Funnymen (32 page)

“Nah, it ain't like that, Vic,” Ziggy said. “Who are you looking for?” I asked him.

“Ah, no one. I was just curious.”

The next day he came into my office and said to me two words: Dolly Phipps.

“You want a private investigator to find Dolly?” I said.

“Yeah. I been thinkin' about it.”

“Why?”

“'Cause, you know, she didn't like Ziggy Bliss of Fountain and Bliss and of El Mo and the Chez Paree. She liked
me,
Harry and Flo's kid.”

“But what about Jane White? She likes you!”

“Ah, I dunno about that.”

“Oh come on. I've see her face light up when you're around.”

“It's prolly just still lit up 'cause I got her into the Copa. Or 'cause I bought her some shoes. Dolly wasn't like that.”

I told him that I didn't know anything about tracking her down and that I also didn't think it was a wise thing. From that day on, though, he always told me before he did a show in a club or a theater to keep an eye out on the crowd, to see if maybe Dolly Phipps was out there somewhere.

Out of nowhere he said now, “I miss my parents sometimes, you know that?”

I told him that I missed them too.

“I think they'd be really proud of their sonny boy,” he said.

“Of course they would!”

“I just wish I could talk to 'em sometimes. I wish I could help them out. I could put 'em up in a really great spread now, Sal, with a great car. Remember that old jalopy we used to bounce around in in the mountains? I could get 'em a Cadillac today. They could live on Fifth Avenue and Flo could be wearing chinchillas and diamonds.”

“I don't know if that would've made them happy,” I said. “Just seeing you happy would have done that.”

“Who says I'm happy?”

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
The war is almost over. The Russians are politely tapping on the door to Hitler's bunker, the Americans are in France and Germany, and Mussolini and his lady friend have already been hung up on a meat hook. It's the bottom of the ninth and the Triple Axis powers are down ten–zip.

The two gray pinstripes and fedoras are in my living room.

“Have you ever been to New Mexico, Mr. Latchkey?” the shorter G-man said.

“Nope,” I told them.

“Are you at all familiar with the terrain or the climate?”

“Can't say as I am, my friend. Why? What gives?”

“We want Fountain and Bliss to perform for the men there.”

“The
men?
Soldiers, you mean? What, after we get through with Hitler we're invading Arizona?”

“Not quite.”

I couldn't get anything else out of him. He told me he wanted Fountain and Bliss to travel to New Mexico after our Detroit engagement—the boys were to put on one show. And then the kicker: he offered twelve grand.

When someone makes an offer, you ask for more. This has been going on since before Adam. Even if you don't need the dough, even if you only go one measly cent over what they offer, you ask for more. So I'm gonna toss out an asking price of twenty grand and hope I can get him up to fifteen before I shake that gray pin-striped hand of his. So I say twenty grand and brace myself. But he says, “Okay, twenty grand, it's yours.” I immediately wished I'd said twenty-five.

“Look, guys,” I said, “when all this is over, can this be told to the public?-Can Joe Doakes and Jane Doe find out about all this?”

“Yes,” the short one said. “When it's all over and only we tell you the time is right.”

They go to the door and tell me transportation will all be arranged from Detroit. I ask him, “Why us? Why not Abbott and Costello or the Marx Brothers or Hope and Crosby?”

“Mr. Clyde Tolson adores the act. And so does Mr. Hoover.”

I say to him, “Where in New Mexico is this joint anyways?”

“It's in a place called Los Alamos, Mr. Latchkey.”

• • •

CATHERINE RICCI:
My brother Sal died at Tarawa. A shell got him. It's so sad. In his hand they found the crumpled-up piece of paper with all those addresses on it, the list Papa had given him. Even though those people were half a world away, Sal was holding it. He must have been terrified before he got hit.

[Carmine] was back from the war. He was an army cook in the south of England. The only fighting he ever saw was when a few GIs were mad at him for burning their flapjacks, he said. We'd moved to New York City, to Brooklyn, and Carmine and another guy had opened up a bakery on Bleecker Street in Manhattan.

I used to read all the papers, the
Post
, the
Herald Tribune
and the
Daily News
and the
Globe.
I was up on all the latest gossip. So I should've been warned when a neighbor told me one day that Ed Sullivan, on his radio show, had made a reference to Vic, about his avoiding the war. The next day Walter Winchell, who hated Ed Sullivan and vice versa, picked up the baton.

He was writing all sorts of garbage about a certain sleepy Italian crooner who'd paid a surgeon to have his toes amputated because he was too much of a pantywaist to serve his country. He never mentioned Vic's name but
anyone
could tell who it was! He said this singer can stand up on his own eight toes and entertain with his round partner at such nifty niteries as El Morocco and the Copacabana, but when it comes to standing up for his country, he suddenly loses his balance.

It was outrageous!

Lulu had heard it too because [Winchell] had said the same thing on his radio show. She was furious. We were on the phone for ten minutes. She was saying that Vic should get Hunny Gannett to work Walter Winchell over, to bash all his teeth in.

Carmine walked in and I said to Lu, “Look, I've gotta go.”

“Cathy?” Lu said in that husky, raspy voice of hers.

“Yeah?”

“How
did
Vic lose them toes anyway? Do you know?”

I told her I had no idea and said good-bye.

