Funnymen (6 page)

“I'm nervous, baby,” Vic would say to me about an hour before he went on. Nobody had ever called me baby before. Or since. It was thrilling.

“There's no reason to be nervous, Victor,” I would assure him.

“Make me not nervous, puddin',” he would say. “Come on. Calm me down.”

I always felt myself blush when he said that . . . I would get all red and prickly.

Mr. Enright and his partner, Mr. Flynn, had sent me up to Lynn every night to ensure the success of the Four Threes trio. As I wanted to do my job and perform all duties required of me—this
was
the Depression, you must remember, and times were tough for everyone—and as I wanted to satisfy everyone, I did as I was told, and Victor was no longer nervous.

TONY FERRO:
The last night he was performing, I drove a bunch of us up there—me, Cathy, Lulu, and Ray—in my old Ford. We were all excited. By then Lulu had a very serious thing for Vic. She had made enough manicotti for an army and was bringing it up for him.

So we pull into Vic's hotel and we're a little early. We climb up the stairs and we open the door to the hallway, right? And from the end of the hallway I heard something. I think I thought someone was moving furniture around. Lulu said, “Some place they got Vic at, huh?”

By now it's clear that it wasn't furniture being moved around. And it was coming from Vic's room.

The door's already open just, like, a slit. I didn't know what to do. I had no idea what it was, right? Then I think it was either Ray or Lu nudged the door open.

The first thing I seen was a naked broad on a bed. This broad was whiter than white by two shades. Like a piece of chalk. And then in the other corner of the room was Vic and Guy, both with just their boxer shorts and socks on. And the two of 'em was kicking some guy in the ribs . . . this blond guy was on the floor and they was kicking him.

The next thing I heard, Lulu had dropped the big vat of manicotti.

Guy came over to the door and says to me, he whispers, “What the fuck you doin' here, Tony?”

I says, “What the fuck are
you
doing?”

Guy says, “It's business . . . something in the group, the trio.” He told me I wouldn't understand and then he closed the door.

LULU FOUNTAIN [Vic Fountain's first wife]:
Wanna know what I think? I think that Guy and Vic were banging the girl. Is that what the world wants to know? One of the other guys in that trio was seeing her, dating her. He heard them banging her and then tried to play hero. He didn't know she was begging for it from Vic and that Guy was part of the deal. So he tries playing Jack Armstrong and Guy beats the daylights out of him while Vic watches. Happy now?

HUGH BERRIDGE:
On the final night at the Lynn Palaestra, there was a most unfortunate mishap. Rowlie—or so he told us—had been playing shuffleboard in Marblehead with some fellow Cantab alums when a boom from a yacht caught a frightful gust of wind and swung toward him. It sounded dreadful, the way he described it to me. Five broken ribs. He was quite shaken.

Suddenly the Four Threes had become the Three Threes again. Now it was just Teddy Duncan, Victor Fontana, and myself.

• • •

SALLY KLEIN:
Before the Blissman act left the Lodge, Rosie had a talk with Harry. She and Harry agreed that, with Ziggy now in the act, they might want to consider changing management. Jerome Milton was handling them. He was a real old-timer and was big on long-term deals, contracts for ten years or longer, so Harry told Rosie that getting out of the deal wasn't going to be that easy. But Rosie Baer was a smart cookie.

She called Jerry Milton up and they shot the breeze for ten minutes. And she says, “Miltie, I got some news for you. And I don't know how you're gonna take this. Harry and Flo aren't too happy with the deal.” So there's no noise on the phone for a half a minute and Rosie says, “Are you still there?” And Jerry says, “Yeah, still here. They're not happy? Gee, that's too bad.” And Rosie tells him—never mentioning Ziggy—that no, they weren't at all happy and they wanted out. And I think she's envisioning lawyers and fees and contracts and all that tsuris when she hears paper being ripped up on the other end.

“Okay, Rosie,” Jerome Milton says, “they're out of the deal.”

So now Rosie was handling the act. She called up the Bursley-Bates publicity outfit in New York and got some tips from someone there. She gave me $400—the most money I'd ever seen up to then—and told me to travel around with Ziggy, Harry, and Flo, make sure everything was always on the level. “Some of these places,” she said, “some of these people . . .” She knew the whole nightclub scene.

She told me to watch out for Ziggy, to keep him out of trouble. Apparently something had happened with Mary Beaumont at the Lodge, but nobody ever told me anything.

I was worried. I think Harry was too. Let's face it: it was wall-to-wall Jew at the Lodge. But now they had to play to
goyim.
I was thinking, If they get so much as a titter out there in
shaygetz
land, it's an act of God.

It didn't take me long to see that there was nothing to worry about. They played Herbie's Duplex in Jersey and the only word that comes to mind is “electric.”

ED SMITH:
I was closing up [Herbie's Duplex] and it was dark—all the chairs were up on the tables—and I was counting the take. Out of the bathroom comes Jimmy Canty. It was customary for a band's road manager to be the last guy out of the joint. He pours himself a shot of something and I probably had a drink too. It's maybe two or three in the morning now.

I offered to drop him at the Statler, where the band was staying. I locked up the place and we're about to pile into my car when Jimmy gets sprayed all over with something. Seltzer it was, coming from one of those old bottles with the nozzle. We looked up 'cause we could tell it was coming from the roof. But we didn't see anybody.

We get into my car and we drive a block and I smell something. And Jimmy smells it too.

There was urine in that bottle. It was piss mixed up with the seltzer.

Jimmy didn't ever figure out who it was. He didn't put two and two together.

I did but I kept my mouth shut. Until now.

