Funnymen (15 page)

You want irony? The first couple nights, Vic never caught the opening act.

Lulu had seen them, though, and she told Vic they were ripping up the joint. “Those are three crazy Jews,” she said.

SNUFFY DUBIN:
I've heard a thousand stories about the first time Ziggy and Vic met. Two thousand maybe. [Columnist] Earl Wilson wrote they met at Handelman's in New York two years before they actually met! I remember Ziggy once had somebody ghostwrite something for him for
Parade
magazine, like an autobiographical thing. In that, Ziggy said he met Vic outside a church. No way that happened.

Vic once told me he had no idea where or when he first met Ziggy. I believe it.

MICKEY KNOTT [bandleader; drummer with Johnny Nelson's band]:
Vic and I walked into the Hacienda [in Philadelphia] and the Blissmans were onstage. “I wanna see this, Mickey,” he said. “My girl told me they was funny.”

So we looked at the act. Ziggy had a trumpet in his hands and was trying to play it. His mother was matching him note for note with that voice of hers. (Shit, thirty years later he was doing the same thing. I was on
The Tonight Show
guest-drumming with Milton DeLugg and the band, and Ziggy was going note for note with Ethel Merman.)

“This is our opener, huh?” Vic said.

“The Blissmans,” I told him. “The kid's a pisser but the parents are just hanging on.”

Ziggy's mother then started to sing a song, some really corny number from about 1880. She's doing that and Ziggy goes into the audience, like he's trying to hide from that noise, which sounded like an air-raid siren inside your skull. And Ziggy is going under the table, standing on tables,
spritzing himself with seltzer water. Then he comes over to Vic and me—we're way in the back, against the wall. And he looked up at Vic and Vic looks down at Ziggy—don't forget, Vic was one foot taller and about ten yards handsomer—and Ziggy's about to do something for a laugh, like maybe cut Vic's tie or step on his foot or jump into his arms. Vic muttered—real low so no one in the crowd could hear it—he said to him, “Don't even think about it, kid.”

And Ziggy slunked [
sic
] off and went back onto the stage.

He did that thing he did at the end of his performances: he apologized and told everyone how sorry he was if he hurt anyone's feelings. Sentimental, syrupy, a total horseshit Vegas thing. But tonight he was just “off.” The second after he'd seen Vic. When he was making his way back to the stage, he stopped and turned
two times
to look back at Victor Fontaine. Two times. He could barely make the syrupy speech.

He'd been thunderstruck, you could say. You know, I haven't ever thought of this until now . . . but you ever see
Ben-Hur?
You know when that mysterious shadow falls over Charlton Heston? In the boat and in the leper colony? It was really as dramatic as that.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
So how, where, and when did I first formally meet Vic Fountain? Well, it was—as so many other great things
aren't
—in Camden, New Jersey, in 1930-blah-blah-blah, Year of Our Lord. The Lomax band was playing the Duplex. I'm going over some piddling business things with this terrifying brutish gent named Lou Manganese, who just so happens to be Al Pompiere's son-in-law. Now why Al Pompiere, who could have “persuaded” Casanova himself to come back from the dead to marry his daughter, let her marry this lowlands gorilla I don't know, but then again she wasn't the prettiest primate herself. So this King Kong in spats is telling me this and that and I'm agreeing with everything he said because the inspired notion had just struck me of keeping both my testicles inside their scrotum where they belonged.

It's Lou Manganese, me, and some
shmegege
manager. There's a knock on the door and in walks this young man with turquoise blue eyes and a head of hair like a tangled ball of navy blue yarn. And he says, “Anybody see Pip Grundy?”

“We're talking business here,” Lou says.

“Anybody see Pip Grundy?” Vic didn't even hear Lou.

The
shmegege
manager winked at me. Well, I knew what that meant. “Take care of this for me, would ya?” Sometimes it's a wink, sometimes it's a nod or a smirk, it could be a rolling of the eyes. CEOs give it to VPs, kings give it to dukes, baseball managers to first-base coaches.

I stood up and I ushered Vic out and now we're in a dark, narrow hallway.

“You know who that is in there, pal?” I said. Keep in mind, who this ginzo Johnny Luscious is I'm yakking with now, I've got no inkling.

“No. Who?” he says.

“That big chimp with a thirty-eight is married to Al Pompiere's daughter.”

“Oh yeah?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

He thinks about it a beat and says, “Big fuckin' deal. Where's Pip Grundy?” While I admired the stripling's raw bravado, I pitied his naïveté.

I told him, “You're not going to live very long in this world, you know that?”

“I'm just trying to make it to tomorrow afternoon's nap, buddy,” he said.

(Man, he could've had that etched into his family crest.)

He told me he wanted to see the Pipper so he could thank him for setting him up with the Johnny Nelson band, who were playing in Trenton just then. I informed him I'd try to relay the message but I added that, in all honesty, I'd probably forget to.

Then I said, “You sing for Nelson, huh? 'Cause let me tell you, the way things are going with us, it's really very touch and go.”

His eyebrows perked up visibly. “What you mean?”

“Connie Bishop just got married and bolted the band,” I told him, “and our other vocalist is addicted to pain.”

“Dick Fain? The baritone?”

“Yeah, him. The man pays local high school quarterbacks to throw rocks at his head and two-hundred-pound whores to put out cigarettes on his
tuches.
”

“But he can still sing good.”

“What you hear is merely the dead echo of his charisma.”

Vic said, “His picture's outside, on the poster . . . how old is Fain anyway?”

“Thirty-five,” I said.

“Going on seventy . . .”

“I'm aware of it,” I said.

“I mean, he looks like he's been through some real hell.”

“I'm familiar with it. Trying to electrocute yourself for a quick pick-me-up-will do that to you.”

“Jeez, me, I just down a coffee.”

“Let me drop by your gig tonight,” I said to him. “I'll hear you chirp. Fain is either headed back to the nuthouse for his fifth sabbatical there or he's going to finally give himself one volt too many and sauté himself for good. We could use a young handsome set of pipes like you.”

“Hey, for all you know, I sing like a hyena.”

“Hey, this is Floyd Lomax's outfit we're talking about. We turn down hyenas for singing too good.”

“Well,” he says, “tell Pip I came by, would you? What's your name anyways?”

“Arnie Latchkey.”

“Arnie Latchkey, huh? . . . And what do you do?”

“Usually anything anybody tells me. And what moniker do you go by?”

“I'm Vic Fontana but they've been calling me Vic Fontaine lately.”

“Oh, like in Joan? Well, Floyd'll change that, mark my words.”

And that was it. He walked down the hallway—slow fade to gray—and then exited and, Teddy, I knew I'd be seeing him again. I just knew it.

That goddamn kismet'll bite you in the ass every single time.

PIP GRUNDY:
Cueball, Arnie, the twins [pianists Larry and Stu Morrell, Siamese twins], and I went to the Hot Spot in Trenton to hear the Nelson Orchestra. It was a frigid, windy evening.

Dick Fain's days were numbered. We had to take precautions with him. Intricately covering the sockets, removing sharp objects from hotel rooms. Arnie would get him girls occasionally but all you heard coming from the room was this ungodly pounding.

Vic sang well, was better now than when I'd first seen him. He really wooed that crowd. The Nelson band was mediocre at best, but Vic made them better.

“He's not bad,” Cueball Swenson said to me. “His singing is swell.”

“He's got something,” Arnie said to Cue. “I just don't know what it is.”

Stu Morrell, who had little interest in music, said, “I'd say it's called ‘presence.'” Larry said, “His range ain't much but—”

“
Isn't
much,” Stu corrected him. “

Isn't
much. But what he does with it is good.”

I added that the girls were lapping him up too.

“Like so much melting spumoni,” Arnie chimed in.

We glanced around. There were forty girls there with jaws agape.

We began talking about it, how to get rid of Fain. If we didn't fire him, how could we nudge him out? We knew Floyd was dying to make a change . . . but Floyd had other things on his mind, for by then he'd already met Thalia [Boneem].

“If Fain dies, then he's out of the band,” Arnie conjectured. “And that could happen any second. Jesus, one rock in the temple too hard and he's a goner.”

We went over every possible scenario . . . but one thing we agreed on was that Murray Katz and Floyd had to hear Vic sing. Soon.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
I went back to the Hot Spot the next night. Real solo-like. Arnie Latchkey, the stealth bomber. After the Nelson band wound up I passed a fiver to a stagehand, in lieu of a business card. I said, “Tell Vic that Arnie Latchkey from the Lomax band is here.”

Two minutes later Vic and I are in a hallway.

“I like the way you warble, Vic,” I said to him. He shrugged. “Where'd you learn to sing like that?”

He said, “I had lessons.” “No. People can't teach what you got. If they did, they'd get fired. How much is Johnny Nelson paying you?”

“Not much.”

“Lomax could top that. How does ‘not quite enough' sound?”

“I'll take it.”

I asked him, “You got a contract with Nelson, right?” He said, “Yeah, I guess. But if I do, it's no big deal. I'll quit and he'll just get another palooka. I've broken contracts before.”

He struck me as the kind of guy who didn't give a fuck about anything. And I liked that. It reminded me of me—not the way I was but the way I wished I could be.

I said, “You know, you were once so nervous about going onstage you puked on the reeds of our tenor sax man, Joe Lambeau. In Massachusetts. You still do that?”

“Sounds like me. But I ain't like that anymore.”

“That's good. Although that was the best that Joe Lambeau ever played,” I jested.

I told him to come by our hotel at six.

He sang “Ol' Man River” and “Always” at the audition. The first was beyond his range—only Paul Robeson and a humpback whale can really pull that off—but he nailed “Always” shut.

After the tryout we went outside into the parking lot, me, Floyd, and Vic.

“You're good, kid,” Floyd said to Vic.

“I'm better than good,” Vic said. “I'm decent.”

“We got a problem, though, and its name is Dick Fain.”