, camera three!

(APPLAUSE)

And the camera swivels to find two mugs in the audience, Carter and Sharp, hands in pockets, the surrounding crowd cracking up for no reason.

I’d been wrong. I loved TV.

We broke into television as the once-a-month hosts of a weekly hour-long live variety show. By 1951, our movie career was mostly over, and we were back where we’d begun, except famous, rich, and middle- aged: a thin man and a fat man on a stage, willing to do anything for a laugh. We were shameless. We insulted the band leader, we knocked down scenery on purpose, we tried to crack each other up. We broke props we’d need later, just so we could improvise first about the breakage, and then about the lack of props. Our old wheezing vaudeville jokes were new again, thanks to the postwar baby boom: the country was full of brand-new people with blissfully unsophisticated senses of humor. You could see Rocky search for the red light that told us which camera was paying attention, doing a slow burn and then saying, “Watch me, camera two,” and tipping his hat. You could see me shove an extra cream puff in his mouth in a banquet scene, so he couldn’t deliver his next line.

Sometimes we laughed so hard we ended up in each other’s arms, even if offstage we weren’t speaking. We spent a lot of time not speaking.

I can’t remember what tipped off that round of fights. No, wait, I do: yes. He’d wanted to talk, and called me up. “Come out to the club,” he said, meaning his own.

“Can’t you come here?”

“No,” he said. “It makes me too sad. You got your happy family there, and what have I got?”

So I went to the Rock Club, into which Rock now poured all of his spare money. He couldn’t stand the idea of it closing—a guy can spend all day in his own bar drinking, and it’s business; a guy drinking in another man’s bar is bad behavior. Chances are Rock deducted his martinis off his taxes. That night, he wore a light brown gabardine suit, a mustard-colored shirt, and a yellow tie. He probably thought he looked spiffy, but mostly he resembled a large cheese sandwich. A cigarette burned in his hand, a bad sign: he favored cigars unless he was upset enough to chain-smoke.

“Friend, Hebrew, countryman,” he said. “Lend me your ear.”

“Have both,” I offered.

He waved to a waiter, who brought us whiskeys. I sipped mine; I’d been drinking so little lately I’d lost all capacity.

“I’ve missed you, Professor,” he said.

“Where have I been?”

“You tell me. Lying in bed, is my guess.”

“Rocky, I see you all the time.”

He tilted his head to let what seemed to him a lie pass. “Anyhow. Drink your bourbon, it’s good for you. I’m just lonely. Just want some company. How are the kids?”

“Swell,” I said. “Wonderful.”

He nodded. “I miss being married.”

“When you’re married you want to be a bachelor, when you’re single you want a wife.”

He got a thinking look on his face, and I realized he’d misinterpreted me: I meant he wanted to be a bachelor, he wanted a wife, but he’d taken this as some universal wisdom, as though I suffered from the same desires.

“You need to make up your mind, Rocky,” I said.

He’d taken ahold of the salt and pepper shakers, made them dance across the white cloth of the table and then kiss, silver top to silver top. I watched this puppet show. Finally he sighed, as though he’d learned another universal truth from the condiments: even salt and pepper belonged together, but he’d never have anyone to own, to own him, except maybe his straight man. “You know me, Professor. I have such lousy luck.”

For some reason, I saw this all of a sudden for the preposterous lie it was: Rocky had plenty of luck with women. I thought of his four wives; of the landladies, all those years ago, who loved him; of the chorus girls on our show I knew would be happy to cheer him up, at least momentarily. He could charm any woman who didn’t particularly interest him, and even some who did. Long ago, though, he’d decided that he was a failure at love, and had held on to that fact as though it were the striped shirt he still, at forty-seven, wore professionally: a vaudeville prop. He once told me that to be a star, you had to have a spectacular romantic life, or a miserable one. “No one with average luck in love has ever made it big,” he said. “Look it up.”

“So go back to Lillian,” I said now. “She’ll take you.”

“Whatever my problems are, Lillian’s not the solution.”

“So when you say you miss being married, you’re looking for a fifth wife?”

“Oh, who keeps count?”

I could tell he expected me to laugh, the way I would have once. Instead, I told him what his third wife had said to me two years before: “You have a family. Go home to it.”

