Funnymen (27 page)

“I don't have to call him back,” she said cockily. “Because I already told him we'd do it.”

Boom!
Back in business. Just like that.

GUY PUGLIA:
Whenever there was an open date, Ziggy used to like to line up a girl—who usually had tits just like Jayne Mansfield's—for exactly 10:45 at night. Now, Hunny had a friend who was a New York cop and he borrowed this cop's uniform and badge. Vic was setting this whole caper up—at this point Hunny and Ziggy have never met. Hunny goes upstairs to this hooker's spread and puts his big ear to the door and hears all this groanin' and gruntin' and he knocks. “Open up!” he says. “Vice squad.” The girl opens the door in a red kimono that she's droopin' right out of and says, “Hey, I paid you guys off last week!” and Hunny sweeps past her and looks for Ziggy, who's now thinkin', My career's over, my career's over. Officer Hunny's in the bedroom now and there's no sign of Ziggy, but he peeks under the bed and there he is, hiding. Somehow Ziggy had managed to squeeze his body underneath there, I don't know how.

Hunny plucks him out and Ziggy says, “Hey, Officer, how does a week free at Heine's resort in the governor's suite sound to you?” Hunny says he's now got him on bribery charges.

He asks Hun if he can make a call and he calls Sally Klein at home. Ziggy is bawlin' and tellin' Sally that this girl is his girlfriend, that he had no idea she was a whore, but Sally was tough and the next thing Ziggy's doing is saying, yeah, she's not his girl and she is a whore but he wasn't really paying for it. Hunny takes the phone away and hangs it up and cuffs Ziggy. “What's gonna happen to me, Officer?” Ziggy asks, and Hunny says, “We're taking you to the Tombs.” Ziggy says, “The Tombs! What's gonna happen to me there?” and Hunny says, “The other prisoners'll probably put you through the grease line.” And Ziggy nearly craps his pants.

There was no such thing as a grease line. Vic had made that one up.

So Hunny hauls Ziggy into the living room and what's the first thing the two of 'em see? Vic's on top of the girl and he's goin' to town with her. That's when Ziggy realized it was all a gag. Hunny told me that Ziggy was crackin' up. And maybe he was, but whether it was real laughter or just laughing to hide the fact that he'd been taken for a sap, I don't know.

• • •

SNUFFY DUBIN:
Before they began their gig at the Blue Beret, they did a tune-up at a much smaller place called Club 18. The pay there was nothing compared to what they could pull in at a Catskills gig. Now, I played Club 18 a few weeks after Fountain and Bliss but for
me
the pay was good. Ziggy got me that engagement—maybe the only favor he ever did me. Must have been an oversight on his part.

Club 18 was in a basement in midtown. This place drew all kinds of celebrities and high society and so forth. The atmosphere was dark, the drinks and service were second-rate . . . so why did they go?
To be put in their place.
These VIPs would go to this club to get insulted by comics, all for a laugh. The week I worked there Clark Gable comes in with Carole Lombard. I see that and my heart starts racing like Man o'fucking War.
Jesus Christ, Clark Gable is coming to see Samuel Dubinsky from Harrison Street in Chicago tell jokes?!
Absolutely unbelievable shit to me, right? But I gotta do the Club 18 thing now, I've gotta insult them and tell jokes at their expense. “Hey, Carole, I hear you walk around the house naked,” I said to her, which was a rumor everyone knew. “Is it true Clark opens the blinds and charges the neighbors a buck a peep?” Okay, not the best gag in the world, but, man, was I scared! The week Fountain and Bliss appeared, Humphrey Bogart and his wife were there and Vic started imitating Bogart—had him down to a T—and Ziggy is being Mrs. Bogart and then they start punching each other . . . because everyone knew that Bogart had this very rough relationship with her. Bogart was on the floor. Jack Dempsey came in, the George Gershwins, Hester Warnocke, Felix Frankfurter, Eddie Duchin, a Whitney or two. Howard Hughes comes in with a doll who's stacked like the New York Public Library and Vic is coming on to her and Ziggy is coming on to him, and Hughes's face is on the table, he's laughing so much. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn came in one night, and the next night Tracy showed up with his wife; his
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
had just come out and he got a standing ovation on both nights. Gus Kahn of Galaxy Pictures was in New York and went to Club 18, and Ziggy and Vic were just relentless, making fun of his pictures, how much money he had and his gambling. Two weeks later Gus Kahn is in New York again and now I'm at Club 18. I'm doing the same kind of stuff and he gives me a look like I'm Hermann fucking Goering about to bomb his Beverly Hills estate in my Messerschmidt. The maitre d' at the club would take Arnie aside and point out some of the socialites and debs and blue bloods, 'cause Vittorio Fontana and Sigmund Blissman didn't really move within that smart Newport horsey set. So you had Warnockes, Rockefellers, Mellons, and Standishes and all this upper-crust Four fucking Hundred
crowd, and Ziggy and Vic have got 'em in their pockets. They
own
them!

