Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  Weeks passed. More negative press. More canceled engagements. John Perona at El Morocco is even starting to come on all queasy-like. Vic comes in one day and he's fuming; he reminds me that I'd so much as promised him he'd come out on top with this thing. I said to him, “I so much as promised you, but I didn't promise you.” I told him to hold tight. But frankly, Teddy, I was starting to get antsy about it too. That maybe we'd been had by Uncle Sam.

  “Lulu and I are getting married,” Vic then told me.

  “When?”

  “We ain't set a date yet.”

  “So Vic Fountain is finally going to settle down, huh?”

  “Probably not.”

  Snuffy Dubin comes back stateside and he's begging Ziggy for a spot on the radio show. Snuffy was broke; he really hadn't made bubkes as a comic yet, don't forget that. He said to Ziggy and me, “Just give me two minutes a week, come on.” Ziggy wouldn't budge. He said that it wouldn't blend in with the rest of the show. I felt for Snuffles, I really did—he'd had a tough time in the marines—but I just couldn't alienate my talent. And Vic, he didn't care, so he weighed in with Ziggy.

  Then I pick up a Daily News one morning and there it was. We'd dropped the big one on the Japs. A super-deluxe martini shaker, all right, that's what it was. The second I read that I knew this was what they'd been cooking up out there in the desert. Ha! Arnold Latchkey from the Bronx—a guy who'd been reaming spit valves just a few years before—eyewitness to history.

  So I go into my office in the Brill Building and what's on my chair? An envelope with 350 eight-by-tens of Fountain and Bliss with Oppie and Fermi and “Steady” Eddie Teller. And the tower in the background. The tower, my friend, that they dropped the first bomb off of! The short gray pin-striped guy calls me and says to me, “Okay, Mr. Latchkey. You can let her rip.”

  The next three days Bertie Kahn and I called up every newspaper, every magazine, every single sonuvabitch with a pencil and a piece of paper. We sent out the photos. It was all over the place, it was everywhere. They started referring to the act as the Atomix Comix!

  That schlemiel at the Capitol Theater calls me up one day and says, “So, Arnie, can we get the boys to open up a movie for us now?” And I said to him, “Oh yeah, sure we can. They'll open up a movie. At the Paramount they'll open up!” And I hung up on that schnorrer.

  Then one day Murray Katz at WAT phones me and says the words I've been having wet dreams of hearing for years.

  “How would Ziggy and Vic,” he asks me, “feel about taking a little trip to Hollywood?”

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: We played the A-bomb card for all it was worth. Talk about nuclear fallout! This was radioactive manna from heaven, the way it fell right into our laps. Ziggy and Vic did a weekend at the Riviera in New Jersey and posed with Albert Einstein for an Associated Press fotog; the Daily Mirror ran the picture and captioned it “Nuclear Nuts.” Bud Hatch mentioned an upcoming engagement in Philly at the Earl Theater and said something like “Do not miss this atom-splitting, sidesplitting act.” Variety called the act “radioactive ridiculousness.”

  Lulu came up to New York one weekend and she, Vic, Estelle, and I had dinner at Delmonico's. Lu had her engagement ring on—the thing was bigger than her head. Now, Estelle knew all about Vic's reputation with the girls—as our receptionist, she often had to juggle three girls at once for him—and she and I had talked about their upcoming nups. “It's just not going to work, honey,” she'd warned me, and I said to her, “Some of these shiksa wives, though, they know something's going on with their husbands and another woman, so they just look the other way.” And Estelle said, “But Vic's with so many girls, she'll run out of other ways to look.”

  Vic says to me at Delmonico's now, “So this Hollywood trip, does this mean we don't have to do the radio show no more?”

  “You got meetings at Columbia, MGM, Galaxy, and Paramount,” I told him, “but for all we know Harry Cohn, Louis Mayer, and the rest of 'em will toss you headfirst out their offices and into the raging Pacific surf. I wouldn't count any chickens before they're hatched.”

  “I tell ya, movies seem like a swell racket, Latch. You do two pictures a year, the rest of the time you're just playing golf or taking it easy.”

  “There's some difference between playing golf and taking it easy?” my darling, clever, beautiful wife-to-be cracked wise.

  Now, I'd sort of picked up that Vic wasn't thrilled with the radio show. He was still showing up late for rehearsal. When theON AIRsign lit up, he'd go great guns, full speed ahead—that was the professional in Vic. But to get to the professional in Vic, you sometimes had to peel away about twenty layers of unprofessional, like an onion. He once said to me that the radio show was like having a real job and he didn't get into show business so he could have a real job.

  “You know, Ziggy is the other half of the act,” I told him. “He likes the radio show.”

  “Yeah, he would,” Vic said with a sneering curl of the lip, upper right side.

  When I told Ziggy about the Hollywood trip, you know what the first thing he said was? “Uh-oh, I hope this don't mean we have to give up the radio show.”

  • • •

  GUY PUGLIA: I was embarrassed. It never bothered me being a short guy 'cause I knew that even though I was a half-pint I was the toughest guy wherever I went. Hunny and I would go at each other sometimes, just goofin' on each other, and he had a foot and fifty pounds on me and I could lick him sometimes, he was so slow. At Barney's Beanery [in Los Angeles] one night I got into a scrap with a big, strong Hollywood stunt guy and they had to pull me off a him so I wouldn't kill him. But what embarrassed me now was the nose. I stayed in St. Vincent's a week longer than I really needed to, 'cause I just didn't want to go outside with the little bandage over my face. Here I am, this little piece of scrap iron, and I'm worried about how fuckin' pretty I look.

  The day I went home I even made sure to have a cab waiting right outside the hospital. So I'd only be outdoors for a second.

  When I was in the lobby about to run for that taxi, who do I see but Hunny Gannett. He gives me a big bear hug and we pile in and head home. He's got a bottle of champagne and by the time we made it to our spread on Fifty-sixth Street we were smashed.

  “Everything's gonna be all right, Gaetano,” he says to me in the car. “You'll see.”

  “I don't know, Hun,” I said. I didn't tell him I was embarrassed. I didn't talk about them type things.

  “You're gonna be okay,” Hunny says. “Nobody's gonna pick on you. Anybody does, the Hun'll pulverize 'em.”

  He took a long swig of the bubbly and I says to him, “Hun, you got a fight tonight, don't forget.”

  He opens the door to the apartment and the first thing I see on the couch is Vic Fountain, my paisan. He's got two naked broads with him, one on each side and both of them with red ribbons around their necks like they was gifts, and there's a bottle of champagne on the coffee table. “Take your pick, you little sawed-off sonuvabitch,” he says to me. “Or take both. It's on me.”

  I figure, what the hell. Why not? I didn't have a girl. I didn't ever have a girl. I picked the shorter one, the brunette, and we went into the next room.

  About the only time Vic and I ever talked about this whole nose thing was a few days later. We was at Hunny's saloon. He says to me, “Guy, I know some serious people. Connected guys. People who can take care of Straccio.”

  Now this was something that I had no problem with. I says to him, “Take care of him? Like how?” I wanted to make sure we were on the same wavelength here.

  “Like, he don't ever bother nobody ever again. Like, he don't even breathe another breath of Codport air. These guys, they do something, it's clean. No dirt ever sticks to you or me. They're professionals about it.”

  I ask him who he would go to and he says either Joe Adonis or Al Pompiere. Now, I didn't want to tell him that Straccio had told me that Joe Adonis owed him a favor, 'cause I didn't want Vic to ever know that I'd lost my schnoz 'cau
se Straccio was threatening to lean on Vic. Right? So Joe Adonis is out. I says, “Awright, see what Al Pompiere can do.”

  A day before he and Ziggy hop on the train to Hollywood, I'm at the same table with Al Pompiere and Vic. Big Al says we need another chair because his son-in-law is coming any second to join this get-together.

  “Big movie star, huh, Vittorio?” Pompiere says. “Once you get an eyeful-of all them juicy Hollywood actresses you'll never come back east.”

  “It can't happen a minute too soon, Al,” Vic says.

  “And I want to hear all about when it does. That Lana Turner . . .”

  Vic then puts his arm around my shoulder and says, “Look what that fuckin' stronzo did to my buddy, Al. Look at this. Fuckin' guy rips his nose off with a blade. Someone does that to a buddy of yours, what do you do to him?”

  Al Pompiere says, “He rips my buddy's nose off, he loses his coglioni. Case closed.”

