Funnymen (42 page)

I said that it might not be legally possible for him to make a record if Ziggy somehow was not involved. He said, “What? I'm
glued
to this guy, Bease? And when the fuck did I ever care what some contract said?”

He asked me if I had some more songs and I told him that if he made a record he didn't have to use just my songs. He did marvelous versions of “Begin the Beguine” and “Always.” I told him the way he sang
under
or
behind
the music, the way he shaded the song
beneath
the beat, was really unique as was the way he got
inside
the lyric. “Oh yeah? I really do that?” he said. And I said, “Yeah, you do.” And then he said, “Hmmm, how about that. Maybe I'm a singer after all if I can really do all that shadin' stuff.”

He got back to the subject of comedy. He said he felt he didn't get the respect that Ziggy got. “I'm like that lion tamer guy Clyde Beatty and he's the lion. The guy with the whip gets no credit.”

“In the long run,” I told him, “everybody remembers Clyde Beatty and nobody cares about the lion.”

“Maybe so,” he said, draining his glass. “All right, baby, off into the jungle.” And then he went out on his nightly revel, gambling, womanizing, drinking, and who knows what else.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Vic and Ziggy were talking to each other onstage and also backstage but not elsewhere, on those rare occasions when their paths crossed. It's my fault, mea culpa all the way. So hang me for it, why don't you? I should've gotten them together as soon as the first turd hit the fan. I should've pooh-poohed all the negative positive publicity that Morty
was spreading. But this publicity . . .
it was working
! We were playing towns we'd never been to, places that the radio show never aired in, and we were drawing hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of people. We killed them in Des Moines, absolutely killed them. Davenport, Iowa? Slew 'em. Council Bluffs? Assassinated. In Davenport, another man had a heart attack the first night and it was like an epidemic: the next night another guy has another one. It got into the papers too. Morty made sure of it. The way he spun things—he was the second coming of Arachne.

We're on a train to Nebraska now, the whole outfit, the boys and Billy's band and everyone. It was early, barely even sunrise. And I'm in the dining car with just Sally and we're going over arrangements in Omaha, and Vic walks in with that glazed look he sometimes had in the morning. He sits down and the steam from his coffee is rising up into his half-closed eyes and then a minute later Ziggy walks in too.

“What are you guys doin'?” Ziggy says right away.

“Not much,” I said.

“Nah, come on, what's goin' on here?”

Sally said, “Ziggy, Arnie and I were looking at some figures and Vic just walked in and—”

“You doin' business without me?”

Vic said, “Pipe down, Zig, it ain't even sunup.”

Ziggy said, “I can't believe you would do this to me. When did I become the Invisible Man of the act? What, I got tape all over my body and a hat and sunglasses on?”

Sally said, “Ziggy, we all just woke up and—”

Vic said, “To be honest, I ain't even been to sleep yet . . .”

Ziggy, that
nut,
thought we were having some Potsdam-like Big Three summit meeting without him! He said, “Nah, nah . . . I want the truth once for a change, please!”

“Zig, I just come in for a cup of joe,” Vic said. “I didn't know Arn and Sal was gonna—”

“Oh, you didn't
know!”

“No, I didn't! And I also don't care either. Jesus!”

I told Ziggy to sit down. It was just the four of us. I began my
shpiel.

“Look, we been together a long time now. This is like a marriage, a marriage with four people. Now in my real marriage if there's a problem, we'll talk. I think her rib roast tastes like an old Goodyear tire, I tell her. She thinks I chew my food loud, she tells me. And maybe we compromise . . . she either improves on the rib roast or maybe she don't cook it anymore, and I try to maybe close my mouth when I eat. And then we got one happy family. You see where this is going?”

Vic puffs his Chesterfield, sips his coffee. Ziggy pouts.

I resume this sermon, which, I admit to you, I didn't know where it's going other than to Omaha. “Now what we got goin' here is a dynamo. We're a Sherman tank, we're Murderer's Row. Nobody draws like us. Nobody. We've got women coming to see the act and they bring a change of clothes because they know they're gonna tinkle in their bloomers. What other act in the solar system can claim this? So what I am asking you is, what the hell is the matter?!”

“Latch, I just think that, well, you know,” Vic said, “just 'cause we got all that chemistry and whatever up there onstage, it don't necessarily follow that we gotta be best friends off of it.”

Those really were not the words I wanted to hear.

Ziggy said, “I don't like the way he takes me for granted. Ziggy . . . the funny guy, the Jew, the human basketball who don't sing, he's a goddamn piece of garbage. I don't like the way he goes to all these reporters and tells 'em stuff, even if he don't even realize he's doin' it at the time. I don't even know if I like the fact that he doesn't like me. He does all this carousing into the wee hours, and where am I? I don't even know if I like
him
.”

Let me repeat myself: Those really were not the words I wanted to hear. So I said, “Sally? Can you throw in your two cents worth here 'cause I'm broke.”

Sally said, “Do you two remember where you were before you met? Do you have any recollection whatsoever? Vic, if your career was even in the dumps then that would've been a tremendous accomplishment, because you barely had one! You had no future or present and your past wasn't much to crow about either, young man!”

“Yeah, really,” Ziggy said with a smile. “Victor Feldbaum. Hee hee hee.”

“Shut up!” Sally said. “Ziggy, you were a zombie. You couldn't perform alone. You were a zombie! Did you think you were going to go places with the O'Hares?
Ha!
If they didn't work out, how many different parents would you have hired? Would you be forty or fifty or sixty years old and you would still be performing a pansy-and-parent routine?”

