Funnymen (48 page)

“'Cause that's the way it usually is . . . I deal with Vic, you deal with Zig, and you and me deal with each other.”

We were about twenty minutes from landing.

When I arrived at the Sky Lodge [in Reno], there was a message from Bertie Kahn's secretary . . . Bertie was on vacation in Paris and couldn't make the wedding. “It's in Bud Hatch's column that Ziggy and a ‘model' from El Monte are involved,” the note said. So I left a message at Morty Geist's office that he had to smooth things over with Bud now. I told his secretary to tell Morty to read Bud the same statement he'd read to Hilda Fleury, except jiggle the names around.

“I give Morty maybe five months to live,
tops,
” I said to Sally.

DANNY McGLUE:
I've been to all kinds of wedding ceremonies, Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, large, small, shotgun. These nuptials were so hastily planned it was almost funny. Rabbi Gershon Susskind was on the plane to Reno and was schmoozing with every star he could. (I think Jack Benny said about Rabbi Susskind that he'd go to the lowest level of hell to do a bris if it was a movie star's son and there was a camera flashing.) But then Ziggy had to break the news to him that a judge would be doing the honors and not him.

The rabbi now flew into a rage. “HOW
DARE
YOU?!” he shouted out to Ziggy. He really made a big scene: He was bellowing and spitting and his eyes were crazy. He accused Ziggy of everything in the book—and that book was
Mein Kampf
!” I suppose you'll be serving pork at the reception too, you self-hating cur!” he screamed right in Ziggy's face. Jack Warner urged him to pipe down and the rabbi yelled to everyone: “I curse this marriage! I curse it and condemn it!” He put his hand on Jane and yelled, “May
this Eva Braun from Lexington Avenue have five children with tails and may they all die of a slow plague!” He was spitting all over the place when he yelled, it was like he was a lawn sprinkler . . . some of it even got on Bogie. Ziggy, in a rare fit of common sense, said, “Gersh, it's just you not doing a marriage ceremony, it ain't the Temple of Jerusalem bein' sacked!” When we finally touched down, Rabbi Susskind refused to get off the plane. He didn't attend the ceremony and the pilot flew him back to Los Angeles.

SALLY KLEIN:
The ceremony was fairly low-key, very simple, although there was a photographer from AP there, and UPI as well. Vic was the best man and Ziggy, who could never ever stop clowning around, kissed
him
on the cheek when the judge told him to kiss the bride. Vic and Ziggy engaged in some mugging for a few seconds and then Ziggy kissed Jane. Afterward there was a reception in Ziggy and Jane's suite. The rooms were filled with flowers, flowers from everyone. They had only one night in Reno and then Ziggy had to fly back to Los Angeles to begin the Ciro's engagement.

After the reception Arnie and I were in the lobby of the Sky Lodge and I heard Vic behind me singing “The Hang of It.” Both Arnie and I turned around but Vic wasn't there.

It was the radio.

I went upstairs. I knocked on Ziggy's door and told him in the hallway that Vic had recorded two songs. I thought he'd open his mouth and fire would come shooting out, like a dragon. But he didn't do anything. I was waiting for some kind of explosion but he just stood there and thought about it and finally said, “I appreciate your telling me. The song will die. I ain't worried. And maybe now I can have my honeymoon maybe?”

SNUFFY DUBIN:
“The operation took, I guess?” I asked about Jane White, and Arnie said, “Oh, it took, all right. She won't be able to stand up straight for three months.” And I replied, “Bad news for her, great news for Macy's.”

I hang around the Ambassador for a few days and I tell you, it was like the help there thought I was an insect. Maybe someone had tipped them off to the fact that I couldn't afford the place or maybe they could tell just by looking at me. I told Arnie that Ziggy had promised me a few gigs out there and he kept saying he'd check with him. But Ziggy told him he didn't remember saying anything like that to me. So I said, “Arnie, I came out here to stay at the Ambassador and they never heard of me. I came out here to be Ziggy's best man and Vic's doing that. I also came out here to work a few joints and make some bread and I'm not doing that.” He said, “It don't sound like this has been a pleasurable few days for you.” I said, “Oh no, I'm having the time of my life staring at the fucking ceiling here.” And he says to me, “Well, what would you be doing if you were in New York?”
And I fessed up and said, “Staring at the fucking ceiling.” “Well, at least it's a different ceiling,” he says.

“You guys are playing Vegas, right?” I said to him, and he said Fountain and Bliss were booked into the Oceanfront for two weeks. I said, “Look, Arnie, I
swear
to you . . . Ziggy promised me some work out there. On the grave of my mother, I swear it.” And he swore on the grave of
his
mother he'd call up Pete Conifer in Vegas.

