Funnymen (22 page)

Let's say Ziggy and Vic were booked into Ciro's or the Blue Beret. Or the Copa. I get off the phone with Jules Podell and tell the boys, “Okay, guys, you're booked into the Copa for a week and you're making twenty grand.” And Ziggy would say, “How's three thousound, Latch?” And I'd look over to Vic and he'd shrug. I'd say, “Sounds good.” Vic didn't really care how much I made—sometimes I don't think he even cared how much
he
made—but I always made certain the figures were square with Ziggy. He knew the numbers like most people know their own birthdays.

SALLY KLEIN:
That whole week it was standing room only at Heine's. The same people were coming back too, night after night! We had to turn people away.

I met with Arnie in his hotel room. We had to talk to Rosie, Jerry Milton, and the rest. And we had to do it before they read about Ziggy and Vic in
Variety, Metronome,
or
Billboard.
The plan was to play it down. Think about it: You had Ziggy, who'd once frozen like a Popsicle onstage alone, and you had Vic, who bounced from lousy band to lousy band and had never struck it big. It was, on paper, a disaster. This was like me calling up and saying, “Guess what?! Lizzie Borden and Rasputin are teaming up to
do a tap dance act!” Arnie and I hoped that everybody would run for cover when they heard that.

It worked. They ran.

Rosie told me, “They're yours!” I reminded her of Jerry Milton, how he'd pulled that Platonic ideal contractual thing, and she said, “I don't know about that and I don't know who this Vic Fountain fella is. Sally, they're all yours! Take 'em.”

I called Jerry in New York and then Joe Gersh and Murray Katz. Joe and Murray knew all about Vic and weren't too sad to see us take him off their hands. Arnie then called a lawyer he knew in New York and all of them—Rosie, Jerry Milton, Gersh and Katz, even Don Leslie!—gladly washed their hands of the matter. It was like we were trying to borrow a car and they thought it was a Corvair and said, “Here. Please. Don't bother returning it.” But it turned out to be a solid gold Rolls.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
It all happened quickly, like surgery. Sally handled Ziggy's people, I handled Vic's. Sally had quite the business acumen for such a young girl. Her old man manufactured girdles, so maybe that was it. And I was no slouch either. She'd make a call and she'd write things down that the person on the line was saying and I'd write down things to her, and then she'd do that to me when I was on the phone. It was very symbiotic, let me tell you.

My one worry was that one of these people was going to say, “You can have Vic in his entirety in perpetuity forever but you'll have to pay me ten grand.” Now, well I knew that the act I was sitting on—Fountain and Bliss—was going to make ten grand easy.
Easy!
But we didn't have that kind of money just then. As a matter of fact I didn't even have any kind of money just then. So when I'm on the phone and talking to these people, in the back of my mind is: Where am I gonna get this dough so quick? There's my brother, but he don't have that kind of cake and we're even—he don't owe me any favors anymore. There's my old man, but he don't have that kind of cake either and besides we barely talked. I can't call him up and say, “Hey, so how is everything? Lend me ten grand to buy out Ziggy Blissman and Vic Fountain.” Even I had some sense of decorum.

Sally and I agreed that, in toto, the ceiling would be ten grand all around. That's the most we could go, was buy out Vic Fountain and Ziggy Blissman for ten grand.

So now Don Leslie and I are on the phone and he says, “There is the subject of money, of course, Mr. Latchland.” The man called me Latchland, Lapland, Bletchley—everything but Latchkey, that
momzer!
And I said, “Yes, Mr.
Wesley,
there is that touchiest of all subjects known to men.” And he says, “I should hope that negotiations between us are conducted
in a cordial yet frank manner, Mr. Lakeland.” And he's probably thinking, I'm not letting you rob me blind, you dirty stinking Jew! So I say to him, “Why, naturally, Mr. Westfield. We are both gentlemen of the old school, are we not?” I'm getting ready to throw out a dollar amount, how much I am willing to pay to own, if you will, Vic outright. He says, while all these numbers are swirling around in my head like so much confetti, “How does two thousand dollars sound, Leakey?” And I say, “Capital!” And exactly while I'm thinkin', Now where can I rustle up two grand? Don Leslie says, “I'll wire the money to you at Heine's first thing.”

