Funnymen Read Online Free PDF Page B

for our first performance together.
    â€œOkay, so what do I do?” That's what Vic asked at our first rehearsal. I remember thinking, What you ought to do is please comb back your hair, but naturally I did not say that aloud. He'd brought a chum along, that diminutive scrappy fellow named Guy.
    Working feverishly, over the course of several weeks we incorporated Victor into the act. I think he and Guy were staying at a hotel near Hanover Street. He was, I must allow, very eager to learn and was quite punctual.
    Vern Hapgood was our arranger. He was a New Haven man, had taught choral music there, and had the reputation of being a martinet. He was a perfectionist, yes, but was not ill-tempered.
    He ran us through the songs and played the piano. He wasn't happy with Vic—not with his voice, not with the way he looked or his manner, the way he spoke and dressed. There was very little about Vic that he liked.

    GUY PUGLIA: The poor kid'd work himself silly with these blue-blood candy asses, day in, day out. But at night, he had stomach cramps real bad. From the worrying. He had the runs and the chills and the sweats. He thought—he said it many times—“I can't cut it, Gaetano. I'm no good.” I said to him, “Hang in there, Vic, it'll come. It's just singing.” He said, “Uhuh. I can't do it. I'm out of my element.” I says to him, “Hey, what the hell is singing anyways? It's talking but with a melody, right? You can talk, can't you, Vic?” And he'd say, “Yeah, I can talk.” But meanwhile he's doubled up with his hands over his guts, shivering and sick.
    He dropped about fifteen pounds—he couldn't keep food down, he couldn't keep food up, he couldn't keep it anywheres . . . so why eat? And he didn't.
    His mom would call the hotel three or four times a week to check up on us. There was no phone in the room so Vic would have to go to a phonebooth out on Salem Street and he'd call her back. She kept telling him to eat, eat, eat. Then she'd put Bruno on the line and Vic'd say, “Hey, Pop,” and then you didn't hear nothin' on the other end. Bruno was on the other end and not saying one fuckin' word.
    â€œOkay, Pop, I got you,” Vic would say. “Put Mamma back on.”
    Violetta told me on the phone once: “You take care of my boy.”
    Well, I wound up doin' that for the next sixty fuckin' years.

    CATHERINE RICCI: Mamma sent me up to Boston with a few slabs of veal Milanese and some lasagna, about thirty pounds of food. She said to me, “Make sure it gets into that boy's stomach. And if it don't go down his mouth, you get it into him some other way . . .”

    HUGH BERRIDGE: Slowly but surely, he got the hang of it. This was not Rigoletto, of course; this was the kind of music the Pied Pipers or the Ink Spots were singing. And he started to fit in. His voice, even Vern admitted it, was malleable. But it was just eating Vic alive at first. “I'm tryin', guys, I'm tryin',” he'd say. He looked sickly at times.
    [Vic] had trouble remembering the lyrics. Teddy Duncan—he always thought on his feet—had the clever idea to write the lyrics on Vic's shirtsleeves. So we had Jack Enright's secretary write the lyrics in red ink on the sleeves of his shirts.
    Unfortunately we had not noticed how much Victor was sweating.

    â€¢ • •

    SALLY KLEIN: You couldn't pay to keep people away. They came from as much as fifty miles away, which in those days was a big deal.
    Harry and Flo already had engagements lined up in Camden, Newark, and Buffalo, and Rosie booked them back into the Baer Lodge for after that.

    DR. HOWARD BAER: The shows at the Lodge were great. It always started the same, making it look as though Ziggy was interrupting Harry and Flo's show in progress. Ziggy would later tell interviewers that he was the first to introduce the whole Pirandello angle into modern comedy, something about a fourth wall being torn