by Ted Heller
The idea was to get some work. Vic didn't want to do nothing but sing. But me, I'd do anything. Gino'd been working the desk for almost fifteen years—he had to go by the name of “Eugene Purcell,” by the way; that was the name on his uniform—and he knew a lot of Broadway people. He said he'd try and help Vic out. In the meantime I got a waiter job at Handelman's on Fifty-first Street. And a week or so after that, Vic got a job too, working three days a week. Doing what, you may ask? He was working at a soda fountain on Broadway and Eighty-first Street. A soda jerk again.
KATHY PUCCIO: Vic and Guy would stay with us a few days and then, when I started to complain about how much they were eating, Gene would sneak them into the hotel for a few days. Guy had gotten a job after a while but Vic would just hang around in the house. Eventually I got him to help me clean up.
My son loved Vic. They hit it off. My husband worked at night, came home at five in the morning, slept till noon, but Vic would spend time with my Paulie . . . they'd play baseball, stickball, handball, all that stuff. Theresa eventually overcame her shyness, but at first she never said a word to either Guy or Vic. I remember one dinner we were having, Theresa's best friend Betty was eating with us . . . I looked over to Theresa and noticed she was staring at Vic. I kicked her under the table and she said, “Ouch!” A minute later she's staring again. So I snatched the napkin off her lap and sort of whipped her arm with it. Then I looked over to Betty and saw she was ogling Vic too.
By that time I was having trouble functioning. I really had it pretty bad for him.
Vic was very nice to me. He'd help me clean, he'd scrub the floor like it was a marine barracks, he would even chop up vegetables. We weren't millionaires, but it was a nice house, only two houses from the beach. You opened up the door and the salt and the spray would wash over you. And with Vic working up a sweat and walking around in an undershirt . . . well . . .
He would offer to rub my back. He'd set me on the sofa and he'd sit right behind me and those strong fingers of his would just go all over my neck and shoulders and spine. I tell you, it was like dreaming, like being half-asleep and half-awake. One day he was doing this and I turned around and looked right at those gorgeous turquoise blue eyes of his. I had a pink blouse on, I can remember, with small buttons. I put my hands in his face and then I closed my eyes. I waited for him to kiss me. Silly me, I probably even puckered up my lips! I waited for about half a minute. I opened my eyes and he was still there.
“Well?” I said. “Don't you want to kiss me, Vic?”
“Can't, puddin',” he said. “Uh-uh.”
“Why not?”
“I just couldn't do that to the Pooch,” he said. “Wouldn't be honorable of me. He's my pal.”
I looked down at a little pleat in my pink blouse . . . and the pleat was moving because my heart was going like crazy.
I was dumbfounded. I said to him, “You can call a woman ‘puddin’ and not kiss her?” I didn't think that was legal!
He got up and went outside to smoke a Chesterfield. I saw him through the curtains. And I stayed on the couch and felt as if someone had just robbed me.
The next time I saw my husband, to be honest with you, I wanted to wring his neck.
• • •
FREDDY BLISS [son of Ziggy Bliss]: My dad told me the story a million times. Bertie Kahn of the Bursley-Bates firm is up in the Catskills, at Marx's in White Lake. Bertie's only about thirty then but already he's a big hotshot, repping Broadway people and music people. Bertie Kahn was up there because Dad had clipped every review in Variety, every little mention in the Wilkes-Barre Bugle or the Tenafly Times, and sent it to him. My father arranged it that Bertie would get the best seat in the house.
The Blissmans did two weeks at Marx's; a ventriloquist with a dummy opened for the Blissmans and the headliner was the Hal Ketchum Orchestra.
Now, the way Dad told the story he had a choice: he could just do the normal act or he could really turn on the juice. But this is make or break, so he decides to crank up the juice to the max. The ventriloquist, Jerry Ochs, came on, and three minutes into his act Dad was onstage. This hadn't happened before—for a week Ochs, who feigned a thick Yiddish accent in the bit, and his aristocratic dummy Little Lord Goodwood, had been coming on and Dad left them alone. But on this night Dad was running rampant. He's going, “You're moving your lips, Jerry!” and “Goodwood's a pansy and I've got the splinters in my tuches to prove it!” And Jerry Ochs, he tries to keep up with Dad, but of course he can't. He's on for fifteen minutes and my father's on for twelve of them and everyone in there ate it up. Dad got the dummy out of Ochs's hands and was trying to make it talk . . . he had the little wooden doll grabbing women by their fannys.
