Funnymen (29 page)

“She won't do that, don't worry. After she told me the news, I introduced her to Hunny.”

“Gotchya.”

“See!” he says. “It's a good thing we're payin' him, ain't it?”

“Yeah, it's terriff,” I said.

I asked him how Lulu was doing and when he was gonna make an honest-woman out of her, and he joked, “Who's Lulu?”

I made a few calls and this little problem was taken care of. And it wasn't some seedy back alley job either, done by some creep with a coat hanger; no, this was done by a Park Avenue surgeon who did the thing on his coffee table in his West End Avenue apartment.

Vic thanked me profusely, said it wouldn't ever happen again, although he added that he wasn't completely sure about that.

SALLY KLEIN:
“You hear what Vic did?” Ziggy asked me one day. “He got some broad in a family way.”

“Really . . .”

“He should be more careful, don't ya think?”

He was trying to create trouble. He was trying to manipulate. Always.

“Wanna know who the girl is, Sal?” he asked me.

“Honestly? No. I don't.”

We were supposed to be talking about the radio show. Bormann beer was about to become the new sponsor. We were expanding to a half-hour, getting a new time slot. But we'd been coming on after
The Dr. Jones Liver Elixir–Enzo Bugatti Piano Hour
and this was like poison for us. We talked about that for three minutes, then . . .

“You ever meet any of Vic's friends? From Lobstertown or wherever he's from?”

“It's Codport. Yes, I've met a few,” I told him.

“What do you think of Guy Puglia?”

“I like Guy. He's a little rough but he has a really sweet heart. Why?”

“What do you think of Tony Ferro? You met Tony ever?”

“I've met Tony. And his fiancée, Maria,” I said. “She lives in Flatb—”
“

Hey,
that's
the girl Vic got in trouble!”

I said nothing for a few seconds, then said, “That's very bad. Does Tony know?”

“Nah. No idear.”

“Okay, Ziggy,” I said. “I've got work to do.”

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
An engagement at the Capitol Theater would have been
massive
for us. Three or four shows a day, a band, Ziggy and Vic opening for a movie, which if my memory serves me well was
Sergeant York
with Gary Cooper. Bertie had some stunts arranged; he had arranged for a hundred screaming bobby-soxers, he organized for there to be a hundred nurses on call in case anyone laughed so much they'd have a heart attack, there were going to be a dozen ambulances parked outside. This would've been
the
big push, the thing that put us over the top, into the cream of the crop, the elite. And what happens? The Japs somehow have the chutzpah to ruin this shindig by bombing Pearl Harbor. It's like Emperor Hirohito himself didn't want Fountain and Bliss to strike it big!

The guy who booked the Capitol calls me up on December 8th and says, “Arnie, the boys can't go on.”

I said, “Look, that's Hawaii. That's fifty thousand miles away. This is Broadway.”

“We can't do it. It's off.”

“But life's gotta go on,” I told this idiot. “Look at England. They got pummeled, pelted, and pounded in the Blitz . . . you think the London theaters canceled their shows?”

“I don't know.”

Neither did I.

“Arnie, when this whole thing is over,” this moron said, “we'd love to have Fountain and Bliss. We won't forget you.”

“Yeah, bub, and I won't forget you either!”

I bid the imbecile a sweet adieu and thought to myself, Okay, the hell with this schlemiel. We'll play the Paramount then, if they want us.

DANNY McGLUE:
I couldn't stand [Ziggy] nosing around, always asking Arnie, asking Vic, asking Estelle about us. Sid Stone would tell me, “He's
asking questions about you and Sally again.” I also didn't like it when he tried to get me to go to the hookers he frequented. “They really know how to treat a guy,” Ziggy said. “No thanks,” I told him. “Well,” he asked me, “where else are you gettin' it from, Danny boy?”

He kept trying to fix Sally up with men who really had nothing going for them. Waiters and ushers and lawyers. Sid would say to me, “You're gonna have to tell him one day, Danny.”

“How can he object to us?” I asked Sally.

“Well, you're not Jewish.”

Now, I'd worked at the Catskills for several summers. That was my life. I grew up with Jewish kids. I worked in an office with Arnie and Sid and Norman. “I'm more Jewish than he is sometimes!” I told her. “Give me another reason.”

“He's meshuga. That's another. I don't think he wants me to get married before he gets married. He's lonely, he wants me to be lonely too.”

Sally and I realized that Ziggy had no leverage here. Everybody knew that he had his 10:45 call girls and he knew everybody knew. So how is he going to tell Sally who she was allowed to see?

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Danny came to me one morning and told me he was going to tell Ziggy about him and Sally. I told him that, not only did I understand, not only was I behind the move a hundred percent, not only did I think it was the the ethical, intelligent thing to do, but that I didn't want to be within a radius of thirty miles when it happened.

So they told him in his apartment, a few days after Pearl Harbor. Sally went over there with Danny. The second he opened the door and saw those two lovebirds, he knew. Ziggy didn't erupt, there was no Mount Vesuvius. No yelling, no throwing chairs around, none of that.

Dissolve. Next day. My office. Ominous Smith-&-Wesson-like click sound is heard from door. Ziggy says to me, “Danny gets the ax or I walk.”

“I think we should talk about this.”

“No talking. He's out.”

Danny was so important to us, you got no idea. I'll tell you how important. When I went to Vic and told him about all this, Vic made a pun. He urgently wanted to keep Danny. He knew he was crucial to the outfit. Vic said, “But Latch, Danny's really McGlue that holds us together!”
I mean, Vic had made this stupid pun!

I asked Ziggy—I tried to be reasonable, which can be a real disaster when you're dealing with entertainers—“Why is this so important to you? What does it matter?”

