Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  We're on a train to Nebraska now, the whole outfit, the boys and Billy's band and everyone. It was early, barely even sunrise. And I'm in the dining car with just Sally and we're going over arrangements in Omaha, and Vic walks in with that glazed look he sometimes had in the morning. He sits down and the steam from his coffee is rising up into his half-closed eyes and then a minute later Ziggy walks in too.

  “What are you guys doin'?” Ziggy says right away.

  “Not much,” I said.

  “Nah, come on, what's goin' on here?”

  Sally said, “Ziggy, Arnie and I were looking at some figures and Vic just walked in and—”

  “You doin' business without me?”

  Vic said, “Pipe down, Zig, it ain't even sunup.”

  Ziggy said, “I can't believe you would do this to me. When did I become the Invisible Man of the act? What, I got tape all over my body and a hat and sunglasses on?”

  Sally said, “Ziggy, we all just woke up and—”

  Vic said, “To be honest, I ain't even been to sleep yet . . .”

  Ziggy, that nut, thought we were having some Potsdam-like Big Three summit meeting without him! He said, “Nah, nah . . . I want the truth once for a change, please!”

  “Zig, I just come in for a cup of joe,” Vic said. “I didn't know Arn and Sal was gonna—”

  “Oh, you didn't know!”

  “No, I didn't! And I also don't care either. Jesus!”

  I told Ziggy to sit down. It was just the four of us. I began my shpiel.

  “Look, we been together a long time now. This is like a marriage, a marriage with four people. Now in my real marriage if there's a problem, we'll talk. I think her rib roast tastes like an old Goodyear tire, I tell her. She thinks I chew my food loud, she tells me. And maybe we compromise . . . she either improves on the rib roast or maybe she don't cook it anymore, and I try to maybe close my mouth when I eat. And then we got one happy family. You see where this is going?”

  Vic puffs his Chesterfield, sips his coffee. Ziggy pouts.

  I resume this sermon, which, I admit to you, I didn't know where it's going other than to Omaha. “Now what we got goin' here is a dynamo. We're a Sherman tank, we're Murderer's Row. Nobody draws like us. Nobody. We've got women coming to see the act and they bring a change of clothes because they know they're gonna tinkle in their bloomers. What other act in the solar system can claim this? So what I am asking you is, what the hell is the matter?!”

  “Latch, I just think that, well, you know,” Vic said, “just 'cause we got all that chemistry and whatever up there onstage, it don't necessarily follow that we gotta be best friends off of it.”

  Those really were not the words I wanted to hear.

  Ziggy said, “I don't like the way he takes me for granted. Ziggy . . . the funny guy, the Jew, the human basketball who don't sing, he's a goddamn piece of garbage. I don't like the way he goes to all these reporters and tells 'em stuff, even if he don't even realize he's doin' it at the time. I don't even know if I like the fact that he doesn't like me. He does all this carousing into the wee hours, and where am I? I don't even know if I like him.”

  Let me repeat myself: Those really were not the words I wanted to hear. So I said, “Sally? Can you throw in your two cents worth here 'cause I'm broke.”

  Sally said, “Do you two remember where you were before you met? Do you have any recollection whatsoever? Vic, if your career was even in the dumps then that would've been a tremendous accomplishment, because you barely had one! You had no future or present and your past wasn't much to crow about either, young man!”

  “Yeah, really,” Ziggy said with a smile. “Victor Feldbaum. Hee hee hee.”

  “Shut up!” Sally said. “Ziggy, you were a zombie. You couldn't perform alone. You were a zombie! Did you think you were going to go places with the O'Hares? Ha! If they didn't work out, how many different parents would you have hired? Would you be forty or fifty or sixty years old and you would still be performing a pansy-and-parent routine?”

  I thought I would chime in. So I said, “Now, Sally's right. So—”

  “Arnie, shut up,” she said. “Have we forgotten that Arnie was nowhere too, was not even nowhere? Before he got you two together, he was cleaning spit valves! Big, big entertainment manager and he's covering up the wall sockets in hotel rooms so the vocalist doesn't electrocute himself!” She took in a deep breath. “As for me, where was I going? What was I doing? Getting Ziggy his ice, getting tea for his parents? I didn't finish high school, I had no fella, I never even had a real job. Vic, would you stop blowing that smoke at Ziggy! And now here we are. I live at the Bel-Nord, Vic keeps two residences, owns two cars, a thousand suits and shoes. Ziggy, you've got a ten-room apartment on Fifth Avenue and everything you ever wanted! Arnie has more money than he knows what to do with! We eat well, sleep well, live well, we're healthy, we have fun, we have fine families. People love us, they travel miles and pay top dollar to see us. Why the hell are we so miserable? Why? Will someone please answer me this?”

  I cleared my throat. I looked at Vic. He was blushing . . . I don't think he'd ever been involved in such a talk like this. Maybe he was embarrassed, getting involved in some boy/boy spat. I looked at Sally . . . she's five foot three, she's got these big cat's-eye glasses on. She was sort of quivering—I don't think she knew she had the baytsim to pull off this speech. But she did. And then I looked over to Ziggy and there were tears pouring from his eyes. He starts whimpering. He's shaking his head and I never saw so many tears in my life, and the mucous is popping out his nostrils like someone is blowing bubbles up there. I handed him a napkin and he blew his nose and dabbed his eyes. He was trying to say “I'm sorry,” but it wouldn't come out. Sally stood up and walked up to him and put an arm around his shoulder and he hugged her waist.

  Outside the train, the sun rose over the vast, flat, desolate Nebraska countryside, which whizzed by incredibly unimpressively. Sally then walked out of the dining car. I got the idea: Let's leave them alone. Let's let them talk. For the first time ever, let the two of 'em just talk to each other! So I got up and left too.

  Hours later I saw Vic at the hotel lobby in Omaha and I asked him, “So did you two iron out your problems?”

  He told me that after Sally and I had left, a few people started coming into the car, some waiters and one couple and then another and some people eating alone. He and Ziggy looked at them, then at each other. Then they just started goofing on everybody.

  • • •

  REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV: When Fountain and Bliss came to Omaha, I bought a ticket to the show. The nightclub, a modern but unspectacular place, was called the Stalk Club and had a corn motif. I gave the maitre d' a note to pass to Vic and Ziggy backstage but when I espied other people doing the same thing—most of them females—I realized that my own note might not make it to its intended targets. This feeling was further exacerbated when, several minutes later, I inquired of the maitre d' as to the status of my note, whereupon he informed me that he'd thrown it out. “I know these people,” I informed him, “and they know me. Please tell them that Reynolds Catledge is here.” This seemed to shake the man, and after the show he ushered me backstage.

  Vic was in a friendly mood and good-naturedly mocked my appearance and demeanor. “You ain't in the army anymore, Cat,” he told me. “You need to loosen up some.”

  The next day was a Saturday and I was roused from sleep very early when my doorbell rang. I was stunned to see Ziggy Bliss . . . I asked him to come in and I put up a pot of coffee for the two of us. (By way of a personal note, I should add that after three years of marriage, my wife, Linda, whom I'd met and married in 1945, had recently left me and taken our son, whom I did not name Reynolds V. I was leading a boring and incredibly solitary, worthless life.)

  Ziggy seemed agitated. At first he spoke only about trivial matters but then he got to the point. He had three days free and wanted me to help him track someone down. I tried to tell him that I had no i
nterest in such a project—I even thought about making up some phony matter I had to attend to, but after a moment's reflection I realized that a long drive with one of America's top comics through the middle of nowhere might be just the proper tonic I needed, and soon we piled into my Ford woody and we were on our way to Laramie, Wyoming.

  The drive was about five hundred miles long and, given the nature of the American automobile at that time, it took quite a while—long stretches of silence were broken by longer stretches of Ziggy complaining about Vic. “The guy don't even go home on his own honeymoon night!” he told me. He complained that Vic's singing style was so sleepy that he could perform at an insomniac ward and have everyone dozing within the first few bars. He said, “If we ever get some big movie deal, you watch—Vic'll get all the credit and all the girls, I'll do all the work and get nuttin'.” At many points during this screed it seemed he was treating imaginary things as if they had already in fact transpired; he would say, “He's banging the daylights out of Lana Turner at the Bel-Air Hotel and here I am, working on new material in the mirror at my puny ranch house.”

