Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  “Fantabulous,” Arnie said. “And you mean ‘amenable,’ I believe.”

  “As for your and Sally's cut, I'd like—”

  Arnie waved his hand—that discussion would wait until a better time. They shook hands and Arnie walked out, then Ziggy sat down and let go a big sigh.

  “There's the little matter now,” I reminded him, “of burying your parents . . .”

  “Oh yeah . . . them,” he said.

  They were buried side by side not too far from Grossinger's. I had to arrange “kiddie coffins” for them because they were so small. There was one tombstone; it said “The Blissmans” and the years of their births and deaths. Seeing their names that way reminded me of when they were in vaudeville and their names were up on a marquee. But then I remembered that their names never did make it to a marquee.

  Years later, Ziggy had them moved to Home of Peace [Cemetery in Los Angeles], to a very grand mausoleum, something fit for royalty. Whether he ever visited it or not, I don't know.

  SNUFFY DUBIN: I get a telegram the next day from Ziggy. Something to the effect of: “Snuffles stop Have struck Italian gold stop Remember our nonexistent plans to double stop Well, plans are off stop Who needs you anyways, you big putz stop Ever heard of Vic Fountain from Floyd Lomax band stop We're a duo now stop Can you come to Heine's PDQ stop PS On sad note, parents dead.”

  I was playing the Shea Theater in Buffalo and I told the manager I couldn't make the next show due to a death in the family. I used that excuse a lot—man, I think I must've killed off about eighty aunts and uncles that way.

  I drove to Heine's and caught the act. I'd seen Vic sing before and by now his voice and his style had gotten a lot better. He was talking to the crowd now too, relating to them. In the fourth song Ziggy came onstage and that's where it began. They didn't do jokes, they didn't do gags. There were no punch lines. It wasn't the Ritz Brothers, it wasn't Burns and Allen, it wasn't Groucho and Chico. It wasn't like anything I'd ever seen before.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: I called Vic at ten in the morning and to my surprise he was awake. Probably, though, he hadn't fallen asleep that night. I told him to meet me right away in the coffee shop right off the lobby. He said, “Latch, do I have to?” And I told him, yeah, he really did.

  Ten minutes later we're sitting at a table and having coffee. There are about thirty other people there and as Vic and I confab, they're all looking at us. This was my very first taste of this. They're looking and leaning toward each other to whisper and sort of pointing at us. What they were saying was: “That's Vic! The guy who was so funny last night!”

  “Ziggy Blissman wants to do a double with you,” I told him.

  “Oh yeah?” Vic said.

  “Yeah, like a song and comedy thing. Mostly comedy.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I would talk to you.”

  “Well, tell the kid sure. Sure,” Vic said. He was thinking it over as he was talking. Or maybe it was like he heard his own voice coming out his maw and he happened to agree with it. “It's a really good idea. I think it'd work out. Sure.”

  “There's all kinds of stuff to go over,” I said to him. “There's stuff with Murray Katz and Joe Gersh and all kinds of people.”

  “I don't wanna know about that,” he said. “I'll sing. I'll play with the kid. I'll do whatever. The only paperwork I want you to give me has George Washington on it.”

  “Gotcha, Vic.”

  You know, I never had any kind of deal with Fountain and Bliss. There was a handshake but I'm not even certain we shook hands all around; I shook Vic's hand and Ziggy's too, but I'm not too sure if they ever shook each other's. If you're picturing The Oath of the Horatii or the Three Musketeers hoisting up one big “all for one and one for all,” boy, you got it all wrong.

  Let's say Ziggy and Vic were booked into Ciro's or the Blue Beret. Or the Copa. I get off the phone with Jules Podell and tell the boys, “Okay, guys, you're booked into the Copa for a week and you're making twenty grand.” And Ziggy would say, “How's three thousound, Latch?” And I'd look over to Vic and he'd shrug. I'd say, “Sounds good.” Vic didn't really care how much I made—sometimes I don't think he even cared how much he made—but I always made certain the figures were square with Ziggy. He knew the numbers like most people know their own birthdays.

  SALLY KLEIN: That whole week it was standing room only at Heine's. The same people were coming back too, night after night! We had to turn people away.

