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.
We did not tell our father of our true ambitions. Let him think we wanted what he wanted for us: good grades at school, the admiration of the neighbors, marriage, children. Hattie would find a nice husband. I would find a nice wife. Eventually I would become Sharp, of Sharp and Son’s, and my own son would assume my old role, and so it would pass on for centuries.
By the time I was eleven I was sent to the front of the store after school one afternoon a week to apprentice with Ed Dubuque, my father’s right-hand man. Ed insisted that his name was real, that his father had been French-Canadian, but there was a rumor around town that he’d been brought up a ward of the state, in an orphanage that named its charges after the duller-sounding Iowa towns—Davenport, Bettendorf, Solon—names that made the orphans sound like solid citizens or gamblers. (Oh, to be named Oskaloosa, or What Cheer, or Cedar Falls!) Poor Ed Dubuque did seem orphanish, abandoned and busy, and he looked like a puppet: weak chinned, spindle nosed, with blond hair that stood upright. He even moved like a marionette, as though his center of gravity was somewhere around his shoulders: his hands floated down to pat children on the head, and when he was startled—several times a day—he jumped straight in the air, knees bent. At slow times he stood behind the counter, his head swaying. I loved him. “Master Sharp,” he always called me. I couldn’t tell whether he was kidding or not.
“Watch Ed,” my father directed, and I did. I could have watched Ed Dubuque for hours. He was a careful, sweet guy who knew all the customers by name, including, it seemed, those he’d never met before. Maybe he’d memorized the census. Sometimes, when he asked a man for his pant size, the customer would look suddenly abashed, as though Ed had asked his grandmother’s maiden name: he didn’t know, God help him; if only he’d paid better attention. And Ed would shake his head deferentially—No, of course, too much in this life to keep track of—and get his tape measure. He gently encircled a customer’s waist and then offered a pair of pants; he knelt at a customer’s feet to pin the cuffs, his face turned up. How’s this?
And so I let both Hattie and Pop plan my future: the wood floor of a stage, the wood floor of Sharp’s Gents’. Upon one set of boards or another, I was destined to tap out my days.
100 MPH
When I was twelve, I came down with a sore throat and slight fever, and Annie promptly sent me to my room, where she bundled me up in bed. She blamed the store, which, in catering to railroad men, invited sicknesses from as far away as Philadelphia. To Annie’s mind, a hangnail was as bad as malaria. The diseases that had killed our invisible and unspoken-of dead siblings, after all, had started as coughs so slight they could have been mistaken for sighs, and so she prescribed bed rest and quarantine for everything, believing that germs couldn’t possibly muscle their way through a bedroom door. On this day, she tucked the quilt beneath my mattress so tightly I might as well have been tied at the stake. Then she went to Sharp’s Gents’ for her bookkeeping duties.
I couldn’t pull my arms out from under the covers to read, which I wasn’t allowed to do anyhow: according to Annie, even the funny pages were too heavy for an invalid to lift. That left sleeping and thinking. I tried to combine the two by hypnotizing myself with strange vivid thoughts (here I am floating down the Raccoon River in a giant felt hat; here I am like my Biblical namesake, being lifted from the river by a princess) in the hopes that I could influence my dreams. That sometimes worked when I had a fever.
I dreamt I was in bed; I dreamt I couldn’t move; then all of a sudden I was in bed, I couldn’t move, and I looked at the window and saw a face. Slowly it resolved into Hattie, who pushed up the sash and stepped into the room.
“Shhh.” She was always shushing me.
I tried to sit up while Hattie closed the window. Finally I had to box my way out of my cocoon. “Were you outside?” I said stupidly. “Did you climb the tree to get up here?”
She was wearing a green and pink silk dress that looked like part of one of my fever dreams. The belt around her hips had come undone, and she tied it. “I went out my window. How do you feel?”
“Why did you go out the window?” I asked. The bedroom she shared with Rose was all the way over on the other side of the house.
She sat on the bed, near my feet. Annie would have been furious: Hattie might as well have guzzled a glass of my spit. I slept in an iron sleigh bed, a terrible piece of furniture that under normal circumstances discouraged loitering: you’d need dozens of pillows to make leaning on the curved headboard tolerable. The footboard was just as bad. Hattie lay the wrong way around and set her feet on my pillow. “I was up on the roof,” she said. “You can se
e everything from up there.”
A vague petty feeling sunk into my neck, and at the moment I believed it was jealousy: behind my back, while I was at the store, Hattie was working on some act I’d never be a part of. Rooftop walking. I was terrified of heights. I lay down so I couldn’t see her face. All these years later, I picture myself—yanking the pillow out from under her feet and throwing it into her face at the end of the bed—and I think maybe I had a premonition, though of what I’m not sure. Maybe that’s all jealousy is, the ability to look into someone’s future or past and see your own absence.
“You’ll get caught,” I told her.
She slipped the thrown pillow under her head. She didn’t have to warn me not to tell anyone; she knew I never would. “Next time you can come with me.”
That won me over, though we both knew I got nervous standing on a chair. “Aren’t you scared?” I asked. I stretched one leg out so I could stick my foot in her armpit.
“Stop that,” she said idly, but allowed it. “If I stood up, I might be scared. Mostly I just sit.”