Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  I call Pete Conifer and told him word had gotten to me that the Blue Beret needed someone. But that pervert iced me. He said they got a singer in to replace Ziggy and Vic. I said, I'll open for the singer. He said, Snuff, I can't do this. I said, Pete, I'm on my knees in my apartment right now, listen to me, I'm fucking begging. I'll work the club, you just give me ten bucks a night. He said, Snuffy, I can't do this. I say, I'll do it for free, Pete, for free. He says, Snuffy, I can't do it. I ask him, Pete, is this Pete Conifer talking to me or is this Fountain and Bliss talking through you? And he says, I can't do this, Snuffy.

  I got off the phone and I popped a pill, poured myself a scotch, and fell asleep.

  • • •

  LULU FOUNTAIN: I'm not gonna lie. I got lucky marrying Vic. If it wasn't for him, I might've married some guy who fishes for cod or maybe even not got married at all. I wasn't the prettiest girl on Buzzard's Bay . . . but somehow I wound up living in Beverly Hills, going to fancy restaurants, and meeting all these big stars.

  I know the things people used to say when they'd see me with Vic. I know 'cause I heard it sometimes. I was at Serge's [Beauty Parlor] one day and some lady under a dryer is looking at Photoplay, which had a picture of me, Vic, and Vic's mom. This woman says to her friend, “I can't tell which one's the mother and which one's the wife.” Everyone always wondered why he married me.

  [Vic and I] were married at the Church of Saint Vincent Ferrer on Lexington-Avenue. Vic picked the place and when he told me the name, I thought Vincent Ferrer was some actor or singer buddy of his with a church named after him. Vic's mom picked out the gown for me but when I tried it on in New York, Jane White and Sally told me I couldn't wear it. I said to 'em, I can't not wear it, Violetta Fontana picked it out! She's going to be my mother-in-law! You can't wear black wool, they told me. I said to 'em, Look, I come from Codport, I'm not from New York. I don't read Harper's Bazaar. Estelle says to me, But, Lu, you're going to be living in New York, there will be photographers there, this will be in the papers, Vic is a big deal. They offered to take me to Saks and Lord & Taylor's, said they would get me something suitable. I didn't like the way they was talking to me, especially Jane. She spent more on clothes in a day than most families do on food in a year. I just wanted to get married, move into my new home, and start a big family.

  JANE WHITE: Being a wife and a mother is not easy. Being a celebrity's wife is particularly hard. There is so much temptation for a young entertainer, or even an older one—the girls, the late nights, the booze, the long trips away from home. I thought Ziggy and I would last forever. I thought Fountain and Bliss would last forever.

  Lulu and I were not the best of friends. Whenever we had to do publicity shoots for Ziggy and Vic, we put on a little show, but we really had nothing in common but our husbands. I thought in many ways she was low class, frankly. A friend of mine once said she was about as refined as tar. Well, actually, I said that. But Vic was not too refined either. With him it was charming but on Lulu it did not work. I used to try to get her to improve her look. We'd go to Bullock's and I. Magnin and try on Chanel, Balenciaga, Pucci, Dior, Bill Blass, Yves Saint Laurent; we went to Elizabeth Arden in Beverly Hills. She had a nice little figure. But her taste in clothing was somewhere between drab and none at all. When we'd leave the store, it was always me holding ten shopping bags and her holding the door.

  But to this day I respect Lulu. Vic put her through hell. All the girls, hundreds of them, all the late nights, the gambling and carousing. Some people would say that Lulu was a sucker for staying with Vic as long as she did. But she had a strong sense of family. She did what she did for her kids. Her marriage was a shambles but still, she stuck it out.

  But sometimes, yes, I do think she really was a sucker.

  SALLY KLEIN: Janie and Lulu—forget Fountain and Bliss, Ted, you could write a book just about those two! Before the wedding, Jane was really annoying poor Lu, really getting on her case. And that was to her face. But behind Lulu's back she was saying the most horrendous things. Now, I knew about Vic and all his girlfriends. Well, Jane kept saying things like, “How is that little twig going to keep Vic happy? The marriage won't last to the reception! She's nothing but a piece of salami.” I said to Estelle, “I can't believe the things that Jane is saying!” And she said, “Neither can I . . . but a lot of it is true!”

