by Ted Heller
So we're watching the act and naturally she's cracking up, everyone is, watching Zig. And now Danny McGlue had written a few songs for the act as well as some fresh gags, and I gotta tell you: Ziggy never gave Danny credit, not then, not ever. He'd say, “This is a song I wrote last night in the bathtub while fiddling with my ocarina.”
After the show Ziggy comes over to our table and he and Dolly instantly had this mutual attraction thing, probably based on the fact that everyone else found them so unsightly. He's talking and being Ziggy and her face is beet red because he's just so fucking hilarious. She's not laughing though. Too self-conscious, right? She's sitting there and trembling and sweating like a hog in a sitz bath because she's keeping it all in. Then she gets up abruptly and runs away! Runs!
“Who's the hot tamale?” Ziggy whispers to me. “She's cute.”
I said, “She is?”
“Yeah!” he said. “You don't think she's cute?”
“Yeah. She's cute, Zig,” I say. “She's a doll.” What the hell . . .
She came back to the table about ten minutes later. I guarantee you she's not the first person, man or woman, who Ziggy made wet their pants.
SALLY KLEIN: It was very ironic because it was as if Harry and Flo had lost their one child now that they'd incorporated him into the act. In some way, it was good for poor Harry. Ziggy was the act, Harry knew that. So it was less pressure on him. He was relaxing. Reading, taking walks in the woods with Flo or by himself, enjoying life.
Ziggy would corner me in a hotel lobby or backstage and say, “I'm stuck in a Ma and Pa Shtetl act!” He'd gripe about his parents all the time.
I was a pretty tough girl. I'd bait him. I said to him, “So why not just dump them like Bertie Kahn said? Go solo. If you don't need them like you say, just go solo. You're the whole act, right? Lose the midgets, Ziggy.”
Well, now that this was actually a possibility, it wasn't so wonderful, was it? With Harry and Flo there, he had people to play off of, he had people he could rip apart. Without them up there, it was just him.
A week after this conversation—it was at Fiedler's Inn in White Lake—he introduced me to Dolly Phipps. He said, “Dolly, this is my cousin, Sally; Sally, this is my new partner, Dolly Phipps.”
New partner?! I thought I was going to die!
He told Harry and Flo he was teaming with Dolly for four weeks and that they should go home to Echo Beach. He and Dolly would take their bookings. They were flabbergasted.
Danny and Ziggy wrote some brand-new material. It was—I think Danny would agree—second-rate stuff.
DANNY McGLUE: Did Sally really say that? Hmmm. Because I thought some of the material was actually pretty good. But she [Dolly] was just so incredibly stiff. The best comedy in the world would have died crossing her lips.
This was the first tough time Ziggy ever had, performing. It went over like granite, and now he couldn't improvise his way out. If he went into the crowd to fiddle with the band or to shpritz with the audience, he would've looked like a scared fat kid trying to weasel himself out of a jam. There was truly a touch of the pathetic to it. And he couldn't ad-lib . . . there would be no snappy Ziggyisms at Dolly's expense. Because she was his girl. Harry and Florence he could make fun of—he could toss out an aside like, “Oh well, they'll be dead soon anyways.”
But you can't do that to a girl you're seeing.
SNUFFY DUBIN: Like a goldfish with a bad cough, that act died.
You can guess the act. She's the dumb clumsy blonde and he's the little fat nebbish. Not once did it click. Burns played against Gracie Allen. She said crazy, spacey things but it all made sense. That was the brilliance. With these two, though, it was like two brain-damaged kids. People were cringing.
Ziggy had indicated to me he wanted to go solo. But no way he wanted to play it alone. No way. Any comedian will tell you: Being up there by yourself is like being buck naked with your hands tied behind your back and everybody's got darts. For a while he'd been trying to dump his parents and team up with me . . . but I didn't want any part of that. No thanks.
So only two weeks into the Ziggy and Dolly Era, he's on the phone again to me. “Snuffy, you gotta get this broad outta my life! You owe me!”
I say, “How the hell do I owe you?!”
“'Cause you got her into my life in the first place!”