  I met with Arnie in his hotel room. We had to talk to Rosie, Jerry Milton, and the rest. And we had to do it before they read about Ziggy and Vic in Variety, Metronome, or Billboard. The plan was to play it down. Think about it: You had Ziggy, who'd once frozen like a Popsicle onstage alone, and you had Vic, who bounced from lousy band to lousy band and had never struck it big. It was, on paper, a disaster. This was like me calling up and saying, “Guess what?! Lizzie Borden and Rasputin are teaming up to do a tap dance act!” Arnie and I hoped that everybody would run for cover when they heard that.

  It worked. They ran.

  Rosie told me, “They're yours!” I reminded her of Jerry Milton, how he'd pulled that Platonic ideal contractual thing, and she said, “I don't know about that and I don't know who this Vic Fountain fella is. Sally, they're all yours! Take 'em.”

  I called Jerry in New York and then Joe Gersh and Murray Katz. Joe and Murray knew all about Vic and weren't too sad to see us take him off their hands. Arnie then called a lawyer he knew in New York and all of them—Rosie, Jerry Milton, Gersh and Katz, even Don Leslie!—gladly washed their hands of the matter. It was like we were trying to borrow a car and they thought it was a Corvair and said, “Here. Please. Don't bother returning it.” But it turned out to be a solid gold Rolls.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: It all happened quickly, like surgery. Sally handled Ziggy's people, I handled Vic's. Sally had quite the business acumen for such a young girl. Her old man manufactured girdles, so maybe that was it. And I was no slouch either. She'd make a call and she'd write things down that the person on the line was saying and I'd write down things to her, and then she'd do that to me when I was on the phone. It was very symbiotic, let me tell you.

  My one worry was that one of these people was going to say, “You can have Vic in his entirety in perpetuity forever but you'll have to pay me ten grand.” Now, well I knew that the act I was sitting on—Fountain and Bliss—was going to make ten grand easy. Easy! But we didn't have that kind of money just then. As a matter of fact I didn't even have any kind of money just then. So when I'm on the phone and talking to these people, in the back of my mind is: Where am I gonna get this dough so quick? There's my brother, but he don't have that kind of cake and we're even—he don't owe me any favors anymore. There's my old man, but he don't have that kind of cake either and besides we barely talked. I can't call him up and say, “Hey, so how is everything? Lend me ten grand to buy out Ziggy Blissman and Vic Fountain.” Even I had some sense of decorum.

  Sally and I agreed that, in toto, the ceiling would be ten grand all around. That's the most we could go, was buy out Vic Fountain and Ziggy Blissman for ten grand.

  So now Don Leslie and I are on the phone and he says, “There is the subject of money, of course, Mr. Latchland.” The man called me Latchland, Lapland, Bletchley—everything but Latchkey, that momzer! And I said, “Yes, Mr. Wesley, there is that touchiest of all subjects known to men.” And he says, “I should hope that negotiations between us are conducted in a cordial yet frank manner, Mr. Lakeland.” And he's probably thinking, I'm not letting you rob me blind, you dirty stinking Jew! So I say to him, “Why, naturally, Mr. Westfield. We are both gentlemen of the old school, are we not?” I'm getting ready to throw out a dollar amount, how much I am willing to pay to own, if you will, Vic outright. He says, while all these numbers are swirling around in my head like so much confetti, “How does two thousand dollars sound, Leakey?” And I say, “Capital!” And exactly while I'm thinkin', Now where can I rus
tle up two grand? Don Leslie says, “I'll wire the money to you at Heine's first thing.”

  Sally got a grand and a half from Rosie Baer too. So, not only did we not have to part with $10,000 that we never did have, we actually wound up making $12,000 from everyone!

  • • •

  TONY FERRO: The first time I ever in my life heard of Ziggy Bliss was when Ray Fontana tells me that Vic is now partners with him. The name meant niente to me. I say to Ray, “How long do you think this relationship is gonna work out?” and Ray says, 'cause he knew Vic's track record, “I give it a maybe a week, tops.”

  CATHERINE RICCI: I'd just gotten engaged to Carmine [Ricci] when Vic told me the news. He called home to tell Mamma first but she was working at her fortune-telling parlor. Vic told me he was no longer a singer and I asked if he wasn't that, then what was he doing, playing pool? And he said he was “entertaining.” I said to him, “You're entertaining but you're not a singer? What are you doing, juggling pool balls then?” He said, “I'm kind of in a comedy deal, you could say, with this other fella, this Jewish guy.” I said to him, “You want me to tell Mamma this? 'Cause I'm not doing it.”

