Funnymen (8 page)

I went home and the next morning it was the same thing, except now my desk and phone were gone.

I came in for two weeks more but Mr. Enright and Mr. Flynn never showed up. I tried calling them at home, but their numbers had been disconnected. I gave up on my job there and started working at Filene's. The next time I heard of Victor Fontana he was Vic Fountain and was performing with Ziggy Bliss.

Years later in the fifties, I ran into Mr. Flynn in a tavern in South Boston. When he saw me coming toward him, he quickly drained his glass and ran out of the place.

• • •

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
It's funny the way things work out. Murray Katz at WAT [Worldwide American Talent agency] was doing the bookings for the Floyd Lomax Orchestra. The Lomax band had played Camden the week before Ziggy and his tiny parents performed there. If Murray had booked us in one week later—
one week!
—Vic and I and Zig would have met then and who knows what would've happened? It really does makes you dwell on kismet.

Entertainment is in my blood.

This goes back years and years, to the old country, and if you think I mean France, what UFO did you just desaucer from, my friend? My grandparents on one side used to make woodwinds back in Poland or Russia or Moldavia or some-where, and on my father's side my grandparents would take the guts out of cats, sheep, and cows and turn them into strings for violins and cellos. You ever wonder, Hey, who the hell is so desperate for money that they turn animal guts into strings? Well, now you know. That's what they did, when the czar and czarina and their henchmen on horseback weren't too busy taking a Zippo lighter to their hovels, might I add?

So they came over in a boat and believe me, they weren't playing shuffleboard in beaver coats and drinking brandy out of gold flasks on the poop deck of the
Mayflower.
They came over on a vermin-infested tub and settled in the Bronx and they didn't miss a beat; it was violin strings again. One thing about a poor neighborhood, no matter where it is: lots of stray cats. Now, when some people look at a stray cat, they see a pet. My family sees one, they hear Brahms.

My mother sewed costumes for the old Yiddish theater big shots downtown, people like Luther Adler and Robert Weitz, Morris Carnovsky, Lionel Gostin, and the great Zelda Gutterman, the “Sarah Bernhardt of
Second Avenue.” These were important people, noble, respectable, almost
regal
people . . .
and they spat on her!
Never a penny in tips or a kind word, those lousy
momzers.
And her sister, my Aunt Ruthie, she played the organ at the Orpheum on Gun Hill Road, for the silent pictures. They had it all mechanically rigged up: the lights darken, the organ and Aunt Ruthie slowly rise out of the floor and she starts playing; when the picture is over she slowly sinks back into the floor. Well, one day—it was the day before
The Jazz Singer
opened—she sank back down into the floor and nobody ever saw her again. It was the end of the Silent Era and the end of Aunt Ruthie too.

My father, Hyman Latchkey, started a music and record store with his brother-in-law Sy Lowe, and if you think they had enough business savvy to call the store Hy's and Lowe's, then think again. Not even Hy and Sy's they could come up with. No. There was a sign above the door and it said
MUSIC STORE.
They sold sheet music and 78s and worked seven days a week and had nothing to show for it. Did they ever complain? Did you ever once hear them gripe or curse their fate? Yes. They did. All the time.

My older brother Marvin was a concierge at Heine's [Resort] in Loch Sheldrake and got me a job as a
tummler
in the Catskills one summer when I was about sixteen. I was a very klutzy busboy by night and by day I'd run Simon Says games or I was a lobby comedian in a bellhop's suit. An insult comic, like Rickles or Jack E. Leonard. But I didn't have the finesse for it. I'd stop people and say, “May I take your luggage? Your wife has the face of a horse.” I got in trouble when I pinched some fourteen-year-old girl's cheek and said to her father, “She's gonna break a lot of hearts in a few years but I'd like to have sex with her right now.” So I was fired, but whether it was 'cause I wasn't funny or 'cause I broke a lot of dishes, I don't remember.

All I know is this: Marvin—he ran dice games up there too—got a girl in trouble. A seventeen-year-old, the daughter of a rich family staying at Heine's. I make a couple of calls to New York and we get this girl taken care of. I saved my brother's neck.

“I owe you one,” Marvin told me as I was getting on the bus to go back to New York after I was fired.

“You sure do,” I said to him. “Big time. And I ain't forgetting it.”

Slow dissolve. Manhattan. I start working at the [music] store, sweeping up, doing inventory, and occasionally stealing a few
centavos
from the cash register. Well, I might not have been the brightest stripling on the Great White Way but I knew I didn't want to work in that crummy store the rest of my life. I wanted out. So I turned on that irresistible, infectious Latchkey charm and wheedled my way into the hearts and minds of some of these Broadway big shots. Irving Berlin. I met Irving Berlin a few times.
A doll. I hit him up for three bucks once and he gave it to me and said, “Kid, here. I don't wanna see you again.” So I go back the next day and asked for four. Didn't get it. Gershwin? Cohan? The Schuberts? Jerry Kern? I met 'em all. Larry [Lorenz] Hart? Great lyricist. Lousy tipper. Cole Porter once was signing something for me at the Waldorf Towers and with the other hand he tried to put his hand on my fanny—I shooed it away like you would a butterfly.

My old man, he fired me from the store. There was a minor discrepancy problem with the inventory. And I was the fall guy and rightly so.

So now it's time to take advantage of some of my contacts. Murray Katz, who years later was Executive VP in Charge of Doing Very Little at Worldwide American, takes me under his somewhat foul-smelling wing and before you know it, I'm twenty years old and I'm the road manager of the Floyd Lomax Orchestra.

If I don't take that Lomax job then I don't manage Fountain and Bliss. Kismet again.

Floyd says to me on my very first day on the job: “Latch, this job is about reeds, reefers, and roast beef sandwiches.” Had he told me I'd be reaming out spit valves too, I might not have taken the job. That and running girls in and out of hotels. Well, to tell you truthfully, he did mention the latter and that's why I leapt at the opportunity.

[Looking at photograph of the Floyd Lomax Orchestra, taken at the Luxor Ballroom, White Plains, New York, 1938.] Okay, let's start here. This pianist . . . look real close . . . that's Larry and Stu Morrell, the Siamese twin pianists. Larry was actually the real musician of the two; Stu just played along with their left hand. He was a real highbrow, read tomes the size of train cars. Their deal was, Larry would be in the band for two years and then Stu would teach philosophy for two years while Larry hung on. I once said to him, “You know, you're the only sideman who
has
a sideman.” Yeah, it was some outfit.

This fellow is Mr. Harry Bacon, he blew alto sax for us. Does he look strange? A little . . .
different?
No? Well, nobody else thought so either. But one day it turns out that Mister Harry Bacon is actually
Miss
Harriet Bacon.
Nobody ever knew!
For years that dyke traveled around with us, nobody knew. She'd pal around with us, smoke cigars, and go to the track and chase tail just like the rest of the boys. And she was married too! Figure that out. Had a wife out on the island, in Bay Shore. We were all completely fooled. It all came out one day when Roy Lindell, one of our horn men and a big bowl of fruit salad, had a few too many one night in Baltimore and he came on to Harry. They started wrestling and roughhousing and the guys are standing around in a circle, cheering them on—this is in a parking lot, I think it was at the old Hippodrome—and Roy's now got
Harry Bacon's pants down and then he pulls his boxers off. Well, the applauding stopped on a dime, believe you me. I say, “Gee, Harry, uh, you're hung like a tick.” “I ain't hung at all,” Harry says. “I'm a broad. Get a load of this . . .” And then she unbuttons her shirt. We were all of us, to a man, astounded. Harry stands up and says, “You tell my wife about this, I'll cut yours off too.” And after that, she was just one of the guys.