  “That's what I'm saying. Al, can you take care of this guy for me?”

  Big Al is mulling this over and I'm starting to think, What the fuck is this powwow about? Vic doesn't really want to get anything done.

  Al says, “Vic, you asked me what I would do and I told you. But now you want me to take care of your business? Why don't you rip this guy's nuts out like I would? I mean, why did you bother even asking me? Where does Al Pompiere fit in?”

  Vic got all red in the face. He liked to come on like a tough guy, but he was no tough guy. He just liked to hang around with 'em sometimes.

  “What do I get out of this?” Al says. “The thrill of knowing that I had some small-town rodent hit three hundred miles away? I need these jollies? I'm a businessman, Vic.”

  The door swings open and this big shadow approaches. It's Lou Manganese, Big Al's son-in-law. Lou the Ape. He sits down and joins us and Big Al introduces us.

  “You and I met once but you maybe don't remember, Vic,” Lou says to Vic.

  “I meet a lot of people I don't remember, Lou,” Vic says. “I'm an entertainer.”

  “Nah, but you hardly was one when we met. It was at this shithole dive in Camden. Herbie's Duplex. You pretty much told me to get the fuck lost.”

  “Vic,” Big Al said, “you're not so stupid you'd do a thing like that, would you?”

  “At that time I might have been,”

  Vic said. “Vic wants us to kill someone, Lou. Like we got nothing else to do?”

  They both break up laughing and Vic begins to melt quicker than the ice in his scotch. They recover from their laughs and Big Al says to me, “Hey, did anybody in your first grade class call you a sissy or maybe steal your Spaldeen? Maybe Vic wants me to cut that kid's head off.” And he and Lou are breaking up again.

  “Ain't you guys ever heard about sticks and stones?” Lou the Ape said. We walked out of there and Vic was in a rotten mood. “If I was Errol Flynn they'd have done it for me,” he's fuming.

  I felt like an idiot. Al Pompiere was right.

  “I'm gonna take care of this thing for you, pal,” Vic said to me.

  It would've been nice if every once in a while, instead of getting me a whore or trying to have someone knocked off, he asked me how I was doing.

  • • •

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: We took a train to Chicago and did a week at the Rio Cabana there. Packed every night. Tons of ink. Billy Ross was now the official arranger and bandleader. From there it was down to Ohio, they played Cleveland and Cinci, then the Statler in St. Loo. Did a walk-on at the old Tunetown Ballroom. Killed 'em. Ovations, laurels, moolah galore. We were moving like a steamroller, like the Green Bay Packers in their prime. Then on to Kansas City to do a few dates there. The Fountain and Bliss Express is rolling like thunder. This is the farthest west the act's ever been and we're a combination of Lewis and Clark and Napoleon and we're taking over the world. The best thing: In Chi, Lenny Pearl was playing the old Palace Theater a few nights while we were there and he couldn't even half fill the place. That thrilled Ziggy to no end.

  From K.C. it was all aboard the Santa Fe Chief. Hollywood or bust.

  Bertie Kahn told me that Morty Geist at Bursley-Bates in Los Angeles would be doing the publicity. This guy was a kid, he was twenty-two years old tops, but he was a prodigy, like Mozart with a telephone. The kid had handled Rin Tin Tin and look at all the fuss he created out of a German shepherd and, from what I hear, not a particularly intelligent one either. What Bertie failed to mention to me about Morty Geist was that the kid was a nervous wreck. You remember What Makes Sammy Run? Well, this was What Makes Morty Tremble? But he was a whiz kid and he knew his business . . . it just pained people to see him working, that's all.

  The train pulls into Union Station in Los Angeles and the only thing we're expecting is maybe a redcap to help us with our trunks. We're ready to step off the train when I hear this racket—it was a roar, like the ocean at high tide. Ziggy even said to me, “What the hell's goin' on, Arn?” And Vic says, “Maybe some big celebrity is here or something.”

  But it was for us! Well, not really. Morty Geist had rigged it all up. He'd gone to UCLA and USC and told every coed there that Hank Fonda, Cary Grant, and David Selznick would be casting a movie at the station and they needed young kids who screamed very loud for an upcoming motion picture. There were a thousand kids there and to this day I don't know if my eardrums have recovered. Meanwhile Morty had told the press that the hubbub would be for Fountain and Bliss! So you had fotogs from the Examiner and the [Los Angeles] Daily News and people from the Hollywood Reporter and Variety and they all reported this hysteria was for Fountain and Bliss, who simply forged their way unmolested through this screaming mob. And then we got in our taxis and headed for the Hollywood Plaza Hotel.

