Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  When someone makes an offer, you ask for more. This has been going on since before Adam. Even if you don't need the dough, even if you only go one measly cent over what they offer, you ask for more. So I'm gonna toss out an asking price of twenty grand and hope I can get him up to fifteen before I shake that gray pin-striped hand of his. So I say twenty grand and brace myself. But he says, “Okay, twenty grand, it's yours.” I immediately wished I'd said twenty-five.

  “Look, guys,” I said, “when all this is over, can this be told to the public?-Can Joe Doakes and Jane Doe find out about all this?”

  “Yes,” the short one said. “When it's all over and only we tell you the time is right.”

  They go to the door and tell me transportation will all be arranged from Detroit. I ask him, “Why us? Why not Abbott and Costello or the Marx Brothers or Hope and Crosby?”

  “Mr. Clyde Tolson adores the act. And so does Mr. Hoover.”

  I say to him, “Where in New Mexico is this joint anyways?”

  “It's in a place called Los Alamos, Mr. Latchkey.”

  • • •

  CATHERINE RICCI: My brother Sal died at Tarawa. A shell got him. It's so sad. In his hand they found the crumpled-up piece of paper with all those addresses on it, the list Papa had given him. Even though those people were half a world away, Sal was holding it. He must have been terrified before he got hit.

  [Carmine] was back from the war. He was an army cook in the south of England. The only fighting he ever saw was when a few GIs were mad at him for burning their flapjacks, he said. We'd moved to New York City, to Brooklyn, and Carmine and another guy had opened up a bakery on Bleecker Street in Manhattan.

  I used to read all the papers, the Post, the Herald Tribune and the Daily News and the Globe. I was up on all the latest gossip. So I should've been warned when a neighbor told me one day that Ed Sullivan, on his radio show, had made a reference to Vic, about his avoiding the war. The next day Walter Winchell, who hated Ed Sullivan and vice versa, picked up the baton.

  He was writing all sorts of garbage about a certain sleepy Italian crooner who'd paid a surgeon to have his toes amputated because he was too much of a pantywaist to serve his country. He never mentioned Vic's name but anyone could tell who it was! He said this singer can stand up on his own eight toes and entertain with his round partner at such nifty niteries as El Morocco and the Copacabana, but when it comes to standing up for his country, he suddenly loses his balance.

  It was outrageous!

  Lulu had heard it too because [Winchell] had said the same thing on his radio show. She was furious. We were on the phone for ten minutes. She was saying that Vic should get Hunny Gannett to work Walter Winchell over, to bash all his teeth in.

  Carmine walked in and I said to Lu, “Look, I've gotta go.”

  “Cathy?” Lu said in that husky, raspy voice of hers.

  “Yeah?”

  “How did Vic lose them toes anyway? Do you know?”

  I told her I had no idea and said good-bye.

  • • •

  GUY PUGLIA: Straccio had sliced the whole thing off. The skin, the cartilage. Gone. So now the rest of my life I gotta walk around with a bandage over the thing.

  I was in St. Vincent's Hospital recovering from an infection—Hunny was there every single night, he'd spend hours with me, and Ernie Beasley visited a few times, so did Arnie and Estelle. Vic come once. Once. He brought me a bottle of scotch. We talked bullshit for a while, then he says, “Maybe it'll grow back, Gaetano.”

  I told him, “It ain't growin' back.”

  He said, “But I cut the skin on my finger, the skin always grows back.”

  “It ain't growin' back, Vic.”

  I didn't tell him that the reason it was cut off was 'cause Straccio was asking for a piece of Vic Fountain. I didn't tell him that.

  The papers and magazines . . . they was all talking about how Vic got out of the draft. The Hotel Astor and another joint even canceled their shows. You had lots of soldiers comin' back from overseas, some of 'em in real bad shape. When Winchell was hinting that Vic paid a doctor to amputate his toes, that didn't go over too good.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: Vic told me he wanted to get Hunny to work Winchell over. I said, Hey, what you do to Hilda Fleury's butler, that's fine.

  Hunny can work Hilda over too, for all I care, that anti-Semite old bag. But not Winchell. That won't wash.

  “You think you're gonna solve every single problem,” I asked him, “by working someone over?”

