Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  He grabs my nose between his fingers, twists it, and says, “I got your nose.” I ran back home holding my nose and I told my mother I was never doing that again.

  GUY PUGLIA: Hunny Gannett—we first met him at the Smokestack Lounge—introduced Vic and me to the ponies. Vic at first couldn't really understand the Daily Racing Form. Now, Hunny—who knew if he could even read at all, but all them little numbers and symbols he could make out just fine. And he knew some of the jockeys too. He'd say, “Vic, stick four to win on Sugar Grove in the third” and then two minutes later Vic, who'd lost his shirt already on the daily double, now had his shirt back plus a few new pairs of pants.

  You know what happened one time? Me, Hunny, and Vic was at the track, at Belmont. And someone recognized Vic! It was the first time. This guy walks right up to us and says, “Hey, you sing with Don Leslie!”

  And Vic says to the guy, “Yeah, I sing with Don Leslie.”

  The guy says, “My fiancée really likes you.”

  “Oh yeah?” Vic says. “She here?”

  The guy points and says, “Yeah, she's over there.”

  And there about fifteen seats away is this broad with curly black hair in a black cloth coat with a red scarf on, a very pretty girl, and I see Vic's face turn white. And so does hers.

  “Why don't you go over and just say hello?” the guy says. “Her name's Patty. It'll make her day.”

  And Vic says, “Just beat it, pal. Okay?”

  And this idiot just stands there—he doesn't put two and two together. And I see this girl panicking; she sees Vic and is petrified he's gonna come over with her beau. Everybody knew what was going on except that idiot. Hunny picks the guy up, walks him over, and plunks him down in his seat right next to Patty, who's still shaking with the fear of gettin' caught.

  “Thanks, Hun,” Vic said.

  ED J. McDOWELL [former editor at Ring magazine]: Hunny Gannett was the prototypical club fighter of the thirties, forties, and fifties and was barely qualified to make anyone's Bum of the Month Club. After he became a saloon keeper, restaurateur, raconteur, actor, bon vivant, and game show panelist, people often forgot he'd been a prizefighter. Tracking down his record as a heavyweight is a futile enterprise as he fought under so many noms de guerre. Tiziano “Big Red” Vecellio, “Batsy” Patsy Conklin, “Mighty” Moses Klein, “Kaiser” Willy Mueller, et cetera. If there was an ethnic group, he carried their standard. His father was Hungarian, from just outside Miskolc, and the last name, now lost to us, was anglicized from something similar to Gannett, but with many z's, s's, and k's in it. Hunny's real first name was Atillio and from that we get Hunny, as in Atilla the Hun. Some people make the artful leap: boxing, the sweet science, sweet, honey, Hunny. But that's a flight of fancy. Hunny comes from Hun.

  [He lost] to Max Baer, he lost to Primo Carnera, he lost to Joe Louis, he lost to Tonys Galento, Zale, and Mutti, and innumerous other Tonys long forgotten. One night he lost by a third-round knockout on the undercard in Paterson, New Jersey, and then fought under a different name two fights later and was knocked out again. It should be pointed out that his father had moved from Hungary to Oakburn, Manitoba, before Hunny was born; the lad grew up in a house on 31 Queer Street. It was supposed to be Queen Street but there was a misprint on the map and the name stuck. As every fight fan knows, “Queer Street” is ring argot—as is “spaghetti legs”—for when a boxer is punched so silly, he has no idea where he is, who he is, or why. It should also be pointed out that Gannett, when his fight career was over, briefly endorsed a macaroni product called Spaghetti Legs. The box that this pasta came in featured a small picture of the retired prizefighter, with his boxing gloves on, holding up a plate of steaming leg-shaped noodles.

  Hunny won fights too. He won them savagely, brutally, sometimes very suddenly. Sometimes not. There was no artistry, no pugilistic panache, no Fred Astaire élan—he floated more like the Merrimac than he did a butterfly and on those occasions when he stung it was more like Big Bertha than a bee. More Marquis de Sade than Marquis of Queensberry.

  He killed at least four people in the ring. A palooka from Evanston, Illinois, named Joe Pollo he dispatched to his maker with one left hook in the ninth round. It was the first and last punch Hunny Gannett threw the entire fight. By that time his own face looked like so much cold spaghetti and tomato sauce. One punch and the Evanston Assassin was dead. The Chicago Tribune wouldn't run the photo, not because Pollo had died, not because of how slack his body looked laid out on the canvas, but because Hunny Gannett's face—the face of the victor, mind you—was such a nauseating eyeful.

