James Wallis

There's an ad buried in old ventriloquist message boards that reads like nothing else in this whole archive. "4SALE, WALLY, LOOKING FOR A NEW HOME." Behind that headline was a seventy-year-old man in Arlington, Texas, quietly putting his whole performing life up for sale to a total stranger, for a price so low the buyer would later call it a giveaway. Pull up a chair. His name was James Wallis, and this one earns its ending.

A five-and-dime kid with an act

He was born James Wallis on March 21, 1939, in Searcy, Arkansas, and raised in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, where his father ran the local five-and-dime.^[1] He graduated Broken Bow High School in 1957, and that same spring he registered his figure with the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, alter ego "Wally Wallis," BVD No. 310.^[3] The write-up in the club newsletter lists what he was doing with him: impersonations of Johnny Ray, Nat King Cole, Frankie Laine, Louis Armstrong, Ed Sullivan, Harry Belafonte, and Elvis Presley, with about fifteen television appearances already to his credit.^[3] A ventriloquist figure doing Elvis in 1957, in a small Oklahoma town, the same year Elvis himself was still scandalizing living rooms on Ed Sullivan's own show. That's a teenager who understood exactly what the country wanted to laugh at.

Sooner Scandals

By 1958 he was "talking his way through" the University of Oklahoma at Norman with Wally on his knee, and the act was no longer just a small-town novelty.^[4] He and Wally won first place in the Engineers Show, OU's all-school talent night, then went on to win Sooner Scandals, the biggest show the university put on, staged over three nights, one of them at the Municipal Auditorium in Oklahoma City, in front of crowds running three to six thousand.^[4] To freshen the act for a room that size, he added singing to the impersonations of Johnny Ray, Elvis Presley, and Harry Belafonte.^[4] A college kid was pulling six thousand people a night. Plenty of working professionals in this art never see a room that big once.

The Roadrunners

By the fall of 1959, Wallis, and Wally (the club newsletter that year spelled it "Walley"), had taken the act in a new direction entirely: fronting a rock and roll band called the Roadrunners, playing Army and Air Force bases.^[5] The show was a dance followed by a floor show built around drinking and smoking bits, the distant-voice illusion, and a phone gag, with Wallis working in impersonations of the day's television personalities.^[5] He wasn't a specialty act filling ten minutes on somebody else's bill anymore. He was running the whole night for servicemen a long way from home, and doing it himself.

From the Playboy Club to the Vegas Hilton

The record goes quiet on the specifics for the next two decades, but the shape of the career survives. Wallis played the Playboy Club in Cincinnati and the Las Vegas Hilton, on bills with Suzanne Somers, Debbie Reynolds, and Rip Taylor.^[6] He kept the evidence on his own wall. Friends who visited his home in Arlington, Texas remembered a whole wall in his computer room covered in signed photographs of the actors and actresses he'd worked alongside over the years, most of them autographed to him personally.^[1] He retired from performing after a hip replacement, by his own account roughly eight years before he died.^[6]

The buyer waiting in Cincinnati

Two states away, a ventriloquist about Wallis's own age had just been through his own reawakening. Tom Farrell of Cincinnati went to the 2008 ConVENTion, watched Terry Fator perform, and walked out to his wife telling him, "You used to be so good at that, you should get into that again."^[6] Farrell dug his own old Insull figure out of a trunk, where it had sat untouched for twenty years while his bookings dried up, and sent for the Maher Course of Ventriloquism to shake off two decades of rust.^[6] He was exactly the kind of buyer who would know what he was looking at when an ad for a very different Insull figure turned up online.

The ad, the friendship, and the last request

Wallis put Wally up for sale. He was an Insull, two heads: one carved at Maher's shop in Michigan back in the 1950s, the other by W.S. Berger himself in the early 1960s, on a body built by Foy Brown.^[6][2] The ad found its way to Farrell.^[6] Months of emails followed. The two men discovered they'd both known W.S. Berger personally and both carried IBV membership from the same era. Wallis wrote to him plainly: "I don't often 'click' with people I don't know, but I like you."^[6]

On March 28, 2009, Wallis made Farrell an offer at a price so low that Farrell would later call it a giveaway. One condition came attached to it.

Farrell took the deal. Then the messages turned strange. Asked if he was all right, Wallis wrote back: "I'm calm, collected and ready. Major problem. Can't comment. Require your trust and best wishes."^[6] A friend later explained he had been putting his affairs in order. James Wallis died in Arlington, Texas on April 13, 2009, sixteen days after making the sale.^[6][1]

One more piece belongs to this story. While digging through a closet for a photograph of Wally's spare head, Wallis had turned up his own old IBV membership pin and sent Farrell a picture of it alongside Farrell's, since Farrell had lost his own back in the 1970s.^[6] After Wallis died, Farrell asked the family for the pin. He had it set into a ring, which he wears on his right hand, the hand that works a figure's controls.^[6] He says that every time he brings Wally to life with that hand, the two of them are, in a way, back together again.^[6]

Wally becomes Jerry DeWitt

Farrell had the figure refurbished by Kevin Detweiler and repainted by Clinton Detweiler, and gave him a new name, Jerry DeWitt.^[7][8] The following year, the figure Wallis had once carried onto Army base stages and the floor of the Vegas Hilton was back on a knee in front of a classroom, working again.^[8] Wallis's one condition was simple: whenever Farrell was through with him, Wally would go to Vent Haven.^[2]

He was featured, in his own lifetime, in a book called Distinguished Oklahomans, by Victoria Lee. His surviving best friend was Mitch Leeds, a theatrical producer in Philadelphia. Friends bought him a brick at Broken Bow High School, engraved: "James (Jimmy) Wallis, Class of 1957, THE ENTERTAINER."^[1] They had that right.

Wally carried Elvis, Belafonte, six thousand people a night at Sooner Scandals, and one Vegas stage, but the ad just said LOOKING FOR A NEW HOME. That's the whole trade in four words, and James got it right at the end.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy