Funnymen (24 page)

Jesus, Lulu was in the next room!

• • •

SNUFFY DUBIN:
I now had Leo Silver at WAT as my agent. Finally having an agent was a very big deal for me, but nothing was lined up. Leo also handled the Louis Bingham Orchestra, who had a radio show on the old Mutual Network, sponsored by Brylcreem. Billy Ross was their pianist, by the way. So I'm having lunch with Leo Silver at Lindy's one day and at the next booth are Arnie, Ziggy, and Vic, who Leo had seen a few weeks before at the White Lake Lodge. Enter through the door: Lou Bingham and the show's producer, Marty Miller. Lou and Marty sit at our booth and before you know it, Ziggy and Vic are going to audition for the Bingham radio show. Which was a fucking
lock:
you just knew they'd get the job. This happened in the blink of an eye! I hadn't even taken one bite out of my cheesecake yet! So they're standing and shaking hands all around and I'm sitting there like a lonely dill pickle, thinking, Hey, what ever happened to
me
?

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
The Shadow
and
The Falcon
were on Mutual, and the Macy Twins, from Lenny Pearl's show, had a program on Mutual too. Those two made the Andrews Sisters look like ravishing beauties. Years later, the Macys got an offer to do television, but they wisely retired instead. Cheated the hangman, you could call it.

Lou Bingham came up to the White Lake Lodge with Marty Miller and a few Brylcreem execs and two days later we're signing the paperwork in Herb Blackstone's office. We were signed for about twenty shows; Ziggy and Vic were guaranteed $250 each a week. Worldwide American took out
their usual 12
1/2
percent, those
gonifs.
Sally and I were coproducers of the show, but, to be honest, we were only responsible for the fifteen-minute segment that Ziggy and Vic did midway through the show, which was an hour long. What Lou Bingham did, played, or said had nothing to do with me. I didn't even listen to the show, other than to Fountain and Bliss, and I was getting paid a hundred a week.

Lou would play a few tunes, interview a few people who were usually plugging something. Lou was a little bit of an Arthur Godfrey type, except he played the clarinet and not the ukulele, thank God almighty. About half an hour into the program he'd turn the mikes over to Ziggy and Vic. Vic would sing a number with the band too. Sometimes Ziggy would interrupt the song but more often than not it was sketch comedy.

Now, this is what separated Fountain and Bliss from Abbott and Costello, who hadn't yet appeared on fat Kate Smith's radio program, and Martin and Lewis. The sheer
range.
Costello was always Costello, the dumb sap. Lewis was always the Melvin character, the pansy. Groucho and Chico had a radio show—it went straight into the toilet—and Chico was always stuck, like the Dutch boy's finger in the dike, doing the Italian thing. But Ziggy could do it all. It was like Gleason later on, who did Reggie Van Gleason, the Poor Soul, Ralph Kramden. Ziggy could do the German cook, the Hungarian scientist, the Japanese gardener, the Yiddish tailor, he could do the pansy, a Li'l Abner rube. They had this one slow-burn routine where Vic has just married this girl, played by Zig, and now they're having their very first meal as a couple and Vic realizes,
Oy vey iz mir,
my bride chews really, really loud! (Where they got this idea, I don't know.) And every sketch was so, so smooth. Vic's timing—nobody was better. Every single pause and note he'd hit on a dime.
On a dime!
You could practically hear him doing double takes on the radio! It was a revelation.

DOMINICK MANGIAPANE:
We could hear the Bingham Brylcreem show in Codport . . . there was a local Mutual affiliate in New Bedford. It came on after
The Lone Ranger
. It was very funny stuff, very out-of-control-type material.

Every week now, something would come in the mail from New York. From Vic. My sister [Lulu] and I would get in screaming fights . . . you think just 'cause she was five foot two and slim she couldn't scream? The voice she had on her! Still does.

I would tell her, “Lu, I don't trust Vic. I don't like him and I don't trust him.”

And she'd hold up a pair of shiny leather gloves and see, “Look at these! How can you not trust him?!”

“Just because he sends you gloves from Wanamaker's he should be
trusted? He used to cheat at cards, he used to cheat at pool, he even cheated at Go Fish!”

“Yeah, but he don't ever cheat me, Dommy!”

“Oh yeah? How do you know? How do you know he don't cheat you? You're here, he's maybe wining and dining all kinds of girls on Broadway.”

“Vic ain't like that,” she said.

But I couldn't tell her what I knew. I couldn't tell her that Vic had banged Joe Ravelli's wife and Virgillio Marchi's wife and Angie Crosetti's mom and he'd banged big Patsy Jones with five other guys one night under the gazebo or that he'd probably bang a dead trout if it was wet enough. I didn't want to break her heart.

“All right, Lu,” I'd say. “Whatever you say.”

When she told me that she was going to marry him, I couldn't bring myself to congratulate her. She was telling me how happy she was gonna be, and all I could remember was him going at Fatsy Patsy under the gazebo, that look on his face.

DANNY McGLUE:
Snuffy really was Ziggy's only pal around the time of the Bingham show. Hunny and Vic would go out together, Guy Puglia too. Ziggy wasn't invited and I don't know if he'd have gone out if he was. See, Vic and Ziggy didn't have common interests. Vic loved boxing, baseball, and the track but Ziggy just liked the theater and comedy and movies. He'd try to get Vic to go to Barney Arundel's Blue Beret Cafe with him to see so-and-so or such-and-such but Vic would rather go to the fights. Also, Vic had started “seeing” Constance Tuttle, who was on the Consolidated [radio] Network, on
The Murphy's Oil Soap's Edmund Sligh's Peerless Radio Theater
show.

