Where the Truth Lies (16 page)

It had worked so perfectly for us over the years. It was an almost foolproof way of intimidating an audience into loving us. If Vince tried a joke and it failed, I would leave the stage and go right out into the audience and yell at them, explaining the logic of the joke and why theyhad to laugh. Now, this worked gorgeous, because no one took my abuse seriously. I was the monkey, right? So here was the little kid yelling at the grown-ups for not appreciating his big brother. How are you going to be offended by that?

And then Vince would yell atme, he’d slap me on the head and say, “Now stop that, Lanny, these nice people have every right not to laugh if they want to, they’ve paid a lot of money to be here, and we should be privileged to perform for them.” And I’d act sorry for what I’d done. Vince would tell me to apologize and I’d wet my eyebrows with my fingertips and put on a posh accent and say how sorry, et cetera, and then flip it by snarling, “You rat finks!” (on TV) or “You rat bastards!” (in a nightclub). Vince would slap me again, the audience would howl, and look what we’d done: through my harmless kid’s mouth, we’d criticized them for their response, abused them, vented all our loathing for them, bullied them, demanded they respond better … then, through Vince’s charming mouth, we’d brown-nosed them, paid tribute to them, told them how appreciative we were, so all the men in the audience could feel like hotshots and big spenders, and I’d still gotten in one final shot. We were mugging the audience, working them over, calling it comedy, and they were loving it.

And we could invert the formula. If I was dying with that night’s crowd, Vince could act like I was this pathetic schlemiel (yeah, sure, a schlemiel in a six-hundred-dollar tux with custom silk shirt and diamond-studded cuff links). He’d put his arm around me and say, “My little partner here”—I’d be slumped over—“is working his heart out to make you folks laugh and you, you sophisticated people, you’re too cosmopolitan to give a chuckle at somebody who is willing to take this”—he’d throw me around the room—“and this”—another flip, concluding with my patented death pratfall—“but no, you’re too jaded, too urbane, for that kind of humor.” By now the audience would be screaming, not only because what I was doing was spectacular slapstick, but also because Vince had let them know they had been letting us down. Since they reallydid want us to like them, to belong to our gang, to be in our club, they would always laugh, if for no other reason than to gain our approval.

And if at some strange second show on a Tuesday the audience was stiff or talkative and we couldn’t get them in line, then we’d just play to each other, or to the band, and we’d cut the ad-libs out of the show and be offstage in thirty-two minutes, fuck the rat bastards, and back to the dressing room to boff the broads we’d noticed sitting at tables eight and seventeen.

It had all worked so perfectly for us. Good-bye to that.

I was worried about Vince. Publicly, he’d taken theNight at the Opera thing fine, but all worms turn and Vince had never been much of a worm in the first place. If he was going to have some kind of blowout with me, it would not be good to do it on live TV.

In past years, it had turned out that our very best ratings came in the last hours of the polio telethon. It was the same thing that brings people to sports car races. In this case, Vince and I were the sports cars, and the audience tuned in hoping one of us would crash. By the last hour or two of the telethon, it was as ifwe were the charity. I would hobble around, reading the latest figures on the tote board, squinting to see through puffy eyes. Ed Herlihy, who had gotten a good night’s sleep, would point at me as ifI were handicapped. “Look at this man here,” he’d implore, “God only knows what’s holding him up, he’s killing himself for you, pick up that phone and pledge your dollars. The number to call is being flashed on your screen as I speak.” We made it like I was staggering my way to Calvary and anyone who didn’t contribute was Pontius Pilate.

This was where we got to the ever-popular “Lanny is going to have a heart attack on camera” segment. I’d wait until Vince was resting. I’d do a tap routine with the Nicholas Brothers, which would leave me panting and unable to regain my breath. I would then sit on a stool and sing “Smile.” I would barely be able to get out the notes. My voice would break. I would gasp and wheeze and mop my head with a handkerchief. A glass of water would be handed to me and my hand would tremble. Sometimes I’d just stop singing but the band would keep playing.“Smile—“ I’d attempt to rejoin them, but my breath would fail me. “Go to the band,” I’d say to the cameraman—while I was still on camera, you understand?—and the cameraman would pan to the Russ Cummings Orchestra, and the musicians would take over, playing the song as an instrumental. I’d let Ed Herlihy walk me off the set to applause. Ed would come back and reassure everyone that Lanny was okay, just overcome with fatigue and I’d be back in a little while, but he didn’t want me to come back until we were within striking distance of our goal. This would usually tie up the switchboards.

This year, just as I was about to tell the camera to pan to the band, Vince strolled out from behind our show curtain, looking equally haggard, and he’d been smart enough not to shave. He took over the melody from me in that voice of his, whichis fucking gorgeous after all, and the audience went nuts. I had no choice but to pretend I’d found some new last reserve of strength, and so I managed to catch my breath and sing in thirds with him. We went for the last notes and he sang the D, so I went for the F sharp above that. He smiled, put his arm around me, and joined me on my note, then slid up to an A that was like a major ninth or something, which I didn’t have in my range even on a good day. Hewas the fucking singer, after all.

So I did the only thing I could do, which was to collapse. There were screams, but Vince caught me. Somebody snapped a picture and I thought, “Front page tomorrow’sMiami Herald. ” I told them I’d just hyperventilated from the singing and the heat and I’d be back at the top of the next hour. Vince said he’d carry the ball from there, and I walked off on my own steam, feeling like a quarterback who takes himself out of a tie game in the fourth quarter because he’s feeling a little woozy, while his coach stares at him in disgust.

I went back to my dressing room to lie down for a minute. I actually needed to, because the fake collapse had taken the wind out of me. I was assisted, as I had been since the telethon began, by a cute kid who attended either the University of Miami or a store where they sold their Tshirts. You can’t expect me to remember her name, but the way her rack distorted theM ’s inMIAMI will live in my memory forever.

One of the two Miami cops who had gotten me into the building (who now alternated as security guards outside our dressing rooms) looked up from his paper and asked, “You okay, Mr. Morris? I saw you had a little accident.” He nodded to a TV monitor next to Vince’s dressing-room door. I told him I was okay.

The cute girl with the defiant torpedoes expressed her concern for me. “You sure you don’t want someone to watch out for you, Lanny?” she said, all worried-looking. “Maybe you shouldn’t be left alone.”

I smiled at her and kissed her forehead. “Listen, sweetheart, two days ago when you wouldn’t leave me alone, I loved it. Right now, I’m beat. But thanks, you were great.” She looked disappointed that this was the end of it and she knew that it was.

Now I was alone in my dressing room and I turned up the volume on the wall speaker that monitored the broadcast. I heard Vince’s voice, so I turned the knob of the speaker to “off.” I got up and looked closely at myself in the mirror, as I always do in dressing rooms. I didn’t look too bad, unless you compared me to a heartthrob like Vince Collins. If I wasn’t twisting my face around trying to look like a monkey all the time, I probably looked just fine. Maybe even handsome. Hey, I got laid with the ladies more than Vince did, for all his looks. I could play the romantic lead in my own movies. Why not? Monkey meets girl, monkey loses girl, monkey gets girl. Darwin would love it.

I heard the door open. I had to admire the Miami T-shirt girl, who was so determined to achieve some kind of record with me.

“Sweetheart …” I protested.

“Sweetheart,” said a mellow baritone back. Vince.

“You’ve got the wrong room,” I said. It was awkward now with us. It was hard to talk to each other. I nodded to the speaker on the wall that monitored the broadcast. “If you’re in here, who’s driving the bus?”

Through the doorway I saw him reach into the fridge for a beer. “The local stations have it for three more minutes. You think I can risk drinking a beer?”

“You?”

“I don’t mean because of getting drunk. I mean will it put me to sleep? I never wanted a beer or a night’s sleep so bad in my life, and I don’t even like beer. Or sleeping.” He opened the beer and came into the bedroom, sat down next to me, offered me a cigarette, which I turned down. He lit his. “You were faking that collapse, right?”

“Right.”

“Uh-huh. Tired all the same?”

His eyes looked like twin entrances to a cave. We were both exhausted. I could hear words, but I was having a hard time remembering what they meant. I knew that everybody hated me. And that the room we were in was suddenly lit very strangely, as if the parts that were supposed to be dark were light, and vice versa.

