Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  “I owe you one,” Marvin told me as I was getting on the bus to go back to New York after I was fired.

  “You sure do,” I said to him. “Big time. And I ain't forgetting it.”

  Slow dissolve. Manhattan. I start working at the [music] store, sweeping up, doing inventory, and occasionally stealing a few centavos from the cash register. Well, I might not have been the brightest stripling on the Great White Way but I knew I didn't want to work in that crummy store the rest of my life. I wanted out. So I turned on that irresistible, infectious Latchkey charm and wheedled my way into the hearts and minds of some of these Broadway big shots. Irving Berlin. I met Irving Berlin a few times. A doll. I hit him up for three bucks once and he gave it to me and said, “Kid, here. I don't wanna see you again.” So I go back the next day and asked for four. Didn't get it. Gershwin? Cohan? The Schuberts? Jerry Kern? I met 'em all. Larry [Lorenz] Hart? Great lyricist. Lousy tipper. Cole Porter once was signing something for me at the Waldorf Towers and with the other hand he tried to put his hand on my fanny—I shooed it away like you would a butterfly.

  My old man, he fired me from the store. There was a minor discrepancy problem with the inventory. And I was the fall guy and rightly so.

  So now it's time to take advantage of some of my contacts. Murray Katz, who years later was Executive VP in Charge of Doing Very Little at Worldwide American, takes me under his somewhat foul-smelling wing and before you know it, I'm twenty years old and I'm the road manager of the Floyd Lomax Orchestra.

  If I don't take that Lomax job then I don't manage Fountain and Bliss. Kismet again.

  Floyd says to me on my very first day on the job: “Latch, this job is about reeds, reefers, and roast beef sandwiches.” Had he told me I'd be reaming out spit valves too, I might not have taken the job. That and running girls in and out of hotels. Well, to tell you truthfully, he did mention the latter and that's why I leapt at the opportunity.

  [Looking at photograph of the Floyd Lomax Orchestra, taken at the Luxor Ballroom, White Plains, New York, 1938.] Okay, let's start here. This pianist . . . look real close . . . that's Larry and Stu Morrell, the Siamese twin pianists. Larry was actually the real musician of the two; Stu just played along with their left hand. He was a real highbrow, read tomes the size of train cars. Their deal was, Larry would be in the band for two years and then Stu would teach philosophy for two years while Larry hung on. I once said to him, “You know, you're the only sideman who has a sideman.” Yeah, it was some outfit.

  This fellow is Mr. Harry Bacon, he blew alto sax for us. Does he look strange? A little . . . different? No? Well, nobody else thought so either. But one day it turns out that Mister Harry Bacon is actually Miss Harriet Bacon. Nobody ever knew! For years that dyke traveled around with us, nobody knew. She'd pal around with us, smoke cigars, and go to the track and chase tail just like the rest of the boys. And she was married too! Figure that out. Had a wife out on the island, in Bay Shore. We were all completely fooled. It all came out one day when Roy Lindell, one of our horn men and a big bowl of fruit salad, had a few too many one night in Baltimore and he came on to Harry. They started wrestling and roughhousing and the guys are standing around in a circle, cheering them on—this is in a parking lot, I think it was at the old Hippodrome—and Roy's now got Harry Bacon's pants down and then he pulls his boxers off. Well, the applauding stopped on a dime, believe you me. I say, “Gee, Harry, uh, you're hung like a tick.” “I ain't hung at all,” Harry says. “I'm a broad. Get a load of this . . .” And then she unbuttons her shirt. We were all of us, to a man, astounded. Harry stands up and says, “You tell my wife about this, I'll cut yours off too.” And after that, she was just one of the guys.

  But poor Roy, when he got an eyeful of that crotch or lack thereof—the fact that he'd made a pass at a broad! —it really sickened him.

  This guy over here, behind Harry . . . Sid Gibson . . . he blew tenor sax. A hophead. This bald head belongs to our trombonist, Cueball Swenson . . . he did a couple of years for something but he straightened out his act somewhat. This is the guitarist, Pip Grundy. Look at his hands. Seven fingers on his left hand, about nine on his right. Anne Boleyn with a geetar. I tell you, the Pipster didn't always hit the right note but he could hit more wrong ones at one time than any other guitarist around at that time.