Sally got a grand and a half from Rosie Baer too. So, not only did we not have to part with $10,000 that we never did have, we actually wound up
making
$12,000 from everyone!

• • •

TONY FERRO:
The first time I ever in my life heard of Ziggy Bliss was when Ray Fontana tells me that Vic is now partners with him. The name meant
niente
to me. I say to Ray, “How long do you think this relationship is gonna work out?” and Ray says, 'cause he knew Vic's track record, “I give it a maybe a week, tops.”

CATHERINE RICCI:
I'd just gotten engaged to Carmine [Ricci] when Vic told me the news. He called home to tell Mamma first but she was working at her fortune-telling parlor. Vic told me he was no longer a singer and I asked if he wasn't that, then what was he doing, playing pool? And he said he was “entertaining.” I said to him, “You're entertaining but you're not a singer? What are you doing,
juggling
pool balls then?” He said, “I'm kind of in a comedy deal, you could say, with this other fella, this Jewish guy.” I said to him, “You want me to tell Mamma this? 'Cause I'm not doing it.”

I dropped in on Carmine at his bakery and told him what Vic had told me. Carmine had heard of Ziggy Bliss because he'd heard him and his parents on Lenny Pearl's old radio show. “I didn't know Vic was funny at all, Cathy,” he said to me.

“I guess he's going to be the one that's not funny,” I said to him. But it occurred to me: Vic was always a really funny kid. He was sometimes better at being funny than he was at singing, as a matter of fact. People were always calling him a wiseass.

RAY FONTANA:
Somehow it became my duty to tell my mother. Probably 'cause everyone else was afraid to.

I went to Haddock Street where the Madame Violet fortune-telling parlor
was. This wasn't goin' to be easy—imagine you want your kid to go to medical school and now you hear he's waiting tables. I climb the stairs—this place had beads, pictures of the Virgin Mary, candles all 'round—and there's Lulu working the till and three old ladies sitting on a couch waiting to see Mamma.

“What's going on, Ray?” Lu asks me. Jesus, I was so worked up about how was I gonna break the news to my mother I'd forgotten that Lulu was going to be there too.

“Lu,” I say, “it's about Vic but don't worry. He's okay. He's giving up the singing a little and he's gonna be in a comedy act.”

Lulu said to me, “But I thought you said Vic was okay.”

She brought me in to see my mother and it was just me sitting between the two of them on a couch. Not a position anybody'd ever wanna find himself in, believe me . . . I'd have rather been gutting scrod at that second.

When I broke the news Mom picked up her crystal ball and tossed it across the room. If the women on the couch hadn't ducked in time, I'd still be pluckin' the glass out of their cheeks.

CATHERINE RICCI:
Me and Ray borrowed Sal's car and we drove to the Catskills. From how Carmine had described it, I was envisioning Ziggy like an adult wearing diapers and with a pacifier. I was picturing all kinds of things. I imagined Vic dressed in a clown suit, I imagined Vic and Ziggy looking like Laurel and Hardy but
both
in diapers. Everything ran through my mind.

I'd never been to Heine's before, or to any of those places . . . Grossinger's, the Concord, Marx's, Kutsher's. This was a whole new world for me. I got out that car and people were looking at us like we just stepped out of a flying saucer.

RAY FONTANA:
Pop would've said something like,
“Mazzi Cristo,
wallto-wall.” Christ killers all over.

[Cathy and I] checked in and we were tired . . . it's a very long drive from Codport to the Catskills. We get our rooms and then this guy in the lobby, he was wearing a Heine's uniform, tries to joke around with me. But I wasn't up for no jokin' around, right? . . . I wanted to go to my room and wash up and then see Vic. This guy's doing all sorts of jokes and stuff but I'm not playing along. Jesus Christ, I can't tell you how out of place I felt. I say to this guy, I whisper to him right in his ear, “Leave me the fuck alone or I'll mash your fuckin' nose down into your throat.” And he decided to leave.

