Where the Truth Lies (15 page)

“The Kitty Carlisle part.”

“So it’ll be‘Yes, it’s Lanny Morris as you’ve never seen him before—three times as dizzy—three times as daffy—three times as wonderful, with Vince Collins and Giselle MacKenzie in a duet you won’t forget!’ I don’t mind playing second fiddle to you, Lanny. But this. I’d be fourth violin.”

I aimed my explanation, not that any was owed anyone, at Billy. “MGM doesn’t know who the hell they are anymore—they’re running around like Chicken Little over in Culver City, I got Shelly Deutsch there throwing money at us to do this project. It’s a classic title, they don’t owe Kaufman or Ryskind a thing, it was a total buyout.” I turned to Vince. “And listen: not that it matters, but when people think ‘opera,’ what do you think they think? They think singing, they think Italians. Who’s the singing Italian in this room? It’s perfect. It could get you into a whole Mario Lanza kind of thing.”

Vince looked up at me. “Why would I want to get into a Mario Lanza kind of thing?”

Billy brought the bottle of Orange Crush down hard on the buffet table. For the first time since I’d known him, he looked at me without masking his contempt. He had always been chummier with Vince. “Listen, for fuck’s sake, Lanny, you’d be telegraphing to everyone, not just the trade but your fans as well, that you think the team is all you. That goes against the whole appeal of the act. People want to think that you think of Vince as your big brother.”

“Abel had a big brother,” I commented, but I don’t think he got the point.

“Even if you think only of yourself, Lanny, this is a terrible move. If this picture is anything less than a smash, people are going to start talking about how you’re in love with yourself and how you shat on Vince. The audience will have stopped believing in the love you guys have between you.”

“Shut up, Billy,” Vince snapped in a quiet tone.

Billy looked at him in surprise. “Come on, Vince, back me up on this.”

“What … Vince back people up?” I asked. “Joke.”

Vince stubbed out his cigarette with his foot on the linoleum floor, even though there was an ashtray on the counter behind him. “Whatever Lanny wants.”

I nodded in agreement. “I’d at least like to know that my partner will never try to stab me in the back. You know I have absolutely no interest in ever ramming the knife into you, don’t you, Vince? Not ever. Not fucking ever.”

Vince held out his hand. “Okay.”

I shook my head. “We don’t have to shake on anything. We can just say we agree.”

Billy retied his tie as if getting ready to leave. “May I be blunt with you, Lanny? Sometimes you are the biggest fucking prick around.”

I smiled at Vince. “What do you think, Vince?” I asked. “You think I qualify for biggest fucking prick?”

Vince mumbled something about us having a show to do and left the room. Billy left the room too, not mumbling.

“Live—until they drop dead—from beautiful Miami Beach, Florida! For the next thirty-nine hours, it’s the Veterans Day Pooooo-lio Telethon! This is little ol’ me, Ed Herlihy, introducing that guy with a voice that’s simply from heaven—and his pal with a face that’s strictly from hunger. That’s right, here they are, folks: your hosts, Vince Collins and Lanny Morris!”

Ed Herlihy’s announcing was always right on the money. The perfect blend of formal and informal. As always, Vince came out first, smooth, debonair, smiling at the audience. He sidled up to the standing microphone in front of our orchestra under the direction of Russ Cummings and started working the mike and the crowd and, most of all, the camera. Vince always played to the fullest part of the studio, which he’d smartly realized early on was the camera. All TV cameras had a red light on top that lit up whenever the public was looking at you through its particular lens. Vince really knew his way around that red-light district. Jesus, was he ever a natural.

His first song, “Pennies from Heaven,” got a big hand. Let me tell you something: Vince Collins could have carried any show we ever did all on his own. The years since then have only gone to prove that. Great singer, sure, but just as great a straight man. And a great straight man usually has better comedy timing than his partner.

Now out I came to a huge roar from the audience. I was dressed up like I was a Good Humor salesman with my own pushcart, and I started selling, “Ice cream, hey ice cream!”—first to our orchestra, then climbing up into and onto the audience, shaking hands, throwing Popsicles, planting big fat kisses on hysterical fat ladies, and all the while Vince is following me, trying to coax me back to the stage, the band vamping the whole time. How long could this go on? On a show like this, that was left up to me. And since we had thirty-nine hours to fill, I felt generous.

Eventually, the studio audience and most of America being in stitches, we calmed down and got on mike to sing our usual “Two Lost Souls”/“Side by Side” medley. No one on earth would ever have known from looking at that performance that there was anything wrong with our partnership.

