Rickie Layne

Rickie Layne and Velvel, in the pose that sold the act: the straight man startled by his own dummy. Photo: Travalanche (Trav S.D.)

Some acts start with a plan. Rickie Layne's started with a toy: a mass produced "Willie Talk" doll, the same one department stores sold by the thousands in the 1940s, picked up for a nine year old Brooklyn kid by his uncle Norbert at a magic shop.^[1][2] Rick renamed it, gave it a Yiddish accent, and carried it onto the Ed Sullivan Show forty eight times, by his own count the hardest number anyone's put on the question.^[3] Pull up a chair. Let me tell you about Rickie and Velvel.

A dummy in a Gladstone bag

Rick was born Richard Israel Cohen in Brooklyn on October 19, 1925, to a Castilian father and a Russian immigrant mother who worked her own vaudeville act as an accordionist under the name Gypsy Sonia.^[1] She put him on a Catskills stage at seven, doing impressions of Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, and he waited tables between shows alongside another kid working the same circuit: Jerry Lewis.^[1]

At nine, his uncle Norbert bought him a ventriloquist figure from a magic shop. Rick named it Gladstone, after the leather Gladstone bag he carried it around in. He later renamed the figure Vevel, Yiddish for Willie, and gave him a Jewish accent.^[1] The name stuck, spelled Vevel or Velvel depending on which trade paper you read, and it became the character that carried Rick's whole career.^[1]

He worked his way up on the road: a touring unit of the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, regular spots on Nick Kenny's radio show, and coaching from Irving Looman, a working vent out of Lakewood, New Jersey and the Catskills.^[3] Then, in his own words, "a funny thing happened in 1943... we got drafted."^[1] Three years followed in an Army entertainment unit built around recruiting for the Women's Army Corps^[1], and at one posting the colonel liked the dummy well enough to have it fitted for its own regulation staff sergeant's uniform.^[3] After the war came the touring revues "Borscht Capades" and "Bagels and Yox,"^[1] including a 1950 return engagement at Chicago's Blackstone Theatre where Rick played the whole show in Yiddish.^[4] In 1949 he made the move a lot of comics of that generation eventually made, out to California. "Why lay off in the snow," he said, "when you can just as well starve in the sunshine."^[1]

Nat King Cole's guarantee

By 1955, Rick was the opening act at Ciro's on the Sunset Strip.^[5] He was working the same bill as a singer who was, at the time, somebody's girlfriend, soon to be his wife.^[1] The somebody was Nat King Cole, and Cole liked the act enough to call Ed Sullivan directly: "There's a guy working with my wife in Ciro's, he's hysterical. He uses a dummy with a Jewish dialect."^[1] Sullivan hadn't seen the act and wasn't sold, so Cole raised the stakes: if Sullivan booked Rick and Rick bombed, Cole would go on Sullivan's show for free.^[1] Sullivan couldn't turn that down. On January 1, 1956, Rickie Layne and Velvel went on the Ed Sullivan Show and killed. Cole never had to make good on the free show.^[1]

Sullivan told him after that first spot, "We're gonna have you on again in two weeks." Two weeks later he told him a month.^[1] The trade papers tracked the payoff fast: billed as "Ed Sullivan's newest discovery" in 1956, playing Winnipeg and Chicago's Chez Paree^[6]; big at the Jewish Night of Stars at Madison Square Garden in 1957, and a week at Winnipeg's Rancho Don Carlos club that same year.^[7] By his own count, Rick made 48 appearances on Sullivan's show across the run. (Vent Haven's own record separately credits Señor Wences with more Sullivan appearances than anyone. Both men earned their place on that marquee, and both counts come out of the trade's own memory of a stage that clearly had room for more than one great double act.)^[8]

Velvel had his own running joke with the host, calling him "Mr. Solomon" instead of Sullivan, a bit Sullivan liked well enough to play along with as the straight man.^[9][10] One exchange survives on the page: Sullivan tried, "Maybe you can teach me to be a ventriloquist." Velvel answered, "I guess we are working with impossible odds."^[1] Told once that Sullivan had bought him a dog, Velvel objected: "I hate dogs. I used to be a tree!"^[10]

Copacabana to the Sunset Strip

Sullivan's stage opened every other door in the business. Rick and Velvel headlined the Copacabana in New York, the Chez Paree in Chicago, and, out in Nevada, Caesars Palace, the Desert Inn and the Flamingo.^[3][5] They played Miami's Fontainebleau and Los Angeles's Orpheum Theatre.^[1] He'd put in rougher rooms first: burlesque bits at the Silver Slipper in the early 1950s, and, as a teenager of fifteen or sixteen, the Roxy Theater and Leon and Eddie's.^[3]

