Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  SEYMOUR GREENSTEIN: Kids from all over Brooklyn would come to our neighborhood just to see this kid Sigmund Blissman. He was a sight to behold, all round and red. And that wild Brillo hair of his, even back then. Kids from Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Flatbush, wherever. One social club from Poseidon Avenue had a contest called Count Ziggy's Freckles. I think he was about ten at the time. They called Ziggy into where the club met and they stripped Ziggy down. They started counting his freckles and Ziggy stood there patiently. As it was dawning on them that they weren't ever going to be able to count them all, Ziggy says, “Wait. You forgot to count these.” And he pulled down his underwear.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: Some of the showgirls in Vegas used to call him “the Hose.” Or maybe it was “the Horse.” His real last name should've been Blessed- man.

  • • •

  CATHERINE RICCI: No girl ever had to worry about whether Vic's mother was going to like her when he brought her home because after a while, Vic never could bring a girl home. Mamma would've gone after her with a chopping knife or her infamous rolling pin.

  If he'd brought home the Virgin Mary, Mom would've complained about her having a bad reputation.

  RAY FONTANA: Vic always had a ton of girls around. All the dates I ever had, I think it was just 'cause they wanted me to introduce them to my good-looking kid brother. I dated this girl Ann McGee maybe two dates. My mother loved her, thought she was terrific. Her family was from Flounder Heights, the ritzy lace-curtain-Irish section. A few months after I took her out, she drops by. I say, “Hey, Annie, where you been?” She brushes right by me and heads toward Vic.

  And then my mother tells me that Ann McGee is the biggest puttana in America. All 'cause she was now with Vic.

  TONY FERRO: He was working half the women in Codport. A lot of these women, Vic was pals with their husbands around town. Guys at the pool hall, at Jiggs's, on the piers. Vic would joke around with them and all but meanwhile he was givin' it to their wives.

  I remember once he told me to pick him up outside of Joe Ravelli's house. Joe was a good guy; he used to sell Italian ices in the summer for extra dough but he'd always give the kids ices for free. He was off fishing and the wife was home. The door opened and I saw Mrs. Ravelli in the doorway, in the shadows, adjusting the belt of her robe, which was green. Vic gave her a nice love slap on the ass—you could hear it twenty yards away. He come outta there with a little smile, he straightened his hair out with a comb, and then he flashed me a crisp new ten-dollar bill.

  ANGELA CROSETTI [friend of Vic Fountain in Codport]: My mom and me would go to Jiggs Cudahy's soda parlor almost every day after school. We'd sit at the counter and Vic would make us an ice-cream soda or a malted. My mother would apply her lipstick and eye shadow for an hour beforehand at her vanity table, till everything was perfect. When she was ready she looked gorgeous. People always compared her to Rita Hayworth.

  She and her friends called Vic il ragazzo con i capelli blu come la notte. The boy with the hair as blue as the night.

  TONY FERRO: The storeroom was between Jiggs's office and the soda fountain. But Vic had set it up so's there was a nice space on the floor in there. He used about a mile of cotton for a mattress. Actually it was Jiggs who set it up. 'Cause there was a hole in the wall that divided Jiggs's office from the storeroom. One afternoon Vic is in there doing his thing—I think it was Angie Crosetti's mom, who was a real hairy cow—and I walk into Jiggs's office and there he is, this fat red Irishman with his cazzo in his hands, peekin' through the hole in the wall.

  “We could charge money for this view, Tony,” Jiggs said to me.

  One day Jiggs's wife is sick, she's got an upset stomach. Jiggs comes over and says to me, “Hey, Tony, can you run these pills over to my wife on your way home?” I tell him, “Flounder Heights ain't on my way home, and besides, I don't deliver the stuff ever. That's Vic's job. Have him do it.” He rubs his chins a couple times and says he'll just bring it over himself when he goes home.

  So I've got an hour left in the day and I notice that Jiggs just isn't concentrating. Then Vic leaves to deliver the pills to Mrs. Cudahy, he takes off his white mesh hat and is on his way. Jiggs waits two minutes and he says, “Okay, Tony. Out! We're closing up!”

