Funnymen (36 page)

Morty met us there, in the lobby. This kid was just on a different plane. His mind raced a million miles a second and I think so did his pulse too. “It went off good, didn't it, at the station?” he said. And I told him it sure did. Even with that good news, he's biting his nails down to the knuckles.

SALLY KLEIN:
When I first met Morty, at the Plaza, I just knew that this was a doomed person. I didn't think this kid would make it past thirty. I used to tell him, “Calm down, Morty,” and he would say, “Sally, this is me being calm.”

Estelle's roommate, Shirley Klein, had told me in New York to look up her older brother Jack in California. He was a recent widower and was a real-estate lawyer. I said, “Why should I look him up?” and Shirl said, “Because, Sally, he's a really nice man.”

And he was. So I married him.

DANNY McGLUE:
It wasn't a good time for me. I got out of the navy and I hopped from apartment to apartment, radio show to radio show. Murray Katz at WAT told me he couldn't represent me, and there was no doubt in my mind that that was on Ziggy's instructions. Why else would Murray drop me like I was a hot potato schmeared with cyanide? But Murray passed me over to Joe Gersh, and he would get me these radio jobs. But they weren't any fun. I wrote for Dinah Shore, for Arthur Godfrey, for Len Coles. The pay was okay but it wasn't like the old days with Ziggy, Vic, Arnie, Sid, and Norman. That was home for me.

Snuffy told me that Zig and Vic were in Los Angeles meeting producers and directors and, well, you know how you can get really happy and really miserable at the same time? That's how I felt. I was happy for them—for Sally too, of course. But I really wanted to be with them.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Hank Stanco, our man at WAT in L.A., set up the whole agenda. The first meeting was with Harry Cohn at Columbia. Now, I was under the impression we'd be meeting with one of Harry's underlings. But Morty Geist calls me in the morning and he's a nervous wreck and he says, “The meeting is now with Harry! His brother Jack has seen the act at the Copa and Harry wants to meet the boys personally.” That's when I got scared.
Harry Cohn? Personally?
This guy was vicious like Gandhi was peaceful! I say to Morty, “Are you sure we should do this?” and he says, “Sure I'm sure.” I say, “Morty, what's that knocking noise I'm hearing now?” and he says, “Those are my knees, Arnie.”

Columbia sends a car for us, and let me tell you, for the first time ever, the boys are nervous. They're both fidgeting. “What's gonna happen here, Latch?” Vic asked me while we waited for the limo. I tell him I have no idea. A minute later Ziggy asks me, “So what do you think is going to happen?” I say to them both, “If I knew the answer, I could cancel the meeting and we could all go on as if it had already happened.” “How big a deal is this Cohn fella?” Vic asks me and I told him he was the cat's meow. “So Harry Cohn is a real big deal, ain't he?” Ziggy asks me two minutes later, and I said, “You two guys are making
me
nervous now!” But I was already nervous by then.

We're ushered into Cohn's office—I don't think Mussolini's executive chambers could have been more imperial—and what is Il Duce of Poverty Row doing when we walk in? Yelling.
Of course!
I mean, this is a given. He's yelling his lungs dry, standing and shouting, and I could count the capillaries on his temple from twenty yards away. He's on the phone to his brother Jack, who ran Columbia in New York, and Harry's screaming, “You fucking son of a bitch, how could you be such an idiot?! . . . I'll destroy you, you fucking bastard! . . . You goddamn idiot, I'll kill you and
eat you and spit you out into the toilet where you belong, you fucking piece of dirt!” Then there's a space where Jack is speaking to him and all of a sudden Harry calms down, sits down, and now they're brothers again and not talking business and this serene air settles over him. “And how are the kids, Jack? . . . really? . . . wonderful . . . How's Jeanette? . . .

Wonderful . . . give the kids a big kiss from their Uncle Harry . . . okay, I'll call you tomorrow and yell at you some more. Toodle-oo.” This guy could separate business from pleasure with a feather.

We're only in Harry Cohn's office for ten minutes, tops. The upshot is he's got a script that's been knocking around the industry since the Lumière brothers. It's called
Shall We Dunce?
It was first intended for Astaire and Rogers, then for Kelly and Grable at MGM, then for Leslie Howard and Rita Hayworth, but then Leslie Howard died in the war. Ten producers, a hundred writers, and two title changes later it's a short and nobody can remember what the original idea was or who the writers were. They were now leaning it more in the direction of Abbott and Costello. Cohn said there was once the germ of an idea here and then the germ became a virus, but now the epidemic was under control and he wanted this thing filmed. It would be a fantastic vehicle to launch a comedy team, he said. He told us the premise—two guys run a dance school and start romancing their female students, blah blah blah.

“And the beauty part,” Cohn says, “is that Clarence L. Gilbert, who's been here since the silent pictures, would kill to direct this.”

Me, Zig, and Vic all looked at each other and nodded very impressed nods. I said, “Wow, Clarence L. Gilbert!”

“Oh yeah,” Cohn says. “Ned is literally droolin' to do this picture. Look at the script. See these three spots? That's his spittle.” Ned was Clarence Gilbert's nickname.

We took the script back to the Plaza and I said he'd hear from us soon. He threw out a figure to us and I almost got blown off my feet. He said, “Latchkey, this movie the boys could do in a week. There's only two sets. You turn this down, you're mentally ill.”

Sally read it and said, “It might work if Sid Stone and Norman took a whack at it. Or forty.” We couldn't tell if the script was for Moe Howard or Leslie Howard. I knock on Ziggy's door and hand it to him and twenty minutes later he knocks on my door and says, “It'd need a lot of work.” We knock on Vic's door and he's not even in. Turns out he was at Barney's Beanery shooting eight ball. I called Murray at WAT in New York the next day and he says that Harry really wanted us for this picture. He says he can squeeze Columbia for twenty grand and it's less than a week's work. He says, “I don't know if there's anything to lose here, Arn,” and I said, “Yeah, but you ain't read the thing. It's so all over the place that it's nowhere.”