• • •

HUGH BERRIDGE:
“I guess the trio's down to three, huh, guys?” Vic said in the rehearsal studio. He was drinking coffee and smoking a Chesterfield.

The weekend after the Lynn shows we had our first radio appearance. It was
The Cecil Newcombe Newcomer E-Z Oil Hour.
Nobody remembers Newcombe nowadays; he was one of those amateur-hour hosts such as Major Bowes or, later on television, Ted Mack. Several noteworthy performers got their start with Cecil Newcombe, whose show was sponsored
by a lubricating company, E-Z Oil. Jerry Talbot, the comic, and Peggy Clements, “the Twangy Torch from Tyler, Texas,” were Newcombe Newcomers, and so was Sasha Deckel, the violinist.

Vern worked us particularly hard that week. He told us that a live show, such as the one we'd performed in Lynn, though it was important, was ultimately ephemeral, but that a radio show was something for posterity. I remember Vic asking me what “ephemeral” and “posterity” meant.

GUY PUGLIA:
Happynuts—that's what we called the arranger—was really giving Vic the business. Yellin', screamin', stompin' his foot down. See, on account of that, uh, “shuffleboard” accident I did, they was down to three singers and had to kind of readapt their sound.

I remember Vic saying to Vern Happynuts, “So, uh, why aren't I featured more?” He just out-and-out asked. Well, you could tell this went over like a belch at a funeral. They just looked at each other and didn't say nothing.

So I piped in. I says, “Yeah. Why not?”

Happynuts said that this was something that'd have to be okayed with Mr. Enright—and then he tried to pull a fast one on Vic. Quickly he says something like, “Okay, from the top, one-two-three.” But I was wise to it . . . I says, “Whoa! Hold your horsies, pal. If this is something that's gotta be okayed with Enright,
then why don't we okay it with Enright?
Like,
right now.”

I picked up the phone and Happynuts—he's maybe five foot four, about two inches taller than me—he walks over to me and I dialed the phone number for him, just in case he tried to pull another fast one on me.

I was looking out for Vic . . . that's what I always did.

MAEVE CLARITY:
I picked up the phone in the office. Mr. Enright and Mr. Flynn were out at that moment celebrating the fact that the windowpane in the door had been repaired.

It was Mr. Hapgood on the other end.

He said that it had dawned on him and on the trio too that, what with Rowland Toomey having quit the group so abruptly, why not feature Victor more prominently? And it made perfect sense. Furthermore, as Victor had been perspiring less, his command of the material was becoming more mature. At one point in the conversation it seemed that somebody was telling him something and that perhaps Mr. Hapgood had stubbed his toe violently.

Well, I did something that to this day I'm not particularly fond of, seeing-as I was brought up by my father and by the nuns at school to never lie.

I told Vern Hapgood to wait. And I kept him waiting for about two minutes. I filed my nails and counted to sixty. And then—oh, I still get
embarrassed thinking about it—I got back on and told him that Jack Enright had thought it “a brilliant idea.”

When I did that I felt so—I don't know. I got a squishy feeling all over.

GUY PUGLIA:
We rigged it up with the Irish broad in the office. The whole thing. And if she didn't go for it—and believe me, she went for it—then Enright would've gone for it. I would have seen to that.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
If you couldn't make it as an amateur on the Major Bowes show, then there was the next level down; that was
The Owen Atkins Spotlight
, brought to you by some Martinizing outfit. Now if you were so lousy that you couldn't do Owen Atkins, the next rung down the ladder was doing a show in your living room with two Dixie cups and a string. And below
that
—twenty rungs down this ladder—was Cecil Newcombe's Newcomers. The man once had three Portuguese jugglers go on and do a four-minute bit and this was on the radio! All you heard were bowling pins dropping.

HUGH BERRIDGE:
I had never been on the radio before. Neither had Teddy. This was something new and exciting for us, a dream come true. We had a week to polish ourselves, to get our act down pat. Victor was now the featured singer and Teddy Duncan and I were moved to the background. Looking back from a remove of some six decades, it makes sense. But Teddy was very upset at the time. Vern tried to placate him and I told Ted, “We really ought to do what Mr. Enright asks of us.”

The show was on a Sunday night . . . we'd been booked into the Newburyport Lounge, a rather smallish nightclub near New Hampshire. We would do two songs and then Mr. Newcombe would chat with us for a minute.

GUY PUGLIA:
Happynuts was going to drive us to that club where the radio show was; he was gonna take Vic and the other two guys.

The Irish broad pops in just when we're all about to leave.

What an operator she was.

MAEVE CLARITY:
I offered to drive Teddy Duncan, Victor, and Guy to the Newburyport Lounge because I felt that . . . well, it was raining that night and Mr. Enright did not like all the boys traveling in one car, particularly Vern Hapgood's, which was really some old crate.

The rain had become torrential and I was never so frightened in all my life.

Ted Duncan . . . he was the life of the party. The other boy, Rowland, he
used to bother me; somehow he'd gotten into his head that I was his girl. But I was no such thing. But as for Mr. Duncan . . . there never would have been a trio if it hadn't been for him.

He was sitting in the back with Guy. We hit a puddle near a sign . . . then that terrible noise . . . Teddy Duncan went right through the window and there was glass all over his head.

I stopped the car and Victor said, “We're supposed to be at the Lounge in five minutes.”

I saw a house, a two-story home, and there were lights on. I told Victor and Guy that I had no idea where a hospital was and that they had to be at the nightclub now in
four
minutes. Mr. Duncan's forehead was bleeding . . . I said that whoever lived in that two-story home would have to summon a doctor.