Funnymen (12 page)

SNUFFY DUBIN:
The very first time I ever heard of Victor Fountain or Fontaine, it was at the Mosque Theater in Newark. He was billed as “the Singing Fisherman” with the Don Leslie All-Goyishe Kupf Orchestra. My first thought was, when I heard him: Devane. This guy is doing Fritz Devane. Next song: Dick Fain. After that: Como. The man wasn't using his own voice, his own style. I saw right through it like it was fucking cellophane.

GUY PUGLIA:
It was like a revolving door! Girls comin' in, girls goin' out. There were times when he'd finish up with one, bring her down to the hotel lobby—'cause he had class; a lot of other guys would've just swept 'em out the door—and then the next one was in the lobby waiting for him and he'd just bring her back up.

And don't forget it was my room too! Sometimes I had no place to go,
while he was busy “accommodating” these girls. So I'd wait in the lobby and read a paper. I spent a few nights sleeping in the back of the Buick, no kidding. Or I'd go to Jack Dempsey's bar on Fiftieth Street or goof around with Hunny. Or I'd hide in the closet and listen to Vic.

There were some classy girls too, girls right out of the society columns, like Elsa Maxwell's or Hilda Fleury's. I'd be reading about some rich horse owner up at Saratoga and four floors upstairs at the Monroe, Vic was putting the sausage parmigiana to the guy's daughter.

So it wasn't all bimbos. But there were a lot of bimbos too.

Hatcheck girls at the Ambassador, waitresses at the Blue Beret Cafe, a busboy's wife, a cigarette girl here and there. Or just some lonely married lady. It just went on and on.

And I was doing all right for myself too, you know? Just from being Vic's buddy and getting his rejects. But some of these girls . . .
marrone!
I think I had a better time alone in the back of the Buick.

ROGER DILLARD:
Vic started to get Don very angry, and I suppose that was only a matter of time. It was the girls, it was the booze and the gambling. Vic—and you have to admire him for it, I guess—he didn't do anything to hide it. He
flaunted
it sometimes. Vic once walked over to Don while he was drinking a glass of milk and he poured a shot of Johnnie Walker into it. “Here, boss, this'll put some hair on your nipples,” Vic said to him.

Don once said to Vic, “You're going to get a girl in trouble one day, you know that?”

And Vic laughed and said, “Man, I already did that! A
few
times!”

It was contagious. Vic wouldn't show Don any respect and it just followed that the band fell in with Vic. We'd be rehearsing and Vic would lay a fart into the microphone and then the drummer would cut one and we'd all pick up our horns and make fart noises with them. Don Leslie just stood there with his trombone, shaking with anger. You almost felt sorry for him.

Whenever I read nowadays how Vic Fountain was such a great song stylist, a skillful interpreter of the American songbook, a master of phrasing, the first thought in my head is of him placing the mike near his pants and ripping out a loud fart. I just don't know if Tormé, Fitzgerald, Sinatra, Bennett, or Eckstine ever did that.

RAY FONTANA:
My mother would send me around Codport when the Elgin watch show was on. We were supposed to listen at the door or through the window to see which families were tuning in and which weren't.

I remember coming to Rocco Straccio's house. I'm listening in at the front door and I don't hear anything. I go to the window, I don't hear a
peep. All of a sudden someone grabs me by my neck. I never was so scared in my life. It was Straccio, but you could hardly see him. I thought my heart was gonna just slip out my mouth. He asked me what I was doing and I tried to answer but no words came out.

He grabs my nose between his fingers, twists it, and says, “I got your nose.” I ran back home holding my nose and I told my mother I was never doing that again.

GUY PUGLIA:
Hunny Gannett—we first met him at the Smokestack Lounge—introduced Vic and me to the ponies. Vic at first couldn't really understand the
Daily Racing Form.
Now, Hunny—who knew if he could even read at all, but all them little numbers and symbols he could make out just fine. And he knew some of the jockeys too. He'd say, “Vic, stick four to win on Sugar Grove in the third” and then two minutes later Vic, who'd lost his shirt already on the daily double, now had his shirt back plus a few new pairs of pants.

