Niagara Falls All Over Again (3 page)

“From up here we'll be able to see everything,” Hattie explained. She unfolded a seat for me.

I sat. “A movie?”

She put a gloved hand on my neck to shush me.

While people around us took their seats, the organist descended, still playing, and a troupe of five Oriental acrobats began to fling themselves around onstage in time to the music. First just grown-ups, who I took to be siblings. The tallest acrobat sprung offstage and then sprung back carrying two carpetbags, and then someone in the wings threw him a third, which he caught and set down next to the others in one swinging motion. He undid the brass buckles—in my head I can still hear them ping, though maybe the house percussionist simply struck the triangle—opened them up, and out stepped the contents: a medium-sized child, a small child, and a child so tiny it seemed like a trick, a dog in a toddler suit. Applause. The Fujiyama Japs, the program called them. Somehow, they made the way they tossed each other around seem like good manners. Pass the salt, pass the potatoes, pass the twelve-year-old, pass the baby, thank you, don't mention it. At any moment, they might have started flinging each other into the audience. Would you like the baby? Here, sir. Hand him along the row when you're done.

“Vaudeville,” Hattie whispered in my ear, as though that explained everything.

That one act would have been enough. But the acrobats were followed by a singer, a shrunk-down version of a play about a crooked politician, a dog act, a man who folded paper in complicated ways, a stout lady who sang about the man she loved who then pulled her hair right off her head—she was a man herself!—a comedy trio, a pair of eccentric dancers who weren't the Fujiyamas but not bad either: they were brother and sister, which made sense when you watched them roughhouse in time to the music. While they danced they were effortless, but they panted like spaniels when they took their bows. (We did not see a young comic from Boston named Rocky Carter, though years later this myth would slip into my official biography:
bitten by show-biz bug, aged ten, when he saw his future partner perform at the Des Moines Orpheum
. Rocky started that rumor.) I don't remember who the headliner was that afternoon, but my favorite act was a girl who came out on a horse and warbled a song (I've never heard it since) called “My Navaho Love.” All I knew was a horse inside a theater was the most astounding thing I'd ever seen, though outside I didn't care for them one way or the other.

Most city boys of my generation were brought up on vaude. Not me. A whole lifetime, it seemed to me then, wasted. Real people on a stage, just for us! My older sisters remembered life before the movies, had seen silent film for the first time projected on the side of a building in downtown Vee Jay, the actors made haggard by bricks, and a miracle. Me, I believed in the Nabob Theater the way I believed in any geographic phenomenon. Who had installed the Raccoon River, two blocks away? God, and then He thought the place could use a movie palace too. (No doubt when Noah filled his Ark some years later, he made sure to include among his couples one straight man, one comic, who'd try to get through the door at the top of the gangplank at the same time, when even the elephants knew better.) I knew all about moving pictures: the people in them only mimed singing, and there was never a chance, when you came back the next day, that a dancer could slip or a dog jump from the stage or a girl on a horse notice a dark-haired boy in the balcony, and address a verse up there, to the rafters.

When the Indian Maid lifted her arms in the air at the end of the song, I thought I could see, just under the arch of her armpits, a margin of white skin between the brown of her body makeup and her sand-colored buckskin costume. I wanted to get up close, so I could count the beads on her bodice.

Afterward, Hattie asked me who my favorite was. We were back in the real world, Des Moines, walking streets called
Walnut
and
Mulberry
and
Grand
. The sun had come out just in time to set. Already I wanted to run back to the theater, set up camp on one of the velveteen seats. I thought it was the only place in the world like that.
Vaudeville
, Hattie had said, and I thought that
vaudeville
meant only this one theater with this particular handful of performers on this solitary afternoon. Had I understood, I might have died of pleasure, there on Grand Avenue on the afternoon of my tenth birthday.

“I liked the Indian girl,” I said.

Hattie snorted. “Her? She's no more Indian than I am.”

“I liked her,” I said, aware of my treachery.

The day had gotten too warm for Hattie's fur hat, so she gave it to me to carry. Behind us, the sun bounced off the gold dome of the State Capitol building. “I think I'll be a dancer,” Hattie said. Then she took the hat back from me, and stopped.