The dynamic of our style was brilliant, if I do say so immodestly, since I pretty much invented it myself. What I’d hit on was that Vince and I were really doing a boy-girl act. A few years after this, George Burns pointed out the same thing to me over soup and martinis at the Hillcrest Country Club. Except we were two heterosexual men, one (me) idolizing the other (Vince). So Vince was the guy and I was the equivalent of the goofy dame. The underbelly of Collins and Morris was: Lanny needs to know that Vince likes (loves) him. “I did good, I did good, huuuuh?” was the trademark question I always asked Vince. When he slapped me around, it was the slap that every guy wants to give every broad who angers him; obviously, unless he’s a wife beater, he can’t hit her. But Vince could slap me all over the moon and the audience would just laugh so much. When a guest star like Rosie Clooney or Marilyn Maxwell flirted with Vince, I’d act insulted that the lady didn’t like me as much as she liked him. But the hidden message was: Vince wouldn’t leave me for a (another) woman, would he?

I’m not saying anyone ever thought it through that far. They just laughed at us. But there’s all kinds of laughter. When people laughed at us, they felt good about it, because underneath all the slapping and the insults was a loving relationship. One that I, monkey-Lanny, hoped and prayed for; one that he, dreamboat-Vince, was saddled with and resigned to.

This all sounds very intellectual, but of course it was also about me falling on mytuchus and Vince breaking a prop violin over my head.

I’m not going to get into every minute of the telethon here. I donated the kinescope to the Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse University, and you can check it out there if you want to.

The fact is, Vince and I were never off camera for more than six hours at any given time. That’s important to remember. And just for the record, there’s no way anybody on earth in 1959 could get to New Jersey and back in under six hours unless he flew in a supersonic jet, landed, had the jet turn around, and took off the next minute. And that probably would have been noticed by, say, the Civil Aeronautics Board, or an airport, or somebody. So that’s that.

The Friday night broadcast from nineP .M. to oneA .M. was nothing for us, absolutely nothing, just a slightly longer version of our nightclub act. The one to threeA .M. slot that Vince did alone was easy enough. He just introduced people from these little file cards he had. Abbe Lane did her whole nightclub act minus Xavier Cugat and that was forty minutes right there. Vince sang “Two Sleepy People” with her and then he introduced Richard Hearne as Mr. Pastry doing his impression of an old man dancing “The Rounders.” Pinky Lee followed with his xylophone bit, then ventriloquist Jimmy Nelson with dummies Danny O’Day and Farfel, and by then all Vince had to do was briefly leave Abbe Lane when he and she were having drinks in his dressing room, go back on camera, and tell everyone he really had to get to bed right away.

Ed Herlihy filled in from three to six with the acts that had circled the date of the telethon on their calendars six months ago and had been counting down to the big day.

I was back on the air at sixA .M., urging kids to go out and get nickels and dimes from their neighbors. This was for me the most tiring part, because I was without Vince and I had to talk slow and non-showbiz to all the kiddies. You try being Miss Frances from Ding-Dong School for three hours and see what it’s like. Thank God for Shari Lewis or I would have passed out then and there.

It was a big relief to see Vince at nine. For about the fifth time that morning, we just happened to accidentally let slip news about our next project.

LANNY: Wow, you sang that song just swell, pal!

VINCE: Thanks very much, Lan.

LANNY: You should be singing somewhere like at the Metropolitan Opera, where they have all the nice costumes and the fat ladies with the German “oh-hoh!” and all like that, huuuuh? Wouldn’t you say?

VINCE: Well now, funny you say that …

LANNY: Funny I say thatwhy, huuuuh?

VINCE: Now, now, Lanny, you know we’re not supposed to let slip the big news.

LANNY: What big news would that be, Prince Vince?

VINCE: The news about our next motion picture,A Night at the Opera, with youand youand you and me taking on the world of classical music in our rowdiest romp yet, for MGM.

LANNY: MGM?

VINCE: Yeah, the people who make those movies that always start out with the (Vince’s impression of a lion’s roar; my standard scared leap onto Vince’s back in fear).

Professionally speaking, I could only admire what a pro Vince was at every hour, especially considering what had happened. Whenever we hit the talk aboutA Night at the Opera, I wondered if Vince might crack or lash out at me. We were live, you remember. There was no rewind.