I thought I would chime in. So I said, “Now, Sally's right. So—”

“Arnie, shut up,” she said. “Have we forgotten that Arnie was nowhere too, was not even nowhere? Before he got you two together, he was cleaning spit valves! Big, big entertainment manager and he's covering up the wall sockets in hotel rooms so the vocalist doesn't electrocute himself!” She took in a deep breath. “As for me, where was I going? What was I doing? Getting Ziggy his ice, getting tea for his parents? I didn't finish high school, I had no fella, I never even had a real job. Vic, would you stop blowing that smoke at Ziggy! And now here we are. I live at the Bel-Nord, Vic keeps two residences, owns two cars, a thousand suits and shoes. Ziggy, you've got a ten-room apartment on Fifth Avenue and everything you ever
wanted! Arnie has more money than he knows what to do with! We eat well, sleep well, live well, we're healthy, we have fun, we have fine families. People love us, they travel miles and pay top dollar to see us.
Why the hell are we so miserable?
Why? Will someone please answer me this?”

I cleared my throat. I looked at Vic. He was blushing . . . I don't think he'd ever been involved in such a talk like this. Maybe he was embarrassed, getting involved in some boy/boy spat. I looked at Sally . . . she's five foot three, she's got these big cat's-eye glasses on. She was sort of quivering—I don't think she knew she had the
baytsim
to pull off this speech. But she did. And then I looked over to Ziggy and there were tears pouring from his eyes. He starts whimpering. He's shaking his head and I never saw so many tears in my life, and the mucous is popping out his nostrils like someone is blowing bubbles up there. I handed him a napkin and he blew his nose and dabbed his eyes. He was trying to say “I'm sorry,” but it wouldn't come out. Sally stood up and walked up to him and put an arm around his shoulder and he hugged her waist.

Outside the train, the sun rose over the vast, flat, desolate Nebraska countryside, which whizzed by incredibly unimpressively. Sally then walked out of the dining car. I got the idea: Let's leave them alone. Let's let them talk. For the first time ever, let the two of 'em just talk to each other! So I got up and left too.

Hours later I saw Vic at the hotel lobby in Omaha and I asked him, “So did you two iron out your problems?”

He told me that after Sally and I had left, a few people started coming into the car, some waiters and one couple and then another and some people eating alone. He and Ziggy looked at them, then at each other. Then they just started goofing on everybody.

• • •

REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV:
When Fountain and Bliss came to Omaha, I bought a ticket to the show. The nightclub, a modern but unspectacular place, was called the Stalk Club and had a corn motif. I gave the maitre d' a note to pass to Vic and Ziggy backstage but when I espied other people doing the same thing—most of them females—I realized that my own note might not make it to its intended targets. This feeling was further exacerbated when, several minutes later, I inquired of the maitre d' as to the status of my note, whereupon he informed me that he'd thrown it out. “I know these people,” I informed him, “and they know me. Please tell them that Reynolds Catledge is here.” This seemed to shake the man, and after the show he ushered me backstage.

Vic was in a friendly mood and good-naturedly mocked my appearance
and demeanor. “You ain't in the army anymore, Cat,” he told me. “You need to loosen up some.”

The next day was a Saturday and I was roused from sleep very early when my doorbell rang. I was stunned to see Ziggy Bliss . . . I asked him to come in and I put up a pot of coffee for the two of us. (By way of a personal note, I should add that after three years of marriage, my wife, Linda, whom I'd met and married in 1945, had recently left me and taken our son, whom I did not name Reynolds V. I was leading a boring and incredibly solitary, worthless life.)

Ziggy seemed agitated. At first he spoke only about trivial matters but then he got to the point. He had three days free and wanted me to help him track someone down. I tried to tell him that I had no interest in such a project—I even thought about making up some phony matter I had to attend to, but after a moment's reflection I realized that a long drive with one of America's top comics through the middle of nowhere might be just the proper tonic I needed, and soon we piled into my Ford woody and we were on our way to Laramie, Wyoming.

The drive was about five hundred miles long and, given the nature of the American automobile at that time, it took quite a while—long stretches of silence were broken by longer stretches of Ziggy complaining about Vic. “The guy don't even go home on his own honeymoon night!” he told me. He complained that Vic's singing style was so sleepy that he could perform at an insomniac ward and have everyone dozing within the first few bars. He said, “If we ever get some big movie deal, you watch—Vic'll get all the credit and all the girls, I'll do all the work and get nuttin'.” At many points during this screed it seemed he was treating imaginary things as if they had already in fact transpired; he would say, “He's banging the daylights out of Lana Turner at the Bel-Air Hotel and here I am, working on new material in the mirror at my puny ranch house.”

We pulled into Laramie that evening and procured lodging at a modest motel. We shared a room with two beds . . . there was an incredible view of the mountains but Ziggy took no notice. I said, “That's the Medicine Bow range, I imagine,” and he said, “Yeah, big deal.”

The first thing he did when we checked in was ask the hotel proprietor for a phone book. Ziggy looked up someone named Dolly Phipps. There were two D. Phippses in the directory and he phoned both of them; neither one of them turned out to be a Dolly. “Do you
know
Dolly Phipps?” he asked them. “Are you maybe related to her maybe?” They were not. He ripped the Laramie phone book in two and gave me the latter half of the alphabet. I was to look at every listing there was and keep an eye out for anyone going by the first name of Dolly. I did find a Dolly Marshall but he found none. It was three in the morning and he phoned the Dolly in question.
A man answered, obviously annoyed at being awoken, and informed Ziggy that not only was his wife Dolly not now or ever a Dolly Phipps, but that she had passed away only two weeks before. “My most sincerest condolences,” Ziggy said. “'Bye.”