The Copacabana story that made the rounds for years: owner Julie Podell spotted Rick at the bar with the figure propped beside him and demanded to know what he thought he was doing there. The figure just looked back at him. Podell turned to the bartender: "This kid is great. Give him a drink."^[3] Miami produced its own legend, and Rick told it himself: a chambermaid at the Ritz-Carlton found Velvel zipped inside his suitcase, called the police, and ran the halls yelling "There's a dead boy! His eyes are open, his eyes are open! She thought I killed a kid." The hotel fired her for going through his things.^[1]

Not every pivot worked. In 1958, columnist Earl Wilson reported that Rick's manager, Abby Greshler, had arranged to switch Velvel from a Jewish accent to an Irish one and rename him Sean, for a tie-in with the television series "The Thin Man." "'Twas arranged, begorra," Wilson wrote.^[11] Velvel kept his own name and his own accent. He opened the Copacabana again on July 30, 1959, and played the Sullivan show twice more that year, August 30 and September 13. The trade press called the material and the animation "extremely good."^[12]

The toy that wasn't supposed to work

Here's the part of the story I love best. In September 1948, The Grapevine News ran a signed review of Rick's eight week run at New York's Bal Tabarin. The reviewer, Roy Douglas, liked the ad libs, liked the Hollywood impressions, liked the way Rick closed with a comic parody of "Old Man River." Then he got to the figure: "He uses a stock 'Willie Talk' dummy which is the biggest fault of the act... He should replace his doll with a professional dummy." Douglas signed off with real encouragement anyway: "A few minor changes and this boy could be one of the top ten."^[13]

Rick never made that change. The stock toy a trade reviewer called the biggest fault of the act is the same figure that walked onto the Ed Sullivan Show, by his own count, 48 times.^[13] By the 1960s, Velvel was just as well known as Rick himself for his quick Yiddish quips to Mr. Sullivan.^[13] Dan Willinger's read on it, and it's his opinion, not mine: "It makes no difference what figure you use as a ventriloquist, because it is the ventriloquist and not the figure that make the illusion work."^[13] I'd put it a little differently. The figure and the man made that career together, a cheap toy and a kid from Brooklyn, and neither one of them was walking onto Ed Sullivan's stage alone.

Rick's own verdict on himself was even plainer: "I'm not a good ventriloquist. I'm basically a comic. I use the dummy as an excuse to do dialogue." And when a bit went sideways: "If something came out wrong, I'd blame the dummy."^[1]

Velvel

The stock "Willie Talk" toy Roy Douglas called the biggest fault of the act in 1948. Rick never traded it in, and by the 1960s it was drawing its own laughs on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Photo: Ventriloquist Central

Grossinger's, every summer

By the late 1970s, both performer and partner had changed with the times. Clean shaven in the 1950s, the pair filled out and grew matching mustaches by decade's end.^[2] Working Reno in 1978, Rick needled Velvel about it: "You're just jealous because your mustache is bigger than mine." Velvel had the last word, as usual: "Anything I have is bigger than yours."^[8]

He kept the Catskills close the whole time. His daughter Terri remembered it plainly: "I remember driving to New York every summer in the 70's so he could perform at Grossinger's and all the clubs. He was such a fun, good natured guy!"^[14] At home, the marriage ran a long, steady course of its own: he met LaRue after the war at a Salt Lake City gambling club called the Club 30, married her in her family's home town of Pocatello, Idaho, with her brother along to check things out ("to see if all was on the up and up. It was."), and stayed married to her until her death in 2002.^[3][10]

Rick showed up at the ventriloquists' own gathering in Las Vegas from the very first one in 1997, standing for a photo that year with two old friends, Jimmy Nelson and Paul Winchell.^[1] He repeated his 1997 Gala Show turn by request at the 1998 Gala^[9], the year the honoree was Nelson.^[1] His last performance anywhere was his own classic club routine, "The Bull Fighter," on the late show at the 2005 convention.^[1]

He died on February 11, 2006, at a hospital in Tarzana, California, 81 years old. By the account that's survived him, he told his nurse a joke that evening. She laughed and stepped out of the room. When she came back, he was gone, heart failure, mid laugh.^[1] His wife had been gone four years already; his own memorial, not far from hers, carries the act's name in bronze: Rickie Layne Cohen and "Velvel." Underneath the dates, four words the family chose to have the last say.^[10]

A mass produced Willie Talk doll off a department store shelf outlasted plenty of custom made figures with fancier pedigrees, proof that Velvel never needed to be carved special to be somebody's whole career.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy