Funnymen (23 page)

One day at the Monroe, my cousin Pooch hands me a telegram, it's from Vic. It says that I was to go up to the Catskills as soon as I finished reading the wire . . . Vic would pay me back for the bus fare, it says. And the last line, I swear, is
“Goomba,
we're going to be rich real soon.” With that in mind, I was on a Greyhound within ten minutes.

SALLY KLEIN:
Look at this wonderful old picture of the dining room at Heine's. Arnie must've taken it. You see how there's Vic's side of the table and Ziggy's? Cathy's there, with her brother Ray. They'd never had Jewish food before. I really think they were looking to pour some marinara sauce on the noodle pudding. That's Guy Puglia sitting next to Ray. This must be one of the last photographs of Guy before that horrible thing happened to him. So sad. Bud Hatch, the columnist, is next to Guy, and that's Jean Hatch, his wife. In his column he always referred to Jean as “the SL,” as in Scintillating Lady. Far from it, you can see. She used to drink a tub of gin for breakfast, it was said, but Bud was the very first reporter to cover us. I don't know who these two girls are, on Jeanie Hatch's right. In every group picture taken at Heine's or Grossinger's, there are always two people and you have no idea at all who they are, and these must be them.

That's Danny on Ziggy's left and that's me sitting next to Danny. He was quite handsome then, don't you think? A few weeks after this picture was taken, Danny and I were very deeply in love. I'd already had a crush on him for a few weeks but nobody had any idea.
Who could I tell?
On my left is Snuffy Dubin, who looked very dashing and dapper back then . . . he's sure put on a few pounds since then, but who hasn't? The woman next to him is Gertrude Heine, Bernie's wife, and that's Bernie Heine next to her. Bernie passed away on the same day they dynamited his hotel to smithereens in 1967, which is not as coincidental as it may sound considering that Bernie made sure to be in the hotel when they pushed the plunger. He wanted to go down with the ship, he said, but wound up going all over it instead.

If you notice, everyone at the table is looking at the camera. Except Ziggy, because he's mugging with his eyes. But look at Vic. He's the only one who's looking away. And I can tell you why. Because there was a very hot redhead at the table to our right, the next table over. I remember that distinctly.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Bud Hatch wrote it up in the old
Globe.
He used adjectives and adverbs you usually reserve for the ceiling on the Sistine Chapel. Ostensibly he said that if you had the chance, you should head for the hills and check out this new dynamic dynamite daffy duo. He promised a gargantuan gaggle of guffaws.

Now, you must understand that the Catskills was a very select area, not select as in some elite Wasp country club, oh no,
au contraire.
Fountain and Bliss may have been playing to a packed house, but it was as far in mental mileage from the Big Time as the Wailing Wall is from the Royal Albert Hall. This was not the Copa, El Morocco, the Blue Beret, the Roxy, or the Chez Paree.

Which meant we had work to do.

With the twelve grand windfall, I opened up an office in New York, in the Brill Building. The rent was staggeringly low by today's standards. I named our little operation Vigorish Productions, Inc. Combination Vic and Zig.

Sally had an office and I had an office and there was the “living room.” We needed a secretary so Murray Katz sent us his niece, Estelle Fein, who'd been sewing size labels onto blouses on Thirty-seventh Street. She was about eighteen then and was a lovely girl, tall and long-legged with a mane of auburn hair that Rita Hayworth would've killed for. How do I know this? Because Rita Hayworth a few years later said directly to Estelle—and by then, may I add, the latter had become Mrs. Arnold Latchkey—“I would
kill
for your hair!” But Rita had a low hairline—she had long bounteous tresses coming out the bridge of her nose—so she might have even killed for Yul Brynner's hairline too.

I remember dropping off at Bertie Kahn's office a clipping of the Bud Hatch review as well as a write-up from a rag up in the mountains, the Loch Sheldrake
Picayune
or some such thing. Bertie sent me a telegram the next day; typical behavior for him even though his office was only two blocks away. As long as I live I'll never forget the wording: “Oil plus water = TNT. Or poison.” You didn't get too many words out of him.

Bertie, though, was willing to work for us.
With
us. He was the best PR man in New York at the time. And his cousin was Gus Kahn (not Gus Kahn the songwriter), who everybody referred to as Genghis and was the head of Galaxy Pictures. And if you think for one second that that incredibly precious little tidbit escaped Arnie Latchkey's purview, then brother, are you sorely mistaken.

DANNY McGLUE:
Every morning we'd meet at the Vigorish office on Broadway at the exact same time, 10:00
A.M.
Vic wanted it to be later; he used to joke, “Hey, I fall
asleep
at eight
A.M.”
It was Sally, Arnie, me, Vic, and Ziggy at first, but after a while Norman White and Sidney Stone would be at the meetings too; they were gag writers who were with us many, many years. Vic sometimes did look like he'd only slept two hours when he came in, but after a Chesterfield, a dose of
Terry and the Pirates,
and some Chase & Sanborn, he'd perk up real quick. We had a piano in there too, and we'd send out for food from Bratz's on Broadway and Fiftieth or sometimes we'd all go to Handelman's or Lindy's.

I wish there were tapes of those meetings. As funny as Ziggy was, and Vic too, Norman and Sidney were more
clever,
in terms of jokes and one-liners. Norman had worked on a few radio shows in New York—
Allen's Alley
and
The Joe Penner Show
—and then done some punch-up script work for MGM, where he'd met F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sid had done some gag work for the Marx Brothers at Paramount. But they hated California, just hated it.

That room was jumping sometimes.

Now, it wasn't
all
productive. I mean, I think that a quarter of the time we were just making fun of how loud Arnie chewed. But you know, now that I think about it, we even developed a routine out of that.