He looked at me almost hatefully. Go home? In this suit? Then he sighed again, as though he had explained this to me dozens of times but I was too dumb to absorb it. “Well, in the fairy-tale world of Moses Sharensky, maybe that works. You leave, you come back, all is forgiven. Life isn’t so fucking easy for the rest of us.”

“You make yourself miserable, Rock,” I said. I didn’t yell. I didn’t contradict him. “You pick up the hammer and hit your thumb, over and over, and after a while, it gets boring. And maybe that was okay before you had a kid, but now you need to think about him.”

Rocky didn’t say anything. We must have sat there silently for five minutes, and I was proud to think he was considering my advice. Then I said, “Rock?” and he didn’t look at me, and I realized it had happened again. Probably he’d stopped listening when I uttered the word boring. His club, his banquette: he wouldn’t leave. “For Pete’s sake, Rocky,” I said, but he didn’t look at me, he just picked up the salt and pepper shakers and clonked them together, the glass toe of the salt to the silver hat of the pepper, which left dents. Good old salt, surely, was the comic, kicking its highfalutin straight man in the head.

But he forgave me again, on the set of our next rotten motion picture. He needed to complain to someone without being argued with: there’s nothing as dispiriting as making garbage and having some well-meaning person assure you that it’s gold.

God knows we made a of lot movies, garbage and aluminum and fool’s gold if not real gold. Twenty-eight features in thirteen years. Our fan club—oh, our fan club, full of men (mostly) who memorize our statistics the way other men learn baseball scores—has arguments in their newsletter about which of our pictures was best. My daughter Gilda, who reads all that stuff, tells me. “There’s a guy who loves Rock and Roll Rock,” she said once, naming Rocky’s last movie, a solo effort, middle-aged Rocky in an Elvis Presley–styled pompadour. “Isn’t that interesting?”

“It’s unconscionable,” I said.

The club spends a great deal of time defending my reputation. “A great straight man,” they say. “The greatest!” They write long annotations of our pictures, full of cross-references and games: find Shemp Howard. Look for this flubbed line. And they also mention the saddest fact of all: that everyone knows that Rocky Carter was funnier (even funnier, they put it) offscreen than on. They wish, more fervently than Carter and Sharp themselves ever did, that just once The Boys had been given a top-notch script to work with. They try to make themselves feel better with Marry Me, Barry, the best of the lot.

Despite the fact that we never made a good picture, they nevertheless over the years got even worse. A little research reveals that most people who’ve wasted time thinking about it would rate Red, White, and Who; Marry Me, Barry; and Ghost of a Chance as our best pictures, all of them made in the first six of our Hollywood years. Problem is, we kept going. We’d always done ghost stories, but after a while our scripts got less and less realistic, probably because the shtick was always to get us in trouble with some unforgiving group, and we’d already antagonized every possible demographic of our time on this earth. So the writers went looking elsewhere: how about pirates? Yo Ho Ho. Mummies? The aforementioned For He’s a Jolly Good Pharaoh. Men from Mars? Elves? Naughty children?

Carter and Sharp Meet Mother Goose was our second color picture. Personally I thought it was pandering, but then our kid fans never particularly cottoned to me, just another grown-up flitting around that large child, Rocky. Rocky played the Piper’s son, Bobby Shaftoe, Little Jack Horner, and Jack Spratt; I appeared as the Piper, Jack Horner’s father, and—in my only drag screen roles—both Mrs. Spratt and Mother Goose herself. Tansy claimed the picture tanked because it came out the same year as Hans Christian Andersen, with Danny Kaye playing so sugary and pure you wanted to bop him in the nose and steal his wooden shoes. But our movie was awful, and we knew it, before we’d even finished filming. Our budget was nothing. I still remember sitting on a hill overlooking a fake lake on the studio back lot; Rocky was
wearing his Bobby Shaftoe outfit, not actually silver buckles slightly below his actual knees. He said to me, “I should have been a silent comedian.”

I said, “What?”

“I would have been famous.”

“You are famous.”

“I would have been great.”

“You are—” I began.

“Like Chaplin,” said Rocky. “Great like that. I’m a B comic. A kid’s comic. I should never have opened my big goddamn mouth.”

