This one comes with a trigger warning, because the story gets pretty dark. In fact it approaches maximum darkness. I’ve occasionally gone there in my writing, though not so often on this blog per se (since most readers seem to resent being served anything that actually matters), so a topic like this may take you by surprise. On the other hand, by now I’ve unavoidably written about over 100 suicides, since some show biz stories do end that way. And I have occasionally gotten philosophical about the topic, especially in posts about people like Brody Stevens and Anthony Bourdain whose untimely and deliberate exits have struck close to home. I’ve explored this and darker topics and will do it again, because I have it in me, and because all stories have to be told. So just be warned.
Anyway, the story of Charles Rocket (Charles Claverie, 1949-2005) does strike close to home. Though I never met him, he was definitely but one degree of separation distant. As I wrote here, he got his start as a performer in Providence (my home city, though not my home town). He performed in Providence clubs, and for a time was even a local newscaster. And he ended his life in Canterbury, Connecticut, fewer than 20 miles from the house where my mother grew up, in the same community where her ancestors lived for centuries. I only insert these details to explain why it felt important to me to get to the bottom of his story. When there’s a hometown angle it always feels more personal. Also, I was about fifteen years old during his all-too-brief peak, and witnessed the moment of his downfall in real time. He’s not just a footnote to me, as he is no doubt to many people, but a hometown hero.
And there’s not much beyond bare facts to be found in the mainstream media. Lack of information always makes me a bit crazy, which is why, when it has become necessary, I’ve actually done the legwork to dig up the facts of a few dozen people whose stories hadn’t previously been gathered up into one single place. Fortunately for us all, this lady in the U.K. did all the legwork there was to be done on the story of Charles Rocket, at least without performing interviews herself. If it’s of interest, I encourage you to look at her article and the comments thereto after reading this post — with the caveat that the woman’s take on it badly needs editing. It’s repetitive, discursive, and entirely too fanciful. Liberties are taken regarding private moments no one could possibly know anything about, and there’s too much speculation in general. But that said, lots of facts are gathered, and they do illuminate the story. My own post will just boil it down to the basics.
First, I’m going to observe that Rocket’s given surname Claverie is French. Since he grew up in New England, my cautious guess is that he’s of the same French Canadian stock I wrote about here. Born in Bangor, Maine, he grew up one of eight siblings living on a New Hampshire farm. The photo above, from the local historical society, may be the house. Right surname, right time frame. Appearances notwithstanding, apparently it was not an idyllic childhood. The Claverie children were ruled by cruel and abusive parents. There were beatings and starvings, psychological head games, and one notable occasion when the father took the three oldest boys (then aged 6-8) out to the woodpile at night and threatened to chop off their thumbs with an axe if they sucked them. That sort of stuff. But Rocket was good looking, smart, and talented. He was able to get out.
He studied art at RISD and got involved in the nutty performance scene in Providence in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He married his gorgeous college girlfriend; they remained linked until the end of his life. He fronted a band called The Fabulous Motels, in which he played the accordion. (Don’t bother googling that band as I just tried to do, though, not unless you’re looking for for “great deals” on travel accommodations). Anyway, Rocket was not only given to stunts and pranks and what we now call “performance art” but also put in his time as a local newscaster, both as an anchorman, and as a roving reporter, not just in Providence, but also in Nashville and Pueblo, Colorado.
This combined skill set somehow made him perfect for the first cast to replace the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players on Saturday Night Live in 1980. I’m not being facetious, I think he did have all the tools it took. He was the obvious stand-out star in a cast that also included Gilbert Gottfried, Joe Piscopo, Denny Dillon, and others. The producers were obviously looking to steer clear of the Second City/ Groundlings improv factories on this go-round in an effort to freshen up the show. In retrospect I don’t think the cast was bad. But the sketches, for the most part, stank. It was the notorious Season Six of the show, which I wrote about here. Rocket came off better than most of the others, both because his handsome smarminess was a throwback to Chevy Chase (who’d left the show in 1976), and because as anchor of “Weekend Update” and the star of his own stand-alone filmed bits called “The Rocket Report”, he was a bit aloof from most of the dreck they were churning out of the writers room.
A few of the “Rocket Reports” are up on youtube, and the comedian comes off great. He makes perfect mocking use of the skill he’d developed as a TV reporter, the ability to keep talking even when there’s nothing at all going on, just padding and gabbing as though there actually WERE something going on. It was genuine satire in the vein of the original SNL and other comedians of the day, like Martin Mull. All things remaining the same, he was golden.
And then in one split second, it was gone. It came at the end of the February 21, 1981 episode, and referred back to a sketch they had just done that spoofed the “Who Shot J.R.?” plot thread on the nighttime drama Dallas. He ad libbed a line, just before the start of the closing theme music, and, clearly cocky and in a good mood, he let slip an F bomb. I don’t know if he’d gotten used to being able to cut out such stuff from his “Rocket Reports”, or if he forgot he was live, or if he was high, or if he thought he should push the envelope in the name of getting some attention, but the fact is he ventured too far out onto thin ice, and fell through. As it happened, I was watching that show with my sister and a bunch of her friends, and we were definitely all about “Did he just say that?” So it did have an impact, it was noticed. And (I hope it goes without saying) back then, “fuck” was one considered one of the worst of the many words you were not allowed to say on network television. So there was a stupid uproar and Rocket, and several staff members were all fired. To my mind, these measures were beyond excessive. Ya know? The Sex Pistols had set a precedent by crossing the same line back on British television in 1976 and it got them a #1 single. And Paul Shaffer had accidentally uttered the word on SNL during the previous season, without being canned. Rocket deserved a reprimand. Maybe even a couple of weeks of unpaid leave. But, nope, he was fired. I think he was basically made a scapegoat for all the bad press the show was getting for what remains SNL‘s worst season ever. Ironically, he had been one of the best things about the show’s worst season, and with his transgression, dared to do the one thing anyone remembers about it.
