Chapter 11 - Where the Truth Lies

Let me explain to you here why two guys doing as good as we were doing at this point would find ourselves working in the state of New Jersey.

I’m old enough that I can remember trolleys. Tin cracker boxes on tin wheels heading down the middle of the street like they owned the place, which you found out they did if you ever stopped to tie your sneakers in front of one like poor Anthony Tedesco. In my grandmother’s time, there were so many of them rolling around that they called the local baseball team the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, although by the time I was a kid the team had dropped the word Trolley. By the time I was a teenager the city had decided to drop the trolleys as well.

The thing I learned—from a guy who once told me exactly how he’d murdered a married couple, so why would he lie to me about public transportation?—is that back when the trolley companies ruled the boroughs and northern New Jersey, their owners had a big problem. Weekdays, business was great; the trolleys would be packed as tight as Lucky Strikes. But on the weekends, the seats sat empty. So the trolley companies took it upon themselves to build all these fancy attractions as close to the end of the line as possible, so that people all along the route would have a reason on a Saturday or a Sunday to get aboard the same trolley or train they’d just said goodbye to on Friday. That’s how places like Coney Island came to be. And nice picnic grounds with swimming and boating. But most of all amusement parks.

My favorite amusement park was set on the high Palisades cliffs in Bergen County, New Jersey. Once they’d finished the George Washington Bridge, you didn’t need a ferry and a trolley to get there. You could take an IRT train to the old terminal at 168th, where you’d catch a Public Service bus across to Fort Lee and on to this place with beer gardens and bars and dancing and the most dangerous rides since Luna. It was called Palisades Park.

You had the saltwater pool with a machine that made artificial waves. You had a Bavarian Funhouse, where the most fun was standing outside of it, watching them shoot air up women’s dresses on a little outdoor balcony that the customers had to step out onto to continue through the maze inside. The view of the girls from the ground below was spectacular.

And speaking of “ground below,” to me the best thing about Palisades Park was that its big roller coaster was set right on the edge of the New Jersey cliffs. When you got to the top of the coaster, just before you took the first big plunge, if you looked down on your left, what you saw wasn’t the drop to the ground that the Hurricane was built on but the drop to the Hudson River some sixty stories below that. The town at the foot of the cliffs was Edgewater, and they said that was where suicides landed when they jumped from their apartments in Fort Lee. It’s not often in life you look straight down and see a different town than the one you’re in. Every time you took that first big crash down the Hurricane at Palisades Park, it felt like you were trying to kill yourself.

Most of New Jersey was strictly from Yokelsville, having been farm country until very recently, but Palisades Park, that was something else again. There were as many big, nicely attired, heartless, neckless Italian murderers operating out of neighboring Leonia and Coyotesville as in the five boroughs, and let’s face it: Anywhere that killers hang out is automatically pretty hip. I mean, for starters you’re going to have really good Italian food, at least of the red gravy kind. And since every Italian is an honorary half Jew, you’re also going to have some pretty decent Cantonese joints as well. You automatically had good steakhouses, because a good steakhouse is determined mainly by a good steak, and a good steak is determined by what gets brought in from the Midwest on union trucks, and you know who controls the trucks and unions. And where trucks, unions, and gangsters go, liquor stores follow like porta-johns at a construction site, because there is money that needs to be dry-cleaned. The phrase “cash and carry” was invented for the mob, not the clientele.

There had been an unusual statute for a number of years that anyone could gamble in Bergen County except people who lived in Bergen County. To me, this seemed like the world’s most open invitation to take the money and run. But by the fifties, gambling was definitely outlawed. The Boys had a nickname for the criminalization of gambling in New Jersey. They called it “the Renaissance.”

At the center of all the prosperity was a big club adjoining the Park called the Casino del Mar. (The name was originally supposed to be “Casino del Mare” but they dropped the e to make it more American.) Almost a year before, we had played some of the last shows in the old nightclub attached to the casino itself, a four-hundred-seater (five hundred whenever we worked there, but that’s because some people will call anything a table) named Tito’s Cliffside Club, which had been plowed under to make way for a shiny new nightclub-restaurant-hotel complex. Not much was made of the shiny new illegal casino that was being built within the complex. Gambling was being moved from the front to the back room, which meant that the showroom had never been more accurately named, since it was all for show, and the front for everything.

It took the Boys a while to figure it out, but eventually they realized having a hot act in the showroom helped legitimize the entire operation. Why are all these cars coming across the bridge from the boroughs of New York City to go to this nightclub and hotel in New Jersey? If the showroom is featuring Penelope and her Trained Cockatoos, there is no reason, is there? Of course, everybody and his sister’s cousin knew the reason was the gambling, but you can’t be that obvious with it, or eventually the police or politicos will be shamed into doing something about it.

But if you get the hottest duo in show business to headline at the front room… well, sure, the crowds are flooding in to see Collins and Morris, and sometimes people get lost in crowds, and sometimes those people who get lost wander to the back of the lobby…

Near the doors marked GENTS and LADIES and MANAGER was another door marked CHILDREN’S SWIMMING POOL. If you went through this door, you found yourself in a long corridor, mirrored on both sides, with very bright lighting. What you didn’t know was that the mirrors on the right-hand side were two-way, with several guards behind them looking you over and sniffing out whether or not you were kosher.

