Chapter 6 - Where the Truth Lies

This is not going to be like any of my other books you’ve read, Laugh Clown Laugh by Lanny Morris with Dick Schaap, 24 Frames a Second by Lanny Morris as told to Rex Reed, et cetera. This one I am writing all by myself, for reasons you don’t want to know.

If you bought this book—and if you didn’t, “Police! Shoplifter!!” (joke)—then you know all about me. Of course you do. They’ve got a street in downtown Barcelona and a movie theater in Taiwan named after me, so if you’re sitting there reading this in Plainfield, New Jersey, sure, you know me.

About my life prior to the summer of 1959, anything you’d want to know is in my other books. Some of it is funnier than it is true, but after a while, the stuff that isn’t true has been retold so many times that it’s become true, even for me. Maybe I wasn’t born quite so poor (“We was so poor that…”) but I definitely wasn’t born rich. And maybe Vince and I actually had worked together once or twice before the night when my bio says we first met and invented a comedy act for ourselves in the kitchen of the Café Arcadia five minutes before we had to go on. But listen to me: What I’m going to be telling you now is as truthful as I know how to make it, even if sometimes the truth is not my best profile.

Where this accounting needs to begin is in the suite that Vince and I would share at the Miami Versailles Hotel whenever we worked there. It’s their best suite, gorgeous, the presidential suite as it happens, though Eisenhower didn’t stay there. It would have been a big waste if he did, because in 1959, Ike would never have been able to accommodate the procession of broads that paraded into and out of the place.

For me, back then, the world is divided up into four types of girls: sluts that I boff; nice girls who in bed turn into sluts (these girls I boff with pleasure); nice girls who remain nice in bed (these I generally leave for the working stiffs, because civilians need to get laid too); and my mother. Her I don’t boff, despite the name my manager calls me in moments of anger. I have no desire to boff my mother. I sort of have that in common with my father. (Joke.)

It’s about five in the afternoon and I’m in my bedroom, just starting in on this girl. Denise is her name, she handles P.R. for the hotel. I’ve been marinating her for three days, very gentlemanly, very courteous and galant, as they say, and now I’ve got her dress off and she’s half under the top sheet. She’s wearing one of those low-cut black bras that turns into a kind of demi-corset (not that this girl needs a corset because she is really pretty skinny). The bra goes down to the end of her ribs for support and lets her breasts float like they’re on a platform, which in a low-cut dress makes them seem a lot bigger than they end up being. Sort of a cheat. Her panties don’t match—they’re light blue, the bra is black. Why does she think this is all right?

I’m about ready to pull off the annoying panties, and she’s doing nothing to stop me, when there’s a knock at the door of the living room. I sigh that sigh of annoyance. “Don’t go anywhere,” I warn her. (Like I’m worried!) I take my black-and-maroon Dunhill robe, silk, from the dresser where Reuben, my Filipino valet, always leaves it neatly folded, and I walk to the door of the suite. It’s a room-service boy, with the champagne Denise had wanted (the price of admission, from my point of view).

I usher the room-service boy into the bedroom. You can tell a lot about a woman by the way she acts when she’s in bed and a room-service boy enters the room. Sometimes a girl will sit up, light a cigarette, like there’s nothing in the world funny about her being naked under a sheet, me being in a robe; it’s obvious that we’re in the process of screwing, so why not let a stranger wearing a red uniform with gold braid into the room? Then there’s the kind that pull the sheet over their head and act like they’re asleep—or, even better, the ones who scrunch real flat, thinking the bed will look empty. Shyness. I like that.

This time (as happens quite frequently to Vince and myself) the room-service boy is a girl. Gorgeous, gorgeous redhead, hair flowing down like sparkling burgundy onto her gold braids. The uniform fit real nice (meaning tightly) and she had some build on her, I’ll tell you. I wished then and there I could trade Denise in for her.

I’d ordered “a bottle of the bubbly, Versailles label.” The bottle shows up in a nest of crushed ice, and the name Versailles makes it look like it’s French, but it’s really Great Western, from the Finger Lakes in upper New York State. The hotel marks it up from three to nine dollars, but it’s still a lot less than the Mumm’s Cordon Rouge at twenty bucks. So everyone wins: The hotel turns a fat profit, the girl thinks she’s special, and I get to pop my cork. Half the time it ends up getting poured on her breasts or stomach anyway, and I defy anyone to tell imported from domestic when they’re slurping it from between two D-cups that’ve already been soaked in an overdose of Arpège from Lanvin. (I’m not really a guy who needs to mix sex with honey, whipped cream, chopped pecans, or champagne, but some women expect these things from a celebrity and I hate to disappoint them. I’m pretty thoughtful that way.)