  I says, “Huh? It's five o'clock, how are we closing?” And he says, “'Cause we just are!”

  He locks up and puts theCLOSEDsign on the door. I see him start walking up the hill toward Irish Town and he was huffin' and puffin' 'cause even though it was April it was still cold out and the smoke was coming out his mouth.

  That night, Jiggs flipped his lid. He set fire to the drugstore . . . nothing-was standing except the soda fountain and the chrome stools at the counter. Everything else was ashes. And Jiggs sawed his wife's head off in her sleep. How they know it was in her sleep, I don't know—you'd think that would wake her up. That was the end of her and the end of him too.

  • • •

  SALLY KLEIN: One day my mother gets off the phone and she's looking very sad and I ask her why and she says, “It's bad news, Sal. The Battling Blissmans are back in business.”

  There was a hotel in the Poconos called the Baer Lodge. Rosie McCoy was an old-time hoofer who'd married “Big” Sid Baer, who owned the place, and she and her husband opened up a nightclub there called the Den. Rosie was the entertainment director and she contacted all her old friends from when she was a dancer. Singers, actors, all kinds. The Beaumonts, Smith and Schmidt, the contortionist act Twyst and Tern, Lenny Pearl. And, of course, Harry and Flo.

  They moved into our cottage in Delaware for a while and rehearsed their act. I'd see them in the backyard going through their paces. The only time I ever heard anything was when Flo sang. What a belter. The furniture would rattle when she sang, like there was an earthquake.

  Ziggy was not staying with us at the time. You know, it might make us sound cheap but to save money to reupholster and recarpet all the places where Ziggy had “gone,” well, as I said, my father manufactured brassieres and girdles and corsets—he just used lace from the factory. For ten years our entire house looked like one big brassiere-and-girdle set.

  Some psychologist might say this is where Ziggy got his big-boob fetish. But I really don't know.

  DR. HOWARD BAER [Rosie McCoy Baer's nephew]: Aunt Rosie booked the Blissmans on a bill with the Beaumonts. I was young then and I had a big crush on Mary Beaumont. She would lean over and hand me candy in her dressing room; it was and still is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me. The bellhops called her Mary Cantaloupes.

  The Blissman act lasted maybe twenty minutes . . . I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be funny. Aunt Rosie had once booked this actor named Lionel Gostin who had done Shakespeare and was very respected. Gostin would get onstage dressed in black and the lights would dim until you could see only his face. He'd do scenes from Hamlet and Othello. He'd play to the thousandth row, but there was no thousandth row. There was usually a plant in the crowd, some guy who'd stand up and yell “Bravo! Bravo!” and get five bucks for it. Now I knew that Lionel Gostin was not onstage to get laughs. He was doing drama. But I never could figure out what the Blissmans were doing.

  Except at the end. Florence would sing. It was as if she was punishing the audience. “Okay, you made it through our lousy comedy act. Think you're so tough? Now I'm going to puncture your eardrums and shatter your eyeglasses.”

  • • •

  HUGH BERRIDGE: I was a vocalist in a Boston trio called the Three Threes. [We wore] woolen vests that had the trey from a domino on them and would play at social functions such as balls, weddings, and once in a while we opened up for big bands—Basil Fomeen and Isham Jones and the like. We had regular jobs or were going to college. Rowland Toomey worked in insurance and was quite the expert at death benefits, Teddy Duncan had a degree in law from Harvard. I too was studying law at Harvard.

  One night we were in Codport performing, and a rather middling tenpiece band was supporting us. Unbeknownst to us, th
e theater manager had written on the advertisements that there would be an “open mike” contest—the Three Threes would take on anyone willing to sing with us. Most of our audience that week was comprised of kids, teenagers only a few years younger than ourselves. And they were quite shy and therefore reluctant. A few did come onstage, and they'd never been on that side of a microphone before . . . they sang a few bars and then trotted off, quite red in the face.

  Suddenly this handsome boy with a mop of dark, curly, and almost preternaturally bluish hair was being pushed by friends into the aisle. He was, as they said back then, “togged to the nines.” He brushed back his hair, adjusted his tie—which was turquoise, I believe, to match his eyes—and walked toward the stage. He already had that now-famous Vic Fountain walk, that combination swagger and strut, a little bit like John Wayne. Very cock-of-the-walk, I must say.