At the end of the corridor you’d go through another door, where you’d be greeted by a slim gentleman in a tuxedo, who welcomed you with a nice smile and ushered you through another doorway straight ahead of you. He’d even say a password, like you were being let into somewhere special, and he’d tell the guard behind the straight-ahead door to “take care of my personal friend, please,” as if you were a privileged character. On the other side of this new door was a short hall leading to metal steps that led down to a loading dock for truck deliveries. It was all cinder block with a poured cement floor and the smell of exhaust in the air.

If it had been determined that you were harmless and had wandered into the corridor accidentally or out of dumb curiosity, you’d be directed to go back around to the front of the building to reenter the Casino del Mar.

But if you were some kind of fink, the loud motor of a large truck would be started, its engine drowning all other noises. You’d be escorted by a couple of guys into the back of the truck, which had a long metal bench screwed into its side, upon which you would be told to sit between your escorts. The truck would drive to a private, fenced-in garbage dump called LATTANZI AND SONS—LANDFILL outside of East Rutherford. You wouldn’t get to meet Lattanzi, but on the way to his dump, you’d be beaten up, either a little bit or an awful lot, depending on what they thought you’d had in mind when you walked down that mirrored corridor on the way to their nonexistent casino.

If you weren’t going to be killed, the beating would serve as a warning, and you’d have to find your own way back home from East Rutherford, holding on to some part of your body that was now bent the wrong way.

If you were to die, they wouldn’t beat you up much at all. They weren’t trying to teach you a lesson you’d remember as long as you lived, because they didn’t intend for you to live much longer. Once your fate had been made clear and you knew the true meaning of the words despair and loneliness, they would put a bullet into you and bury you beneath a mountain of landfill. If the landfill didn’t crush you, it would smother you soon enough. Hopefully, you were already gone before the backhoe started heaping generous servings of dirt over your body. No one checked first to see if you were dead or not. If you weren’t dead yet, that was your dumb luck.

But if you had every right or reason to walk down that secret mirrored corridor, then when you got to the door at its end, the same tuxedoed gent would greet you with the same nice smile and direct you to an unmarked door on his far left, and you would enter one of the sweetest, plushest casinos ever located less than a half hour from Forty-Second Street.

Most of the crowds that wandered into the casino were just fine by the Boys. These patrons followed the rules of etiquette that the Boys expected the clientele to observe: no cursing, no brawling, no cheating, and no winning.

As for Vince and myself, the situation was kind of like that of the bookies who used a bakery as a front, but regrettably the bakery made the best brownies in all of Brooklyn and people kept buying the brownies and pretty soon the horse-racing operation started to cut into the profits of the bakery. We were such a hot draw that the Boys would get a little angry with us. By the time the high rollers hired the limo for themselves and their mistresses, ate a big fancy dinner in the Blue Grotto with lobster fra diavolo for ten and liquor for twenty, and greased every palm of every worker on up: the busboy, the water boy, the men’s room attendant with the bottles of Pinaud and Vitalis and Aqua Velva, the ladies’ powder-room attendant, the coat-check girl, the cigarette girl for a cigar or a fast blow job in the parking lot, the corsage girl, the camera girl who you’d pay for taking a picture (or pay even more for destroying the negative), the bartender who set you up with the cigarette girl, your waiter, your other waiter, your other waiter’s brother who made the Caesar salad at your table, the sommelier, the captain, the maître d’, the other maître d’ who flambéed your cherries at your table, the coat-check girl again, the doorman, the parking-lot attendant, the tip for the limo driver, not to mention (which I’m mentioning) the cover charge, the music charge, the setup charge, and the drink minimum for forty minutes of the songs and comedy antics of Vince Collins and Lanny Morris… who the hell had any money left to gamble?

And that was if you went with your wife or girlfriend. God forbid you and your friends went stag. Then there’d be the hookers. And the hotel rooms for you and the hookers. And tipping the night clerk and the elevator operator to look the other way, and room service, and the whole thing would start up again.

There might also be the cost of drugs.

You gotta understand about drugs in the late fifties, early sixties. There were drug “addicts.” That was the name applied to Blacks or jazz musicians (many of whom, you’ll note, were already Black to begin with). And then there were people who sometimes did drugs. But since they were white and had jobs and homes and none of them were full-time working musicians, they were not drug “addicts.” They were just jet-setters. At least this was the thinking of the time. Pepsi used to have a jingle suggesting that their cola would keep you “young and fair and debonair.” Affluent people who used drugs were just being extremely debonair.

To our limited way of thinking, anything you didn’t take with a needle was okay. It wasn’t serious serious. It was like running a red light. Everyone used bennies. Vince added them to his morning coffee like saccharine pills. We used to sing, to the tune of “Lollipop” by The Chordettes: “Benzedrine, methedrine, why not amphetamine…”

I realize this is a startling confession but we were… “up.” All the time. We had figured out that if you slept eight hours a day (which I hear a lot of people like to do), this was one-third of your life gone, shot, lost forever. If you lived to be seventy-two and always slept eight hours a day, you were giving up your active time on earth from age twenty-one to forty-five. Well, come on. Would you have wanted to go from your college graduation ceremony directly to being forty-five, leaving out all you did in between?

When we did finally decide to flatten out (choosing to get unconscious was much less of a defeat than falling asleep), we’d take two or three Tuinals (or one or two Three-inals—joke, an old one, not mine). They were real good. Between the moment you took them and passing out, they felt really… sexy, you know?

The only drug problem Vince and I ever had was that sometimes we’d run a little low on drugs. Then we’d do our comedy bit with the audience: “Is there a doctor in the house?” We’d always find some smart young Jewish Dr. Stephen Something with his young wife in the audience. Backstage after the show, one of us would ask him, “Listen, as long as I’m giving you my autograph, you think you could give me yours for some medication I need? I’m out of town and they tell me I can’t use my doctor’s prescription out of state. It’s just for some of those pills, the green-and-black ones, what are they called? Yeah, that’s it. Just so I can sleep.” Or, sometimes, “keep the weight off.” The Dr. Steves were more than happy to oblige. They felt it made them our pal.

The Casino had built a brand-new showroom called the Blue Grotto, and it was a very nice place. Lots of good seafood with a Sicilian touch, meaning they shot the lobsters in the back of the head before broiling them (joke).

The showroom was actually belowground, leaving room for the hotel lobby and the hidden casino behind the long barricade of the front desk. The walls of the Blue Grotto were done to look like the walls of a cave, like a funhouse or a Tunnel of Love. They were made of Liquifoam, a mix of plaster and Styrofoam, flammable as all hell, but the Boys had learned that it was a lot cheaper to give a fire inspector two hundred bucks and a ringside table at our show than to spend thousands of dollars on fireproofing. Besides, it was always vital in a business enterprise of this sort to have available the option to torch the place at a moment’s notice, should the need present itself.

So this tinderbox called the Blue Grotto sat twelve hundred patrons in total comfort and danger. There were four small waterfalls with catch basins in the four corners of the room—nothing too fancy, you understand, but the nice thing was that blue spotlights hit the basins and reflected the shimmer of running water on the walls of the cave, so the whole Blue Grotto seemed alive with rippling aquamarine light. You also could hear the sound of the fountains gurgling wherever you sat in the restaurant, which drove everyone to visit the restrooms on a regular basis. The restroom attendants, who worked strictly on tips, liked that feature a lot.

On a little Japanese-type bridge, you crossed a small pool filled with Maine lobsters. These Maine lobsters were flown in live from Miami each day. Don’t ask.

All right, since you asked, I’ll explain. See, the Versailles in Miami Beach (which was operated by the same people who operated the Casino del Mar) flew live lobsters from Maine down to Florida every day or two. The Blue Grotto planned to fly in lobsters from Maine as well. But when the Blue Grotto in New Jersey decided it would also fly in Florida stone crabs every day or two from the Versailles in Miami, they arranged for the Versailles to include some of the lobsters that had been flown in to them from Maine with the shipment of stone crabs being flown from the Versailles to the Blue Grotto. This saved the management a third flight from Maine to New Jersey each day, and that’s why live Maine lobsters packed in ice (along with stone crabs) were flown in fresh from Miami each day. Sorry you asked?

The Casino del Mar operation was run by one of the biggest of the Big Boys, a man named Sally Santoro. Now, I know that every time you see the name Sally after this, your first reflex will be that I’m talking about a girl, so keep in mind that Sally was a man. He had more balls hanging than Sandy Koufax in spring training, and unlike Sandy, he was very good with a baseball bat in his hands. Sally’s real name was Salvatore, but the only people who called him Salvatore were his mother and the politicians who accepted his donations but didn’t want to appear to be his buddy.

I wish I could tell you that Sally was a slim, six-foot-six guy who looked like David Niven with glasses and spoke with an English accent. Then I wouldn’t seem to be falling back on a stereotype. The trouble is, Sally was a respectable Italian gangster who looked and talked just like you’d expect from the movies. Maybe he’d seen those movies too and copied them. He was one of those cold sons o’ bitches: five-ten, jet-black hair, strong arms, strong chest, dark black eyes, thin lips always a little in a frown even when he laughed at my jokes, which he did. He laughed a lot. He was scary.

Sally Santoro ran the Versailles and a few small clubs down in Miami, some strip joints and a really fine whorehouse in Baltimore, and the soon-to-open Casino del Mar in Palisades Park, New Jersey. We had flown out from Hollywood to be at the dedication ceremony for the entire Casino del Mar complex three months before the place would actually open. Sally had invited us up to bring some name value to the ceremony. As a rule you accepted these invitations, unless you had a really good reason, like your mother and father had been killed in a car crash. Loss of one parent alone probably wouldn’t be enough.

After the dedication ceremony, which was also attended by Joni James, little Brenda Lee, Domenico Modugno, and actress Mara Corday, Vince and I were told to join Sally and his friends in his office, which was the first part of the new Casino del Mar to be completed. His friends were already sitting around this big, round table that went well with the Spanish Mediterranean decor. There was a lot of black velvet in the room. On the couches and chairs and in the draperies. A lot of the wall paintings were done on black velvet as well. A matador. A tastefully naked woman. A clown. There was a fantabulous view of Manhattan from a terrace looking across the Hudson at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. I bet more than one person had seen that view upside down, while being hung by his ankles off the edge of that terrace.

We were shown seats and Sally said, “Vince, Lanny, I wanted you to meet my business partners here.” He gestured to the other men and introduced them, first names only, then said collectively to them, “Guys, these are my very good friends Mr. Vince Collins and his spastic retard Jew partner, Lenny Something.” I wondered what I’d done to make him angry. Then I saw him almost smiling and realized this was his brand of humor. Komedy for Killers. The Boys were making little laughing noises somewhere in their necks, so Vince and I laughed along. Hey, Sally, you’re funny. You should be the comedian. No, says Sally, I leave that horseshit to cocksuckers like you. Laff riot!