  Grayling Greene, the columnist, once wrote that Hunny Gannett left more brain tissue, his own and others, on canvas than Reubens did paint. I told Hunny that line at his saloon and he had a clever comeback line; he said, “Did I once have brain tissue, Eddie?”

  GUY PUGLIA: People think of Hunny and they see his big head with these big dark eyes and those car-tire lips and the Frankenstein forehead . . . and they think of his saloon. Or they think of him on the panel of What Is It? They didn't know Hunny the man.

  One time in the fifties, Vic, [valet] Joe Yung, me, and Hun was at Santa Anita. Vic put $100 across the board on a ten-to-one horse Gerry Kent was riding. The horse wins and we all go to the winner's circle and then the barn to meet Gerry Kent. Now Kent recognized Vic of course and he recognized Hunny but he didn't know me and Chinese Joe from Eisenhower and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. So I shake Gerry Kent's hand and he says to me, “Hey, you should be a jockey.”

  I said to him, “I ain't no jockey.”

  And he says, “I think I'm taller than you. You should ride horses, pal.”

  I said to him again, “I ain't no jockey.”

  He says, “There's something wrong with being a jockey, is there, pipsqueak?”

  I make a lunge for him . . . we're on the ground and I'm punching him in the face and he's trying to bite my hands, him in his lime green silks and yellow beanie with a red hoop. Gerry goddamn Cunt. He was pretty strong—the sonuvabitch rode race horses, for Christsake—but he wasn't no fighter. I'm trying to get at his face and suddenly—whoosh —Hunny lifts me off him by my collar, with one hand yet, lifts me right off him.

  Then Hunny says to Gerry Kent—and you gotta remember that when he spoke he sounded just like a cow if a cow could talk—he says, “Okay, Gerry, now eat some slop.”

  “Huh?” Kent says. And there's some mixture in a big square bucket that the horses eat, it looked like mud and quicksand and oats and I-don'tknow-what.

  “Eat the slop.”

  He had no choice. So we all watched as he stuffed his face full of about five pounds of this horse meal. He couldn't race the rest of the card 'cause of the weight gain.

  And that's Hunny Gannett.

  You know, Vic was booted out of the Leslie band because of the Kid Burcham fight. It had nothing to do with singing.

  Hunny was fighting at Sunnyside Garden. Kid Burcham—he looked like Tab Hunter but with real solid muscle—he was from Ohio and worked out at Pops Deegan's Gym on Amsterdam Avenue. Pops was a great trainer, he knew boxing inside and out and would take on raw street toughs and train them, but the word was that he was a finocchio and had flings with a few of the fighters in his stable.

  Hunny had gotten me, Vic, Don Leslie, and Ruth Whitley tickets. Ringside. And Leslie had shown up in his white tie and tails. All immaculate-like.

  When Hunny seen this Kid Burcham in the ring, his eyes lit up, and those were dark eyes he had too. People called Burcham the Akron Adonis and the Ohio Apollo. He didn't have so much as one nick on his face. And Hunny was just a big bohunk galoot, you know? He wanted to smear the Akron Adonis like jam all over Queens Boulevard.

  ED J. McDOWELL: Gannett was paid a hundred bucks to lose. Al Pompiere's son-in-law, Lou Manganese, had walked into the gym where Hunny trained and said to him, “How'd you like to lose Friday night in Sunnyside?” Manganese wasn't merely being curious and it wasn't really a question, and he
tendered the fighter a C-note to prove it. “And I want you to lose by a decision. No dives, Hun,” Manganese said. Hunny promised him, “Okay, Lou, I'll be on my feet when the bell sounds.”

  It was one of the worst sanctioned beatings ever inflicted in a so-called civilized society. Kid Burcham hit Gannett with everything he had and when he ran out of the things he had, he cashiered his own future for more. Burcham walloped him, he thrashed him, he kept coming and coming. Not once did Gannett hold his fists up to defend himself. By the fifth round both of Hunny's eyes were swollen shut, and there was a paperback booksize cut running along his forehead. His lower lip had to be stapled back on. The referee had fashioned a makeshift headdress out of a towel to protect himself from the bile spraying onto him from Gannett's face. Hunny didn't move, he just stood there and took it. In the seventh round he was being hit by his own teeth; he'd lost two teeth, which were now embedded in Burcham's glove, and each time Burcham punched him it was like a mallet coming at him with two razor blades attached.

  Gannett was behind on points. In between rounds when Gussie Beck, his trainer, held out a bucket and implored him, “Liquid! Spit! Spit out some liquid!” Gannett uttered to him the now-classic corner quip: “Gussie, the only liquid I got left is my checking account!”

  Kid Burcham was exhausted; he'd run a marathon, he'd fought a war, he'd spent it all. Pops Deegan was about to throw in the towel for him, but this doomed blond gladiator wouldn't have it. The bell in the final round tolled—almost mournfully, some said—and Burcham staggered to the center of the ring, where Gannett strode with no small measure of gallantry to meet him, almost slipping on the five humors he'd shed. Burcham could barely lift his own arms. “Come on, Kid,” Hunny said to him, “come on and lick me.” He raised his gloves at this point, beckoning for Burcham's fists—the first time Hunny's hands had been lifted above his waist since he'd shaken his opponent's hand and wished him luck. But, above his own desperate wheezing, the Kid couldn't hear anything Gannett was saying.

  They stood there for a minute.

  “All right then,” Hunny said, keenly aware of the ticking clock.

  Hunny reared back with his right and swung flush into Kid Burcham's forehead. There was no whiplash, no sudden snapping. “The roof came clean off of Kid Burcham's house, as if blown off by a tornado whirling inside it,” some scribe in the Daily News wrote, “and all the belongings came exploding out.” There was a god-awful, terrible silence. A stentorian silence. Burcham fell like he'd been thrown down a garbage chute.

  The bell sounded as the referee was counting him out. Kid Burcham was saved by the bell. He was dead. Hunny had killed him, had rent his head in twain, but the Kid had won on points. And Gannett got to keep his hundred dollars.

  GUY PUGLIA: The Kid Burcham fight was like sitting in on spleen surgery done with tire irons. When it was over, there was no noise, no clappin' or cheers or nothin'. A few people stood around the ring to officially pronounce the Ohio Apollo dead. I looked down . . . I was gonna say a prayer. Then I saw that I was covered with blood and stuff. I elbow Vic and I say, “Get a load of this!” And Vic looks at me and then at himself. And he's got it all over him too.

  There were little strands of stuff on me, like macaroni. And worse stuff, much worse stuff. I bend over in my seat and I start retching . . . Vic's vomiting too. And while we're doing that we looked over to Don Leslie and Ruth Whitley and they're covered with the same muck. They got it worse than we did—it looked like someone had tossed two gallons of Maypo on each of 'em. You couldn't see one speckle of white on Don Leslie's tuxedo. They were both passed out.

  The next day when Vic showed up to rehearse he was fired.

  And a week after that we was back in Codport again.

  • • •

  SALLY KLEIN: After Ziggy got rid of Dolly, he started to go crazy with girls. He wasn't famous yet and he wasn't good-looking—he wasn't ever good-looking—but with some women, if you just put a microphone in front of a man, even if he looks like three-week-old gefilte fish, he becomes Clark Gable.

  There were girls in the towns in the Catskills—I don't even know if you could say they were call girls; I doubt they had phones or knew how to use them. Somehow he found them.

  I called Rosie Baer in Pennsylvania . . . I really was at the end of my rope. All that tension. Harry, Flo, and Ziggy . . . such arguing like you've never heard. Rosie told me that if it was really too much for me I should quit. Then she mentioned how much the act was bringing in a week. Now, it wasn't thousands, don't get me wrong, they were not living like the Rockefellers. But it was a lot. Rosie said that Harry and Flo's old manager [Jerome Milton] was getting suspicious now; he'd ripped up all the contracts but by now he'd heard how well they were doing. And Rosie had even gotten calls from Joe Gersh from MCA and Murray Katz from Worldwide American . . . those sharks were flitting around.

  So there was all this money and excitement now. But Rosie said that if I wanted to quit I should quit.

  My mother told me that if I dropped out, someone else would take my place. They reminded me that this was my own family, my cousin and my aunt and uncle.

  I didn't know what to do.