ERNIE BEASLEY [songwriter]:
I met Vic and Ziggy because my rehearsal studio was two doors down the hallway from the Vigorish office. I was writing jingles then with Max Marcus, stuff for Texaco, L&M cigarettes, and Gillette razors . . . or for anybody really. This was not the road I'd chosen in my life, having studied with Otto Korda at Juilliard. But the pay was good and I was living in Greenwich Village and, besides, that “road” was really chosen for me by my family. They would listen to the NBC Symphony Orchestra on our farm and—this is to their credit, I suppose—
they would not let me work the farm. They were too afraid of me bruising or hurting my fingers.

Ted, I would be playing the piano in the studio and Max Marcus would be singing along and we'd be playing at fairly high volume too—and you could hear, even through those thick prewar walls in the Brill Building, even
two offices down
—the absolutely raucous laughter ringing out from the Vigorish office.

A few times I'd gather enough nerve up to knock on the door. Estelle would answer and even as I was saying something as mundane as “Could you
please
try to keep it down in there?” I'd be looking over her shoulder and I couldn't believe what I saw! You had grown men lying on the floor, standing on their heads or on furniture, sometimes with their pants at their ankles or wearing outrageous wigs. One time I went in there and Vic was playing Arnie and Sally and Norman's heads like they were conga drums! There was always food all around and always there were faces as red as roses with laughter. And it was infectious. About the third or fourth time Ziggy grabbed my hand and dragged me in. They had a small piano in there and I started to play and within a few bars I became part of that wonderful, delirious mayhem.

After that, I didn't want to go back to my studio, where Max Marcus was waiting for me. I ask you: Who in his right mind would want to write a song about Silver Crest socks or Wilson's Miracle Shaving Powder after a taste of all that?

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
It was a fecund breeding ground. The ideas, the jokes, the
everything
that was born in those rooms . . . many years later we were still using the material. I once saw Ziggy and [second wife] Pernilla on that Bert Convy game show
Tattletales
and Ziggy used some joke that he and Sid Stone had written! Three decades earlier!

SALLY KLEIN:
Arnie and I could only do so much. Ziggy and his parents had been booked for a few more engagements that summer in the Catskills. But now Harry and Florence were dead. I made some calls and got Fountain and Bliss in for those dates . . . I think it was Fiedler's, Grossinger's, and the White Lake Lodge for a week at each place. But after that, the calendar was clear. Which is very frightening for entertainers.

“Estelle darling, call Murray Katz at Worldwide, would you,” I remember-hearing Arnie say one day.

I went in to his little office and said, “Why are we calling
them?
”

“Because as Bert Kahn says, this act could be TNT . . . but as long as we're only in the mountains, it won't amount to more than a moist firecracker.”

“We could call places,” I said naively. “We could call other people. I have a friend who knows Julie Podell at the Copa.”

“And, Sally, the man who shines my shoes also shines the shoes of the man who does manicures for the man who cuts Sherman Billingsley at the Stork Club's hair!”

In my heart I felt that calling Murray or any of Herb Blackstone's people-at WAT was a betrayal . . . it was going outside our little
mishpocheh.
But Arnie tried to make me see—frankly, he wasn't very convincing—and then Bert Kahn in six words convinced me that for big-time talent you had to use big-time people.

Still, when Murray Katz showed up one day for a meeting of prospective venues I had a very bad taste in my mouth. Until he started rattling off dollar amounts. I must admit, the bad taste vanished very quickly.

DANNY McGLUE:
I was living in a dumpy studio apartment off Columbus Avenue on Seventy-fourth Street. Sally was living in the Eighties on West End Avenue. I'd see her every day at the office and we'd talk and joke around for hours at a stretch. In the evenings, I would want to phone her or take her out to dinner but I never could summon up the nerve.

I didn't have the dough or the space for a piano so sometimes at night I would go back to the office to play and write my silly songs. One night I'm there writing some little ditty and what happens? Sally Klein walks in, looking very surprised to see me there. She told me she'd forgotten some paperwork and that's why she'd shown up. I continued playing and then I stopped and, well, before you know it, I was kissing her all over.

SALLY KLEIN:
The first boy I kissed was in Philadelphia and that was like being with a camel, frankly. Well, Danny knows this now but I returned to the office that night not because I'd forgotten anything, but because Arnie had told me that Danny sometimes would tickle the ivories at night. So I was hoping that he'd be there. And he was.

Even as Danny and I were kissing, it occurred to me: Ziggy is not going to like this.

• • •

RAY FONTANA:
After they went back to the Catskills for a few more weeks and Vic had some more dough, he got his first real spread, right near the Ansonia. I drove Lulu, Mom, and Pop down to New York one weekend—it was their first time there. Lu and Vic hadn't seen each other for a while, but I got to tell you, I've seen couples who've been apart for a while and this wasn't like that really. It was more like two cousins. He did give
her some gifts though—earrings and a coat. He got Mom some stuff too, but she wasn't too big on clothing or jewelry
.
Pop refused to accept anything from Vic; he wouldn't even let Vic buy him the
Daily News.
We went to Antonio's, an Italian restaurant, and Vic paid, but even after that Pop slipped him the dough for his and for Mamma's meals.

Vic showed us all these newspaper clippings, stuff from the
Post
and the
News
and
Variety.
It was really very impressive. And my parents met Ziggy for the first time. He tried to make 'em laugh, he was really cranking it up . . . he even got my mom goin' a few times. But Pop didn't crack a grin, not at all.

I remember that while Ziggy was entertaining everyone in the main room of the Vigorish office, Vic excused himself to make a call. Ten minutes go by and then I go into Sally Klein's office where Vic was, alone. And Vic is whispering into the phone and his back is turned. I heard him say something like, “Baby, they're all leaving today, I'll meet you at Jimmy Dooley's joint at ten sharp.”