  “If not solve them,” Vic said, “then come real close.”

  “Look, I got something better for you. After the Detroit trip, you're gonna perform a service for your country like you don't know what. They'll be so much positive ink on this, it'll be like both your missing toes won Congressional Medals of Honor.”

  But I couldn't tell him exactly what it was because I didn't know.

  JANE WHITE: Ziggy and I went to Le Pavillon for dinner. I'd bought a new pair of shoes at Saks and had my hair done. He kept me laughing the entire time—I almost couldn't eat. He walked me home and, yes, we kissed for the first time. But he was a gentleman . . . he didn't try anything further than that. I knew he was going to the Midwest to perform and I said to him, “Well, I guess I'll see you in a week or so.” But he said it would be two weeks. He had someplace else to go, he told me. “Oh, golly!” I said. “Where?” He shook his head and said it was classified. “Is it Hollywood? Are you going to Los Angeles?” He pinched my cheek and said some words of endearment in Yiddish, something like “such a goyishe shayne punim you got on you.” I told him I didn't like him talking like that. We kissed again and then he left.

  • • •

  REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV [soldier, employee of Vigorish, Inc.]: I was General Emmet “Woody” Woodling's adjutant in Washington, D.C., and also at Los Alamos, New Mexico. General Woodling served as a liaison between the Trinity group in New Mexico, the Manhattan Project in Chicago, and General George Marshall in D.C. My father, I should mention, was General Reynolds Catledge III, who served in Patton's Third Army and who'd graduated second in his class at West Point and served under General Pershing in World War I. His father and grandfather had both attended West Point and I too had attended—I did not fare well there—and, though I urgently requested an appointment in the European Theater, I was instead assigned to General Woodling in Washington. I dearly wanted to see combat, to test my mettle, but my father used his position and connections to keep me stateside, and I was relegated to a degrading, humiliating desk assignment.

  To my dismay, I was little more than a secretary at times, or a valet. Occasionally I would have to get the general's shoes shined or bring in his pants to be pressed, and I found myself sewing buttons onto his shirts. The general was married to Lucinda Hodge, whose father was Elihu J. Hodge, the department store magnate, but General Woodling was carrying on a rather indiscreet affair with a woman named Betsy Cunningham, whose father worked in a Rexall drugstore as a stock clerk. One of my duties, on the evenings when the general would be occupied with Miss Cunningham (which was practically every evening), was to keep Mrs. Woodling company. A dowdy, tedious woman in her late forties, she and I would dine and attend the theater together or have tea in her living room. To this day I thank God that it was tea I was drinking and not liquor—otherwise I would have fallen asleep in her company. On the other hand Betsy Cunningham had once—or so she'd informed the general—won a beauty contest in North Dakota; now she was twenty-three years old, twenty-seven years the general's junior, and was a shapely blond tart with wavy golden hair and succulent Cupid's-bow lips. And here I was, twenty-four years old, spending World War II, not leading a group of men at Monte Cassino or on the Rhine, but playing canasta and gin rummy with this dull, white-haired dowager in frumpy flower-print dresses and a pearl necklace.

  None of my requests to be transferred were granted. I tried everything but was stymied by my father every single time. “The lad will not last a day in c
ombat,” he told my mother.

  I made numerous arrangements to fly the general into and out of Chicago and New Mexico, always on army air force planes, but was never told precisely why he was going there. He would receive phone calls from Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and even from physicists Neils Bohr, Emilio Segré, and Ernest Rutherford, and I would have to put them through, but I had not the vaguest notion as to why they were calling. General [Leslie R.] Groves, who supervised the Trinity program for the army, was a frequent caller. One afternoon Betsy Cunningham was in the general's office, which adjoined mine, and the door was locked. One can only imagine—which I did, often—what was going on in there. Dr. Oppenheimer phoned and informed me it was urgent. I buzzed the general and relayed that to him but was brusquely instructed to tell Dr. Oppenheimer that the general would call him back in a half hour. I did as I was told. Through the door I heard the sounds of Miss Cunningham and the general arguing. And then not arguing.

