Because he’d never do anything that Fred Allen did.
Okay, then, like Jack Benny.
No, said Rocky.
I don’t know why he was so adamant, though it was true that Penny wouldn’t have been right: our sponsors, the manufacturers of Cape’s Turkish soap, wanted the show bubble light and cheerful, and Penny torch-sang everything, even “Keep Your Sunny Side Up.” Compared to Penny, Marlene Dietrich was Helen Kane.
Rocky adored radio, where you could stand with your script and the audience could recognize and love even the plainest ad-lib. My mike fright was a little better than it had been on the Vallee show. Mostly, I worried about getting the giggles, then I discovered that the audience loved it when I got the giggles. They thought that was hysterical. The only time I became incapacitated was the night our soundman showed up drunk — his wife had just left him — and for every single sound effect clattered the hoof-beat coconuts. A visitor knocks: clippety-clop. Rocky walks to the door: clippety-clop. We’re riding around in the car, and I tell him to hit the horn; Rocky extracts a kiss from the vocalist; I fall down the stairs: here comes the cavalry, every single time. I could hardly breathe after the first ten minutes, and maybe we should have sent the guy home, but it was so funny.
“Hey, Rocky,” I said, “you sound a little horse.”
“Must you always be such a naysayer?” he answered.
The radio show allowed Rocky to finally kidnap my sisters. He did it behind my back. He convinced the writers that he should be the only boy from a large family.
“Six beautiful sisters!” he said to me, breaking the news, but who was he fooling? Beautiful sisters wouldn’t be funny.
“Why can’t I keep my own sisters?”
“Because,” said Rocky, “you’re the straight man. Six sisters is a punch line, not a setup.” They even named Rocky’s fictional sisters after mine, though they changed Hattie to Betty after I insisted. Maybe I should have also insisted on changing the other names, but we did need the gags — if you came up with enough running jokes, your audience felt in cahoots with you, and they’d keep tuning in.
Rocky’s sisters loved him. They knit him six-armed sweaters. They baked him sugarless, eggless, butterless, tasteless Victory cookies that, when you bit into them, made a sound like a struck gong. Soon enough, they were as famous as he was: they got fan mail. Reporters wrote articles about them. They assumed the sisters were real. Why would someone make up siblings, just for a laugh? On the other hand, who really had six sisters? I was, radio-wise, a guy without a family. Rocky was the guy with too much, including a protective mother who hated me. “Listen, Mr. So-called Sharp,” she’d say to me, “you leave Lovey alone.” (Both halves of that sentence became catchphrases.) The fictional Mrs. Carter loved her son so much that she got in fistfights (the soundman hit the pages of an open dictionary with a damp glove) with everyone: me; Bill Thomas, our announcer; Loretta Patchett, the vocalist; and a slew of guest stars, including Lana Turner, Jack Benny, Don Ameche, and Joe Louis.
Do you have to ask who won?
I felt like I was cheating on my real sisters with another pack of girls. Their letters didn’t mention their radio counterparts. They said, simply, that they’d listened to the show, and that I was very funny. Would Pop listen, I wondered. Then I thought: Annie makes him, because one of the sisters is named Rose, that forbidden name suddenly spoken in the house again. And then, as it happened, Rose’s ill-fated marriage to the Roman Catholic met its ill fate; Quigley-less, she’d come back to Vee Jay. If you wanted to cast a spell over Rose, of course you used the radio: her name was said aloud in the parlor, and like any ghost, she was summoned back. She sent me a letter: you can write to me here, now. Picture me in the parlor, listening to you. My father forgave her, because he’d been proved right.
“Rocky!” people yelled on the street. “How are your sisters?”
“Unmarried!” he yelled back. “What are you looking for? We got ’em in all sizes.”