But what could have kept him quiet? Nothing. I knew the guy: nothing. Okay, maybe imagine he worked harder, was born a few years earlier, hitchhiked to Hollywood in the teens and talked his way onto a set and then into a movie and then into a scene: All right, the director says, give the kid five minutes of film, let’s see what he can do. The movie’s set in a department store, and Rocky tangos with a tailor’s dummy. Across town, there are men trying to figure out, by means of science, how to make people speak from the screen. For now the fat kid is silent, but dancing. He wants to tell you everything, but he can’t.

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.

“A change of pace,” said Rocky.

“I don’t want one,” I told him.

What I wanted was out. We had plenty of money; I’d invested pretty well over the years. I was getting too old—correction, I’d gotten—though I’d dive through a store window for old times’ sake, and I could still stand next to a table, then suddenly jump on top of it. In fact, under the iron hand of my health-nut wife, I was in fine physical condition: I just thought a man of forty-two should find more dignified work. I didn’t tell Rocky this; he’d take it as an insult, since he was even older, and even sillier.

And besides, something had to change. The guy was destroying himself.

Well, then, why didn’t I save him?

I couldn’t have.

Why didn’t I try?

Good question. Now it seems obvious: I just should have said something. As it was, I spent hours in bars and restaurants with him, always a fraction of a second from saying, You know, Rocky, that you drink too much.

And then I’d imagine what he’d say in return.

I know. (Still, he takes a gulp of his fresh drink.)

Come on, move in with us, stay in the guest suite. We’ll keep you busy. Jess will whip you into shape in no time. Spinach, deep knee bends—

Sounds great. (He takes another gulp.)

You’ll love it.

No really, says Rocky, his finger in the ice cubes at the bottom of his now empty glass, it sounds terrific. But I’d rather die.

And I couldn’t watch. I wanted no part of it.

 

I believed then—as almost everyone believed—that if one of us went on to have a solo career, it wouldn’t be me. Sometimes, when I thought of stepping down, I imagined the comeback we’d make later, staid, cleverer. A sophisticated double act. Other times I thought that without the Professor hectoring him, Rocky could finally become, as he wanted, great. A guy who could speak that many languages could do something with his own, once he had to, write movies, become an auteur. Go abroad, hang out with brooding comic Englishmen—he loved The Lavender Hill Mob. Hang up the damn striped shirt and act his age, in other words. I believed that I’d have to orphan the on-screen childish Rocky to push him out into the world. Okay, I’d be selfless and walk away. Like many a guardian, I tried to leave in degrees. Like many a juvenile delinquent, he clung and misbehaved, longing for attention and punishment.

Six years before, I’d threatened to quit the act, but waffled. This time I stood my ground: I wanted to take a break, at the very least. Jake was ten, Nathan nine, and Gilda three. Betty would have been seven. Rocky called all the time to twist my arm. The last time was March 17, 1954. The kids and Jess and I were in her studio, watching Jake practice a Western dance—he had a cowboy outfit he loved, with chaps and a holster and a hat he wore slung back on his shoulders, its string across the hollow of his throat. I could hear the phone ring in the house. By that time we had no live-in help to answer, just a maid who came in the mornings and a cook who came at night. Normally I would have let it alone, but my sister Sadie’s husband, Abe, had been sick, and I worried she might be calling with bad news. I took the call in my study, so if we needed to fly to Des Moines for a funeral I could check my calendar to see what I’d have to cancel.

“I want to talk about this television thing,” Rocky said without prelude.

“You never rest,” I said.

“You hang around the house enough as it is.” He said this like it was a new argument, though we’d been having it since 1943. Used to persuade me.

“We’ve been working for almost twenty-five years steady,” I said. “Don’t you want to take some time off?”

That was a stupid question.

He said, “How much time?”

I pretended to think carefully. “Three years.”

“In three years,” Rocky said, “every jerk’s going to have a show. In three years, Tansy’ll have a program. Live, from Hollywood: the Buddy Tansy Hour. He’ll look at the camera and bare his teeth and pull down millions.”

“I’ll be happy for him. All that thwarted promise, finally realized.”

“But it should be us.” He tried to appeal to the actor in me. “Same character, every week. You can develop it. You’ll be married. Hey,” he said, and lowered his voice, “—I bet we could swing it so Jess can play your wife, and your kids can play themselves. How about that?”

