Funnymen (39 page)

But one thing about show business, it's not all “What have you done for me lately?”—it's also “What can you do for me in the next twenty seconds?” You get knocked off your high wire, you dust off the powder that once was your spine, and you hop back on.

Murray, Sally, and I had a tour booked that would obliterate all the bad news in one fell swoop. Boston, Hartford, Atlantic City, Philly, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit. Also, Miami and Atlanta and finally out west to L.A. at the Pantages Theater. And then back to play the Venetian. It was going to be a monster of merriment, a leviathan of laughter, a Goliath of guffaws. The Venetian sat over thirty-five hundred people . . . did you know the aisles were canals and the ushers dressed as gondoliers and poled you to your seats? It's true. (But Vic refused to go in the gondolas.) We made sure that in every town we went to, we'd be playing the biggest place, open for the best movie. This was take-no-prisoners, brook-no-quarter, no-holds-barred time. We were out to scorch the earth, my friend, and scorch it we did.

We got off to a flying stop. We test-drove the act at Bill Lee's joint in Fort Lee [New Jersey], the Riviera. We did five nights there and it went over like lead. We'd been coasting on the old stuff for a while now, on Danny, Sid, and Norman's stuff, but now that rolling stone had gathered a touch of moss. Don't get me wrong: The act was never in grave or critical condition, but was, at best, only slightly stable. And there was some friction.

Vic would sing “The Hang of It” for an opener before Ziggy came on. It was really a swinging number and the audience lapped it up. When Vic warbled this tune, you should've seen Ziggy's face when he realized the crowd loved it. One by one the freckles on his skin turned purple. After two nights, Ziggy says to me, “Vic's killing the act with that song. It's gotta go.”

“How is he killing it?” I asked. “You've got five hundred people out there snapping their fingers and tapping their feet. The number really gets the juice flowing, Zig.”

“He's killing it because he's killing
me.
We can't have this song in the act.”

Sally had warned me this might happen. Hey, you think [comedian] Milt Kamen wants to come on right after Sinatra sings “I've Got You Under My Skin”? How'd you like to be a lousy ventriloquist comin' on right after Lincoln does the Gettysburg Address? So, yeah, I sympathized
with Ziggy. But I bravely held my ground and said, “You really should talk to Vic about this.”

After a few shows—we did two a night—we're back in the Brill Building and Ziggy says, “This old stuff was once lightning in a bottle but what we got now is just the bottle.”

Barry Singer said that there was still time to change stuff, that he and Manny could tinker. I felt bad for those two. They were good kids.

“What if we end with that ‘Hang of It' number?” Ziggy said. “Let's put that at the end, after all the routines.”

Vic said, “That song gets the crowd in the mood, man. We put that at the end, we—”

“Can we at least try it?” Ziggy said. “Why don't we start with Vic singin' ‘Mamselle'?”

I was worried he'd suggest that. That song, which Art Lund had a big hit with, Vic almost fell asleep while he was singing.

So we gave it a shot . . . and it didn't work. Vic and I were right. This song got the juice surging, the toes tapping, the drinks flowing. So between sets we told Billy Ross that the number was back in the beginning.

So what happens in our final set? Vic is chirping this tune and all of a sudden one of the trumpets is sounding a little diseased. Up from the pit stands Ziggy holding the horn. And Ziggy begins to engage in some comedic repartee with Vic. But Vic is a little stunned, like he'd been caught in the jaw with a jab, and he's a little ticked off here. But Vic braved this storm. You could tell though—perhaps by how tightly he was clenching his fists, perhaps by how hard he was biting his lips, or perhaps more so by the fact that he later said to me, “One day I'm going to carve that fat sonuvabitch into little pieces”—that Vic was not enjoying this. After that show, he pulled Ziggy aside and it was just the two of them in a dark corner . . . I couldn't hear what Vic was saying to him—it sounded more like hissing than anything—but Ziggy looked pale afterward.

