Funnymen (35 page)

Sure enough when we get back to our hut, there's twenty grand in cash in a GI duffel bag waiting for us. Right on my pillow. Vic and Zig took fourteen, gave me and Hunny three each. All in all, not bad for a day's work.

Cat woke the four of us up at 3:00 in the
A.M.
that night. “Everyone has to go,” he said. “Right now. Orders from the top.” We piled into a jeep and drove off into the blackness.

We slept in the jeep most of the way, with Cat driving . . . I remember there not being a cloud in the sky . . . there was nothing but white and blue stars, big, close, and twinkling. The next morning we were in Albuquerque, billeted to some small cheap hotel that was as hot as a goddamn steambath. We slept some more. That was the day, it turned out, that the first atom bomb was tested. We weren't allowed to see it. Years later, Vic and Ziggy were still griping about that. The nerve of the army, right?

After a day in Albuquerque, Cat drove us to Las Vegas, our first time there. We stayed at the Last Frontier. I said to Cat, Hey, if you ever get out of the army, look me up. And I offered him a grand. “I'm not permitted to accept this,” he said, so I said, “Are you permitted to accept two grand?” Apparently that fell within the regulations of army conduct, and the next day we were on a train to Chicago and then we were back in New York.

I get a
Post
one day and the first thing I read is Bud Hatch, who'd always been a friend to the act, weighing in on Vic's toes. Bud was on our side but, still, it was annoying that this thing was still being bandied about. (It was probably his wife, the so-called Scintillating Lady; she got half of the scoops, wrote half the column, bore half the grudges, and drank all the gin.) A day later, the short gray pin-striped guy called me on the phone at the office and I asked him, “Hey, you promised me publicity! When can we break this thing to the press?!” He said that soon I could tell everybody everything. Where are the pictures of my boys with all the science guys? I asked him, and he told me that in good time I'd get the pictures. “I get my talent out there in the middle of that desert to play a show for a bunch of stiffs and I can't even tell the press!” I barked out to him. “That's absurd!” He said, “You
were
paid twenty thousand for it.” And that shut me up good.

Weeks passed. More negative press. More canceled engagements. John Perona at El Morocco is even starting to come on all queasy-like. Vic comes in one day and he's fuming; he reminds me that I'd so much as promised him he'd come out on top with this thing. I said to him, “I
so
much as
promised you, but I didn't promise you.” I told him to hold tight. But frankly, Teddy, I was starting to get antsy about it too. That maybe we'd been had by Uncle Sam.

“Lulu and I are getting married,” Vic then told me.

“When?”

“We ain't set a date yet.”

“So Vic Fountain is finally going to settle down, huh?”

“Probably not.”

Snuffy Dubin comes back stateside and he's
begging
Ziggy for a spot on the radio show. Snuffy was broke; he really hadn't made
bubkes
as a comic yet, don't forget that. He said to Ziggy and me, “Just give me two minutes a week, come on.” Ziggy wouldn't budge. He said that it wouldn't blend in with the rest of the show. I felt for Snuffles, I really did—he'd had a tough time in the marines—but I just couldn't alienate my talent. And Vic, he didn't care, so he weighed in with Ziggy.

Then I pick up a
Daily News
one morning and there it was. We'd dropped the big one on the Japs. A super-deluxe martini shaker, all right, that's what it was. The second I read that I knew this was what they'd been cooking up out there in the desert. Ha! Arnold Latchkey from the Bronx—a guy who'd been reaming spit valves just a few years before—eyewitness to history.

So I go into my office in the Brill Building and what's on my chair? An envelope with 350 eight-by-tens of Fountain and Bliss with Oppie and Fermi and “Steady” Eddie Teller. And the tower in the background. The tower, my friend, that they dropped the first bomb off of! The short gray pin-striped guy calls me and says to me, “Okay, Mr. Latchkey. You can let her rip.”

The next three days Bertie Kahn and I called up every newspaper, every magazine, every single sonuvabitch with a pencil and a piece of paper. We sent out the photos. It was all over the place, it was everywhere. They started referring to the act as the Atomix Comix!

That schlemiel at the Capitol Theater calls me up one day and says, “So, Arnie, can we get the boys to open up a movie for us now?” And I said to him, “Oh yeah, sure we can. They'll open up a movie.
At the Paramount they'll open up!”
And I hung up on that schnorrer.

Then one day Murray Katz at WAT phones me and says the words I've been having wet dreams of hearing for years.

“How would Ziggy and Vic,” he asks me, “feel about taking a little trip to Hollywood?”

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
We played the A-bomb card for all it was worth. Talk about nuclear fallout! This was radioactive manna from heaven, the way it fell right into our laps. Ziggy and Vic did a weekend at the Riviera in New Jersey and posed with Albert Einstein for an Associated Press fotog; the
Daily Mirror
ran the picture and captioned it “Nuclear Nuts.” Bud Hatch mentioned an upcoming engagement in Philly at the Earl Theater and said something like “Do not miss this atom-splitting, sidesplitting act.”
Variety
called the act “radioactive ridiculousness.”