  Early in 1944 I, for the first time, accompanied General Woodling to New Mexico. Miss Cunningham was also on the plane, which was a violation of protocol . . . I'd had to refer to her as “Army Nurse Cunningham” in order to procure her passage. I sat by myself on the transport plane and the two of them sat in front of me, alternating between infantile giggling and stern silences. It was just we three. At one point in the flight, General Woodling fell asleep and I noticed that Miss Cunningham began looking through his kit bag, but he awoke and admonished her. She nibbled on his ear and the matter was quickly settled. He fell asleep again and she turned around to me and made a flirtatious “kissy gesture” to me, not the first time she had done so. At another juncture in the flight, the general came over to me and, his breath reeking of bourbon, said, “Reynolds, I know that the past two years haven't been easy for you, that you haven't appreciated being kept in the dark. But very soon you're going to learn what this is all about and why it had to be that way.” As I was telling him that I understood the need for complete confidentiality, I espied Betsy Cunningham applying a glistening red lipstick and looking back at the two of us. “How's Mrs. Woodling doing?” the general asked me. “I spend far too little time with Lucinda nowadays.” I told the general that she was doing well, that her teas, social functions, and canasta games kept her busy. Miss Cunningham at this juncture crossed her legs and tugged at her skirt slightly. There was a brief flash of skin, the skin between the upper rim of her stocking and the hem of the skirt. Unbeknownst to General Woodling, she saw me see this flash of skin and then made a crude yet alluring tongue gesture.

  Los Alamos, which General Groves and Dr. Oppenheimer had selected as the laboratory and test site, was the ideal location. It is unimaginable that any other place would have sufficed. The scenery was awe-inspiring. The sky stretched out forever in all directions; hills and mountains rose and fell with unbearable majesty, and the play of colors was almost unendurable: umbers, ochres, puces, and the pale blue sky arcing overhead . . . truly an awesome vista. Miles and miles of desolation, of isolation, an endless, broken terrain of terrible emptiness. It was as harrowingly lonely a place as I have ever been to in my life.

  And that was the problem.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: See, you had all these highbrow E=MC2 types, these chemists and engineers and physicists, and you had some army guys, and some of the wives there too . . . but there wasn't anything to do! Take the most exciting two hundred people in the world and plop them down right smack in the middle of Death Valley. Things would get pretty dead pretty quick, wouldn't it? But this was worse. Because these people were not exciting. A scintillating time for them was getting a new piece of chalk to write a formula with.

  That's why we were there. Sure, they had their chess games and their little parties before Fountain and Bliss arrived. There were square dances and Enrico Fermi used to play the piano and I think Edward Teller used to even play the fiddle. But, you know, even a physicist who's designing the most powerful weapon in the history of mankind at the most crucial moment in history wants to get up and swing once in a while! That's what General Woodling told us: This was for morale. We were to play one show and then get the hell out of here. I had no idea, Vic and Ziggy had no idea, that they were working on an atomic bomb.

  On our first day there we were taken to a small dusty barracks to meet Woody and Oppenheimer, who was as skinny as a lollipop stick. I said to him, “Oppie, bubeleh, eat something!!!” I don't care how much a guy knows about the cosmos and uranium and neutrons, I don't care if he has become Death, shatterer of worlds, just eat something! Ziggy even said he was going to call Sally and have her send him ten pounds of rugelach . . . but Oppenheimer reminded Ziggy that we were not allowed to use the phones. Vic said, “No phones? Doc, this place is deader than last week's beer!” “Yes, it is,” Oppie said. Boy, you couldn't get a giggle or a smile out of that guy.

  “You're going to perform one show,” Woody told us. “It will be the night of July fifteenth. It will be at an undisclosed location on the base . . . you'll be informed hours before the show.”

  “Jesus, I hope we're flying Billy Ross in,” Vic said.

  “Who's Billy Ross?” Oppie asked.

  “My arranger and bandleader. I ain't going on with some nickel-and-dime army band.”

  While Oppie and Woody now confabbed in a corner for a second, Ziggy, Vic, and I took the opportunity to similarly huddle together.

  “This place is death,” Vic said. “I want out.”

  “This is important, guys,” I said.

  “Vic's right, Latch,” Ziggy chimed in. “I'd rather play a prison full of condemned deaf mutes than this joint.”

  “Look, we do one show, we do two hours, then we get going. The Astor canceled on us because of Vic's toes. The Hippodrome dropped us in Baltimore too. I promise you, I give you my word, that this thing is going to fix that. We need this!”

  “And I need a drink,” Vic said.

  General Woodling and Oppenheimer came back and Woody said, “We're not flying Billy Ross in. I'm sorry. We have several people here who play musical instruments. I'm sure that they would love to provide accompaniment for you.”

  “Hey, who's the dish?” Vic said. Out the barracks window we saw some blond doll in a jeep with a figure like Linda Darnell's. She was looking in the rearview mirror, fixing her hair.

  “Back to this music problem,” Woody said. “Do you have any—”

  “Yeah!” I said. “I got the charts!” I opened up my suitcase, which those Army security momzers at the gate had thoroughly searched—Vic and Ziggy were chuckling to no end about my polka-dot boxers—and I handed Woody the charts.

  “What are you guys working on here, Doc, “Vic asked Oppenheimer, “some sort of super-deluxe martini shaker to get the Nips so bagged we can just waltz into Tokyo?”

  “Perhaps we should devote ourselves to that, Mr. Fountain,” Oppie said to him.

  “Lieutenant Catledge will show you to your quarters,” Woody said.

  “Is there any booze in this operation?” Vic asked. “I'm parched.”

  General Woodling told us that there was alcohol and that he would have some sent over to our quarters after Catledge filled out the proper requisition papers.

  “Jeez, I go to Jack Dempsey's bar, I don't have to fill out any requisition papers,” Vic said.

  We walked out and Lieutenant Catledge walked us over to a little Quonset-hut setup, about a mile's walk. Ziggy was huffing and puffing as we walked and Vic kept saying, “Where's our hotel room in? Fuckin' Brazil?”

  The hut was so bare I almost blushed out of embarrassment. Three cots and a toilet. And a window with a breathtaking view of absolutely nothing.

  “What kinda design style is this? Early igloo?” Ziggy said.

  “No phone, huh?” Vic chimed in. “How'm I supposed to call my bookie?”

  Catledge told us that there were phones but that we did not have clearance to use them. Vic said, “Look, pal, if you've got clearance, do me a favor. Put a fin on the Red Sox today.”


  “I wouldn't know who to call for that, Mr. Fountain,” Cat said.

  “I was only kiddin' ya,” Vic said. “And it's Vic, not Mr. Fountain.”

  Catledge left and we plotzed as one on our respective cots.

  “Where the hell's our next show after this, Latch? We playing for some bedouins at the Club Sahara?” Ziggy said.

  “Yeah, Zig,” I said. “I'll try to line that one up for us.”

  REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV: I'd been at the base a few weeks before Fountain and Bliss arrived and was on the verge of losing my sanity. There were square dances on weekends and there was even a low-watt radio station, but I really did feel as though I was at the very edge of the world. The food was not bad—Edward Teller's veal paprikosh was splendid. But the place needed a jolt, a shot in the arm.

  My only source of diversion was Betsy Cunningham. One day she came into General Woodling's office. She wanted to use the phone, she told me, and I told her this was impossible. She sat on my desk, crossed her legs. She ran her fingers through my hair, told me what a handsome boy I was. “Poor wittle Reynolds,” she said, pinching my lips together with her hands, “wittle, wittle baby boy who works for big, big strong general but wants to fuck the general's girl and who's got this wittle, wittle hard-on right now.”

  She told me that I should wait up for her that night, that she would tap on my window at three in the morning and, like a fool, I did.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: They wouldn't let us do anything! We wanted to walk around, get the feel of the place, but everywhere we went, someone told us we couldn't go here, we couldn't go there. Ziggy was sweating up a storm . . . the place was like being inside an oven. I said to Catledge, “You gotta give us a jeep, Cat,” and he said he'd do what he could. We got the jeep. Vic went to the mess hall on our second day and “liberated” some gin and vermouth and some bourbon and seltzer. Meanwhile Ziggy's clothes are sopping wet with his constant shvitz. “Can you get this guy some new duds?” I say to Catledge and boom, ten minutes later Ziggy, me, and Vic are all decked out in army fatigues. (Boy, did Vic ever get a big kick out of walking around in an army uniform for a few days!)