Monsieur Brunard

Monsieur Brunard and Joe Flip, signed by his own hand at the table. Photo via Travalanche (Trav S.D.)

Some performers hit a wall in the act and go buy a new dummy. Richard "Dick" Bruno had a bigger idea. He kept the same dummy and built a whole new self instead: a different walk, a different voice, a beard grown on purpose, and by 1948 half of New York's nightclub circuit believed a Frenchman had wandered onto the bill.^[1] Pull up a chair. This is the story of Monsieur Brunard.

A New York kid with a horn and a deck of cards

He came from a family of harp players, but Dick Bruno picked up the saxophone instead and worked jazz bands as a young man, emceeing and playing nightclubs through the 1930s.^[2] Magic got him first. As a boy he bought his first trick from Prof. Otto Hornmann's shop, and years later his interest came roaring back after he met Will Park, once an assistant to Adelaide Herrmann, and befriended fellow magic-shop regular Frank Ducrot.^[2]

Ventriloquism came almost by accident. In 1936 he worked alongside John W. Cooper, one of New York's veteran vaudeville vents, and decided on the spot to switch careers.^[2] He bought his own figure at Max Holden's magic shop in New York City on December 4, 1941.^[2] By his own account, he'd started with ventriloquism back in 1936 and was performing professionally by early 1938.^[3]

Three months that fixed everything

Bruno was already a working professional when he ran into the man who actually taught him the trade. Here's how he put it himself, years later in his own Oracle column: "I never realized how poorly I was performing vent until I met up with the late Great Lester, and it was mainly through his coaching and guidance that I was put on the right track. Though I was with him only three months, we developed a friendship that lasted through the years up to the time of his passing."^[3] Three months of coaching on top of a career already underway, and the whole technique got rebuilt. Lester became, in Bruno's own words, his inspiration, and Lester's counsel kept solving problems for him for years afterward.^[3]

The war, and the idea that changed everything

World War II took Bruno's act around the world with USO camp shows. A photo survives from a foxhole unit in New Guinea, June 1944, Bruno holding the control stick alongside Russ Delmar, Charlie Caruso, and Little Johnny Jones.^[4] In Europe he managed a unit called "Five for Fun," attached to the 64th Armored Field Artillery, playing everything "from cow pastures to castles."^[4] By June 1946 he was in occupied Tokyo, where a Japanese artist made a lightning sketch of him.^[4]

The idea for the whole act came out of a chance meeting. Sam Margules, the magician in his USO unit, was with Bruno one weekend in New York when the two of them ran into the sleight-of-hand legend Dai Vernon. Somewhere in that meeting they picked up a book on foreign dialects, and reading the section on French gave Bruno his answer: change the stage personality from a New Yorker to a Frenchman, and let the figure answer back as the New Yorker instead.^[2]

That same year, on a USO tour of Army hospitals in Louisville, he met a young magic-world writer named C.O. Montgomery, who watched the transformation happen for real, at Bruno's own home in New York, the following year. The overseas tours had wrapped in March 1947.^[5] Late that year, instead of shopping for a new dummy, Bruno rebuilt himself: he grew a beard, changed his mannerisms, changed his speech, and stepped out first as "Monsieur Richard," then as "Monsieur Brunard."^[1] Montgomery's own words on it: "He had an excellent act, but he was not satisfied... And he didn't do what most of us do when we feel the act needs a change, that is, get a new dummy. No, sir! Dick Bruno got himself a new personality."^[1]

Monsieur Brunard is born

He branched out under the new name early in 1948,^[5] and his first long run as Monsieur Brunard was sixteen straight weeks at New York's Bal Tabarin.^[6] Later he played the WIVEL on West 54th Street, the same club where his mentor Lester used to hold court,^[1] and matched Lester's own sixteen-week record there.^[6] The bit worked because of the contrast at its center: Bruno spoke English with a French accent so complete "even Frenchmen are fooled," while his figure Joe Flip answered back in flat American slang with a Brooklyn accent.^[1] French Canadian papers bought it whole. The Montreal Matin, August 11, 1949, wrote him up as the genuine article, "le fameux ventriloque francais," and added that he was also a virtuoso of saxophone and piano, "un magicien epatant."^[1] Two summers later, in 1951, the New York World-Telegram and Sun made the same claim, straight-faced: "a ventriloquist from France."^[1]

He wore the joke lightly, too. Writing to a colleague in 1956 he signed himself "the Ol' Monsoor," and wondered whether two vents who used to visit him backstage when he was breaking in as a foreign-born Frenchman, Ricky Lane and Eddie Garson, had picked up the trend from him.^[7]

The road: ships, clubs, and one night in Louisville

Brunard and Joe Flip worked the road hard through the 1950s. He'd been knocking them dead at the Bal Tabarin in late 1950.^[8] In 1951 he appeared on the concert program of Cunard's SS Mauretania on a West Indies cruise.^[1] The next year he entertained Korean War convalescent troops at Camp Pickett, Virginia, then finished a three-week cruise on the Empress of Scotland as Brunard and Joe Flip, good enough that Canadian Pacific Steamship Lines booked him for a second one; that same year he also took over the ventriloquial teaching post at New York's newly reopened Magic Center.^[9] He was generous with the community too: in 1952 he sent a spare wig off Joe Flip's own head to help dress a bald figure in the Vent Haven collection.^[10]