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: Morty Geist came up with the idea and it was pure genius. Vic's got a guest list for the wedding, it's maybe a hundred people. So what do we do? We send out about eight hundred invitations. We sent them to everybody and to anybody. We sent invites to Dr. Oppenheimer from the Manhattan Project, to Teller and to Einstein too. We sent them to actors and actresses and socialites that Fountain and Bliss had never met. What we were looking for—and, boy, what we got!—was an overflow crowd, maybe even if things went right, a slightly hysterical, out-of-control crowd. Bertie alerted the press the day before the wedding that he'd heard from the police there was going to be a mob scene, and then he called the police and told them he'd heard from the press there was going to be a mob scene. Everybody picks it up. It's in Winchell, it's in Sullivan, it's in [Leonard] Lyons and Earl Wilson and Hilda Fleury, it's like it's in skywriting! The final result? You've got this wedding of Vic Fountain to this little Italian girl from Codport at the Church of José Ferrer [ sic] and there are two hundred cops, thirty fotogs, and about a thousand people screaming their kishkes off and they got no reason why.

  It was beautiful!

  ESTELLE LATCHKEY: It was one of the most miserable moods I've ever seen Ziggy in. Nobody knew the term “manic-depressive” back then . . . I don't even know if there was such a term. I know he could go from being very, very zany to being very, very miserable in the space of a second. The week of the wedding he tried to make everyone as miserable as he was—is there a word for that condition, I wonder?—and succeeded.

  SALLY KLEIN: Vic was getting married but you'd have thought that it was Ziggy marrying the Bitch of Belsen. He'd come in sulking and in a lousy, hostile mood. We had two kids writing for us now, two brothers named Barry and Manny Singer. This was their first week, as a matter of fact. They'd done some comedy at Grossinger's and the Concord and then some radio. They'd hand Ziggy a radio script and he would read it for a minute or pretend to read it and then he would lace into these two. “You two are ignorant! How dumb are you two? This isn't funny! Are we paying you to write tragedy? This is Oedipus Rex you're handing me! Who the hell ever told you you were funny!” I think the first time this happened, Barry Singer (who later wrote for Jack Paar, by the way) thought it was a prank; he kept waiting for Ziggy to stop his tirade and then start laughing. But it didn't happen. Manny I thought was going to die. He was very sensitive and after a few of these attacks he went into the bathroom and Vic heard him crying.

  “What the hell's got into Zig?” Vic asked me that week.

  “You're marrying Lulu,” I told him. “He's jealous.”

  “Wha—? He wants me to marry him instead?”

  “He's jealous of any shred of attention that anybody but him gets.”

  That week the act was performing at El Morocco—I think they were getting about $20,000 for sixteen shows a week then—and this young pretty British singer Julie Mansell was opening for them. They called her “the Nightingale of Berkeley Square.” She was [British comedian] Eddie Bramshill's girl then. She was maybe twenty-two years old, just a little darling. And Ziggy wanted her off the bill. He called her into his dressing room and he was yelling at her so loud that the stagehands had to go in there and restrain him. “You look like a piece of spaghetti!” he was yelling. “You sing like a sparrow with a whistle caught in its throat!” This poor dear broke down crying, she had no idea what she'd done wrong.

  “I'm not going to quit, Mr. Bliss. I'm simply not going to,” she told him. You know, that whole stiff upper British lip.

  “I didn't expect you to, you goddamn piece of string!” he spat back at her. “I can get rid of you!
”

  “You can't go around doing stuff like that, Zig,” Vic told him when he found out about this explosion.

  Ziggy said, “Oh no? They paid her off for the week and fired her.”

  JANE WHITE: Oh, I remember it quite well. The columnists caught wind of what Ziggy did to her. Hilda Fleury was calling Ziggy all sorts of names in her column. I asked Ziggy about it, if he had really yelled all those nasty things at her, and he said that I should never believe anything I read about him in the papers unless it was something good.

  DOMINICK MANGIAPANE: It was some ceremony—all those people yelling outside the church, the fans and the cops. The police would be pushing people back and the fans would push the cops the other way. The headline in the paper was “A REAL COMEDY RIOT!”

  Look, I didn't approve of the marriage . . . I thought Vic was a bum and a cheat, but still it was a very nice wedding.

  Vic's sister Cathy was the maid of honor. Bruno looked very big and very quiet in his black suit, and Vic's mother was arguing with the priest. I kept looking for Tony Ferro and his wife but I found out they weren't invited.

  CATHERINE RICCI: One minute before they're going to exchange vows, who stands up and walks out? Ziggy Bliss! Who does this?! What kind of human being or animal does this?! Not even a ferret would scamper out at that time. Maybe Ziggy was upset that he wasn't Vic's best man—Hunny Gannett did the honors and it took him a few seconds to find the ring—but still, you don't create such a commotion at another person's wedding! He told people he wasn't feeling well and had to go home, but I don't believe it.

  The reception was at the Waldorf. Vic pulled out all the stops. Mayor La Guardia was even there. I was crying all day; my little brother a big star, marrying a hometown girl. His suit must have cost a thousand dollars. All sorts of celebrities were there and it was in every paper. There was dancing and Billy Ross's band and so much champagne. Snuffy Dubin made a nice, long funny toast that had everybody in stitches. And I saw Sally, who hadn't married Jack yet, dancing with Danny McGlue.

  Late in the evening, Lulu came up to me and asked me if I'd seen Vic. I realized I hadn't. I asked Carmine if he'd seen him. He hadn't. Ray and Mamma hadn't seen him since the church.

  GUY PUGLIA: I didn't go to the ceremony or the reception and I'll tell you why. Hunny had the idea to put the bandage on my face and then put some putty underneath to make it look like I still had my nose. But every person in that church would know I didn't. So I sat home and listened to a ball game and drank a couple of beers. It was a hot day and I had the window open and the fan going. Alls of a sudden there's a knock on the door and who is it? It's Vic. In his slick wedding getup.

  “Hey, wasn't you getting married today?” I say to him. He says, “Oh yeah, I took care of that. Gimme a Ballantine.” I get him a beer and he undoes his tie and says, “Now why the fuck did I go and do that? Huh? Tell me?” I ask, “Do what?” and he says, “Marry Lulu? I could be with Lana Turner maybe or Linda Darnell or Rita Hayworth.” “Lulu's a good gal. Jesus,” I tell him, “I'd like to get married someday. But I guess I never will now.” “What's the score here, pal?” he asks me, and I tell him, “Yankees are up six to one.”

  He pulled up a chair to the radio and we sat in front of the window, where the fan was. We drank beer after beer and then we both conked out. When we woke up it was about ten. I said to him, “You better go home, pal.”

  “Nah, why don't you come out? Let's you, me, and Hunny go out and have a blast.”

  I reminded him it was his honeymoon night and he said he knew that. He said, “I'm gonna have the rest of my life with her, so what's one night?” He reaches Hunny at the Waldorf and they decide they're going to go to the Latin Quarter and get blasted. He grabs his coat and heads for the door and says, “See ya, Guy.”

  I told him to hold up and wait for me.

  SALLY KLEIN: Lulu wanted to go to Miami Beach for their honeymoon, but Vic hated the water, absolutely hated it. She also thought of a cruise to France but Vic refused to go on a boat; he said he'd only go if there were indoor shuffleboard courts where he could hustle the other passengers. Then Murray Katz cinched a big deal for Fountain and Bliss that was too good to pass up: a cross-country tour, opening up movies in large theaters, playing the very biggest clubs. And it was going to end at the old Venetian Theater in New York. So there was no honeymoon.

  The Monday after the wedding Ziggy gets a call at the office. It's from Jane White. She'd been arrested at Gimbel's for stealing a patent-leather belt. She said that she'd been buying a few accessories and trying on some things and had accidentally walked out of the store with the belt on. When the security man was questioning her, she tried to explain what had happened and showed him how much money was in her purse . . . then the man noticed that the purse had a price tag on it from Saks. She said her boyfriend was Ziggy Bliss, and the man asked her which department store she stole him from. So right away Ziggy called [money manager] Shep Lane and they had her out of jail in only a few hours.