DANNY McGLUE: Ziggy and I were never truly close friends. At first, he was a performer and I just worked at the hotel. The money he paid me for the songs and the jokes—it was in cash then, maybe $25 a week, which I needed. But we weren't close.
This was the first time he ever blew up at me. Not the last, of course. When it happened, I was stunned. I shouldn't have been—I'd heard him yell and say the cruelest things, things which really hurt, to Sally. Making fun of her hair, her nose, everything.
Backstage after a show I was in his little dressing room. He had a glass of seltzer, I remember that. And he was naked except for a towel around his neck. Naked and very sweaty. Not a pleasant sight, all those red bumps and pimples and the flab. And that shlong of his, like a prize-winning carrot at a state fair.
“I'm dying every single night, Danny,” he said. “Sometimes two times a night.”
I started to say, “Ziggy, this act with Dolly—”
“What about Dolly?! What about her?!” he snapped at me.
Now, I had to stand my ground. Because it was her fault, not mine. I said, “Zig, I'm sorry but I think she's very stiff up there.”
And he said, “Did it ever occur to you it might be your jokes and your songs? Maybe you're very stiff?”
“She's a lovely gal,” I lied. “She's really the sweetest thing. But she's just not funny.”And that's when it happened. He took his glass of seltzer and smashed it into the mirror right next to him, the vanity mirror. And he yelled at me. He was yelling at the top of his lungs and every pore of his body was flushed like a strawberry. Called me every name in the book. He was humiliating me—he was as loud as his mother when she sang and everyone in that hotel could probably hear it and I was shaking with fear and shame.
It lasted ten minutes. I wiped my eyes with a handkerchief. I'm thinking to myself: I don't need this. Big deal. A few dollars a week. It's not worth it. I'll have a drink and tell him I'm quitting and if he screams at me for that I'll just walk away.
He pours me a scotch and I thought, Okay, one more drink and then I'll tell him I'm out. So he poured me another.
And then he went into his wallet and slapped four fifties on the vanity. And he said, “Okay, let's burn the midnight oil, Danny. Take the dough. It's yours. Jeez, just for letting me yell at you like that, you should get a grand.”
And we worked until six in the morning and wrote completely new material. We played off each other: I'd be him and he'd be Dolly or he'd be Dolly and I'd be him. And we kept saying, “Socko stuff.” “Mucho yuks.” You know, like a Variety review. At one point we were cracking up so much he said, “Hey, Danny, you're doing so good as Dolly maybe I'll team up with you!” By the next day I'd nearly forgotten about the torrent of abuse he'd unleashed.
The new material died. Died. You know how good this stuff was, Ted? Years later we recycled it—with some touchup work, obviously—for Ziggy and Vic's TV show.
“Okay,” he told me. “I'm getting rid of that blond ball and chain.”
SNUFFY DUBIN: He was afraid to give Dolly the heave-ho. He actually wanted me to drive up there and, one, fire her from the act, and, two, break up with her for him! He wanted me to do this!
I say, “Ziggy, this is your doing. I ain't doing this for you. I just ain't.” And in the back of my mind is when Jimmy Powell and me had to extricate him from that girl in Newark.
“Come on, Snuff,” he says.
I tell him, “No, Zig. This is just morally and ethically wrong.”
“I'll give you six hundred dollars,” he says.
“Make it eight hundred plus expenses and you're on,” I told him. “And I already got a
plan too.”
He says, “Okay. Eight hundred. And hurry your tuches up here.”
The next day I'm in Loch Sheldrake, in Dolly's hotel room. I'm looking all solemn and everything, right? I got a black suit on, my hair is slicked back, I look like John Q. Undertaker. I sit down and I take her hand and I say, “Dolly . . .” And I'm whispering too! Talking very gently, very seriously in these hushed tones. I say, “Dolly, Harry Blissman has a contract out on your life. It would really be in your best interest to skip town, to leave the act and the state and this portion of the country and maybe just . . . just get lost for a while.”
She's a got a look on that face of hers like I'm trying to explain relativity to her. Huh?!
“There are people,” I say, “people who work for the Pompiere family in Jersey, and they're coming here to kill you. Lou Manganese is on his way as we speak, my contacts are telling me. They're going to cut you into two pieces and send one piece to your parents and the other to Harry so he knows they did the job.”
And her teeth, those big buck teeth, I tell you, they were twitching! And she says, “But . . . but what about my career?”
I was almost bursting at the seams! I wanted to say, “Honey, a wax pear's got more charisma than you do.” But I said instead, “Dolly, sweetheart, this is your life we're talking about.” And I handed her an envelope and inside were two tickets. I said to her, still whispering solemnly, “Go to New York, Grand Central Station. And then go to Laramie, Wyoming. When you get to the Laramie depot you'll be met there by a man with an eye patch named Millard La Chance. He'll set you up there. He'll give you ten, maybe fifteen grand to start over. You'll be safe there. You have my guarantee. And when things have settled down, we'll send for you and you can return. But not until then.”
She was sniffling a little.
“Dolly,” I said, “you better get moving. Time is of the essence like you got no idea.”
I helped her pack. And all the time I'm looking out the window as if two hit men were about to drive up with Thompson submachine guns.
We're in my car heading toward the bus station to get to New York.
She asks me, “What's the name of this fella with the eye patch again?”
“It's Millard La Grange,” I said. “Right?”
She said, “No. I think it was La Chance you said.”
“Oh yeah, right,” I said. “La Chance. That's it. Right.”
For all I know, Dolly Phipps is still wandering around Laramie, fucking Wyoming, looking for some guy with an eye patch named Millard La Chance.
• • •
RAY FONTANA: I saw the Don Leslie band at the Ambassador, sure. And you could hear 'em Fridays on the radio, brought to you by Elgin watches. One time Vic put me on the comp list and I brought my wife, who was then just some girl I was seeing.
The whole band wore white tuxedos. Don Leslie, though, he wore white tails. It was the kind of music where you expected champagne bubbles to float out of the tuba. This wasn't my kind of music and, to be honest, I felt out of place, me an Italian fisherman with all these swells and debutantes. But Vic looked like he belonged up there. He slicked back his hair so it wasn't hanging all over his face. And when that voice came out his mouth I looked around—I thought it was a joke. This isn't Vic singing! That's what I thought, that someone else was singing and he was just up there moving his mouth. But it was him.
I don't know if it was his idea or Don Leslie's but Vic wasn't wearing white. He was the only one. The lady singer [Ruth Whitley] wore white too. But Vic had on this powder blue tux and matching shoes. And when I saw that, I remembered! The choir. When he was in that choir, he'd wear a different color too.
GUY PUGLIA: Two hundred a week—this was the most dough Vic had ever made in his life by far. I remember I called 'em two hundred clams once and Vic says to me, “Please, they ain't clams.” You just couldn't bring up seafood to him . . . it was like a jinx.
And he got a car too, his first car. A black Buick Century coupe. Used.
But with all that dough we was still staying at the Monroe.
Don Leslie, he tried to play father to him, but that Ozzie Nelson routine didn't go too far. First thing Leslie did was change Vic's name from Fontana to Fontaine, like in Joan Fontaine. He bought Vic clothing, told him about fine food. He's trying to tell Vic that you should have this wine with this veal and Vic's stuffin' his face and saying, “Oh yeah, Don? Then what kinda beer should I have with this fuckin' hot dog?” He wanted Vic to go to church every Sunday, he wanted Vic to stop going to the track, he told Vic the booze would ruin his pipes. One time he caught Vic with his hands up a floozy's skirt in the stairway of a nightclub and he pulled Vic off the broad and tried to deliver a lecture right then and there. Started talking about disease and filth and sin. Vic told him to cram it up his trombone.
Leslie was a real straight arrow. He had that big Waspy image to protect. Ruth Whitley was his girlfriend and they stayed in separate rooms but one time I saw him sneaking to her room at 3:00A.M.Some straight arrow, huh?
He even found Vic a nice spread on Broadway in the Seventies. “You don't want to live in that lice trap, do you, Vic?” he asked him. And Vic said, “Hey, they're my lice.”