He told me that Bertie Kahn was laughing so hard he was just paralyzed. Bertie Kahn! Who had lips of stone. But I bet that Jerry Ochs wasn't too pleased.
SALLY KLEIN: Bertie was very tall, a little overweight, and he dressed impeccably. Arnie said he was the spitting image of Sydney Greenstreet, and he was right. He was very imperious and smoked fancy foreign cigarettes. Also, he rarely said a sentence more than five words long. And here he was, red in the face and literally slapping his knees!
Ziggy is backstage afterward, drenched with sweat, soaking. Such a shvitz you've never seen. Hal Ketchum strolled up to him with a big cigar and his clarinet dangling from his neck on a strap. He said to Ziggy, “You spilled over into our time. My time is precious to me. You do that again, I got a drummer who'll fry you with onions for his breakfast.”
At this second you felt really sorry for Ziggy. Hal Ketchum is a foot taller and thirty years older. But now Bertie Kahn came over and steps between them. Hal Ketchum said, “Hey, you're Bert Kahn.” And Bertie said to him, “Scram, Ketchum. Chase a breeze.” And Ketchum just slinks off. It was wonderful!
Ziggy asked Bertie, “Enjoy the act, Mr. Kahn?”
“Very much so. Here's my advice. Lose the midgets. They're killing you.”
DANNY McGLUE [joke writer]: I was a bellhop at Marx's, the only Irish punim for miles, and I'd joke around in the nightclub, the Red Room. Larry Marx had a piano on the stage and I'd get up there and sing my silly nonsense songs, do some double-talk. I studied the piano growing up in Yorkville [Manhattan]—the idea was for me to become the next Horowitz or Rubinstein but here I was in the Catskills singing, “I want to marry you, I want you to have my babies, I love you more than my dog, but unlike him, you've got rabies.”
The night after Bertie Kahn had introduced himself, Ziggy walked up to me in the lobby and said, “Danny? You're Danny McGlue . . .”
“I admit it,” I said. “I am.”
“Could I buy a few of your songs?”
I had no idea what he meant! Songs? What songs?
“Those little silly numbers you do, Danny,” he said. “Like, ‘I thought you had a nice complexion, but upon further reflection, something escaped my detection, I think I'll make another selection.’ That kind of stuff.”
I said to him, “Look, Ziggeleh, it's not as if I ever write down these little-ditties . . .”
He scratches the freckles on his chin and then reaches into his trouser pockets and hands me a twenty. And he said, “Here. Write 'em down, Danny. I'm going places. Maybe you wanna hop along.”
I hopped along. For the rest of my life.
SNUFFY DUBIN: Everyone's got an entourage. Elvis had the Country Cosa Nostra or the Memphis Mafia, Robin Hood had the Merry Men, and Jesus had his crew too. Vic had Hunny Gannett, Ernie, Guy, Ices Andy, and Chinese Joe Yung—man, even Vic's entourage had entourages!—and Ziggy had Sally and now was gathering up me and Danny and then eventually Shep Lane and Buzzy Brevetto. It was all coming together. Every big cat's gotta have his kittens around him. You need that support system, right? So if you wake up one morning and you got a baseball-sized pimple on your nose, there's some schlemiel-for-hire to tell you “You look great, boss!” An entertainer really needs that. The problems begin when you start believing them.
• • •
ARNIE LATCHKEY: The Smokestack Lounge was right near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, around Vinegar Hill. Maybe a hundred people could fit in there, depending on that day's bribe to the fire chief. Vic I think was making forty bucks a week singing there and they were literally paying him with silver. He must've sounded like Marley's ghost, boy, rattling his chains at the end of each night going home, with all those quarters.
GUY PUGLIA: The Smokestack Lounge? Stickiest floors you ever saw in your life. Nobody ever danced there because nobody could ever dance there. It wasn't too easy to get from one place to another . . . it'd be like jitterbugging in glue.
