Days off, I called my sisters in Des Moines and got the news. Annie had planted a Victory garden; Abe and Sadie were hoping that their clothing store had been rationed enough pairs of leather shoes (Abe thought plastic disastrous for growing feet); everyone argued about how much to tell the children. My father, said Annie, refused to talk about the war at all, though whether this was old age or old sorrow, she didn’t know. The WACs were headquartered at Fort Des Moines, and marched down Grand Avenue downtown, dozens of women in heavy shoes, and while some of them might have been beautiful in other circumstances, as they passed by the Savery Hotel, they looked like what they were: soldiers who happened to wear skirts. (Even so, Des Moines became a fabled place on U.S. Army bases: all those single women! Soldiers wanted to transfer to Fort Des Moines, meet a nice WAC, and get her drunk at Babe’s. Des Moines, City of Romance!)
Rocky and I didn’t save tin foil or plant gardens, but we joined the war effort. We went on bond drives, first locally, and then cross-country. A city had to promise a million-dollar subscription to get us to stop and perform. Eighty cities came up with the cash, and we hit them all in thirty days. Vaudeville at high speed: we’d dash from the airport to the high school auditorium, do “Why Don’t You Sleep?” or some other bit, heckle the audience into buying bonds, and dash back to the airport. Starlets could bribe with kisses; we made our pitch into a giant gamble, me choosing one half the room, Rocky the other. “You gonna let that side of the room beat you?” Rocky would say. “Come on!” We set records that way.
Now when people talked about The Boys, they didn’t mean us. The Boys were who we drummed up money for. The Boys were who we entertained at army bases and navy camps, who’d laugh at any groaning joke about KP or WACs or WAVEs. We were happy to do our part, though in this we were no better than Bugs Bunny, another bond salesman.
You could argue that I did plenty of good making upbeat films in which I impersonated a serviceman — think of the young men who would realize, while watching, Sure, I’m scared, but who’s as bad as that guy? Sometimes I had my doubts: Annie wrote of the kids in Valley Junction who’d joined up, and I sensed some rebuke in her letters. Finally, at a bond drive on the Santa Monica boardwalk, I was climbing the stairs onto a bandstand when I heard a woman’s voice at my ankles.
She said, unmistakably, “Slacker!”
Then it was a filthy name: a slacker was a coward, a man willing to sacrifice other men’s lives for his own comfort. Ahead of me, Rocky was already skipping around the stage, waiting for me to stroll on and tell him to hold still. But I was on the stairs, looking for the owner of the voice. There she was. Her hair was an artificial russety orange-blond — judging by her eyebrows, it had once been black-brown — and her small round blue hat was sliding into one dark, belligerent eye. Her lipstick made her mouth look extra puckered.
“Tell me, you,” she said, “why do you let boys better than you fight? And die? What’s wrong with you, you don’t enlist? You—”
Already I’d started to bend down to take her white-gloved hand, to explain myself. All my life, my only defense — against angry women, or anyone — had been my charm. But charm was not patriotic, and maybe this woman believed that in order to save my own life I’d used my Hollywood savoir faire and slipped free of the draft. She stuck her own hands behind her back so I couldn’t touch her.
“My son died,” she said, “to save the likes of you.” I didn’t know whether she meant fancy movie stars or Jews, though either way I was afraid she was about to spit at me. Except to spit she’d have to break her gaze, and that she’d never do.
“My son died,” she said again, and I thought sadly, but didn’t say, Dear lady, lots of people have died. Let’s you and I sit and talk and discuss all of them—
“Sister,” said an old bald man standing next to her, “he’s one of the good guys.” That didn’t help, of course: her problem was she was surrounded by chumps who had the good luck to be alive, while the one person who deserved to be was dead. All I could do was shrug, stand back up, and join Rocky—4F because of his weight — at the microphone.
I couldn’t shake her, though. Even the misguided dye job seemed brave to me: I imagined her with the peroxide bottle, weeping for her son and washing the color from her hair. My sisters would have clucked at all that artifice, the losing battle to stay young and glamorous, but I was with that lady: when someone dies, it only makes sense to do desperate things to stop the clock and then wrestle it into the other direction. And besides, I believed her: here I was, well paid, useless, a slacker.
Rocky poked me in the ribs. “Wake up!” he said. “We’re fighting for our country here!” and the crowd cheered.
All through that appearance, all the way home, all that night: I argued with myself. Don’t be stupid, I said, and then, That’s like saying, Don’t be brave. You’re not a slacker, you’re a morale booster. You’re not a morale booster, you’re a coward. You could be killed. Rocky would kill you — imagine quitting the business when things are going so well!
By six in the morning, I couldn’t stand myself. All I wanted was a uniform that didn’t come out of the wardrobe department, that didn’t say, on its stitched name tag, Buzz or Flash or Percival or any of my foolish movie names. M. Sharp. Private. That’d be fine. I went to the local draft board on Cuyoga Boulevard and stood in line with all the other young men who’d been up talking to themselves or their loved ones and had jumped to the same conclusion. I didn’t get far.
“Let me get this straight,” the doctor said. He sat on a rolling stool in front of my chair and took my forearms and lifted my wrists so I could get a good look. “You think you can be a soldier with these?” He coughed a little, and tried to cover his mouth with his elbow. “You’d keep dropping things. All the jobs we have are for guys who don’t drop things.”
Ah. My wrists. They’d ached for fifteen years, ever since Hattie’s fall not-quite-into my arms. I’m still not sure whether the Valley Junction doctor had botched setting them. Watch me smoke a cigarette in a movie, and you’ll see: I lift my whole arm to my mouth, my elbow up and my cigarette dangling. I’m not trying to be debonair, I just don’t bend like other smokers.
I explained to the doctor that my wrists were oddly strong, locked as they were: didn’t I hold up Rocky pretty well? The doctor laughed. He bounced my sore wrists on his knees. “Make more funny movies,” he said. “That’s your part.”
In our pictures, when the Professor got drafted, he’d pull any kind of lamebrain stunt at his inspection to get out of it: he sat on a radiator in hopes of sweating off enough pounds to be underweight; he applied an iron to flatten the soles of his feet. The movie doctor would give him the bad news: “4-A! Next!” But this doctor knew he was giving me bad news by denying me. He looked over the top of his thick glasses, and I thought: lousy eyes, 4F, as though there were some comfort in stamping him defective too. But he was in a hurry: there were plenty of guys waiting to see him and a newsreel crew outside, because some matinee idol — not me — was supposed to enlist later. “Good of you to come,” the doctor said.
I thought, without gratitude, Maybe Hattie has saved my life.
When the Carter and Sharp radio show went on the air (Tuesday nights at seven, shipped overseas via Armed Forces Radio), Penny wanted a part. Fred Allen had hired his wife, why not Rocky?