GRACE WHEELWRIGHT [actress; friend of Constance Tuttle]:
I was Connie's roommate for many years, until she married [Broadway producer] Jake Nealy. Connie was a classically trained actress, had been educated as a girl in Switzerland, and then studied drama in London in her late teens. Well, that's what she told everybody. She told me that a few of her British pursuers had included Ivor Novello, Michael Redgrave, and Charlie Chaplin. And Robert Donat too. He had terrible, terrible asthma and Constance said that when he made love to her he always made sure to have three tanks of oxygen near the bed. By four in the morning, supposedly, the tanks were emptied and Robert Donat's valet had to deliver three more.

Connie, did you know, almost landed a big part in Alfred Hitchcock's
Lifeboat,
a part which was simply perfect for her. But Tallulah Bankhead edged her out. “Oh well,” Connie said to me, “at least I don't have to kiss William Bendix.”

She was a bit of a prima donna. She lied about her age and used to dress in ridiculously opulent furs and jewels, most of which were borrowed. Edmund Sligh, who wrote, produced, directed, and acted in the Murphy's oil soap show, did not pay Constance what she thought was even half her due, but I suppose the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds combined would not have been able to do that either. She really did think she was the cat's meow. For someone who spent the first twelve years of her life in Columbus, Ohio, Connie did sound veddy, veddy British. I mean, she'd only studied at RADA for a year! (If that.) But you would have thought she was Dame May Whitty the way she rolled her
r'
s.

When Vic entered her life she was about forty years old. It's hard to say. When she died, even the
Times
was unsure about her age, something Connie would have loved. (Although she would have preferred getting more than two paragraphs on the obituary page.)

“I've just met the
most
delicious young boy!” she told me one night.

“Oh really, have you, Connie?” I asked, actually imagining an eight-year-old.

“He's on the Louis Bingham program, darling. Have you ever heard it?”

I told her I did not listen to such fare, something which she was already aware of.

“Tell me, Gracie,” she asked me, “have you ever been kissed by a dago?”

The veal I was eating nearly slipped into my lungs.

“I beg your pardon, Connie?”

“This boy is as Italian as zucchini and just as delectable,” she told me. “He can't be more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Has the blackest hair you've ever seen. Why, it's almost
blue
! Like an eggplant! And such shoulders.
Mmm-mmmm!”

She told me that she'd recently met him at Schrafft's. They'd chatted very briefly after being introduced and then he asked for her phone number.

“I find this very intriguing, Grace,” she said with a long, deep puff. She used an incredibly ornate and long cigarette holder.

That night in our apartment, she turned on the Bingham show, and while I heard the audience laughing at Fountain and Bliss, I stumbled on a small crumpled piece of paper. Written on it was a phone number. It was Watson 349 or something or other. And written over the number were the words “Big tasty Vic.”

So I knew right away that she'd actually asked
him
for
his
phone number!

GUY PUGLIA:
Sure, I met Constance Tuttle a few times. You remember that
Three Faces of Eve
movie, with Joanne Woodward? Well, this was
Two Faces of Connie.
She'd come on all prim and proper and regal-like but by her fifth old-fashioned at the Colony [restaurant], she'd be saying something like, “Vic, let's go into the bathroom now so I get in just one lick of your exquisite cock.” I heard that! In five minutes she went from sounding like the Duchess of Kent to a whore working the London docks.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
That nutty broad would've worn a sable coat, a silver fox stole, and chinchilla panties on a dune in the Sahara during a heat wave camped near a large space heater. And I thought she was going to pry my pupils out with that épée of a cigarette holder she wielded.

[Vic was] missing our usual 10:00
A.M.
meetings at Vigorish. He'd either show up an hour late or he'd call in hungover and sometimes he didn't even bother to call.

“Latch, where's my better half?” Ziggy said to me one morning in my office.

“I have no idea,” I said to him.

“This is approachin' three days in a row,” he says.

“I'm aware of it,” I said.

“I ain't ever missed one meetin', Latch. You know that. Not one.”

“I'm familiar with it.”

“I mean, if Vic wants to keep standin' me up at the altar, that's okay. I really don't mind. But Norman and Sidney, they're kinda fed up to their pharynxes about it. They're saying it's really unprofessional, Arn.”

“I'll talk to Vic about it.”

“It's this Tuttle dame. A guy fucks a broad in a fur, he forgets about all his friends and responsibilities. That ain't right.”

“True, true,” I said. And it
was
true and still is.

Now, this was the first time Ziggy had ever talked about Vic to me, either good or bad. The thing is, I'd been thinking that Ziggy had
enjoyed
it without Vic at the meetings! Because you had about seven people and now Ziggy was the main center of attention.

Not five minutes later Sid Stone is in my office. With Norman White.

“What's up, guys?” I said.

“Vic is missing a lot of meetings lately, you know,” Sid says.

“I'm aware of it.”

“He seems to have lost interest.”

“I'm familiar with it.”

“Good,” Sid said. “'Cause I don't know how you're dealing with Ziggy.”

“With Ziggy?”

Norman broke in and said, “Ziggy said that you were fed up to your pharynx with this sort of behavior.”

“Hmm. I see, I see.”

They strode out of my office. For some reason I picked up the phone . . . but then I realized: I got nobody to call about this.
Who do you call?!
Oh, the forlorn, lonely life of a manager! So I hung up and probably put my hands through my hair, which, not coincidentally, was at that precise second just beginning its long, irrevocable journey into disappearing.