Once upon a time this might have sounded swell to me. In the early days of our radio show, I listened to our competitors—at home, of course, never around Rock—and got jealous. Not of the laughs: of the on-air marriages. George Burns, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Goodman Ace, Fibber McGee—those guys got to work with their wives, got to broadcast to the country that they were married, even if they didn’t play married. I loved to hear Portland Hoffa on the Fred Allen program say, in her slightly stiff, slightly boop-oop-a-doop voice, “Oh, Mister A-a-a-allen.” He’d answer, and the audience would applaud, as though both he and the people in the studio had had no idea she’d show up that night. I knew that an on-air romance resembles an off-mike one only in the names, but through the radio it sounded wonderful.

But now Jess had a job: she’d just started choreographing variety-show dance numbers at the networks. She had no interest in being in front of the camera. Besides, I couldn’t think of anything worse, my whole family on TV. “I’m not putting my kids to work,” I said. “Who am I, Fagin?”

“I was thinking Ozzie Nelson,” said Rocky, “but okay. We’ll get kid actors.”

“No, Rock. I don’t want to do this.”

“Tell me why, and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.”

My den was in the back of our house, on the first floor so I could shuffle papers without being disturbed. The window looked out on a little patch of foliage. Fifteen years in California, and I still couldn’t identify the flora. I wished I could see Jess’s studio, though I thought I could hear Gilda and Nate and Jessica applauding Jake. Yes, there was Nate, yelling in his oddly husky voice, “Brava,” which was what I called out to his mother when she danced. Jess must have corrected him, because now he yelled, “Bravo, Bravo, Braveeeeessssssimo!” How had I come up with a kid so smart? I thought about telling Rock this story, but he was after business and it had been years—I realized with a start—since I’d told him such things. It felt like bragging.

“Two guys, two wives,” I said instead, “one guy, one wife. What’s the difference? Call it The Rocky Carter Show. Who’ll notice that I’m gone?”

He said, brusquely, “If that’s the way you want it,” and hung up.

Two hours later he drove over. He found us in the yard. Jake was on his back, idly firing his toy guns in the air; Nathan, our critic, was telling his mother a long story about a little girl at school who liked to lick other people’s sandwiches. Gilda had put on Jake’s hat and was rattling it around on her head. Everyone but me wore blue jeans. The Mike Sharps at Home, the picture in a movie magazine would have said, though we hadn’t posed for any such stories since Betty died. Before then, we did a couple, plus a newsreel piece of Jake’s fourth birthday party, Rocky standing by the heart-shaped pool and waving, me threatening fiercely to push him into the pool, then kissing him on the cheek.

“Mike,” said Rocky, which gave me a shock—he never called me Mike. “Spare a moment?”

“Hey!” said Jake, still Rocky’s particular favorite.

“Howdy pardner,” Rock said with no real enthusiasm. “Mike?”

So we went inside the house.

“I need to talk to you about this TV thing,” he said.

“I thought it was settled. The Rocky Carter Show. Solo billing. Hundred percent of the salary. Nice TV wife—get a single girl and maybe marry her off-camera too.”

“The sponsors want both of us or neither.”

“Gotta be neither, then, Rocky. I’m telling you: I need time off.”

I don’t think I really understood his desperation then. He looked awful—he’d been gaining weight steadily since he and Lil broke up, from the drink and too many breakfasts. He rarely ate anything but ham and eggs and buttered toast, up to five times a day. He had a scratch under one eyebrow, and his hair needed dyeing, and if I’d been thinking about it I would have known something was wrong, because he was so vain about his hair: he had it colored every two weeks and, for the TV show and movies, painted his scalp black beneath to cut down on the glare. Now I could see a little border of sandy brown at his hairline, like a curtain starting to rise.

He bit his upper lip, and then ran his tongue over his front teeth. I couldn’t tell whether he planned to threaten or beg me.

“Look,” he said. “Commit to a year. One year of the show, and then you’re out. By then it’ll be on its way and they won’t even miss you.”

“No,” I said.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “After all you’ve done to me?”

He must have meant, after all I’ve done for you.

We stared at each other while we both deliberated over how much of a joke he was making. I could hear Jake knocking with the butt of his gun on the French doors behind me. “Daddy,” he said, his voice muffled through the glass. “Mom says can I have some ice cream.”

I didn’t turn around. “In a minute, honey.”

For some reason, I felt like we were in some ridiculous Western, maybe because I’d watched Jake’s cowboy dance earlier. Rocky and I faced each other. He had the advantage: he could look out on my family sitting on the grass. No telling what he’d do if I let my guard down. I couldn’t tell whether this was a comic Western or a real one, whether I’d be saved by the cavalry or a pull-apart horse.

I said, with some forced kindness, “How’s Junior?”

“He could use the money, same as me. I guess. His mother won’t let me see him. But, see, if I was on TV again, he could watch—”

Good God, what fancy thinking. “Rocky,” I said. “Do not make this about me keeping you from your kid. Okay? You left. Right? And if your life has not been what you wanted since you and Lil—”

“Since Penny,” he said. “My life’s not been what I wanted since Penny. Look at you. Look at your own life, and look at mine. Your gorgeous children. Your brilliant wife. Do me one fucking favor in your life. Mike,” he said, because I was turning away from him, “wait. Mike. I can make it so you don’t have a choice.”

“Get out your handcuffs,” I said, “and I’ll hire a locksmith. Threaten me with lawyers, and I’ll go abroad. I will not do this show. I don’t know how else to put it.”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and shook them, polished one shoe on the back of the opposite calf. “It’s nice Jess is working,” he offered.

“It’s lovely,” I said, exasperated.

“At the networks.” He said this helpfully, as though I’d misunderstood. “Doing her dance stuff. She likes that, right?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, then, I’ll blackball her.”

Poor Rock, to have such a high opinion of himself. This was 1954, not 1944, and though he could convince one or two people not to hire my wife as a personal favor to him, he wasn’t exactly the most powerful man in Hollywood. If he was, he’d be on TV by himself now, wouldn’t he?

And that’s what I told him, laughing.

He flinched a little, as though this was news. Then he said, “That’s not what I meant. I mean, I’ll bring up her past.”

I had no idea of what he was talking about, but I didn’t care. Certainly I’d never known him to make up stories about anyone other than himself, but that must be what he was doing now, he was working on some fake scandal about Jessica, something just awful enough. He would have threatened me directly, but he needed to keep me employable.

Was I going to have to push him out the door? He was heavy, but I’d been building my biceps in my time off. “Rocky,” I said, “go home. Sleep off whatever it is that’s making you this way. Get Tansy to find you some jobs, work on your act, leave me alone.”

He said, “You know what will happen if people find out she’s a communist.”

I laughed again. “Current events, is it? That’s the best story you can come up with? My wife’s a commie.” I turned and pointed through the window. “Is it the blue jeans? No, I get it: you have pictures of her in a red dress. She loves Tchaikovsky?”

He looked puzzled. “She never told you?”

“She doesn’t keep me up to date on your delusions, no.”

Jake had gone back to sit with his siblings, who watched their mother. She was dancing on the grass—she told me later she could hear the two of us fighting, and wanted to distract them. She didn’t know we were arguing about her. An ordinary dance wouldn’t do: Jessica, forty-one, was turning cartwheels, doing back bends, all of those things children think make for really fine ballet.

“I’ll bet you,” Rocky said. “I’ll bet you one year of work.” He swung open one of the French doors and called to her. “Jessie,” he said, and his voice was suddenly more reasonable than it had been all day, or all year. “Would you come in for a minute?”

She walked to the threshold. Rock waved her in like a maître d’, with a small bow and a sweeping hand. “We’ve called you in to settle a bet.”

“What he wants to know, dear,” I said, taking hold of my all-American sweetheart’s hand, “is are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?”

There was a pause while she cocked her head at me, then at Rocky. The cartwheels had styled her hair into something island-girlish; she wore it lately to her shoulders, where it hung in lovely waves. The right knee of her blue jeans was grass stained.

She said to me, “You knew that.”

All these decades later, the issue of the hearings seems simple: bad men asked questions they shouldn’t have. What goes on in someone else’s head is none of your business, cannot hurt you. Asking is un-American.

