Funnymen Read online

  ALSO BY TED HELLER

  Slab Rat

  SCRIBNER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2002 by Ted Heller

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

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  ISBN-10: 0-7432-4236-X

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-4236-3

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, who also met in the mountains.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Once again, I wish to thank Chuck Verrill, my agent, and Jake Morrissey and Nan Graham of Scribner.

  I also would like to acknowledge the following people: Laura Galen and the crew from Nickelodeon magazine, Richard Beswick, Patricia Schultz, Iris Johnson and the Johnson family, Michael Hainey for the martinis, Susan Mitchell for her incredibly sharp eye, and, with the hopes that he doesn't sue me, Ken Lipman, hopefully not the only person who will like this book.

  Now we are all sons of bitches.

  —Kenneth Bainbridge,

  Director of the Trinity test,

  July 16, 1945

  ARNIE LATCHKEY [co-manager of Fountain and Bliss]: It's sad to say, but the funniest that Harry and Flo Blissman ever were was on the night that they were too dead to perform. Best thing that ever happened to Ziggy, his parents dying the way they did. Best thing. From a professional standpoint, of course.

  SALLY KLEIN [Ziggy Bliss's cousin and co-manager of Fountain and Bliss]: When Harry met my Aunt Florence, she was one of the old Garrity Gaiety Gals; she had a wonderful figure, a fabulous face, but she was only five feet tall. Harry had two inches on her. But Flo could really belt it out; “a lion's roar coming out of an ant” is how someone once described her voice.

  If Harry and Flo were passing through Philly, they'd stop over at our place. We had a front porch and Harry would go on the porch and sit on a swinging seat. He'd gaze off into the distance and he'd be mumbling and swaying. My mother told me he was doing their act in his mind, trying to get it right. Well, he may have been doing that or he might have just been talking to himself. With entertainers you can never tell.

  My parents took me to see them once. Harry and Flo came on toward the middle and did a sketch about a wife who couldn't cook. The audience took this time to go to the bathroom or smoke cigars in the lobby. I really don't remember much about the act.

  LENNY PEARL [comedian]: Instant amnesia, it was like—as soon as they went offstage you forgot what you'd just seen. I was on the road with them for years. They were strictly a bottom-of-the-barrel, low-rung vaudeville act. A cough in the audience was like a standing ovation for them. They were the two tiniest things you ever saw, if you ever saw them.

  Now, let's tell the truth here: the act failed. Before they signed with the Bratton circuit, they were on the Pantages circuit and they also had toured with the Keith and Albee companies. California, Oklahoma, Chicago, Florida—they failed everywhere. But at least they got to see the country.

  Archie Bratton [president of A. C. Bratton Theater Ventures] wanted to bill them as the Mirthful Midgets, did you know that? Well, Harry stood up to him and said, “Hey, we ain't midgets!” But Bratton did it anyway.

  There was this magician with our company and his name was Ferdinand the Fantastiq. The reason there were no letters after the q was because Archie Bratton was so goddamn cheap, he'd even save money on the ink on the handbills they passed around.

  If you ask me what Ferdinand was, where he was from, I couldn't tell you. Some people thought he was Maltese or a Gypsy. His hair was jet black. He put a lot of paprika in his food, I remember, so he might have been Hungarian. He was a damn good magician. Did the best disappearing act I ever saw. Let's see someone else really disappear like that!

  SCARLET ROBIDEAUX [Ferdinand's assistant]: Ferdinand had a thin handlebar mustache and he waxed it with black shoe polish, and his shiny black hair was parted in the middle. He was always polite to me and to the other girls. He never tried to lay a hand on us and that was rare—if you were an entertainer there were all kinds of things said about you. But he was a gentleman.

  All I really did was go on the stage and hold up things for him or slip backstage and get props. That was quite a costume I had! I looked like a peacock. All those blue feathers. Ferdinand would do the routine, saw me in half, make me disappear, levitate me. He never worked with birds though—he told me he'd often had “artistic differences” with them.

  I realized that there was something going on between him and Florence Blissman. I heard rumors. I would see them walking down the hallway together in the hotels. And you just knew. She was very lonely and I couldn't blame her.

  LENNY PEARL: Oh, there was all kinds of gossip. But this was the life we led. Did I know about Flo and the magician? Sure I did. It was like The Wizard of Oz with the Munchkins. You put all these munchkins from the world over on a set together and suddenly it's the ancient Roman baths all over again except a lot shorter.

  When Flo got pregnant I slapped Harry on the back and congratulated him. He was so small I nearly knocked him over. He didn't seem very happy for it being his first kid. 'Cause maybe it wasn't really his kid.

  SCARLET ROBIDEAUX: In the act I got into a box and Ferdinand sealed it shut. He spun it around and then opened it and I was gone . . . there would be nothing but my feathers wafting around inside.

  One night Ferdinand told me he was going to change the act. He was going to disappear, he said. He told me he had a brand-new box and all I had to do was stand there and look very pretty. Well, I could not believe my eyes! This new box was quite grand. It was real mahogany. There was gold and pearls and floral inlay and it was very magnificent.

  At the end of the act Ferdinand bowed to the audience and then went into the box and tipped his hat. I closed the door and walked around it. Then I opened the door and he was gone.

  As far as I reckon, he was never seen again.

  SALLY KLEIN: After Ziggy was born, my mother told me, Harry just devoted himself to the act. That was when he started rehearsing to himself and mumbling and staring off into space.

  • • •

  CATHERINE RICCI [sister of Vic Fountain]: Codport [Massachusetts] was a fishing town, right on Buzzard's Bay. Papa [Bruno Fontana] worked on the piers, in the fish market. He was an assistant manager there. He couldn't ever get the smell of fish off him, even on weekends. Nobody would sit too close to us at the movies because of the smell. But nobody really liked to sit too close to anybody. Most people smelled of fish in that town and everybody pretty much kept to themselves.

  Mamma [Violetta Fontana] was like a lot of Italian mothers. She stayed home and took care of the kids. You couldn't walk in that house without tripping over a baby. Vic was the youngest, so I think he had more people tripping over him than the rest of us. Maybe that toughened him up.

  My father was very quiet. He'd give you a look and you shut up for a while. He'd always be yanking Vic's hair or his ear, especially his ear—it's amazing Vic could even hear with all that yanking. But make no mistake: Mamma ran the family.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: Vic hated fish, would never eat it. Not even caviar or lobster. You couldn't pay him to look at it. Once we had him all set to do a swashbuckler movie with Rhonda Fleming, but he wouldn't do it. I tell him, “Vic, you know, it's not like you're
really on the high seas; you're on a soundstage and they got a big bathtub,” and he says, “No, but when I see the movie it'll be like I was on the high seas.” As though he would go to see one of his own movies.

  [Vic's mother] had a little dash of Madame Defarge about her. Cooking, cleaning, and knitting, but plotting to take over the world. Vic got his looks from Bruno, the hair, the height, the eyes. Bruno, who could make Calvin Coolidge seem talkative, had those scary blue eyes—like looking at ice. And his hands were as big as catcher's mitts.

  RAY FONTANA [Vic's older brother]: Pop worked his way up at the fish market, lifting crates of cod and clams. Crates it took two guys to carry, he did it on his own. Once I saw him carry an armoire down the stairs without resting it. The armoire alone weighed two hundred pounds. And after he put it down, what happens? Three of my sisters and my brother Sal come running out.

  TONY FERRO [childhood friend of Vic]: Rocco Straccio was a terror. Everyone in Codport was scared stiff of him. He had dark skin and all the kids called him Rocky the Nigger. Not to his face, mind you. He had black eyes. And his teeth were black, his teeth and his gums. There was all kinds of stories about him. He'd come over from Sicily on steerage when he was six. Alone. The immigration people in Boston saw that he was covered with rat bites, and he bragged to them he'd bitten back. They didn't believe him, but then they found two dead rats on the ship with tiny human teeth marks on them.

  Straccio took the money in three cuts. From the fishermen themselves; if they didn't pay Straccio up front, they couldn't fish. From the market, where the fish was hauled in and then distributed. And finally when the fish was transported out of New England.

  He'd do this thing—he'd put his hand on your nose and twist it really hard and say, “Got your nose.” And then he'd have his thumb wiggling between his fingers. Now, my uncle did that to me too and it was no big deal, but when Straccio did it, for the next five hours you made sure you still had your nose.

  [Vic and me] both dropped out of school and wound up working at Jiggs's Pharmacy over on Governors Street. Jiggs was Jiggs Cudahy, a big Irishman with a big round red face, like an apple. I was a stock boy and a soda jerk and Vic jerked sodas and did deliveries. He made good ice-cream sundaes and malteds. The both of us, we had those white uniforms—like a Norman Rockwell picture—and it made us look like we was doctors except we had those meshed paper hats and not too many doctors wear meshed paper hats. Vic was always fussing, smoothing out the wrinkles, sneaking looks at himself in the mirror behind the counter. And he delivered stuff—you know, cough syrup, bromides, elixirs, that kind of stuff. I kept wondering, why's Vic so anxious to do the deliveries? You got a nickel a run sometimes, while if you was behind the counter you could sometimes clear fifty cents in that time.

  Well, in a fishing town the men are gone most of the day and there's no chance of them popping in. Vic's a strong handsome kid and we were what?—seventeen, eighteen years old at the time. Well, what do you think Vic was doing? Why do you think it took an hour to deliver a tin of cold cream two streets away? That sonuvabitch'd be making a big fancy banana split with his left hand and sniffing the fingers on his right. Jiggs didn't care—as long as Vic told him everything blow by blow afterward, old Jiggsy didn't care.

  RAY FONTANA: The women in town, all the girls—they loved Vic. The one word they used to describe him was “luscious.”

  • • •

  SEYMOUR GREENSTEIN [neighbor of the Blissmans in Echo Beach, Brooklyn, and childhood friend of Ziggy's]: After Ziggy was born, Flo would leave him with my parents when she and Harry were on the road, and my mother would take care of him. When Flo was back in town she'd take him back. But there were times, my mother said, when they'd be out touring and Ziggy wasn't with us. I don't know where he was then.

  My mother also told me that when the Catholic mothers in the neighborhood saw her with Ziggy in the baby carriage, they'd cross themselves. He was always weird looking.

  There was this one time that Ziggy was completely forgotten about. Harry and Flo left him with a neighbor, who then left him with us, and my mother left him with—well, somehow he got lost during all those handoffs. It was like football: you keep lateraling and doing all sorts of razzle-dazzle and flea flickering, you're going to eventually fumble. So one time he got fumbled and for about three weeks he was on his own. A ten-year-old kid, all alone.

  I saw him perform years later. If you knew how poor and lonely he was as a kid, then the way he performed made sense. He wanted, he needed you to love him. He'd do anything for it.

  SALLY KLEIN: My father's ladies' undergarment business was doing well and we had a small cottage in Delaware, nothing too fancy. Ziggy was with us for a few weeks there. He was around seven, I'd say. A year older than me. He didn't know his way around the house, he'd always walk into the wrong room or he'd fall down the stairs.

  He'd “go” everywhere. He'd run around the house and bounce off the walls and he'd be holding himself nervously, trying to keep it in. It was pretty funny but then it wasn't funny when you found a puddle in the kitchen or you'd open a door and he'd be going against the couch. My mother didn't know how to handle it. I remember this one Sunday morning in the summer. My father was lying down on the love seat with a newspaper over his head. When he woke up he howled, he really howled. Ziggy had had an accident on his feet.