Hey, I can't be too mad. Fountain and Bliss footed the tab for the hotel. [My agent] did get me two nights at Mocambo. A guy in the crowd there had seen me at the China Doll and—guess what?—the man is an orthopedist! So I sit for a half an hour at his table with him and his wife and I make real nice and I leave there with a prescription for fifty fucking bennies.

Then I went to Vegas and saw Fountain and Bliss at the Oceanfront. They were tremendous . . . the crowd was completely mesmerized. Me and Pete Conifer have a meal together and he's just crowing how he'd laid this showgirl and that showgirl, and I'm sitting there with a big phony grin you could drive a Cadillac through. I'm just waiting for him to ask me, “Snuffy, can you give me three weeks? Snuffy, can you give me three nights? Snuffy, can you balance a lit stick of dynamite on your nose?” Nothing. I'm giving him all kinds of hints and he don't bite one fucking time. Finally I said to him, “Did Ziggy tell you that I'm available to work this place? That's why I'm here, Pete. I thought I was gonna open for Fountain and Bliss.” And he said to me, “Yeah, Arnie did say something. But we're bringing in that girl singer to open for them.” I asked him, “
What
girl singer?” And he said, “That Berkeley Square Nightingale girl, Julie Mansell.”

• • •

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
By the time the Ciro's engagement began, they weren't even talking to each other except onstage. People kept walking up to Vic and telling him things about himself that he didn't know. Things they'd read in the trades. “Hey, congratulations on extending the witch hazel show,” Ann Sheridan said to him once at the Brown Derby.
Huh?
We hadn't worked out anything with Consolidated or Dickinson's! Turns out Ziggy had told a
Variety
reporter that. I'm at the House of Murphy with Vic and Ernie, and Abe Lastfogel from William Morris sashays up to us and says, “Congratulations on the musical, Vic. Broadway will
adore
you.”
Huh?
“What musical?” Vic said. “Did I do a musical?” And Abe says, “It's all over Louella Parsons's column today.” Abe sashayed back to his table and Vic looked into his coffee and grumbled, “Ziggy!”

Before a show at Ciro's one night, Sugar Ray Robinson comes backstage and, after he tells Vic how much he loves the “The Hang of It,” he
says he's sorry that Vic won't be recording any more songs. “I
won't be?
” Vic says to the greatest pound-for-pound pugilist of all time. “Well, I was at this big benefit,” Robinson says, “at the Hollywood Bowl last night that Fritz Devane did for that Cedars of Lebanon Hospital . . . and Ziggy come out and he and Devane joked around for ten minutes. And then he told Fritz and all the audience how you weren't gonna record anymore.” “What did Devane say to that, Ray?” Vic, quivering with rage, now asked of the sweet scientist. “Devane,” Robinson said, “just said one word: ‘Good.'”

Sally spoke to Zig about it. Ziggy—you know, he was floating around in the cloud nine of conjugal bliss for a little while—he apologized. He sent a telegram to Vic's bungalow even though all he really had to do was walk twenty yards and slip a note under the door. He wrote that he was very sorry, that he knew that Devane was not just a personal sore spot but was a festering one to boot. He'd crossed the line, he admitted. Vic sent back a wire telling him something like, “Don't worry about it, partner.”

So for one brief, bright, shining moment there's a golden sliver of sunlight poking through the storm clouds. Sally, me, Vic, and Zig even had breakfast together one morning at some dive in Westwood. Eggs, coffee and danishes, and flapjacks and toast. And for an hour it's like the old days, all the fun and everything. You felt it, the juice, the laughter so loud it hurt your bones, the
naches!
And so that night
which
sleepy-toned, Italian, aubergine-haired, fishophobic singer does a walk-on appearance on Lenny Pearl's TV show?
Take a wild goddamn guess which one?!

DANNY McGLUE:
The atmosphere became stifling. I had to get out of Los Angeles. There was poison in the air. Betsy was drinking too much. It may have been my fault . . . I don't know. One night at Musso and Frank I let it slip that Sally and I had once been an “item,” that I'd loved her very deeply and even told her we'd lived together. She was truly stunned. She had no idea and I believe she got very angry but kept it inside. This was all my mistake—I should never have told her how much I loved Sally. Now, Betsy drank before this, she drank a lot . . . but it—me and Sally—it was always a wall between us.