  As he got on the stage I heard a sighing and some sort of commotion—the girls in the crowd really thought that this boy was very handsome.

  We didn't even have to nudge him toward the mike . . . he just walked up and grabbed it. I turned to Jarvis and Teddy; we had no idea if this dark, handsome boy could sing, but we were quite sure he had charisma.

  The band started up “Ain't She Sweet,” and we began singing. Vic mouthed the words for a few bars but then he realized that, as he was only inches in front of the microphone, everyone could tell.

  He stepped back a few feet and whispered to me, “What do I do?”

  “You sing,” I whispered back sternly.

  So he began singing.

  Vic was a natural baritone who made himself into a tenor. He sang “under” the lyrics, behind them. He phrased a shade behind the beat and got beneath the lyric. It was instinct, I suppose. Either that or he didn't know the song we were singing. While we sang, he sang around us . . . it was almost scatting, one could say, but was, I guess, lazier than that, more Perry Como than Ella Fitzgerald.

  He was the only one that night who did an entire song with us; it was “Always” by Irving Berlin. He got applause. We got applause.

  The next night there was an open mike again. The first person on the stage was none other than the boy from the previous night. He showed up for all five nights, each time dressed better.

  By the fifth night he had memorized the two songs he performed with us. Within a month he was part of the act.

  GUY PUGLIA [friend of Vic Fountain]: “What would you think if I became a singer or something?” Vic asked me. We were shooting eight ball at Kitty's Korner Klub on Perch Street.

  “You?” I says. “Vic, you ain't sung since that candy-ass choir. And you didn't even sing then.”

  Well, he proceeds to tell me about that trio, the Three Threes, and I says, “Yeah, but come on . . . what about the actual singing part of it, when it comes down to making the words come out your mouth in the form of some kind of melody?” He waves his hand at me and says, “Hey, anything Bing Crosby can do, I can do.”

  And I understood that. Vic was six-one, had big shoulders and muscles . . . and you ever see Crosby? He looked like a twig that someone hung a tweed hat on and handed a golf club to. So to me that made sense.

  There was only one voice teacher in the town. His name was Enzo Aquilino and he'd sung opera in Milan decades before. Or so he said. Walking past his house you sometimes heard opera playing on the Victrola, pouring out the window. It was beautiful. But sometimes you heard his students tryin' to sing opera and that wasn't so beautiful.

  CATHERINE RICCI: My mother called Mr. Aquilino “the little skunk” because of his silver and black hair. Well, he simply refused to give any lessons other than in the operatic style. But Mamma knew that was not the kind of singer Vic wanted to be. “Okay, okay,” my mother says to him and then leaves. Twenty minutes later she's back with her rolling pin. Aquilino locked his door but she busted in through the window and started smashing all his framed Enrico Caruso pictures to pieces. “You teach my boy to sing or I'll eat your piano!” she tells him.

  Now, I slept with [my sisters] Connie and Dolores, in the room next to Vic's. Vic was the only one of us who had his own room. Ray and Sal shared too, upstairs.

  One night I hear yelling and I rush to Vic's room . . . I had no idea what was going on.

  I couldn't believe what I saw: Papa had pinned Vic to his bed with one arm—Vic was flailing around like crazy, trying to break free. And my father was jamming a big haddock down Vic's throat in one piece. He was just shoving it down Vic's mouth.

  “You wanna sing, sissy?” Dad was hissing. “Femminuccia! Big-band sissy boy want to sing? Trying singing now, eh? Sing now. Sing like that sissy boy Crosby! Sing now!”

  In five minutes the whole haddock from the head down to the tail was down Vic's throat.

  But Vic kept at it. Every day he took the lessons.

  Oh, did I mention that the haddock was still alive?

  HUGH BERRIDGE: Vic asked me for a way to reach us in Boston, and I gave him the number of our manager, Jack Enright. I did not think we would ever hear from him.

  On the train back to Boston, Rowland Toomey started imitating the way that Vic had vocalized, the sonorous, oily swirling around the melody. Teddy Duncan turned to him and said, “Rowlie, perhaps we could use another voice. He certainly did have a presence.”

  “But we're a trio,” Rowlie said. “We've always been a trio.”

  And as the world knows, soon Vic climbed aboard our little caravan, and we became the Four Threes.

  • • •

  SEYMOUR GREENSTEIN: When a teacher called on him and he didn't know the answer, Ziggy would give his wrong answer in cockamamie accents and dialects, like Yiddish, Chinese, German, Japanese. And so there was a lot of laughing because he never knew the right answer. We were once reading Romeo and Juliet aloud and when it was Ziggy's turn, he really hammed it up. I don't know if he got one word right but it didn't matter, not with that hilarious British accent. He was the class clown to end all class clowns.

  SALLY KLEIN: It was summer and the Blissmans were booked for the Baer Lodge for July. Ziggy was, I'd say, seventeen. He'd never seen them perform. They'd never taken him on the road. But this time—for whatever reason—they brought him to the Poconos.

  DR. HOWARD BAER: I was at the desk when they came in. Ziggy looked nothing like his parents. He was a teenager, had bright red hair and a round nose, and he looked like a brand-new basketball.

  The three of them walked into the lobby and approached Allie Gluck, who worked the front desk. Allie indicated Ziggy and asked, “Harry, what's this?”

  Ziggy squirmed in that babyish way he used in the act and he pinched his crotch and said, “I'm this.” The way he said it . . . you had to be there.

  I remember thinking it was strange: Harry had booked only one room. So you had a husband, a wife, and a seventeen-year-old staying in one room. Not even a suite.

  Allie said to Ziggy, “You sure you don't want a room for yourself?”

  “Yeah, I'm sure,” Ziggy answered him.

  Allie asked him, “Are you scared of the dark?”

  “Oh yeah. I'm a-scared. Very a-scared. But not of the dark.”

  Allie asked, “Of what then?”

  “Oh, lots and lots of things,” Ziggy said.

  By now you've got two dozen or so people in the lobby and they're all paying attention.

  “So you want to be with Mommy and Daddy?” Allie asked.

  Ziggy looked at Harry, made a weird face, then he looked at Flo and made the same face.

  “On second thought,” he said to Allie, “I think I'm a-scared of them too.”

  I'm not kidding when I tell you that Ziggy Bliss already had about fifteen people in the palm of his hand.

  When Harry's face lit up, it looked like it was the first time that had ever happened.

  It was a double bill. Harry and Flo were opening up for the Beaumonts. You had a hot weekend in July and a packed hotel. The Beaumonts could have been the next Fred and Adele Astaire o
r Vernon and Irene Castle. They were in Staten Island Serenade with George Raft but I think that was it, film-wise. They really were such magnificent dancers.

  The routine the Blissmans were doing was that Harry is jealous because Flo, he finds out, had been working as a small-size model behind his back and, it turns out, she's making more money than him. They're five minutes into it and—no exaggeration—half of the crowd had filed into the lobby or was in the bathroom.

  All of a sudden Ziggy comes onstage. It was like that —he was just there. His first time ever.

  Now most people in the club had never seen Sigmund Blissman before. They'd never seen anyone who looked like Ziggy Blissman. They couldn't tell if he was five or fifteen or fifty-five years old. Right away there's a big hush.

  He's on the corner of the stage. One hand is nervously clutching the curtains and the other is holding an ashtray.

  “What are you doing here?” Harry asks him. And he's apoplectic. Coming onstage during his act . . . you simply don't do that.

  “I'm watching the show, Poppy,” Zig says.

  “Go upstairs! We're performing!”

  “Don't look like much performing to me, Poppy.”

  People are tittering already, they're coming in back from the lobby.

  “Zig,” Harry says, “your mother and I—”

  “What? You're finally gonna get married?” Ziggy says.

  Ziggy lifts up the ashtray and then lets it drop. And it breaks. He says, “Hey, Mommy, now you don't have to sing tonight.”

  The place is in hysterics by now.

  Ziggy goes into the audience, grabs an ashtray. He breaks that one too and says, “And now you don't got to sing tomorrow neither.”