  I dropped in on Carmine at his bakery and told him what Vic had told me. Carmine had heard of Ziggy Bliss because he'd heard him and his parents on Lenny Pearl's old radio show. “I didn't know Vic was funny at all, Cathy,” he said to me.

  “I guess he's going to be the one that's not funny,” I said to him. But it occurred to me: Vic was always a really funny kid. He was sometimes better at being funny than he was at singing, as a matter of fact. People were always calling him a wiseass.

  RAY FONTANA: Somehow it became my duty to tell my mother. Probably 'cause everyone else was afraid to.

  I went to Haddock Street where the Madame Violet fortune-telling parlor was. This wasn't goin' to be easy—imagine you want your kid to go to medical school and now you hear he's waiting tables. I climb the stairs—this place had beads, pictures of the Virgin Mary, candles all 'round—and there's Lulu working the till and three old ladies sitting on a couch waiting to see Mamma.

  “What's going on, Ray?” Lu asks me. Jesus, I was so worked up about how was I gonna break the news to my mother I'd forgotten that Lulu was going to be there too.

  “Lu,” I say, “it's about Vic but don't worry. He's okay. He's giving up the singing a little and he's gonna be in a comedy act.”

  Lulu said to me, “But I thought you said Vic was okay.”

  She brought me in to see my mother and it was just me sitting between the two of them on a couch. Not a position anybody'd ever wanna find himself in, believe me . . . I'd have rather been gutting scrod at that second.

  When I broke the news Mom picked up her crystal ball and tossed it across the room. If the women on the couch hadn't ducked in time, I'd still be pluckin' the glass out of their cheeks.

  CATHERINE RICCI: Me and Ray borrowed Sal's car and we drove to the Catskills. From how Carmine had described it, I was envisioning Ziggy like an adult wearing diapers and with a pacifier. I was picturing all kinds of things. I imagined Vic dressed in a clown suit, I imagined Vic and Ziggy looking like Laurel and Hardy but both in diapers. Everything ran through my mind.

  I'd never been to Heine's before, or to any of those places . . . Grossinger's, the Concord, Marx's, Kutsher's. This was a whole new world for me. I got out that car and people were looking at us like we just stepped out of a flying saucer.

  RAY FONTANA: Pop would've said something like, “Mazzi Cristo, wallto-wall.” Christ killers all over.

  [Cathy and I] checked in and we were tired . . . it's a very long drive from Codport to the Catskills. We get our rooms and then this guy in the lobby, he was wearing a Heine's uniform, tries to joke around with me. But I wasn't up for no jokin' around, right? . . . I wanted to go to my room and wash up and then see Vic. This guy's doing all sorts of jokes and stuff but I'm not playing along. Jesus Christ, I can't tell you how out of place I felt. I say to this guy, I whisper to him right in his ear, “Leave me the fuck alone or I'll mash your fuckin' nose down into your throat.” And he decided to leave.

  Cathy and I are walking through the lobby and we see this poster; it said on it something likeHILARIOUS SENSATIONorSENSATIONAL HILARITYor something. There was a photo of Vic and one of Ziggy Bliss, except he was still Ziggy Blissman then. I gotta admit: Alls I did was take one look at that picture and I started giggling.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: “Fountain and Blissman,” it occurred to me right away, not only did not have a ring to it, it had a built-in thud. It dies on the tongue like ten-year-old cottage cheese, am I right? Now, the straight man usually comes first: Burns and Allen, Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello. Of course, you've got Laurel and Hardy but Laurel was British and they also drive on the wrong side of the road. Rowan and Martin. Rossi and Allen [ sic]. I did try Blissman and Fountain and, you know, that sounded better . . . but still, the funny guy comes second.

  I called up Ziggy's bungalow and said, “Hey, how'd you like to change your last name?” I stated my case and, as I did so, in the back of my mind is: Uh-oh, this is going to be our first quarrel and the kid is going to throw a fit and then it's all over. (That day, Sally had warned me about his temper and his fits.) But he said, “Arnie, I think that's a real good idear. Ziggy Bliss it is. I'll have Sally handle the legal stuff on that real pronto-like.” End of phone call.

  I thought, Jesus, this road is really going to be smooth. It ain't even gonna be a road, it's gonna be more like a path.

  SALLY KLEIN: For the first year they were together, I remember hearing people mistakenly refer to the act as “Fountain of Bliss.”