  • • •

  RAY FONTANA: Vic was my mother's favorite kid, there was no question about that. I got hand-me-downs from Sal. But Vic always got new clothing. That kid was the best-dressed second grader you ever saw. His diapers were tailor-made—I ain't kiddin'—by this Milanese tailor downtown. And the crease was always in the right place.

  It was not a musical family, no. There was no piano, nobody ever took violin lessons, nothing like that. The thought of one of us going into show business? Forget it. The thought of anybody in that town going into any business other then fish . . . you might as well talk about getting elected president.

  CATHERINE RICCI: Vic really got the looks. My mother used to tell him that angels had dipped him in a lake of honey and then brought him to our house.

  And the hair. Under the light sometimes it could look blue . . . it was just like Superman in the comics.

  At the dinner table Vic sat closest to Mamma and half the time she had her hand in his hair or was pinching his earlobe and saying, “Faccia bella.” She would then wrap her big arms around him and pull him into her chest and he'd stay in there for a while.

  As a kid, Vic liked listening to the radio. Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo, Basil Fomeen. Fritz Devane, “the Grand Forks Golden Boy,” was his favorite. He hated Vaughan Monroe, the man who sang “Racing With the Moon” and sounded like a hound being strangled.

  Father Claro was the priest [when] Vic was about ten or eleven. He came to our house one night and asked Mamma if Vic could join the choir. My mother and father went into the kitchen to talk about it—I think Papa thought that any boy who sang in a choir was an effeminato, a sissy. They came out of the kitchen and Mamma says to Father Claro, “How did you know my boy can sing? We never hear him sing. Can Vic sing?” And Father Claro says, “Signora Fontana, with a face like this, he could honk like a dying goose but we'd still want him.”

  A few weeks later, every woman leaving the church would tell Father Claro how much better the choir sounded now that Vic was in it. You couldn't find a seat in that place. The women and the girls all loved to watch Vic sing.

  TONY FERRO: He really stood out in the choir. All the other boys wore these wrinkly gray choir uniforms but Vic's was sky blue—his mother saw to that—and not a wrinkle to be seen. And the other thing was, he didn't sing, he mouthed the words. He told me he wasn't supposed to sing; Father Claro had told him to just move his lips.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: The first time Vic ever had to lip-synch a song, the director asked him if he needed help or instructions. “Are you kiddin'?” Vic said. “I did this for three years in church!”

  • • •


  LENNY PEARL: Archie Bratton fired me one day when we were in Columbus, Ohio. I went back to the hotel to pack and I was thinking, Okay, bubeleh, now what? You're eighteen years old and your mother's a cripple and your father sells used tea kettles on Orchard Street and your sister's married to a door-to-door comb salesman who stutters.

  It turns out that Bratton did that to all of us, fired everyone one by one. The Beaumonts, a tap-dancing and tango act, Billy and Mary . . . he calls Billy Beaumont in and says, “Billy, hit the road. You're out. You're a cancer on the show. Go. Mary stays, you're gone.” Then a few minutes later Bratton calls Mary in, told her she was fired and that Billy was staying. Now, he could've done the brave thing and lined us all up and said, “Guys, gals, the company is bankrupt, it's kaput. I'm sorry. Good luck.” But he had to get one last shot in.

  So I'm on the train that night back to New York and when I get to Grand Central the next morning I pick up a copy of Metronome and read to my great relief that Archibald J. Bratton had been shot three times in the head at the Southern Hotel in Columbus.

  Whoever did it, God bless 'em.

  SALLY KLEIN: Harry and Flo went back to Echo Beach. My mother told me Harry was humiliated, distraught . . . she thought it would kill him.

  Years later, Ziggy told me it was the happiest he'd ever been. For the first time, he had his parents around for a long stretch. And I found that strange. Because, if you think about it, Uncle Harry and Aunt Flo were devastated—they'd been performing their whole adult lives and now they had absolutely nothing. But Ziggy remembered it as a great time.