Funnymen

by Ted Heller

“It's Veda Lankford,” I reminded him.

  “Can you believe it, Gaetano? I used to cop a feel with Angela Crosetti in Codport at the gazebo and now I got Veda Lankford's sticchio all over my finger.”

  The plane was bouncing up and down and the pilot told us it was just an air pocket. “You sure you know how to fly this thing?” Hunny asked the pilot, and the pilot said, turning around to us (which I most certainly did not appreciate), “Oh sure . . . I was shot down three times in the First World War.” As though that was reassuring.

  The plane kept bouncing and everyone except the pilot and Vic was terrorized.

  “Shouldn't we have brought Veda back with us?” I asked. “Gus Kahn is going to wonder what we did with her.”

  “Well, first I started kissin' her, right? And then I lifted up her skirt and—”

  “Gee, I hope we don't have to ditch this thing,” the pilot said.

  “Aw, fuck, I'm gonna die,” Hunny said. His huge head was turning a greenish white.

  “What decides whether you have to ditch the thing or not?” I asked the pilot.

  “All sorts of factors,” he said. “But I don't remember what they are.”

  “Got any tequila in there, Smilin' Jack?” Vic asked him. And sure enough, he passed Vic back a bottle. “If you gotta go, you gotta go, ain't that right, Hun? At least I got to bang a movie star first.”

  “But I didn't!” Hunny told him.

  The pilot said to me, “Could you open that little drawer down there and see what's inside?” I opened a drawer and there was a parachute bag. I passed it to the pilot, who strapped it on.

  “Only one?” I asked him.

  “We'll make it . . . I've made it before in bad weather,” the pilot said.

  “But the weather isn't bad,” I said.

  Guy was praying, saying the Hail Mary over and over again. I did what I always do when I'm scared: I sang songs to myself. The same lyric again and again. I was singing “Just One of Those Things.” But I must have been singing aloud because Vic told me, “Will you knock it off about them gossamer wings, Bease?”

  “Where are you guys going?” the pilot asked.

  I told him, “Vic's supposed to be at the Pantages Theater in about ten minutes.”

  “Where's that?”

  “In Los Angeles! I told you we were going there!”

  “No, I mean, where in the city is it? I'll take you right there.”

  Vic took a big swig and handed him the bottle and I looked out the window and we were coming down through the clouds. We were in Hollywood, going right over Argyle. I could make out Vine up ahead and I told the pilot to hang a right there.

  “I'm gonna die,” Hunny said again. “I always thought I'd die in the ring.”

  I could make out Hollywood Boulevard and then the theater came into view. Traffic was light and we were descending very, very quickly. The long line into the Pantages was snaking in. Then there was a tremendous bump when we hit the asphalt and we were right behind a Cadillac. I wish you could have seen the expressions on all the drivers' faces! The plane skidded and turned around two times and then stopped . . . we were about ten yards from the theater. And you can't imagine how many people were staring at us and how many horns were honking!

  “Hey, thanks, buddy!” Vic said and he handed the pilot some money.

  Vic and I had to jostle Hunny awake because he'd fainted. I nudged Vic in the ribs because I saw about a half a dozen photographers running toward us. When he saw that, Vic grabbed the tequila from the pilot.

  We were soon surrounded by photographers snapping Vic's picture, the lights going off in our faces, dazzling us. Properly sensing the moment, Vic made exactly like John Wayne getting out of the plane and strutting with manly bravado to the theater with the bottle of tequila . . . oh my, you should have seen it. It was right out of Douglas Sirk's The Tarnished Angels!

  We went around the back and the man at the door recognized Vic and let us in. Vic was combing his hair back and dusting himself off on his way to his dressing room. I saw a tall shadow with a cigar down the corridor. It was Arnie Latchkey. He was holding a tuxedo and he handed it to Vic and said, “Awful muy grande of you to show up.”

  “Where's Zig?” Vic asked, slipping into the tux.

  “He's onstage now. Dying a horrible death. Oh, just forget the goddamn cummerbund!”

  SALLY KLEIN: “I'll kill him! I'll kill him!” Ziggy was hissing to me in his dressing room. “Sal, if I go on alone, I'll die. I'll die!”

