Where the Truth Lies (14 page)

Vince and I looked at each other. I was curious and asked, “Sally, what do those have to do with Florida?”

“Nothing, I’m just up to my balls in waffle irons and three-D cameras, you’ll be doing me a favor if you take some. They make great presents. Oh, and I got chinchilla wraps for your mothers.” He glared at us and grabbed my wrist hard as it lay on the table. “But only for them, you understand, you cocksucking bastards? I don’t want some hooker walking around my lobby wearing the same chinchilla I gavemy mother. Understood?”

We understood that we were going to return to the Casino del Mar three months from now, directly after finishing the 1959 Veterans Day Polio Telethon, which was the biggest as well as the last of our televised fund-raisers.

The truth is, polio was over. The vaccine had worked. Eventually we learned that the main reason we were still raising money was for all those scumbags at the American Polio Foundation who’d built themselves a very cushy operation with fancy headquarters in Stamford and extremely generous salaries. They used to say “Polio is Public Enemy Number One,” but within the ranks, the enemy they really wanted to destroy was Jonas Salk and his goddamn vaccine, which was putting them all out of their sweet jobs.

Three months later we were back at the Versailles in Miami and had closed out our latest stint on Wednesday night. Louis Prima and Keely Smith along with Sam Butera and the Witnesses were taking over from us. They weren’t us, obviously, but they did a good show, threw in a little comedy, and they could draw the same sort of crowd.

We spent most of the day out at the private pool the Versailles had. It wasn’t much for swimming but it was railed off, which meant we could actually get some sun and a little seclusion. We got back up to the suite around seven and found that Sally had been more than good to his word. Laid out around the living room were various crates bearing the address of their destination, our suite at the Casino del Mar Hotel in Palisades Park, New Jersey. What I thought was a box of beach balls turned out to hold the thinnest-skinned, most dripping-wet grapefruits I ever tasted in my life. Likewise the promised six-foot metal locker filled with fruits of the sea, over a dozen lobsters shifting slowly across a bed of stone crabs and ice. A crate of cigars from Cuba. What cigars. And a box of eight waffle irons and four thirty-five-millimeter 3-D cameras, with viewer and slide projector.

We saw that the crates were closed up again, and having presented them to us for our approval like a fancy birthday cake, the Versailles was to ship these goodies up to New Jersey the next day, where they’d be waiting for us at the new Casino del Mar on Sunday. The insulated metal crate filled with ice and shellfish went to the hotel’s meat locker for overnight storage. Sally had kept his word and now expected us to keep ours.

We purposely made it an early night Thursday because we knew we wouldn’t have anything resembling a full night’s sleep again until Monday afternoon. We called down for Maureen, the room-service girl with the gorgeous red hair that you stopped staring at once you got a look at her body, the same Maureen who’d brought me champagne while I was helping out Vince by boffing Denise. Maureen brought us up three steaks (one was for her) as her last official delivery of the day. Much as I love lobster, all that shellfish nested on ice in the living room had actually put us in the mood for hoofs, not claws. I didn’t have much trouble convincing Maureen to also supply some attentive room service in my bedroom. Vince and I had both popped a couple of Tuinals to ensure that we’d sleep like babes, and Vince bought insurance on his bet by having a few babes on hand. Well, not exactly on his hand. The Tuinals, coupled with a nice amount of booze, guaranteed us the sleep of the dead. Late the next morning, Maureen was sent packing and Vince and I went about preparing ourselves for that night’s broadcast.

The goal that year was $3.9 million “to stop polio from coming back,” whatever the hell that meant. And how’d they arrive at $3.9 million, like four would have been too ostentatious? To remind the viewers of the goal, we had agreed that the telethon could run thirty-nine hours, nonstop. The show would begin at nineP .M. on Friday night and finish at noon on Sunday.