By late Saturday night, when we felt like someone had injected scrap metal into our veins, I was very much at the breaking point. That’s when Jack Lescoulie, who was helping us out, came on at midnight with a big black telephone that had cables attached to it and told us we had a very important phone call from a very important person. Usually this would be someone like Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon or Bishop Fulton J. Sheen or Eleanor Roosevelt.

“Hello, Lanny, this is Sheldon Deutsch, president of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion pictures.”

I looked at Vince in mock shock. He reacted in kind. What total ecstasy we pretended to be feeling, to be receiving a phone call from an old, short Jew who normally would have barely deserved a wave from us at Musso and Frank’s on any Tuesday afternoon.

“SheldonDeutsch ?” I questioned Vince with a throb in my voice. “He’s, he’s, he, he, he, he, he, ha, ha, ha—” Vince slapped me across the face, maybe a little harder than was necessary. “He’s the head of MGM motion pictures, hello Mr. Shel-dun.”

“Hello Lanny and hello Vince,”Sheldon read aloud over the phone. His voice was piped onto the floor monitors. We stared at the phone as if God had just come up with an eleventh commandment and had called to let us know about it.“As the president of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion pictures, now celebrating its fortieth anniversary, it’s my pleasure to talk to you via transcontinental hookup from station KDRA here in Hollywood.”

“Transcontinental hiccup?” I joked.

Vince slapped me. “That’shook up. He’s got a hookup from Hollywood!”

“I thought they arrested all the hookups in Hollywood—or at least got them off the streets,” I ad-libbed. It was pretty risqué for the time, especially for TV. But since it was live they couldn’t bleep it, and since it was in the name of charity, no one could condemn it. The crowd went nuts for like a minute while Vince mock-beat me over the head for my vulgarity. When we let the audience finally calm down, Vince took the phone from me and said respectfully:

“Mr. Deutsch, this is Vince Collins. We’re very pleased to hear from you.”

“Thank you, Vince, and thank you, Lanny. We here at MGM have a long history of supporting those who cannot always physically support themselves. That is why it is our pleasure to announce an endowment from MGM to your wonderful cause, to celebrate the release of our latest movies, which we hope will get all your able-bodied viewers off their feet and into their local movie theater:Ask Any Girl,starring Shirley MacLaine and David Niven, andThe Gazebo,starring Glenn Ford and Debbie Reynolds.”

I mugged, “An endowment, Vince? With Debbie Reynolds and Shirley MacLaine, I bet they’re very well-endowed, huuuh?” Walk on ankles, Vince slaps me, tells me to listen to Mr. Deutsch.

“Therefore, it is my pleasure to donate the grand sum of ten thousand dollars to your cause on behalf of MGM and all its upcoming motion pictures.”

We and the crowd went crazy. Ten thousand dollars? So much! So unexpected!

“Ah, ah, ah. But there is one little catch to this,”says Shelly Deutsch over the phone, interrupting my mad Irish jig. It was really great to hear him try to do comedy delivery. Sort of like watching your CPA perform openheart surgery.“If you want this money for your polio pals and gals … we at MGM want you boys to say yes to starring in our biggest musical comedy ever: A Night at the Opera,with you, Lanny, playing all the roles that the Marx Brothers played in our classic comedy years ago … and with you, Vince, singing your heart out to Miss … Jayne Mansfield!”

The crowd went crazy yet again. What a great thing to hear about. Me and Vince looked sheepishly at each other … me trailing my toe in a line in front of me like some reluctant coed, Vince looking at the audience as if to say, “Should we … should we?”

Vince and I locked eyes, slowly nodded in sync, slammed handshakes together. “Mr. Deutsch,” I shouted into the phone, “we’lldo it!”

The band struck upPagliacci, I started dancing with Jack Lescoulie, Vince smiled at the merriment. What a wonderful spontaneous moment. Jack yelled, “You heard it here first, folks!” I could see our agent, Billy, who had set up the call as per my instructions, standing out of camera range. He was not applauding. He was just looking at Vince.

By the last two hours of Sunday morning, I was croaking, literally. The schedule had been arranged so that Vince and I could drop in or out of the proceedings as we saw fit between naps in our respective dressing rooms. Usually that meant I would fiddle while the Roman slept, but not this year. Vince seemed to have forgotten the meaning of the word “sleep,” or discovered a pharmaceutical better than what he’d previously been using. Maybe Vince didn’t want to leave me alone on camera too long. I had the opposite point of view: I was more worried about what might happen when both of us were on camera. That old feeling that we were there to defend each other was gone.