Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: Mickey and I “commandeered” a car very quickly. That is, I slipped the faygeleh concierge two C-notes and in five minutes I'm behind the steering wheel of God knows whose Packard. Mickey had sort of a vague idea where this place was but the previous night was mostly one smoky fog for him (and you can guess what kind of smoke that was). After a futile search for an hour, I'm ready to give up and head back to the hotel and take Ziggy up on his offer to forget Vic, when Mickey pops up like he's got springs in his tuches and yells, “There it is!”

  It was a two-story juke joint called Spike's Bed of Nails. The place smelled like beer and urine twenty yards away, even with our windows closed. I pulled up, got out, and knocked on the door but the place was closed. “A place like this doesn't even open till midnight, man,” Mickey told me.

  “Vic! Vic! Are you up there?” Mickey is yelling up to the second floor.

  I hear Vic yell back, “Mickey baby, is that you? You gotta help me!”

  “Latch is here too!” Mickey yells up to him.

  “Guys, can you get in?” Vic calls out. “I can't get loose!”

  It's pouring out now, Teddy, and we're practically in the woods and any second some two-ton grizzly might pop out of a tree and maul our heads off. Mickey kicks to pieces a closed window and we climbed inside this joint. Typical late-forties, early-fifties roadhouse—sticky floors, splintered furniture, a cracked mirror, discarded bric-a-brac, a wobbly staircase, which the great drummer and I were soon ascending. On the wall going up the stairs were about twenty photographs; it was their “Tart of the Month Club.” But the girls looked like Ethel Rosenberg, Rosa Luxemburg, and Dillinger's Lady in Red. No great beauties, any of 'em.

  We found Vic in a room on the second floor with nothing in it save a warped, disheveled four-poster bed. Vic, buck naked, was in this bed, each hand and each foot handcuffed to a post. And, may I add, there was not one stitch of his expensive threads inside this entire hostelry?

  “It's a long story,” he said. “Can you get me outta here?”

  “You think I got the keys to your handcuffs, Vic?” I snapped.

  Mickey went downstairs and found a rusty old hacksaw . . . this thing had tetanus written all over it. He's sawing the bed while Vic is stretched out on it like it's a torture gizmo right out of the Marquis de Sade. He tells me the two girls he picked up—two of them! —the night previous had taken him to this roadhouse operation and how they'd all emptied a gallon of scotch. “A gallon?” I said. “You stretch the limits of credulity.” He admitted, “Well, it was a lot.”

  Mickey is sawing away and the dust is going all over the place and the smell of booze, urine, cigarettes, sweat, and other testimony of summer nights is unbearable. Vic is telling us that he's in the sack with the two girls and they're putting on quite a show, boy; they're shakin' and shimmyin' and flickin' their tongues like they're cobras, when all of a sudden two sheriffs bust in. These two lawmen come across as real no-nonsense . . . the fact that Vic is one half of Fountain and Bliss, that means as little to them as “I was Martin Van Buren's vice president.”

  The girls, it turns out, are both sixteen years old.

  “These sheriffs said I was looking at ruin, scandal, and damnation,” Vic told us, “which didn't really bother me, but also at maybe twenty years in stir, which did. I told 'em I could make it worth their while to let me go. I said how did five grand sound and they Jewed it up—no offense, Latch—to ten.” So Vic called and woke up Morty Geist, who was in Frisco now, and Morty was going to, first thing, call Shep Lane in New York and have Shep wire ten grand to the two corrupt John Laws. Morty also had to make sure this thing was kept buried press-wise. The sheriffs then left Vic cuffed to the bed and told him if they didn't receive the dough by noon the next day, they'd either haul him in or burn the roadhouse down with him in it. Which was doubtful as it seemed they most likely ran the joint. As a matter of fact, Vic said to me and Mickey, “The two girls were probably their daughters, those fuckin' figlie di puttane.”

  By now we've got Vic free but he's still got the cuffs around his wrists and ankles. Mickey swathed him in these musty sheets and the three of us piled into the Packard and made it back to the hotel. Just in the nick of time too because as we were heading back the way we'd come, Vic espied the two shakedown guys in an unmarked Ford heading toward the roadhouse.

  Back at the hotel, the concierge called a locksmith and we got Vic unbound and back into his threads, $10,000 the poorer but probably not one IQ point the wiser.

  • • •

  ERNIE BEASLEY: I called Hank Stanco at the Worldwide American Talent offices on Wilshire. Hank was Fountain and Bliss's man on the West Coast. I told him that Vic was looking into cutting a record. (Don't forget: Everything was 78s then.) Hank was up for the idea and knew that Fountain and Bliss would be in Los Angeles at the Pantages Theater and Ciro's. He said that he'd make some calls. He was meeting that day, as a matter of fact, with Bobby Bishop, who was doing A & R with the Pacific Coast label then. Hank said he might be able to get Vic some studio time and I told him that Billy Ross and the boys would love to record. He asked me what song, and I said that Vic could do either “Malibu Moon” or “The Hang of It.” Hank had seen the act many times and was familiar with both numbers. He said, “Of course, I'd have to look at some of the paperwork about this, contractually . . . to see if it's okay that Vic can do this without Ziggy.” I told Hank that I certainly did not wish to be the one to tell Vic that he could not record, nor did I wish to be the one to tell Ziggy that Vic could. “Well, I guess that's what Arnie and Sally are for, huh?” Hank said to me.

  DANNY McGLUE: Fountain and Bliss did a week at El Matador in San Francisco. It was the second-to-last stop on this whirlwind tour. We were all tired. Lulu was about to give birth to Vicki in New York, Estelle and Arnie were married but had been apart for months. We couldn't wait to get everything over and done with and then knock off for a while.

  So we're in Arnie's room at the Mark Hopkins and Vic says, “Guys, listen, I don't mean to drop a big one on you, but is there any law that says we gotta still do this radio show when we get back to New York?”

  Arnie said that there wasn't a law but there was a contract with the Consolidated Network.

  “Contracts, Jesus,” Vic said. “Why does everything have to have a contract?! Whatever happened to just doin' something or not doin' it?”

  “The radio show is tremendous publicity,” Sally said.

  “It's also a tremendous amount of work.”

  I said, “What about television? That little box is going to be socko, guys. Lenny Pearl's got a show. And Berle's very hot.”

  Arnie asked Ziggy how he felt about continuing the radio show and Ziggy said, “I agree with Sally. Radio puts us into people's homes and into their heads.”

  “We can do one more season for the Dickinson witch hazel people,” Arnie said, “and then we call it quits. How's that sound?”

  “Only one more . . . ?” Ziggy said with a slightly sick look on his face.

  Vic said, “I don't know if I can do one more show, Latch. The thought of getting in that studio is makin' me sick. I got a kid on the way any day now! I'd like to maybe spend some time bein' a father, you know?”

  Ziggy said, “Oh, get a load of Judge Hardy with blue hair over here!”

  “Shut up, Ziggy! At least I got a wife!”

  “A wife? You didn't even make it to your own honeymoon night, you were so busy gassing it up at El Mo!”

  “It was the Latin Quarter and besides, I eventually did make it home.”

  “Guys, guys . . . please,” Arnie said. “Are we a team or aren't we?”

  But neither Ziggy or Vic responded to that.

  GUY PUGLIA: I really liked managing the Hunny Pot. I liked meetin' all the people who went there . . . Joe DiMaggio, Leo Durocher and Laraine Day, Ernest Hemingway, Rocky Marciano, Sinatra, Jimmy Cannon, Gleason, people like that. Anytime a famous person come in, I was supposed to call Bud Hat
ch or his wife. Bud had a list of jokes that a few gag writers had written. It went like this: Cary Grant comes into Hunny's joint one night, I call Bud, Bud gets a joke from this list, writes it in the column that Hunny was “overheard” cracking a gag to Cary Grant last night at the Hunny Pot. It was great publicity.

  These men in black suits come in one afternoon and tell us they're from the Health Department. They start inspecting the joint with white gloves on, like it's a marine barracks. One of 'em says to Hunny, “We understand that some cockroaches have been seen on the premises,” and Hunny says, “Yeah, they're my best customers.” “Okay, we're closing the place down,” one guy says and I go after this gent but Hunny holds me back. So Hunny locks the door, pulls the gate down, and closes up, and I says to him, “Okay, now what do we do?” He says, “We gotta get a [sic] attorney most likely, Gaetano.”

  We went back to the place we was sharing—most of the time he was shacked up with this broad named Maria G. that Vic had introduced him to—and an envelope that said FROM THE HEALTH DEPT was slipped under the door. Hunny rips it open and what's inside? Two airline tickets to Los Angeles. A typed note said: “Get your asses over here, you two dumb fairies. Vic.”

  “Let's pack,” I says to the Hun, and Hunny says, “But I still need to call a [sic] attorney first.” He couldn't put one and one together, I guess.

  SALLY KLEIN: Jack had sent two dozen pink and white roses to my room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. That was so sweet of him. He also took a week off so he could spend some time with me. I was a little wary of introducing him to Danny . . . you know how that's always a sticky situation. I didn't tell Jack that I once had been Danny's girl. Eventually he figured it out.

  The first bad thing that happened in Los Angeles was that Ziggy once again started granting interviews. He was on the phone day and night or meeting columnists at Chasen's, the Villa Capri, and the Trocadero. Louella Parsons he met at Chasen's. He wasn't saying anything completely inflammatory but he wasn't exactly being very charitable to Vic either. Bobby Hale did a long interview with him, and Ziggy barely mentioned Vic. He talked a lot about Harry and Flo though . . . [he said] every single thing he learned about show business he learned on the lap of his parents. He called them “titans.” The Examiner was going to run the story and wanted photos of Harry and Flo to run on the page, but Ziggy told them he didn't have any. They ran the story anyway.

  Meanwhile, Danny told me that Ziggy had started a thing with a model named Myrna, who lived in El Monte. She wasn't really a model—she made what they called “blue movies” back then. She was the typical Ziggy girlfriend . . . a dizzy bottle blonde with an immense bust. Danny told me that Ziggy had bought this Myrna girl diamond earrings and about three fur coats. “I guess it must get real cold in El Monte,” Danny said.

  Guy and Hunny were in Los Angeles now. We hardly saw Vic at all—he was off with Hunny, Ernie, and Guy most of the time. Or Ginger Bacon, who'd also flown out. Arnie was left to baby-sit Ziggy alone.

  ERNIE BEASLEY: Vic, Hunny, Guy, and I went to the track one day and Vic saw Gus Kahn in his usual seats. He introduced us to Mr. Kahn, who was sitting next to a perky little blonde. It was Veda Lankford, who had done two movies for Galaxy, The Big Kill and Here We Go Again with Glenn Ford. Kahn had seen Hunny box, he told us, and had won five grand on him. “You bet on me, Mr. Kahn?” Hunny asked him. “Hell no!” Kahn said. “I bet against you!”

  It was a Saturday and we stayed for only half the card. I've never placed a bet in my life but I liked being around a racetrack; I liked the wonderful characters and the electricity. Also, I had once had an affair with a jockey in Saratoga. (There's just something about a boy with taut muscles in green, gold, and lemon yellow silks with a whip!) Vic was flirting with Veda—she was billed as “the next Veronica Lake”—the entire day, right in front of Gus Kahn, who had quite a reputation with the girls. Was it Selznick who had a “four o'clock girl”? Every day at four some girl would be ushered into his office to “service his needs.” Well, I've heard that Gus Kahn had a four o'clock girl as well as one for 4:15, too.

  After the fourth race Gus Kahn asked Vic what he was doing.

  “I got a show tonight at that big theater, the Pantages,” Vic said.

  “You're opening The End of Mrs. Smith? That's a Galaxy picture. Hey, it's too bad 'cause me and Veda are going down to Agua Caliente, down Mexico way. Fifteen roulette wheels, ten dice tables, a hot band, and more blackjack tables than you can count.”

  “How far's that from here, Mr. Kahn?”

  “By car it's six hours.”

  Vic said, “But I got this show tonight, see.”

  “Well, there's always my plane.”

  A half an hour later we were on Gus Kahn's plane. This craft was very swank—there was a bartender and a chef as well as a movie projector and screen. And a piano too. I played a few songs for Mr. Kahn and he was very impressed. The tequila was flowing freely and I had a few. Everyone did. Veda was having a good time playing with the scars on Hunny's face, and Kahn asked Guy what had happened to his nose but Guy didn't want to talk about it.

  The Agua Caliente resort was just outside Tijuana and, boy, it was a wild, woolly scene. Mickey Cohen and the Fratelli brothers were running it then. You think the Federales cared a jot that none of us had a passport? They saw Gus Kahn and everything was immediately okay. The Dick Stabile band was playing and the house was packed.

  Gus Kahn went to the five-hundred-dollar-minimum blackjack tables but Vic admitted, “This is too rich for my Codport blood.” He went to the craps table with Veda Lankford and I could just not believe how truly star-studded the place was—when I was walking in, Barbara Stanwyck was walking out. Ava Gardner was there that day, so were Frank Sinatra and Jack Warner and William Wyler and the screenwriter Jess Auerbach. Vic lost about two grand that day and it didn't take long before Veda Lankford and he wandered off someplace together.

  I looked at my watch and saw that Vic had to be at the Pantages in about two hours. Then Mr. Kahn walked up to me, Hunny, and Guy and told us he'd lost $13,000. “Well, easy come, easy go,” he said.

  “Sounds more like easy go to me, Mr. Kahn,” Hunny said.

  “Anyone see Veda? We gotta get back to Los Angeles.”

  I looked at Hunny and Guy and we all shook our heads.

  “Where's Vic Fountain?” Gus Kahn asked us, and we shook our heads again.

  “Hey, Gussie!” Jess Auerbach said, sticking a cigar as big as a loaf of bread into his mouth. “You can take twenty grand off the price of my next script!” Apparently he had won twenty thousand at the same table that Gus Kahn had lost his thirteen.

  “Go to goddamn hell, Jessie! Tell ya what, I won't even buy any more scripts from you, how's that sound, you sonuvabitch?”

  “I saw that new blonde ingenue of yours sneak off with that big blue-haired dago, Gus.”

  “Oh yeah? Where'd they go?”

  “Where do you go when you're here?” Jess Auerbach said to him.

  “Jesus goddamn Christ,” Mr. Kahn said, his eyes drifting upward toward the second floor. But, you know, he didn't look too upset or angry. “Well,” he said, “I gotta get back to civilization. Nice meeting you gents.”

  “Mr. Kahn,” Hunny said, “we gotta get back too. To see Vic's show.”

  Guy reminded Hunny that, as Vic was upstairs right now, there really wasn't much of a rush, and then Gus Kahn just slipped off.

  Ten minutes later I saw Vic and the next Veronica Lake at a craps table. He was smashed—his hair was falling all over his face—and looked a mess. I pulled him away from Veda and I said to him, “Gus Kahn just left, Vic.”

  “Oh yeah? How'd he do at the blackjack?”

  “Somehow we have to get back to Los Angeles.”

  “Guess what I did, Bease? I fucked a movie star! Me! Vic Fountain! I just fucked a movie star!”

  “That's great, but you have a show to do in Los Angeles and we're in Mexico.”

  “What a hot piece o
f ass too. Oh yeah, I forgot . . . that don't mean nothin' to you.”

  I found a phone and called Arnie in L.A. at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was fuming. “How can he do this to me?!” he was barking out. “I got enough troubles with Ziggy and now Vic pulls this?! I thought Vic was the reliable one! Now it turns out I got no reliable one!”

  From behind Vic grabs the phone from me and I hear him say, “Who's this? . . . Latch? . . . Hey, Latch, guess what I did? . . . I banged a movie star! . . . Aw, come on, give me some congrats! . . . So I miss one show! Big deal . . . huh? . . . huh? . . . Oh, it was Veda Lankford from The Big Kill . . . huh? . . . Yeah, she was pretty good.” And he hung up.

  Guy came over and said he'd found someone who could fly us into Los Angeles right away, that that's what this person did, it was his own private shuttle service. “But this pilot,” Guy said, “I don't know if I'd trust him with a paper airplane.” The pilot was about fifty-five years old and had been a silent movie stunt pilot—he'd been in Wings even. But he had seen better days and, frankly, I did not feel so comfortable getting into that old flying jalopy of his.

  “I'll have you there in no time, guys,” the pilot said. “Where to?”

  “Los Angeles,” I told him.

  The plane was from 1930 or so. There were no numbers on it and there was hardly even a cockpit—the pilot was just sitting right in front of us.

  “Where you guys going?” he asked us when we'd been aloft for a few minutes.

  “Los Angeles,” I told him. “I told you that already!”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Arnie and Ziggy are going to be mad at you, Vic,” I warned Vic.

  “Why? 'Cause I didn't let 'em watch me with Vera Langley?”