Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  “I don't know.”

  Neither did I.

  “Arnie, when this whole thing is over,” this moron said, “we'd love to have Fountain and Bliss. We won't forget you.”

  “Yeah, bub, and I won't forget you either!”

  I bid the imbecile a sweet adieu and thought to myself, Okay, the hell with this schlemiel. We'll play the Paramount then, if they want us.

  DANNY McGLUE: I couldn't stand [Ziggy] nosing around, always asking Arnie, asking Vic, asking Estelle about us. Sid Stone would tell me, “He's asking questions about you and Sally again.” I also didn't like it when he tried to get me to go to the hookers he frequented. “They really know how to treat a guy,” Ziggy said. “No thanks,” I told him. “Well,” he asked me, “where else are you gettin' it from, Danny boy?”

  He kept trying to fix Sally up with men who really had nothing going for them. Waiters and ushers and lawyers. Sid would say to me, “You're gonna have to tell him one day, Danny.”

  “How can he object to us?” I asked Sally.

  “Well, you're not Jewish.”

  Now, I'd worked at the Catskills for several summers. That was my life. I grew up with Jewish kids. I worked in an office with Arnie and Sid and Norman. “I'm more Jewish than he is sometimes!” I told her. “Give me another reason.”

  “He's meshuga. That's another. I don't think he wants me to get married before he gets married. He's lonely, he wants me to be lonely too.”

  Sally and I realized that Ziggy had no leverage here. Everybody knew that he had his 10:45 call girls and he knew everybody knew. So how is he going to tell Sally who she was allowed to see?

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: Danny came to me one morning and told me he was going to tell Ziggy about him and Sally. I told him that, not only did I understand, not only was I behind the move a hundred percent, not only did I think it was the the ethical, intelligent thing to do, but that I didn't want to be within a radius of thirty miles when it happened.

  So they told him in his apartment, a few days after Pearl Harbor. Sally went over there with Danny. The second he opened the door and saw those two lovebirds, he knew. Ziggy didn't erupt, there was no Mount Vesuvius. No yelling, no throwing chairs around, none of that.

  Dissolve. Next day. My office. Ominous Smith-&-Wesson-like click sound is heard from door. Ziggy says to me, “Danny gets the ax or I walk.”

  “I think we should talk about this.”

  “No talking. He's out.”

  Danny was so important to us, you got no idea. I'll tell you how important. When I went to Vic and told him about all this, Vic made a pun. He urgently wanted to keep Danny. He knew he was crucial to the outfit. Vic said, “But Latch, Danny's really McGlue that holds us together!” I mean, Vic had made this stupid pun!

  I asked Ziggy—I tried to be reasonable, which can be a real disaster when you're dealing with entertainers—“Why is this so important to you? What does it matter?”

  And he said that what we had was a business. It was radio, it was the Catskills, it was the nightclubs, maybe one day, God willing, it'd even be movies. And we couldn't have people messing with business.

  Now this made sense to me except for two things. One: most of the time we were all together, it hardly seemed like a business. We'd be just screwing around, trying new material, goofing off. This was not a board meeting at General Motors, you have my utmost assurance. And the second thing was, I had begun seeing Estelle, my own secretary, by then.

  Danny nipped it all in the bud. He offered me his resignation. I accepted it. I wished him luck and told him I'd do anything to help him get a new job. He wants me to call up Murray Katz at Worldwide, he wants me to call Fred Allen or Jack Benny or Lenny Pearl, I'll do it. I'll call up John Perona at El Morocco or Sherman Billingsley, I'll call up anybody with a telephone or who lives within a mile of a phone booth, I told him. But instead the next day that patriotic shmendrick enlists in the navy.

  CATHERINE RICCI: [My brothers] Sal and Ray enlisted, Ray into the army and Sal the marines. Pop was against it, but they would have been drafted anyway. My father didn't want them killing Italians, he didn't want them getting killed by Italians. He gave them both addresses and names of relatives to look up in Messina, Palermo, or around Calabria, just in case they found themselves there and wanted to desert. “You need help,” he said, “you find these people.” It didn't happen though. Ray wound up in France, although he didn't see much action, despite what he may tell you. And Sal fought in the Pacific.