  I was having dinner with Ziggy and I just came out with it. I told him I had no life, that my life was making sure that Harry and Flo didn't have nervous breakdowns. I didn't have a boyfriend and I wasn't in school and this wasn't really a job. He said, “Sal, when things fall into place I'll have either Joe or Murray put you on the payroll. Until then, I'll add another thirty bucks a week to your salary.”

  I said to him, “Joe Gersh or Murray Katz?”

  And now I knew those sharks were flitting around because Ziggy had contacted them. He was trying to dump Rosie Baer.

  LENNY PEARL: To me, radio was a big racket. I never felt like such a gonif in all my life. After vaudeville and burlesque, radio was a day at the beach! I had writers, producers, engineers, I had three or four other people on the air with me, like [announcer, singer] Billy Quinn, who was a dear man. And Viceroy [cigarettes] was paying me more money than I knew what to do with. A real racket.

  My producer [Tony Freedman] comes into my dressing room one day and says, “Do you know anyone named Rosie Baer?” And I said, yeah, sure I did. And I get on the phone and Rosie and I exchange pleasantries and she tells me how good the Battling Blissmans were doing. I thought it was April Fool's Day! She might as well have been trying to tell me Hitler was good for the Jews. She tells me that it wasn't the Battling Blissmans now, she says that Harry and Flo had taken a backseat, to which I replied, “Can anybody even see them sitting back there?”

  I sent one of Tony Freedman's assistants up to Marx's over the weekend to catch the act. He calls me from the hotel, tells me that the act is hilarious. I said, “Hey, are you sure you went to the right hotel?”

  So then I sent Tony Freedman himself up and, son of a gun, he actually called me during the act. He said, “Lenny, we gotta put them on.”

  I was baffled. Because you have to understand, when I think of Harry and Flo I think of people snoring and getting up to leave. And now my producer is urging me to give them air time!

  “All right,” I said. “Let's put 'em on. What the hell.”

  GLENN PETTIBON [assistant to the producer of The Viceroy Hour]: Lenny Pearl didn't ever rehearse. I read something once where he said that that took away all the spontaneity—well, that's hogwash. He didn't like to rehearse because he had other things to do, such as nap and play pinochle, chase girls, and ignore his wife. So we'd take turns filling in for him at the rehearsals. A lot of time it was Billy Quinn, who detested Lenny. He'd make fun of Lenny while standing in for him . . . and it was hilarious. He did the New Yorky accent, he flubbed the lines, he'd do some off-color material—it was the funniest comedy they ever had on the show and of course nobody outside the studio ever heard a word of it.

  Tony had allotted about ten minutes of airtime to the Blissmans. If you went over by one second it was considered high trea
son. They had eight minutes to do their material, and then Lenny would shoot the breeze with them for two, and then they broke for Viceroy advertising. So for our first rehearsal Billy Quinn—he died in North Africa in the war, by the way—“was” Lenny Pearl. Ziggy and his parents had a routine: he wanted a pet parrot and his parents were against it. So they're doing the routine and it just wasn't going anywhere. Tony calls for a break and asks them what's wrong. See, they were used to all sorts of pandemonium, to chaos and adlibbing, but now they were in a studio and they had to do their act in eight minutes. (I saw Fountain and Bliss a few years later in Miami Beach and they couldn't put out a cigarette in eight minutes!)

  They took it from the top and tried to play it a little looser but now it was as if they were playing at being looser and freer. It just wasn't natural. So Tony talked to them again and Ziggy was sweating up a monsoon. Billy Quinn came over to me and said, “Who are these pip-squeaks anyway?” And I said, “I heard they were funny,” and he said, “Well, they're not.”

  The night before we went on the air we did the last rehearsal and I stood in for Lenny Pearl. The Blissmans had gotten no better, Ziggy was fidgety and sweaty—it was as if you'd locked a wolverine in a tight cage. He was squirming.

  I said to Billy, “They're going to stink. Lenny's going to have a stroke.”

  “Good!” Billy said. He really hated him that much.

  SNUFFY DUBIN: I was at Jimmy Dooley's [bar] on Eighth Avenue with Zig an hour before he went on. He was beefing about how's he supposed to do the act in eight minutes, how's he supposed to be himself? I know exactly where he was coming from. My Vegas act was an hour, an hour and a half sometimes if I was really on. I go on Carson, I get five minutes. I do Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, I get enough time for a hiccup. It's like trying to get twenty pounds of chopped liver on one fucking saltine. She ain't gonna hold.