Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  It's Lou Manganese, me, and some shmegege manager. There's a knock on the door and in walks this young man with turquoise blue eyes and a head of hair like a tangled ball of navy blue yarn. And he says, “Anybody see Pip Grundy?”

  “We're talking business here,” Lou says.

  “Anybody see Pip Grundy?” Vic didn't even hear Lou.

  The shmegege manager winked at me. Well, I knew what that meant. “Take care of this for me, would ya?” Sometimes it's a wink, sometimes it's a nod or a smirk, it could be a rolling of the eyes. CEOs give it to VPs, kings give it to dukes, baseball managers to first-base coaches.

  I stood up and I ushered Vic out and now we're in a dark, narrow hallway.

  “You know who that is in there, pal?” I said. Keep in mind, who this ginzo Johnny Luscious is I'm yakking with now, I've got no inkling.

  “No. Who?” he says.

  “That big chimp with a thirty-eight is married to Al Pompiere's daughter.”

  “Oh yeah?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  He thinks about it a beat and says, “Big fuckin' deal. Where's Pip Grundy?” While I admired the stripling's raw bravado, I pitied his naïveté.

  I told him, “You're not going to live very long in this world, you know that?”

  “I'm just trying to make it to tomorrow afternoon's nap, buddy,” he said.

  (Man, he could've had that etched into his family crest.)

  He told me he wanted to see the Pipper so he could thank him for setting him up with the Johnny Nelson band, who were playing in Trenton just then. I informed him I'd try to relay the message but I added that, in all honesty, I'd probably forget to.

  Then I said, “You sing for Nelson, huh? 'Cause let me tell you, the way things are going with us, it's really very touch and go.”

  His eyebrows perked up visibly. “What you mean?”

  “Connie Bishop just got married and bolted the band,” I told him, “and our other vocalist is addicted to pain.”

  “Dick Fain? The baritone?”

  “Yeah, him. The man pays local high school quarterbacks to throw rocks at his head and two-hundred-pound whores to put out cigarettes on his tuches.”

  “But he can still sing good.”

  “What you hear is merely the dead echo of his charisma.”

  Vic said, “His picture's outside, on the poster . . . how old is Fain anyway?”

  “Thirty-five,” I said.

  “Going on seventy . . .”

  “I'm aware of it,” I said.

  “I mean, he looks like he's been through some real hell.”

  “I'm familiar with it. Trying to electrocute yourself for a quick pick-me-up-will do that to you.”

  “Jeez, me, I just down a coffee.”

  “Let me drop by your gig tonight,” I said to him. “I'll hear you chirp. Fain is either headed back to the nuthouse for his fifth sabbatical there or he's going to finally give himself one volt too many and sauté himself for good. We could use a young handsome set of pipes like you.”

  “Hey, for all you know, I sing like a hyena.”

  “Hey, this is Floyd Lomax's outfit we're talking about. We turn down hyenas for singing too good.”

  “Well,” he says, “tell Pip I came by, would you? What's your name anyways?”

  “Arnie Latchkey.”

  “Arnie Latchkey, huh? . . . And what do you do?”

  “Usually anything anybody tells me. And what moniker do you go by?”

  “I'm Vic Fontana but they've been calling me Vic Fontaine lately.”

  “Oh, like in Joan? Well, Floyd'll change that, mark my words.”

  And that was it. He walked down the hallway—slow fade to gray—and then exited and, Teddy, I knew I'd be seeing him again. I just knew it.

  That goddamn kismet'll bite you in the ass every single time.

  PIP GRUNDY: Cueball, Arnie, the twins [pianists Larry and Stu Morrell, Siamese twins], and I went to the Hot Spot in Trenton to hear the Nelson Orchestra. It was a frigid, windy evening.

  Dick Fain's days were numbered. We had to take precautions with him. Intricately covering the sockets, removing sharp objects from hotel rooms. Arnie would get him girls occasionally but all you heard coming from the room was this ungodly pounding.

  Vic sang well, was better now than when I'd first seen him. He really wooed that crowd. The Nelson band was mediocre at best, but Vic made them better.

