“An audience,” said Jessica, dryly.
So what if the baby was not in a hurry to be a kid, a toddler, a refuser of fatherly advice? Maybe she just enjoyed the condition of infancy. In my own childhood home we’d always known that there were good babies and bad babies. There wasn’t any pattern: good babies could grow up to be miserable people, and bad babies saints. My father always said that Fannie, the mildest and quietest of my sisters, had been such a squalling vomiting bundle that sometimes he threatened to take her to the store and put her in the case that held smaller accessories, white handkerchiefs for businessmen, bandanas for the railroad men. “I could have gotten a good price for her,” my father said, and Fannie smiled, and apologized for her earlier behavior.
Just as I’d planned, Betty was my favorite and I was hers. The boys preferred their mother, and who could blame them? The baby stuck to me. She gave her mother what I called the House Detective Glare, a kind of polite suspicion. Jessica probably wasn’t stealing the towels, but she bore watching. I sat on the sofa, and the baby backed up between my knees and slung her arms across my thighs, watching her mother stretching on the floor.
“Where did you come from, my little blondie?” I asked her. It seemed impossible that Jess and I could have produced such a creature.
“She’ll darken,” said Jess. “I was blond as a child.”
“What?” That seemed even more impossible.
“Sure. My hair didn’t turn this dark till I was a teenager.”
“A former blonde,” I said musingly. “No kidding. All the women I know are former brunettes.” Already I felt sad that Betty might become like the rest of us. I loved her this way, different, my changeling, my little bubblehead. Don’t darken, I thought, and of course later I could hear my sister Annie whispering in my ear, See? See? Things you wish for will be granted, in the worst possible way. Wishes are fatal.
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.