I’d talked him out of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, only to lose him to another body of water. Do you know: I went running farther out, the surf coming up to my hips. I swear I was ready to dive in, to start parting my hands in front of me till I found him (that’s what you did when a child got lost in a cornfield, I remembered), calling his name. Didn’t I have to save him?
Except I couldn’t. I was out to nearly my waist, the waves even higher, before I realized that swimming wasn’t something you’d pick up the first time. The newspaper article would say, one man drowned, and then another man drowned. That, too, was a familiar Iowan story, people who went leaping into flooded rivers, hoping to be heroes but ending up as corpses.
I turned to the shore and yelled Penny’s name, but she was out cold. Then I felt something brush past my ankle.
It was Rocky. He pulled me out of the water like Frankenstein with his bride, my back against the surface of the ocean. My heart had swollen so in my chest it felt rib-striped.
“Kick your legs a little,” he said. “See? You can swim.”
“I wasn’t!” I told him. “I thought you were dead!”
“Me?” He laughed and set me on my feet. He started walking back to Penny. “If there’s one thing you shoulda noticed by now: I’m buoyant. You can’t drown me.”
“No kidding, Rock, I thought you’d drowned yourself.” Then I felt something else run past my ankle, and jumped again. “Something bit me!”
“Nothing bit you. It was probably a dead fish rushing by.”
“I’m getting out of this goddamn ocean,” I said. “Dead fish!”
He was looking at the beach, squinting at the sun. If he’d kept his underclothes on for modesty’s sake, it wasn’t working. His back was to me, his wet undershirt soaked to silk netting. He put his arms up, as if to dry them, and said, “Only their souls ascend to heaven.”
They Also Serve Who Only Dance and Sing
“The studio’s trying to find something to suit your talents,” Tansy told us, and we got antsy. All we knew was we weren’t working, though we did draw a small salary. I started to long for that brass band myself, something to show that Hollywood knew that The Boys had arrived.
Then the draft act passed. Why not draft Carter and Sharp? As it happened, there was an old army script floating around just made for a comedy team, intended for Wheeler and Woolsey, or Olsen and Johnson, or Clark and McCullough, or some other mismatched pair of guys who’d either broken up or died or gotten too old to make credible soldiers. “I got a guy who can spruce it up for you,” Tansy told the studio, and that’s how Neddy became our movie writer too. He punched up the script, took out the references to the Kaiser, stuck in a number in a USO club. A cheap and easy vehicle for its cheap and easy stars.
Red, White, and Who? was a dumb and cheerful army picture, complete with a few patriotic songs belted from the back of a jeep. Some consider it our best movie. The timing, anyhow, made it our luckiest. We played soldiers on leave from camp who accidentally fall asleep on a train and end up in New York City; for the rest of the movie we try to get back to base before our absence is noticed. An old friend of ours from vaude, Johnny Atkinson, appeared as our mean sergeant. He’d been in Hollywood awhile, playing tough guys with hearts of gold. That was Johnny, the kind of guy who smoked a stogie while pruning his rosebushes. He had a flat-nosed gangster’s face and sorrowful blue eyes.
I loved the soundstages, the prop rooms, the cameraman leaning into his camera, the booms, the cars we drove in front of movie screens full of passing scenery. I loved seeing a character who’d last played a cop in a Bette Davis flick playing an army secretary for us. I loved having someone else apply my makeup for me. “Close your eyes,” the makeup girl would say. “Now open. Now close.”
Rocky had been right, all those years before: he had to have an audience to work. We decided to play to the cameramen, the grips, the propmen, the script girl, anyone who happened to be on the soundstage. Frank Brothers, the director, tore out his hair. He needed a silent set, but we needed laughs. So we worked even louder to cover up the laughter, and the folks on the set laughed louder, and we threw our props around — guns to the ground! suitcases on the baggage racks! ourselves onto upper berths! — and together we managed.
The picture was a huge hit. You can’t imagine. We filmed it in the thirty-one days of October 1940; the studio released it in June of ’41; by July, we were famous. Luck. Maybe lack of it too: for the rest of our careers, we had to make movies that resembled this one. Even if we’d stumbled onto something by mistake, that was how we’d do it forever and ever, whether Carter and Sharp got in trouble in the navy or on the moon, in the Wild West or Ancient Egypt. We filmed on the same breakneck schedule, and the budgets only got bigger because our salaries did. A rock on a dude ranch reappeared three years later as a rock on Mars; an Italian nightclub became a New York nightclub with a change of tablecloths. “It’s what your fans want!” the studio said, as though the public would miss a papier-mâché boulder.
Tansy had been clever, or psychic. When we signed with the studio for a pittance, he inserted a clause in our contract that said we’d bring home a percentage of the profits of all our pictures. Nobody’d ever heard of such a thing back then, but the studio shrugged at the oddity — how many tickets could a couple of knockabout comedians sell, anyhow? — and allowed it. Plenty of other guys (the Three Stooges, for instance, no matter which Three Stooges they were at the time) made nearly nothing from their studio deals.
Carter and Sharp, on the other hand, got filthy rich.
Red, White, and Who? was still playing when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Good box office, plus a war: like plenty of guys Rocky and I wore uniforms almost nonstop in the early forties. We just returned them to wardrobe at the end of the day. Gobs Away! Fly Boys, Navy Blues, We’re in the Army, Carter and Sharp on the High Seas (our first title billing!), Wrong Way Rocky: endless, those pictures. We churned ’em out four a year, and I pretty much couldn’t tell one from the other, though as I recall Fly Boys was the best of the lot, and We’re in the Army, essentially a retread of Red, White, and Who?, the worst. None of the movies made reference to a particular war or enemy. The War raged; the Enemy would be defeated. Sometimes nonsense that sounded like Hitler or Tojo squawked out of a radio. Maybe those pictures had distinct plots; all I remember is Carter and Sharp blundering about like fools, while various second leads bounded into heroism. Sometimes Rocky got to act heroic, too, mostly by accident. I hid under a lot of beds in those pictures.
If you judge history by Carter and Sharp movies, it was a pretty glamorous war. All girls had time to style their hair perfectly for their WAC caps; all soldiers were broad shouldered and brave (with two top-billed exceptions, of course). Everyone could dance. For any battle, there were five parties, and no one ever, ever died on-screen. Battle wounds made soldiers stronger. Orphans were adopted. The jeep was invented because it made such a good little stage: it’s hard to do a musical number in a closed car. Once our radio show started, we’d joke about rationing — the Professor might try to get Rocky to invest a pound of hamburger in a surefire meat-loaf deal — but in our movies, we never mentioned a lack of anything.