Funnymen Open ebook - 2002

Excerpt

from Chapter One

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.

SEYMOUR GREENSTEIN: Kids from all over Brooklyn would come to our neighborhood just to see this kid Sigmund Blissman. He was a sight to behold, all round and red. And that wild Brillo hair of his, even back then. Kids from Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Flatbush, wherever. One social club from Poseidon Avenue had a contest called Count Ziggy's Freckles. I think he was about ten at the time. They called Ziggy into where the club met and they stripped Ziggy down. They started counting his freckles and Ziggy stood there patiently. As it was dawning on them that they weren't ever going to be able to count them all, Ziggy says, "Wait. You forgot to count these." And he pulled down his underwear.

ARNIE LATCHKEY: Some of the showgirls in Vegas used to call him "the Hose." Or maybe it was "the Horse." His real last name should've been Blessed-man.

CATHERINE RICCI: No girl ever had to worry about whether Vic's mother was going to like her when he brought her home because after a while, Vic never could bring a girl home. Mamma would've gone after her with a chopping knife or her infamous rolling pin.

If he'd brought home the Virgin Mary, Mom would've complained about her having a bad reputation.

RAY FONTANA: Vic always had a ton of girls around. All the dates I ever had, I think it was just 'cause they wanted me to introduce them to my good-looking kid brother. I dated this girl Ann McGee maybe two dates. My mother loved her, thought she was terrific. Her family was from Flounder Heights, the ritzy lace-curtain-Irish section. A few months after I took her out, she drops by. I say, "Hey, Annie, where you been?" She brushes right by me and heads toward Vic.

And then my mother tells me that Ann McGee is the biggest puttana in America. All 'cause she was now with Vic.

TONY FERRO: He was working half the women in Codport. A lot of these women, Vic was pals with their husbands around town. Guys at the pool hall, at Jiggs's, on the piers. Vic would joke around with them and all but meanwhile he was givin' it to their wives.

I remember once he told me to pick him up outside of Joe Ravelli's house. Joe was a good guy; he used to sell Italian ices in the summer for extra dough but he'd always give the kids ices for free. He was off fishing and the wife was home. The door opened and I saw Mrs. Ravelli in the doorway, in the shadows, adjusting the belt of her robe, which was green. Vic gave her a nice love slap on the ass -- you could hear it twenty yards away. He come outta there with a little smile, he straightened his hair out with a comb, and then he flashed me a crisp new ten-dollar bill.

ANGELA CROSETTI [friend of Vic Fountain in Codport]: My mom and me would go to Jiggs Cudahy's soda parlor almost every day after school. We'd sit at the counter and Vic would make us an ice-cream soda or a malted. My mother would apply her lipstick and eye shadow for an hour beforehand at her vanity table, till everything was perfect. When she was ready she looked gorgeous. People always compared her to Rita Hayworth.

She and her friends called Vic il ragazzo con i capelli blu come la notte. The boy with the hair as blue as the night.

TONY FERRO: The storeroom was between Jiggs's office and the soda fountain. But Vic had set it up so's there was a nice space on the floor in there. He used about a mile of cotton for a mattress. Actually it was Jiggs who set it up. 'Cause there was a hole in the wall that divided Jiggs's office from the storeroom. One afternoon Vic is in there doing his thing -- I think it was Angie Crosetti's mom, who was a real hairy cow -- and I walk into Jiggs's office and there he is, this fat red Irishman with his cazzo in his hands, peekin' through the hole in the wall.

"We could charge money for this view, Tony," Jiggs said to me.

One day Jiggs's wife is sick, she's got an upset stomach. Jiggs comes over and says to me, "Hey, Tony, can you run these pills over to my wife on your way home?" I tell him, "Flounder Heights ain't on my way home, and besides, I don't deliver the stuff ever. That's Vic's job. Have him do it." He rubs his chins a couple times and says he'll just bring it over himself when he goes home.

So I've got an hour left in the day and I notice that Jiggs just isn't concentrating. Then Vic leaves to deliver the pills to Mrs. Cudahy, he takes off his white mesh hat and is on his way. Jiggs waits two minutes and he says, "Okay, Tony. Out! We're closing up!"

I says, "Huh? It's five o'clock, how are we closing?" And he says, "'Cause we just are!"

He locks up and puts the CLOSED sign on the door. I see him start walking up the hill toward Irish Town and he was huffin' and puffin' 'cause even though it was April it was still cold out and the smoke was coming out his mouth.

That night, Jiggs flipped his lid. He set fire to the drugstore...nothing was standing except the soda fountain and the chrome stools at the counter. Everything else was ashes. And Jiggs sawed his wife's head off in her sleep. How they know it was in her sleep, I don't know -- you'd think that would wake her up. That was the end of her and the end of him too.