It wasn’t that easy at the time. I turned my back on Rocky because he threatened my wife, yes. He menaced us with a truth instead of a lie, but that made no difference. I felt the way I had when someone in a wartime crowd shouted, “Slacker!” You lack character, he seemed to be saying. I’ll expose you, and your so-called patriotism, Mr. So-called Sharp. If I were a character in a movie, I would have delivered a speech, my eyes shining, about my immigrant father who’d come to this country with nothing and had built up a business, a man who so loved his new home and opportunities that he never mentioned his past life in Lithuania, never spoke his own language again—at this there might be a double exposure of my father, eyes similarly shining, and then another of a waving flag.

“Aha!” said Rocky, like some lawyer who’d been trying to break her for five years.

I still held Jess’s hand, a little tighter now, though of course I didn’t care about her politics, which to be sure had always been left of mine. “What did I know?” I asked her.

“You were here. When Rocky and I talked about New York. All of my friends in the city were members of the Party. We were artists,” she said. “We wanted great things for the world.”

The city, of course. The Party. Maybe I had known this, ten years ago. Rocky was a member of the Swans’ Club; Jessica was a member of the Communist party. Now she combed her hair with her hands and realigned a bobby pin above one ear. She wasn’t contrite, of course. Years later, the threat might sound silly—who cares whether someone’s wife was slightly pink as a kid? Romantic, even: Jessica with her dark hair, testifying. She might miss her TV choreography a little, but not enough to lie or apologize. TV work was not artistic, not a great thing you planned for the world.

Oh, yes. After they called her, they’d call me.

I was a bigger star than anyone who’d been ruined by the hearings so far, sort of a dream name for HUAC: famous, but not beloved. Known, but past my prime. A fine example. A lovely scandal. People could deny me work and not feel like they’d been cheated out of anything.

I organized a few thoughts. Rocky was smart enough to know that if he informed on Jessica, he would ruin both her career and mine, which wouldn’t do him any good. If he did it out of spite anyhow, well, I’d wanted to retire, hadn’t I? I’d rather choose the terms myself, but we had money, and if it got unpleasant to live in North Hollywood, then we’d move somewhere else—to New York. To Des Moines. We were hardly the Rosenbergs. What kept me in California?

Only Rocky, who had his hand in his hair, as though he’d just become self-conscious of the creeping blond in it. All in all, an impressive display of betrayal: threaten my wife, her livelihood, mine. Years ago, maybe even months ago, maybe even last week, I would have begged him not to do such a thing. I would have been driven crazy, like the straight man in that old bit about Niagara Falls, who hears the words and clenches his fists and advances on the comic, all because his wife ran off with his best friend to Niagara. Those two words remind him of all he’s lost and still desires. Not a bad part for a straight man. Maybe Rocky thought if he couldn’t make me bend, he could make me rage. If he said the right words, I would turn around like a trouper and walk toward him, feeding him setups for panicked punch lines. Revenge, after all, is a kind of love.

But this? He broke my heart, as brutally as anyone or anything had ever broken it, and now I was too old to throw myself at his silly two-toned shoes and beg him to stay. Heartbreak makes you plead and weep, or else it shuts you up. Who was I to him? The Professor. As Mose Sharp I was useless.

Rocky said, uncertainly, “I won the bet.”

“There was no bet,” I said. “No bet, no show, no team. Nothing.”

Suddenly he seemed afraid of what he’d done. Thinking back, I believe he’d tried to get out of his threats by calling it a gamble. He didn’t care about politics any more than I did. Just another story we’d tell: one day, in 1954, we wagered over some ridiculous thing, and that’s how Life with Rocky began.

“Mose,” he said. “Professor.”

But I had my back turned to him. My kids were in the yard—Jake and Nate had heaped all of the cowboy costumes on Gilda, and died gloriously as she shot the pistols into the tree, over the roof of Jess’s studio. All those times we stopped talking, and this was the first time I’d begun it. I could see the appeal. I hadn’t known before, when I’d borne the brunt, that it was the worst thing you could do to someone. I felt cruel and happy. Rocky said, “Mosey.”

I am not talking to you.

Rocky said, “Okay, listen, wait.”

I am not talking.

If I’d opened my mouth, I would have said, over and over, You broke my heart, can’t you see you broke my heart? I kept my back turned. Jessica murmured something to him, and led him to the front door, and then I didn’t see him again for a long time.