You know what happened one time? Me, Hunny, and Vic was at the track, at Belmont. And someone recognized Vic! It was the first time. This guy walks right up to us and says, “Hey, you sing with Don Leslie!”

And Vic says to the guy, “Yeah, I sing with Don Leslie.”

The guy says, “My fiancée really likes you.”

“Oh yeah?” Vic says. “She here?”

The guy points and says, “Yeah, she's over there.”

And there about fifteen seats away is this broad with curly black hair in a black cloth coat with a red scarf on, a very pretty girl, and I see Vic's face turn white. And so does hers.

“Why don't you go over and just say hello?” the guy says. “Her name's Patty. It'll make her day.”

And Vic says, “Just beat it, pal. Okay?”

And this idiot just stands there—he doesn't put two and two together. And I see this girl panicking; she sees Vic and is petrified he's gonna come over with her beau. Everybody knew what was going on except that idiot. Hunny picks the guy up, walks him over, and plunks him down in his seat right next to Patty, who's still shaking with the fear of gettin' caught.

“Thanks, Hun,” Vic said.

ED J. McDOWELL [former editor at
Ring
magazine]:
Hunny Gannett was the prototypical club fighter of the thirties, forties, and fifties and was barely qualified to make anyone's Bum of the Month Club. After he became a saloon keeper, restaurateur, raconteur, actor, bon vivant, and game show panelist, people often forgot he'd been a prizefighter. Tracking down his record as a heavyweight is a futile enterprise as he fought under so many
noms de guerre. Tiziano “Big Red” Vecellio, “Batsy” Patsy Conklin, “Mighty” Moses Klein, “Kaiser” Willy Mueller, et cetera. If there was an ethnic group, he carried their standard. His father was Hungarian, from just outside Miskolc, and the last name, now lost to us, was anglicized from something similar to Gannett, but with many
z
's,
s
's, and
k
's in it. Hunny's real first name was Atillio and from that we get Hunny, as in Atilla the Hun. Some people make the artful leap: boxing, the sweet science, sweet, honey, Hunny. But that's a flight of fancy. Hunny comes from Hun.

[He lost] to Max Baer, he lost to Primo Carnera, he lost to Joe Louis, he lost to Tonys Galento, Zale, and Mutti, and innumerous other Tonys long forgotten. One night he lost by a third-round knockout on the undercard in Paterson, New Jersey, and then fought under a different name two fights later and was knocked out again. It should be pointed out that his father had moved from Hungary to Oakburn, Manitoba, before Hunny was born; the lad grew up in a house on 31 Queer Street. It was supposed to be Queen Street but there was a misprint on the map and the name stuck. As every fight fan knows, “Queer Street” is ring argot—as is “spaghetti legs”—for when a boxer is punched so silly, he has no idea where he is, who he is, or why. It should also be pointed out that Gannett, when his fight career was over, briefly endorsed a macaroni product called Spaghetti Legs. The box that this pasta came in featured a small picture of the retired prizefighter, with his boxing gloves on, holding up a plate of steaming leg-shaped noodles.

Hunny
won
fights too. He won them savagely, brutally, sometimes very suddenly. Sometimes not. There was no artistry, no pugilistic panache, no Fred Astaire élan—he floated more like the
Merrimac
than he did a butterfly and on those occasions when he stung it was more like Big Bertha than a bee. More Marquis de Sade than Marquis of Queensberry.

He killed at least four people in the ring. A palooka from Evanston, Illinois, named Joe Pollo he dispatched to his maker with one left hook in the ninth round. It was the first and last punch Hunny Gannett threw the entire fight. By that time his own face looked like so much cold spaghetti and tomato sauce. One punch and the Evanston Assassin was dead. The Chicago
Tribune
wouldn't run the photo, not because Pollo had died, not because of how slack his body looked laid out on the canvas, but because Hunny Gannett's face—the face of the victor, mind you—was such a nauseating eyeful.

Grayling Greene, the columnist, once wrote that Hunny Gannett left more brain tissue, his own and others, on canvas than Reubens did paint. I told Hunny that line at his saloon and he had a clever comeback line; he said, “Did I once have brain tissue, Eddie?”

GUY PUGLIA:
People think of Hunny and they see his big head with these big dark eyes and those car-tire lips and the Frankenstein forehead . . . and
they think of his saloon. Or they think of him on the panel of
What Is It?
They didn't know Hunny
the man.

One time in the fifties, Vic, [valet] Joe Yung, me, and Hun was at Santa Anita. Vic put $100 across the board on a ten-to-one horse Gerry Kent was riding. The horse wins and we all go to the winner's circle and then the barn to meet Gerry Kent. Now Kent recognized Vic of course and he recognized Hunny but he didn't know me and Chinese Joe from Eisenhower and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. So I shake Gerry Kent's hand and he says to me, “Hey, you should be a jockey.”

I said to him, “I ain't no jockey.”

And he says, “I think I'm taller than you. You should ride horses, pal.”

I said to him again, “I ain't no jockey.”

He says, “There's something wrong with being a jockey, is there, pipsqueak?”

I make a lunge for him . . . we're on the ground and I'm punching him in the face and he's trying to bite my hands, him in his lime green silks and yellow beanie with a red hoop. Gerry goddamn Cunt. He was pretty strong—the sonuvabitch rode race horses, for Christsake—but he wasn't no fighter. I'm trying to get at his face and suddenly—
whoosh
—Hunny lifts me off him by my collar, with one hand yet, lifts me right off him.

Then Hunny says to Gerry Kent—and you gotta remember that when he spoke he sounded just like a cow if a cow could talk—he says, “Okay, Gerry, now eat some slop.”

“Huh?” Kent says. And there's some mixture in a big square bucket that the horses eat, it looked like mud and quicksand and oats and I-don'tknow-what.

“Eat the slop.”

He had no choice. So we all watched as he stuffed his face full of about five pounds of this horse meal. He couldn't race the rest of the card 'cause of the weight gain.

And that's Hunny Gannett.

You know, Vic was booted out of the Leslie band because of the Kid Burcham fight. It had nothing to do with singing.

Hunny was fighting at Sunnyside Garden. Kid Burcham—he looked like Tab Hunter but with real solid muscle—he was from Ohio and worked out at Pops Deegan's Gym on Amsterdam Avenue. Pops was a great trainer, he knew boxing inside and out and would take on raw street toughs and train them, but the word was that he was a
finocchio
and had flings with a few of the fighters in his stable.

Hunny had gotten me, Vic, Don Leslie, and Ruth Whitley tickets. Ringside. And Leslie had shown up in his white tie and tails. All immaculate-like.

When Hunny seen this Kid Burcham in the ring, his eyes lit up, and
those were dark eyes he had too. People called Burcham the Akron Adonis and the Ohio Apollo. He didn't have so much as one nick on his face. And Hunny was just a big bohunk galoot, you know? He wanted to smear the Akron Adonis like jam all over Queens Boulevard.

ED J. McDOWELL:
Gannett was paid a hundred bucks to lose. Al Pompiere's son-in-law, Lou Manganese, had walked into the gym where Hunny trained and said to him, “How'd you like to lose Friday night in Sunnyside?” Manganese wasn't merely being curious and it wasn't really a question, and he tendered the fighter a C-note to prove it. “And I want you to lose by a decision. No dives, Hun,” Manganese said. Hunny promised him, “Okay, Lou, I'll be on my feet when the bell sounds.”

It was one of the worst sanctioned beatings ever inflicted in a so-called civilized society. Kid Burcham hit Gannett with everything he had and when he ran out of the things he had, he cashiered his own future for more. Burcham walloped him, he thrashed him, he kept coming and coming. Not once did Gannett hold his fists up to defend himself. By the fifth round both of Hunny's eyes were swollen shut, and there was a paperback booksize cut running along his forehead. His lower lip had to be stapled back on. The referee had fashioned a makeshift headdress out of a towel to protect himself from the bile spraying onto him from Gannett's face. Hunny didn't move, he just stood there and took it. In the seventh round he was being hit by his own teeth; he'd lost two teeth, which were now embedded in Burcham's glove, and each time Burcham punched him it was like a mallet coming at him with two razor blades attached.