Dissolve. Next day. We're at MGM, in L. B. Mayer's office, which is as big as the left side of Canada, and we meet the old man. This time Ziggy and Vic are a little looser because, one, there's no threat that Mayer is going to decapitate us—he's like everybody's uncle who falls asleep after a big Thanksgiving meal—and, two, we'd already heard Harry Cohn screaming. Why would you be scared of a furry puppy after being in a cage with a rabid python? But Mayer just isn't paying attention to us . . . Ziggy is trying to yuk it up and L. B. ain't buying it. After taking calls from Tracy, Fleming, Cukor, and Garland and leaving us twiddling our thumbs, he said to us, “Now, why did you fellows want to meet me again?” And I said, “We thought you wanted to meet
us
!” And he said, “Apparently a grave error has been committed.” Like the
Bismarck
we sank into the plush leather furniture.

It's time to go and Mayer gets up and walks us to the door. He asks, “Did you two fellows once play a place called Club 18 in New York?” And Ziggy and Vic's faces light up! We thought here's our chance to get in good with the old man. And Vic says, “Yeah, we did!” And Louis B. says, “Yes, I saw you perform . . . you said some very insulting things about me and my company.” Teddy, I wanted to grab this guy by his collar and say, “That's what was
supposed
to happen at Club 18, you old bastard! This is like buying tickets for an airplane and then complaining afterward that it left the ground and flew!” Ziggy said to him, “We saw you laughing, though, Mr. Mayer. You can't deny that.” And he said, “I can afford to laugh.”

We left there with the taste of rust in our mouths.

That night we tried to get Vic to read the script and he said he would. The next morning he and I ate breakfast together and I asked him, “So whatchya think?” and he answered, “I thought the flapjacks were real good.”

“Not that. Are you gonna ever read this thing, Vic?”

“Can't you and Ziggy make the decision? I'll do the acting and singing.”

“You trust Ziggy with a decision this important?”

“I'll do whatever you want me to do, Latch.”

“I want you to read the damn thing is what I want!”

“All right, give me the script then.”

“I already did! You've still got it!”

He said to me, “Look, don't get all worked up. We do this movie, we get a sweet payday, we go home. I mean, what's the big deal here? Whad-daya think?”

I was so exasperated that all I could respond was, “I thought the flapjacks were real good, Vic.”

The next day a driver from Gus Kahn's office picks us up. Now, I've heard that Gussie Kahn can make Harry Cohn look like a goddamn saint.
He's louder, he's meaner, he's ruder, he's cruder, and, unlike Harry, he don't even like his own relatives. The driver takes us on the scenic route to Galaxy Pictures because, he tells us, Gussie is going to be a little late that day. So we're driving around and the mood in that car was not good. Ziggy is now wanting to get back to New York, and Vic knew that we knew he hadn't read the script. We'd been on trains together, in hotels together since Chicago, we urgently needed to be apart.

“I got a new idear for the radio show, guys. A new bit,” Ziggy said. We were all three of us tightly crunched together in the back of that car.

“I got an idea for the radio show too, Zig,” Vic said. “We cancel it.”

“Why you wanna cancel it for?”

“'Cause I got better things to do at night than that.”

“Like what, Vic? Bang as many broads as you can before you marry Lu?”

“Yeah, Zig, that
is
what I'm doing. It's a plan. I figure, I get that out of my system before I'm a married man, then maybe I won't want to do it so much when I am one. And at least, partner, I don't have to pay for it.”

Ziggy elides over the latter part of that statement and says, “And we should cancel the radio show on account of this ten-point Marshall Plan of yours?”

“Guys, please,” I said.

Vic says to the driver, “Where the hell are we, buddy?”

“I thought I'd show you some of California's beautiful shoreline, Mr. Fountain.”

We were in Santa Monica. Right near the pier.

“Did I say I wanted to see the goddamn shoreline, you fuckin' punk?!” Vic barks at the poor kid. “Did I ask to see that?!”

“S-s-sorry,” the poor kid simpers.

“I grew up near the goddamn shoreline! I need to see the same goddamn thing here?!”

“But this ain't the same ocean, Vic,” Ziggy butts in. “This is the Pacific.”

Vic gets out of the car, he's in a rage. He opens the driver-side door and pulls the driver out by his collar. He grabs the cap off the kid and stomps on it a few times. Vic gets back in, into the driver's seat, while me and Ziggy just sit there with our jaws slung open to New Zealand. “I'll fuckin' drive us where we wanna fuckin' go!!!” Vic yells.

Five minutes later Vic says, “Where were we going again?”

“To Galaxy Pictures,” I told him. “Do you have any idea where that might be?”

So Vic pulls a U-turn and drives back to the pier . . . Vic gets out and grabs the kid again by the collar and pushes him back into the driver's seat.

“Take us to Galaxy, kid,” Vic says. “Here.” And he hands him $300.

“Gee, thanks, Mr. Fountain,” the driver says.

So we arrive at this meeting not in such a fantastic mood. And Gus Kahn ain't even there. The secretary tells us that and Vic mutters to me, “Let's just do the
Dunce With Me
flick, Latch, okay?” I reminded him the name of the vehicle was
Shall We Dunce?
The secretary says that Gus Kahn is at the track today and he'd like to meet us there—the driver will take us to Santa Anita right away. This seemed to ameliorate Vic's mood somewhat, but Ziggy quickly soured. “We gotta go to the track, Arn?” he asked me in a sort of annoying whine. “Maybe we should just do the dunce flick for Columbia.”