A gimpy kid named Frankie brought in sandwiches on a tray. Everyone was happy to see the sandwiches and then absolutely nothing was eaten. Maybe coffee would be poured and reluctantly sipped, but questions like “You want the egg salad? Did they send us any Russian dressing? Is this ham or tongue?” were topics of as little interest to these gangsters as they were the very center of the universe to Jews like me. In all my life I don’t think I’ve seen an Italian mobster eat a cold meal. Not a tuna-salad sandwich with lettuce, a BLT, or a hard-boiled egg. Okay, I lied: Once I saw a mob boss eat a shrimp cocktail, but that took two minutes and then he was on to the fried calamari.

Then Sally and his associates had one of these amazing Mafia nonconversations. They sat there like the place was a steam room. They soaked up the silence, let it settle into their bones.

Finally, Sally started up. “So what’s with our friend?” And after about four bars of nothing, one of the others tried back:

“You mean Joey?”

Two-beat rest.

“Yeah.”

Three-beat rest.

“Joey from Dallas?”

“Joey from us.”

“Joey with the, yeah, Joey.”

“He’s okay with that? Because I wouldn’t want it to be that he’s sayin’, you know—”

“No, he’s okay.”

Intermission.

“And his cousin. Tilio?”

“Yeah, I’m taking care of that. It’s done, to be honest.”

“So we’re over, that’s what you’re saying.”

“Yeah, Sally.”

This is exactly how these nonconversations would go. Vince and I heard them many times. Maybe they did it for our benefit. Maybe when there was no one else in the room, they talked like the Rotary Club.

There were another forty-five seconds of silence and then everybody but Sally stood, like some floor director had given some invisible cue. Tilio, in leaving, addressed us for the first time. “I saw you guys with Ed Sullivan last Sunday,” he said. “That Ed Sullivan is some cold fish, huh?”

I answered, “Yeah, when we met I said, ‘Gee, Ed, you look almost exactly like you did when you were alive.’ ”

Happy laughter.

Tilio nodded. “I love that thing you do walking on your ankles. Do that for me.” I did it for him. He loved it. “That’s great. Hey, one thing, though: Every time I see you guys, Vince here tries to sing a song, he’s just getting started, and you come out and interrupt him.”

Well, of course, that was the whole departure point of our act, and I laughed at Tilio’s joke. Then I saw he was serious. It was like complaining that in Rhapsody in Blue, the piano keeps coming in and drowning out the orchestra. “I’ll watch it from now on,” I nodded with a serious expression.

Tilio nodded back. “You should. Vince is a great singer and a good-looking guy too. Someday he may want to go out on his own, and then where would you be?”

I tried hard not to smile, for Vince’s sake. For over a year now, columnists like Jack O’Brien, Moe Cohn, and Earl Wilson had raised the exact same point, only their argument was reversed: What would happen to poor Vince Collins if Lanny Morris ever left him high and dry? It was something we never talked about.

“Next time he cuts into your song, Vince,” advised Tilio, “take my advice: Just keep singing. The audience will tell him to get his loudmouth Jewish ass right off the stage.”

I liked that Tilio was now in show business. Especially since I’d been told that the only time he’d ever killed an audience was when he’d shot a passerby who’d witnessed a rubout.

Vince, for his part, had been playing it very cool, simply smiling away in no general direction. His attitude, and I can’t tell you he was wrong, was that you don’t win an argument with these guys, so you smile and agree and hope that the next day it’s all blown over.

But for me, I was getting a little annoyed. “What is this, the Italian Penny-Ante Defamation League? Keep in mind, Jesus was a Jew.”

The Boys turned into a snapshot.

Big John asked very slowly, “What the fuck are you saying?”

It was as if one of their wives had said she’d given Sidney Poitier a blow job. They couldn’t make sense of the statement, they couldn’t envision it, maybe it was some sort of a joke that they just weren’t getting. I tried to backpedal. “I’m not saying anything. It’s just that Jesus and his family were all Jews who traveled to the, to the Holy Land.” I saw their reaction and added, “From Naples, it’s now believed.”

Tilio didn’t know if he should kill me or if he was just talking to the dumbest asshole on the face of the planet. He explained to me, like I was a baby: “Listen, if Jesus Christ wasn’t a Christian, where do you think the word Christian comes from? The Holy Mother gave him that name.”

“Sure, I was just saying that before there was a Christian religion, Jesus was a Jew. Mary was a Jew too.” Whoa. Big problem here. Lots of grunting noises from the Boys like I’d gone too far. I bailed: “Only in that there was no Christian Church until Jesus was born. There couldn’t be. So Mary had to fall back on whatever religion that was around that was, you know, looking forward a lot to being Catholic.”

I heard a chorus of grunts agreeing with this. Sally acted as Dag Hammarskjöld. “Tilio, hey, come on, Vince and Lanny here are comedians, you know? They say whatever they want and the crowd loves them for it. You’ll see the show the boys are putting on tonight for the groundbreaking ceremony. You’ll sit at my table.”

There was going to be a little show that evening in the temporary lobby of the hotel. We were going to perform a song or two. We were the guests of honor, which meant we were working for free.

