by Ted Heller
“I've just met the most delicious young boy!” she told me one night.
“Oh really, have you, Connie?” I asked, actually imagining an eight-year-old.
“He's on the Louis Bingham program, darling. Have you ever heard it?”
I told her I did not listen to such fare, something which she was already aware of.
“Tell me, Gracie,” she asked me, “have you ever been kissed by a dago?”
The veal I was eating nearly slipped into my lungs.
“I beg your pardon, Connie?”
“This boy is as Italian as zucchini and just as delectable,” she told me. “He can't be more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Has the blackest hair you've ever seen. Why, it's almost blue! Like an eggplant! And such shoulders. Mmm-mmmm!”
She told me that she'd recently met him at Schrafft's. They'd chatted very briefly after being introduced and then he asked for her phone number.
“I find this very intriguing, Grace,” she said with a long, deep puff. She used an incredibly ornate and long cigarette holder.
That night in our apartment, she turned on the Bingham show, and while I heard the audience laughing at Fountain and Bliss, I stumbled on a small crumpled piece of paper. Written on it was a phone number. It was Watson 349 or something or other. And written over the number were the words “Big tasty Vic.”
So I knew right away that she'd actually asked him for his phone number!
GUY PUGLIA: Sure, I met Constance Tuttle a few times. You remember that Three Faces of Eve movie, with Joanne Woodward? Well, this was Two Faces of Connie. She'd come on all prim and proper and regal-like but by her fifth old-fashioned at the Colony [restaurant], she'd be saying something like, “Vic, let's go into the bathroom now so I get in just one lick of your exquisite cock.” I heard that! In five minutes she went from sounding like the Duchess of Kent to a whore working the London docks.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: That nutty broad would've worn a sable coat, a silver fox stole, and chinchilla panties on a dune in the Sahara during a heat wave camped near a large space heater. And I thought she was going to pry my pupils out with that épée of a cigarette holder she wielded.
[Vic was] missing our usual 10:00A.M.meetings at Vigorish. He'd either show up an hour late or he'd call in hungover and sometimes he didn't even bother to call.
“Latch, where's my better half?” Ziggy said to me one morning in my office.
“I have no idea,” I said to him.
“This is approachin' three days in a row,” he says.
“I'm aware of it,” I said.
“I ain't ever missed one meetin', Latch. You know that. Not one.”
“I'm familiar with it.”
“I mean, if Vic wants to keep standin' me up at the altar, that's okay. I really don't mind. But Norman and Sidney, they're kinda fed up to their pharynxes about it. They're saying it's really unprofessional, Arn.”
“I'll talk to Vic about it.”
“It's this Tuttle dame. A guy fucks a broad in a fur, he forgets about all his friends and responsibilities. That ain't right.”
“True, true,” I said. And it was true and still is.
Now, this was the first time Ziggy had ever talked about Vic to me, either good or bad. The thing is, I'd been thinking that Ziggy had enjoyed it without Vic at the meetings! Because you had about seven people and now Ziggy was the main center of attention.
Not five minutes later Sid Stone is in my office. With Norman White.
“What's up, guys?” I said.
“Vic is missing a lot of meetings lately, you know,” Sid says.
“I'm aware of it.”
“He seems to have lost interest.”
“I'm familiar with it.”
“Good,” Sid said. “'Cause I don't know how you're dealing with Ziggy.”
“With Ziggy?”
Norman broke in and said, “Ziggy said that you were fed up to your pharynx with this sort of behavior.”
“Hmm. I see, I see.”
They strode out of my office. For some reason I picked up the phone . . . but then I realized: I got nobody to call about this. Who do you call?! Oh, the forlorn, lonely life of a manager! So I hung up and probably put my hands through my hair, which, not coincidentally, was at that precise second just beginning its long, irrevocable journey into disappearing.
SALLY KLEIN: Ziggy would call me up for a movie, a show, or dinner. He was very lonely. Often he'd call me up and ask me, “Hey, you seen Danny around?” and I'd tell him I had no idea where Danny was. Which was a lie, since Danny was on my couch, either with his typewriter or with me. Ziggy would ask me, “You wanna go out to Lindy's? You wanna see a picture?” And I'd tell him I was too tired.
