by Ted Heller
And the beauty part is this: Vic never had to enter the army. Why? Because that lucky bastard was missing two of his goddamn toes!
We should've sent a check for a million bucks to Constance Tuttle for that.
Okay. Now . . . dissolve. It's about fifteen years later, I'm at Al Roon's Health Club on Broadway, right near the Ansonia, in one of those big old sweatboxes. You sit in there, they close the door on you, you lose fifty pounds of perspiration in ten minutes, and you come out looking like a bleached raisin. For this I had to pay Al Roon five bucks a month? I could've just had myself dry-cleaned.
I look over to my left and there in the next box is none other than Edmund Sligh. That guy was married to the theater—ancestors of his were in the theater when Shakespeare was just a lad making wee wee into the Avon. I'd read that morning in Ed Sullivan's Daily News column that Sligh's theater show was about to bite the dust and I offered my condolences. He didn't look too happy, I gotta tell you, but then again he was sitting in a crate of molten lava at the time.
The conversation got around to Constance Tuttle, who'd left the show a few years before and was now playing some eccentric matriarch on The Edge of Night.
The heat and the sweat must have gotten to me because I related the story to Sligh, about how Constance Tuttle had gotten Vic stewed to the gills one night and then sliced off two of his toes and tried to cook them in a white wine and shallot sauce. I said to him, “It's a good thing she was a lousy cook 'cause she probably would've gone for the fingers next, Eddie.”
“Oh, would she have?” he said.
A few minutes later, he gets out of his box. He's buck naked and drying-himself with a towel and I get an eyeful of the man's physique. It was a little bit hard to see in there because of all the steam, but I know what I saw: Edmund Sligh had just a tiny thimble-size stump where his shlong should be.
So maybe Constance Tuttle wouldn't have gone for the fingers next.
• • •
SNUFFY DUBIN: That was the first big dose of press they ever got. And what was it about? It was about Vic collapsing and Ziggy being the trouper. About Vic being “nervous” and exhausted and Ziggy being strong. Vic was the goat and Ziggy ate it up like it was a plate of kasha fucking varnishkes during the worst famine ever. Cutting articles out, pasting them into a book, talking to Bud Hatch and even Hilda Fleury, the society columnist. I remember him telling me, “Somewheres my parents are proud of me somewheres, Snuffles.” He didn't talk about his parents that much—this might've been the first time since they died.
Yeah, things had changed. Vic knew he'd let down a lot of people. Lou Bingham, Arnie, Sally, Sid Stone and Norman White, and the Brylcreem sponsors. And Ziggy too. But I don't think he felt too bad about that.
DANNY McGLUE: Ziggy was really lording it over everybody. It was a big Hail-the-Conquering-Hero thing. But sometimes, I guess, you want to hail the conquering hero, grab him by his throat, and then strangle him.
Lou Bingham and the Brylcreem people were not happy with Vic's stunt, even though it had brought the show a lot of tub-thump. Arnie worked it out with Lou and with the Mutual radio people that Fountain and Bliss would be off the show but that they would get a fifteen-minute radio spot before the Bingham show came on. Fountain and Bliss would lead into the Brylcreem show. Arnie and Marty Miller scrambled around and got Lifebuoy soap to sponsor the new show.
Things fell into place quickly. Billy Ross left the Bingham band and led a small band for the new Fountain and Bliss Lifebuoy show. Ernie Beasley now began writing serious songs for Vic . . . when he wasn't soused, I might say. A lot of people think I got jealous or upset when Ernie became our unofficial cleffer [composer] but I didn't, because I knew that my music wasn't really music and that it was silly. I was more than content being just a joke man. And—Ernie will tell you this is true—once in a while if he was stuck for a nice turn of a phrase or a rhyme, I was always there to throw my two pesos in.
During the hiatus, I remember, Arnie had approached Lee Sperling from the Schuberts about putting Fountain and Bliss in a Broadway show. It was a sort of Busby Berkeley meets Flo Ziegfeld meets Dames at Sea thing called Aweigh They Go. Dancers, songs, comedy, some drama. Arnie was all for it but when he told Ziggy and Vic about it, there was a rift. Vic wanted to do it—it would give him a really good chance to use his pipes, he said—but Ziggy threw a fit. He refused to even consider it. They'd be saying someone else's lines, he screamed. The material wouldn't be from him or Sid or me or Norman, he shrieked. It wasn't really their act, he hollered. All that yelling—I thought I was listening to Flo Blissman singing again! He was throwing stuff around and his face was red—ever see White Heat with Jimmy Cagney? That's what it was like. Now, I'd seen this sort of behavior before and so had Sally, but this was the first time that the others had. God, you should have seen Sid Stone and Norman that day. They both had these incredible “What-are-we-doing-here?” looks on. After this ten-minute explosion, Arnie defused it by saying, “Okay, I'll tell Lee Sperling the answer is no.” (Sperling eventually got Cubby Cavanaugh and Jack Haley and it did whammo box office.)
In a small way, this was good for Vic, for his ego. Because the whole toe incident had really cut him down to size. He'd been acting sheepish and been quiet because of what he'd done. Now with this fit, this White Heat attack of Ziggy's, Vic got a little more credibility. It was like he was saying to everyone, “Okay, I was so in my cups that this woman cut my toes off but look at this little red gorilla having a seizure now!”
ARNIE LATCHKEY: To be honest, Lee Sperling's heart wasn't broken when I told them my clients had pooh-poohed the deal. It was one of the shortest conversations I ever had with a producer in any medium, as a matter of fact. Ten seconds, tops.
One day we're at the office and Sidney Stone says that he and Norman could dig out a play and blow the dust off it—a play they'd both written when they were in Hollywood—and that maybe Ernie Beasley could write songs for it. Sid Stone had balls the size of the Statue of Liberty's because he did this only days after Ziggy went nutsy over the Schubert thing.
Ziggy said to Sid, “You wrote it,
Sid? Honest?” Sid said, “Me and Norman did, yeah, Ziggy. On the Paramount lot.”
You heard about ten hearts pounding in that room and two of them were mine, Teddy! Who knew if Ziggy was gonna pull another Mount Vesuvius act?
“Is it any good, Norman?”
“Ziggy, it ain't Mourning Becomes Electra,” Norman said, “but it's good enough.”
“I'll take a look at it, guys. Okay?”
Everyone in that room had muscles so tight that if a slight breeze blew in we would've all fallen apart, but now we all sort of exhaled and relaxed.
“Vic,” Ziggy said, “you wanna look at the script?”
Vic said, “Nah, you look at it, Zig.”
Ziggy said, “You still anxious to get your toes wet on Broadway still?”
Vic looked down . . . at his toes. Had Ziggy purposely meant this as a cruel, cutting jeu d'esprit? To antagonize him? To get his goat? No man will ever know.
Vic looked back up and said, “Just read the damn thing, okay?”
It was called Three of a Kind . . . it was typical Broadway fare of the day. It was a version of the old Noël Coward play Design for Living, but set in Hollywood. Ernie already had three wonderful songs that would have been just swell with the play. Sid and Norman adapted and tinkered with the thing and changed it around to suit Ziggy and Vic more. We got it to Murray Katz at WAT and he said it'd be a difficult sell. He tried Lee Sperling but Sperling passed. We got it to Morgan Talvert and Norman Barasch but they passed too. Murray's heart wasn't in it and now neither was Sid Stone's or Norman's. Ernie Beasley came in one day and played “Malibu Moonlight” for us, which he'd just written for the show. We knew that song, whether it got into this play or not, would be a hit one day and it was . . . it was perfect for Vic's style.
Three of a Kind never got off the ground. It was a huge setback.
Our first. The office was not the usual fun house it was, unless you consider a morgue a fun house. We'd meet at ten and we had these shell-shocked looks on our faces, like all our mothers had just died in one bus accident.
The Lifebuoy show was about to start and we had little or no material. Things were very bleak indeed.
The phone rings one day and Estelle picks up and hands it to Sally Klein. Sally takes the call in her office and meanwhile in the living room you've got about six men swallowing, coughing, excavating their noses, and scratching their privates.
Sally comes out with one of the arms of her eyeglasses in her mouth and says, “That was Barney Arundel. Charlotte Charlot, ‘the Charmant Chanteuse from Chantilly,’ isn't going to play her Blue Beret Cafe engagement. Turns out she's a Nazi sympathizer and can't get a cabaret license. Barney wants to know if Fountain and Bliss can give him two weeks.”
I said, “It sounds like a good idea to me, Sal. Call Barney back. Tell him the answer is oui, oui. Tell him we'll do it.”
“I don't have to call him back,” she said cockily. “Because I already told him we'd do it.”