We tried everything at the Riviera. We jiggled things, we juggled it, we tinkered and toyed. The problem was that every single person at the Riviera had already seen the act. Look, I can listen to Sinatra doing “I'm a Fool to Want You” a thousand times, but how many times can I listen to Shelley Berman doing the exact same bit on the imaginary phone with his mother?

We took a few weeks off after the Fort Lee engagement. In that time Jane White discovered Tiffany, and—perhaps more important—Tiffany discovered Jane White. Shep Lane and I brought two grand over there to begin an account for her. That's when Shep told me that Vic was keeping two apartments. He and Lu had moved into this massive place on Central Park South but he also now kept a swank suite at the St. Regis.

“That don't bode too good,” I said to Shep.

SNUFFY DUBIN:
Ziggy came to see my act at Jimmy Geary's Sapphire Lounge one night. This place was a dive so deep you got the bends just walking through the front door, and Ziggy had bigger tits than the waitresses, depending on what he'd eaten for breakfast. When he told me I needed to go back to the old one-liner stuff, I told him to shove it. But, you know, I had to be careful now . . . 'cause I'm working joints like this black hole of Calcutta and 'cause his name is in Ed fucking Sullivan's column every day.

There was this one blonde there named Bubbles Van Boven at the Sapphire; this girl used to balance a tray full of martinis on her chest. One night, while Ziggy and I are talking and while I'm pretending to listen to him complain about Vic, I can see he's got the hot nuts for her. You gotta picture it: It's four in the morning now, the amphetamines I've taken have worn off, and I just wanna go to the Belmore Cafeteria, get some eggs, and then go back to my pad and watch the sun rise over the Queensborough Bridge and over my miserable fucking life. “Vic thinks he's the whole act,” Ziggy says. “It's a good thing Bertie Kahn plants screaming girls in the crowd, it covers up his lousy singing,” he says. “I could make any ginzo singer four hundred thou a year.” “Hey,” I tell him, “Vic's got great comic timing. He sets you up like he's throwing batting practice.” “My shoe can do that, Snuff,” he says. I doze off in my chair and when I wake up, there's only one guy in there, some old shine with a mop. I say to this cat, “Where'd the guy I was with go?” And he says, “That little round man with that Brillo head? He in the back with Miss Bubbles.”

I go to my dressing room and everything's all blurry like it's underwater, you know? I open the door and there's Bubbles Van Boven, naked and on her knees, and Ziggy is bending over her and rubbing his head in her cleavage. In one hand she's got fifty bucks and with the other she's pumping that rhino prick of his and, Jesus, did I walk in at the wrong second!
Thwack!
All over my brand-new houndstooth jacket hanging on the coatrack.

The next thing I know I'm sitting in the Belmore at a long table and I'm nodding off into my two eggs over easy, and what's the first thing I hear? “. . . And another lousy thing about Vic. He don't even get the jokes . . .” I perk my head up out of the gray ooze it's in and there he is, rattling away, complaining about his partner, and I've got on the houndstooth-check jacket with a jizz stain the size and shape of fucking Greenland.

SALLY KLEIN:
The tour began in New York at the Luxor . . . the boys were opening a Fritz Devane movie called
Such a Wonderful Time.
We had a choice, we could've opened either that or
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
or
Red River.
But when we were presented with this by Murray Katz, Vic's eyes lit up. “We gotta open up the Fritz movie, we've got to,” he said.

The Singer brothers had sort of given up, they weren't giving it their all. We tried to get some of the old craziness going, putting on wigs and hats and stuff, and Barry and Manny were funny but not our kind of funny. Manny came to me and said, “Sal, it's not working out and we want to do what's best for the act. So what should we do?”

I had dinner with Estelle and Arnie at the Colony and we knew what we had to do. “I'll call Danny McGlue tomorrow,” Arnie said. “His wilderness years are over. Sally, you call Norman and Sid.” I said, “What happens if Ziggy has a fit about Danny?” and Arnie said, “We'll buy some new furniture first thing tomorrow just to keep in reserve.”

But Ziggy didn't have a fit. He took me aside and said, “Look, when I busted up you and Danny I did it for you. I didn't think he was good enough for you.” He said, “It didn't have nuttin' to do with the religion thing . . . I don't care about that. I mean, look at me and Janie, right?”

“Jane White is really Judith Weissblau or have you forgotten?” I reminded him.

“She's the one who forgot that,” he said, “not me.”

DANNY McGLUE:
I'd just left the
Ex-Lax Modern Romances
show at ABC and was writing for
A Date With Judy
for NBC. That show was cornier than Iowa and Nebraska combined. Betsy Cantwell was in the cast, she was a pretty brunette from York, Pennsylvania—she played Penny Jones on the show—and we'd begun seeing each other. I was in my little dust closet of an office trying to come up with some dialogue one day and the phone rang. “Danny
bubeleh,
how are ya?!” Arnie's voice booms over the line. “How am I?” I say. “I'm writing for
A Date With Judy,
that's how I am. How are you?” And he cuts right to the chase and says, “How quick can you get to the Brill Building?” And I say to him, “I've got to finish this show, Arn, I can't just—” and he said, “Oh, yes you can. Barry and Manny Singer'll finish it . . . get your
tuches
over here pronto. And make sure you don't run the Singers over when you pass one another in the street.”

And that was it. Back in the fold.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
When I had enough free time to pop the question to Estelle, she popped the answer “yes” right back to me. “Do you think it's smart,” she sagely inquired of me, “that we'd be married and I'd still be your receptionist?” to which I lovingly replied, “You're not only right,
you're fired!”
So when we hitched up, I let her go and we hired Millie Roth, who, like Estelle, also had been working in
shmattes.

MILLIE ROTH [assistant at Vigorish, Inc.]:
My first few weeks on the job were very active. The Singer brothers had just left and Danny McGlue
signed back on, Sidney Stone and Norman White flew in from California and we put them up at the Woodstock Hotel, and Lulu Fountain was pregnant. Ernie Beasley came in with three or four new songs and Billy Ross worked out the arrangements. The office was what you would call a beehive of activity. I remember that Ziggy was very friendly to me—not in
that
way, no—and he took me out to lunch at Lindy's a few times and I met all sorts of famous Broadway people.

That was also the time that people realized that Ernie Beasley was not attracted to women. Vic and Ziggy were getting on his case about not ever having a girlfriend—Ziggy said to him, “What are you, some kinda
faygeleh?”
—and his face turned as red as a beet. We realized it in an instant. Vic said to him, “Ernie, I don't care if you like boys, girls, black, white, purple, or sheep or cats. You just keep cranking out them songs. Oh yeah. And just keep your paws offa me.” Which got a big laugh all around.

There was an unflattering comment in Grayling Greene's column about Vic, I remember that. It hinted that Vic—it never mentioned his name—could learn a thing or two about being faithful to his not-so-long-suffering bride. Vic read that and hit the ceiling. He called Grayling Greene scum, lower than scum, and then he finally settled on “not even scum.” Arnie had Bertie call Mr. Greene, but the damage had been done. Now, I've never told anyone this, but I am dead certain that Ziggy had planted this item with Grayling Greene.

When Vic calmed down they got back to the business of writing and rehearsing. I'd never met Sidney Stone or Norman White before. If you saw them, you would not think these two men were funny. They both dressed very conservatively and looked like businessmen. Sid Stone always wore dark Brooks Brothers suits. But two hours into a meeting, his tie was undone, his jacket and vest were on the floor, and he's standing on his head talking gobbledygook! I kept notes and sometimes I was laughing so much I couldn't write a thing. But Danny McGlue was the person who kept things going; he was the motor and organizer. He would suggest this or that if something wasn't going right, and then it did go right.