Funnymen (4 page)

The crowd loved it.

SALLY KLEIN:
Rosie Baer said you could see it physically, literally dawn on Harry:
After years and years, I've finally found my meal ticket!

The problem with Harry and Flo was that for thirty years, it was basically two straight men. Well, now they finally had their funnyman.

• • •

RAY FONTANA:
Aquilino told my mother he wouldn't give him any more lessons. And this rumor got spread around town that my mother destroyed—that she
ate
—his piano. Now, it is true that he did get a new piano several weeks after the lessons stopped. But that my mom ate it . . . that's just a lie.

CATHERINE RICCI:
When Mamma came back from Mr. Aquilino's the last time, she looked really bad. I went to the bathroom door and asked if I could help her but she said no. An hour later she's in the kitchen preparing our dinner. I notice she keeps picking things out of her teeth and throwing them out into the little trash can. They were splinters. She kept taking these white and black splinters out of her mouth.

HUGH BERRIDGE:
Our manager Jack Enright phoned one day and said that a fellow named Victor Fontana was calling. The name meant nothing to me, I told Jack. He said that Vic had claimed that we—Teddy Duncan, Rowlie, and myself—had promised to secure a position in the trio for him. Jack was upset. “A trio does not have four people in it, Hugh,” he told us, quite unaware in his fit of pique that, yes indeed, not only could I sing but I could count as well.

I told Jack about what had happened in Codport and he told me that he would—the words are his—“lose the wop.”

But Victor was not so easy to get rid of.

MAEVE CLARITY [Jack Enright's secretary]:
Our office was very small; there was a reception area, which was where I worked, Mr. Enright's office behind me, and there was [his partner] Timothy Flynn's office and a small meeting room. We were on Boylston, only a few streets away from Our Lady of Victories Church, where I would go every day before work and at lunch.

On that fateful day, I was typing up a contract for Mr. Enright and there was a knock at the door. We had one of those doors with a small pane of glass in it—the glass was frosted and you could only see shadows behind it—and our company's name was on the door:
FLYNN ENRIGHT ENTERTAINING AGENTS.
When I heard the knock I said, “Come in!” but nobody did. I saw a shadow behind the glass and there was another knock. “Come in! The door is open,” I said again, very nicely I might add.

Suddenly there was a loud noise, a crash . . . the little window in the door was being smashed in by—I couldn't believe my eyes—it was a rolling pin! Some of the letters on the door were gone and the ones that were left now spelled out
FRIGHTENING GENTS.

Then in a flash the entire pane of glass was gone.

It was a short stocky woman dressed completely in black and there was a tall boy maybe eighteen years old . . . his hair looked blue to me under the light and he had clear blue eyes, almost turquoise. There was another man, very short and wiry. I was so scared. I was eighteen years old.

They burst into the reception area and they started jabbering all at once—I couldn't understand what was going on, not one word. When I reached for the phone to call the police, Guy, the short wiry one, yanked the phone out of the wall.

All the time I thought that the lady was going to start clubbing me with the rolling pin.

[They sat] down and waited for Mr. Enright to return from lunch and I kept looking at the clock. Those ticking sounds were sounding very loud, let me tell you. I knew he would be back at 1:30 and he was never late. He was a kind man, he always took care of his family, and he was seldom intoxicated during the day.

At exactly 1:30 he walked in and was about to say, “Maeve, what happened to the glass in the door?” But then he was struck on the head by the rolling pin. They dragged him into his office and closed the door. The short wiry man told me not to get the police. Well, that wasn't going to happen anyway as Victor's mother had used the phone cord to tie me to my chair.

HUGH BERRIDGE:
Teddy Duncan and I were going over some charts in our rehearsal space when Jack Enright called. He said, “You know, boys,
I've been giving it a lot of thought. A trio with four people in it is a
capital
idea! Why not give this Fontana lad a shot?” Well, at that second Rowlie walked in, and when we told him about this, he said that if we let Fontana in, he would quit. Rowlie got on the horn and I heard Jack's voice on the other end. Rowlie kept saying “no” and “I don't think so, Jack.” Then I heard a woman's voice on the other end—she was rattling away, talking a mile a second, sometimes in English, sometimes in Italian.

Rowlie hung up and said, “You know, perhaps we
could
use a new direction in our sound.”

• • •

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Zig related to me that after that first show they went back up to their hotel room. Rosie Baer is in there too with a bottle of champagne and a tray of chopped liver and crackers.

Now Harry and Flo had no idea if Ziggy was gonna do this again. No idea at all. The old man's probably thinking, If the kid don't do this thing again, I'll disown the bastard! So he looks at Zig and says, “Sonny, how would you feel about maybe doing this again?”

“You want me to go onstage again, Poppy?” Zig says.

“Didn't you hear all the people laughing?”

“Yeah sure, I heard,” Zig says. “But you were mad at me at first.”

“At first, yes,” Harry says. “Now, why do you think they were laughing?”

“On account of you and mom and the act?” Playin' real dumb.

My guess is that Rosie Baer is thinking,
Oh, Jesus God, the freckled fat boy isn't gonna do it again.

Harry says to Zig, “Well, they were also laughing at
you
. They thought you were very funny.”

“Me?” Zig says. “They thought I was funny?”

Flo chimes in with her two cents and says, “They thought you were hysterical, Ziggy.”