Boom! Back in business. Just like that.
GUY PUGLIA: Whenever there was an open date, Ziggy used to like to line up a girl—who usually had tits just like Jayne Mansfield's—for exactly 10:45 at night. Now, Hunny had a friend who was a New York cop and he borrowed this cop's uniform and badge. Vic was setting this whole caper up—at this point Hunny and Ziggy have never met. Hunny goes upstairs to this hooker's spread and puts his big ear to the door and hears all this groanin' and gruntin' and he knocks. “Open up!” he says. “Vice squad.” The girl opens the door in a red kimono that she's droopin' right out of and says, “Hey, I paid you guys off last week!” and Hunny sweeps past her and looks for Ziggy, who's now thinkin', My career's over, my career's over. Officer Hunny's in the bedroom now and there's no sign of Ziggy, but he peeks under the bed and there he is, hiding. Somehow Ziggy had managed to squeeze his body underneath there, I don't know how.
Hunny plucks him out and Ziggy says, “Hey, Officer, how does a week free at Heine's resort in the governor's suite sound to you?” Hunny says he's now got him on bribery charges.
He asks Hun if he can make a call and he calls Sally Klein at home. Ziggy is bawlin' and tellin' Sally that this girl is his girlfriend, that he had no idea she was a whore, but Sally was tough and the next thing Ziggy's doing is saying, yeah, she's not his girl and she is a whore but he wasn't really paying for it. Hunny takes the phone away and hangs it up and cuffs Ziggy. “What's gonna happen to me, Officer?” Ziggy asks, and Hunny says, “We're taking you to the Tombs.” Ziggy says, “The Tombs! What's gonna happen to me there?” and Hunny says, “The other prisoners'll probably put you through the grease line.” And Ziggy nearly craps his pants.
There was no such thing as a grease line. Vic had made that one up.
So Hunny hauls Ziggy into the living room and what's the first thing the two of 'em see? Vic's on top of the girl and he's goin' to town with her. That's when Ziggy realized it was all a gag. Hunny told me that Ziggy was crackin' up. And maybe he was, but whether it was real laughter or just laughing to hide the fact that he'd been taken for a sap, I don't know.
• • •
SNUFFY DUBIN: Before they began their gig at the Blue Beret, they did a tune-up at a much smaller place called Club 18. The pay there was nothing compared to what they could pull in at a Catskills gig. Now, I played Club 18 a few weeks after Fountain and Bliss but for me the pay was good. Ziggy got me that engagement—maybe the only favor he ever did me. Must have been an oversight on his part.
Club 18 was in a basement in midtown. This place drew all kinds of celebrities and high society and so forth. The atmosphere was dark, the drinks and service were second-rate . . . so why did they go? To be put in their place. These VIPs would go to this club to get insulted by comics, all for a laugh. The week I worked there Clark Gable comes in with Carole Lombard. I see that and my heart starts racing like Man o'fucking War. Jesus Christ, Clark Gable is coming to see Samuel Dubinsky from Harrison Street in Chicago tell jokes?! Absolutely unbelievable shit to me, right? But I gotta do the Club 18 thing now, I've gotta insult them and tell jokes at their expense. “Hey, Carole, I hear you walk around the house naked,” I said to her, which was a rumor everyone knew. “Is it true Clark opens the blinds and charges the neighbors a buck a peep?” Okay, not the best gag in the world, but, man, was I scared! The week Fountain and Bliss appeared, Humphrey Bogart and his wife were there and Vic started imitating Bogart—had him down to a T—and Ziggy is being Mrs. Bogart and then they start punching each other . . . because everyone knew that Bogart had this very rough relationship with her. Bogart was on the floor. Jack Dempsey came in, the George Gershwins, Hester Warnocke, Felix Frankfurter, Eddie Duchin, a Whitney or two. Howard Hughes comes in with a doll who's stacked like the New York Public Library and Vic is coming on to her and Ziggy is coming on to him, and Hughes's face is on the table, he's laughing so much. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn came in one night, and the next night Tracy showed up with his wife; his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had just come out and he got a standing ovation on both nights. Gus Kahn of Galaxy Pictures was in New York and went to Club 18, and Ziggy and Vic were just relentless, making fun of his pictures, how much money he had and his gambling. Two weeks later Gus Kahn is in New York again and now I'm at Club 18. I'm doing the same kind of stuff and he gives me a look like I'm Hermann fucking Goering about to bomb his Beverly Hills estate in my Messerschmidt. The maitre d' at the club would take Arnie aside and point out some of the socialites and debs and blue bloods, 'cause Vittorio Fontana and Sigmund Blissman didn't really move within that smart Newport horsey set. So you had Warnockes, Rockefellers, Mellons, and Standishes and all this upper-crust Four fucking Hundred crowd, and Ziggy and Vic have got 'em in their pockets. They own them!