SALLY KLEIN: One day my mother gets off the phone and she's looking very sad and I ask her why and she says, "It's bad news, Sal. The Battling Blissmans are back in business."

There was a hotel in the Poconos called the Baer Lodge. Rosie McCoy was an old-time hoofer who'd married "Big" Sid Baer, who owned the place, and she and her husband opened up a nightclub there called the Den. Rosie was the entertainment director and she contacted all her old friends from when she was a dancer. Singers, actors, all kinds. The Beaumonts, Smith and Schmidt, the contortionist act Twyst and Tern, Lenny Pearl. And, of course, Harry and Flo.

They moved into our cottage in Delaware for a while and rehearsed their act. I'd see them in the backyard going through their paces. The only time I ever heard anything was when Flo sang. What a belter. The furniture would rattle when she sang, like there was an earthquake.

Ziggy was not staying with us at the time. You know, it might make us sound cheap but to save money to reupholster and recarpet all the places where Ziggy had "gone," well, as I said, my father manufactured brassieres and girdles and corsets -- he just used lace from the factory. For ten years our entire house looked like one big brassiere-and-girdle set.

Some psychologist might say this is where Ziggy got his big-boob fetish. But I really don't know.

DR. HOWARD BAER [Rosie McCoy Baer's nephew]: Aunt Rosie booked the Blissmans on a bill with the Beaumonts. I was young then and I had a big crush on Mary Beaumont. She would lean over and hand me candy in her dressing room; it was and still is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me. The bellhops called her Mary Cantaloupes.

The Blissman act lasted maybe twenty minutes...I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be funny. Aunt Rosie had once booked this actor named Lionel Gostin who had done Shakespeare and was very respected. Gostin would get onstage dressed in black and the lights would dim until you could see only his face. He'd do scenes from Hamlet and Othello. He'd play to the thousandth row, but there was no thousandth row. There was usually a plant in the crowd, some guy who'd stand up and yell "Bravo! Bravo!" and get five bucks for it. Now I knew that Lionel Gostin was not onstage to get laughs. He was doing drama. But I never could figure out what the Blissmans were doing.

Except at the end. Florence would sing. It was as if she was punishing the audience. "Okay, you made it through our lousy comedy act. Think you're so tough? Now I'm going to puncture your eardrums and shatter your eyeglasses."

HUGH BERRIDGE: I was a vocalist in a Boston trio called the Three Threes. [We wore] woolen vests that had the trey from a domino on them and would play at social functions such as balls, weddings, and once in a while we opened up for big bands -- Basil Fomeen and Isham Jones and the like. We had regular jobs or were going to college. Rowland Toomey worked in insurance and was quite the expert at death benefits, Teddy Duncan had a degree in law from Harvard. I too was studying law at Harvard.

One night we were in Codport performing, and a rather middling ten-piece band was supporting us. Unbeknownst to us, the theater manager had written on the advertisements that there would be an "open mike" contest -- the Three Threes would take on anyone willing to sing with us. Most of our audience that week was comprised of kids, teenagers only a few years younger than ourselves. And they were quite shy and therefore reluctant. A few did come onstage, and they'd never been on that side of a microphone before...they sang a few bars and then trotted off, quite red in the face.

Suddenly this handsome boy with a mop of dark, curly, and almost preternaturally bluish hair was being pushed by friends into the aisle. He was, as they said back then, "togged to the nines." He brushed back his hair, adjusted his tie -- which was turquoise, I believe, to match his eyes -- and walked toward the stage. He already had that now-famous Vic Fountain walk, that combination swagger and strut, a little bit like John Wayne. Very cock-of-the-walk, I must say.

As he got on the stage I heard a sighing and some sort of commotion -- the girls in the crowd really thought that this boy was very handsome.

We didn't even have to nudge him toward the mike...he just walked up and grabbed it. I turned to Jarvis and Teddy; we had no idea if this dark, handsome boy could sing, but we were quite sure he had charisma.

The band started up "Ain't She Sweet," and we began singing. Vic mouthed the words for a few bars but then he realized that, as he was only inches in front of the microphone, everyone could tell.

He stepped back a few feet and whispered to me, "What do I do?"

"You sing," I whispered back sternly.

So he began singing.

Vic was a natural baritone who made himself into a tenor. He sang "under" the lyrics, behind them. He phrased a shade behind the beat and got beneath the lyric. It was instinct, I suppose. Either that or he didn't know the song we were singing. While we sang, he sang around us...it was almost scatting, one could say, but was, I guess, lazier than that, more Perry Como than Ella Fitzgerald.

He was the only one that night who did an entire song with us; it was "Always" by Irving Berlin. He got applause. We got applause.

The next night there was an open mike again. The first person on the stage was none other than the boy from the previous night. He showed up for all five nights, each time dressed better.

By the fifth night he had memorized the two songs he performed with us. Within a month he was part of the act.

GUY PUGLIA [friend of Vic Fountain]: "What would you think if I became a singer or something?" Vic asked me. We were shooting eight ball at Kitty's Korner Klub on Perch Street.

"You?" I says. "Vic, you ain't sung since that candy-ass choir. And you didn't even sing then."

Well, he proceeds to tell me about that trio, the Three Threes, and I says, "Yeah, but come on...what about the actual singing part of it, when it comes down to making the words come out your mouth in the form of some kind of melody?" He waves his hand at me and says, "Hey, anything Bing Crosby can do, I can do."

And I understood that. Vic was six-one, had big shoulders and muscles...and you ever see Crosby? He looked like a twig that someone hung a tweed hat on and handed a golf club to. So to me that made sense.

There was only one voice teacher in the town. His name was Enzo Aquilino and he'd sung opera in Milan decades before. Or so he said. Walking past his house you sometimes heard opera playing on the Victrola, pouring out the window. It was beautiful. But sometimes you heard his students tryin' to sing opera and that wasn't so beautiful.

CATHERINE RICCI: My mother called Mr. Aquilino "the little skunk" because of his silver and black hair. Well, he simply refused to give any lessons other than in the operatic style. But Mamma knew that was not the kind of singer Vic wanted to be. "Okay, okay," my mother says to him and then leaves. Twenty minutes later she's back with her rolling pin. Aquilino locked his door but she busted in through the window and started smashing all his framed Enrico Caruso pictures to pieces. "You teach my boy to sing or I'll eat your piano!" she tells him.

Now, I slept with [my sisters] Connie and Dolores, in the room next to Vic's. Vic was the only one of us who had his own room. Ray and Sal shared too, upstairs.

One night I hear yelling and I rush to Vic's room...I had no idea what was going on.

I couldn't believe what I saw: Papa had pinned Vic to his bed with one arm -- Vic was flailing around like crazy, trying to break free. And my father was jamming a big haddock down Vic's throat in one piece. He was just shoving it down Vic's mouth.

"You wanna sing, sissy?" Dad was hissing. "Femminuccia! Big-band sissy boy want to sing? Trying singing now, eh? Sing now. Sing like that sissy boy Crosby! Sing now!"

In five minutes the whole haddock from the head down to the tail was down Vic's throat.

But Vic kept at it. Every day he took the lessons.

Oh, did I mention that the haddock was still alive?

HUGH BERRIDGE: Vic asked me for a way to reach us in Boston, and I gave him the number of our manager, Jack Enright. I did not think we would ever hear from him.

On the train back to Boston, Rowland Toomey started imitating the way that Vic had vocalized, the sonorous, oily swirling around the melody. Teddy Duncan turned to him and said, "Rowlie, perhaps we could use another voice. He certainly did have a presence."

"But we're a trio," Rowlie said. "We've always been a trio."

And as the world knows, soon Vic climbed aboard our little caravan, and we became the Four Threes.

SEYMOUR GREENSTEIN: When a teacher called on him and he didn't know the answer, Ziggy would give his wrong answer in cockamamie accents and dialects, like Yiddish, Chinese, German, Japanese. And so there was a lot of laughing because he never knew the right answer. We were once reading Romeo and Juliet aloud and when it was Ziggy's turn, he really hammed it up. I don't know if he got one word right but it didn't matter, not with that hilarious British accent. He was the class clown to end all class clowns.

SALLY KLEIN: It was summer and the Blissmans were booked for the Baer Lodge for July. Ziggy was, I'd say, seventeen. He'd never seen them perform. They'd never taken him on the road. But this time -- for whatever reason -- they brought him to the Poconos.

DR. HOWARD BAER: I was at the desk when they came in. Ziggy looked nothing like his parents. He was a teenager, had bright red hair and a round nose, and he looked like a brand-new basketball.

The three of them walked into the lobby and approached Allie Gluck, who worked the front desk. Allie indicated Ziggy and asked, "Harry, what's this?"

Ziggy squirmed in that babyish way he used in the act and he pinched his crotch and said, "I'm this." The way he said it...you had to be there.

I remember thinking it was strange: Harry had booked only one room. So you had a husband, a wife, and a seventeen-year-old staying in one room. Not even a suite.

Allie said to Ziggy, "You sure you don't want a room for yourself?"