  And this is Floyd Lomax. Looks just like Humpty Dumpty, don't he? He was from some town outside Detroit, he played trumpet. Kept a pearl-handled Colt in his trumpet case for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Ypsilanti, that's it. Six foot seven, weighed 350 pounds jaybird naked. Could he eat? He'd down more sausages in one meal than Warsaw does in a year. And the man loved cooze. Craved it. If he couldn't score it was a nightmare—he'd just break down and cry his fat heart out, Floyd would. You ever see a six-foot-seven, 350-pound whale in boxer shorts holding a trumpet and weeping like his puppy just got run over by the ice-cream truck? Christ, on all his undershorts he had sewn in gold threads—and you could've moved a family of ten into Floyd Lomax's boxers—the words “'Tis all pink on the inside.”

  The kind of music they played . . . Floyd was aiming for the High Society-sound, sort of like Eddie Duchin or Griff Williams; it all sounded like you'd just chowed down on a Vassar sophomore, which are Floyd's words, not mine. Now, we knew we could never crack that market. It just wasn't gonna happen. So we aimed lower, a lot lower. Billboard even called it “the Low Society sound.”

  We'd play a set and then we go back to our hotel and Floyd gets his fix of you-know-what, and I got to make sure that [vocalist] Dick Fain is all tied up in his bed with manacles so he don't electrocute himself, and the boys are playing pinochle and drinking and just playing their horns . . . and that's what we did. It was a hard life, it didn't pay too good, the hours were lousy as hell, but, boy, did we have a ball.

  • • •

  SALLY KLEIN: It was at the Mohican Club in Teaneck when Ziggy broke the news to us. Harry and Flo and I were in the dressing room and Ziggy walked in. He pulled a chair up, loosened his tie. It was a jokey tie, orange and a yard wide.

  “I been thinkin' about the act,” he said. He's got that impish face on—you've seen it a million times in the movies—what Arnie called his “Uh-oh, I think I may have driven your Mercedes off a cliff” look.

  Harry asked him, “What about the act?”

  Ziggy just comes out and says, “I think Flo should cut a song or two from the act, maybe drop the number at the end.”

  Now, I'd sensed this coming. Because Flo always ended with a song and Ziggy was always interrupting it. But for the last couple of shows he was barely allowing her to begin it. The act ended with Ziggy being Ziggy and the audience loving it.

  Flo said, “You want me not to sing? This is what my son is telling me?”

  “This is what I'm telling you, Flo,” Zig said. By now he didn't call them Pop or Mom anymore except when they were onstage.

  “But I got my start singing,” Flo says to him. “That's how your father and I got started.”

  “Look, if it was up to me, you'd belt out thirty songs up there. And there wouldn't be an ashtray or a pair of eyeglasses intact within a hundred miles. But this is business.”

  Harry said, “I think this is something your mother and I should talk about.”

  And Zig said, “Okay. Then talk about it.” And he—knowing quite well that Harry had meant talking about it alone, in private—just leaned back in his chair.

  Flo turned to Harry and said, “All right, Harry, all right. No more singing then. Fine.”

  Harry said to her, “You sure, darling?”

  She nodded and Ziggy said, “I'm glad you seen it my way,” and then walked out.

  When he left the room, it was like Himmler had just left after an interrogation. We could breathe again.

  “Uncle Harry,” I said, “are you sure you just did the right thing?”

  He said, “The right thing? No. The right thing would be to ship him off to a nuthouse, that would be the right
thing. What we just did, Sally, was make sure we have our next few meals and a roof over our heads and can afford to be buried properly. Which might be any day now!”

  SNUFFY DUBIN [comedian]: I was offered the emcee's job at the Mohican Club and I grabbed it. It was a good house, two hundred seats and the three b's: bands, booze, and broads. Johnny Nelson's band was the house band, Tina Mitchell sang for them, and Benny Lampone was the owner on paper. But Big Al Pompiere and a few other Jersey characters were the real owners.

  I met Ziggy at the Mohican and, man, we just clicked. Same age, same backgrounds—him from New York and me from Chicago—we grew up poor and my father was in show business too. He was a cantor—Pavarotti with payess, no shit. Ziggy and me were friends, but there was a mutual jealousy thing maybe too: you know, he was a performer already and was flat-out hilarious and he just destroyed people up there, so yeah, I envied that, sure. He was a comic genius, even at that age. See, some people, some comedians, they just have that raw comic instinct. They're born with it. Me, I had to work and work and teach myself that instinct.

