Funnymen (30 page)

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
The negative flack we got from Vic not going in was incredible. Here's a guy in his early twenties, he's big, he's strong, he's healthy. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is being inducted, but not Vic Fountain. And to make things worse, you had all kinds of celebrities going into the armed forces. And they always made a big hullabaloo about it too, to boost morale and get everybody gung-ho. I pick up the paper and there's a picture of Jimmy Stewart getting his physical.
Oy vey.
I see that, I get a duodenal ulcer. Here's a photo of Clark Gable enlisting. Now I got the angina. Hank Fonda goes into the navy. I can feel my lungs starting to collapse. Tyrone Power into the marines! My prostate is the size and temperature of the
Hindenburg.
Thank God for Frank Sinatra and Duke Wayne.

We did damage control. As best we could. They played some army and navy bases in the South, they raised thousands and thousands for war bonds. They toured with Georgie Jessel and opened up for Glenn Miller in Boston to raise money. They even did a USO show with Lenny Pearl. Once in a while you heard booing. These guys in uniform—hey, next week they might be on Okinawa or in Tobruk, so who could blame them?—they'd yell things at Vic. Coward, sissy, candy ass, and some ethnic things too. Nobody ever called Ziggy a coward though . . . I guess with him it was quite evident why he wasn't serving his country.

Bertie concocted the whole lobster-trap tale. When Vic was a kid, this saga went, he was picking up a lobster trap one morning in the bay. The trap is empty, to his abject shock. Vic's looking inside it and as he's doing so two lobsters clamp down real tight on his feet. They each one take a little toe off. Vic staggers back to the shore and
just
makes it to a doctor, who manages to save his life. Real Herman Melville, Joe Conrad-type material, right?

It was perfect. But some people weren't buying it.

I'm at the Stork with Grayling Greene and he just doesn't purchase this bill of goods. He even doubted that Vic was missing any toes to begin with. I call Vic from the phone at the table and twenty minutes later Vic is at the table too. I say to him, Let Mr. Greene get an eyeful of those tootsies. Vic whips off his socks and shoes and, voila, there they aren't: not even stubs where the little toes were. Grayling looks at 'em, nods, jots down a few words, Vic leaves, goes back home to finish the job on who-knows-which broad he was with at the time.

“How do I know that he didn't shoot them off, Arnie?” Greene says to me.

“Shoot his toes off? That ain't Vic.”

“Why not?”

“Vic don't like guns.”

“Which is why he doesn't want to join the army. So he shoots his own toes off—men are doing that, they say. Or Vic pays a surgeon to amputate them.”

“It was the lobsters. I swear it was. On the grave of my mother.” Who, at that time, was still alive and kickin'.

Grayling Greene snorts, jots down a few more notations. I'm getting up to go and I'm thinking: This guy is plugged in to everybody. Gary Cooper jerks off in Beverly Hills, Grayling Greene knows about it on Fifty-eighth Street. He maybe knows that that cannibal Constance Tuttle sautéed Vic's little piggies. Hey, Sinatra had a bum eardrum, right? That's what kept him out of the war? For all I know, Connie Tuttle plucked it out and deep-fried it while Frank had a bun on.

As I'm walking out, I pass by Winchell's table. He says to me, “Two lobsters, huh, Arn?”

Vic did an interview with
Life
and addressed the subject. He said these words exactly—I know, because I rehearsed him over and over again: “It's one of the lousiest breaks I ever got, this toe deal. I would love to be over there killing Japs. I really would. This country has been great to me and my family. I sure owe it one. Heck, my older brother Sal is in the Marianas right now . . . I'd give anything to be there with him, giving him some cover.” “Oh really?” the smart alecky, pain-in-the-ass interviewer said. “Would you even give your toes?” (
Life
didn't publish that clever rejoinder, fortunately for us.)

SNUFFY DUBIN:
I was just about to head to Parris Island for my basic training. Okay, one thing I don't do is, I don't talk about what happened to me in the war. I could've come back and gotten a hundred hours' worth of material out of it. The characters I met, the stupid stuff I had to do—some of it was funny. But you get a guy's brains blown onto your lap, you forget the funny stuff real quick. Shit, after I made it as a comic, they offered me
parts in
The Dirty Dozen, The Longest Day,
and
Kelly's Heroes
. Turned 'em all the fuck down.

This socialite columnist Hilda Fleury ran an item a week before I reported, it was about Fountain and Bliss. It was a blind item but anybody in the know could tell who it was. Someone had told her that Vic had had his toes amputated by a surgeon, to avoid the army, that this lobster thing was a lie. She doctored the item up and ran it really small. Vic saw it, he hit the roof. To him it was one thing if you get sozzled and some broad lops your toes off after you give her the high hard one, it's another thing to
pay
some doctor to do it to avoid serving your country. And besides, after a while, Vic had probably convinced himself that he could've been some kinda big war hero. So Vic sends Hunny over to Hilda's house, on Park Avenue. The doorman tries to stop Hunny, Hunny nails him with a left hook. Hunny rings the buzzer, Hilda's butler answers the door, starts asking who wishes to see
madame.
Hilda comes to the foyer and Hunny is pounding the butler . . .
Bam! Bam!
Hilda gets the phone to call the cops, and maybe Hunny Gannett ain't Albert fucking Einstein but he ain't braindead either. Not yet. He rips the phone out, tears this poor butler's shoe off, then breaks the butler's little toe.
Madame
gets
le message.

The upshot of this story is this: Who do you think it was that went to Hilda Fleury and told her the story? Who told her that the lobster trap thing was a lie? Of course. It was Ziggy. Who the fuck else?