Lulu came up to New York one weekend and she, Vic, Estelle, and I had dinner at Delmonico's. Lu had her engagement ring on—the thing was bigger than her head. Now, Estelle knew all about Vic's reputation with the girls—as our receptionist, she often had to juggle three girls at once for him—and she and I had talked about their upcoming nups. “It's just not going to work, honey,” she'd warned me, and I said to her, “Some of these shiksa wives, though, they know something's going on with their husbands and another woman, so they just look the other way.” And Estelle said, “But Vic's with so many girls, she'll run out of other ways to look.”

Vic says to me at Delmonico's now, “So this Hollywood trip, does this mean we don't have to do the radio show no more?”

“You got meetings at Columbia, MGM, Galaxy, and Paramount,” I told him, “but for all we know Harry Cohn, Louis Mayer, and the rest of 'em will toss you headfirst out their offices and into the raging Pacific surf. I wouldn't count any chickens before they're hatched.”

“I tell ya, movies seem like a swell racket, Latch. You do two pictures a year, the rest of the time you're just playing golf or taking it easy.”

“There's some difference between playing golf and taking it easy?” my darling, clever, beautiful wife-to-be cracked wise.

Now, I'd sort of picked up that Vic wasn't thrilled with the radio show. He was still showing up late for rehearsal. When the
ON AIR
sign lit up, he'd go great guns, full speed ahead—that was the professional in Vic. But to get to the professional in Vic, you sometimes had to peel away about twenty layers of unprofessional, like an onion. He once said to me that the
radio show was like having a real job and he didn't get into show business so he could have a real job.

“You know, Ziggy
is
the other half of the act,” I told him. “He likes the radio show.”

“Yeah, he would,” Vic said with a sneering curl of the lip, upper right side.

When I told Ziggy about the Hollywood trip, you know what the first thing he said was? “Uh-oh, I hope this don't mean we have to give up the radio show.”

• • •

GUY PUGLIA:
I was embarrassed. It never bothered me being a short guy 'cause I knew that even though I was a half-pint I was the toughest guy wherever I went. Hunny and I would go at each other sometimes, just goofin' on each other, and he had a foot and fifty pounds on me and I could lick him sometimes, he was so slow. At Barney's Beanery [in Los Angeles] one night I got into a scrap with a big, strong Hollywood stunt guy and they had to pull me off a him so I wouldn't kill him. But what embarrassed me now was the nose. I stayed in St. Vincent's a week longer than I really needed to, 'cause I just didn't want to go outside with the little bandage over my face. Here I am, this little piece of scrap iron, and I'm worried about how fuckin' pretty I look.

The day I went home I even made sure to have a cab waiting right outside the hospital. So I'd only be outdoors for a second.

When I was in the lobby about to run for that taxi, who do I see but Hunny Gannett. He gives me a big bear hug and we pile in and head home. He's got a bottle of champagne and by the time we made it to our spread on Fifty-sixth Street we were smashed.

“Everything's gonna be all right, Gaetano,” he says to me in the car. “You'll see.”

“I don't know, Hun,” I said. I didn't tell him I was embarrassed. I didn't talk about them type things.

“You're gonna be okay,” Hunny says. “Nobody's gonna pick on you. Anybody does, the Hun'll pulverize 'em.”

He took a long swig of the bubbly and I says to him, “Hun, you got a fight tonight, don't forget.”

He opens the door to the apartment and the first thing I see on the couch is Vic Fountain, my
paisan
. He's got two naked broads with him, one on each side and both of them with red ribbons around their necks like they was gifts, and there's a bottle of champagne on the coffee table. “Take your pick, you little sawed-off sonuvabitch,” he says to me. “Or take both. It's on me.”

I figure, what the hell. Why not? I didn't have a girl. I didn't ever have a girl. I picked the shorter one, the brunette, and we went into the next room.

About the only time Vic and I ever talked about this whole nose thing was a few days later. We was at Hunny's saloon. He says to me, “Guy, I know some serious people. Connected guys. People who can take care of Straccio.”

Now this was something that I had no problem with. I says to him, “Take care of him? Like how?” I wanted to make sure we were on the same wavelength here.

“Like, he don't ever bother nobody ever again. Like, he don't even breathe another breath of Codport air. These guys, they do something, it's clean. No dirt ever sticks to you or me. They're professionals about it.”

I ask him who he would go to and he says either Joe Adonis or Al Pompiere. Now, I didn't want to tell him that Straccio had told me that Joe Adonis owed him a favor, 'cause I didn't want Vic to ever know that I'd lost my schnoz 'cause Straccio was threatening to lean on Vic. Right? So Joe Adonis is out. I says, “Awright, see what Al Pompiere can do.”

A day before he and Ziggy hop on the train to Hollywood, I'm at the same table with Al Pompiere and Vic. Big Al says we need another chair because his son-in-law is coming any second to join this get-together.

“Big movie star, huh, Vittorio?” Pompiere says. “Once you get an eyeful-of all them juicy Hollywood actresses you'll never come back east.”