We paced it so that Vince and I were on from kickoff time Friday night to oneA .M.; then Vince handled one to three alone, and our announcer, Ed Herlihy, handled three to six, which he really loved doing; then I did from six to nineA .M., catching the Saturday morning kids’ cartoon audience. Vince and I worked from nine to threeP .M. nice and light, lots of breathers, then we both took a four-hour nap, with people like Jack Narz, Art Linkletter, and Bill Cullen (very sweet guy) filling in. Then the two of us came back out for our big Saturday night, from sevenP .M. to oneA .M. Bert Parks handled one to sixA .M., with Vince and myself dropping in if we felt like it—Vince never felt like it but by this point I was usually wired from lack of sleep, so I did—and then we caught the big wrap-up from six to noon, with Vince and me finishing it bleary and teary and weeping as America got ready to go to church. The effect was that it seemed as if Vince and I had been on the air from Friday to Sunday nonstop, and if we hadn’t done exactly that, it was still a pretty heroic effort.

The TV studios in Miami were a miracle. They were one of the main reasons we wanted to do the telethon from there instead of New York. The heat from the overhead lighting for television at this time was a killer, I mean akiller. In Miami, they take heat seriously. It’s a year-round issue. Until you’ve stood at the intersection of Fonseca and Ponce de Leon Boulevard for three minutes in any August, you don’t know what it feels like to have your pants nicely steam-pressed while they’re still on your body. In New York, if you didn’t like the heat from the television lighting, they told you that was how it had to be. In Miami, they did something about it.

The Liftin Studios had cool blue walls everywhere, with glassy navy blue linoleum floors, as wet-looking as a rain slicker, covered with coats and coats of glassy Plastic Wax. As you first entered the doors to the studio, the air-conditioning hit you like you were dropping into your neighbor’s vinyl pool, which had been filled from a garden hose. By the time you got to your dressing suite, you were rubbing your arms to keep warm, looking for a sweater, and asking about coffee. When you arrived on the stage, where the cameras and audience were, you were grateful to feel the caring warmth of those overhead TV lights. These Miami people knew how to handle heat.

I hadn’t wanted to make a joint entrance with Vince, especially not now. Admission to the telethon was first come, first serve, so a good four hours before the broadcast (which was a transcontinental hookup over our own affiliation of local stations) there was already a long line of Collins and Morris fans wrapped twice around the block. This in ninety-six-degree heat.

We had already worked out that Vince and I would secretly enter the studios by crossing from the roof of the building next door, a big piano warehouse. This may sound ridiculous to you, but if you’d been there, you’d know what the mobs Vince and I dealt with were like. I entered the piano warehouse from its service entrance, where two members of the Miami police were waiting for me. The sun had been bright outside and it was pure gloom inside, so I didn’t see them at first, until they stepped into a shaft of sunlight coming through the service door. They startled me and I jumped. I reflexively cracked, “Hey, you got the wrong guy!” (Joke—not my best.) We all laughed.

We took a slow service elevator up, the open kind with a low corral fence in front of it. Then they led me up a short flight of stairs and out onto the roof. Pools of tar bubbled on the carpet of shingles around me. A light aluminum trestle bridge had been placed across the roofs of the two buildings. Although the two buildings were three feet apart at most, still, the four-story drop would kill you.

I told one of the cops, “The rule in Japan is that men walk ten paces ahead of the women except when strolling through a minefield. You first, please.” He smiled and went ahead of me, then held the bridge steady on his end. I told the other cop to hold the side behind me and I scooted quickly from one building to another without looking down. Then the second cop crossed over and pulled the bridge over to the studio’s roof, just in case anybody else got the idea of coming over that way.

“Just a second,” I said. “What about Vince?”

“He’s already here, Mr. Morris,” said the cop. “We brought him over about fifteen minutes ago.”

It was unusual for Vince to arrive anywhere ahead of me. He liked to wander in after I’d gotten the lay of the place, whether it was a TV studio, soundstage, nightclub, or state fair. But today, it made sense.

The cops walked me to what looked like an outhouse in the middle of the roof. One fumbled with a key, unlocked the door to this “privy,” and there was a short staircase, which we headed down. A hall led to a bank of elevators, one of which was being held for me. I signed some autographs for the cops and the elevator operator as we went down to a hallway on the first floor, where they walked me to my dressing room, which had an intentionally anonymous sign on the door sayingHOST 1. I looked across the hall and saw that Vince’s dressing room was markedHOST 2. The police watched me walk into my dressing room and sat themselves down on either side of a small desk outside my door. They let me know they’d be there to make sure no unauthorized persons went into either of our dressing rooms while we were on the air, and particularly to make sure that no one disturbed us when we were napping. I thanked them and shut the door behind me.