• • •

GUY PUGLIA:
Straccio had sliced the whole thing off. The skin, the cartilage. Gone. So now the rest of my life I gotta walk around with a bandage over the thing.

I was in St. Vincent's Hospital recovering from an infection—Hunny was there every single night, he'd spend hours with me, and Ernie Beasley visited a few times, so did Arnie and Estelle. Vic come once. Once. He brought me a bottle of scotch. We talked bullshit for a while, then he says, “Maybe it'll grow back, Gaetano.”

I told him, “It ain't growin' back.”

He said, “But I cut the skin on my finger, the skin always grows back.”

“It ain't growin' back, Vic.”

I didn't tell him that the reason it was cut off was 'cause Straccio was asking for a piece of Vic Fountain. I didn't tell him that.

The papers and magazines . . . they was all talking about how Vic got out of the draft. The Hotel Astor and another joint even canceled their shows. You had lots of soldiers comin' back from overseas, some of 'em in real bad shape. When Winchell was hinting that Vic paid a doctor to amputate his toes, that didn't go over too good.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Vic told me he wanted to get Hunny to work Winchell over. I said, Hey, what you do to Hilda Fleury's butler, that's fine.

Hunny can work Hilda over too, for all I care, that anti-Semite old bag. But not Winchell. That won't wash.

“You think you're gonna solve every single problem,” I asked him, “by working someone over?”

“If not solve them,” Vic said, “then come real close.”

“Look, I got something better for you. After the Detroit trip, you're gonna perform a service for your country like you don't know what. They'll be so much positive ink on this, it'll be like both your missing toes won Congressional Medals of Honor.”

But I couldn't tell him exactly what it was because I didn't know.

JANE WHITE:
Ziggy and I went to Le Pavillon for dinner. I'd bought a new pair of shoes at Saks and had my hair done. He kept me laughing the entire time—I almost couldn't eat. He walked me home and, yes, we kissed for the first time. But he was a gentleman . . . he didn't try anything further than that. I knew he was going to the Midwest to perform and I said to him, “Well, I guess I'll see you in a week or so.” But he said it would be two weeks. He had someplace else to go, he told me. “Oh, golly!” I said. “Where?” He shook his head and said it was classified. “Is it Hollywood? Are you going to Los Angeles?” He pinched my cheek and said some words of endearment in Yiddish, something like “such a
goyishe shayne punim
you got on you.” I told him I didn't like him talking like that. We kissed again and then he left.

• • •

REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV [soldier, employee of Vigorish, Inc.]:
I was General Emmet “Woody” Woodling's adjutant in Washington, D.C., and also at Los Alamos, New Mexico. General Woodling served as a liaison between the Trinity group in New Mexico, the Manhattan Project in Chicago, and General George Marshall in D.C. My father, I should mention, was General Reynolds Catledge III, who served in Patton's Third Army and who'd graduated second in his class at West Point and served under General Pershing in World War I. His father and grandfather had both attended West Point and I too had attended—I did not fare well there—and, though I urgently requested an appointment in the European Theater, I was instead assigned to General Woodling in Washington. I dearly wanted to see combat, to test my mettle, but my father used his position and connections to keep me stateside, and I was relegated to a degrading, humiliating desk assignment.

To my dismay, I was little more than a secretary at times, or a valet. Occasionally I would have to get the general's shoes shined or bring in his pants to be pressed, and I found myself sewing buttons onto his shirts. The
general was married to Lucinda Hodge, whose father was Elihu J. Hodge, the department store magnate, but General Woodling was carrying on a rather indiscreet affair with a woman named Betsy Cunningham, whose father worked in a Rexall drugstore as a stock clerk. One of my duties, on the evenings when the general would be occupied with Miss Cunningham (which was practically every evening), was to keep Mrs. Woodling company. A dowdy, tedious woman in her late forties, she and I would dine and attend the theater together or have tea in her living room. To this day I thank God that it was tea I was drinking and not liquor—otherwise I would have fallen asleep in her company. On the other hand Betsy Cunningham had once—or so she'd informed the general—won a beauty contest in North Dakota; now she was twenty-three years old, twenty-seven years the general's junior, and was a shapely blond tart with wavy golden hair and succulent Cupid's-bow lips. And here I was, twenty-four years old, spending World War II, not leading a group of men at Monte Cassino or on the Rhine, but playing canasta and gin rummy with this dull, white-haired dowager in frumpy flower-print dresses and a pearl necklace.

None of my requests to be transferred were granted. I tried everything but was stymied by my father every single time. “The lad will not last a day in combat,” he told my mother.

I made numerous arrangements to fly the general into and out of Chicago and New Mexico, always on army air force planes, but was never told precisely why he was going there. He would receive phone calls from Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and even from physicists Neils Bohr, Emilio Segré, and Ernest Rutherford, and I would have to put them through, but I had not the vaguest notion as to why they were calling. General [Leslie R.] Groves, who supervised the Trinity program for the army, was a frequent caller. One afternoon Betsy Cunningham was in the general's office, which adjoined mine, and the door was locked. One can only imagine—which I did, often—what was going on in there. Dr. Oppenheimer phoned and informed me it was urgent. I buzzed the general and relayed that to him but was brusquely instructed to tell Dr. Oppenheimer that the general would call him back in a half hour. I did as I was told. Through the door I heard the sounds of Miss Cunningham and the general arguing. And then not arguing.