He was jealous of Vic. Vic was the “good-looking” one, of course. That eventually became a big part of the act and Ziggy played along with it. But if you ever saw his face while he's in the corner and Vic is being fawned over by two or three girls—it was a pout you could've used in a diaper ad.
GRACE WHEELWRIGHT: I remember coming home from a rehearsal one night . . . the first thing I saw was one of Connie's chinchilla coats on the floor. I went into the bathroom and . . . there they were in the tub. He was standing and she was on her knees, all covered with soap. She was actually pouring champagne onto his private parts!
“Oh please, Gracie dahhhrling,” she said to me, “do jump in and enjoy some of this scrumptious bubbly.”
I hope you'll mention that I closed the door and went to my room!
GUY PUGLIA: Vic would tell me everything about Connie Tuttle. I'd never seen this broad naked but if they blindfolded me I could put my finger on a freckle or a mole, I knew her that well. Hey, it's kind of ironic, I guess, that Murphy's oil soap was the sponsor of that radio show 'cause you'd need twenty gallons of that stuff to wash out that filthy mouth of hers.
“She uses words I ain't even heard of for it, Guy,” Vic told me once. “For what?” I ask him, and he says, “For everything. She's got pet names for my nuts, for my sac, even for my veins down there. She calls one of the veins spaghetti and another linguini. My nuts she calls watermelon and cantaloupe.” I says to him, “Vic, I don't know if I wanna hear all this.” He tells me, “She calls me up at the Vigorish office or at the radio studio and says, ‘I want to devour you whole, you succulent slab of mortadella, you.’ And you gotta see what she does with food!” “With food? Most people just eat it, you know,” I says to him. He says, “Oh, she eats it all right. She eats it off me. You ever had caviar, Guy?” I tell him I've never even seen it, and he tells me she put caviar on him, in a very, very specific place. And then sucked it out.
“Hey, Vic,” I says to him. “Caviar is fish, did you know that?”
“Huh?”
“Yeah. Caviar is fish. It's the eggs of a fish.”
“Aw, shit.”
He told me that one thing she wanted to do was pour some rum on him down there and then take a match to it. And while he was on fire she would lap it all up. But he said no to that.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: We had a radio show to do and Vic had only made it to one meeting and one rehearsal that week. But I gotta tell ya: He had a mind like Fort Knox. You give him a script, he rehearses it one time, it's sealed in there. My big problem was not him not being there—it was Ziggy manipulating, instigating, and provoking. He'd tell Sally something that I'd said, which I'd never said at all, and then he'd tell me something that Sally had said, which she'd never ever said. Of course, Sally and I would talk about it and put two and two together. It's one thing to lie, but to be so reckless about it—it just doesn't reflect well.
“Vic, you gotta start showing up on time,” I said to him one day.
“Why's that?”
“Because everybody else does. It looks bad.”
“Who's mad at me? Is Sid mad? Norman?”
I shrugged.
“Is it Danny? Is Sally mad at me? Is it Ziggy?”
I cast my gaze down at my mushroom and barley
soup.
“It's Ziggy,” he said.
“Look, it's maybe no one in particular or maybe it's everyone as a whole.”
He lit up a Chesterfield and leaned back in the booth.
I told him, “You look like shit, you know that? How many hours sleep you get?”
“Who sleeps, Latch?”
“Is it Constance Tuttle? Is that it? She's old enough to be your mother, you know.” I noticed something strange just then. “Hey, do you smell rum?”
“Rum?”
“Yeah. Rum.”
“Nah, Arn,” he said. “I don't smell rum. This is Bratz's deli. They don't serve rum at Bratz's.”
GRACE WHEELWRIGHT: She called him all sorts of pet names, right in front of me. “Marshmallow” was one. “Big Beluga,” too. He called her things like “Puddin'” and “Hot Tomato.” He'd be reading Gasoline Alley on our couch and she'd be looking at a script, with her head resting on his lap. And I couldn't help but notice that she'd be moving her head there, sort of grinding it against him. A minute later he'd stand up and swagger into Connie's room. She'd head for the refrigerator, find something, and then bring it into her room and close the door.
