Funnymen (3 page)

Suddenly this handsome boy with a mop of dark, curly, and almost preternaturally bluish hair was being pushed by friends into the aisle. He was, as they said back then, “togged to the nines.” He brushed back his hair, adjusted his tie—which was turquoise, I believe, to match his eyes—and walked toward the stage. He already had that now-famous Vic Fountain walk, that combination swagger and strut, a little bit like John Wayne. Very cock-of-the-walk, I must say.

As he got on the stage I heard a sighing and some sort of commotion—the girls in the crowd really thought that this boy was very handsome.

We didn't even have to nudge him toward the mike . . . he just walked up and grabbed it. I turned to Jarvis and Teddy; we had no idea if this dark, handsome boy could sing, but we were quite sure he had charisma.

The band started up “Ain't She Sweet,” and we began singing. Vic mouthed the words for a few bars but then he realized that, as he was only inches in front of the microphone, everyone could tell.

He stepped back a few feet and whispered to me, “What do I do?”

“You sing,” I whispered back sternly.

So he began singing.

Vic was a natural baritone who made himself into a tenor. He sang
“under” the lyrics, behind them. He phrased a shade behind the beat and got beneath the lyric. It was instinct, I suppose. Either that or he didn't know the song we were singing. While we sang, he sang around us . . . it was almost scatting, one could say, but was, I guess,
lazier
than that, more Perry Como than Ella Fitzgerald.

He was the only one that night who did an entire song with us; it was “Always” by Irving Berlin. He got applause.
We
got applause.

The next night there was an open mike again. The first person on the stage was none other than the boy from the previous night. He showed up for all five nights, each time dressed better.

By the fifth night he had memorized the two songs he performed with us. Within a month he was part of the act.

GUY PUGLIA [friend of Vic Fountain]:
“What would you think if I became a singer or something?” Vic asked me. We were shooting eight ball at Kitty's Korner Klub on Perch Street.

“You?” I says. “Vic, you ain't sung since that candy-ass choir. And you didn't even sing
then.
”

Well, he proceeds to tell me about that trio, the Three Threes, and I says, “Yeah, but come on . . . what about the actual singing part of it, when it comes down to making the words come out your mouth in the form of some kind of melody?” He waves his hand at me and says, “Hey, anything Bing Crosby can do, I can do.”

And I understood that. Vic was six-one, had big shoulders and muscles . . . and you ever see Crosby? He looked like a twig that someone hung a tweed hat on and handed a golf club to. So to me that made sense.

There was only one voice teacher in the town. His name was Enzo Aquilino and he'd sung opera in Milan decades before. Or so he said. Walking past his house you sometimes heard opera playing on the Victrola, pouring out the window. It was beautiful. But sometimes you heard his students tryin' to sing opera and that wasn't so beautiful.

CATHERINE RICCI:
My mother called Mr. Aquilino “the little skunk” because of his silver and black hair. Well, he simply refused to give any lessons other than in the operatic style. But Mamma knew that was not the kind of singer Vic wanted to be. “Okay, okay,” my mother says to him and then leaves. Twenty minutes later she's back with her rolling pin. Aquilino locked his door but she busted in through the window and started smashing all his framed Enrico Caruso pictures to pieces. “You teach my boy to sing or I'll eat your piano!” she tells him.

Now, I slept with [my sisters] Connie and Dolores, in the room next to
Vic's. Vic was the only one of us who had his own room. Ray and Sal shared too, upstairs.

One night I hear yelling and I rush to Vic's room . . . I had no idea what was going on.

I couldn't believe what I saw: Papa had pinned Vic to his bed with one arm—Vic was flailing around like crazy, trying to break free. And my father was jamming a big haddock down Vic's throat in one piece. He was just shoving it down Vic's mouth.

“You wanna sing, sissy?” Dad was hissing. “
Femminuccia!
Big-band sissy boy want to sing? Trying singing now, eh? Sing now. Sing like that sissy boy Crosby! Sing now!”

In five minutes the whole haddock from the head down to the tail was down Vic's throat.

But Vic kept at it. Every day he took the lessons.

Oh, did I mention that the haddock was still alive?

HUGH BERRIDGE:
Vic asked me for a way to reach us in Boston, and I gave him the number of our manager, Jack Enright. I did not think we would ever hear from him.

On the train back to Boston, Rowland Toomey started imitating the way that Vic had vocalized, the sonorous, oily swirling around the melody. Teddy Duncan turned to him and said, “Rowlie, perhaps we
could
use another voice. He certainly did have a presence.”

“But we're a trio,” Rowlie said. “We've always been a trio.”

And as the world knows, soon Vic climbed aboard our little caravan, and we became the Four Threes.

• • •

SEYMOUR GREENSTEIN:
When a teacher called on him and he didn't know the answer, Ziggy would give his wrong answer in cockamamie accents and dialects, like Yiddish, Chinese, German, Japanese. And so there was a lot of laughing because he
never
knew the right answer. We were once reading
Romeo and Juliet
aloud and when it was Ziggy's turn, he really hammed it up. I don't know if he got one word right but it didn't matter, not with that hilarious British accent. He was the class clown to end all class clowns.

