by Ted Heller
That night we're back in our hut and just shooting the shit. Tellin' stories, reliving some of the good times we've had. You know, Vic and Ziggy were now sort of becoming pals. The Detroit shows had gone really well. We'd gone out to dinner and lunch there every night, all of us together. Their rapport was improving. They had all that chemistry on the stage and now they were getting it offstage too. And that was the first time we ever started insisting on things. And we did it just for the hell of it. In the hotel in Chi, Ziggy called down to the front desk and said he wanted ruby red sheets and pillow cases, to match his hair. Ruby he wants! And they did it. Then he calls Vic's room to crow about that, and Vic now one-ups him . . . he says he wants turquoise, to match his eyes. And they did that too.
So we're in the hut drinking martinis and Catledge comes in, just to check on us.
“Any broads around here, Cat?” Vic says to him.
“There are indeed,” Catledge told us. There were the wives, there were some lady scientists, and so on, he told us.
“Nah, you know what I mean,” Vic said. “Where can a fella get some action in this one-ghost town? Mr. Baciagaloop needs to whet his whistle.”
After we assured Cat that we hadn't snuck [ sic] anyone named Mr. Baciagaloop onto the grounds, he said to us, “There are some girls if you're really interested.”
Vic perked up, offered Catledge a drink. Vic said, “I'm a two-a-day man and I ain't even had my first yet. You and me, Cat, whattaya say?”
Catledge—he was a small, serious crewcut guy who wouldn't smile if you stretched his lips with pliers—blushed, and Vic looked over to me and Ziggy. Ziggy said, “I'm game for some broad action—you know me.” Vic said, “You stay here and keep Latch company, Zig. Me and the lootie have some reconnoitering to do, ain't that, right, Lieutenant Catledge?” Vic slapped Cat on the back and then he and this bashful lieutenant go driving off into the darkness.
Two days later who shows up? Hunny Gannett!
Vic said that he would not go on, would not do the show, would in fact leave the whole area, if Hunny was not on the premises. He made this abundantly clear to Catledge, who in turn made that known to the top pooh-bahs at Los Alamos. Turns out that the two pin-striped FBI guys had already cleared Hunny. Too dumb to be a spy, I guess. They flew Hunny in, dragged in another cot, and now it was the four of us, swilling martinis, goofing off and swapping stories.
Boxers back then would do exhibitions. You go from this base to that, you strip to your trunks and strap on the Everlasts and shuffle and jab, and you've done your duty. Keep the boys entertained, keep your tuches in one piece. Vic's idea was to have Hunny maybe take on some of the army guys on the base. “It'd really loosen up the place, Arn,” he said. The army bought it.
REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV: There was a makeshift three-hole golf course on the base, and when Vic Fountain found out about that he was very pleased. He would spend hours at the course, driving and putting. Dr. Ursula Fischer, an Austrian physicist, came to the course one day to relax and get a few holes in. Dr. Fischer was an integral part of the Manhattan Project, whose work in radioactive isotopes has never been fully appreciated; she was twenty-seven years old and had studied under Dr. Heisenberg in Germany. She was pretty, fair-skinned, tall with hazel eyes. Vic saw her driving some balls and he sidled up to her. Within a few minutes she was giggling like a Viennese schoolgirl and Vic was helping her with her stroke. He asked her if he could take her out to dinner that night but she reminded him that there was no place to go. He asked her where he might find her, and she, in between giggles, told him which dormitory she was living in. He said he would swing by and they could, in his words, “talk physics.”
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Yeah, Vic had something going with one of the local brains. He came stumbling into the hut one morning and I asked him where he'd been all night. He said he'd been with a girl. I asked him, “Which girl? Humor me. I'm lonely. I miss Estelle.” I asked him, “Was it the physicist Austrian broad from yesterday?” He said, “Who? Madame Curie with tits? Yeah, it was her.”