“I’m fine,” I told him.

Vince was saying something to me now, but it was very hard for me to take it all in. I kept wondering whether his head was as big as it seemed, like a weather balloon.

“I thought about it, pally,” Vince said from this immense head of his. “You think you have me over a barrel but listen: you don’t. You want to shoot me with a shotgun in a telephone booth? Fine. Anything you do to me is going to splatter all over you. The ricochet might even kill you. No matter what, you’d come out of it looking like one helluva mess.”In somnia veritas, I thought. Vince took a long swill of the Pabst beer. “So let’s play nice.”

“Go play with yourself, you goddamn Mediterranean,” I said in a steady voice and stared him down. For a second I thought he would hit me, and if he hit me, it was going to hurt, I knew that. But he didn’t.

He got up. “I’m finishing out the last hour. Would be swell as hell if you dropped in.”

He walked out of the room, a little uncertain in his steps but not because he was drunk. He was just really tired. Me, I wanted to stay on the bed past forever, but I knew if I did, Vince would be glad to end the show without me, and then there’d be talk about my health at the press conference, the one we had agreed to hold in New Jersey late this afternoon. Why had we ever agreed to it? I knew why. We were afraid of Sally Santoro.

We could sleep on the plane, though. That’s right, we could sleep on the plane. I forced myself onto my feet and walked out of the dressing room. The nameless cutie was still waiting for me.

“Sweetheart, walk me to the stage, okay?”; I asked her. She answered, but again, it was very difficult to understand her, because she was speaking in English and I was hearing in Braille. I asked her to try talking faster, but that didn’t help. She was saying something to me about when we might see each other again and I told her not to be ridiculous, that of course we weren’t ever going to see each other again and she started to cry. I asked her if she’d like to lie down on the floor and do her impression of a couch with two big fluffed-up pillows for me. She just stood there as I found my mark near Vince on camera and the audience cheered my return after my dramatic collapse.

We told the audience that wehad to reach our goal of $3.9 million in pledges. Actually, we had reached it about two hours earlier, but they purposely held back the real totals, because the big boost always came in the last hour, when people at home called in droves to get us over the magic number.

Now the numbers moved rapidly on the tote board, and when we hit $3.9 million the whole place went hysterical, like Ben Grauer reporting from Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

With gravelly throats, we told the audience to watch forA Night at the Opera from MGM, and Vince and I sang “Side by Side” to finish the show. We had no voices, and as we sang to each other, we each looked at the other’s earlobe, shoulder, Adam’s apple, anywhere but each other’s eyes.

I walked quickly to my dressing room, but Billy Bishop was there with a couple of Sally Santoro’s friends. Billy told us that they were taking us right to the airport, where the twelve-thirty American flight to New York was going to be held for us.

A motorcade led by both the police and Sally’s friends took Vince, myself, and Billy Bishop to the airport at about ninety miles an hour. We boarded the American Airlines flight bound for Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York’s Idlewild. Vince and I fell into a stupor without the assistance of booze or Tuinals, and we weren’t awakened until we’d landed in the fourth and final city. I was told that during the flight I’d wake for a minute, ask for water like a four-year-old, have a sip, and then pass out again. Billy Bishop and the stewardesses made sure no one bothered us.

When we landed in New York and they shook the two of us awake, I felt completely groggy, like a dentist had put an entire box of cotton pads into my mouth and rammed a few up my sinuses as well. As we came down the roll-up stairway onto the tarmac, we were hit by a twenty-one flash-gun salute going off in our faces. The press was told we wouldn’t be making a statement until we got to the new Casino del Mar, so off we all went like a funeral cortege that had entered the Indy 500. Apparently, we were a pretty big deal. We had a police car in front and in back of the limo that Sally Santoro had provided for the two of us, along with several bodyguards, who were there to protect us from any thoughts we might have of going AWOL prior to our press conference.

Our limo pulled up to the front of the hotel itself, which was a wall of windows, each with that gray plastic curtain lining taking up different amounts of the window’s frame. We stepped out, and a stiff, cold breeze that you’d never have found outside the Versailles in Miami flapped around our tuxedo jackets, which we were still wearing.