  We waited and waited for Vic and I never told Ziggy that he was in Mexico. I said to him, “I have to ask you a tough question.” He looked like he didn't have one drop of energy inside of him, like he was drained by all his waiting and worrying. I said, “How long do you think Fountain and Bliss is going to last? Do you want to be with him for thirty years?”

  “I don't know if I can take another thirty days of this, Sal. Why?”

  “Let's say you two split up . . . what do you imagine yourself doing?”

  “Honest, I never thought about it.”

  “Well, think about it. Because if you're not with Vic, then you're going to be alone. So you better get used to performing alone. Or else you're stuck here. Why don't you just give it a shot?”

  “No!”

  “Please. Just try it!”

  “No!”

  I picked up a copy of the Examiner off the table and turned to the interview he'd done with Bobby Hale. I started reading him back excerpts from it, how he was the funny guy, how he got the laughs, how he did all the work. “This is all a load of malarkey!” I said. “Look at you, Ziggy! Without Vic, you're nothing!” And I stormed out.

  One minute later he walked out of his dressing room, wiping his forehead, and ambled onto the stage. Poor Billy Ross didn't know what to do. He started up “Malibu Moon” and Ziggy actually sang the song . . . imitating Vic! It got some laughs but still, people were wondering: Where's Vic? Ziggy stood by the mike and kept adjusting it . . . he pulled it up, he pushed it down, he brought it here and there. He kept wiping his head with a handkerchief. He twitched a little, kept shaking his head and blinking his eyes. I'd seen this before and knew we were in big trouble.

  “We have to get him off, Arnie,” I whispered backstage. “He'll have a stroke.”

  “Sally, listen to that . . . LISTEN!” he said to me.

  The audience was going crazy for it! They thought it was part of the routine. His gestures, his twitches and eye blinks—they thought he was doing a pansy act! Every time he moved his head they burst out laughing! The microphone picked up these faint wheezing sounds and when they heard that, they were on the floor.

  I heard a loud commotion from outside the theater—horns honking, people-cheering—and Arnie slipped backstage. Ziggy was frozen and pale and the crowd kept eating it up, and all of a sudden Vic was standing next to me.

  “Oh, if it isn't the Italian cavalry just in time,” I said to him.

  “Hey, Ziggy's doing great without me,” Vic said. He wasn't too pleased.

  Arnie pushed Vic out there and it was a while before Ziggy even noticed him.

  “Nice of you to show up, Vic,” Ziggy said to him.

  “I thought I'd just drop in, see how you were doing.”

  “And?”

  “It looks like you don't need me no more.”

  “I guess I don't.”

  “Except maybe to clean that puddle you made that you're standing in.”

  About four thousand eyes all looked to Ziggy's feet. (Of course, there was no puddle.)

  “I sunged ‘Malibu Moon’ without you, Vic,” Ziggy said, “I'll have you know.”

  “Oh yeah? How'd it go over?”

  “Well, for the first time ever, the audience was awake at the end of it.”

  It only took two minutes before they began to click and when they clicked, it was explosive.

  The Pantages shows were all sold out, every night. There were fights outside the theater to get tickets. Vic told ev
erybody—including dozens of reporters—that he had flown the plane from Mexico because the pilot was too drunk, that he had landed the plane on Hollywood Boulevard to get to the theater on time. Morty Geist said, “Gee, I wish I'd thought that one up!” The photo of Vic getting out of the plane with the bottle was everywhere! The Examiner had a headline “ON A SING AND A PRAYER!” and Variety went “CROONER'S CRAFT CRASHES PANTAGES BASH.” Estelle called from New York to tell me the Daily News ran the photo on their cover with the headline “40 SECONDS OVER JOKE-E-O.”

  DANNY McGLUE: Every few years I'd ask Vic, “Did you really fly the plane that night?” And he'd tell me that he did. When I asked Guy and Hunny, they'd shrug and tell me to ask Vic.

  Betsy arrived in L.A. only a few days before the plane thing and she stayed with me at the hotel. She had quit A Date With Judy —they were giving her only a line a week now—and it was a very rough time for her.

  “So is it always this exciting with Ziggy and Vic?” she asked me.

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  I took Betsy to Vendôme . . . we ordered a bottle of expensive wine and were just about to enjoy a pleasant dinner when the waiter told me I had a phone call. I went to the bar and it was Ziggy on the other end.

  “This plane thing is blowing up in our faces, Danny!” he told me. “That was some stunt Vic pulled!”

  “You're sold out at the Pantages, you've been extended a week at Ciro's, and Arnie is cooking up something in Vegas . . . if this is blowing up, then maybe we should have more of it.”

  “Well, I'm all for it if the plane crashes a little harder next time,” he said.

  “Don't talk like that. I really don't think Vic crashed the plane to boost his career. If he was really flying it, that is.”

  “It worked for Knute Rockne, Danny,” he said to me. “If Rockne's plane don't crash, they don't make that movie with Pat O'Brien.”

  “Ziggy, my snails just showed up . . . I'm with Betsy,” I told him.

  “I put an ad in Variety, a full-page ad,” he told me. “And it's gonna run elsewheres too. The Globe in New York and—”

  “An ad?” I said.

  “Yeah, you'll see it. Enjoy your snails.”

  When I got back to the table, the snails were indeed there but most of the wine wasn't. Betsy had knocked back about two-thirds of it. “Sorry about that, honey,” I said to her.

  “About what?” she asked me, her eyes already sinking.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: The paper was slipped under my door at the hotel . . . I woke up to it. Why not wake me up with the news that they dropped the H-bomb on my living room in New York and Estelle was blown to smithereens!? Because this hit me the same way.

  There weren't too many words to the thing. On the top of the ad it said, “vic is my copilot.” There was a photo beneath that of Ziggy and Vic, one of those publicity photos Bertie and Morty hand out to a million places. And then Ziggy Bliss tells the world how much he loves Vic Fountain and how he thanks God Vic didn't bite it on Hollywood Boulevard. “I have been blessed with many things,” the ad said, “with beautiful, loving parents and with that most underrated and underappreciated of all of God's gifts: the gift to make people laff.” By the time I'm on this sentence I had already lost my appetite for the whole day and the next few to come. “But of all the gifts I am thankful for, it is for my fellow yukster and trouper extraordinaire Vic Fountain. You may have crashed into Hollywood but in my heart, Vic, it's always a safe landing.” And there was Ziggy's big, loopy, five-year-old's signature.

  My jaw was dropping in disbelief and I'd spilled my coffee over the floor and then the phone rang. I knew it would be Sally asking me, “Can you believe this thing?!” so I picked up the phone and said, “No, Sally, I cannot believe this goddamn thing!”

  “Where does he get the chutzpah for this? Where?” she asked.

  “I'd fire him,” I told her, “but then where the hell would we be?” In addition to all this airplane mishegoss there was also the matter of Vicki Fountain being born. Vic was getting letters, telegrams, and flowers sent to his room all the time. The fact that he wasn't with Lulu and hadn't seen the baby, Morty Geist was able to put a lid on; he just released it to the press that “mother, baby, and warbler are doing fine.” Nobody bothered to ask where Lulu was because they just naturally assumed Vic was by her side, not that Hunny and Guy were.

  When Morty found out that Vic and Ginger Bacon were living together at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he hit the ceiling. “What if this gets out?!” he was saying. “What is it with these two guys?! I'm gonna hang myself!” I told him it was his job to see that it didn't get out. He told me that cleaning up after Fountain and Bliss was like being a stable boy at an elephant circus. I told him I knew exactly what he meant but that; nevertheless, he should get sweepin'.

  Hey, in the same edition of Variety that they ran Ziggy's ad in, you know what also ran? It was a small story, maybe a paragraph. It said that Galaxy Pictures had terminated its contract with its young blond starlet Veda Lankford.

  GUY PUGLIA: We had to keep it completely hush-hush about Lulu. We checked her into French Hospital in New York under the name of Jane Q. Doakes—Arnie come up with that name. She didn't know this though . . . I mean, Morty Geist is telling us to muffle this thing big time and Lulu's got enough worries right now, right, what with it being her first kid. So we get her her own room and the nurses and residents keep calling her Mrs. Doakes. But she's so out of it she don't even notice. Once in a while she'd ask if Vic was comin' and I told her I didn't know. Hey, I knew! I knew that Vic was three thousand miles away shacked up in a bungalow with Ginger Bacon.