And he said that what we had was a business. It was radio, it was the
Catskills, it was the nightclubs, maybe one day, God willing, it'd even be movies. And we couldn't have people messing with business.

Now this made sense to me except for two things. One: most of the time we were all together, it hardly seemed like a business. We'd be just screwing around, trying new material, goofing off. This was not a board meeting at General Motors, you have my utmost assurance. And the second thing was, I had begun seeing Estelle, my own secretary, by then.

Danny nipped it all in the bud. He offered me his resignation. I accepted it. I wished him luck and told him I'd do anything to help him get a new job. He wants me to call up Murray Katz at Worldwide, he wants me to call Fred Allen or Jack Benny or Lenny Pearl, I'll do it. I'll call up John Perona at El Morocco or Sherman Billingsley, I'll call up anybody with a telephone or who lives within a mile of a phone booth, I told him. But instead the next day that patriotic
shmendrick
enlists in the navy.

CATHERINE RICCI:
[My brothers] Sal and Ray enlisted, Ray into the army and Sal the marines. Pop was against it, but they would have been drafted anyway. My father didn't want them killing Italians, he didn't want them getting killed by Italians. He gave them both addresses and names of relatives to look up in Messina, Palermo, or around Calabria, just in case they found themselves there and wanted to desert. “You need help,” he said, “you find these people.” It didn't happen though. Ray wound up in France, although he didn't see much action, despite what he may tell you. And Sal fought in the Pacific.

They wouldn't take Vic on account of his feet. I have no idea how he lost those two toes . . . it was in the news that it happened while he was picking up some lobster traps as a kid, but Vic wouldn't go within an inch of a lobster, dead or alive, Newburg or thermidor. There were rumors he'd shot his toes off to avoid military service, but that's just not true. My other brothers went, so why wouldn't Vic?

SALLY KLEIN:
Do you think Ziggy would've lasted one day in a training camp?! To do one push-up would've taken him all day and even then he probably couldn't finish it. Arnie had him go to two or three doctors—they were going to tell him what his status would be. They took one look at him and said, “Kid, don't worry. They won't take you.” And they were right. Ziggy said that for him they invented some new category. He wasn't too short, he wasn't too fat, he wasn't too crazy . . . he was just too
round.

They did this routine on the tours they did to sell war bonds. Vic is “interviewing” Ziggy.

Vic asks him: “So how come you ain't in the army, Zig?”

Ziggy said, “I'm Three-F.”

Vic said after a perfect pause, “
Three-
F?”

Ziggy said, “Yeah, Three-F.”

“Well, I've heard of Four-F before but—”

“Three-F, Vic. Three-F.”

“Well, I've gotta ask ya,” Vic says. “What's that stand for anyway?”

And Ziggy said, “Fat . . . funny . . . and
'fraid!”

When they did that routine in the Catskills, though, they made some changes. The third
f
was for
faygeleh.

Oh, did you know that Bormann beer was dropped as the sponsor after a season? It turned out that the family who owned the brewery was related to Martin Bormann, who was a bigwig in Hitler's crowd. So we got rid of them—they weren't the nicest people in the world anyway—and Dickinson's witch hazel sponsored the show.

GUY PUGLIA:
Can you see Vic in a foxhole? Fixing his hair after a kraut bullet whistled over it and mussed it up? Or on a battleship? Like he'd ever get close to the fuckin' ocean?

I tried the army, I tried the marines, and they both turned me down. Too short, they said. Like being short has anything to do with not being tough? I really wanted to go. Someone told me to apply for the navy, tell 'em I'm from Codport and that I've been on many boats in my life, fishin'. And that I should do it in New Bedford, not New York. And this fella told me to put these lifts in my shoes. I did it . . . it added a few inches and I was in.

And then . . . well, I guess you wanna know how this thing happened to me.

I don't like tellin' this story, not one bit. But I will.

I'm two days from going to Virginia to report. I'm in Codport and I'm hangin' around with the old crowd and my old man too, who's now got cancer. I'm going to the pool hall, and I'm eatin' hot dogs and gettin' ices from Joe Ravelli on the boardwalk and seeing Lulu and Dominick and Tony [Ferro], who was now married. I'm in a bar and in walks Rocco Straccio. Tells me he wants to have a little powwow with me. Those goddamn black gums and teeth of his. Well, that scumbag didn't scare me no more. He was just a fuckin' hood. I've lived in New York, right? I know Hunny and I've met Al Pompiere, Frank Costello, Angelo Galvanese, and Louis Lepke. I've even met Bette Davis, for Christsake! What do I need this goddamn hood for?

He tells me he wants a cut of Vittorio Fontana's pie. I tell him I don't know anybody by that name. He says Vic Fountain is Codport's leading export now, other than cod. I tell him Vic ain't interested in small-town hoods like him. It's dark in this bar, the only light is coming from the clock, I'm just trying to enjoy my beer. Straccio says he wants me to talk to Vic, if
not he can make a phone call to some people in New York—he tells me [gangster] Joe Adonis owes him a big favor. He says it isn't fair that this guy comes from this town and doesn't put anything back in it. Straccio wanted his tribute, that's what he wanted. “Must be a lot of dough in those big fancy New York clubs,” he says. I said, “You want a piece of Vic's pie, you can have a piece of me first, scumbag.” That's just what I said. Then he put his hand on my nose and laughed like he used to when I was a kid. He says, “I got your nose,” and laughs. Ha ha ha, he goes. He pulls his hand away and there's blood squirting all over the place, it's squirting like it's comin' out a kid's water pistol. It took me a few seconds before I felt it—I just saw the squirts first. I looked at his hand and he's got all the flesh of my nose—it looked like a thumb—in his hands. And a razor blade too. That fuckin' sonuvabitch fuck had sliced my nose off. And on account of that, I never got to serve my goddamn country.