There was a vanity with lightbulbs trimming three sets of mirrors. There was a wet bar, a large basket of fruit that would never be eaten, and the makings of a chef’s salad laid out buffet-style on a tray. I heard the sound of a newspaper’s pages being turned and I swiveled to see our agent, Billy Bishop, stretched out on the bed in a small room attached to my dressing room. I guess he’d told the cops he was authorized. He was dressed in a gray seersucker suit and patterned tie, looking as all Young Turk agents were supposed to look. I frowned at him.

“Shoes off my bed, Billy Boy,” I said. “I’m really going to be sleeping there, not just fucking around.”

He got up at the right speed, not so fast as to seem like he’d done something wrong, not so slow as to seem arrogant. “Sorry, Maestro,” he said, smiling nicely with lots of small teeth. He had been calling me “Maestro” since the day we met, and I’d done nothing to stop him. “See what happened to Cornel Wilde?” he asked, indicating the trade paper on the bed.

Unlike Billy, I had never been that interested in Cornel Wilde. “I want Vince and myself and you to have a quick meeting. Go let him know, will you?”

Billy nodded. “Mind telling me what it’s about?”

“No, I don’t mind telling you, that’s why you’re invited to the meeting. Go get Vince.” I nodded toward the door. He started to speak, but I guess he saw something in my face that made him cancel the idea and he left the room.

A Kelvinator refrigerator was stocked as per our rider. I found a bottle opener, popped the cap off a C&C Cola (that was the cola I liked) and sat in a chair with my back to the makeup mirror so the bulbs framed me from behind and made it a little harder to look at me in the windowless room.

Vince came in, looking attentive. His eyes went around the small room. “Reuben’s not here?” he asked quietly.

As I took out a cigarette, Billy joined us and closed the door behind him. I answered Vince. “He’s packing up the stuff at the hotel that we don’t need here. I thought this meeting should be private anyway.” Vince eyed Billy, and I added, “Except for Billy. He should be part of this.”

Vince sat down in the chair next to mine, in front of its own bulb-framed mirror, and looked at me as if I were a waiter setting a plate of warm, green, funny-smelling raw clams in front of him. “Your call,” he said.

Billy asked, “Okay if I get one of those sodas for myself, Lanny?”

“Yeah, in a second. Sit down,” I advised Billy, and he did so. I took a nice last drag on my cigarette and dropped it into the C&C Cola bottle. “At some point over the next three days, everyone who owns a TV set will watch us. I’ve thought a lot about it, and I think from the start of the telethon right to the end, we should be talking about our next movie.”

Billy disagreed. “You have a movie out right now, Lanny. Plug that.”

“Plug you, Billy, it’s already out and already it’s out, if you know what I mean.”

“It did fine.”

“It did okay, but we need to change some things.” Billy looked at Vince, who seemed as passive about this as I thought he might be. “So what I want us to do is to announce tonight, and repeat through all the hours ahead of us, that our next picture is going to beA Night at the Opera for MGM. We’re going to accept Shelly Deutsch’s offer. Billy, you’ll call and tell him we’re going to announce.”

Vince lit a cigarette and exhaled. He looked vaguely amused.

Billy said, “We’ve been up and down this, Lanny. It’s not a good idea. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the really bad ideas. There’s no way you’re going to get away with remaking the Marx Brothers.”

I shook my head. “It’s not a remake. It’s a whole different take on the story.”

Billy said, “So you really want to play Groucho and Chico and Harpo. What, with trick photography?”

“Yeah. Not just split-screen. They have these things called traveling mattes. If Alec Guinness could do it inKind Hearts and Coronets, I sure as hell can. I’m thinking I’ll play Harpo as a circus clown, Chico as an American zoot-suit Jazzbo-type, and Groucho as an egghead, my German-professor character.”

Billy got up from where he was sitting, opened the refrigerator, and took out an Orange Crush. He uncapped it and took a long drink. “You ever consider the fact that you’re one half of a duo, Lanny?”

I looked at Vince. “Vince would do the Allan Jones role,” I said.

Vince looked down as if his cue card had fallen onto the carpet and murmured, “Lanny, the Allan Jones role isn’t a real part. The Marx Brothers wouldn’t have given it to Zeppo. What, I’d sing three songs and marry— Who would I marry at the end?”