Funnymen (26 page)

He's trying to wedge himself into his tux. It wasn't easy to get even a master tailor to make clothing for him . . . his measurements defied common sense.

“I think we got to fire him, Latch.”

“And replace him with who? The goddamn
O'Hares
? Forget about firing
Vic. What are you gonna do
tonight
? Can you give Lou fifteen minutes?”

“A solo?”

“Yeah. Solo.”

He sat there, started twitching a bit.

“You okay, Ziggy?”

“Fifteen minutes, solo?”

“That's what I need. That's what
you
need, Ziggeleh.”

“I got no solo material. The only material I got is me and Vic.”

There was a knock on the door. A stagehand yelled out, “Ten minutes, Mr. Bliss.”

I sat down and pulled my seat up next to him and I said, “How about if
I
do your part tonight and you do Vic's?”

“You could do that, Latch?”

“Could you do Vic's part?”

“What? The straight man? Ha! That cigar you're smokin' could do that!”

“Good. Now how about this: You do
both
parts. You do Ziggy and you do Vic. Can you do that?”

“Gee, I don't know . . .” he started hedging.

“Ziggy baby, come on. I know you can do it. You know you can. This is for the sake of the act. One time, pal, one time.”

“This is tough, Arn,” he said.

I wanted to throttle him! I knew he could do it and he knew it too! He just wanted me to beg him . . . he wanted me to get down on my goddamn knees and plead with him!

So I did.

I'm on my knees and my hands are clasped like I'm praying to God that the plummeting aircraft which is my life don't crash into the drink. I'm begging, I'm pleading, I'm beseeching, I'm making entreaties.

“Okay, I'll do it,” he says finally.

He went on the air and he was fan
tabulous.
He was perfect, he was wonderful. He was Joe DiMaggio, Joe Louis, Sid Luckman, Eddie Arcaro all rolled into one.

Bertie Kahn got it into the papers what Ziggy had done, how marvelous the performance was. He'd called Grayling Greene up during the show and made sure Greene was listening. It was a combination of damage control and an ink extravaganza all in one shot. Bertie told everyone that Vic was suffering from nervous exhaustion due to the rigorous rehearsal schedule, the radio show, playing the Catskills on the weekends and whatnot. Hatch, Greene, Pegler, Winchell, Fleury, Sullivan . . . they all made mention of it.

And the beauty part is this: Vic never had to enter the army. Why?
Because that lucky bastard was missing two of his goddamn toes!

We should've sent a check for a million bucks to Constance Tuttle for that.

Okay. Now . . .
dissolve.
It's about fifteen years later, I'm at Al Roon's Health Club on Broadway, right near the Ansonia, in one of those big old sweatboxes. You sit in there, they close the door on you, you lose fifty pounds of perspiration in ten minutes, and you come out looking like a bleached raisin. For this I had to pay Al Roon five bucks a month? I could've just had myself dry-cleaned.

I look over to my left and there in the next box is none other than Edmund Sligh. That guy was
married
to the theater—ancestors of his were in the theater when Shakespeare was just a lad making wee wee into the Avon. I'd read that morning in Ed Sullivan's
Daily News
column that Sligh's theater show was about to bite the dust and I offered my condolences. He didn't look too happy, I gotta tell you, but then again he was sitting in a crate of molten lava at the time.

The conversation got around to Constance Tuttle, who'd left the show a few years before and was now playing some eccentric matriarch on
The Edge of Night.

The heat and the sweat must have gotten to me because I related the story to Sligh, about how Constance Tuttle had gotten Vic stewed to the gills one night and then sliced off two of his toes and tried to cook them in a white wine and shallot sauce. I said to him, “It's a good thing she was a lousy cook 'cause she probably would've gone for the fingers next, Eddie.”

“Oh, would she have?” he said.

A few minutes later, he gets out of his box. He's buck naked and drying-himself with a towel and I get an eyeful of the man's physique. It was a little bit hard to see in there because of all the steam, but I know what I saw: Edmund Sligh had just a tiny thimble-size stump where his
shlong
should be.

So maybe Constance Tuttle wouldn't have gone for the fingers next.

• • •

SNUFFY DUBIN:
That was the first big dose of press they ever got. And what was it about? It was about Vic collapsing and Ziggy being the trouper. About Vic being “nervous” and exhausted and Ziggy being strong. Vic was the goat and Ziggy ate it up like it was a plate of
kasha
fucking
varnishkes
during the worst famine ever. Cutting articles out, pasting them into a book, talking to Bud Hatch and even Hilda Fleury, the society columnist. I remember him telling me, “Somewheres my parents are
proud of me somewheres, Snuffles.” He didn't talk about his parents that much—this might've been the first time since they died.

Yeah, things had changed. Vic knew he'd let down a lot of people. Lou Bingham, Arnie, Sally, Sid Stone and Norman White, and the Brylcreem sponsors. And Ziggy too. But I don't think he felt too bad about that.

DANNY McGLUE:
Ziggy was really lording it over everybody. It was a big Hail-the-Conquering-Hero thing. But sometimes, I guess, you want to hail the conquering hero, grab him by his throat, and then strangle him.

Lou Bingham and the Brylcreem people were not happy with Vic's stunt, even though it had brought the show a lot of tub-thump. Arnie worked it out with Lou and with the Mutual radio people that Fountain and Bliss would be off the show but that they would get a fifteen-minute radio spot
before
the Bingham show came on. Fountain and Bliss would lead into the Brylcreem show. Arnie and Marty Miller scrambled around and got Lifebuoy soap to sponsor the new show.