Undraftable and overpaid as I was, my own war was pretty glamorous, despite myself. In 1942, the year I turned thirty-one, I had money in the bank and money in my pockets. I volunteered at the Hollywood Canteen. I dated starlets and would-be starlets. Every Tuesday night at seven, people tuned in to hear my mockable, quavering voice say, “What will we do with you, Rocky, what will we do?” And in Lithuania, forty thousand Jews in the town of Vilna were killed, some shot in their homes and some taken into the Ponary Forest and exterminated there, but they were all killed, including those related to a man who had once been called Jakov Shmuel Sharensky.
I didn’t know that then. As I said, in my line of work, we did not discuss killing, only rescues.
Everyone Dances Underwater
There were days when I came home, and, having spent hours going Yipes! Duck in this alleyway; here comes the sarge! could not shake it. I went Yipes through the door, Yipes to the kitchen, Yipes into bed under the covers, my shoulders up around my ears and my arms fluttering like the flightless bird I was.
So to soothe my nerves, I bought things, including — at Rocky’s urging — a house. (On our radio show, we joked about the housing shortage. We just never suffered from it.) The lady agent showed me a five-year-old white stucco house in North Hollywood, with a flat-topped Spanish-style roof that seemed impractical; I told her so: what about snow? Would you have to shovel it off so it wouldn’t cave in your ceilings?
She looked at me. She looked at the sky. She looked at the palm trees that lined the street.
Yes, that’s right: California. I laughed and pulled out my checkbook. You could stroll across that roof like a park if you wanted. Safe. Anyone who wanted to hurt herself here would have to jump, I thought.
I hadn’t given much thought to the house itself, which God knows was more room than I needed, but I was like someone who’d starved as a kid: all I wanted was space. I’d grown up in a house crowded with people; I’d roomed in broom closets all my years on the road. Sometimes, in vaude houses, dazzled by the space and high ceilings, I’d daydream about moving onto the stage, or even into one of the boxes that overlooked it — maybe I’d install a Murphy bed to pull down from the wall, an invention I’d only seen in movies, where they behaved like dragons accustomed to a steady diet of sleepers. My new place — not quite a mansion, but pretty close — had six bedrooms, and five bathrooms, and a whole variety of rooms in which to live and dine and recreate and play games, and all for me. Dimly I thought, Well, kid, if you ever marry you can fill the place up; mostly I judged it a hell of a spot for assignations.
There had been nothing in my childhood home newer than the nineteenth century except some of the people: I wanted a place where everything was new and modish and luminous. That was how I decorated: mirrors everywhere, setting like suns and rising like moons; slim tables with blue glass tops. A martini cart trembling with glasses.
Rocky and Penny bought a bona-fide Beverly Hills mansion that had belonged to a suicided silent movie director. The place was as fountainous as Rome: in every corner on the grounds, there was something or someone cast in concrete and spitting. They had two swimming pools and a tennis court and a guesthouse and bathrooms for days and days. Their greatest regret was that because of the manpower shortage, they couldn’t build on more bathrooms. Happily, the place came with a movie theater already, and they added a popcorn machine and moved in a soda fountain by the main swimming pool. Rocky, fondly remembering that cellar in Milwaukee, put in a bar in the basement and hired, before any other household help, a bartender, a wonderful old Portuguese guy named Bobby who wore his hair in a dyed black pageboy and mixed weaker and weaker drinks as the night wore on. Penny wanted a Ferris wheel, though Rocky was putting that off. They threw parties downstairs, and invited everyone — crew guys from our movies, people who Penny had met in stores, soldiers on leave. Rocky vowed that he’d never forget what it was like to be a regular working stiff — though when was he ever? — which to his mind meant laying out as much cash as it took to get the working stiffs dead drunk. Sometimes the parties would start with dinner; mostly, they’d start with drinks and end with breakfast for whoever was left standing. The soda fountain had a giant grill, and we would emerge from the smoky basement and go out to the pool, the sky the color of a dress that Penny wanted. Rocky would scramble dozens and dozens of eggs.