But poor Roy, when he got an eyeful of that crotch or lack thereof—the fact that he'd made a pass
at a broad!
—it really sickened him.

This guy over here, behind Harry . . . Sid Gibson . . . he blew tenor sax. A hophead. This bald head belongs to our trombonist, Cueball Swenson . . . he did a couple of years for something but he straightened out his act somewhat. This is the guitarist, Pip Grundy. Look at his hands. Seven fingers on his left hand, about nine on his right. Anne Boleyn with a geetar. I tell you, the Pipster didn't always hit the right note but he could hit more wrong ones
at one time
than any other guitarist around at that time.

And this is Floyd Lomax. Looks just like Humpty Dumpty, don't he? He was from some town outside Detroit, he played trumpet. Kept a pearl-handled Colt in his trumpet case for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Ypsilanti, that's it. Six foot seven, weighed 350 pounds jaybird naked. Could he eat? He'd down more sausages in one meal than Warsaw does in a year. And the man loved cooze. Craved it. If he couldn't score it was a nightmare—he'd just break down and cry his fat heart out, Floyd would. You ever see a six-foot-seven, 350-pound whale in boxer shorts holding a trumpet and weeping like his puppy just got run over by the ice-cream truck? Christ, on all his undershorts he had sewn in gold threads—and you could've moved a family of ten into Floyd Lomax's boxers—the words “'Tis all pink on the inside.”

The kind of music they played . . . Floyd was aiming for the High Society-sound, sort of like Eddie Duchin or Griff Williams; it all sounded like you'd just chowed down on a Vassar sophomore, which are Floyd's words, not mine. Now, we knew we could never crack that market. It just wasn't gonna happen. So we aimed lower, a lot lower.
Billboard
even called it “the Low Society sound.”

We'd play a set and then we go back to our hotel and Floyd gets his fix of you-know-what, and I got to make sure that [vocalist] Dick Fain is all tied up in his bed with manacles so he don't electrocute himself, and the boys are playing pinochle and drinking and just playing their horns . . . and that's what we did. It was a hard life, it didn't pay too good, the hours were lousy as hell, but, boy, did we have a ball.

• • •

SALLY KLEIN:
It was at the Mohican Club in Teaneck when Ziggy broke the news to us. Harry and Flo and I were in the dressing room and Ziggy walked in. He pulled a chair up, loosened his tie. It was a jokey tie, orange and a yard wide.

“I been thinkin' about the act,” he said. He's got that impish face on—you've seen it a million times in the movies—what Arnie called his “Uh-oh, I think I may have driven your Mercedes off a cliff” look.

Harry asked him, “What about the act?”

Ziggy just comes out and says, “I think Flo should cut a song or two from the act, maybe drop the number at the end.”

Now, I'd sensed this coming. Because Flo always ended with a song and Ziggy was always interrupting it. But for the last couple of shows he was barely allowing her to begin it. The act ended with Ziggy being Ziggy and the audience loving it.

Flo said, “You want me not to sing? This is what my son is telling me?”

“This is what I'm telling you, Flo,” Zig said. By now he didn't call them Pop or Mom anymore except when they were onstage.

“But I got my start singing,” Flo says to him. “That's how your father and I got started.”

“Look, if it was up to me, you'd belt out thirty songs up there. And there wouldn't be an ashtray or a pair of eyeglasses intact within a hundred miles. But this is business.”

Harry said, “I think this is something your mother and I should talk about.”

And Zig said, “Okay. Then talk about it.” And he—knowing quite well that Harry had meant talking about it
alone,
in private—just leaned back in his chair.

Flo turned to Harry and said, “All right, Harry, all right. No more singing then. Fine.”

Harry said to her, “You sure, darling?”

She nodded and Ziggy said, “I'm glad you seen it my way,” and then walked out.

When he left the room, it was like Himmler had just left after an interrogation. We could breathe again.