Things fell into place quickly. Billy Ross left the Bingham band and led a small band for the new Fountain and Bliss Lifebuoy show. Ernie Beasley now began writing serious songs for Vic . . . when he wasn't soused, I might say. A lot of people think I got jealous or upset when Ernie became our unofficial cleffer [composer] but I didn't, because I knew that my music wasn't really music and that it was silly. I was more than content being just a joke man. And—Ernie will tell you this is true—once in a while if he was stuck for a nice turn of a phrase or a rhyme, I was always there to throw my two pesos in.

During the hiatus, I remember, Arnie had approached Lee Sperling from the Schuberts about putting Fountain and Bliss in a Broadway show. It was a sort of Busby Berkeley meets Flo Ziegfeld meets
Dames at Sea
thing called
Aweigh They Go
. Dancers, songs, comedy, some drama. Arnie was all for it but when he told Ziggy and Vic about it, there was a rift. Vic wanted to do it—it would give him a really good chance to use his pipes, he said—but Ziggy threw a fit. He refused to even consider it. They'd be saying someone else's lines, he screamed. The material wouldn't be from him or Sid or me or Norman, he shrieked. It wasn't really their act, he hollered. All that yelling—I thought I was listening to Flo Blissman singing again! He was throwing stuff around and his face was red—ever see
White Heat
with Jimmy Cagney? That's what it was like. Now, I'd seen this sort of behavior before and so had Sally, but this was the first time that the others had. God, you should have seen Sid Stone and Norman that day. They both had these incredible “What-are-we-doing-here?” looks on. After this ten-minute explosion, Arnie defused it by saying, “Okay, I'll tell Lee Sperling the answer is no.” (Sperling eventually got Cubby Cavanaugh and Jack Haley and it did whammo box office.)

In a small way, this was good for Vic, for his ego. Because the whole toe incident had really cut him down to size. He'd been acting sheepish and been quiet because of what he'd done. Now with this fit, this
White Heat
attack of Ziggy's, Vic got a little more credibility. It was like he was saying to everyone, “Okay, I was so in my cups that this woman cut my toes off but look at this little red gorilla having a seizure now!”

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
To be honest, Lee Sperling's heart wasn't broken when I told them my clients had pooh-poohed the deal. It was one of the shortest conversations I ever had with a producer in any medium, as a matter of fact. Ten seconds, tops.

One day we're at the office and Sidney Stone says that he and Norman could dig out a play and blow the dust off it—a play they'd both written when they were in Hollywood—and that maybe Ernie Beasley could write songs for it. Sid Stone had balls the size of the Statue of Liberty's because he did this only days after Ziggy went nutsy over the Schubert thing.

Ziggy said to Sid, “You wrote it,

Sid? Honest?” Sid said, “Me and Norman did, yeah, Ziggy. On the Paramount lot.”

You heard about ten hearts pounding in that room and two of them were mine, Teddy! Who knew if Ziggy was gonna pull another Mount Vesuvius act?

“Is it any good, Norman?”

“Ziggy, it ain't
Mourning Becomes Electra,
” Norman said, “but it's good enough.”

“I'll take a look at it, guys. Okay?”

Everyone in that room had muscles so tight that if a slight breeze blew in we would've all fallen apart, but now we all sort of exhaled and relaxed.

“Vic,” Ziggy said, “you wanna look at the script?”

Vic said, “Nah, you look at it, Zig.”

Ziggy said, “You still anxious to get your toes wet on Broadway still?”

Vic looked down . . . at his toes. Had Ziggy purposely meant this as a cruel, cutting jeu d'esprit? To antagonize him? To get his goat? No man will ever know.

Vic looked back up and said, “Just read the damn thing, okay?”

It was called
Three of a Kind
. . . it was typical Broadway fare of the day. It was a version of the old Noël Coward play
Design for Living,
but set in Hollywood. Ernie already had three wonderful songs that would have been just swell with the play. Sid and Norman adapted and tinkered with the thing and changed it around to suit Ziggy and Vic more. We got it to Murray Katz at WAT and he said it'd be a difficult sell. He tried Lee Sperling but Sperling passed. We got it to Morgan Talvert and Norman Barasch but they passed too. Murray's heart wasn't in it and now neither
was Sid Stone's or Norman's. Ernie Beasley came in one day and played “Malibu Moonlight” for us, which he'd just written for the show. We knew that song, whether it got into this play or not, would be a hit one day and it was . . . it was perfect for Vic's style.

Three of a Kind
never got off the ground. It was a huge setback. Our first. The office was not the usual fun house it was, unless you consider a morgue a fun house. We'd meet at ten and we had these shell-shocked looks on our faces, like all our mothers had just died in one bus accident.

The Lifebuoy show was about to start and we had little or no material. Things were very bleak indeed.

The phone rings one day and Estelle picks up and hands it to Sally Klein. Sally takes the call in her office and meanwhile in the living room you've got about six men swallowing, coughing, excavating their noses, and scratching their privates.

Sally comes out with one of the arms of her eyeglasses in her mouth and says, “That was Barney Arundel. Charlotte Charlot, ‘the
Charmant
Chanteuse from Chantilly,' isn't going to play her Blue Beret Cafe engagement. Turns out she's a Nazi sympathizer and can't get a cabaret license. Barney wants to know if Fountain and Bliss can give him two weeks.”

I said, “It sounds like a good idea to me, Sal. Call Barney back. Tell him the answer is
oui, oui.
Tell him we'll do it.”