by Ted Heller
Barry Singer said that there was still time to change stuff, that he and Manny could tinker. I felt bad for those two. They were good kids.
“What if we end with that ‘Hang of It’ number?” Ziggy said. “Let's put that at the end, after all the routines.”
Vic said, “That song gets the crowd in the mood, man. We put that at the end, we—”
“Can we at least try it?” Ziggy said. “Why don't we start with Vic singin' ‘Mamselle’?”
I was worried he'd suggest that. That song, which Art Lund had a big hit with, Vic almost fell asleep while he was singing.
So we gave it a shot . . . and it didn't work. Vic and I were right. This song got the juice surging, the toes tapping, the drinks flowing. So between sets we told Billy Ross that the number was back in the beginning.
So what happens in our final set? Vic is chirping this tune and all of a sudden one of the trumpets is sounding a little diseased. Up from the pit stands Ziggy holding the horn. And Ziggy begins to engage in some comedic repartee with Vic. But Vic is a little stunned, like he'd been caught in the jaw with a jab, and he's a little ticked off here. But Vic braved this storm. You could tell though—perhaps by how tightly he was clenching his fists, perhaps by how hard he was biting his lips, or perhaps more so by the fact that he later said to me, “One day I'm going to carve that fat sonuvabitch into little pieces”—that Vic was not enjoying this. After that show, he pulled Ziggy aside and it was just the two of them in a dark corner . . . I couldn't hear what Vic was saying to him—it sounded more like hissing than anything—but Ziggy looked pale afterward.
We tried everything at the Riviera. We jiggled things, we juggled it, we tinkered and toyed. The problem was that every single person at the Riviera had already seen the act. Look, I can listen to Sinatra doing “I'm a Fool to Want You” a thousand times, but how many times can I listen to Shelley Berman doing the exact same bit on the imaginary phone with his mother?
We took a few weeks off after the Fort Lee engagement. In that time Jane White discovered Tiffany, and—perhaps more important—Tiffany discovered Jane White. Shep Lane and I brought two grand over there to begin an account for her. That's when Shep told me that Vic was keeping two apartments. He and Lu had moved into this massive place on Central Park South but he also now kept a swank suite at the St. Regis.
“That don't bode too good,” I said to Shep.
SNUFFY DUBIN: Ziggy came to see my act at Jimmy Geary's Sapphire Lounge one night. This place was a dive so deep you got the bends just walking through the front door, and Ziggy had bigger tits than the waitresses, depending on what he'd eaten for breakfast. When he told me I needed to go back to the old one-liner stuff, I told him to shove it. But, you know, I had to be careful now . . . 'cause I'm working joints like this black hole of Calcutta and 'cause his name is in Ed fucking Sullivan's column every day.
There was this one blonde there named Bubbles Van Boven at the Sapphire; this girl used to balance a tray full of martinis on her chest. One night, while Ziggy and I are talking and while I'm pretending to listen to him complain about Vic, I can see he's got the hot nuts for her. You gotta picture it: It's four in the morning now, the amphetamines I've taken have worn off, and I just wanna go to the Belmore Cafeteria, get some eggs, and then go back to my pad and watch the sun rise over the Queensborough Bridge and over my miserable fucking life. “Vic thinks he's the whole act,” Ziggy says. “It's a good thing Bertie Kahn plants screaming girls in the crowd, it covers up his lousy singing,” he says. “I could make any ginzo singer four hundred thou a year.” “Hey,” I tell him, “Vic's got great comic timing. He sets you up like he's throwing batting practice.” “My shoe can do that, Snuff,” he says. I doze off in my chair and when I wake up, there's only one guy in there, some old shine with a mop. I say to this cat, “Where'd the guy I was with go?” And he says, “That little round man with that Brillo head? He in the back with Miss Bubbles.”
I go to my dressing room and everything's all blurry like it's underwater, you know? I open the door and there's Bubbles Van Boven, naked and on her knees, and Ziggy is bending over her and rubbing his head in her cleavage. In one hand she's got fifty bucks and with the other she's pumping that rhino prick of his and, Jesus, did I walk in at the wrong second! Thwack! All over my brand-new houndstooth jacket hanging on the coatrack.
The next thing I know I'm sitting in the Belmore at a long table and I'm nodding off into my two eggs over easy, and what's the first thing I hear? “. . . And another lousy thing about Vic. He don't even get the jokes . . .” I perk my head up out of the gray ooze it's in and there he is, rattling away, complaining about his partner, and I've got on the houndstooth-check jacket with a jizz stain the size and shape of fucking Greenland.
SALLY KLEIN: The tour began in New York at the Luxor . . . the boys were opening a Fritz Devane movie called Such a Wonderful Time. We had a choice, we could've opened either that or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or Red River. But when we were presented with this by Murray Katz, Vic's eyes lit up. “We gotta open up the Fritz movie, we've got to,” he said.
The Singer brothers had sort of given up, they weren't giving it their all. We tried to get some of the old craziness going, putting on wigs and hats and stuff, and Barry and Manny were funny but not our kind of funny. Manny came to me and said, “Sal, it's not working out and we want to do what's best for the act. So what should we do?”
I had dinner with Estelle and Arnie at the Colony and we knew what we had to do. “I'll call Danny McGlue tomorrow,” Arnie said. “His wilderness years are over. Sally, you call Norman and Sid.” I said, “What happens if Ziggy has a fit about Danny?” and Arnie said, “We'll buy some new furniture first thing tomorrow just to keep in reserve.”
But Ziggy didn't have a fit. He took me aside and said, “Look, when I busted up you and Danny I did it for you. I didn't think he was good enough for you.” He said, “It didn't have nuttin' to do with the religion thing . . . I don't care about that. I mean, look at me and Janie, right?”
“Jane White is really Judith Weissblau or have you forgotten?” I reminded him.
“She's the one who forgot that,” he said, “not me.”
DANNY McGLUE: I'd just left the Ex-Lax Modern Romances show at ABC and was writing for A Date With Judy for NBC. That show was cornier than Iowa and Nebraska combined. Betsy Cantwell was in the cast, she was a pretty brunette from York, Pennsylvania—she played Penny Jones on the show—and we'd begun seeing each other. I was in my little dust closet of an office trying to come up with some dialogue one day and the phone rang. “Danny bubeleh, how are ya?!” Arnie's voice booms over the line. “How am I?” I say. “I'm writing for A Date With Judy, that's how I am. How are you?” And he cuts right to the chase and says, “How quick can you get to the Brill Building?” And I say to him, “I've got to finish this show, Arn, I can't just—” and he said, “Oh, yes you can. Barry and Manny Singer'll finish it . . . get your tuches over here pronto. And make sure you don't run the Singers over when you pass one another in the street.”
And that was it. Back in the fold.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: When I had enough free time to pop the question to Estelle, she popped the answer “yes” right back to me. “Do you think it's smart,” she sagely inquired of me, “that we'd be married and I'd still be your receptionist?” to which I lovingly replied, “You're not only right, you're fired!” So when we hitched up, I let her go and we hired Millie Roth, who, like Estelle, also had been working in shmattes.
MILLIE ROTH [assistant at Vigorish, Inc.]: My first few weeks on the job were very active. The Singer brothers had just left and Danny McGlue signed back on, Sidney Stone and Norman White flew in from California and we put them up at the Woodstock Hotel, and Lulu Fountain was pregnant. Ernie Beasley came in with three or four new songs and Billy Ross worked out the arrangements. The office was what you would call a beehive of activity. I remember that Ziggy was very friendly to me—not in that way, no—and he t
ook me out to lunch at Lindy's a few times and I met all sorts of famous Broadway people.
That was also the time that people realized that Ernie Beasley was not attracted to women. Vic and Ziggy were getting on his case about not ever having a girlfriend—Ziggy said to him, “What are you, some kinda faygeleh?” —and his face turned as red as a beet. We realized it in an instant. Vic said to him, “Ernie, I don't care if you like boys, girls, black, white, purple, or sheep or cats. You just keep cranking out them songs. Oh yeah. And just keep your paws offa me.” Which got a big laugh all around.