  We pulled into Laramie that evening and procured lodging at a modest motel. We shared a room with two beds . . . there was an incredible view of the mountains but Ziggy took no notice. I said, “That's the Medicine Bow range, I imagine,” and he said, “Yeah, big deal.”

  The first thing he did when we checked in was ask the hotel proprietor for a phone book. Ziggy looked up someone named Dolly Phipps. There were two D. Phippses in the directory and he phoned both of them; neither one of them turned out to be a Dolly. “Do you know Dolly Phipps?” he asked them. “Are you maybe related to her maybe?” They were not. He ripped the Laramie phone book in two and gave me the latter half of the alphabet. I was to look at every listing there was and keep an eye out for anyone going by the first name of Dolly. I did find a Dolly Marshall but he found none. It was three in the morning and he phoned the Dolly in question. A man answered, obviously annoyed at being awoken, and informed Ziggy that not only was his wife Dolly not now or ever a Dolly Phipps, but that she had passed away only two weeks before. “My most sincerest condolences,” Ziggy said. “'Bye.”

  The next day we drove around the city. The scenery in the distance was breathtaking, the air was fresh and the sky pale blue, but Ziggy took no notice. He was driving now and we spent upward of eight hours weaving in and out of the same streets over and over again. He would drive up one street, then drive back down, over and over again. Giving up on this street, he would then drive to an intersecting one and spend a half hour traversing it. Several policemen noticed this suspicious behavior, and we were stopped on several occasions. “I'm Ziggy,” he would tell them, “from Fountain and Bliss. Here's a hundred bucks.”

  Ziggy had two old, somewhat faded photographs of his old flame, taken from newspapers in the Catskills. He gave me one of the pictures as well as $1,000 in twenties and tens, and he took the other. We were to stop passers-by and go into every store, shop, restaurant and ask for information. It's a good thing Laramie was not a teeming metropolis.

  I had not attained anything close to a lead and had handed out about three hundred dollars to a few shrewd citizens when I heard Ziggy yell: “CAT! PAY DIRT!” I ran across the street, where Ziggy stood outside a “feed store.” There was an old man, approximately seventy-five years old, in a cowboy hat. This individual had a weathered, wrinkled face and sparse snowy white hair. “He remembers her, Cat!” Ziggy, quite excited, said to me.

  We took the man—he said his name was “Ol' Zeke”—back to the motel and began a frustrating two-hour interrogation. He insisted that we ply him with liquor and he must have emptied a quart of Jack Daniel's. The more he drank, the more colorful his “memory” became. For example, he initially said, “Yeah, I 'member this girl come to town 'bout ten years ago,” but then, after having drained half the bottle, he said, “Yeah, this gal was really sumpin', she showed some of the boys at the Golden Spur a real good time.” By the time the bottle was empty, “Miss Phipps” had become the proprietor of a brothel known as Dolly's Lollies, the wife of the richest cattleman in the state—whom, rumor had it, she'd murdered—and eventually had died of an overdose of laudanum.

  After we deposited, faced-down, Ol' Zeke back at the feed store—it was now about two in the morning—Ziggy's mood alternated between one of sky-high elation and dark despondency.

  “She was here, Cat! The old man remembers her!” he said.

  “But what about the rest of his story?” I asked.

  “The way I see it is, she came here, maybe she stayed here for a while. Dolly was very shy, see, so maybe she just disappeared and moved on. But she was here!”

  “What about the brothel? The murdered cattleman? The laudanum?”

  “That was Jack Daniel's talking. He was just putting the touch on us for an extra grand, that sharp coot.”

  The next day, a Sunday, Ziggy and I split up. He was repeating his drive of the previous day while I made several inquiries of the local constabulary as well as a judge; the startling episode of a cattleman's wife murdering her husband and then suffering an overdose of laudanum rang only one bell. But this incident had occurred in the late 1890s. For $200 one of the town's clerks briefly combed through some property records but the name of Dolly Phipps did not surface.

  Ziggy and I reconvened at the motel. “Zilch!” he said to me. I told him that I too had hit a dead end.

  “See if the guy here's got any ice, would you, Cat?”

  I returned from the proprietor's cabin with a bucket of ice. Ziggy, nude now, dumped the cubes into a towel and formed it into a turban and wrapped it around his head.

  “I have to get back to Omaha,” I told him. I was running a beer-distribution business then, which was not doing well.

  There was a small table with a lamp on it between our beds. Wearing nothing but the towel on his head, Ziggy picked up the table and threw it against the opposite wall. He lifted up the chair and threw it through the window. His naked body took on the aspect of one large palpitating tomato, and as he raved and ranted around the room his penis swung about like the trunk of an epileptic elephant. There was a dresser in the room and that soon was being hurled to and fro. I tried to restrain him, I tried holding him back . . . but I could not. He was incredibly strong; the flab on his arms belied the muscle underneath. Within three minutes the room was destroyed . . . it was splinters, shredded curtains and sheets, tiny chips of plaster, and shards of glass.

  Ziggy wrote a check for $2,000 dollars to the proprietor, who said upon receipt of this largesse, “Hey, any ol' time you wanna destroy any other rooms I got, you jus' go right ahead, sir.”

  Ziggy uttered not one single word on the long drive back to Omaha. A week later in the mail a check came to me from California. It was from Ziggy Bliss and was for the sum of $5,000. There was no note attached.

  • • •

  MICKEY KNOTT: For a cat who could carry a tune, Vic didn't have too much interest in music. He did a souped-up version of “Night and Day”; everyone snapped their fingers and swayed in their seats. He'd flick the sleepy Perry Como switch and croon “Malibu Moon” and it's like a lullaby. But when we were in Kansas City some of the boys [in the band] were going to check out Dizzy and Bird, and I asked Vic if he wanted to come along. He thought I was talking about two circus clowns. I thought he was joking. I say to him, “Come on, man, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach!” I said to him, “You ever heard of Lester Young or Billie Holiday?” He said, “Oh sure. Wasn't she the blonde in Born Yesterday?” And then he asked for another dose of weed—he called it “loony tea”—which I served right up.

  SALLY KLEIN: By the time we made it to California, we were starting to fray at the edges. Personally, it was very tough on me, Danny being everywhere. I still carried a torch for him. If he was staying on the same floor as I was, sometimes I'd hear his door opening—maybe he was going to get a coffee or a paper—and I would then emerge fro
m my room and we'd just pass a few minutes together in the hallway or elevator.

  Ziggy had disappeared for a few days after we played Nebraska—to this day nobody knows where he went—and he was sullen and not very communicative when he rejoined us. Arnie tried everything, Ernie and Billy Ross tried, I tried. I would ask him what's wrong and he'd just say, “Nuttin'! Leave me alone.” I said, “But you seem lonely,” and he'd say, “I am! That's the problem! So please let me be by myself.”

  Vic was pretty angry, because Ziggy had given one or two interviews on the phone to columnists in New York and to some local reporters in Seattle and San Francisco. “He gets on me,” Vic said to me, “'cause I accidentally said something to Winchell when I was bagged one night, and now he's yapping to every clown with a Remington [typewriter].” Ziggy was pretty sly in these interviews; people would ask him, “Why are Fountain and Bliss so funny?” and in the answers he would always say something like, “I've been doing comedy since I was a kid. My parents, God bless their souls, were comedians. They taught me everything I know.” Or he might answer, “Me and Danny McGlue spend hours and hours and weeks perfecting this stuff. It's like Michelangelo with a chisel.” But he never would mention Vic.

  There was some trouble in Seattle. The band and the rest of us were waiting outside our hotel, about to board a bus to San Francisco . . . it was drizzling and we had no idea where Vic was. Ziggy said, “Oh, let's just go without him!” Mickey Knott took Arnie aside and they spoke for a minute. Then Arnie told me, “Mickey and Vic picked up a few girls last night after the show. Mick thinks Vic's probably still with 'em.” But Mickey, Arnie told me, was so tight the night before he didn't remember where they'd gone. It was a roadside joint somewhere, he remembered.