Sally moved the guys out the door, explaining that he had some business to discuss with us. We wondered what we had done wrong, but what we had done was done good. He sat us down and said he’d always liked us, liked the business we’d done at the old nightclub; he thought we were “a good fit” with his crowd, meaning we brought in an audience that was hip (or thought they were), meaning heavy drinkers, adulterers, and gamblers.

“Thanks for the compliment, Sally,” I said.

He said we brought in people who liked to laugh, and people who like to laugh are more inclined to laugh off their losses.

“That’s us,” I said. “We got them laughing all the way to your bank.”

Sally said I was fucking funny. “So what we want is for you guys to come back here three months from now and open our new showroom for us. A two-week, exclusive, limited engagement that we want you to give us for six weeks.”

God help you when a killer takes a real shine to you. He’ll move the earth over you. I looked at Vince and scratched my nose, which meant our strongest no.

Vince smiled warmly at Sally. “Sally, that’s a very great honor.”

“You damn fucking straight it is,” he agreed.

“Only we’ve been really trying to cut down on the nightclub work. We just turned down the Sands so we could do a TV special. The only reason we still work the Versailles is out of friendship for you.”

Sally just looked at him.

Vince asked, “What dates are we talking about?”

Sally named the date.

I smiled regretfully. “Sally, any other time and we’d be here in a flash. But that’s the day we finish the next polio telethon, and we always take two weeks off after that, simply to recover.”

Sally didn’t even blink. He said he knew that, that he’d intentionally planned our first promotional appearance for the day after we finished our third annual polio telethon, which we’d be doing live from Miami. When it was over, and we were near dead, we were to fly up from Miami that same day, hold a press conference all haggard and hoarse so that people would know what great guys and heroes we were… and then we were just going to flatten out for three days of R&R. Which stood for Roche and Rorer, as far as Vince and I were concerned. “Look, boys, I know it’s a big favor, but this one is for me, okay?”

I tried to figure out which of the big favors we’d done him in the past were not for him. The thing with a gangster is, give him an inch, he’ll take a foot and cut it off you and stuff it in your mouth and then ask you if you understand better now that it’s been explained to you. Sally’s motto was “If you can’t beat them, beat them.”

He tried to soften the blow. “Look, when you’re here, you’ll have the run of the hotel. I’ll keep a suite with the best hookers I got on your floor, your own personal cathouse—you like young girls? I mean like of age, of course. None of that degenerate stuff. Or how about a belly dancer? A real one, not a stripper.”

Vince said, “Thanks for the offer, but generally speaking we like to find our own talent. You know. The thrill of the chase.”

Sally shrugged. “Tell you what, I’ll give you your own masseuse, then. And I’ll throw in five hundred dollars in chips for each of you every night, they’ll be waiting inside the you know…”

Of course he couldn’t say “casino.” There was no casino at the Casino del Mar, right? This gift was an old trick they used with entertainers in Vegas and Reno, offering to pay them more if they’d take their salary nightly in chips. The entertainer would start to gamble, get into hock his first night out, and have to pay down his debt by working on a regular basis at the casino in return for just room and board. Sammy Davis was once booked for a long weekend that turned into three years that way.

“… and I’ll have them send you up here your own shipment of lobsters and stone crabs from the Versailles. You like lobster?”

We said we did, because we really did.

“And a case of these grapefruits I get special down there, you never tasted such a thing in your life, you need a towel when you’re done eating them. You like Cuban cigars?”

We said we did. Sally frowned at Vince. “You, with your voice! I got some Cohibas and Saint Luis Reys, they’re what Frank smokes, we’ll ship those up here for you too. You’ll thank me ’cause we don’t know what the fuck is going to happen with this Castro guy taking over. Oh, and you like waffle irons, and cameras that take 3-D pictures?”

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 3-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 gave my 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 fundraisers.

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 nine P.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 one A.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 nine A.M., catching the Saturday morning kids’ cartoon audience. Vince and I worked from nine to three P.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 seven P.M. to one A.M. Bert Parks handled one to six A.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 a killer. 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 saying HOST 1. I looked across the hall and saw that Vince’s dressing room was marked HOST 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 be A 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 in Kind 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?”

“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 Gisele 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 my tuchus 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 nine P.M. to one A.M. was nothing for us, absolutely nothing, just a slightly longer version of our nightclub act. The one to three A.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 six A.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 that why, huuuuh?
• VINCE: Now, now, Lanny, you know we’re not supposed to let the big news slip.
• LANNY: What big news would that be, Prince Vince?
• VINCE: The news about our next motion picture, A Night at the Opera, with you and you and 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 about A 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.

“Sheldon Deutsch?” 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’s hookup. 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, and The 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 open-heart 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’ll do it!”

The band struck up Pagliacci, 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.

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 they had 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 at me, 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 really did 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. Goodbye to that.

I was worried about Vince. Publicly, he’d taken the Night 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 if we 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 if I 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, which is 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. He was 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’s Miami 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 T-shirts. You can’t expect me to remember her name, but the way her rack distorted the M’s in MIAMI 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 found my mark near Vince on camera and the audience cheered my return after my dramatic collapse.

We told the audience that we had 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 for A 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. There were police cars 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, with gray plastic curtains filling each 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.

We were greeted by what turned out to be the lead publicist for the Santoro operation, a thin, sharp-edged, dark-haired woman in her early thirties. “Hello! Jackie Biderman, I’m running public relations for El Toro Enterprises, welcome to the new Casino del Mar.”