CHARLES FRAME [stage manager at the Blue Beret Cafe]: The club was originally called the Red Beret Cafe, did you know that? That was the name when Barney Arundel opened it. But one evening in, say, 1938, J. Edgar Hoover and his intimate companion Clyde Tolson came in and asked Barney why the Red Beret . . . why red? Why are the tablecloths and the napkins and the menus red? Why are the strawberries red? Barney was not a political man and he'd chosen the name of the cafe simply because his daughter wore a red beret. That simple. Barney walked away and overheard Mr. Tolson saying to Mr. Hoover, “Well, you didn't have to be such a bitch about it, Edwina!” The next week the place was renamed the Blue Beret—and so it remained until it closed in the 1950s—with blue tablecloths, blue menus, blue napkins, and, yes, blueberries.
Pete Conifer was in charge of the entertainment. Yes, that Pete Conifer, who was later the head of the Oceanfront [Hotel and Resort] in Las Vegas. He was only in his twenties at the time but was going places, you could tell, and he really knew how to kiss up to the important patrons. One night Jack Warner came in with his wife, and Pete sent over flowers to the table. Everything was free for them, and Pete even sent flowers and champagne to their hotel suite too. Franchot Tone and Joan Crawford (but not together), the Luces, the Cagneys, Fiorello La Guardia, Myrna Loy, Louis B. Mayer, the Fritz Devanes—he did the same for them. Meanwhile, though, there were the hatcheck girls and les Blue Beret danseurs, and Pete couldn't keep his hands off them, he was like a hungry dog. Some of them were truly terrified of him, so terrified that they even quit to work at the Copacabana, the Riobamba, or at El Morocco.
We were excited to get Fountain and Bliss for two weeks—we'd never had comedians perform there; it had always been music. There would be a cabaret singer, like Jeanne Courbet or Paul DeMarche, or we'd get the Ben Bentley Orchestra with Virginia Carstairs. But Barney had found out that Charlotte Charlot was not only a Nazi sympathizer, she sympathized rabidly. She'd done some fund-raisers around the Yorkville area, also known as Germantown, for the German-American Bundt. She'd sung at an America First rally and palled around with Father Coughlin. Even
Neville Chamberlain, believe it or not, had banned her from performing in England.
When Fountain and Bliss were at the Blue Beret, material kept being delivered to their dressing room that had been intended for Charlotte Charlot. There were Nazi leaflets, Nazi newspapers with these horrid cartoons with salivating vermin in skullcaps raping Aryan women. Shady-looking men in trench coats stopped by and wanted to meet Charlotte. One such fellow handed our maitre d', Michel Perpignan—real name: Mickey Peters—a bundle of something and said it was for Frau Charlot. We looked inside and it was about a pound of German sausage. Barney may have done what Hoover and Tolson told them to do when he changed the cafe's name, but he was not about to let the club become a beachhead for Hitler on Fifty-third Street!
SALLY KLEIN: After Club 18, the boys were ready for the big time on the nightclub scene. You paw Howard Hughes's girlfriend, you make fun of the size of Clark Gable's you-know-what, you're ready for anything. The Blue Beret seated about five hundred people. Billy Ross, Vic's bandleader for many years, led a small band, and Vic sang a few numbers before Ziggy would “interrupt” him. Ernie Beasley wrote two songs specifically for this engagement, “Back on the Boulevard Again” and “My Sweet Cheri,” and Vic also sang Cole Porter's “Do You Want to See Paris?” from his Fifty Million Frenchmen, which I'd seen as a young girl with my mother.
Not only were the gossip columnists there, but music critics too. Danny Richman from the Post, Robert Schappell from the Globe. And so on. Bertie Kahn asked for a few tables from Barney Arundel and planted a bunch of people there to laugh and applaud. He hired a few top-notch “ladies of the evening,” got them dolled up in very fancy evening clothing and hairdos, and told them to pour it on and applaud their hearts out for Vic's singing. Nobody had any idea what these women really did for a living.