I did start noticing the strangest delicacies in the house. Suddenly there were many jars of capers. There would be tubs of Horn & Hardardt applesauce and different kinds of honey—oh yes!—and maple syrup from Vermont and all sorts of exotic jellies and preserves. I remember leaving the house for the theater one night and seeing a jar of molasses in the cupboard; when I returned hours later, the empty jar was in the trash. I heard Vic in the shower yelling out to Connie, “This stuff ain't comin' off too easy, baby.”
SNUFFY DUBIN: When he wasn't complaining about Vic to me, Ziggy was going to whores, to hookers. A few of the cats in the Bingham band had some phone numbers. There was this place on Eighth Avenue in the Fifties, near Roseland, an apartment building. The fifth floor of that building, man, every chick was working some kind of operation. With that shvantz of his, I didn't know how he managed. But he did mention something once about Crisco vegetable shortening.
DANNY McGLUE: Fountain and Bliss had a contract for so many weeks, maybe fifteen or sixteen weeks, with Lou Bingham. The show went on hiatus for a few weeks and it was just a given that the deal would be renewed for more money. Despite the time slot being opposite Burns and Allen, it was a success, and Bert Kahn was getting the act some ink. He'd brought them over to Westbrook Pegler's table at the Stork Club and they had him in stitches—Pegler gave them about two paragraphs the following day—and Winchell gave them some airtime too. Winchell knew that Vic was involved with Connie Tuttle and hinted at it.
The final week in the radio contract Vic was showing up again. He'd be there on time and he was participating. Everything was copacetic and he and Ziggy were gelling.
The first truly big crisis the act ever had was on the final night. They were going on in two hours and nobody had any idea where Vic was.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: I called Vic at home—he was living at the Dorilton on Seventieth near Broadway—and there was no answer. I called Hunny and Guy; they didn't know where he was. Guy said to call Constance Tuttle's spread. Meanwhile, I'm sweating like Niagara Falls—I've got to be at the studio any minute! I called Connie Tuttle and she ain't home but her roommate says she's positive that Connie and Vic are at Vic's pad.
“Sally, you gotta go up to the Dorilton and round up Vic,” I say. “Take Danny.”
“What if he's not there?”
“If he's not there, then we're sunk! Hurry.”
She leaves with Danny, and Ziggy, who's already so shvitzy he's making me look like a fresh sheet of sandpaper, sidles up to me and asks, “Where the hell is he, Arn?”
“We're gonna find him, Zig. I swear to God. I hope. Danny and Sally are going up to the Dorilton right now as we sweat.”
“Danny and Sally?”
“Uh, yeah. Why?”
He's patting himself on the forehead with a hanky and he says, “They seem awful chummy sometimes around here, don't they?”
“Well, we all do. I mean, I'm chummy with you, right? And Sid Stone is chummy with me.”
“Yeah, but you and Sid don't have tits.”
SALLY KLEIN: Danny and I took a taxi and told the driver to step on it . . . we were on Seventieth Street in no time. The doorman buzzed up and there was no response, but Danny told me that a lot of times Vic never answered the door or the phone anyways. The doorman says we cannot go upstairs under any means whatsoever, so Danny gave him a five-dollar bill and he let us up.
We ring and we knock and we shout through the door but there's no answer. Danny goes back down to the doorman and gives him another five dollars and now we've got the house keys.
Danny and I walk in and the first thing I saw made me jump almost to the ceiling! I thought it was a dead rat, but it was just a chinchilla stole lying on the floor. I thought I was going to die.
“Vic? Vic? You in here?” Danny says. We're holding each other's hands.
There's no answer. This was only the second time I'd been in Vic's apartment. It was furnished in a sort of garish, swank style of the time. There were two empty champagne bottles on the couch, and Vic's clothes, including the tuxedo that he wore for the Bingham show, were on the floor.
“At least he tried to get dressed,” Danny said when he saw the tux.
We tiptoe to the bedroom, which is dark. Danny flips on the light and we saw that the whole bedroom was in a shambles. I saw this bundled-up mink coat on the bed. And it was moving slightly up and down, like breathing.
“Constance?” Danny says. “Miss Constance Tuttle?”
I noticed that there was not only a mink coat on the bed but two smaller things, two more swatches of fur where the feet were.