  Hunny was the one who really took care of Lu, not me. He was up till five in the morning the night Vicki was born . . . and he had a fight in Sunnyside the next day too. He didn't sleep a wink and twelve hours later he gets knocked out cold in the ring. And that fight wasn't fixed neither. He was out cold for two days, then he snapped out of it. But he wasn't really the same afterward.

  SNUFFY DUBIN: I came home one night at like four in the morning from some joint called Nick's Lagoon in Roosevelt [Long Island] and there's a telegram waiting for me from Ziggy. It's telling me to fly to Los Angeles—he's marrying Jane White. He tells me he'll pay my expenses, he wants me to be his best man. He'll put me up at the Ambassador. He tells me they're going to play a fancy club soon in L.A. and do a few shows at the Oceanfront in Vegas and he'll see to it that I open for him.

  I didn't even bother to call the manager of the club I was playing to tell him I couldn't finish out the week. That fucking chozzer hadn't paid me a dime. My agent called him up and said, “My guy isn't being paid.” And this pig says, “Your guy isn't being funny either.” I was playing to the same thirty drunks for two weeks and you could hear the sound of men vomiting in the bathroom every five minutes. That'll tend to throw your timing off, you know.

  Now, we all know why Ziggy married Jane when he did. This is no government state secret. It was murdering him inside, all the attention Vic was getting—Vic piloting the plane and Vicki being born. Well, Ziggy wasn't about to stage his own airplane crash—although I bet he thought about it—so this is how he gets even. He does a quickie marriage in Nevada, invites some of his Hollywood big-shot buddies, and makes sure every reporter from Tehachapi to Timbuk-fucking-tu knows about it.

  I show up with my beat-up old valise at the Ambassador—the only time I'd ever been to Los Angeles before this was right before I got sent overseas—and they didn't have me registered there. I went to the phone booth in the lobby and tried to reach Ziggy at the Beverly Hills but they wouldn't put me through. Oh Christ, I'm thinking, was this some practical joke being playing on me? What the fuck am I doing in Tinseltown with two pair of underwear and forty bucks in my wallet? I call the WAT offices in L.A. and Hank Stanco's girl says Hank will call me back right away. She asks me where I'm staying. Where I'm staying?! I'm staying in this fucking phone booth! And how long am I supposed to wait for an agent to call me back
?!

  So twenty minutes later I'm in some fleabag like the Hotel Cucaracha on Franklin. I fluff the pillows and bedbugs sprinkle out like there's snow flurries. And then I realized: Damn it, I only have five more bennies left to my name.

  I called the Beverly Hills again and this time I reached Arnie. “Is Ziggy really getting married or is this a gag?” And Arnie said, “Of course he is! And Vic just cut a record yesterday with Pacific Coast Records!”

  “Wha—?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Arnie said, “there was all this stuff about Ziggy getting married to Jane White, so Vic went out and recorded a song with Billy Ross's band. ‘The Hang of It.’ Bease's number. Boy, this seesaw for attention is veering out of control, Snuff. Every day some new dung is hitting the fan.”

  “Look,” I said to him, “this hotel I'm—even the desk clerk has got antennas. Ziggy told me he'd put me up at the Ambassador, but I go there and they don't know me from Judge Crater.”

  “I'll make some calls. Go back to the Ambassador. The wedding is tomorrow.”

  “So tell me: What do I have to do as Ziggy's best man?”

  “Huh?”

  “I'm Ziggy's best man . . . ain't I?”

  “No . . . so far as I know it,” he said to me, “Vic is.”

  REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV: I was in my office in Omaha when Ziggy called me from California. I asked him how he was, and he told me that he wanted me to do something. He gave me the phone number of two reporters; one man was named Bobby Hale and the other was a woman named Hilda Fleury in New York.

  Ziggy wanted me to call these two journalists and tell them that someone named Ginger Bacon was living with Vic Fountain in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I asked him why he wanted me to do this, and he told me that Vic's wife had recently given birth, that Vic was out of control and needed to settle down. “It'd be good for the act, sure,” Ziggy said, “but most of all, it'd truly be the best thing for his family.”

  “I just don't know if this is right,” I said to him.

  “Oh, it ain't right, Cat,” Ziggy concurred, “but that don't mean you shouldn't do it.” He then proceeded to give me a lecture on loyalty and friendship.