CHARLES FRAME [stage manager at the Blue Beret Cafe]:
The club was originally called the Red Beret Cafe, did you know that? That was the name when Barney Arundel opened it. But one evening in, say, 1938, J. Edgar Hoover and his intimate companion Clyde Tolson came in and asked Barney why the
Red
Beret . . . why
red
? Why are the tablecloths and the napkins and the menus
red
? Why are the strawberries red? Barney was not a political man and he'd chosen the name of the cafe simply because his daughter wore a red beret. That simple. Barney walked away and overheard Mr. Tolson saying to Mr. Hoover, “Well, you didn't have to be such a bitch about it, Edwina!” The next week the place was renamed the Blue Beret—and so it remained until it closed in the 1950s—with blue tablecloths, blue menus, blue napkins, and, yes, blueberries.

Pete Conifer was in charge of the entertainment. Yes,
that
Pete Conifer, who was later the head of the Oceanfront [Hotel and Resort] in Las Vegas. He was only in his twenties at the time but was going places, you could tell, and he really knew how to kiss up to the important patrons. One night Jack Warner came in with his wife, and Pete sent over flowers to the table. Everything was free for them, and Pete even sent flowers and champagne to their hotel suite too. Franchot Tone and Joan Crawford (but not together), the Luces, the Cagneys, Fiorello La Guardia, Myrna Loy, Louis B. Mayer, the Fritz Devanes—he did the same for them. Meanwhile, though, there were the hatcheck girls and
les
Blue Beret
danseurs
, and Pete couldn't keep his hands off them, he was like a hungry dog. Some of them were truly terrified of him, so terrified that they even quit to work at the Copacabana, the Riobamba, or at El Morocco.

We were excited to get Fountain and Bliss for two weeks—we'd never had comedians perform there; it had always been music. There would be a cabaret singer, like Jeanne Courbet or Paul DeMarche, or we'd get the Ben Bentley Orchestra with Virginia Carstairs. But Barney had found out that Charlotte Charlot was not only a Nazi sympathizer, she sympathized
rabidly.
She'd done some fund-raisers around the Yorkville area, also known as Germantown, for the German-American Bundt. She'd sung at an America First rally and palled around with Father Coughlin. Even Neville Chamberlain, believe it or not, had banned her from performing in England.

When Fountain and Bliss were at the Blue Beret, material kept being delivered to their dressing room that had been intended for Charlotte Charlot. There were Nazi leaflets, Nazi newspapers with these horrid cartoons with salivating vermin in skullcaps raping Aryan women. Shady-looking men in trench coats stopped by and wanted to meet Charlotte.
One such fellow handed our maitre d', Michel Perpignan—real name: Mickey Peters—a bundle of something and said it was for Frau Charlot. We looked inside and it was about a pound of German sausage. Barney may have done what Hoover and Tolson told them to do when he changed the cafe's name, but he was not about to let the club become a beachhead for Hitler on Fifty-third Street!