• • •

JANE WHITE:
Ziggy and I went to “21” on our first date. I thought we'd be there for an hour but we wound up being there for three. I'd really had myself done over for the date. My hair was naturally brown but I had it colored sunny blond, and I bought a new dress at Lord & Taylor. I remember being all scared because that day at Lord & Taylor, they thought I had stolen a gold silk scarf. They brought over a security person and I explained to him that it was all some mistake. I showed him that I had about $30 in my purse and that if I really wanted the scarf I could afford it. It was an accident, I explained. He didn't know what to believe and when I began to cry, he escorted me to the door and let me out on Fifth Avenue. I told Ziggy all about that and he made me feel better about what happened, joking about it and everything.

Ziggy could not believe the way I was brought up. He said he never heard of a Jewess being on a yacht and I told him that I really could not be considered a Jewess. He told me about his childhood and I'd never heard of anything so sad in my life. It was almost as though he'd been an orphan. During dessert the maitre d' brought the phone over and Ziggy got on and
said that he'd be over at 10:45 that night. When he hung up he told me it was Vic Fountain. I asked him if he got along with Vic, and he told me they never socialized. I said, “But you're seeing him at ten forty-five tonight.” And he said, “Oh yeah. Right. Well, there's a first time for everything.”

He actually wanted to take me home in a horse and buggy! I said that was embarrassing so we took a cab. He walked me to the front door of my apartment . . . I was so tired from laughing at this point, I really was. He didn't try to kiss me. I told him that I'd had my hair done especially for him, for this date, and it made him happy.

“So do you think you'd maybe want to ever do this again with me ever?” he said.

“I had a wonderful time tonight,” I told him.

“But not wonderful enough, izzat it?” he said.

“Do you want to see me again?” I asked him.

“Would that be something that you would consider doin'?” he asked me.

I told him that, yes, I would consider that. I'd had such a great time at the “21” Club. Tommy Dorsey had said hello to Ziggy, and Cary Grant had come over and introduced himself! And two people came over to our booth and asked Ziggy for his autograph. It was quite exciting.

The next day the doorman buzzed me and said there was something for me in the lobby. I went down there and there was a box from Lord & Taylor. Ziggy had sent me twenty gold silk scarves.

FREDDY BLISS:
My mother's hair when she was young was jet black. She had very curly black hair, a little bit like Hedy Lamarr's, and had to iron it to get the kinks out. She used to dye it blond all the time. Any time a root reared its ugly head, it was off to Mr. Paolo.

After she and Dad moved to Los Angeles, Mom had her nose fixed. The plastic surgeon, the best there was, did a wonderful job. No bumps or ridges or anything. It was perfect. And then she had it redone. Why? Because it was
too
perfect. It made her look like a Jewish woman who'd gotten a nose job trying to disguise the fact that she was Jewish. Which is what she was. So she went back and the same doctor put in just the slightest, slightest ridge. And that was Mom.

I've been told that when Dad wanted to get me circumcised, she really raised the roof.

• • •

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
You want to talk termites crawling headfirst out of the woodwork? Guess who phones me one day? Estelle calls out, “I have a Floyd Lomax on the phone for you.”

My first reaction: It's Ziggy playing a hoax on me. They were always doing that.

I pick up the phone and I say, “Hey, Floyd darling, long time no speak.”

“Yeah, Arnie, too long. How's tricks?”

“Tricks is good. How's by you?” I'm just looking for some sign that this is Ziggy, feeling him out like we're two prizefighters stalking each other in round one.

“My life is hell.”

I was pretty sure it was Floyd Lomax now. But I had to make completely sure.

“Hey, Floyd,” I said, “what was it again that you had written on all your boxer shorts? I was musing over this the other day and it somehow escaped my mind.”

“It was ‘'Tis all pink on the inside,' Arn. In gold stitching.”

“Floyd, how are ya?!”

“My life is in the toilet.”

I'm not a hard-hearted man, Teddy. I'm not made of stone. I watch
Mrs. Miniver,
which I've seen a hundred times, I break down like a baby. Floyd Lomax's band—that's how I made my bones in this business. But the last time I saw him, he was shooting a pearl-handled Colt at me because we'd cheated him at cards. So naturally I feel that maybe there's some atoning to do.

“The toilet ain't such a terrific place to be, Floyd,” I said.

“I don't even have a band anymore. I get a recording date now and then or I sit in with Jimmy Babcock's band.”

Is this some sort of touch? . . . that's what I'm thinking, that he's gonna hit me up for cash. Christ, I'd wire the sonuvabitch two grand if it'd get him out of my hair for ten years.

I tell him I'm sorry about his career. And then he says the words I dread.

“I blame Vic for this.”

“Vic? What did Vic do?”

“Thalia Boneem. The only girl I ever—”

“Oh yeah. That. Sure, sure. Look, Floyd, I'm a busy man nowadays.”

“So I've heard, Latch. Jesus, the Copacabana, all sorts of swell joints, huh?”

“Yeah, well, such are the haphazard spins of Dame Fortune's wheel, Floyd. I gotta go—”

“Tell Vic I said hello, okay? Tell him one day I'll catch up with him.”

And then he hangs up.

I did not relay this message.

• • •

ESTELLE LATCHKEY:
Before I married Arnie, I lived with a girlfriend named Shirley Klein in Greenwich Village. Only about three blocks away from Ernie Beasley, as a matter of fact. One night Shirley and I were home . . . the bell rang and two men came to the door, two very serious-looking, no-nonsense men. They were dressed in identical gray pin-striped suits and gray fedoras. The shorter one of the two showed me some identification that said he was from the FBI.