In the immediate aftermath, Rocket’s New Wave musician friends boosted his spirits by including him in their projects. His old RISD cohort David Byrne hired him to play accordion on the B-52’s Mesopotamia album, which he produced. Chris Stein of Blondie had him as a regular on his public access show TV Party.
Gradually, Rocket began to dig himself out of pariah status. In the mid-80s he had recurring roles on Moonlighting and Max Headroom. He’s in the very hip New Wave musical comedy Earth Girls Are Easy (1988). In movies, his best stretch started just about a decade after leaving SNL: you can see him in supporting roles in Dances with Wolves (1990), Hocus Pocus (1993), Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), It’s Pat (1994) with SNL‘s Julia Sweeney, Wagons East (1994), and Dumb and Dumber (1994) by fellow Rhode Island natives the Farrelly Brothers.
Still, it must have been somewhat galling. Rocket had been on track to follow in the footsteps of Chevy Chase and Bill Murray as the star of such films. Now he was most often cast as jerky comic foils, more in the vein of Mark Metcalf, the guy who played Neidermeyer in Animal House. Gradually, the movies got worse. He began to work in guest shots in television. Initially there were recurring roles in shows like Touched by an Angel and The Home Court (a sitcom starring Pamela Reed). Most promisingly, in 2000 he was cast as a regular on the sitcom Normal, Ohio starring John Goodman, Anita Gillette (of Me and the Chimp and Quincy), Joely Fisher (Carrie’s half-sister), Mo Gaffney, and Orson Bean. It was created by Bonnie and Terry Turner of 3rd Rock from the Sun and That ’70s Show. Goodman played a gay man who returned to his hometown, the name of which conjures a kind of mash-up of Winesburg, Ohio and The Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone”. One season was shot, but only seven episode aired. I guess the Fox audience wasn’t ready for it!
Rocket’s last screen credit was a 2004 episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent. See photo above in which Vincent D’Onofrio’s detective Goren performs one of his famous head games on him, the titular “Pas de Deux”. Which sounds pretty great, but the reality is Rocket had basically become anonymous by this point. A lot of people who play those guest starring roles are actors whose names no one will ever know, because they had never “made it”. Rocket had made it. He was literally at the big show. And it had slipped away.
Now, as a vaudeville aficionado, one thing has always bugged me. The guy had an ACT. He had been a comedy musician, and he had famous friends. Why not play clubs, cut albums, go for bookings on the late night TV circuit, and so forth? Was it too much of a risk? At the same time, by all accounts, many of Rocket’s dramatic performances on these TV shows were very good, in an intense, edgy way. I’ve only seen a couple of these, so I can’t judge entirely. But it seems like he was drawn to being a serious actor and had committed himself to trying to attain some success there. But when it’s down to Law and Order...as much as I would LOVE to be on Law and Order, it’s also true that dozens of my friends have been on that show. It’s not like the whole country is going, “Did you see the guy who played a murder suspect on Law and Order last night?!” It’s a respectable credit, but it doesn’t get you on the cover of magazines.
By his last few months, Rocket and his wife had acquired an old Colonial farmhouse on a 13 acre tract of land in rural Connecticut, and were restoring it. If you’re interested, this listing has lots of photos of the interior and exterior of the house. Unsurprisingly, it makes no mention of the tragedy.
The source I cite speculates that Rocket’s recent roles and his return to New England stirred up old memories of his unhappy childhood (and his happy early career), and made him melancholy during his last months. That’s entirely possible, even logical, maybe even likely, but it is projection at best to make that conjecture. There was also stress. His work was down to mostly cartoon voice-overs, and he was neck deep in the expense and worry of renovating this old house. And then there was the state of his career. 56 year old Charles Rocket had not been on his way up in nearly a quarter of a century. And rockets are meant to go up.
Whatever the reason, one night in October 2005, Charles Rocket walked out to a tent he kept pitched on his property…and slit his own throat. That gruesome methodology is the kind of thing that sparks chatter. Almost no one does it that way. It clearly takes some combination of courage, despair, and/or total detachment from reality to go there, and he clearly did, for homicide was ruled out. The tool he used to do it was from his work bench, and the angle and arrangement of the body clearly indicated self-harm. Horrible.
Worst of all, to my mind, is that no one particularly noticed. This happened nearly 20 years ago, and I’m not sure that I learned about it until pretty recently. You know, like “I wonder what Charles Rocket is up to?” and you look it up, and that’s the story. Even the bizarre nature of the death didn’t capture much attention. There was a lot going on then. The war in Iraq was raging, The Gulf Coast was recovering from Hurricane Karina. By then, the name Charles Rocket had become the answer to a trivia question. Mentioning the name would provoke snickers in memory of a stunt he had pulled one time that lasted all of two seconds, and this is among the few who remembered him at all. His obits all mentioned that one event as if it were his chief accomplishment in life. That must have tortured Rocket wherever he went, whenever he met someone. It must have been like a sore that wouldn’t go away. Then he pulled his second stunt, just as brief in the execution as the first, and even more devastating in its consequences.
Would the second stunt have happened if not for the first? It was such a tiny thing. Another sort of character might have dined out on it with pride. He hadn’t really done anything wrong. And yet every second of our lives is a dimensional crossroads. Every second matters. It’s maybe best not to dwell on the infinite directions you didn’t take.