The gorgeous room-service girl takes the ice bucket off the cart. “Over there by the flowers,” I tell her. I see that in the bed Denise is lighting a Salem.

“Can I have your autograph, Mr. Morris?” says the room-service girl. People are amazing, aren’t they? Here I am, flagrante delicto, mid-bofferino as it were, and she wants my autograph. But I’m very nice about these things. “Never bite the hand that applauds you,” my agent says.

“Certainly,” I say. I step over to the stack of eight-by-tens that Reuben leaves out on the dressing table, on top of which rests a Scripto Admiral, one of the few pens that writes on a gloss finish without smearing. You learn these things. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“No, I meant I need your signature, Mr. Morris. On the bill?” she says, handing me the leatherette billfold containing the check for the champagne.

In the bed, Denise issues a sharp-edged little snort of a laugh. I notice this. Yeah. Go mention my name to her tomorrow, see if she laughs.

I look back at the room-service girl. She has an award-winning rack, a C-cup at least, and her pants are tightly wrapped around a rear end like two independently owned and operated honeydew melons. With that out of the way, I look at her face. She’s got that Irish thing. Maureen, I bet her name is. (It is, I learn; I’m incredible.) She smiles. Short teeth, wide tongue. We like that. She adds in a hurry, “I mean, believe me, I’d love to have your autograph, but we’re under orders not to ask.”

I smile over at Denise in the bed as I sign the check for the room-service girl and add below the tip and total the words “Come back here in one hour.” I fold up the billfold, she takes it from me and says, “Thanks so much. And if there’s anything else you need, Mr. Morris, please just ask for Maureen in room service.”

She hasn’t looked in the billfold, so I walk her out of the bedroom to the door of the living room.

“I left a little tip for you in there,” I say, indicating the billfold. “You should look at it after you leave. I don’t think it will disappoint you.”

She thanks me as I pat her ass lightly twice and close the door behind her. I look across the living room at the door to Vince’s bedroom, which is shut. I go over to the door, knock two times, then once, then twice again. Our code knock. There’s no answer. I then move quickly back to Denise, who is stumping out the last of her Salem. I toss off the robe.

“Who was that knocking now?” she asks, annoyed.

“Me. On Vince’s door. Making sure he wasn’t in his room.”

She looks cautious. “He said he was driving up to Palm Beach.”

“Sure. I just thought better safe than sorry.” I reach below the sheets and slide the panties off her. “Which reminds me. Talking about safety…”

“No, not inside me,” says Denise. “My period ended two weeks ago.”

“I’ll use a Trojan.”

“I once got pregnant from a jerk who used a Trojan.”

“Beware Greeks bearing gifts,” I say, which I thought was witty. Some people are very surprised when I do intellectual humor like that.

Not her. She says, “The operation cost my father five hundred dollars. The doctor who did it was younger than I am. Probably a student aborting his way through medical school. I don’t think he did a great job. I still feel a little funny whenever I pee.”

At this point, the ice bucket seems a more inviting place to park myself than in this bony maroney. These P.R. ladies, every hotel has at least one. I swear there’s a conveyor belt in Detroit that turns them out when there’s no demand for Studebakers. Cold metal, glossy paint job, hard on impact. (For Vince, a hotel’s P.R. ladies are the equivalent of the basket of fruit we get when we check in. “Compliments of the Management.”)

I down a fast glass of champagne to loosen up my libido, pour one for her and a second for me. “Here’s to us,” I say. I drink half the second glass and undo the demi-corset while she sips. It is just as I had thought: The bra had made them look as big as they were ever going to look. The only interest I have now is whether her oral skills go beyond talking a blue streak to the Miami columnists about the Versailles’ current headliners. I’m hopeful. Vince has very high standards in that department.

“ ‘To us,’ ” she sniggers. “You and I aren’t what one would call an ‘us’ kind of thing, are we?”

“Like you and Vince are?”

“I don’t know. It’s been feeling like Vince and I might be something more than”—she looks around the room—“this.”

“Then why are you doing—this?” I say.