Betsy and I flew back to New York. I had a few meetings with Marty Miller, who was now at NBC, and with a few big shots at CBS and Dumont. CBS was offering me money to punch up a few
Life With Riley
scripts, and the money was good. I was just about to put my John Hancock on the dotted line when I realized:
I don't want to do this!
I didn't want to leave Fountain and Bliss. I didn't know where the road was going, I didn't know where or how it would end, but I knew I wanted to be bouncing up and down on it.

I'd go to the Vigorish office every day . . . I'd talk to Arnie long distance and listen to him complain about Ziggy and Vic and also listen to him
kvell
about how well the act was doing, which stars were showing up, how much money they were bringing in. I had lunch with Guy at the Hunny Pot; he told me that Lulu knew about Vic and Ginger but would never utter a word about it to Vic. I saw Hunny there and it took him about ten seconds for him to remember me.

After lunch I went back to the office and Millie Roth told me that Arnie had just called her from Los Angeles. Jack Klein and Sally had been at Ciro's the night before and Jack was laughing so much he'd had a mild heart attack. He would be okay, though, she told me, unlike the man three nights before who had seen the show, gotten in his car with wife, and was still cracking up so much that he drove head-on into another car and killed two people.

The boys did a week in Vegas at the Oceanfront, which Pete Conifer was now running. They brought the place to its knees. Pete had Jimmy Durante booked for two weeks after Fountain and Bliss but held them over a week and took a week off Durante. The Ciro's engagement was whammo too. Arnie has always maintained that this was Fountain and Bliss in top form, at their peak. Sally said so too. Winchell was in California, so was Leonard Lyons, they both saw the show although not at the same night, thank God, and they couldn't rave enough. It all proved what Sally and Arnie and I always knew in our hearts: The boys were at their best, at their funniest, when they couldn't stand the very sight of each other.

GUY PUGLIA:
I'm in my place, Hunny's at his girl Maria G.'s place. Bruno and Violetta are staying over with Lulu and Vicki, helpin' out. It's four in the morning and the phone rings. My first thought is: Hunny's broad tossed him out and he don't know where he left his keys even though they're probably bobbing up and down in his pants pockets. I pick up the phone and it's Vic in California. He's yellin' and whoopin' it up. “What happened?” I says to him. “Did Ziggy die or something?”

And he says to me, “Oh, it's even better than that!” I hear Ginger pop open a bottle of champagne in the background. Vic asks me, “Remember Gus Kahn? The Galaxy big shot?”

I said to him, “No, Vic, I fly in a Jew movie mogul's private plane to Mexico
every
day.” Like, sarcastic, you know?

Vic tells me, “Guy, he just signed me and Ziggy to a big movie deal with Galaxy!”

“Wasn't you gonna break up with Ziggy, Vic? Wasn't you gonna bust up the act and go solo?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I guess them plans are on hold, huh?”

GUY PUGLIA:
In 1953 my old man bent down to lift a crate of clams and never stood back up again. I was in Los Angeles when it happened, settin' up my seafood restaurant, and had to fly to New York and then drive to Codport. I called Vic at the Beverly Wilshire, where he had his bachelor spread even though he was married, and he said to me, “
Goomba,
whatever you want, whatever you need me to do for you, you know I won't let you down.” He asked me where and when the funeral was. “It's at Ciampini's Funeral Home on Tuesday at noon,” I told him, “and the burial is at the Catholic cemetery on Haddock Road.”

Well, yeah, the guy sent I don't know how many hundreds of flowers to the funeral parlor, and the hearse he sprang for could've fit the whole town in it. But he was too busy playing golf to actually attend the thing.

The morning after the funeral I go over to Vic's old house. Vic's mom made me so much food I thought I was gonna burst apart—all that escarole and lasagna, Jesus Christ. His old man ain't sayin' anything, as usual. All the years I known that guy, he was just quiet, lookin' at you with them icy eyes. Now, I'd seen Bruno a few times since Straccio cut off my nose, but we'd never really spent this kind of time together, there was always other people around, right? So Bruno points to my nose and makes a gesture with his chin, like to say, “What's the real story, huh? What happened with that thing anyways?” And I says to him, “It was Rocco Straccio, that goddamn
stronzo.
” And he shook his head slow, like to say it was a shame. I told him that Rocco had been asking questions about Vic, about maybe gettin' some dough from Vic, and that I'd talked back to him.

I went back to my old man's house. [My sister] Franny was there with her husband and their two kids. I spent the night there. The next morning Tony Ferro calls me up, it's maybe 9:00
A.M.
He says to me, “Didja hear, Guy? Rocky Straccio died . . . he had a heart attack and died last night.” I said to him, “Hey, this ain't the worst news to wake up to, Tony boy.”

