Funnymen (31 page)

They came in and politely asked Shirley to go to the other room.

The shorter man did all the talking. He asked me lots of questions, about where I'd gone to school, who my parents were, and what they did. Then he began asking questions about Fountain and Bliss and about Arnie too—oh, it was a whole third degree. He seemed to be already familiar with a lot of information about them; he knew, for instance, that Ziggy had been to two doctors to talk about the draft and that Vic had changed his last name a few times. The agent also knew that Ziggy and his parents had performed in the Catskills at some places where they sang the Communist theme song. I kept asking what this was all about and he said that eventually I would find out. I was not to tell anybody about the visit, not even Arnie, who, somehow, he knew I was going out with. And this my mother didn't even know yet!

The two men made me promise that I would never tell anyone about the visit. I told them that I loved my country, that loose lips sank ships, and it was between me and God.

When I told Arnie ten minutes later, he told me that the same two men had visited him.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Those two G-men scared the bejesus out of me! Now, I didn't go into the army because of my eyesight—I'm legally blind ten times over—and after they made it abundantly clear they weren't going to execute me for treason and cowardice I started to worry they may really have been Nazi spies, like Peter Lorre in
All Through the Night.
Maybe it was something to do with Charlotte Charlot or some routines that Ziggy and Vic were doing. I'm thinking, Oh no, tomorrow Arnold Latchkey is gonna be found ground into 180 pounds of bratwurst and they'll be serving me up at the Kleine Konditorei on Eighty-sixth and Lexington.

A week after that first visit we had an engagement at the Chez Paree in Chicago. Fountain and Bliss are doing their thing, absolutely ripping up the place, and I'm surveying the crowd. And who do I see out there, sitting in the back? Heckle and Jeckle in gray pin-striped suits, fedoras on the table. Only people in the entire joint who didn't have a drink.

Cut to a week later. Fountain and Bliss are playing the Vogue Room in Cleveland and then, after that, the Beachcomber in Florida. Who's in the
crowd? The same two suits and fedoras, the same monotone expressions, the same lack of drinks on the table.

A week or so later I'm leaving my apartment building about to go to work and there they are, waiting for me. They ask me to get into their car. I get in and I'm thinking, Okay, this is my last minute alive. At least I'm going to get garroted in a nice big Cadillac. I've truly come a long way in life.

They had a driver and he was taking us toward midtown.

“We want Fountain and Bliss to perform a significant service for their country, Mr. Latchkey,” the short one said. “I'm sure that they'll come through for us. Won't they?”

“Can you give me an inkling as to what they have to do?” I said.

“Just keep the week of July tenth free on their calendar. We know they're booked at the Riverside Club in Detroit the week before that, which is fine. But just keep that week free. It is absolutely
imperative.
Do you understand this?”

“But we haven't talked dollars and cents yet, guys.”

They looked at each other and, for the first time since I'd been observing them observing me, they changed their expressions.

“That will be taken care of, Mr. Latchkey.”

We pulled up to Fifty-first and Broadway and the tall one opened the door and I got out. The car drove off.

“Sons of bitches didn't even drop me off at the office,” I muttered under my breath.

• • •

SALLY KLEIN:
I remember seeing Ziggy on
Merv Griffin
in the sixties—he told Merv that Fountain and Bliss had never truly felt comfortable on the radio. He said that radio was too small for them. A lot of what Ziggy said to interviewers and reporters never came close to smacking of the truth, but in this case I think he was right.

Fountain and Bliss was all about craziness, about anarchy almost. It was about not knowing what would be next. On the radio, though, it was like they were locked in a small closet sometimes. They could do a two-hour show in a nightclub and do whatever they wanted to, but then every Sunday they have thirty minutes and five of those are for commercials for Dickinson's witch hazel or BiSoDol antacid mints, which became their sponsor right before the war ended.

When Danny left us, it had a big effect. I know that Vic tried to reason with Ziggy, but Ziggy wouldn't listen. They had even gone out to lunch and Vic tried, in his own mild Vic Fountain way, to get Ziggy to change his mind. But he may as well have been trying to get Ziggy to give up show business for
the priesthood. “No dice, Sal,” he said to me when he got back from Sardi's that day. Me, I was so incensed that I couldn't even talk to Ziggy about it. Who was he to interfere with my life like this! I had schlepped from town to town in the Catskills and baby-sat his parents for him and meanwhile what life did I have of my own?! None.
None.

We had very bad time spots on the Mutual Network. They put us on Sunday nights at seven opposite
The Jack Benny Show.
This was like running against Roosevelt. Murray Katz raised a big ruckus and so what did they do? They moved the show to 10:30, opposite Fred Allen. That was the last straw. Norman White left to write for Bob Hope, and Sid Stone did some more script work for Paramount. Fountain and Bliss then moved to the Consolidated Network, which had fewer affiliates than Mutual. Hiram F. Beckwith, who started Standard Lanolin and owned a few newspapers in Texas, kept gobbling up radio stations and tried to take on CBS and NBC and Mutual. He swore to Murray and Arnie he'd get us a good spot. He offered us Fridays at eight, opposite Kate Smith's show, which she did for Jell-O. Arnie hit the ceiling! “We do Fridays at eight, the show can't be live then!” he yelled. See, that time was atrocious for us . . . it would've cut into many, many club dates. Beckwith said, Okay, tape the show, then do your nightclubs.

Taping the show was a godsend. It really was. But still, the show was losing its zest. “When Danny gets back from the navy,” Vic said to me, “he better-come back with us. He writes for Benny or Hope, I'm gonna pick up my fishing net and make an honest living again.”

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
“You guys may get a script you've got to stick to on your
own
show,” I hinted to Ziggy and Vic one day at Lindy's, “but, you know, there's no law that says you gotta stick to a script on somebody else's.”