SALLY KLEIN:
After Club 18, the boys were ready for the big time on the nightclub scene. You paw Howard Hughes's girlfriend, you make fun of the size of Clark Gable's you-know-what, you're ready for anything. The Blue Beret seated about five hundred people. Billy Ross, Vic's bandleader for many years, led a small band, and Vic sang a few numbers before Ziggy would “interrupt” him. Ernie Beasley wrote two songs specifically for this engagement, “Back on the Boulevard Again” and “My Sweet Cheri,” and Vic also sang Cole Porter's “Do You Want to See Paris?” from his
Fifty Million Frenchmen,
which I'd seen as a young girl with my mother.

Not only were the gossip columnists there, but music critics too. Danny Richman from the
Post,
Robert Schappell from the
Globe.
And so on. Bertie Kahn asked for a few tables from Barney Arundel and planted a bunch of people there to laugh and applaud. He hired a few top-notch “ladies of the evening,” got them dolled up in very fancy evening clothing and hairdos, and told them to pour it on and applaud their hearts out for Vic's singing. Nobody had any idea what these women really did for a living.

But, you know, we didn't even need those gimmicks. The boys were supposed to do a hour and a half, they did twice that. They ad-libbed, they danced and did impressions; they'd toss that invisible, imaginary fireball of theirs back and forth. There were times when Ziggy would be so funny that Vic was on the verge of cracking up, and when that happened it was infectious and the audience was laughing too. The third night, Ziggy—Vic had no idea he was going to do it—dressed up as Charlotte Charlot: the tight black sequined gown, twenty pounds of rouge, the red feather boa, the cigarette holder and guitar. He adjusted the boa halfway through a song that Danny had written and then you saw he also had on a swastika armband. After the song—Billy Ross was accompanying him on the accordion—Vic “interviewed” her. And they were just
on.
Vic knew what to ask, Ziggy knew what to answer. It was absolute magic! They kept the routine, not only for the rest of the engagement, but for the rest of the war. It really helped destroy Charlotte Charlot's career, thank God.

TONY FERRO:
My late wife, Maria, may God rest her soul, was living in Brooklyn with her Aunt Nancy, in Flatbush. We weren't married yet—that was a few months away. I took a train to New York and Vic got us a table
at the Blue Beret. Here I am, I'm a butcher now and the son of an immigrant fisherman, and I'm with this lovely girl and we're at this swank nightclub. I'll never forget it. Never.

After that, though, I don't know . . . Vic and me, we drifted apart. I didn't hear from him again. Hell, we worked at Jiggs's together. But he went his way, I went mine.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
It happened again. At the Blue Beret. Some man in his late sixties was laughing so much he burst a blood vessel in his brain and bought the farm. This happened in week one, maybe the fifth night. The Edward G. Robinsons were in the audience that night, and Ziggy is at their table and he and Vic are doing a bit about ordering Robinson a “little Caesar salad.” Get it?
Little Caesar?
So this poor man in the audience dies. I saw him too . . . you ever see a corpse frozen stiff with a smile as big as Florida? We should all be so lucky to go out like this!

The next day I'm on the phone with Bertie Kahn, which was almost like being on the phone with dead air, he was so damn terse. We were talking about the guy who'd died laughing and I said, “What do we do about this, Bertie? Do you want to call up Winchell and Pegler and Greene and have them bury this?”

“Bury this?” he said.

“This is two people who've died now,” I reminded him. “And that's just the ones we know of. We don't want people to be afraid to see the act!”

“We don't?” he said, debonairly puffing a Gitane probably.

And it struck me like lightning, right in that office—in my chair this jagged bolt struck me!
Of course
we wanted people to be afraid to see the act!

Bertie made some calls and not only was it in the gossip columns, it was in the news sections too. The
Daily New
s ran it on the second page and all the Hearst papers carried it too. It was absolutely terr
ifulous
press!