  “He's not bad,” Cueball Swenson said to me. “His singing is swell.”

  “He's got something,” Arnie said to Cue. “I just don't know what it is.”

  Stu Morrell, who had little interest in music, said, “I'd say it's called ‘presence.’” Larry said, “His range ain't much but—”

  “Isn't much,” Stu corrected him. “

  Isn't much. But what he does with it is good.”

  I added that the girls were lapping him up too.

  “Like so much melting spumoni,” Arnie chimed in.

  We glanced around. There were forty girls there with jaws agape.

  We began talking about it, how to get rid of Fain. If we didn't fire him, how could we nudge him out? We knew Floyd was dying to make a change . . . but Floyd had other things on his mind, for by then he'd already met Thalia [Boneem].

  “If Fain dies, then he's out of the band,” Arnie conjectured. “And that could happen any second. Jesus, one rock in the temple too hard and he's a goner.”

  We went over every possible scenario . . . but one thing we agreed on was that Murray Katz and Floyd had to hear Vic sing. Soon.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: I went back to the Hot Spot the next night. Real solo-like. Arnie Latchkey, the stealth bomber. After the Nelson band wound up I passed a fiver to a stagehand, in lieu of a business card. I said, “Tell Vic that Arnie Latchkey from the Lomax band is here.”

  Two minutes later Vic and I are in a hallway.

  “I like the way you warble, Vic,” I said to him. He shrugged. “Where'd you learn to sing like that?”

  He said, “I had lessons.” “No. People can't teach what you got. If they did, they'd get fired. How much is Johnny Nelson paying you?”

  “Not much.”

  “Lomax could top that. How does ‘not quite enough’ sound?”

  “I'll take it.”

  I asked him, “You got a contract with Nelson, right?” He said, “Yeah, I guess. But if I do, it's no big deal. I'll quit and he'll just get another palooka. I've broken contracts before.”

  He struck me as the kind of guy who didn't give a fuck about anything. And I liked that. It reminded me of me—not the way I was but the way I wished I could be.

  I said, “You know, you were once so nervous about going onstage you puked on the reeds of our tenor sax man, Joe Lambeau. In Massachusetts. You still do that?”

  “Sounds like me. But I ain't like that anymore.”

  “That's good. Although that was the best that Joe Lambeau ever played,” I jested.

  I told him to come by our hotel at six.

  He sang “Ol' Man River” and “Always” at the audition. The first was beyond his range—only Paul Robeson and a humpback whale can really pull that off—but he nailed “Always” shut.

  After the tryout we went outside into the parking lot, me, Floyd, and Vic.

  “You're good, kid,” Floyd said to Vic.

  “I'm better than good,” Vic said. “I'm decent.”

  “We got a problem, though, and its name is Dick Fain.”

  I asked Floyd if there was an insanity clause in Fain's contract and Floyd said that if there was, Fain wouldn't have signed it because Fain wasn't crazy. Floyd and Murray Katz had been trying to nudge Fain out for weeks but the only way Fain could get the boot was if he died or quit.

  Then—Eureka!—I got an idea and was it ever a masterstroke. If the Nobel committee were around, I'd be sporting a gold medallion right now, my friend. Now, there are many shady, low-down things in my life that I've done that I'm not proud of, but this one I'm re
al proud of. We'd have Vic sing with us in rehearsals and sit in with us on gigs and radio dates. If Fain asked, “Hey, who's the Italian kid?” we'd answer, “Huh? What Italian kid?” If he asked, “Why's this handsome guy sitting in with the band?” we'd answer, “What handsome guy?”

  It was beautiful.

  GUY PUGLIA: You read the old Look magazine article about Vic, it says that he agonized over the decision to change bands. Agonized over the decision! Vic didn't agonize over anything unless it was to decide olives or a twist.

  PIP GRUNDY: We played a week in Wilmington, Delaware, and Vic sat next to Dick Fain with the band. Vic never sang, he never stood up from the chair, he just sat there right next to Fain.

  “Did you see that guy sitting on my right, Pip?” Dick asked me one night.

  “No, I didn't. What guy?” I asked.