“Hmmm,” she said. She set her hat on my head, then angled it rakishly—she had to hook it on my ears so it wouldn't fall down around my nose. “What will you be?”

I felt transformed by my new headgear, foreign, ursine, despite my own everyday noggin underneath. Well, wasn't that the point? Like the man who sang dressed as a woman. Except I knew the right answer as I looked at Hattie. A sister-and-brother act, and Hattie couldn't sing. She tilted her head in the same direction that she'd tilted my hat. “A dancer,” I said. “Me too.”

“We'll have to practice,” she said, and I said, “Sharp and Sharp.”

“Sharp and Sharper,” she answered. “Partners?”

My first contract.

The Comic Baby

Comedians rarely have happy childhoods. Cue the violins: they should be whining “Laugh, Clown, Laugh” right about now.

For instance: Rocky. All of his childhood stories were about brands of misery, even when presented as high slapstick. He was, he said, the only child of college professors in Boston, and he'd worked in various capacities in burlesque houses from the time he was eleven. His first burley house was the Old Howard in Boston's Scollay Square, where he'd been allowed to occasionally touch the dancers, a gift he described so vividly I could feel it: small hand on a big thigh, half your palm on stocking and half on skin, your middle finger ticking along the border like a metronome, not being able to decide which version of leg you liked better.

When he drank, Rocky would speak fondly of the women he met then. Sometimes he made it sound as though he'd slept with plenty; sometimes he claimed his cheeks had permanent slap-burn, so clumsy and sudden were his advances. A childhood in a burlesque house! I was skeptical.

“Safest place in the world for me,” he said when he was outlining his show-biz life the day after we met.

“But you were
eleven
,” I said. “Didn't your parents go looking for you?”

He shook his head as though my foolishness in thinking so was sweet. “There was dancing there,” he explained. “My parents never went anywhere there might be dancing. You think they'd been brought up on an island where the locals performed human sacrifice in tap shoes. As a kid, I was punished if I even walked too enthusiastically. No. I left. My folks let me go.”

“And that was the end of it?”

“Oh, we write,” he said, “but they are sorely disappointed in their only offspring.”

“What did they want you to be?”

“A disappointment,” he said. “They'd
planned
on that. They just figured I'd be a disappointment in a field they understood. That way they could have written a monograph on the subject. My mother was a sociologist. She'd studied me all her life, and she never saw
that
coming, her kid becoming a burlesque comic. I refuted all her research.”

There are books that talk about Rocky, but they're filled with the stories he liked to tell just to hear them. How he boxed as a kid. (He told me himself this wasn't true. “I like to scare reporters,” he said, “except girl reporters, but they never send me girl reporters.”) How he'd briefly been a cook in the navy, a story I believed until we filmed
Gobs Away!
and he proved himself to be completely ignorant of anything shipside; the writers incorporated some of his more boneheaded misunderstandings into the script: “The waddyacallit, top floor, penthouse,
deck
.” He had a tattoo he said was from his service days, a so-called anchor that looked more like a fishhook. I don't know where he really got it.

When I first met him, I loved his lies. Mental exercise, I thought, warming up for the stage: he'd lie to see how far he could get. He'd tell a pretty girl he'd gone to the Cordon Bleu, and then inform her how you got the butter on the inside of chicken Kiev—you took a live chicken, see, and fed it cream, and then you picked up the chicken and shook and shook. . . . He liked best the moment some tender soul frowned and said, “That's not true. Is it?” Oh yes, of course, completely true. He could cite facts for hours by making them up on the spot, but he knew some things for sure. He could read both Latin and Italian: I saw him do it. I might have thought he was snowing me (I read English, that's all) until we made a European tour in the forties. In London, he translated the Latin off the tombs in Saint Paul's with such passion and cleverness that even the tour guides shut up and sidled over. During our week in Barcelona, he caught Spanish like some tourists catch colds. He was talking up shopgirls and bawling out cabdrivers by the end of the week. From the look on their faces, he must have been saying
something
.