“Miss Tuttle? Do you know where Vic Fountain is?” Danny asked. I noticed that there was not only a Just then we heard this deep baritone snore. Danny and I knew that instant that it was Vic. Sometimes when he sang, in that sleepy Perry Como style, it could sound like snoring. We recognized the noise.
Danny and I are at the bed and we turn Vic over. He's out cold and has nothing on but the fur coat and the two pieces on his feet. Danny sits him up, against the headboard, and I went to the bathroom and got some cold water and threw it on his face. We're imploring him to wake up. There's still time to get him dressed and get to the studio.
Finally he begins to regain consciousness. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
“Vic, you've got a show to do . . . you're on in a half hour,” Danny told him.
“A show?” Vic said. “Oh yeah.”
I went into the living room and picked up Vic's tuxedo and cummerbund. But when I went back into the bedroom Vic was whiter than the sheets on the bed and Danny looked sick too. They were both frozen . . . frozen stiff. They were staring at Vic's feet.
Danny had lifted the two pieces of fur off. Two of Vic's toes were missing! They were gone. There was blood on his feet and on the bed. It was the pinkie toe on the right and left feet. Gone.
“Vic . . . what happened to your feet?” Danny finally asked him.
“Aw fuck,” he said. “That crazy broad.”
I went into the kitchen to get some water and wet some towels . . . to keep around Vic's feet until we could get him to the hospital. So I'm wetting these dish towels in the sink and I hear this faint little noise. It was like a sizzling sound. And I smell garlic. I looked over to my right and there in a frying pan were Vic's toes! His two pinkie toes.
I got sick into the sink. That's the last thing I remember.
Danny had to not only revive me, he had to take Vic to the hospital too.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: He missed the show. I told [producer] Marty Miller that Vic had to be rushed to the hospital, and Marty asked me if Ziggy could go on for fifteen minutes solo.
So I go to the greenroom and say to Ziggy, “Vic can't make it.”
He's trying to wedge himself into his tux. It wasn't easy to get even a mas
ter tailor to make clothing for him . . . his measurements defied common sense.
“I think we got to fire him, Latch.”
“And replace him with who? The goddamn O'Hares? Forget about firing Vic. What are you gonna do tonight? Can you give Lou fifteen minutes?”
“A solo?”
“Yeah. Solo.”
He sat there, started twitching a bit.
“You okay, Ziggy?”
“Fifteen minutes, solo?”
“That's what I need. That's what you need, Ziggeleh.”
“I got no solo material. The only material I got is me and Vic.”
There was a knock on the door. A stagehand yelled out, “Ten minutes, Mr. Bliss.”
I sat down and pulled my seat up next to him and I said, “How about if I do your part tonight and you do Vic's?”
“You could do that, Latch?”
“Could you do Vic's part?”
“What? The straight man? Ha! That cigar you're smokin' could do that!”
“Good. Now how about this: You do both parts. You do Ziggy and you do Vic. Can you do that?”
“Gee, I don't know . . .” he started hedging.
“Ziggy baby, come on. I know you can do it. You know you can. This is for the sake of the act. One time, pal, one time.”
“This is tough, Arn,” he said.
I wanted to throttle him! I knew he could do it and he knew it too! He just wanted me to beg him . . . he wanted me to get down on my goddamn knees and plead with him!
So I did.
I'm on my knees and my hands are clasped like I'm praying to God that the plummeting aircraft which is my life don't crash into the drink. I'm begging, I'm pleading, I'm beseeching, I'm making entreaties.
“Okay, I'll do it,” he says finally.
He went on the air and he was fantabulous. He was perfect, he was wonderful. He was Joe DiMaggio, Joe Louis, Sid Luckman, Eddie Arcaro all rolled into one.
Bertie Kahn got it into the papers what Ziggy had done, how marvelous the performance was. He'd called Grayling Greene up during the show and made sure Greene was listening. It was a combination of damage control and an ink extravaganza all in one shot. Bertie told everyone that Vic was suffering from nervous exhaustion due to the rigorous rehearsal schedule, the radio show, playing the Catskills on the weekends and whatnot. Hatch, Greene, Pegler, Winchell, Fleury, Sullivan . . . they all made mention of it.