Ziggy got it right away . . . he got that impish sparkle in his eyes. But Vic said to me, “I don't savvy.”

I tried to do it like Socrates would. I said, “I hand you a script. The show begins with Vic singing ‘God Bless America' and then Ziggy interrupts it. Is that going to make any waves?”

“Probably barely a ripple, Latch,” Vic says.

“Or Ziggy breaks into ‘God Bless America' and you interrupt it as per the script. Is this going to change the field of human endeavor any?”

“I doubt it.”

“But Kate Smith is singin' it on her strawberry Jell-O show and all of a sudden who's in the studio but Ziggy and Vic and they're singing along and doing this and doing that, is that going to create a ripple?”

Vic pulled his Chesterfield and said, “A fuckin' tidal wave, Latch.”

So this was our “assault plan,” you could call it. You know what had happened? We'd lost the
juice.
The juice. George Patton had it right:
Tou-jours,
l'audace!
We needed a shot of something, something new and big and bold.
We needed to be audacious!

So we began doing these surprise “walk-ons” as soon as we moved to Consolidated. Let's face it: CBS was known as the Tiffany Network but do you know what they used to call Consolidated? The Dead Lamb Network, because the money behind it came from lanolin, from sheep. We would crash these big shows, invade them.
Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge?
Oh, we were all over that one! Kyser was doing “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” and in storm Fountain and Bliss and they're singing “Praise the Broads and Pass the Gin Martinis.” They stormed onto Kate Smith's show—they threw some strawberry Jell-O around—and Vic was coming on to her and she was actually playing along!
Kate Smith is flirting!
This is bordering on bestiality, I tell you! It was all wonderful publicity, fan
tabulous
for us. The picture of fat Kate and Vic making goo-goo eyes at each other while Ziggy was pouting and sucking his thumb—that must've run in fifty papers the next day.

There was a big boxing match, I think it was 1944, a middleweight title fight, Tony Zale versus Tony Mutti. Don Dunphy, a dear man, is calling the fight and sure enough Ziggy and Vic wrest the mike away from him and they proceed to announce the rest of the bout. Zale knocked out Mutti in the fifth round but nobody listening to the radio had any idea what the hell was going on, no idea at all. I listened to the thing at home and I was doubled over. Ziggy was imitating Dunphy and said that Jimmy Cagney was stopping by and then Vic did his Cagney impression. And Vic was a great, great apist, let me tell you that. Then Vic said Eleanor Roosevelt was now in the ring taking a savage beating from Zale, and then Ziggy pretended to be Mrs. Roosevelt. You could hear Dunphy saying to them, “Okay, guys. Can I get the mike back? Please?” But he couldn't get the thing back.

It was marvelous publicity.

DANNY McGLUE:
I came back in '44 and I didn't know what to do with my life. I'd had it pretty easy in the navy . . . very few times did I ever think my life was in jeopardy. The worst problems I had were boredom and seasickness. And missing Sally. I would write her letters all the time. But I never sent them.

I was listening to Devane's radio show on CBS one night. Don't ask me why. And I hear [announcer] Bob Williams going through the
shpiel
about De Soto automobiles, which used to sponsor the show. But Williams is saying that the car is made out of balsa wood and that it won't last three miles and the steering wheel will come off in your hands. Now what the heck is
this
? Has Devane lost it? Williams turns it over to the Grand Forks Golden Boy and Fritz starts singing his theme song, “Believe in Me.” But he's
singing instead “Believe in Flea,” about a dog who's got fleas! And then it dawns upon me: This cockamamie ditty rings a bell . . .
'cause I wrote it!
This isn't Fritz Devane singing! It's Vic Fountain! That wasn't Bob Williams. That was Ziggy Bliss!

As far as I know, that was the one time that it didn't go over well. Vic told me that while they were in Devane's studio, he thought that if Fritz had a gun he would've shot them both. But the show was live, mind you. Devane did the smart thing: he let the two of them wreak their havoc and then leave. (Well, not before they plugged their upcoming appearance at the Riviera.) And when they were finally gone, Devane let them have it. He called them amateurs and idiots, he used the words “ne'er-do-wells” and “rapscallions”! He started going on about how sacred airtime is, as though he was John the Baptist talking about holy water. He started playing the patriotism angle too somehow—he said that our men were fighting and dying overseas to protect freedom of speech and now these two nincompoops had exploited the airwaves. As if I'd served two years on a destroyer so that Fritz Devane could croon “Believe in Me” and sell De Sotos!

The next day I pick up my
Post
and there on the third page is a photo of Fritz Devane standing between Ziggy and Vic. Fritz's tweed hat is in shreds, like confetti, and his golf club is twisted around Ziggy's neck. Great, funny photo. Tons of free publicity.

RAY FONTANA:
Vic grew up listening to Devane and idolizing him and now there was this big feud between them. If you ask me, it started in that parking lot in New Bedford. Someone calls you a greaseball, someone treats you like dirt, you take it to your grave.

• • •

SALLY KLEIN:
Ziggy was starting to see Jane more and more, but it was taking a while. Jane felt that Ziggy was “beneath” her. Sometimes she tended to forget that—despite the education, the nose jobs, despite her rich friends letting her aboard their yachts—her father was just Joe Weissblau, a bookkeeper.

I was with Ziggy and Vic one night at Bratz's and Ziggy, out of nowhere, said, “Do you think there's any way to track someone down? Like, if you hadn't seen a person for years and they may have gone a long, long way, could a private dick find this person?”

“Why not give Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, a call, Zig?” Vic joked while slapping Ziggy on the back. “Maybe he can find the O'Hares for you.”