  “The guy with the blue hair sitting immediately to my right . . . you didn't see him?”

  “Nope,” I told him almost too casually. “Blue hair, eh, Dick?”

  I remember that on the last three nights of the Wilmington engagement, when Dick would get up to sing at the mike, Vic would slide over to Dick's chair so that when Dick sat back down he'd have to sit in what had been Vic's chair.

  We'd call for rehearsals at 3:00P.M.but tell Dick they were at 3:30. Dick would come in at 3:30 and he'd see Vic singing with the band. And Vic—he was a superb mimic—would be imitating Dick Fain; he had the phrasing, the glissandos, the tone and pauses down pat. Dick would see this, hear this, and his face would turn the color of a cigarette ash.

  I was talking to Cueball Swenson one day and Dick came over and asked, “What are you guys talking about? Were you talking about how paranoid I am?”

  Cue said to him, “We were talking about how you probably think you're going to be replaced.”

  GUY PUGLIA: The Lomax band was playing the Hippodrome in Baltimore. The furnaces were turned up full blast and big Floyd is drippin' sweat like he's Niagara Falls. He's at the mike and he says, “And now Vic Fain would like to sing for you ‘Without a Song.’” And Fain stands up and then realizes as he takes his first step, Wait, my name isn't Vic Fain. And while that's occurring to him Vic has made it over to the mike and he's singing “Without a Song.” Dick Fain inches back to his chair, slowly sits down, and for a week he never stood up except for when it was to leave the entertainment business for good and hightail it into a Swiss sanitarium. He must've been happy there . . . the rumor was he was gettin' shock treatments three times a day.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: Floyd asked Vic, “Where are you from anyway, kid?”

  “Codport,” Vic said.

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “Arnie, get this kid some soap. I don't want the whole band reeking like haddock. And from now on you're Vic Fountain. I don't want anybody coming to my gigs thinking they're seeing Joan Fontaine's long lost Italian brother and then leaving disappointed.”

  “Who's Joan Fontaine?” Vic asked.

  Floyd shrugged and said to me, “Arn, with a pretty kisser like this he's gonna steal all my cooze away from me! Ha ha!” But by then big Floyd was pretty smitten with this doll he'd met named Thalia.

  They billed Vic as “the Singin', Swingin' Fisherman.” He wasn't too happy about that.

  • • •

  SALLY KLEIN: Well, guess who appears out of nowhere all of a sudden? Jerome Milton! He read Grayling Greene's column and called up Rosie in the Poconos.

  Rosie says to him, “Uh, Jerry darling, you did rip up the contract, didn't you?”

  Jerry says to her, “I ripped them up only on paper, yes, de facto technically.”

  And Rosie says, “What do you mean, ‘de facto technically’?”

  Jerry explains that while, yes, he did rip up the paperwork, the contract was for ten or so more years beyond the paper it was printed on, that the paper was only the physical manifestation of the actual agreement, which was some sort of Platonic ideal. The agreement itself was immutable and eternal, the paperwork merely transitive. “One is earthly, Rosie, and material,” he said to her, “and the other is ideal and is in heaven.” And Rosie says, “Jerry, you book circus geeks into sideshows in Tennessee! What the hell are you talking about?!”

  “I'm talking,” he tells her, “that this act is getting hotter every day. I don't know if I can keep Joe Gersh or Murray Katz away anymore from my door!”

  And Rosie said, “What in God's name are they doing at your door anyway?!”

  It was a good question.

  Ultimately, Ziggy agreed to sign with Murray Katz, and then Murray Katz sold a portion of the contract to Joe Gersh. But Uncle Harry couldn't care less. You've got ten agents and managers dipping their hands into the pie, but the thin little slice that was left for Harry and Flo was still a lot more pie than they'd ever eaten before.

  We're in the Catskills, in Loch Sheldrake, and we're driving around and Ziggy says to me, “Sal, I've got it. It occurred to me last night driving back to the hotel. I'm going solo.”

  I grabbed the wheel from him and pulled us over and we almost mowed down the last line of a Burma Shave ad. I said to him, “You could hardly hold a crowd when you had Dolly Phipps!”

  “That was Dolly's fault, that wasn't me. And don't ever bring her up again.”

  “You think you've got the baytsim to get onstage all by yourself?”

  “Sal, I've been carrying Harry and Flo on my shoulders. Imagine how good I'll be when the only thing on my back is my hair and freckles.”

  “I should get out and walk!” I told him.

  “Go ahead then. Walk.”

  But we were in some hills and ten miles away from anything.

  “Are you going to fire them?” I asked him.

  “I'd sort of like you to. I mean, this is the kind of thing you're here for.”

  I leaned my head against the window and stared at the trees and bushes until they became blurry. I told him I wouldn't do it.

  He started up the car and said, “You know, I'm doing this for Harry and Flo too, not just for me. They been working hard all their lives. They deserve a break.”

  He said something about them taking some time off, he'd pay for a trip to Paris for them. I was so distraught that I didn't even tell him that they couldn't go to Paris because the Nazis just so happened to be there. Although maybe that was what he had in mind.

  Ziggy got Jerry Milton, that doll, to fire them.

  SNUFFY DUBIN: I take some credit for this. Zig sent them to Laramie, Wyoming! For all I know, when they got off the bus there, they ran into Dolly Phipps.

  I was playing a joint in Passaic, a real dive. I was putting my act together, getting the rhythm and the pace, and picking up that sense of interaction with the audience, the rapport. Ziggy calls me up real early one day and says, “Big night tonight, Snuff, big night.”

  I think, Huh? I thought he was talking about something other than himself for once and I was trying to figure out why it was a big night for me. So I said, “Yeah, big night.”

  “Snuffy, I need some gags,” he said.

  And I realized it, that he was talking about himself. It was his big debut as a solo . . . he was calling me from Heine's in Loch Sheldrake.

  “You got Danny McGlue for that, Zig,” I said. “I give you my material, people will think I swiped it from you when they see me perform.”

  “Just give me three jokes and I'll give you credit.”

  “Danny McGlue, Zig,” I said.

  “Snuffy, I think I made a mistake. I don't know about this solo deal. I mean, who do you play off of when you're up there?”

  “Nobody,” I told him. “You're naked. It's you and the walls and two hundred people who fucking hate you for raping their daughter and then burning her alive. That's what it's like.”

  “Christ, that don't sound too good.”

  I said, “Zig, you're ten times funnier than I am. You were born with it. A guy like you don't even need gags. Just get up there and shpritz. You'll have 'em in your hands in a minute.”<
br />
  “You think so?”

  I could tell he was getting confident and excited. “I know so, pal,” I told him.

  I hung up the phone and I realized: I either just created a comedy juggernaut or the biggest dud since the Stone Age.

  DANNY McGLUE: I saw Harry and Flo get on the Greyhound . . . a bellhop helped Flo with her bag, which was bigger than she was. He tried to help Harry too but Harry insisted on carrying his valises himself. He could barely do it. The bus driver loads the luggage into the bus, and Harry and Florence are about to board. 'Bye, Mommy! 'Bye, Poppy!” Ziggy calls out from outside the lobby, under the awning. He looked like a kid, like a ten-year-old. And they looked so old. Flo called out, “Good luck, Ziggy!” and Ziggy called back, “Thanks, Mom!” She told him to eat well and wear a scarf and cap at night because it got cold up there, even in the summer. Harry called out to him to not be nervous and to keep 'em laughing. “Okay, Pop!” Ziggy yelled out. They got on the bus and my heart nearly broke.

  Ziggy's first performance was on a Wednesday night in late spring. It was a good crowd. There was a lot of local tub-thump . . . the posters saidZIGGY BLISSMAN, ALONE AT LAST.

  You know, I've seen a lot go wrong in this business. Once I saw a tenor have a heart attack and die onstage exactly at the moment in the opera when his character was supposed to die, and the cast and the audience had no idea he'd really died. I've also seen an actor deliver one of the most breathtakingly beautiful versions of the Hamlet “To be or not to be” soliloquy, but unfortunately he was appearing in Macbeth at the time.