In Paris—where he spoke a burbling fast-paced French—I asked him: where did he learn his languages? He shrugged, and slapped me on the back, and said, “Didn't I ever tell you I was a child prodigy?”

We were in a basement jazz club that looked like a catacomb, and sat at a bar tended by a thin man who looked like a corpse taking advantage of the short commute. Rocky was ordering various drinks for us, happy I had no idea what was in them. The guy put a pink concoction in front of me. “Drink up,” said Rock.

“What is it?”

He menaced my drink with a lit match. “Le Sterneau.”

“No, really,” I said. The drink tasted of peaches and peppers. “Like, French. When did you have time to learn French?”

“Would I lie to you?” he asked. “I was a failed child prodigy.” Which led to this version of his childhood:

“I'm still not sure my parents know where babies come from—they'd married late, they'd been clumsy about romance all their lives—runs in the family, Professor—and I doubt they believed that the outcome of sex would be for them what it was for other people. They probably thought babies came from flirting, and they never flirted. So there I am, a baby, completely bored by childhood, and so's my old man bored, and he figures, Ah! something in common. Why not make himself a child prodigy? It was all the rage among his colleagues. Now you know, Professor, that real-life professors make the best straight men: they just can't see that cream pie coming. So my father the straight man says to me, the comic baby,
Look here. You will learn Latin
, and he drills me through noun declensions. I declined until I was old enough to decline, if you know what I mean. When I turned five, my father gave up. ‘Bright kid,' the neighbors told him. Ha! He'd taught me so much in my first five years it took me until I was eleven to forget it all. Every day I forgot a little until I was stupid enough to make my way in the world.”

“You remember the languages,” I said.

“That's about it,” he said. “I'd give them up if I could.” He gestured silently to our ghoulish barkeep. Apparently he could do even that in French, because two poison green drinks arrived. Then Rock laughed. “I learned one other thing, one very useful thing that I call upon often in my comedy career. How to take a punch.”

Now I ask you, is this true? A child prodigy? But he could speak those languages, and he could take a punch.
Hit me harder
, he told me during our earliest years onstage.
I can't
, I said, and he said,
Learn. Don't you want it to be funny? Learn, kiddo
.

You're Not Dancing

I believed, as I said, that vaudeville was Hattie's clever invention, my birthday gift. She explained to me the hundreds of theaters across the country, the thousands of performers inside, and the trains that brought them to the theaters. Every Saturday we went to the matinee, then we came home to practice. Our sister Rose sat on the back stairs or on the grass, and watched. (Our little audience: we tolerated her presence, because she regularly gave us standing ovations.) Hattie could do anything: backflips and backbends and one-handed cartwheels. She could hold still as a mannequin until I begged her to move, to blink her glassy unfamiliar eyes. We were vaudeville stars, and then movie stars, and then movie stars touring vaudeville houses. I always pretended to be a particular person—Harold Lloyd, for instance—but Hattie played Hattie, except famous. She despised Harold Lloyd; she hated everything in a thrilling way, except Buster Keaton. Rose had a crush on Charley Chase, which made Hattie crazy. “Charley Chase isn't even funny,” said Hattie, and six-year-old Rose swoonily said, “But he's handsome.”

“A comedian doesn't need to be handsome,” said Hattie. “It's better if he's not.”

(Years later I'd argue with Rocky over who was funny and who wasn't. He loved Charley Chase, as it happened, though he loved anyone who came to a bad end, and Charley Chase had drunk himself to death. His doctor told him he'd die if he didn't lay off the stuff, and Chase declared he'd rather be dead than sober, and soon enough while on a bender he got his wish.)

So we threw each other around the backyard, and slunk through the alleys of downtown Valley Junction looking up to the windows of pool halls so we could hear accents to imitate. We hooked our knees over tree branches to see how long we could bear our own blood beating away in our faces, the bark biting at the backs of our knees. Hattie's idea: she was crazy for tests of stamina. She could last longer, always. All my life I have partnered up with people funnier than me, smarter, better. Hattie was only the first.
What's the secret of your success?
Live off the glory of others. They won't mind as long as you admire them.