You know, Vic was a great mimic. So at this time—and I don't know if the bandleader, who was Mickey Ford, told him to do it or he come up with it himself—he was just imitating other singers. Dick Haymes, Devane, Perry Como, Columbo, Dick Fain . . . he was just putting on their voices! And I couldn't believe my ears. 'Cause now alls of a sudden his range had really stretched out. It was like someone handing him a baseball bat and saying, Here, hit the ball. And he couldn't do it. But then someone says, Okay, Vic, now imitate Ted Williams's swing . . . and bang! He's hitting all the notes, he's carrying the song. Everything was perfect and it wasn't like he was really even singing!
KATHY PUCCIO: I would sneak off to see him. This was pretty daring—it's not easy to get from Long Beach to that part of Brooklyn, and a girl in those days didn't go out alone. All those workers from the navy yard, it made me a little nervous. So Theresa and her friend Betty and I went out together. We looked just like three sisters. And Gene never knew because he was at the hotel.
I'd catch Vic's eye every once in a while up there. One night he was singing “Moonlight in Vermont” and he winked and smiled and I thought I was going to swoon backward, which wouldn't have been good because the floor there was so disgusting. I thought, He's doing this just for me. Nobody else sees it! And then Theresa elbows me and says, “Mom, Uncle Vic just winked at me!” And I'm sure Betty thought so too.
Uncle Vic. That's what my kids called him.
It was killing me. He was living in the house walking around in a T-shirt, a tanktop. That gorgeous, smooth olive skin. Even the hair on his shoulders . . . the hair was in these perfect tight little black coils. I used to fake backaches and charley horses just to get him to touch me.
One day I took the subway into Manhattan and just walked around. I didn't know what I was doing. I went to Macy's, Ohrbach's, and Gimbel's, walking around with my head in the clouds. I didn't buy anything. I kept thinking of Vic. I called Theresa from a phone booth and made up some cockamamie story and told her she should cook Paulie and herself dinner that night. I went to see a movie—it was Dark Victory. Halfway through I walked out. I got a cab and at first I thought I'd go to the Smokestack Lounge and see Vic perform . . . but I was so mixed up I didn't even know what night it was. The taxi took me home.
I walked into the house and the place was empty. Where Paulie was, I don't know. I walk into my bedroom and the very first thing I see is Betty, Theresa's friend. She's stark naked, facing me, these little sixteen-year-old breasts, like chestnuts. She had long curly auburn hair. And I see Vic's feet, the bottom of his big feet on the bed. That's all I see of him. He's flat on his back and Betty's on top of him, facing me.
Betty sees me see her and she gets off Vic and picks up her blouse and runs into the bathroom. And then I saw Theresa. She was naked too. She was—she was facing away from me . . . I don't even want to say what Vic was doing to her.
It all happened in a flash. I'll never forget it.
“Ma!” she said when she turned her head around.
I was paralyzed. I don't know how long I stood there. I tell you, it might've been for an hour.
Honorable! Wouldn't be honorable?! That's what Vic had said. But this was?
Two weeks later Theresa was in a convent and three years later she was a nun.
So now I hated everybody in that house. Vic I wanted to murder. That bastard. Theresa I would've strangled with my bare hands; Paulie I could've shot, and Betty I never allowed in my house again.
But the next morning when Gene came home I flung my arms around his neck and kissed his cheeks all over and must've told him thirty times how much I loved him.
GUY PUGLIA: Vic must've liked the Monroe more than me because after shuttling between Pooch and Kathy's house and the hotel, he all of a sudden decided he didn't want to stay in Long Beach no more. You know, if you didn't mind whores and hopheads, if you didn't mind some washed-up opera singer singing La Traviata while gargling with Hiram Walker, then it wasn't such a bad joint.
[Boxer, raconteur, saloon keeper] Hunny Gannett got booted from where he was living—some broad he was shacking up with in the East Twenties got wind he was married, not to one but to two women. So Vic told Hunny about the Monroe and now you had all three of us living there.
Gino one day walked up to Vic at the barber shop near the Monroe while he was getting a shave. Pooch says, “Vic, this is Bert Kahn.” So Vic starts talking to this Kahn fella, who don't say so much when he talks. And Gino is playing Vic up, he says, “You gotta hear this guy sing, Mr. Kahn, the girls go crazy for him.” And Kahn sends Pooch away with a five-spot and he promises he'll check out Vic at the Smokestack.
Bertie Kahn never showed up but someone sure did. Because in a week an agent from Worldwide American Talent had called him at the Monroe and a week after that he was belting out songs with the Don Leslie band at the Ambassador [Hotel]. When Vic auditioned, he just “put on” Bing Crosby's voice, like an impressionist, and Leslie fell for it. Ha! Vic said to me later, “That was like puttin' on an Einstein mask and getting a job teaching physics.” He even cut a record. “My Tall Blue-Eyed, Blonde Dearie.” That was the very first record he ever sung on. It was a 78 and I still have a copy somewheres. The voice is the spitting image of Sinatra's . . . I remember Vic giggling and telling me, “If Frank Sinatra ever hears this thing he's gonna think he sang it.” Vic sent ten copies back to Codport, including one to Lulu.
We were going places, we thought.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: When I first hooked up with Vic I asked to look at paperwork, the contracts. I don't think he'd ever even heard the word “paperwork.” I said to him, “You've signed some things, right?”
“Oh yeah, sure,” he said. “I've signed some things.”
But he didn't have any copies.
After a few phone calls to [company president] Herb Blackstone at WAT, I had the paperwork. Vic had signed some things all right. Vic would sign a shoeshine boy's rag if it had dotted lines on it. What I saw I couldn't believe. He was paying Don Leslie, he was paying Mickey Ford, he was paying Worldwide. For every dollar be made, he owed a buck twenty.
• • •
DANNY McGLUE: They played every resort in the Catskills. They'd work for peanuts, sometimes less, just the shells. (I wrote that gag for them and they used it.) Their car made the crate Jane Darwell drove in The Grapes ofWrath look like a Corvette. They'd do a week at Grossinger's or Kutsher's, pack up, head down the road to Heine's Hideaway, which was the grandest joint of them all—it put the Concord and Grossinger's to shame. If there was a room, if there was a microphone and a piano, they'd play it. They'd play outdoors outside a collection of little bungalows and they would play these summer camps too, places where the kids were taught to salute pictures of Leon Trotsky and sing the Communist national anthem. Camp Hammer-and-Sickle, Ziggy called those places.
I caught up with them at Koppelman's [Resort]. I had a day off and Fred Stein [a coworker at Marx's] and I drove over to Loch Sheldrake to catch the act. See, I'd written two songs for Ziggy, two nonsense songs. “The Numb Dumb Drum That Is My Heart” and “The Itty-Bitty Ditty,” which was fairly risqué for its day: “Okay, I'll let you wear my ringy if you can help me find my thingy . . .”
This was exciting to me. Someone other than me was going to sing my songs! Now, Ziggy had told me that Harry and Flo loved them too. So
Fred and I were sitting toward the back and we're waiting and waiting and I say to Freddy, “They're gonna do it. You just watch!” But meanwhile Ziggy's shpritz is just going on and now I'm thinking, What am I doing here?
Finally Florence starts to sing a song but after a few bars Ziggy nudges her and says, “Mommy?”
And Flo—by now I guess she was used to being interrupted—says to him, “Yes, Sonny?”
“I have a little song I'd like to sing,” he says.
From ten yards away I could hear Flo's mouth go dry in a flash. And I knew at that instant that Ziggy had never told his parents about my songs.
“What are you going to sing, Ziggy?” she asks him warily.
Ziggy—he'd given the pianist the charts—nods to the five-piece band and all of a sudden he's singing “The Itty-Bitty Ditty.” This was to the tune of that old corny ballad “My Tall Blue-Eyed, Blonde Dearie.” But we sped it up a bit. “I left my thingy in the dinghy, help me find it if you don't mind it. Is it small? Why, not at all. If you give it a call, it will stand quite tall . . .”
And to my delight the audience loved it. People were laughing, tapping their toes. But I tell you, you could almost smell the smoke coming out of Flo's ears.
SNUFFY DUBIN: Dolly Phipps was her name. Physically, she resembled a young Eleanor Roosevelt but with bright blond hair, a pageboy cut, pale, and with teeth like a mule. She was about nineteen years old, I'd say. Me, her, and a few others went up to see the Blissmans at Berenson's Hotel in the mountains. Dolly was kind of simpleminded. Oh yeah, she had a mild lisp too. The one word people used to describe her was “daffy.” Very tall and gawky and the biggest feet you ever saw on a chick. But she was a good kid. Someone told me her parents had tried to send her to finishing school but nothing took. How can you finish something that wasn't ever started? She might not have been able to balance a book on her head but I think she could have toted the entire Library of fucking Congress on each foot.