"Yeah, I'm sure," Ziggy answered him.

Allie asked him, "Are you scared of the dark?"

"Oh yeah. I'm a-scared. Very a-scared. But not of the dark."

Allie asked, "Of what then?"

"Oh, lots and lots of things," Ziggy said.

By now you've got two dozen or so people in the lobby and they're all paying attention.

"So you want to be with Mommy and Daddy?" Allie asked.

Ziggy looked at Harry, made a weird face, then he looked at Flo and made the same face.

"On second thought," he said to Allie, "I think I'm a-scared of them too."

I'm not kidding when I tell you that Ziggy Bliss already had about fifteen people in the palm of his hand.

When Harry's face lit up, it looked like it was the first time that had ever happened.

It was a double bill. Harry and Flo were opening up for the Beaumonts. You had a hot weekend in July and a packed hotel. The Beaumonts could have been the next Fred and Adele Astaire or Vernon and Irene Castle. They were in Staten Island Serenade with George Raft but I think that was it, film-wise. They really were such magnificent dancers.

The routine the Blissmans were doing was that Harry is jealous because Flo, he finds out, had been working as a small-size model behind his back and, it turns out, she's making more money than him. They're five minutes into it and -- no exaggeration -- half of the crowd had filed into the lobby or was in the bathroom.

All of a sudden Ziggy comes onstage. It was like that -- he was just there. His first time ever.

Now most people in the club had never seen Sigmund Blissman before. They'd never seen anyone who looked like Ziggy Blissman. They couldn't tell if he was five or fifteen or fifty-five years old. Right away there's a big hush.

He's on the corner of the stage. One hand is nervously clutching the curtains and the other is holding an ashtray.

"What are you doing here?" Harry asks him. And he's apoplectic. Coming onstage during his act...you simply don't do that.

"I'm watching the show, Poppy," Zig says.

"Go upstairs! We're performing!"

"Don't look like much performing to me, Poppy."

People are tittering already, they're coming in back from the lobby.

"Zig," Harry says, "your mother and I -- "

"What? You're finally gonna get married?" Ziggy says.

Ziggy lifts up the ashtray and then lets it drop. And it breaks. He says, "Hey, Mommy, now you don't have to sing tonight."

The place is in hysterics by now.

Ziggy goes into the audience, grabs an ashtray. He breaks that one too and says, "And now you don't got to sing tomorrow neither."

"Sonny, every ashtray you break will come out of our paycheck," Harry says.

"But you work for free, don't you, Pops?"

"For free?"

"Yeah, you always say that Rosie Baer don't pay you nothing. Hey, Ma, can I dance with Mary Beaumont tonight?"

"You?" Flo says. "With Mary Beaumont? Dance? Why, you can hardly walk!"

"Oh, I can walk," Ziggy says. And then he breaks out the physical gags, he tries to walk but it's as though he has his ankles tied together. He reels around the stage, goes into the audience, falls down, even starts jumping from table to table. "See, Ma, I can walk. I wanna dance with Mary Beaumont!" Whining like a three-year-old.

"Now now, Ziggy," Harry says, "that's what Billy Beaumont is for."

"Yeah, you're right, Poppy. They're the best pair there is in dancing. And you know what? Billy Beaumont, he ain't bad neither."

Flo sang the closing number and Zig did this thing, as if he was going insane from the noise, covering his ears and reeling around like a boxer getting his brains knocked out.

It didn't end there. After a twenty-minute break, Billy and Mary took the stage. Ziggy let them do a number and, well, he couldn't resist. He bounced onto the stage during a tango and asked Billy if he could cut in. Now, poor Billy, he could not say one word onstage because of the mincing, effeminate manner in which he spoke. So he just shook his head. Ziggy whipped out a pair of scissors and cut Billy's bow tie. Then he started flitting around like a butterfly for a few seconds and grabbed Mary and began to tango, if that's what you want to call it, with her.

Billy would have murdered Ziggy, and Mary would've grabbed those scissors and castrated him. But in show business, I guess, if the crowd is going with it, you go with it too.

So Mary and Ziggy did a tango and during one dip he buried his head in her cleavage and when he got up out of it, his eyes were bulging out...it really looked like they were going to pop out of their sockets. He careened around the stage and bounced off the walls. When he finally "recovered" himself, instead of dancing with Mary, he started dancing with Billy instead.

The crowd loved it.

Copyright © 2002 by Ted Heller

Media reviews

Walter Kirnauthor of Up in the AirTed Heller takes one of pop literature's tinniest forms, the gossipy celebrity "oral history," and makes of it a golden opportunity for jazzy, sympathetic satire. A fine performance. Reserve your tickets now.