She smiles. “Well, you’re pretty hard to say no to. You don’t really give someone a chance. That’s kind of appealing. And it’s exciting to be the object of Lanny Morris’ interest, even if only for the twenty-four hours his partner is out of town. I didn’t even know you were interested until yesterday, since lunch you haven’t stopped talking, and now I’m naked in your bedroom.”

“You don’t have to do this,” I offer.

“Oh, it’s the kind of thing I do.” She lights another cigarette, which I don’t think is very cordial of her, considering what I had planned for her next. “I was spoiled growing up, so now I always make certain to spoil things for myself. I’m liking Vince. I’m wondering if we might have some kind of future beyond your three-week booking here. So, therefore, according to the way my psyche functions, it must now be time for me to do Vince’s partner while he’s out of town.” She moves her legs apart. “Don’t you think?”

I’m thinking to myself, I know this girl from every college town we’ve ever played. They’re called graduate students, teaching assistants, and in a major city, if they’re over twenty-two, they’re “career girls.” The absolute easiest lays in this great nation of ours. At a party, they stand there scowling all night while you’re trying to charm some curvy blonde. And they’ll be there in a straight black dress, severe black hair: your basic neurotic, Seven Sisters, folk music, “I must sleep with a Black man before I die or I am not a true liberal” type. Around three in the morning, you’ve lost the blonde so you offer to drive the neurotic brunette home, which you do with long stretches of silence. You pull up to the apartment building or student housing where she lives, you ask if she would like to screw in the back of the car, she mumbles, “Yeah, all right,” and you ball each other’s brains out. When it’s over, she won’t give you her phone number. “It was what it was,” she says. She walks to the front door and you notice she has no ass at all.

I’m noticing that lack of ass now as I’m proceeding to boff Denise. She’s making noise and I’m making noise but not so much noise that I don’t hear the door to the bedroom open.

In walks Vince.

He’s saying, “Lanny, I decided not to go to Palm—” and I feel Denise turn into a salamander beneath me, her skin instantly clammy. She goes from sixty to zero in under two seconds. She’s looking at Vince. I get up off her, which leaves her looking really naked, not sexy-naked but more like on-an-operating-table naked. Now she’s looking at me and I can see she thinks somehow I’m so smart and such a celebrity that there’s something I can think of to say that will make all this just fine.

“Sorry, Vince,” I mutter.

I love Vince. Vince is such absolute class. He goes to the champagne bucket and pours himself a glass, sips at it. He scowls. “Jesus, they call anything ‘champagne’ these days. What vintage is this, nineteen past noon?” He empties his glass into the bucket, withdraws a pack of Cavalier cigarettes, and flames one with a single pass of his solid-gold stick lighter. He takes a nice long drag, exhales, flicks the ash into the bucket. “So?”

I look at him. “So?”

He indicates Denise. “I hope you love her, Lanny. Because if you love her, I say, Well, hey. Love and all that. But if you don’t, this means you care more about a quick piece of ass than our partnership.”

“Vince…” says Denise.

He looks at her, puzzled that she would even speak. He has an expression on like I’m actually curious what it is you might possibly think you have to say. “Was my partner raping you?” he asks and looks around the room. “I see no signs of a struggle. A small stain on the sheet there, but it wouldn’t appear to be blood.”

She reaches for a Salem and lights it. “Forget it,” she says. There’s a little mascara smeared below her right eye. It looks like a smudge of chocolate cupcake frosting around a kid’s mouth. I guess she had more feelings for Vince than I thought.

Vince turns to me. “Did you know she was something more to me than the usual thing, Lanny? Because if you did, that would make this enemy action.” He turns to Denise. “You should leave now. This is private between me and my partner.”

We watch her put on her dress over her naked body and slip into her shoes. Then she somehow shoves the rest—panties, nylons—into this little clutch bag. I feel sorry for her, but what’s happened has happened. She says, “Vince, there’s something you ought to know about me. When I—”

“Denise. You were screwing my partner. That’s it.”

She nods her head slightly a couple of times, like a defendant who agrees with the judge when he says a stiff sentence is in order. She looks toward me. “Lanny?”

I say nothing. Vince tosses his Cavalier in the ice bucket. It makes a little pssst noise. Then Vince says to her (and me): “If my partner ever talks to you again, there won’t be any more Collins and Morris. When we cancel the booking, you can be the one to tell your bosses why. Maybe you’ll also explain that to the polio research people… and all the folks who count on us to lighten the burden of their day.”

I can’t look Denise or Vince in the eye.

We watch her walk out of the bedroom and we listen to the door to the suite close behind her.