Vince looked at me. In earlier days, when we met these P.R. women (this Jackie could have been the older sister of Denise, the skinny brunette we’d dumped from the Versailles, but then they all could have been), Vince would mutter softly to me, “Yours.” Unless I beat him to it. This time, however, he said nothing.

I turned to Billy Bishop, who’d been with us all the way from Miami and said, “We have to clean up a little. See where Reuben is.” Vince’s five o’clock shadow had him looking like a saddle bum, and I was beginning to resemble the caricature of me that occupied the right half of the bass drum in the Russ Cummings Orchestra.

Billy conveyed our needs to Jackie, who smiled no, explaining that Mr. Santoro wanted us to look like the heroes we were. He was being very smart from a publicity angle. Vince and I had just finished a nationally televised broadcast. We were the Good Guys. We had broken all box-office records for a disease. Now, before the telethon had a chance to fade out of the public’s mind, here we were talking about the next huge event in our lives: the opening of a hotel in Bergen County, New Jersey. And it would make the local seven o’clock news in the tristate area if we moved our butts (as Jackie was instructing us) into the main reception hall, where we were about to hold a press conference.

A pair of New Jersey state policemen walked on either side of us as we entered the lobby of the hotel. They stayed with us throughout. It was an indication of how legitimate Sally had gone that he could bring in the local police to guard the facade of his racket.

You could see that the hotel wasn’t completely finished because there was no wall between the public restrooms and the reception desk. The view of Manhattan’s Riverside Drive from the cocktail lounge was particularly clear, thanks to there being no glass in its windows; the wind whipped through us in the lobby more than it had in the driveway outside.

Jackie showed us into a room marked GRAND BALLROOM (which is also how I describe a lady wearing an athletic supporter—joke, not mine). Already seated at a long dais were Sally Santoro and some people who looked like attorneys. Jackie indicated that the two vacant center chairs were for us. Sally hugged us both. That was a first.

It seemed as if Jackie Biderman intended to serve as emcee because that was what she was telling the newspaper people she was going to do. “B-i-d-e-r-m-a-n, with one n,” she explained to the press, who weren’t writing anything down. “Well now. I want to welcome all our friends to this very special press conference with three very special people.” I was hoping she was not counting herself. “Mr. Salvatore Santoro, that’s S—” and she spelled his name for them. When the members of the press saw that Sally’s boys were taking down the names of those who didn’t take down Sally’s name, the fourth estate instantly whipped out their pencils and scribbled away. “And of course two gentlemen on my right who need no introduction and who, as you can see, have come here directly from their record-breaking polio telethon in Miami, Florida.”

The first thing she did was announce that Mr. Santoro, on behalf of the El Toro corporation, was pledging $20,000 to the American Polio Foundation. She had a quick whispered word with one of Sally’s boys, asking if they had the oversized check to hand to us for the benefit of the newspaper cameras. They looked around at one another like altar boys. No, gee, uh-no, we don’t. She inquired in another whisper if they had a normal-sized check that Mr. Salvatore could hand to us for the benefit of the newspaper cameras. The Boys gazed idly around the room, like maybe the check had been taped to the chandelier.

Sally stared straight ahead throughout all this.

Jackie announced into the microphone that regretfully, through a mix-up, the check itself wasn’t here at the press conference, but she was pleased to be able to announce Mr. Santoro’s magnificent pledge. “And in addition, it is my very great pleasure to announce that Mr. Santoro is also donating to the American Polio Foundation over…” She consulted a file card in her hand. “… over two thousand Kenmore waffle irons, so that those afflicted with this terrible disease can enjoy waffles any time of the day… and I’m sure we all applaud him in this humane effort.”

Santoro had a word in the ear of his associate, who whispered a word in Jackie’s ear. She nodded and added, “And also over five hundred 3-D photographic cameras, because the crippled are entitled to save their memories just like the rest of us.”

She sat and Sally waited while lots of flash cameras went off. He had a whispered word with the attorney at his side and leaned in toward the microphone to speak. How he managed not to reflexively say, “I refuse to answer upon the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me,” I have no idea. Instead, he read a little speech about how proud he was that the United States had launched the Vanguard rocket into space and how he was proud that New Jersey was launching its own rocket, the new Casino del Mar. Then he jumped off the prepared text and talked about how he would never forget all the people who helped and all the people who didn’t, “because that’s who I am.”

Jackie looked at her watch and said that since we were a little ahead of schedule, she would let the press ask us a few questions before our live TV interview with the local ABC affiliate. That’s when these sophisticated New York journalists started trading wits with us, and man, was it hard to keep up with them.

“Ralph Latiff, Bergen Record, question for Mr. Morris: Are you tired?”

“You bet I am. Yes?”

“Rose Wanamaker, Daily Mirror, how did it feel—this question for Mr. Collins—how did it feel raising all that money for polio?”

Vince answered, “It felt great. Really, really great.”

A guy from a Trenton newspaper asked from the back of the room about the movie we had announced, A Night at the Opera. “Will the movie be in color?” And they wonder where the new Edward R. Murrows will come from.

Vince answered: “We don’t know. I hope it will be. Everyone ought to see how pink my eyes get some mornings.” The press laughed and I saw a lot of pencils moving. So Vince had drawn first comedy blood, huh?

The Trenton newspaper had a follow-up question. “Will it be a wide-screen movie?”