“It can't happen a minute too soon, Al,” Vic says.

“And I want to hear all about when it does. That Lana Turner . . .”

Vic then puts his arm around my shoulder and says, “Look what that fuckin'
stronzo
did to my buddy, Al. Look at this. Fuckin' guy rips his nose off with a blade. Someone does that to a buddy of yours, what do you do to him?”

Al Pompiere says, “He rips my buddy's nose off, he loses his
coglioni.
Case closed.”

“That's what I'm saying. Al, can you take care of this guy for me?”

Big Al is mulling this over and I'm starting to think, What the fuck is this powwow about? Vic doesn't really want to get anything done.

Al says, “Vic, you asked me what I would do and I told you. But now you want me to take care of your business? Why don't
you
rip this guy's nuts out like I would? I mean, why did you bother even asking me? Where does Al Pompiere fit in?”

Vic got all red in the face. He liked to come on like a tough guy, but he was no tough guy. He just liked to hang around with 'em sometimes.

“What do I get out of this?” Al says. “The thrill of knowing that I had some small-town rodent hit three hundred miles away? I need these jollies? I'm a businessman, Vic.”

The door swings open and this big shadow approaches. It's Lou Manganese, Big Al's son-in-law. Lou the Ape. He sits down and joins us and Big Al introduces us.

“You and I met once but you maybe don't remember, Vic,” Lou says to Vic.

“I meet a lot of people I don't remember, Lou,” Vic says. “I'm an entertainer.”

“Nah, but you hardly was one when we met. It was at this shithole dive in Camden. Herbie's Duplex. You pretty much told me to get the fuck lost.”

“Vic,” Big Al said, “you're not so stupid you'd do a thing like that, would you?”

“At that time I might have been,”

Vic said. “Vic wants us to kill someone, Lou. Like we got nothing else to do?”

They both break up laughing and Vic begins to melt quicker than the ice in his scotch. They recover from their laughs and Big Al says to me, “Hey, did anybody in your first grade class call you a sissy or maybe steal your Spaldeen? Maybe Vic wants me to cut that kid's head off.” And he and Lou are breaking up again.

“Ain't you guys ever heard about sticks and stones?” Lou the Ape said. We walked out of there and Vic was in a rotten mood. “If I was Errol Flynn they'd have done it for me,” he's fuming.

I felt like an idiot. Al Pompiere was right.

“I'm gonna take care of this thing for you, pal,” Vic said to me.

It would've been nice if every once in a while, instead of getting me a whore or trying to have someone knocked off, he asked me how I was doing.

• • •

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
We took a train to Chicago and did a week at the Rio Cabana there. Packed every night. Tons of ink. Billy Ross was now the official arranger and bandleader. From there it was down to Ohio, they played Cleveland and Cinci, then the Statler in St. Loo. Did a walk-on at the old Tunetown Ballroom. Killed 'em. Ovations, laurels, moolah galore. We were moving like a steamroller, like the Green Bay Packers in their prime. Then on to Kansas City to do a few dates there. The Fountain and Bliss Express is rolling like thunder. This is the farthest west the act's ever been and we're a combination of Lewis and Clark and Napoleon and we're taking over the world. The best thing: In Chi, Lenny Pearl was playing the old Palace Theater a few nights while we were there and he couldn't even half fill the place. That thrilled Ziggy to no end.

From K.C. it was all aboard the
Santa Fe Chief.
Hollywood or bust.

Bertie Kahn told me that Morty Geist at Bursley-Bates in Los Angeles would be doing the publicity. This guy was a kid, he was twenty-two years old
tops,
but he was a prodigy, like Mozart with a telephone. The kid had handled Rin Tin Tin and look at all the fuss he created out of a German shepherd and, from what I hear, not a particularly intelligent one either. What Bertie failed to mention to me about Morty Geist was that the kid was a nervous wreck. You remember
What Makes Sammy Run?
Well, this was
What Makes Morty Tremble?
But he was a whiz kid and he knew his business . . . it just pained people to see him working, that's all.

The train pulls into Union Station in Los Angeles and the only thing we're expecting is maybe a redcap to help us with our trunks. We're ready to step off the train when I hear this racket—it was a roar, like the ocean at high tide. Ziggy even said to me, “What the hell's goin' on, Arn?” And Vic says, “Maybe some big celebrity is here or something.”

But it was for us!
Well, not really. Morty Geist had rigged it all up. He'd gone to UCLA and USC and told every coed there that Hank Fonda, Cary Grant, and David Selznick would be casting a movie at the station and they needed young kids who screamed very loud for an upcoming motion picture. There were a thousand kids there and to this day I don't know if my eardrums have recovered. Meanwhile Morty had told the press that the hubbub would be for Fountain and Bliss! So you had fotogs from the
Examiner
and the [Los Angeles]
Daily News
and people from the
Hollywood Reporter
and
Variety
and they all reported this hysteria was for Fountain and Bliss, who simply forged their way unmolested through this screaming mob. And then we got in our taxis and headed for the Hollywood Plaza Hotel.