Ziggy puts his shoes up on the coffee table and says, “Did anyone ever say that you was hysterical, Mom?”

Flo says, “To be honest, no . . . nobody has ever said that.”

“Did anyone ever say
you
was hysterical, Poppy?” Zig asks.

“No, Ziggy. No one,” Harry says. Not an easy thing for a comic to admit.

Ziggy puts his hands behind his head, leans back against the couch, and says to Rosie: “I get fifty-two percent, they split the rest twenty-four/ twenty-four. Plus I want an additional ten percent of the take from the box before you take your bite.”

“You three split it thirty-three percent down the line and I give you five percent,” Rosie says.

“Then you can all go to hell,” Ziggy says, “and burn rye toast there.”

Rosie says, “Okay, then, have it your way.”

And they shook hands all around and in a minute Ziggy was dipping his stubby red fingers into the chopped liver.

SALLY KLEIN:
I saw Ziggy in the hotel coffee shop the morning after the first performance. I hugged him—he
was
my cousin after all—and I said, “Congratulations! I'm so happy for you!”

“Little did you know, when I did a number one on your couch pillows where I'd be today, didja?” he said with kind of a twisted smile.

“No. I guess I didn't,” I said to him. “I hear you were hilarious.”

“Was it hilarious when I wee-wee'd on your father's socks?”

I kept trying to congratulate him but he just wouldn't let me. He kept bringing up other things.

DR. HOWARD BAER:
On the poster stand advertising the show, the one that stood in the hotel lobby, Ziggy's picture was up the next day. The next day! There was a black-and-white glossy of the Beaumonts at the top and beneath them it said: “Also appearing, the Blissmans. Plus: Ziggy!” The picture of Harry and Flo was just of them, smiling pleasantly. But Ziggy—his hair was wild, his eyes were crossed and bulging out, and his tongue was sticking out.

If you ask me, Ziggy already had a dozen of these pictures when he checked in.

There was a serious incident very late one night. The house detective told Allie Gluck, who told me. Strange noises were coming from Mary's room—she and Billy didn't sleep in the same room—and the detective was summoned. Ziggy, apparently, had tied Mary's wrists and ankles to the bed using hotel towels, which had a bear logo on them. She was naked and so was Ziggy, who was swaying back and forth in the chandelier over the bed. “The Lord in his mysterious ways,” the house dick told Allie, “had blessed this young Hebrew mightily.”

Ziggy, Allie was told, merely wanted one kiss from her. That was all.

• • •

MAEVE CLARITY:
Looking back, I guess I resented that we were now representing a man who had tied me up in my seat and whose mother had threatened to bash my brains in. But I must say, being tied up . . . it was thrilling at the time.

HUGH BERRIDGE:
Vic had a pleasant voice; his was a relaxed, ambient timbre, but he was terribly unpolished. It was going to take some time to meld him into our own sound. He was, we also realized, going to stand out on the stage. Our performances were live, in small ballrooms or at social functions, and Rowlie, Teddy Duncan, and I were all on the short side or of average height and had short, straight blond hair (Rowlie had sandy brown hair but after a summer at Newport it would be dirty blond). But Vic was a lot swarthier. And taller. The cut of his clothing was—dare I say it?—gangsterish, and his hair was curly and terribly unruly.

Mr. Enright tried and tried and ultimately got Vic to agree to dye his hair blond for our first performance together.

“Okay, so what do I do?” That's what Vic asked at our first rehearsal. I remember thinking, What you
ought
to do is please comb back your hair, but naturally I did not say that aloud. He'd brought a chum along, that diminutive scrappy fellow named Guy.

Working feverishly, over the course of several weeks we incorporated Victor into the act. I think he and Guy were staying at a hotel near Hanover Street. He was, I must allow, very eager to learn and was quite punctual.

Vern Hapgood was our arranger. He was a New Haven man, had taught choral music there, and had the reputation of being a martinet. He was a perfectionist, yes, but was not ill-tempered.

He ran us through the songs and played the piano. He wasn't happy with Vic—not with his voice, not with the way he looked or his manner, the way he spoke and dressed. There was very little about Vic that he liked.

GUY PUGLIA:
The poor kid'd work himself silly with these blue-blood candy asses, day in, day out. But at night, he had stomach cramps real bad. From the worrying. He had the runs and the chills and the sweats. He thought—he said it many times—“I can't cut it, Gaetano. I'm no good.” I said to him, “Hang in there, Vic, it'll come. It's just singing.” He said, “Uhuh. I can't do it. I'm out of my element.” I says to him, “Hey, what the hell is singing anyways? It's talking but with a melody, right? You can talk, can't you, Vic?” And he'd say, “Yeah, I can talk.” But meanwhile he's doubled up with his hands over his guts, shivering and sick.

He dropped about fifteen pounds—he couldn't keep food down, he couldn't keep food up, he couldn't keep it anywheres . . . so why eat? And he didn't.

His mom would call the hotel three or four times a week to check up on us. There was no phone in the room so Vic would have to go to a phone
booth out on Salem Street and he'd call her back. She kept telling him to eat, eat, eat. Then she'd put Bruno on the line and Vic'd say, “Hey, Pop,” and then you didn't hear nothin' on the other end. Bruno was on the other end and not saying one fuckin' word.

“Okay, Pop, I got you,” Vic would say. “Put Mamma back on.”

Violetta told me on the phone once: “You take care of my boy.”