Cathy and I are walking through the lobby and we see this poster; it said on it something like
HILARIOUS SENSATION
or
SENSATIONAL HILARITY
or
something. There was a photo of Vic and one of Ziggy Bliss, except he was still Ziggy Blissman then. I gotta admit: Alls I did was take one look at that picture and I started giggling.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
“Fountain and Blissman,” it occurred to me right away, not only did not have a ring to it, it had a built-in thud. It dies on the tongue like ten-year-old cottage cheese, am I right? Now, the straight man usually comes first: Burns and Allen, Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello. Of course, you've got Laurel and Hardy but Laurel was British and they also drive on the wrong side of the road. Rowan and Martin. Rossi and Allen [
sic
]. I did try Blissman and Fountain and, you know, that sounded better . . . but still, the funny guy comes second.

I called up Ziggy's bungalow and said, “Hey, how'd you like to change your last name?” I stated my case and, as I did so, in the back of my mind is: Uh-oh, this is going to be our first quarrel and the kid is going to throw a fit and then it's all over. (That day, Sally had warned me about his temper and his fits.) But he said, “Arnie, I think that's a real good idear. Ziggy Bliss it is. I'll have Sally handle the legal stuff on that real pronto-like.” End of phone call.

I thought, Jesus, this road is really going to be smooth. It ain't even gonna be a road, it's gonna be more like a path.

SALLY KLEIN:
For the first year they were together, I remember hearing people mistakenly refer to the act as “Fountain of Bliss.”

• • •

DANNY McGLUE:
It was the most sensational act I'd seen up to then. I'd seen Berle, [Phil] Silvers, Jimmy Durante, Cubby Cavanaugh, Burns and Allen, Benny . . . but even they after five minutes could get so predictable. The first time I saw Ziggy and Vic together—it was at Heine's—I had no idea where it was going. You ever been dreaming and you
know
you're dreaming and you're thinking, Okay, where is this going to end? Do I let it end or should I wake up? That's what the act was like.

It wasn't easy for me to get backstage . . . it was so crowded. Oh, you know who was there? Bud Hatch from the
Globe.
And there were all kinds of people, it was bustling, like the stateroom scene in
A Night at the Opera
. So I shouted over to Bernie Heine, “Bernie, tell Zig that Danny McGlue's here!” He shouted back, “Okay, Danny, but there's lots going on back there!” That SOB waited a good ten minutes before he went in to Ziggy's dressing room. And you know, they'd used some of my gags and songs, Vic and Ziggy had.

Finally this tall guy in powder blue with Coke-bottle eyeglasses, a long face, and rubbery lips comes out and says, “You're Danny McGlue?”

I tell him I am and I ask who's he and he says he's Arnie Latchkey.

“Look,” he says, “I know we used some of your material and we're willing to remunerate you for this. If you contact a Miss Sally Klein at—”

“Look, I'm not here for remuneration,” I said to Arnie—I didn't even know what the word meant, I just knew that I wasn't there for it.

A minute later I'm in Ziggy's dressing room. He's got the white towel over him and the ice is dripping down. And instead of a bottle of scotch, there are two bottles of champagne in two buckets.

“Danny, this is Vic Fountain,” Ziggy says. “Vic, all those jokes that didn't get no laughs—Danny wrote those.”

Vic and I shook hands and I told him I thought the act was socko. Someone pours me a glass of champagne and I start to tell Vic the whole Danny McGlue and Ziggy Blissman saga. I'm halfway through and he says, “Uh-huh,” then veers away and starts talking to a blonde. I don't know if he caught a word of what I was saying. If he did, he sure didn't seem to care.

GUY PUGLIA:
I was back in New York, sparring for a few bucks a day at Gleason's Gym and at Pops Deegan's and waiting tables some nights. I'd spar with Hunny, who had fifty pounds on me, which was a joke. He'd go thirty seconds and then want to take a break to throw back ten hamburgers.