Vince lights another cigarette. I allow myself to voice the scorn for him I’m feeling: “ ‘… and all the folks who count on us to lighten the burden of their day’?” I roll my eyes. “Jesus, Vince. Thank God you don’t write our material.”

Vince nods agreement and gives me that slow wink of his. “Thanks, pal.”

I move toward the bathroom, complaining. “You could’ve at least let me shoot my wad, for God’s sake. I’m gonna be walking funny all night.” Then I remember the gorgeous redhead from room service named Maureen and my mood starts to pick up. I turn on the shower and wait for the water to get like it’s from a kettle.

Vince follows me to the doorway. He checks his watch. “Sorry, I thought I was supposed to barge in at twenty after.”

“No, you were right,” I admit. “Room service took a little longer than I thought it would.”

Vince tries to console me. “You didn’t really miss out on anything, pal. She was kind of like what’s-her-name, the actress we fired. The one who was incredible at her audition and then got slightly worse each day of rehearsals. What was her name?”

“Sheila.”

“Sheila, that’s it. Every day Denise was trying to make things feel a little more like love and a little less like sex. Another week and she’d have been a virgin.”

I drop the robe, step into the shower. I call out, “Sure, I had a hooker who fell in love with me once. When she did, she decided she shouldn’t do anything with me that she’d ever done with a trick. She said, ‘That’s for the trade. You and I are different.’ I said, ‘You and I are over.’ ”

Vince sits down on the toilet-seat lid. “Thanks for getting her off my hands so nice and clean. We may have to work here again someday.”

“Nothing you wouldn’t do for me, right?” I half-grunt. Reuben had laid in some Camay soap for me, but the Miami tap water was still hard. Rinsing was a real chore.

Vince asks, “You doing anything tonight?”

“I’m going to be busy for a while with an Irish girl, a redhead named Maureen from room service. You’re not doing her, right?”

You can see how very close Vince and I were. Give you another example. The very next night, we’re clowning around with the audience at the second show. You have to understand that at this point in our careers if you took the part of our act that was formally structured, it would probably not fill two pages, double-spaced. And the jokes, God help us, would read something like:

• VINCE: Listen, pal, I didn’t come here to be insulted!
• ME: Oh, where do you usually go? (Mug for audience.)
• VINCE: I’ve half a mind to leave the stage.
• ME: Come back when you find the other half. (Prance around piano.)
• VINCE: That does it. I’m not singing another song.
• ME: Always give the public what it wants! (Walk on inside of ankles.)

But three-quarters of our stage time was ad-lib, just clowning around with the audience. With the movies going great for us and the TV specials right through the roof, the only reason for playing nightclubs anymore was because of a certain contract certain people had with us that if we didn’t take them seriously they’d take a contract out on us, seriously. So we viewed the weeks at the Versailles in Miami, the Biarritz in Vegas, and the Casino del Mar in northern New Jersey as a working vacation.

And when we worked the audience, we were like advance men scouting a location. What we were scouting was who we’d be boffing later that night. It didn’t matter if the girls came to the show with dates. They’d come back without them. That was the main reason we didn’t mind doing a second show every night; Reuben, my valet, would get word to them after the first show that we wanted them to be our special guests for the second show. How they got rid of their dates I never knew, but they always did.

This particular night, I’ve got Maureen the redhead ready to room-service me later, so for a change I’m not scouting, just mingling with the crowd, and this fat guy starts heckling me. “You stink, Morris!” he yells at me. Every joke I make he yells, “You’re not funny!” It’s coming off pretty personal. He’s even going out of his way to laugh at Vince’s straight lines. Vince is looking at the back of the room for the captain to step in, but we don’t see him anywhere.

Now, I don’t like to let a heckler take control of the show, but unfortunately this guy is really loud and there’s no way I cannot acknowledge him. “Sir,” I say, “when you go to the movies, do you talk to the screen?”

“Go back where you came from, you bastard!” Great comeback on his part. I’m also wondering where he thinks I came from. I have a standard repertoire of zingers, but what the guy is feeding me is hard to riff on. What makes it tougher is he’s not heckling Vince; it’s just me. Vince is sensitive to this and tries the “politely shame them” angle. “Excuse me, sir. Clearly you don’t like our act, but you’re spoiling the evening for the rest of this nice audience. The management will refund your cover charge if we’ve failed to amuse you. Now can we please continue the show?” Some decent applause comes from the rest of the patrons, which is, of course, the whole point of Vince saying what he said. The heckler shouts, “No, we all love you, Vince. I just think the monkey is a jerk.” Meaning me.