There was an unflattering comment in Grayling Greene's column about Vic, I remember that. It hinted that Vic—it never mentioned his name—could learn a thing or two about being faithful to his not-so-long-suffering bride. Vic read that and hit the ceiling. He called Grayling Greene scum, lower than scum, and then he finally settled on “not even scum.” Arnie had Bertie call Mr. Greene, but the damage had been done. Now, I've never told anyone this, but I am dead certain that Ziggy had planted this item with Grayling Greene.
When Vic calmed down they got back to the business of writing and rehearsing. I'd never met Sidney Stone or Norman White before. If you saw them, you would not think these two men were funny. They both dressed very conservatively and looked like businessmen. Sid Stone always wore dark Brooks Brothers suits. But two hours into a meeting, his tie was undone, his jacket and vest were on the floor, and he's standing on his head talking gobbledygook! I kept notes and sometimes I was laughing so much I couldn't write a thing. But Danny McGlue was the person who kept things going; he was the motor and organizer. He would suggest this or that if something wasn't going right, and then it did go right.
Ziggy had told me that Danny and Sally had once been very serious about each other, but you wouldn't have known it; although once in a while I would catch Danny sneaking a peek at her and at other times her sneaking one at him. Come to think of it, that happened a lot, so maybe you would have known it.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Oh, we were clicking again! That fantabulous, funderful magic and manic energy was back. We had a map up on the wall of the United States and Sally had put pins in at all our upcoming stops. Bertie called one day and asked us how we'd like it if Morty Geist from L.A. went along on the tour and I said to him, “Has he calmed down yet?” I mean, you could hear Morty sweating over the phone.
The thing began at the Luxor. On the marquee above the title of the movie—which was your typical Devane snoozefest that did decent box office—it said FISSION FUNNYMEN FOUNTAIN & BLISS. Four shows a day they did. Morty and Bertie really played up the “dare angle,” that's what they called it. The ads said something like “In the last five years, over fifty people have had to be taken to the hospital during a Fountain and Bliss show. Can you handle it?” They had ten ambulances outside, they had a hundred tanks of oxygen inside as well as real doctors and nurses (supposedly). But the coup was they had about ten plants there, people to fake being taken ill. One woman—this was Morty's brainstorm—had a little thermos of water . . . at some point during the show, she would pour the water over herself and then go running out. She had just tinkled herself from laughing, it looked like! After two nights, though, we didn't need her because there were about five or so people every show who really would wet themselves with laughter.
Before we left town Fritz Devane showed up and came out for a bow and said a few words. Nobody knew this was going to happen. Devane is talking to about two thousand people and the boys are backstage and Vic said to Ziggy, “Hey, partner, remember what we did to that magician at the Circle Theater in Indy? Well, let's do it again with this son of a bitch.” And they were on the stage behind Fritzy and he had no goddamn idea. They were doing this pantomime thing, making funny gestures and moves, and Fritz was getting laughs and had no idea why. His motion picture was like The Best Years of Our Lives but with music, and Devane was going on about how we should remember our nation's veterans and war dead and their sacrifices and how he should be remembered come Oscar time, but people are rolling in the aisles! Fritz couldn't figure out why—he even checked to see if his fly was zipped! Then he turns around and sees the boys doing their shtick and storms off.
• • •
CATHERINE RICCI: I remember we had Vic and Lulu over for dinner one night. Vic was a little fidgety . . . he'd get up and make a few phone calls now and then. Carmine told me he thought Vic was being rude but I said, “He's my little brother and he's famous, he's not rude.”
When we were at the table I was going on and on about our son Paul, about how smart he was. And Lulu was talking about her plans for her kid, once he was born. (Of course, it turned out to be a she; it was Vicki.) I asked Lulu which hospital she was going to give birth in and just then, Vic came back to the table, told us all that he'd just won three hundred bucks on a race in Hialeah, and sat down. Lulu said, “French Hospital. Dr. Williams there promises me they're very good.” Vic says, “French Hospital? Huh?” And Lu said, “Right, that's where we're having the baby.” And Vic said, “Who is? Huh? Oh yeah. That.”
JANE WHITE: Every day before that big tour I would get presents from Ziggy. It became almost a joke with me and my doormen. Ziggy and I had tea one day on Fifty-seventh Street and I told him how much I loved the china there and—lo and behold—the next day I get the very same china. One time I complained about a blister on my foot and wouldn't you know it, every day for a week there were new shoes waiting downstairs for me.
We'd be in the paper every now and then, as a gossip item. The pictures were not always so flattering, but it wasn't my fault. I was three inches taller than him, I was skinny and perky, and I had the brightest smile in Manhattan, and he . . . well, he was Ziggy. My father talked to me about going out with him, and my mom told me that Mitch George had called asking about me. But I told them that just being with Ziggy and meeting all these famous people—he introduced me to Joe DiMaggio once!—just about beat anything that boring old Mitch George could come up with. My mother warned me . . . she said to be careful with Ziggy.
Ziggy and I had not yet consummated. Now, I was a virgin, I hope you'll mention that . . . and it wasn't easy. (Both Jimmy Hetfield and Mitch George had put much, much pressure on me, not only separately but together.) We had tried to consummate. But there were problems. Physical problems. It was frustrating for him and it hurt me too. I would cry like a sorry duck. I wanted to make him happy. But you cannot put a square peg in a round hole, especially when the square peg is a baseball bat and the round hole was the eye of a needle.
Before he left on the big tour, he gave me the phone number of a doctor on Park Avenue. “It's Howie Baer, I've known this guy since I was just a little runt in the Poconos,” Ziggy told me. “He'll take care of you good.”
SALLY KLEIN: Jack was in New York a few days before we set off. He and I and Jane and Ziggy were going to eat at “21” for dinner. Ziggy had moved to Fifth Avenue and Sixty-second Street now; he had a ten-room apartment with a lovely view of the park. Jack and I waited ten minutes downstairs but Ziggy didn't show, which was unusual. The doorman let me up and I rang Ziggy's door. His maid Ruth let me in and I saw Ziggy and Jane sitting with a girl who I recognized. It was Julie Mansell, the Nightingale of Berkeley Square. There were a few tears running down her cheeks and she was holding some tissue. Jane was holding her hand when I walked in. Jane walked up to me and I asked her what was going on.
“Your cousin has the sweetest heart there ever was, Sally,” Jane said to me.
“Huh? Which cousin? My cousin Julius in Miami Beach?”
“You know which one. That's Julie Mansell and—”
“Yes, I know who it is.”
“Ziggy felt so bad about what he did to her. It's been costing him so much sleep just thinking about it and regretting it.”
I braced myself. What had he done?
“He got her signed with MCA,” she told me, “and she has a record deal now. And Joe Gersh has her booked at El Morocco and at Mocambo in Los
Angeles and so, so many other wonderful places!”
I looked at the Nightingale. She was a very talented singer and seemed like a nice girl. But I couldn't tell if she was crying out of real gratitude or because she was simply disgusted at herself for accepting all this.
“And wait till you see the sable coat he got her,” Jane said. “Isn't he just wonderful, Sally?”
“We're going to be late for dinner.”
RAY FONTANA: Look, I never asked Vic for nothing. Not one time. But I knew that Vic had bought Cathy and Carmine a new turquoise blue Chevy Styleline Deluxe, and when I heard that, well, you know, I got a little envious, sure. And he'd gotten Guy Puglia a car too, a big blue Cadillac Fleetwood. Beautiful car. And Guy wasn't even Vic's own blood. But I never asked Vic for nothing. So one Saturday morning my wife goes outside to pick up the milk and she calls out to me, “Ray, why's there a brand-new blue Coupe de Ville in our driveway?” And right away I knew . . . my little brother had come through.
He couldn't give Pop anything though—Pop was too proud to take it. So he'd just send cash to my mother. She'd get envelopes with thousands in it sometimes. It was one thing if Vic drove up in a new Caddy and said, Here, it's yours. That wouldn't fly. But if all of a sudden Mom goes to a dealership in New Bedford and plunks down a few grand for one, then it's okay.
• • •
MICKEY KNOTT: Before I got my own band, the last band I toured with was Billy Ross's. Yeah, the Fountain and Bliss Express. It was the lush life all right, lush and luxurious. We stayed at the best hotels, ate the best food, smoked the best tea, played the best joints, and the chicks were superb. I knew Vic from bumming around band to band from years before, and he gave me a call when Billy needed a new skins man.