I moved in on my mike. “If Jayne Mansfield is in it, it’ll have to be.”

Now here was Cindy Goldner, a local gossip columnist. She wasn’t a guaranteed pushover. “Vince, with Lanny playing three roles, aren’t you actually taking fourth billing?”

Vince started to speak into his mike but I overrode that. “This is a Collins and Morris movie. Vince has always had top billing.”

Vince looked at me with a slightly crooked smile. “I think Lanny means sixth billing, don’t you, pally?”

Cindy pressed him. “How do you figure sixth, Vince?”

Vince drawled, “Well, as I understand it, Lanny is going to play a trio of wonderful roles, and Jayne Mansfield has quite a pair.” Laughter from the press. “I figure that puts me sixth.”

The guy from the Daily Mirror tried his professional best to goad Vince. “You sound like you’d be okay about Miss Mansfield getting billing above you, Vince.”

“I always prefer my women on top,” smiled Vince.

Rich laughter from the press. We all knew they could never print a comment like that in a newspaper, and they knew that too, so you could say it strictly for the amusement of the press without having to go off the record. The only ones who didn’t always live by this gentlemen’s agreement weren’t there today: Kilgallen, O’Brien, and Winchell hadn’t felt like hiking all the way to New Jersey for a puff piece like this, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were in L.A., and Moe Cohn only wrote his column for Miami, so thank God we’d escaped his raking.

Jackie Biderman had gone a little pale at this last exchange and advised us that when we went on the air with George Gromire from the local ABC affiliate, Mr. Santoro hoped we’d mention the Casino del Mar and the Blue Grotto and the dates of our engagement there.

At six minutes after seven, local ABC correspondent George Gromire got his cue and thrust a mike in our faces. “Vince Collins, Lanny Morris, welcome to New Jersey. We all saw you on the telethon that ended this morning. Are you tired?”

I said in that voice, “Oh no, Mr. Gromire, we’re both fresh as dai—” and pretended to pass out, my head hitting the table hard enough to cause a loud comic impact and even to hurt me a little. I instantly started snoring real loud. Let Vince do the interview.

Gromire pushed the mike toward Vince with a weak laugh. “Well, as long as your partner seems to have departed for dreamland, Vince, tell us why you’re here, won’t you?”

Vince said the right things about how we were honored that our good friend Mr. Santoro had asked us to be the first act in this magnificent entertainment center so close to Manhattan yet so high above the Hudson River, that this area had always been very special to us, et cetera. I snored a loud snore.

“We also hear you’re about to film a remake of that wonderful Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera,” lobbed Gromire.

“Yes.” Vince nodded. “And on top of that, I’m very excited to announce my motion-picture debut as a straight dramatic actor in The Maginot Line, about an American soldier during World War II trying to escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in Nazi-occupied France.”

Gromire and I were both very interested to hear this, but only he showed it. “This would be a solo effort, without your partner?” he asked. Now I felt like a real dickhead stuck in the middle of this fucking stupid snoring bit I’d gotten into.

Vince said, “Well, I know I’ll welcome all the advice and guidance my pally here can give me, if he ever wakes up.”

I pretended to wake up and shot upright. “Starting this Friday at the Blue Grotto here at the Casino del Mar in Boigen County for the next two weeks!” I said, plugging like I was supposed to. The jack-in-the-box bit would have been funny in another context. Suddenly it felt lame.

Gromire turned to the camera. “Well, a very full calendar for two guys full of talent and goodwill, Vince Collins and the dizzy, dozy Lanny Morris.” He froze his smile for about fifteen seconds, until someone relayed that he was clear. “Thank you very much,” he said to both of us.

I looked to my left and saw Billy Bishop smiling at Vince. He gave Vince a little wink. This solo project had clearly been in the making for some time.

Jackie Biderman was not happy at all. Through a smile of icicle teeth, she hissed, “It would be better if in any future interviews we set up, you mention show times and how to get to the Casino from both New York and Connecticut.”

Vince leaned toward her, and said in a voice that only she and I could hear, “It would be better if you never told us what to do again, because if you do, I’ll set fire to your lacquered hair and put out the flames by—” and he whispered something in her ear.

She looked like she had been hit direct center in her starved stomach. “Oh my Guh—God,” she moaned.

I got up, stepped over to Sally, and, for the benefit of his hired photographer, did the pose I’d done a million times without ever really understanding it. I, famous person, have my left arm around a not-famous person and with my free right hand, I point at the not-famous person. What am I indicating when I point at him? What does that mean? Throughout this world are millions of photos of me pointing at strangers. What is the message of my pointing? “Look, this stranger momentarily exists alongside me!”

It was hard not to imagine a congressional committee someday questioning me about every photo I’ve had taken with my arm around gangsters, mass murderers, extortionists, arsonists, and child molesters. And in every case, I have a stupid grin on my face and am pointing at them.

At last we were led by Sally and company away from the Grand Ballroom and toward the elevators to our suite, which had been completed weeks ago, they assured us. Sleep, priceless sleep, awaited.

