“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.