  They wouldn't take Vic on account of his feet. I have no idea how he lost those two toes . . . it was in the news that it happened while he was picking up some lobster traps as a kid, but Vic wouldn't go within an inch of a lobster, dead or alive, Newburg or thermidor. There were rumors he'd shot his toes off to avoid military service, but that's just not true. My other brothers went, so why wouldn't Vic?

  SALLY KLEIN: Do you think Ziggy would've lasted one day in a training camp?! To do one push-up would've taken him all day and even then he probably couldn't finish it. Arnie had him go to two or three doctors—they were going to tell him what his status would be. They took one look at him and said, “Kid, don't worry. They won't take you.” And they were right. Ziggy said that for him they invented some new category. He wasn't too short, he wasn't too fat, he wasn't too crazy . . . he was just too round.

  They did this routine on the tours they did to sell war bonds. Vic is “interviewing” Ziggy.

  Vic asks him: “So how come you ain't in the army, Zig?”

  Ziggy said, “I'm Three-F.”

  Vic said after a perfect pause, “Three- F?”

  Ziggy said, “Yeah, Three-F.”

  “Well, I've heard of Four-F before but—”

  “Three-F, Vic. Three-F.”

  “Well, I've gotta ask ya,” Vic says. “What's that stand for anyway?”

  And Ziggy said, “Fat . . . funny . . . and 'fraid!”

  When they did that routine in the Catskills, though, they made some changes. The third f was for faygeleh.

  Oh, did you know that Bormann beer was dropped as the sponsor after a season? It turned out that the family who owned the brewery was related to Martin Bormann, who was a bigwig in Hitler's crowd. So we got rid of them—they weren't the nicest people in the world anyway—and Dickinson's witch hazel sponsored the show.

  GUY PUGLIA: Can you see Vic in a foxhole? Fixing his hair after a kraut bullet whistled over it and mussed it up? Or on a battleship? Like he'd ever get close to the fuckin' ocean?

  I tried the army, I tried the marines, and they both turned me down. Too short, they said. Like being short has anything to do with not being tough? I really wanted to go. Someone told me to apply for the navy, tell 'em I'm from Codport and that I've been on many boats in my life, fishin'. And that I should do it in New Bedford, not New York. And this fella told me to put these lifts in my shoes. I did it . . . it added a few inches and I was in.

  And then . . . well, I guess you wanna know how this thing happened to me.

  I don't like tellin' this story, not one bit. But I will.

  I'm two days from going to Virginia to report. I'm in Codport and I'm hangin' around with the old crowd and my old man too, who's now got cancer. I'm going to the pool hall, and I'm eatin' hot dogs and gettin' ices from Joe Ravelli on the boardwalk and seeing Lulu and Dominick and Tony [Ferro], who was now married. I'm in a bar and in walks Rocco Straccio. Tells me he wants to have a little powwow with me. Those goddamn black gums and teeth of his. Well, that scumbag didn't scare me no more. He was just a fuckin' hood. I've lived in New York, right? I know Hunny and I've met Al Pompiere, Frank Costello, Angelo Galvanese, and Louis Lepke. I've even met Bette Davis, for Christsake! What do I need this goddamn hood for?

  He tells me he wants a cut of Vittorio Fontana's pie. I tell him I don't know anybody by that name. He says Vic Fountain is Codport's leading export now, other than cod. I tell him Vic ain't interested in small-town hoods like him. It's dark in this bar, the on
ly light is coming from the clock, I'm just trying to enjoy my beer. Straccio says he wants me to talk to Vic, if not he can make a phone call to some people in New York—he tells me [gangster] Joe Adonis owes him a big favor. He says it isn't fair that this guy comes from this town and doesn't put anything back in it. Straccio wanted his tribute, that's what he wanted. “Must be a lot of dough in those big fancy New York clubs,” he says. I said, “You want a piece of Vic's pie, you can have a piece of me first, scumbag.” That's just what I said. Then he put his hand on my nose and laughed like he used to when I was a kid. He says, “I got your nose,” and laughs. Ha ha ha, he goes. He pulls his hand away and there's blood squirting all over the place, it's squirting like it's comin' out a kid's water pistol. It took me a few seconds before I felt it—I just saw the squirts first. I looked at his hand and he's got all the flesh of my nose—it looked like a thumb—in his hands. And a razor blade too. That fuckin' sonuvabitch fuck had sliced my nose off. And on account of that, I never got to serve my goddamn country.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: The negative flack we got from Vic not going in was incredible. Here's a guy in his early twenties, he's big, he's strong, he's healthy. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is being inducted, but not Vic Fountain. And to make things worse, you had all kinds of celebrities going into the armed forces. And they always made a big hullabaloo about it too, to boost morale and get everybody gung-ho. I pick up the paper and there's a picture of Jimmy Stewart getting his physical. Oy vey. I see that, I get a duodenal ulcer. Here's a photo of Clark Gable enlisting. Now I got the angina. Hank Fonda goes into the navy. I can feel my lungs starting to collapse. Tyrone Power into the marines! My prostate is the size and temperature of the Hindenburg. Thank God for Frank Sinatra and Duke Wayne.