An assistant to the ABC TV reporter hurried over to Vince in the lobby and handed him a folded slip of paper. She was very pretty, maybe twenty-three, with the sweetest pair of partridges for breasts. She looked like a breathless, blond Natalie Wood. I could hear her say in a low voice to Vince, “Hi, I work with George Gromire, just an assistant, my name is Joan, I’m married and I absolutely love my husband, but when we got married, I told him, ‘Listen, no joke, I’ll always be faithful to you but if I ever meet Vince Collins, I get to cheat, at least for one night.’ He agreed, so if you would like to spend the night with me while you’re here, that’s my phone number. Or even right now.” She sort of presented herself with good posture and a hopefulness that was so lovely. “It’s all right with my husband. It really is.”

Vince pocketed the slip of paper and said, “That’s just the nicest compliment, Joan. Sounds to me like you have a wonderful relationship with your husband. That’s not easy to come by in this world, and I’d hate to intrude on that, tempting as the offer might be.”

We stepped toward the elevator bank, where the door was being held open for us.

“It would be all right,” she assured him, cupping her small hand around his ear and trying to whisper: “I’m really good in bed. You’d really like it.”

Vince smiled at her. “You don’t have to tell me that. I know you would be.” As he stepped into the elevator, he pretended to take a mental picture of her by staring deep into her face. “I promise I’ll never forget you. Joan.”

We joined him on the elevator, myself, Jackie, Sally, the two state policemen who had been with us since the outset (this is important to remember), and a bellman who had the carry-on luggage from our flight.

Jackie, always thorough, asked Vince, “Shall I arrange some comps for Joan and her husband?”

Vince looked genuinely confused. “Who?”

The good suites were as far away from the elevators as they could be, toward the southern end of the corridor, so that their view favored Manhattan.

At the end of the hall was a door into a vestibule, from which branched three doors numbered 501, 500, and 502. There was a maid’s service wagon outside 501 and the door was ajar. The bellman nodded at the cart. “The maid is turning down your beds.”

“Nobody ever turns down Vince’s bed,” I said as a knee-jerk reaction, forgetting that the press conference was over.

Sally nodded. “We guessed you might want some sleep. We gave you our best bridal suite.”

The bellman opened the living room door and we walked in. Not bad. The view was fantabulous. You could see the Empire State Building, the RCA building, and the sparkling brown of the polluted midtown harbor. Standing on four angled legs, Danish modern in an antique white finish, was a giant RCA console TV, and I would not be a bit surprised if it was a compatible color model. On top of the TV was a turntable stacked with LPs, probably all Vince’s recordings. The immediate left wall of the living room was mirrored, a tan marbleized watermark rippling through it. There was a stocked wet bar on my right and art on all the walls, most of it identical to the black velvet paintings in Sally’s office: a matador, a tastefully naked woman, a clown. If you couldn’t get laid in this suite, you couldn’t get laid.

“Fucking nice, huh?” asked Sally. Vince and I agreed it was very fucking nice. “People talk about having fancy hotel rooms and apartments on the West Side of Manhattan and what do they get to see? Fucking New Jersey. Here, you see the skyline of New York City.”

There was a scream. Not a funny scream. A real scream on our left.

A mother hears her daughter scream a million times and it’s almost always because another kid took her daughter’s toy, or because she fell off her tricycle, or because she’s scared of the witch in Snow White. And the mother will slowly stop a conversation she’s having with a friend and walk into the kid’s room to see what the problem is. But sometimes a mother hears her kid scream because her kid’s hand is caught in the garbage disposal, and the mother knows instantly that this scream is different from all the others and she runs to her child faster than she’s ever run in her life. Vince and I had heard a million screams in the last few years and we usually smiled and said, “Thank you.” This scream made us run to the source.

It took us a second to realize that it was coming from behind the living room door that led into one of the two bedrooms, the one on the west side of the suite. I ran to the door and tried to open it, but it was locked from the inside, as is usually the case with a hotel suite when you first check in. The two state police who had been admiring the living room with us had moved fast to the hall, where the door to 501 was open, with the maid’s cart still outside it. I ran after them, Vince following me.

“Oh, man,” I heard one of the cops say as I entered the bedroom. It was obviously a nice bedroom, but I didn’t take time to look at the decor. A woman in a maid’s outfit, about fifty or so with a squat Dutch face and braided hair, was kneeling on the floor near the end of the bed, vomiting onto the nice green carpet. I turned away, feeling reflex-sick myself, and saw the cops standing in the bathroom, looking at the bathtub.

Lying in the narrow tub was a young woman. The tub had just enough water in it to cover her face and drown her. An inch less and her nostrils would have been above the surface.

I remembered a cleaning woman in Crown Heights who’d banged her head on an overhead pipe and fallen unconscious into her bucket of water. She’d drowned in that little bucket, in a big basement room that was otherwise bone-dry.

The young woman in the tub would have been extremely attractive if she hadn’t been dead. Her red hair was still rich in color against her blue-gray face.

The medical examiner, who was summoned immediately by the state patrolmen, estimated she’d been dead somewhere between two and four hours. The good news was that both Vince and I had been watched by everyone from security police to airline stewardesses to a live TV audience of millions from Friday to Sunday, nonstop. Even when we’d been alone, we’d been guarded. And of course, we’d only been in the New York area for a few hours, during which time we were constantly with cops, reporters, and other witnesses.

This was more than a little important, because both Vince and I were acquainted with the young dead woman in the bathroom of what had been meant to be my hotel bedroom in New Jersey.

Her last name, we were to learn, was O’Flaherty.

Her first name was Maureen. She was the girl from room service at the Versailles Hotel in Miami, Florida. The girl Vince and I had both come to know.