ROGER DILLARD [trumpeter with the Leslie band]: Don Leslie's previous singer was Phil Hardy, who was a first-class prima donna. Then Hardy met a widowed millionairess, married her, moved to Newport, and was never heard of again until the woman found him in a hammock with a yacht boy. So Vic was a breath of fresh air, he was just one of the guys.
The girls in the audience . . . they adored him. Couldn't keep their eyes off of him.
He did have trouble with the lyrics. That was Don's big complaint. When Vic couldn't remember the words, he would mumble, moan, and basically slur over the words. And with the style of relaxed, lulling singing he was doing, you almost didn't notice it. I guarantee you, he could have slurred over an entire set and not one girl at the Ambassador would have noticed. Or if they did they wouldn't particularly care.
SNUFFY DUBIN: The very first time I ever heard of Victor Fountain or Fontaine, it was at the Mosque Theater in Newark. He was billed as “the Singing Fisherman” with the Don Leslie All-Goyishe Kupf Orchestra. My first thought was, when I heard him: Devane. This guy is doing Fritz Devane. Next song: Dick Fain. After that: Como. The man wasn't using his own voice, his own style. I saw right through it like it was fucking cellophane.
GUY PUGLIA: It was like a revolving door! Girls comin' in, girls goin' out. There were times when he'd finish up with one, bring her down to the hotel lobby—'cause he had class; a lot of other guys would've just swept 'em out the door—and then the next one was in the lobby waiting for him and he'd just bring her back up.
And don't forget it was my room too! Sometimes I had no place to go, while he was busy “accommodating” these girls. So I'd wait in the lobby and read a paper. I spent a few nights sleeping in the back of the Buick, no kidding. Or I'd go to Jack Dempsey's bar on Fiftieth Street or goof around with Hunny. Or I'd hide in the closet and listen to Vic.
There were some classy girls too, girls right out of the society columns, like Elsa Maxwell's or Hilda Fleury's. I'd be reading about some rich horse owner up at Saratoga and four floors upstairs at the Monroe, Vic was putting the sausage parmigiana to the guy's daughter.
So it wasn't all bimbos. But there were a lot of bimbos too.
Hatcheck girls at the Ambassador, waitresses at the Blue Beret Cafe, a busboy's wife, a cigarette girl here and there. Or just some lonely married lady. It just went on and on.
And I was doing all right for myself too, you know? Just from being Vic's buddy and getting his rejects. But some of these girls . . . marrone! I think I had a better time alone in the back of the Buick.
ROGER DILLARD: Vic started to get Don very angry, and I suppose that was only a matter of time. It was the girls, it was the booze and the gambling. Vic—and you have to admire him for it, I guess—he didn't do anything to hide it. He f
launted it sometimes. Vic once walked over to Don while he was drinking a glass of milk and he poured a shot of Johnnie Walker into it. “Here, boss, this'll put some hair on your nipples,” Vic said to him.
Don once said to Vic, “You're going to get a girl in trouble one day, you know that?”
And Vic laughed and said, “Man, I already did that! A few times!”
It was contagious. Vic wouldn't show Don any respect and it just followed that the band fell in with Vic. We'd be rehearsing and Vic would lay a fart into the microphone and then the drummer would cut one and we'd all pick up our horns and make fart noises with them. Don Leslie just stood there with his trombone, shaking with anger. You almost felt sorry for him.
Whenever I read nowadays how Vic Fountain was such a great song stylist, a skillful interpreter of the American songbook, a master of phrasing, the first thought in my head is of him placing the mike near his pants and ripping out a loud fart. I just don't know if Tormé, Fitzgerald, Sinatra, Bennett, or Eckstine ever did that.
RAY FONTANA: My mother would send me around Codport when the Elgin watch show was on. We were supposed to listen at the door or through the window to see which families were tuning in and which weren't.
I remember coming to Rocco Straccio's house. I'm listening in at the front door and I don't hear anything. I go to the window, I don't hear a peep. All of a sudden someone grabs me by my neck. I never was so scared in my life. It was Straccio, but you could hardly see him. I thought my heart was gonna just slip out my mouth. He asked me what I was doing and I tried to answer but no words came out.