SALLY KLEIN:
It was summer and the Blissmans were booked for the Baer Lodge for July. Ziggy was, I'd say, seventeen. He'd never seen them perform. They'd never taken him on the road. But this time—for whatever reason—they brought him to the Poconos.

DR. HOWARD BAER:
I was at the desk when they came in. Ziggy looked nothing like his parents. He was a teenager, had bright red hair and a round nose, and he looked like a brand-new basketball.

The three of them walked into the lobby and approached Allie Gluck, who worked the front desk. Allie indicated Ziggy and asked, “Harry, what's this?”

Ziggy squirmed in that babyish way he used in the act and he pinched his crotch and said, “
I'm
this.” The way he said it . . . you had to be there.

I remember thinking it was strange: Harry had booked only one room. So you had a husband, a wife, and a seventeen-year-old staying in one room. Not even a suite.

Allie said to Ziggy, “You sure you don't want a room for yourself?”

“Yeah, I'm sure,” Ziggy answered him.

Allie asked him, “Are you scared of the dark?”

“Oh yeah. I'm a-scared. Very a-scared. But not of the dark.”

Allie asked, “Of what then?”

“Oh, lots and lots of things,” Ziggy said.

By now you've got two dozen or so people in the lobby and they're all paying attention.

“So you want to be with Mommy and Daddy?” Allie asked.

Ziggy looked at Harry, made a weird face, then he looked at Flo and made the same face.

“On second thought,” he said to Allie, “I think I'm a-scared of them too.”

I'm not kidding when I tell you that Ziggy Bliss already had about fifteen people in the palm of his hand.

When Harry's face lit up, it looked like it was the first time that had ever happened.

It was a double bill. Harry and Flo were opening up for the Beaumonts. You had a hot weekend in July and a packed hotel. The Beaumonts could have been the next Fred and Adele Astaire or Vernon and Irene Castle. They were in
Staten Island Serenade
with George Raft but I think that was it, film-wise. They really were such magnificent dancers.

The routine the Blissmans were doing was that Harry is jealous because Flo, he finds out, had been working as a small-size model behind his back and, it turns out, she's making more money than him. They're five minutes into it and—no exaggeration—half of the crowd had filed into the lobby or was in the bathroom.

All of a sudden Ziggy comes onstage. It was like
that
—he was just there. His first time ever.

Now most people in the club had never seen Sigmund Blissman before.
They'd never seen anyone who
looked
like Ziggy Blissman. They couldn't tell if he was five or fifteen or fifty-five years old. Right away there's a big hush.

He's on the corner of the stage. One hand is nervously clutching the curtains and the other is holding an ashtray.

“What are you doing here?” Harry asks him. And he's apoplectic. Coming onstage during his act . . . you simply don't do that.

“I'm watching the show, Poppy,” Zig says.

“Go upstairs!
We're performing!”

“Don't look like much performing to me, Poppy.”

People are tittering already, they're coming in back from the lobby.

“Zig,” Harry says, “your mother and I—”

“What? You're finally gonna get married?” Ziggy says.

Ziggy lifts up the ashtray and then lets it drop. And it breaks. He says, “Hey, Mommy, now you don't have to sing tonight.”

The place is in hysterics by now.

Ziggy goes into the audience, grabs an ashtray. He breaks that one too and says, “And now you don't got to sing tomorrow neither.”

“Sonny, every ashtray you break will come out of our paycheck,” Harry says.

“But you work for free, don't you, Pops?”

“For free?”

“Yeah, you always say that Rosie Baer don't pay you nothing. Hey, Ma, can I dance with Mary Beaumont tonight?”

“You?”
Flo says. “With Mary Beaumont? Dance? Why, you can hardly walk!”

“Oh, I can walk,” Ziggy says. And then he breaks out the physical gags, he tries to walk but it's as though he has his ankles tied together. He reels around the stage, goes into the audience, falls down, even starts jumping from table to table. “See, Ma, I can walk. I wanna dance with Mary Beaumont!” Whining like a three-year-old.

“Now now, Ziggy,” Harry says, “that's what Billy Beaumont is for.”

“Yeah, you're right, Poppy. They're the best pair there is in dancing. And you know what? Billy Beaumont, he ain't bad neither.”

Flo sang the closing number and Zig did this thing, as if he was going insane from the noise, covering his ears and reeling around like a boxer getting his brains knocked out.

It didn't end there. After a twenty-minute break, Billy and Mary took the stage. Ziggy let them do a number and, well, he couldn't resist. He bounced onto the stage during a tango and asked Billy if he could cut in. Now, poor Billy, he could not say one word onstage because of the mincing, effeminate manner in which he spoke. So he just shook his head. Ziggy whipped out a pair of scissors and cut Billy's bow tie. Then he started flitting
around like a butterfly for a few seconds and grabbed Mary and began to tango, if that's what you want to call it, with her.

Billy would have murdered Ziggy, and Mary would've grabbed those scissors and castrated him. But in show business, I guess, if the crowd is going with it, you go with it too.

So Mary and Ziggy did a tango and during one dip he buried his head in her cleavage and when he got up out of it, his eyes were bulging out . . . it really looked like they were going to pop out of their sockets. He careened around the stage and bounced off the walls. When he finally “recovered” himself, instead of dancing with Mary, he started dancing with Billy instead.