The best story from those years happened at Louisville, at the 1954 IBM/IBV convention. Brunard stepped in at the last minute for an absent Phil D'Rey on the Friday All-Star show. MC Jay Marshall introduced him as "a foreign importation," Bruno came out spouting French, and the crowd didn't know what to make of it, until Joe Flip cut loose in Brooklynese and brought the house down. The Oracle's own writeup called it plainly: "Never has Louisville seen a more startling contrast between Ventriloquist and Dummy."^[11] By the mid-1950s he kept booking steadily: an Order of the Eastern Star show in Dover, New Jersey in December 1954, then the New Year's Eve show at Club Claire on Long Island heading into 1955.^[12] He was reaching further too: by the spring of 1955 he was trying to arrange his own trip to the IBV's convention in Britain, and word came back promising "a real British welcome" for their American brother.^[13]

He kept a hand in club life as well. By 1957 he'd settled into a regular booking at New York's Harmonie Club, giving its annual children's Christmas party,^[14] and the local musicians' union paper ran a profile on him titled "Local 6 Member Has Dummy, Will Travel."^[15] Illness slowed him down more than once: hospitalized in November 1957,^[16] and his column went dark again for an issue in 1959.^[17]

He never really stopped being a magician, either. His own after-dinner trick, "Voice in the Glass," entertained magic names like Jarrow, Milbourne Christopher, and Blackstone over the years, along with Berger, Frank Marshall, and the Great Lester himself.^[18] He was an early convert to the reel-to-reel tape recorder too, swapping recorded messages with fellow IBV members years before he turned the same idea into a coaching business, offering criticism and correction by mail on tape rather than printed lessons.^[19][20]

The teacher in the column

Brunard wrote The Oracle's "Vent News and Views" column for years, taking it over from Jerry Layne,^[21] and signing off some installments in French: "Avec de la patience, on arrive a tout."^[20] In 1958 he delivered a Vent Lecture at the IBM-IBV convention in Buffalo, and when an Australian member, Arthur Norris of Sydney, wrote in asking him to publish the text for members who couldn't travel that far, Brunard didn't just print the lecture. He rewrote it as a full teaching series, "Advice for the Beginner" and on, running for more than a year.^[22]

The series is one of the most detailed how-to columns the Oracle ever ran. He gave the word's own history, Latin ventri and loquar, belly and speak, across five languages.^[23] He taught readers to study a baby in its crib for ear-training, and, more strangely, the sounds people make at the dentist's and the chiropractor's.^[23] He drew the tongue position for the ventriloquial voice, warned against becoming "a slave to the mirror," and told students to drink something hot before a session, never something cold.^[23] He ran a full alphabet of labial substitutions, letter by letter, after first tearing apart what the other published courses taught.^[4] And on handling the figure itself, he gave a rule nothing else in the corpus states so plainly: manipulation is fifty percent of the act, and the mouth lever gets one pull per syllable, because the more human the touch, the better the act.^[24]

He put the teaching to work in person too. One of his pupils was a young Shari Lewis, coached by Brunard for a stretch before she carried the art onto American children's television.^[25][2] In 1960 he was working with a photographer from Staten Island named Joe Mannis, of whom the column reported he was "making rapid and promising progress under Monsieur Brunard's tutelage."^[4] He helped the IBV reach across the Pacific too, working to bring Japanese ventriloquists into the brotherhood when language was the only obstacle.^[5]

The cast

For close-up work he carried a miniature figure, a Tommy Knott model made by Frank Marshall, dressed as a Basque and named Toto; Brunard even made Toto "sing" in French, a little joke tucked inside the bigger one.^[24] But the regular partner, the one that made the whole act work, was Joe Flip.

Joe Flip

A 40-inch Frank Marshall figure and, in Brunard's own words, "one of the best Frank has ever turned out, barring none." Joe Flip's whole job was to answer the Frenchman back in pure Brooklyn.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

The circle

No act like this happens alone. Here's Brunard's world: the teacher who fixed his technique, the man whose act pointed him toward ventriloquism in the first place, and a student who carried the line forward.

The last bow

Brunard kept working into his later years. One of his last stage appearances came at the T.A.O.M. convention in Dallas in 1980, more than three decades after he'd first grown out the beard.^[2] By 2016, Cybervent put his name on a tentative sixteen-person shortlist for its Legends Collectors Cards, the community's own accounting of who mattered.^[26] Richard "Dick" Bruno died May 18, 1986, in St. Petersburg, Florida, eighty-four years old.^[2]

Bought his figure December 4, 1941, kept the same face, changed the whole man around it. I have known ventriloquists who could not commit to a new tie, let alone a beard and a nation.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy