Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  When I contacted Mr. Hale he was quite brusque with me. He said to me, “I know this already and I don't care! And you can tell Ziggy Bliss I said so!”

  It took a while before I could actually reach Mrs. Fleury in New York City—her secretary was not easy to get past. Mrs. Fleury, when I finally was conversing with her, did seem genuinely interested in the information I possessed. She asked me who I was, how I had come upon this information, and I followed Ziggy's instructions and told her, “It's me . . . Hunny Gannett, the prizefighter,” and hung up.

  • • •

  ERNIE BEASLEY: The recording session was very professional. Bobby Bishop got Hal Gordon to produce, and they used Billy Ross's arrangements. Vic did the tune in two takes. Billy wanted the song to really, really swing so he brought in a few extra musicians. And one of them knew Vic from a previous band.

  “Cueball Swenson! You sonuvabitch, give us a hug,” Vic said when he saw this bald man, a trombonist.

  “Vic,” Cueball said, giving him a big bear hug, “when I heard this recording date was for you I jumped at the chance.”

  They talked about the old days for a minute or two, and I recall Vic telling Cueball that he was going to make sure that Bobby Bishop and Hal Gordon would pay him three times what they would normally pay. Cueball was up to date on the success of Fountain and Bliss and said to Vic, “I even saw that short movie you two did.”

  “What? That Gotta Dunce thing?” Vic said. “You know, I didn't think it was as bad as everyone said.” (When people say things like that, I've found, it usually was as bad.)

  “So . . .” Cueball asked him, indicating Ginger Bacon, who was in the studio that day, “is that the missus? Is that Lulu Fountain?”

  “That's just a friend. Lu's with the kid. So whattaya hear about Pip Grundy? And those Siamese twins?”

  “Ah, they all split up soon after you left us, Vic. But you know, I ran into Floyd Lomax in Las Vegas a few months ago . . .”

  “Uh-huh. Yeah?”

  “And we got to talking. He said that if I ever saw you that I should tell you he sends his regards and that he hasn't forgotten.”

  “Well, Cue, thanks for passing the message along. If you see Floyd again, would you tell him that I have?”

  The band did the song and then recorded an old Harold Arlen number for the B-side. Hal and Bobby wanted Vic to do another take, but Vic said he'd get to that after we broke for lunch. He, Ginger, and I went to Chasen's and got positively gassed over martinis and chili. Vic couldn't believe he'd recorded a song on his own. At one point he got up and phoned Lulu in New York to see how she and the kid were doing.

  “Don't ever become anybody's mistress, Bease,” Ginger said to me then, lighting up a cigarette. “It's just pure damn hell.”

  When we got back to the studio Vic had no interest in doing the Arlen song again. He simply refused. Billy Ross took Hal and Bobby aside and said to them, “I know Vic . . . he won't do it.” So Hal said, “Okay, then . . . can we do ‘Malibu Moon’ now?” Well, that's such a slow, languid, torpid song that I chimed in and said that since Vic was half in his cups, now would be the perfect time. So Billy busted out the charts for ‘Moon,’ the band went over it a few times, and then Ginger woke up Vic and he did it in one take. I was slightly annoyed that he slurred over a word here and there but he really captured the essence of the song. It's one of my best lyrics, one of my best songs: “It must have been the Malibu moon, that made me fall in love with you. It must have been that light in your eyes, those cocktails of silver and blue.” The third time he sang the words “those cocktails” he somehow turned it into one syllable.

  Still, when Hal and Bobby were shaking my hands that day as Vic, Ginger, and I were leaving, Bobby Bishop said to me, “Ernie, we recorded two hits today.”

  JANE WHITE: I can't believe that I was ever so impulsive. Ziggy called me up one day from L.A. and said, “Jane, let's you and me make it official, how about it?” Well, I'd been envisioning a long engagement and wonderful parties and dinners with my mother and him, perhaps a cruise to Europe . . . but he said that he would have a ring over to my apartment in a matter of minutes.

  I expressed my reservations and he said to me, “Janie, Shep Lane'll put you and your mother on a plane to California today. And the ring too. Except the ring'll be so big it might need a separate plane. I'll put everybody up at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” I asked him about my bridesmaids and my maid of honor and he said to me, “I don't have time for this, sweets. I wanna marry you. I want you to have my kids. And I wanna do it now.”