  We did damage control. As best we could. They played some army and navy bases in the South, they raised thousands and thousands for war bonds. They toured with Georgie Jessel and opened up for Glenn Miller in Boston to raise money. They even did a USO show with Lenny Pearl. Once in a while you heard booing. These guys in uniform—hey, next week they might be on Okinawa or in Tobruk, so who could blame them?—they'd yell things at Vic. Coward, sissy, candy ass, and some ethnic things too. Nobody ever called Ziggy a coward though . . . I guess with him it was quite evident why he wasn't serving his country.

  Bertie concocted the whole lobster-trap tale. When Vic was a kid, this saga went, he was picking up a lobster trap one morning in the bay. The trap is empty, to his abject shock. Vic's looking inside it and as he's doing so two lobsters clamp down real tight on his feet. They each one take a little toe off. Vic staggers back to the shore and just makes it to a doctor, who manages to save his life. Real Herman Melville, Joe Conrad-type material, right?

  It was perfect. But some people weren't buying it.

  I'm at the Stork with Grayling Greene and he just doesn't purchase this bill of goods. He even doubted that Vic was missing any toes to begin with. I call Vic from the phone at the table and twenty minutes later Vic is at the table too. I say to him, Let Mr. Greene get an eyeful of those tootsies. Vic whips off his socks and shoes and, voila, there they aren't: not even stubs where the little toes were. Grayling looks at 'em, nods, jots down a few words, Vic leaves, goes back home to finish the job on who-knows-which broad he was with at the time.

  “How do I know that he didn't shoot them off, Arnie?” Greene says to me.

  “Shoot his toes off? That ain't Vic.”

  “Why not?”

  “Vic don't like guns.”

  “Which is why he doesn't want to join the army. So he shoots his own toes off—men are doing that, they say. Or Vic pays a surgeon to amputate them.”

  “It was the lobsters. I swear it was. On the grave of my mother.” Who, at that time, was still alive and kickin'.

  Grayling Greene snorts, jots down a few more notations. I'm getting up to go and I'm thinking: This guy is plugged in to everybody. Gary Cooper jerks off in Beverly Hills, Grayling Greene knows about it on Fifty-eighth Street. He maybe knows that that cannibal Constance Tuttle sautéed Vic's little piggies. Hey, Sinatra had a bum eardrum, right? That's what kept him out of the war? For all I know, Connie Tuttle plucked it out and deep-fried it while Frank had a bun on.

  As I'm walking out, I pass by Winchell's table. He says to me, “Two lobsters, huh, Arn?”

  Vic did an interview with Life and addressed the subject. He said these words exactly—I know, because I rehearsed him over and over again: “It's one of the lousiest breaks I ever got, this toe deal. I would love to be over there killing Japs. I really would. This country has been great to me and my family. I sure owe it one. Heck, my older brother Sal is in the Marianas right now . . . I'd give anything to be there with him, giving him some cover.” “Oh really?” the smart alecky, pain-in-the-ass interviewer said. “Would you even give your toes?” ( Life didn't publish that clever rejoinder, fortunately for us.)

  SNUFFY DUBIN: I was just about to head to Parris Island for my basic training. Okay, one thing I don't do is, I don't talk about what happened to me in the war. I could've come back and gotten a hundred hours' worth of material out of it. The characters I met, the stupid stuff I had to do—some of it was funny. But you get a guy's brains blown onto your lap, you forget the funny stuff real quick. Shit, after I made it as a comic, they offered me parts in The Dirty Dozen, The Longest Day, and Kelly's Heroes. Turned 'em all the fuck down.