  “You don't have to go around stealing belts, honey,” Ziggy said to her.

  “I wasn't stealing! It was an honest mistake,” she insisted.

  “Anyways, if you want a belt just tell me and I'll get you twenty of 'em.”

  “You will?” she said. And he gave that babyish expression, like his aunt had just bought him a jelly apple. “My hero Ziggy!” she said.

  Do you know what Shep and Arnie eventually did? They brought a thousand dollars to all the big stores: Macy's, Bloomingdale's, B. Altman, Ohrbach's, Wanamaker's. A thousand dollars to each place! They gave it to them and said that when they saw Jane White take something, just let her go. Let her leave the store and write down what she'd taken and then take that out of the thousand. Janie must have thought she was a master thief, that loony girl.

  We'd get a call a week. Arnie would yell out, “Saks! Four hundred and ten dollars!” Which meant that she only had that much left on her Saks “account.” Shep and Arnie had a little side wager going, which place she'd drain first. Evidently Jane liked Lord & Taylor a lot.

  • • •

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: What scant attention the dunce flick got was highly negative. Bosley Crowther of the Times massacred it. He'd seen the act live and he said that this was not the Fountain and Bliss he knew. “Someone slipped them a Mickey Finn,” he wrote. The Herald Tribune skinned it alive. So did the Globe, the Post, and the News. Archer Winsten butchered it. We had all the newspapers on the floor at the office and it was like the room was a slaughterhouse, there was so much blood and gore on them.

  But one thing about show business, it's not all “What have you done for me lately?”—it's also “What can you do for me in the next twenty seconds?” You get knocked off your high wire, you dust off the powder that once was your spine, and you hop back on.

  Murray, Sally, and I had a tour booked that would obliterate all the bad news in one fell swoop. Boston, Hartford, Atlantic City, Philly, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit. Also, Miami and Atlanta and finally out west to L.A. at the Pantages Theater. And then back to play the Venetian. It was going to be a monster of merriment, a leviathan of laughter, a Goliath of guffaws. The Venetian sat over thirty-five hundred people . . . did you know the aisles were canals and the ushers dressed as gondoliers and poled you to your seats? It's true. (But Vic refused to go in the gondolas.) We made sure that in every town we went to, we'd be playing the biggest place, open for the best movie. This was take-no-prisoners, brook-no-quarter, no-holds-barred time. We were out to scorch the earth, my friend, and scorch it we did.

  We got off to a flying stop. We test-drove the act at Bill Lee's joint in Fort Lee [New Jersey], the Riviera. We did five nights there and it went over like lead. We'd been coasting on the old stuff for a while now, on Danny, Sid, and Norman's stuff, but now that rolling stone had gathered a touch of moss. Don't get me wrong: The act was never in grave or critical condition, but was, at best, only slightly stable. And there was some friction.

 
Vic would sing “The Hang of It” for an opener before Ziggy came on. It was really a swinging number and the audience lapped it up. When Vic warbled this tune, you should've seen Ziggy's face when he realized the crowd loved it. One by one the freckles on his skin turned purple. After two nights, Ziggy says to me, “Vic's killing the act with that song. It's gotta go.”

  “How is he killing it?” I asked. “You've got five hundred people out there snapping their fingers and tapping their feet. The number really gets the juice flowing, Zig.”

  “He's killing it because he's killing me. We can't have this song in the act.”

  Sally had warned me this might happen. Hey, you think [comedian] Milt Kamen wants to come on right after Sinatra sings “I've Got You Under My Skin”? How'd you like to be a lousy ventriloquist comin' on right after Lincoln does the Gettysburg Address? So, yeah, I sympathized with Ziggy. But I bravely held my ground and said, “You really should talk to Vic about this.”

  After a few shows—we did two a night—we're back in the Brill Building and Ziggy says, “This old stuff was once lightning in a bottle but what we got now is just the bottle.”