Vince hears the word “jerk” and plunges straight into quoting a lyric I wrote for him in our first motion picture, Smithereens. The song was called “Just My Pal and My Gal.” Vince recites, “Mister: ‘I’m honored to work with this jerk,’” indicating me and walking his hand-mike down to the heckler. Russ Cummings has the piano player noodle behind him as he croons, “ ‘I never frown with this clown. I love to joke with this bloke. I feel real cool with this fool.’ ”

The heckler grabs Vince’s mike and says into it, “Fine, but don’t give the mike to this kike!”

The crowd can’t help but laugh.

Vince starts breaking up too. He says, a bit sheepishly, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not often my partner and I get topped by a member of our audience, but this gentleman has just done the near impossible, and we’re wondering, sir, if you’d be a great sport and help us out onstage. What do you say, folks?”

The folks say hooray. Vince explains, “You see, Lanny and I keep an old routine called ‘School Daze,’ that’s D-a-z-e, in our hip pocket for whenever a celebrity friend of ours might drop by. But don’t you think this gentleman—what’s your name, sir? Phil? Don’t you folks think Phil here is as funny as, say, Red Buttons or Red Skelton or Red China even? How about it?”

The crowd loves this, they’re all cheering Phil as he downs the rest of his drink. Vince waves everybody quiet one more time and says, “Now, in this routine, our friend Phil here is going to play a crazy professor who’s giving Lanny and me our final high school exam… so if you’ll excuse us while we help Phil change into a ca-raaaaay-zy professor outfit—Russ, a little costume-changing music, if you please!” He looks at our musical director, Russ Cummings, who quickly calls out a title and cues the band into “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.”

Well, I don’t know what the hell Vince is going on about, but he walks this heckler named Phil offstage, leaving me alone. So I start doing the bit where I ask the trombone player from the house band if I can play along—I make a few noises on the bone and then the slide comes off in my hand and as I try to put things back together, I “accidentally” knock over all the music stands—so now the stage is in shambles and I look into the wings and what I can see is Vince slamming the guy face-first into a radiator by a brick wall just before the dressing rooms. The guy bounces up off the radiator and lands on the floor. I would tell you that the guy has a broken nose, but that wouldn’t be true. The guy now has no nose. There’s just this black-and-purple mess above his mouth and below his eyes. Someday he might have a nose again, but not this year.

The audience can’t see or hear anything, but from where I am, I see plenty. The guy is groaning, weakly. Vince stands over him and says, “You call any goddamn Jew on this planet anything you like, I don’t care, but nobody calls my partner a kike, you hear me?” And he kicks him and would have kicked him again if Reuben hadn’t stepped in. He pulls Vince away, straightens his tux (somehow not a drop of blood has gotten on Vince’s shirtfront, but that was Vince, I’ll tell you), and Vince walks back out onstage, suave as ever.

Now the audience is wondering where Phil is. So I ask Vince, for the audience’s benefit, “Hey, where’s our friend Phil?”

Vince says, “Oh, he developed a sudden case of the jitters.”

“Would that be like a virus?” I ask. I give Vince the little hand signal we have that means “Feed the line back to me,” and Vince lobs it perfectly.

“Lanny, why do you want to know if his jitters might be like a virus?” he says for the audience’s benefit.

“I thought it might be a jitterbug!” I squeal and go into my “I’m so simultaneously ashamed and thrilled with myself” dance. The band starts playing one of those rock-and-roll vamps and I’m good for five minutes, right up through my trademark death-pratfall.

Of everyone in the club, Phil’s table is laughing the hardest. They weren’t laughing so hard a month later when Vince told the judge that Phil had tripped over a folding chair in the wings. Reuben and the lighting operator and the wardrobe mistress and the showgirls all verified this. The club’s captain said so too, and he was particularly emphatic, considering he was in the changing room getting his doorknob polished by one of the showgirls at the time. The judge gave Phil’s attorney a little lecture about people who bring unfounded lawsuits against celebrities. Later we signed some eight-by-ten glossies for the judge, one to go in his chambers and one for the window of his nephew’s dairy restaurant. (I wrote, “You’ve glatt to be kidding!” Cute.)

Boffing ladies and bashing gentlemen. I tell you, there was nothing under the sun Vince and I wouldn’t do for each other.