  • • •

  DANNY McGLUE: It was the most sensational act I'd seen up to then. I'd seen Berle, [Phil] Silvers, Jimmy Durante, Cubby Cavanaugh, Burns and Allen, Benny . . . but even they after five minutes could get so predictable. The first time I saw Ziggy and Vic together—it was at Heine's—I had no idea where it was going. You ever been dreaming and you know you're dreaming and you're thinking, Okay, where is this going to end? Do I let it end or should I wake up? That's what the act was like.

  It wasn't easy for me to get backstage . . . it was so crowded. Oh, you know who was there? Bud Hatch from the Globe. And there were all kinds of people, it was bustling, like the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera. So I shouted over to Bernie Heine, “Bernie, tell Zig that Danny McGlue's here!” He shouted back, “Okay, Danny, but there's lots going on back there!” That SOB waited a good ten minutes before he went in to Ziggy's dressing room. And you know, they'd used some of my gags and songs, Vic and Ziggy had.

  Finally this tall guy in powder blue with Coke-bottle eyeglasses, a long face, and rubbery lips comes out and says, “You're Danny McGlue?”

  I tell him I am and I ask who's he and he says he's Arnie Latchkey.

  “Look,” he says, “I know we used some of your material and we're willing to remunerate you for this. If you contact a Miss Sally Klein at—”

  “Look, I'm not here for remuneration,” I said to Arnie—I didn't even know what the word meant, I just knew that I wasn't there for it.

  A minute later I'm in Ziggy's dressing room. He's got the white towel over him and the ice is dripping down. And instead of a bottle of scotch, there are two bottles of champagne in two buckets.

  “Danny, this is Vic Fountain,” Ziggy says. “Vic, all those jokes that didn't get no laughs—Danny wrote those.”

  Vic and I shook hands and I told him I thought the act was socko. Someone pours me a glass of champagne and I start to tell Vic the whole Danny McGlue and Ziggy Blissman saga. I'm halfway through and he says, “Uh-huh,” then veers away and starts talking to a blonde. I don't know if he caught a word of what I was saying. If he did, he sure didn't seem to care.

  GUY PUGLIA: I was back in New York, sparring for a few bucks a day at Gleason's Gym and at Pops Deegan's and waiting tables some nights. I'd spar with Hunny, who had fifty pounds on me, which was a joke. He'd go thirty s
econds and then want to take a break to throw back ten hamburgers.

  One day at the Monroe, my cousin Pooch hands me a telegram, it's from Vic. It says that I was to go up to the Catskills as soon as I finished reading the wire . . . Vic would pay me back for the bus fare, it says. And the last line, I swear, is “Goomba, we're going to be rich real soon.” With that in mind, I was on a Greyhound within ten minutes.

  SALLY KLEIN: Look at this wonderful old picture of the dining room at Heine's. Arnie must've taken it. You see how there's Vic's side of the table and Ziggy's? Cathy's there, with her brother Ray. They'd never had Jewish food before. I really think they were looking to pour some marinara sauce on the noodle pudding. That's Guy Puglia sitting next to Ray. This must be one of the last photographs of Guy before that horrible thing happened to him. So sad. Bud Hatch, the columnist, is next to Guy, and that's Jean Hatch, his wife. In his column he always referred to Jean as “the SL,” as in Scintillating Lady. Far from it, you can see. She used to drink a tub of gin for breakfast, it was said, but Bud was the very first reporter to cover us. I don't know who these two girls are, on Jeanie Hatch's right. In every group picture taken at Heine's or Grossinger's, there are always two people and you have no idea at all who they are, and these must be them.

  That's Danny on Ziggy's left and that's me sitting next to Danny. He was quite handsome then, don't you think? A few weeks after this picture was taken, Danny and I were very deeply in love. I'd already had a crush on him for a few weeks but nobody had any idea. Who could I tell? On my left is Snuffy Dubin, who looked very dashing and dapper back then . . . he's sure put on a few pounds since then, but who hasn't? The woman next to him is Gertrude Heine, Bernie's wife, and that's Bernie Heine next to her. Bernie passed away on the same day they dynamited his hotel to smithereens in 1967, which is not as coincidental as it may sound considering that Bernie made sure to be in the hotel when they pushed the plunger. He wanted to go down with the ship, he said, but wound up going all over it instead.