  This socialite columnist Hilda Fleury ran an item a week before I reported, it was about Fountain and Bliss. It was a blind item but anybody in the know could tell who it was. Someone had told her that Vic had had his toes amputated by a surgeon, to avoid the army, that this lobster thing was a lie. She doctored the item up and ran it really small. Vic saw it, he hit the roof. To him it was one thing if you get sozzled and some broad lops your toes off after you give her the high hard one, it's another thing to pay some doctor to do it to avoid serving your country. And besides, after a while, Vic had probably convinced himself that he could've been some kinda big war hero. So Vic sends Hunny over to Hilda's house, on Park Avenue. The doorman tries to stop Hunny, Hunny nails him with a left hook. Hunny rings the buzzer, Hilda's butler answers the door, starts asking who wishes to see madame. Hilda comes to the foyer and Hunny is pounding the butler . . . Bam! Bam! Hilda gets the phone to call the cops, and maybe Hunny Gannett ain't Albert fucking Einstein but he ain't braindead either. Not yet. He rips the phone out, tears this poor butler's shoe off, then breaks the butler's little toe. Madame gets le message.

  The upshot of this story is this: Who do you think it was that went to Hilda Fleury and told her the story? Who told her that the lobster trap thing was a lie? Of course. It was Ziggy. Who the fuck else?

  • • •

  JANE WHITE: Ziggy and I went to “21” on our first date. I thought we'd be there for an hour but we wound up being there for three. I'd really had myself done over for the date. My hair was naturally brown but I had it colored sunny blond, and I bought a new dress at Lord & Taylor. I remember being all scared because that day at Lord & Taylor, they thought I had stolen a gold silk scarf. They brought over a security person and I explained to him that it was all some mistake. I showed him that I had about $30 in my purse and that if I really wanted the scarf I could afford it. It was an accident, I explained. He didn't know what to believe and when I began to cry, he escorted me to the door and let me out on Fifth Avenue. I told Ziggy all about that and he made me feel better about what happened, joking about it and everything.

  Ziggy could not believe the way I was brought up. He said he never heard of a Jewess being on a yacht and I told him that I really could not be considered a Jewess. He told me about his childhood and I'd never heard of anything so sad in my life. It was almost as though he'd been an orphan. During dessert the maitre d' brought the phone over and Ziggy got on and said that he'd be over at 10:45 that night. When he hung up he told me it was Vic Fountain. I asked him if he got along with Vic, and he told me they never socialized. I
said, “But you're seeing him at ten forty-five tonight.” And he said, “Oh yeah. Right. Well, there's a first time for everything.”

  He actually wanted to take me home in a horse and buggy! I said that was embarrassing so we took a cab. He walked me to the front door of my apartment . . . I was so tired from laughing at this point, I really was. He didn't try to kiss me. I told him that I'd had my hair done especially for him, for this date, and it made him happy.

  “So do you think you'd maybe want to ever do this again with me ever?” he said.

  “I had a wonderful time tonight,” I told him.

  “But not wonderful enough, izzat it?” he said.

  “Do you want to see me again?” I asked him.

  “Would that be something that you would consider doin'?” he asked me.

  I told him that, yes, I would consider that. I'd had such a great time at the “21” Club. Tommy Dorsey had said hello to Ziggy, and Cary Grant had come over and introduced himself! And two people came over to our booth and asked Ziggy for his autograph. It was quite exciting.

  The next day the doorman buzzed me and said there was something for me in the lobby. I went down there and there was a box from Lord & Taylor. Ziggy had sent me twenty gold silk scarves.

  FREDDY BLISS: My mother's hair when she was young was jet black. She had very curly black hair, a little bit like Hedy Lamarr's, and had to iron it to get the kinks out. She used to dye it blond all the time. Any time a root reared its ugly head, it was off to Mr. Paolo.

  After she and Dad moved to Los Angeles, Mom had her nose fixed. The plastic surgeon, the best there was, did a wonderful job. No bumps or ridges or anything. It was perfect. And then she had it redone. Why? Because it was too perfect. It made her look like a Jewish woman who'd gotten a nose job trying to disguise the fact that she was Jewish. Which is what she was. So she went back and the same doctor put in just the slightest, slightest ridge. And that was Mom.