Ziggy would do his thing in the mess hall and he had all the army boys and the brass and even the science guys in stitches. There was a food fight that he instigated one day between the chemists and the other guys . . . the chemists killed 'em! It was no contest. (I guess if you know the correct properties of baked beans you can hurl them at a better angle or something.) One night Catledge took us to the little radio station—they were playing Brahms's Fourth Symphony at the time—and Ziggy and Vic grabbed the mike and started doing their celebrity shtick, imitating Cagney, Gable, [Bette] Davis, Cooper, Bogie, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, everybody. When they were doing that I looked out the little window of this shack we were in . . . I looked from barracks to barracks and I could see silhouettes in the windows. People were laughing.
Slow dissolve. Outdoors, a field. Day before the big show. Hunny had his exhibition. In the middle of nowhere these army engineer guys set up this jerry-built boxing ring. Hunny had brought a couple pair of Everlasts and was ready to take on all comers. Believe me, they came. Soldier boy after soldier boy got in the ring—these poor kids had been cooped up in the desert all this time, with nothing to do, with no war to fight. Hunny would toy with each kid, circle and circle, and if the solider hit him he'd pretend to be hurt. But after a few minutes he'd just rear back and let loose a haymaker. Even “Steady” Eddie Teller got in the ring but General Woodling told Hunny to not hurt this guy, he was important, so Hunny played nice. (Not the first time he took a dive.) Woodling was sitting with this blond dish, the same broad we'd seen in the jeep a few days before. This girl could've been a movie star, all the bits and pieces were in the right place. But she wasn't having such a great time right now. You know how you take a girl somewhere and she gets in a bad mood and so she tries to make it a miserable a time for you too? That's what she was doing. She and the general left before the thing was over.
That night in the hut, before Vic snuck [ sic] out, he and Ziggy went over which routines to do. We agreed that the joint was looser than when we'd first arrived. When we got there, it was like granite; now it was like any old Wednesday night at a club in Toledo, Ohio. A little tight but some grease would loosen it up quick. Fountain and Bliss could play the goddamn Reichstag, we all agreed, and have the place jumping.
“Hey, I met the guy who invented the radio today!” Vic said suddenly. “He's an Italian just like me! He's gonna be leading our band tomorrow too.”
“What the hell are you talking about, the guy who invented the radio?” I said.
“Enrico Fermi. Yeah, I met him today.”
I said, “Marconi invented the radio, not Fermi!” and I threw a pillow at him.
“All right, I better get going,” Vic said, looking at his watch and grabbing a bottle of Gordon's.
“Where you goin', Vic? Huh? Take me along,” Ziggy said.
Hunny grunted. “Betchya it's that isotopes broad.”
The next morning I'm in the mess hall alone when two gray pin-striped shadows with fedoras slowly descend over my bowl of oatmeal.
“Hey, guys, hop in,” I said, indicating the gruel.
They asked me how everything was going and I told them it was all hunky-dory, considering our current locale. They started to walk away and I grabbed the shorter G-man by his jacket tail and tugged him back to me. I said to him, “Me, Vic, and Ziggy, we're outta here in a few days, my friend. And we ain't coming back, not if you offer us forty grand. Hey, for fifty, maybe we do it. But I need—the act needs—some proof that we were here. You get me? Remember? You promised me that Joe Doakes and Jane Doe would find out about this gig!”
So at about three o'clock that day, Oppie drives up to the small golf course, and me, Ziggy, Vic, and Hunny pile into the jeep. We keep driving. Off in the distance—and, believe me, there was enough distance to go around—I see a tall metal tower. The jeep pulls up at the tower, there's a bunch of guys standing there. It's all the hotshots . . . Fermi, Ken Bainbridg
e, Segré, Bohr, “Steady” Eddie Teller, General Groves, Rutherford, a bunch of other fellas. The two gray pin-striped guys are there. And there's an official army shutterbug too. It's Joe Doakes time.
The scientists, including Oppenheimer, gather around Ziggy and Vic. They're all standing right underneath this big tower. The sun is blazing hot. Vic puts on his romantic crooner look and Zig bugs out his eyes northeast and southwest. Snap! The picture is taken.
The G-men are standing next to me, behind the fotog, when everybody says cheese. I mutter to the short one, “I'd like three hundred and fifty of those, if you don't mind.”
REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV: When Arnie said he couldn't guarantee a great show because Victor Fountain was very hung over, I got some aspirins over to their hut right away. He also said that Ziggy was in a rotten frame of mind. I inquired as to why, and Arnie said that I would not understand. He then asked me where I'd taken Vic on the first night, when Vic wanted a woman. I said there was a barracks where some women who “serviced” the community were kept. “Can you take Ziggy there, Cat?” he asked me. I said I would do so. He said, “I don't think you get me, soldier boy. Can you get him there now?” I said I would do so immediately.
Unfortunately, there was a problem. The woman that Ziggy Bliss had selected refused to service him, once he'd removed his clothes. Ziggy said he would pay her three times what she usually made for such an endeavor but she held firm. A rather large woman who worked there said that she could handle him but insisted on four times the usual rate. They went upstairs. A minute later, Baldwyn Sloate, a short man who worked for the FBI and who always wore a gray pin-striped suit and a fedora, as did his partner, Timothy Jones, walked in and told me that the entire place had to be evacuated. I foolishly asked, “Can we possibly wait four more minutes?” but Sloate said we could not. There were several army trucks parked outside. The women were not even allowed to gather their personal effects—they were led into the trucks by several soldiers, some of whom they'd no doubt pleasured. The woman who was with Ziggy was fetched by Agent Jones, and Ziggy appeared at the top of the stairs with nothing on but a towel. “Hey, I was just about to unload my buckets!” he said. He was very angry. He put his army fatigues back on and I drove him back to the hut.
A few hours later I was in General Woodling's headquarters—he was not in at the time nor had be been in all that day—going over some paperwork when Agents Sloate and Jones walked in and closed the door.
“What do you know about Betsy Cunningham?” Sloate asked me.
“What do you want to know?” I asked.
“Every single thing, Lieutenant.”
In the space of a second, I weighed several things over in my mind. By this time I had come to detest the general; I loathed how he'd forced me to spend evenings with his wife, how I had to cover up for his assignations with Betsy Cunningham. I'd even had to go to department stores in Washington and in Virginia and buy her lingerie! Miss Cunningham would taunt me publicly. Three times she had pinched my buttocks and started giggling while General Marshall was addressing the staff in Washington. On one occasion in Washington while General Woodling was in his office with the door closed, she paced back and forth, waiting for him to let her in. I could not concentrate on the work at hand. The sound of her heels, the saliva clacking in her mouth. She said, “Two more minutes and I'm never talking to that fat old jackass again.” She opened a file drawer and I told her that she had to close it, the information in there was classified. “This is really important!” she said to me. I asked her, “May I inquire as to the nature of the business at hand?” And she said, “Yeah, this is the business,” whereupon she stood before me, shifted all her comely weight to one side, and lifted up her skirt. She was not wearing panties. I swallowed . . . I got dizzy very quickly. “You want it, don't you?” she asked me. “Like the way it's shaved?” I could not contain myself any longer—months of frustration and bitterness seemed to overwhelm me—and I foolishly reached for her. She brought her skirt down quickly and said, “Ha! Take a long walk on a short pier, sissy.” The door then opened and she ran giggling into the general's office. The door was shut but I was able to listen to their coupling over the intercom.
I told agents Sloate and Jones that Betsy Cunningham was the general's mistress. They'd been having an affair for three years and had first met at a lunch counter in Arlington. I named every hotel in Virginia and Washington where they had their trysts, and added that I myself had had to book their rooms. I related the incident about her looking through the general's effects and opening the file drawers. I even told them what size bra she wore—34DD—I knew as I'd had to purchase several of them. I told them that her father worked at a Rexall in Virginia, and they looked at each other.
Baldwyn Sloate asked me how I'd come about the information regarding Miss Cunningham's father and I told them that she had told me. They asked me if I'd ever met her father and I told them no, I had not. They asked me if I had ever had any sexual relations with Miss Cunningham and I told them that although I had not I was dying to. They told me they understood.
I never saw Miss Cunningham again, not in the flesh. Nor did I ever see General Woodling.