  But, yeah, jealousy. I was—back then, at least—a slim guy and there were girls around, and I went out and had a good time. I don't think that Ziggy had even kissed a girl yet.

  Well, we fixed that.

  Zig and I are hangin' at the bar one night and it's me, him, and this colored cat named Jimmy Powell. He cleaned up for us but let me tell you, that man could dress. Silk and satin all over the place and the fucking shiniest white shoes you ever saw, a real hepcat, and where he got the money for his threads . . . well, who knew?

  It's way after hours and me and Zig are telling jokes and shooting the shit and the subject gets onto girls. As in, where do you get one in this town?

  I told him, “Ziggy, it's four in theA.M.—anygirl you get right now, you don't wanna get.”

  “Oh yeah?” he says. “Then where is she?”

  He looks down at the floor and that's when I realize, hey, this guy's never been within one foot of a broad. I call Jimmy Powell over. He's maybe forty-five years old and as skinny as a sewing needle.

  We piled into my Hudson Essex Terraplane and Jimmy tells us where to go.

  We ended up in Newark. It was really dark out, I remember that, and it's this neighborhood, warehouses and factories and not a soul on the street.

  We get out of the car and walk into this building, like a three-story townhouse. It's a bordello. Big surprise, right? Well, it was a surprise because this was no rundown dingy whorehouse, this was a very, very flashy joint. Velvet all over the place, velvet curtains and rugs from Afghanistan or Persia, moldings in the wall, sconces and candelabras and gold lamps and furniture from eighteenth-century France.

  There's a living room and it's wall-to-wall red velvet in there and there's about nine, ten chicks in it. Some of 'em, they're pretty—and I don't just mean pretty for Newark at four in the morning. And they had the works on: pearl necklaces, merry widows, garters, the whole kit and caboodle.

  Zig says to me, “You wanna go first, Snuffy?”

  I tell him I think I'll pass.

  “What about you, Jimmy?” he asks, and Jimmy Powell passed too.

  I say to him, “Why don't you just do the job, Zig? It's late.”

  So Ziggy paces up and down, gets an eyeful of these whores. And he went for the ugly duckling—he picked the ugliest one of them; this girl's flab had flab. They climbed the stairs and then me and Jimmy Powell waited on the couch and the chicks slowly filed out and went back to their knitting, working with the handicapped, and Bible study.

  “Snuffy,” Jimmy said, “I don't think that boy's gonna know where to poke his stick.”

  “Jimmy, if he can't figure it out, then you're going up there and telling him,” I say.

  Two minutes later the broad who's runnin' the joint is flying down the stairs. A big gutsy blonde, like Dorothy Malone in her prime plus thirty pounds. And she's runnin' down the stairs and it's some big emergency.

  Jimmy Powell asks her, “Alice, what's going on?”

  “He's stuck,” Alice says. “The fat boy is stuck.”

  I'll never forget that. It's one of those things you hear and it just stays with you. The fat boy is stuck. That's what you should call The Ziggy Bliss Story, Ted. The Fat Boy Is Stuck.

  Me and Jimmy run up the spiral stairs to the third floor. The pole that goes up the stairs, the newel? This thing was 100 percent pure marble and there were little carvings of naked broads with long tresses in it with serpents all around 'em, like from Greek myths. Alice is running behind us and she tells us room number seven. So me and Jimmy open the door to room number seven.

  The very first thing I see is Ziggy's big ass. This big red medicine ball and it's shakin' like raspberry Jell-O in a hurricane.

  “Is that you, Snuffy?” he asks me.

  I tell him, Yeah it's me, and that Jimmy Powell's here too.

  “I can't get out, Snuff. I'm, like, lodged.”

  “Goddamn, man,” Jimmy Powell whispers to me.

  Alice asks the girl underneath Zig if she can breathe, and she says, yeah, she can breathe but not really too good.

  Alice tells me and Jimmy to get Zig out of there. I say to her, “What do we do, call the fucking fire department for this?!” I mean, Jesus Christ . . .

  “We could try just givin' him the heave-ho,” Jimmy says.