  The buzzer rang from the lobby and my mother spoke to the doorman. Ziggy was cajoling me and painting these wonderful pictures, and, well, I knew how big he was! I mean, you could not read a Walter Winchell or Earl Wilson column without seeing something about him or Vic in it. My mother walked in with a large white box and a small blue one and I asked her what it was. She told me they were from Shep Lane's office on Lexington Avenue. I tore open the large box . . . inside was the most beautiful wedding gown from Saks. I tore open the small box and ripped away all the tissue paper and there was just the most magnificent diamond ring. There were also airline tickets for my mother and me. I picked the phone back up and told Ziggy how much I loved him, and we were in California the next day.

  SALLY KLEIN: Ziggy told me at the Polo Lounge: “I proposed to Jane and she said yeah.”

  “Then why don't you look so happy?”

  “When are you and Jack gonna tie the old Gordian knot?”

  I noticed that he changed the subject but I let him. I told him, “Oh, you never know . . .”

  “Jack's a good guy. Jack's all right.”

  “So's Danny.”

  “Aw, come on, Sal,” he said, “that's all water unner the bridge.”

  Ziggy told me that Janie was already on the way to California with her mother, that he wanted to get married as soon as he could. He had already called up Rabbi Gershon Susskind, the “rabbi to the stars.” Morty was calling every paper and reporter he could and was still burning up the lines. He told me they were going to fly to Reno in a few days, Vic would be the best man, and—then I interrupted him.

  “How do you think Jane White—née Judith Weissblau—is going to feel about someone named Rabbi Gershon Susskind performing this ritual?”

  “Oy vey,” he said. “You're right.”

  “And are you and Vic even speaking to each other?”

  “Ah, it's good press that he's my best man. He'll do it. You watch. Don't forget, I'm godfather to his child.”

  “No you're not! That's just what we're telling everybody. You haven't even seen Vic's kid.”

  “Yeah but neither has he.”

  He finished his drink and got up, said he had more arrangements to make. I said to him, “This wedding of yours . . . it has nothing to do with Vic getting all this press over the crash landing or anything, doesn't it?”

  He said with a smile, “Come on, Sally, give your cousin some credit.”

  “I thought I was.”

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: After one of the final shows at the Pantages, Vic calls me from his bungalow, says he wants to see me. I'm bushed, I'm about to hit the hay. But Vic, he's on a different schedule than most Homo sapiens, up to five in the morning most nights.

  I went to his bungalow, making sure to avoid going past Ziggy's—the very last thing I needed was Ziggy seeing me going to Vic's. Anyway, if my memory serves me well, Jane was already there with him then . . . and she'd just had that, uh, “work” done by Dr. Howie Baer so I'm sure they were quite occupied with matters of the flesh.

  “Sit down, Latch,” Vic tells me.

  “Can I get you a drink, Arnie?” Ginger asks me and I told her that it depended on what Vic had to tell me.

  “I recorded a song today,” he said. “Two of 'em. Actually, four, but two of those were B-sides and I didn't really give it my all.”

  Quickly, I asked Ginger to make me a scotch and soda.

  “Vic, there's
the little matter of the round, red, fat, soap-pad-tressed, freckled Sigmund Blissman that is your partner.”

  “Well, that's why I'm comin' to you first.”

  I told him that, no, in fact he had not come to me first. As a matter of fact, he came to me second to last, it seemed!

  “Well,” I said, “we can't keep this a secret from him—that would be amoral—as much as I'd like to.”

  “Am I gonna get sued for this?” he asked me. You know, he seemed like the old, somewhat vulnerable Vic Fontana when he asked me this. “I mean, alls I did was sing.”

  I told him I didn't think so. I told him that Shep Lane and Hank Stanco would look at the paperwork but that I was sure everything would be okay.

  “You know,” he said, “me and Zig, we got quite a thing goin' . . . the clubs and the shows and whole deal and all. I don't wanna lose this! I swear it, Arn, really. But sometimes I feel—I don't know. You know?”

  “Yeah. I know. Sure.”

  The big lug couldn't have a heart-to-heart talk even if someone had transplanted a brand-new ticker into him.

  He and Ginger stood up and put on their coats, about to go somewhere.

  “Listen,” I told him. “I got some bad news too.”

  “Hold on, puddin',” he said to her.

  “Morty just called me in my room,” I told him. “Hilda Fleury knows that you and Ginger are shacked up here. So does Louella [Parsons].”

  “So?” he said.

  “So? Well, let's examine this . . . if you had once had Hunny Gannett work my butler over, I might want to disseminate bad dope on you to the entire universe too.”

  “Yeah, but don't you think she'll be scared Hunny'll do it again? I mean, that's how this leanin' on people stuff is supposed to work.”

  “I'll take care of Louella. And Morty's on a plane to New York now,” I told him. I reminded him that Morty had also had to go back to Seattle from Frisco, to Mexico from L.A., to Detroit from Chicago, to Miami Beach from Atlanta, and made other similar journeys just to mop up with extra-strength ammonia the swath that Vic was cutting across the country.

  “Ah,” Vic said, “the kid is probably lovin' all that luscious scenery!”

  The kid was a nervous wreck, the kid had lost twenty pounds in the last six months, the kid was sleeping three hours a night and talkin' suicide.

  I finished the scotch and made for the door. Ginger and Vic were leaving too . . . they had a chauffeur now and a Rolls they tooled around in. I asked them where they were going and Ginger said, “Johnny D'Antibes has a club in Santa Monica.” Boy, those two knew about joints nobody else did, they danced and drank and did it all. They knew how to live, all right, and at times I thought it might kill the both of 'em.

  Vic put Ginger in the car and came over to me and whispered, “Arn, if my music sells, if these songs go places, I'm thinkin' about maybe leaving the act.”

  “Don't say this to me,” I hissed. “You'll kill me.”

  “I just need to get out on my own. You know, like the old days. I feel sorta stuck.” He dropped his Chesterfield to the ground and put it out with his shoe. “So you're gonna smooth this record thing out with Zig?”

  “Yeah sure,” I told him. “I'll have Sally do it.”

  MILLIE ROTH: Hilda Fleury ran the item in her column. Morty Geist had tried everything he could to prevent it but nothing was good enough. She pointed her nose straight up in the air and said, “Mr. Geist, I am a journalist and cannot be swayed from printing the truth!” Morty Geist asked her if she was going to actually mention Vic's name, as well as Ginger Bacon's, and she said she most certainly would. “Wild horses or five thousand dollars could not prevent me from doing so,” she said.

  The day that Hilda Fleury printed that column, Morty was ready with a prepared statement from Vic, which ran all over town. It said: “I have many friends, and Miss Ginger Bacon happens to be one of them. That Hilda Fleury would choose to besmirch my family at a time when I just became a new father is shocking to me. This is an insult to my wife, to my child, and, most importantly, to me. I struggled all my life to get where I am today. Maybe Mrs. Fleury would like to wake up at fourA.M.and go fishing for cod. But no, she's not man enough for that or man enough to make these accusations to my face. And she can tell her butler I said so.”

  The next day, after Morty got $6,000 in cash over to her apartment, Mrs. Fleury was kind enough to print a retraction. But Hunny Gannett told me that Ginger Bacon was let go from the Latin Quarter.

  GUY PUGLIA: I was pullin' triple duty: I'd take care of Hunny at Lenox Hill [Hospital] and then I'd rush over to the Hunny Pot to make sure nobody was stealing from the till and then I'd go to Vic's apartment to check on Lulu and Vicki. I was running myself ragged—it was like I'd been knocked out cold for two days and given birth. In addition to all this, I had to prevent Lulu from readin' the papers and the columns.

  One time I'm in the apartment and I'm changing Vicki's diaper and I hear Lulu on the phone with Vic. She was screaming at him, and I thought, Uh-oh, she knows about Ginger. Or, uh-oh, she knows about Veda. Or, uh-oh, she knows about everything else. But alls I heard was Lu saying, “Why does it say ‘Victoria Catherine Doakes’ on little Vicki's birth certificate?!” Vic told her, I guess, it was some hospital mistake and that it didn't matter any. Then he asked her to put me on in another room.

  “Tell Vicki to say hello to her papa,” he says to me.

  “The kid don't know ‘hello’ yet, she ain't even two weeks old,” I told him.

  “How's the Hun?” he asked me.

  “Hunny's kind of in bad shape still, Vic,” I said. “All woozy, you know?”

  Vic said, “Aw, he ain't in bad shape, he's just Hunny.”

  “We gotta get him to stop fightin'.”

  “Listen,” he said, “I'm maybe thinking of going solo.”

  I thought about it for a second and then said, “Hey, pal, you and Ziggy . . . you're the kings right now. I mean, nobody's doin' better than you.”

  “I figure, though, if I do half as well without him, I'd still be doing the same.”

  “Okay, I see that. But what's so bad about being with Ziggy?”

  “Being with Ziggy,” he said.

  Then he told me to do something. He told me to call Bud Hatch's wife, who was the biggest female drunk in New York. Face like a frog too. Bud always called her “SL” in his column, which stood for “Scintillating Lady.” But everyone always said it really stood for “Slobbering Lush.” Anyways, I'm supposed to call her and tell her that Ziggy's in the sack with a stripper named Myrna. She's from El Monte. I'm supposed to tell her to tell Bud. I says to Vic, “Hey, I don't wanna get involved in this. I got enough trouble with the saloon, with Hunny's coma, and your kid.” He said to me, “Gaetano, just this once. For me. Okay?”

  So I call the Slobbering Lush at home and pass along the news. She says thanks and that she'll call Bud when he gets in at the Globe office in ten minutes. I was keeping my fingers crossed hoping she was so bagged that in ten minutes she'd forget.

  JANE WHITE: Our party had a whole plane to ourselves and it was so much fun! Poor Morty Geist arranged it, and he also arranged for there to be reporters at the airport in Los Angeles and in Reno too. There were about thirty bottles of Veuve Clicquot and marvelous hors d'oeuvres from Canter's of Fairfax. Frank and Ava were on the plane, so were Betty Bacall and Humphrey Bogart and Ty Power and the Van Johnsons and many others. I felt like royalty! If my mother ever objected to me marrying Ziggy, when Charles Boyer introduced himself to her on the plane and lit her cigarette, all her objections simply vanished.

  Vic sat in the rear with Shep Lane and Arnie. He seemed sort of down. Lulu had just given birth to Vicki, so maybe that was it—he wanted to be with them.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: “The song is gonna hit the airwaves any minute now, Sal,” I whispered. We sat together on the plane to Reno. “You gotta tell him.”

  “Why do I have to tell him?” she asked me.

  “'Cause
that's the way it usually is . . . I deal with Vic, you deal with Zig, and you and me deal with each other.”

  We were about twenty minutes from landing.

  When I arrived at the Sky Lodge [in Reno], there was a message from Bertie Kahn's secretary . . . Bertie was on vacation in Paris and couldn't make the wedding. “It's in Bud Hatch's column that Ziggy and a ‘model’ from El Monte are involved,” the note said. So I left a message at Morty Geist's office that he had to smooth things over with Bud now. I told his secretary to tell Morty to read Bud the same statement he'd read to Hilda Fleury, except jiggle the names around.

  “I give Morty maybe five months to live, tops,” I said to Sally.

  DANNY McGLUE: I've been to all kinds of wedding ceremonies, Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, large, small, shotgun. These nuptials were so hastily planned it was almost funny. Rabbi Gershon Susskind was on the plane to Reno and was schmoozing with every star he could. (I think Jack Benny said about Rabbi Susskind that he'd go to the lowest level of hell to do a bris if it was a movie star's son and there was a camera flashing.) But then Ziggy had to break the news to him that a judge would be doing the honors and not him.

  The rabbi now flew into a rage. “HOW DARE YOU?!” he shouted out to Ziggy. He really made a big scene: He was bellowing and spitting and his eyes were crazy. He accused Ziggy of everything in the book—and that book was Mein Kampf!” I suppose you'll be serving pork at the reception too, you self-hating cur!” he screamed right in Ziggy's face. Jack Warner urged him to pipe down and the rabbi yelled to everyone: “I curse this marriage! I curse it and condemn it!” He put his hand on Jane and yelled, “May this Eva Braun from Lexington Avenue have five children with tails and may they all die of a slow plague!” He was spitting all over the place when he yelled, it was like he was a lawn sprinkler . . . some of it even got on Bogie. Ziggy, in a rare fit of common sense, said, “Gersh, it's just you not doing a marriage ceremony, it ain't the Temple of Jerusalem bein' sacked!” When we finally touched down, Rabbi Susskind refused to get off the plane. He didn't attend the ceremony and the pilot flew him back to Los Angeles.