  Morty met us there, in the lobby. This kid was just on a different plane. His mind raced a million miles a second and I think so did his pulse too. “It went off good, didn't it, at the station?” he said. And I told him it sure did. Even with that good news, he's biting his nails down to the knuckles.

  SALLY KLEIN: When I first met Morty, at the Plaza, I just knew that this was a doomed person. I didn't think this kid would make it past thirty. I used to tell him, “Calm down, Morty,” and he would say, “Sally, this is me being calm.”

  Estelle's roommate, Shirley Klein, had told me in New York to look up her older brother Jack in California. He was a recent widower and was a real-estate lawyer. I said, “Why should I look him up?” and Shirl said, “Because, Sally, he's a really nice man.”

  And he was. So I married him.

  DANNY McGLUE: It wasn't a good time for me. I got out of the navy and I hopped from apartment to apartment, radio show to radio show. Murray Katz at WAT told me he couldn't represent me, and there was no doubt in my mind that that was on Ziggy's instructions. Why else would Murray drop me like I was a hot potato schmeared with cyanide? But Murray passed me over to Joe Gersh, and he would get me these radio jobs. But they weren't any fun. I wrote for Dinah Shore, for Arthur Godfrey, for Len Coles. The pay was okay but it wasn't like the old days with Ziggy, Vic, Arnie, Sid, and Norman. That was home for me.

  Snuffy told me that Zig and Vic were in Los Angeles meeting producers and directors and, well, you know how you can get really happy and really miserable at the same time? That's how I felt. I was happy for them—for Sally too, of course. But I really wanted to be with them.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: Hank Stanco, our man at WAT in L.A., set up the whole agenda. The first meeting was with Harry Cohn at Columbia. Now, I was under the impression we'd be meeting with one of Harry's underlings. But Morty Geist calls me in the morning and he's a nervous wreck and he says, “The meeting is now with Harry! His brother Jack has seen the act at the Copa and Harry wants to meet the boys personally.” That's when I got scared. Harry Cohn? Personally? This guy was vicious like Gandhi was peaceful! I say to Morty, “Are you sure we should do this?” and he says, “Sure I'm sure.” I say, “Morty, what's that knocking noise I'm hearing now?” and he says, “Those are my kn
ees, Arnie.”

  Columbia sends a car for us, and let me tell you, for the first time ever, the boys are nervous. They're both fidgeting. “What's gonna happen here, Latch?” Vic asked me while we waited for the limo. I tell him I have no idea. A minute later Ziggy asks me, “So what do you think is going to happen?” I say to them both, “If I knew the answer, I could cancel the meeting and we could all go on as if it had already happened.” “How big a deal is this Cohn fella?” Vic asks me and I told him he was the cat's meow. “So Harry Cohn is a real big deal, ain't he?” Ziggy asks me two minutes later, and I said, “You two guys are making me nervous now!” But I was already nervous by then.

  We're ushered into Cohn's office—I don't think Mussolini's executive chambers could have been more imperial—and what is Il Duce of Poverty Row doing when we walk in? Yelling. Of course! I mean, this is a given. He's yelling his lungs dry, standing and shouting, and I could count the capillaries on his temple from twenty yards away. He's on the phone to his brother Jack, who ran Columbia in New York, and Harry's screaming, “You fucking son of a bitch, how could you be such an idiot?! . . . I'll destroy you, you fucking bastard! . . . You goddamn idiot, I'll kill you and eat you and spit you out into the toilet where you belong, you fucking piece of dirt!” Then there's a space where Jack is speaking to him and all of a sudden Harry calms down, sits down, and now they're brothers again and not talking business and this serene air settles over him. “And how are the kids, Jack? . . . really? . . . wonderful . . . How's Jeanette? . . .

  Wonderful . . . give the kids a big kiss from their Uncle Harry . . . okay, I'll call you tomorrow and yell at you some more. Toodle-oo.” This guy could separate business from pleasure with a feather.