The general had already been relieved of his duty earlier that day, I later discovered, and eventually he vanished into obscurity. Sloate and Jones had him ushered off the base and flown to an undisclosed location for interrogation. An innocent, gullible man, he was exonerated from any wrongdoing other than being a bored fifty-year-old man married to a frumpy, whitehaired, canasta-playing wife. But Miss Betsy Cunningham, whose real name was Ludmilla Danilova, was deported to the Soviet Union in 1963.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: I don't know what Enrico Fermi did when it comes to atoms or molecules or radiation, but it's a good thing he stuck to that and not the piano. Ouch! Talk about matter being transformed! Here's a perfectly fine in-tune Steinway and he's making it sound like a kazoo. There was a tenpiece band and this combo was about as off-key as a second-grade music class. Vic was trying to sing a few numbers and he actually did make it through, but you think the A-bomb made a racket? You should have heard Fermi mangle “Night and Day.”
The show was in the mess hall. Hunny was tending bar and, boy, were the drinks flowing that night. The chemical boys had some grain alcohol and Hunny had gotten some lime or lemon flavoring and he made this big vat of punch. Some army cutup had taken some paint and drawn a picture of a uranium atom on the thing, that's how powerful this joy juice was! And they were lining up to guzzle it, all the highbrows and the soldiers and the wives.
Ziggy and Vic were on for about three hours. At the end, nobody could even laugh anymore. Too hoarse, too wrung out, too smashed. That was the night Fountain and Bliss originated their Dr. Louie Kablooie bit, where Ziggy puts on an Einstein wig and mustache and Yiddish accent and Vic interviews him. Now keep in mind, we still had no idea what the hell all these science guys were working on but we figured that to put everyone out here in the middle of nowhere and to have a fence around the joint and to send those agents to talk to Estelle, it's gotta be something powerful. So Ziggy and Vic had guessed it had to be a bomb, right? But the fact that this bomb had some atom splitting inside of it—well, we were in the dark about that. This Louie Kablooie bit really had 'em on the floor. And for the very first time in the week we were there, Oppie was even smiling. When the show was over he came over to me and said, “Your act has done us a great service.” To which I, ever the astute manager, replied, “Great. Where's our dough?”
Sure enough when we get back to our hut, there's twenty grand in cash in a GI duffel bag waiting for us. Right on my pillow. Vic and Zig took fourteen, gave me and Hunny three each. All in all, not bad for a day's work.
Cat woke the four of us up at 3:00 in theA.M.that night. “Everyone has to go,” he said. “Right now. Orders from the top.” We piled into a jeep and drove off into the blackness.
We slept in the jeep most of the way, with Cat driving . . . I remember there not being a cloud i
n the sky . . . there was nothing but white and blue stars, big, close, and twinkling. The next morning we were in Albuquerque, billeted to some small cheap hotel that was as hot as a goddamn steambath. We slept some more. That was the day, it turned out, that the first atom bomb was tested. We weren't allowed to see it. Years later, Vic and Ziggy were still griping about that. The nerve of the army, right?
After a day in Albuquerque, Cat drove us to Las Vegas, our first time there. We stayed at the Last Frontier. I said to Cat, Hey, if you ever get out of the army, look me up. And I offered him a grand. “I'm not permitted to accept this,” he said, so I said, “Are you permitted to accept two grand?” Apparently that fell within the regulations of army conduct, and the next day we were on a train to Chicago and then we were back in New York.
I get a Post one day and the first thing I read is Bud Hatch, who'd always been a friend to the act, weighing in on Vic's toes. Bud was on our side but, still, it was annoying that this thing was still being bandied about. (It was probably his wife, the so-called Scintillating Lady; she got half of the scoops, wrote half the column, bore half the grudges, and drank all the gin.) A day later, the short gray pin-striped guy called me on the phone at the office and I asked him, “Hey, you promised me publicity! When can we break this thing to the press?!” He said that soon I could tell everybody everything. Where are the pictures of my boys with all the science guys? I asked him, and he told me that in good time I'd get the pictures. “I get my talent out there in the middle of that desert to play a show for a bunch of stiffs and I can't even tell the press!” I barked out to him. “That's absurd!” He said, “You were paid twenty thousand for it.” And that shut me up good.