About a year later Vic's folks move to California. Me and Joe Yung [Vic's valet] picked them up at the airport and we was gonna drive them straight to their new spread, right? But Violetta tells me that they have to
go to the police department first and I asked her why. I could see that Bruno didn't want her to tell me the story, but that didn't ever stop Vic's mom. Turns out Bruno had knocked on Straccio's door that night, the night after my old man's funeral, and Straccio invited him in. Bruno didn't say one single fuckin' word to him—he just stared at him, just fixed his ice blue eyes at Straccio. That scumbag rat couldn't look anywhere else, he was hypnotized. And he started tremblin' and sweatin' and goin' pale. And then his heart stopped cold he was so fuckin' frightened to death.

Why was Vic's parents goin' to the police station? 'Cause they had to. See, every time Bruno went to a new city, he had to register his eyes as dangerous weapons.

• • •

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
We were all in Vegas when Murray called me from New York. Paramount was champing at the bit to ink Fountain and Bliss to a multipicture deal. And Jack Warner had seen the act at Ciro's and he too was drooling to sign them up. Harry Cohn caught wind of this, had a big confab with his underlings, and before you know it he was salivating as well. Well, with all this important, high-powered spittle bubbling like lava, who now starts dribbling all his spit glands dry? Gussie Kahn.

Murray told me the ins and the outs of the deal and my heart was pumping like an oil gusher. The boys would be locked in for eight pictures; they'd split four hundred grand for the first five, six hundred for the final three. If they renewed after the eight pictures were done, Galaxy would double the numbers. They'd be guaranteed top billing in the movies—it didn't matter if Jesus Christ or Joan of Arc was their costar. In addition, Murray said, Vigorish Productions would get a percentage of the gross after the picture broke even, and it was a handsome enough chunk too. Handsome enough for me to buy a wonderful house on Cañon Drive and keep Estelle in Christian Dior for perpetuity. It was Murray's expert opinion that what Galaxy was offering was a perfect package. He said this was a fan
tab
ulous offer.

“Where are they right now?” he asked me on the phone.

“Vic's probably playing dice, and Ziggy could be anywhere,” I told him.

“Well, you tell them all the particulars, Arn, and if they don't snap at this bait, then those two fish are clinically dead.”

“There's this slight problem, Murray,” I said rather hesitatingly.

“Oh yeah? How slight?”

“Well, they don't really talk to each other anymore.”

I went down to the casino and sure enough there was Vic shooting craps. I see him, I see a brunette, not Lulu and not Ginger, sidling up close
to him, and I see he's got a grand on the pass line. He rolls a five and then places another thousand in bets all around. The very next roll he craps out.

“Vic, could I get in a word here?” I say to him.

“Not now, Latch, I'm hot,” he said.

“Hot? You just lost two grand, Vic!”

“Yeah but ten minutes ago I lost three.”

I pulled him away from the dice table and I related Murray's news. He was nodding as I was rattling off the numbers. “This is swell,” he'd say. “This is marvelous.” I told him that Murray and Hank Stanco were gaga over the deal and he said, “This is just marvelous.” When I informed him there was no escape clause, he said, “Who needs one of those?”

“So are you in?” I asked him.

“You just tell me what you want me to do, I'll do it.”

“Look, if you're locked into this deal,” I said as his eyes veered from the dice table to a seat opening up at a blackjack table, “it means you're locked into Ziggy. You realize that, right?”

“How much dough is it a picture again?” he asked.

SALLY KLEIN:
I found Ziggy at the bar at the Flamingo. He was with Red Buttons, Rose Marie, Buzzy Brevetto, just shooting the breeze. I told him I had some news for him and he and I went into the lobby. I related everything to him that Arnie had told me. He was very, very attentive. He told me that he wanted to see the contracts, he wanted the paperwork sent to him. He wanted to know how much control Fountain and Bliss would have over the movies, the scripts, directors. I told him that was something between WAT and Vigorish and Galaxy.

“What about you and Vic?” I asked him. “I don't think you should put your signature on this unless you and he iron out your problems.”

“What problems? Me and Vic don't have any problems.”

“You don't get along,” I said. “You're not friends, you bicker and go behind each other's backs, and you get spiteful and try to destroy each other.”

“I don't see how this is a problem though. I think it makes us click.”

That night Arnie and I were having dinner. Estelle was there . . . she'd flown out from New York. The three of us barely touched on business; we were just having a pleasant dinner. Estelle said, “Look who just walked in . . .” Arnie and I turned and saw Vic checking in with the maitre d', who showed him to a secluded table. “I bet you a ten-spot tonight he's with a blonde,” Arnie said.