  And that's what we did . . . I take one leg and Jimmy Powell takes the other and we tried to dislodge him. But there was no give . . . it wasn't working. And we were really trying too—we rolled up our sleeves and planted our feet and did it on the count of three. But no dice. And then Alice gets all the other girls and now you've got me and Jimmy and ten hookers and we're tugging on Ziggy's arms and feet and there's just no way to extricate him. And now, hey, the idea of calling the fire department isn't really too outlandish all of a sudden.

  “I got an idea,” Jimmy Powell says, and before you know it we're all tying velvet curtains and bedsheets together. Yankee ingenuity at its finest. Jimmy flings this makeshift rope of curtains and sheets out the window, and then me and him go downstairs to my Terraplane. We tie one end of the rope thing to the rear fender, and upstairs Alice and her harem tie the other end around Ziggy's waist.

  We're in the car and I start it up and press down on the accelerator. We don't move. I'm really gunnin' it and the wheels are spinning and we're kickin' up dust. Finally I just floor the sonuvabitch and—my hand to God—from upstairs in that house I hear a sound like a fifty-gallon bottle of champagne being popped open. POP!!! And me and Jimmy Powell look back up and, Jesus Christ, my Hudson damn near pulled Ziggy Blissman straight out the window too.

  We go back upstairs and the poor kid—I mean, it's his first time with a girl and there's ten people standing around him and he's naked and all red and everything—he's shaking and almost in tears. I got an eyeful of Ziggy's shvantz, I couldn't believe it . . . it was like a goddamn baseball bat. Which was, I guess, the problem to begin with.

  So he gets dressed now and me and him and Jimmy Powell and Alice are at the front door and the sun is coming up over Newark.

  And this, I'll never forget. We're about to leave and Jimmy Powell reaches into his pants and pulls out a wad of bills and hands about fifty bucks to Alice and tells her to take good care of the girl. And then he looks at me and says, “That fat boy don't ever come to this house again, you understand?!”

  So I guess Jimmy Powell was runnin' the joint, which is how he had all them fine threads.

  • • •

  GUY PUGLIA: The band finked out on us too. Vic and me, we tried to round 'em all up. But it was funny how they was all “out” that day. I called the trumpeter and his wife tells me, “His brother in Omaha died. He's in Omaha.” I called the trombone fella and his wife says, “Oh, his brother in Omaha died today too.” Three dead brothers in Omaha later, we get the message. Vic had no band.

  One day at a Red Sox game, Vic says to me, “So we gotta go back to Codpo
rt, huh?”

  “And what are we gonna do in Codport?” I ask him.

  “I guess we tote fish,” he answers.

  “You wanna tote fish, Vic? Is that what you wanna do?”

  So that night we hopped a Greyhound to New York.

  I had a cousin, Gino Puccio—he worked the desk at the old Monroe Hotel on Forty-ninth, just off Broadway. The Monroe at this time was on its way down. And it didn't have too far to go either 'cause I don't think it had ever had its way up.

  KATHY PUCCIO [wife of Guy Puglia's cousin]: One night we're having dinner at our house [in Long Beach, Long Island], Gene, me, and the kids, and there's a knock at the door. My son, Paulie, gets the door—in those days you didn't have to look through the peephole—and there is this tall well-built guy in a blue suit and right next to him is this short fellow, not much bigger than Paulie, who was maybe nine at the time.

  “Mom, there's a man with blue hair at the door,” Paulie said. And for some reason my daughter, Theresa, runs into her bedroom and closes the door. She was sixteen.

  “Gino baby!” Guy says.

  “Is that my Cousin Gaetano?” my husband says.

  “Hey, Pooch,” Guy says.

  And they hug and pinch each other's cheeks. And not a minute later our guests are sitting down with us, and Vic and Paulie are boxing with each other—you know, just screwing around—at the table. Vic and Guy wolfed down about ten pounds of food in thirty seconds.

  GUY PUGLIA: You had all kinds staying at the Monroe. Hookers, drunks, junkies, freaks, crackpots who thought the world had five minutes to live, musicians and hepcats and vaudeville wash-ups, burlesque girls, actors on their way up, actors who'd already come down. More ambulances pulled up to that joint than taxis, that's the truth. Walking down them long hallways you saw things that'd curl your hairs quick. People injecting junk with the doors open, men dressed up as women—that wasn't even abnormal after a while. Some guy left the door open and I saw two ostriches prancing around the room. Ostriches!