“Redhead,” Estelle said. “Pay up, honey.” Arnie and I turned around again and there was Ziggy, being shown to Vic's table. The two of them sat down and had their dinner.

I remember two days later, Arnie and I were taking a drive around Las Vegas. It was a sunny day, not a cloud in the sky. There wasn't much to do in the daytime, really—there was just Fountain and Bliss at night. So we drove to Hoover Dam and then around a golf course and then headed back to the Oceanfront. When we pulled up, a valet offered to park the car. Arnie handed him the keys and we saw it was Vic! I saw a few yards away that Ziggy was also dressed as a valet and was parking people's cars too. The two of them were working the guests, they were
tummeling!
The four of us then stood out there together and Ziggy and Vic were just going off on these wonderful tangents, joking around, making no sense. All of a sudden there was a tremendous flash of light in the sky and the ground beneath us shook like there were twenty subways underneath us. I don't remember if I heard anything—I don't think so.

“Jesus, what the fuck wazzat?” Vic asked.

“That, my friends,” Arnie said, “was the army. They test atomic bombs out here, didn't you know that?”

• • •

DANNY McGLUE:
The day I married Betsy was the happiest day of my life, because that was also the day that Fountain and Bliss canceled their radio show. I know that might seem mean, but at the small, simple ceremony we had—Betsy insisted that Sally not be invited, and Sally understood—I had this nagging sense of doubt. About the marriage, not the radio show.

Film scripts started arriving by the truckload. You should see some of the garbage I was reading. Galaxy would send us everything, even if it wasn't tailored for Fountain and Bliss. We'd get swashbuckler scripts, war scripts, sports scripts, tons of romance scripts, scripts that may have been perfect for Vic and a romantic lead actress but not for Vic and Ziggy. I remember Sally read one, came into my office, and said, “This is a musical comedy about dying—it's
Dark Victory
with Ziggy as Bette Davis and Vic as George Brent!” She was exaggerating, I think.

Sid Stone and Norman White, meanwhile, had reworked
The Three of Us
—the play that would've been drop-dead perfect for Fountain and Bliss—into a comedy script for the movies. They'd added characters, opened it up, taken out some of the music. It was a wonderful screenplay. For Fountain and Bliss, you could do no better. It was silly yet mature, sophisticated but also slapstick, and it would have played perfectly on the tension between Ziggy and Vic. Sid and Norman asked me to add some jokes and I did. Murray Katz sent it to Galaxy and a week later we got it back with not even a note.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Oh, the boys would have loved that to be their first picture! They
adored
the script. “This is us, Latch, this is us,” Ziggy said. When we sent it to Gus Kahn, it didn't even occur to me that the script would get rejected.

Dissolve. Two weeks later. Murray calls me, tells me that Gus and Ezra Gorman, the producer, had decided on a script titled
Robin Hood and His Merry Morons
for the boys. When I heard the name of this vehicle it was like someone was trying to sell me a berth on the
Lusitania.
I told Murray, “This sounds like
The Dunce of Life
to me all over again!” And he said, “It was called
Shall We Dunce?
and anyway, Ezra swears it's not.”

But how did Ezra Gorman know it wasn't? I mean, nobody had ever seen that picture!

ERNIE BEASLEY:
I was going through a rough time. I had money coming in from Vic's records—they were huge hits—but my personal life was falling apart. My lover Mike and I were no longer together. What happened was, I'd been invited to a party at a certain movie producer's house in Bel Air. Well, this producer was gay, I knew that—everybody pretty much knew that. I brought Mike along and when we went to the swimming pool in the back, I couldn't believe my eyes. There were boys on the patio and the pool was filled with boys, gorgeous, tanned blond boys with blue eyes, all very muscular. Something out of a Leni Riefenstahl movie! Also in the pool were some older, flabbier men, who certainly did not mind sharing the water.

I went into the house and had a few Manhattans. I really got smashed. There was a piano there and when I've had a few I simply cannot resist a piano. I sang a few songs and mingled and it began to get dark. I made my way back to the patio and was looking for Mike to take me home. I couldn't find him . . . I was asking people where my date was. Then I saw Mike in the pool and was about to say, “Hey, there you are!” when I noticed James J. Pierce, a sixty-three-year old producer at MGM who resembled a fat chipmunk, right behind him. They were both in the deep end. And I don't have to tell you what Jimmy Pierce was doing to Mike.