Senor Wences

"S'Alright? S'Alright!" The single that turned a catchphrase into a coast-to-coast punch line. Photo via Travalanche.

Some people in this family didn't just perform the art. They rebuilt it from scratch, with whatever was on hand, literally. Señor Wences took ventriloquism down to its barest possible instrument, his own fist, a painted face on his thumb and forefinger, nothing else required.^[1] No big carved figure. No trunk. Just a hand, a box, and a Spanish accent that never let you forget where he came from. Pull up a chair. Let me tell you about Wences.

A bullring, a ruined arm, and a new trade

He was born Wenceslao Moreno on April 17, 1896, in Peñaranda de Bracamonte, in the Spanish province of Salamanca.^[2] Before he was ever a ventriloquist, he was a bullfighter, a teenager who took the ring for real. Several hundred fights in, a bull gored him so badly he had to quit. His doctors told him the injured arm needed exercise to heal, so he picked up two things to work it: juggling and ventriloquism.^[2] Johnny, the character who made him famous, the face drawn on a fist, exists because a bull gored a Spanish teenager and the cure was a hobby. I don't know a better origin story in this whole art.

He spent the following years touring Europe and building a reputation as one of the highest-paid vaudeville acts anywhere in the world, known as much for a dazzling plate-spinning act as for the ventriloquism.^[3] He came to America in the mid-1930s, already in his late thirties, already a polished, seasoned performer, and made his New York debut at Club Chico.^[4] No overnight discovery here. Just a professional showing up at the top of his form.

A train wreck, a box, and "S'awright"

Here's the part everybody half-remembers and almost nobody gets exactly right. When Wences first arrived, he worked conventionally, another ventriloquist with a dummy, in his own words.^[5] A couple of years in, traveling to Chicago, his figure was crushed in a baggage car accident. Wences bought a box, stuck the ruined head inside it, and asked it, right there on stage that same day, if it was okay. The head answered back in a voice as gravelly as Johnny's was squeaky: "S'awright!"^[5] Pedro was born out of a wreck and a deadline. That's the whole story. No workshop, no months of tinkering. A performer with a ruined prop and a show to do that night.

Johnny came together just as plainly. Wences scrunched up his fist, drew a mouth where thumb met forefinger, and draped a blond wig over the top.^[5] And here's the detail that tells you everything about the man: he drew Johnny's face on his own hand in front of the audience, every single night. He never hid the trick. He performed it as part of the act.^[2] That's the opposite of what this whole trade usually does. Most of us work to make you forget the mechanism. Wences built the mechanism into the show and dared you to still fall for it. You did anyway.

Pedro

The head in the box, salvaged from a wrecked figure on the way to a Chicago booking. "Difficult for you, for me it's easy," in a voice pitched gravel-low against Johnny's falsetto.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Johnny

A childlike face drawn live, on stage, on Wences's own thumb and forefinger. The reduction of ventriloquism to a single hand, and it made him famous the world over.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Cecilia

Cecilia Chicken, the third member of the act, alongside a lesser-known fourth: Johnny's Sister, a girl fist puppet Wences used in a television commercial.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Forty-eight times on Sullivan

Once television found him, it never let go. He stood out in the 1947 picture Mother Wore Tights, then Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theater in 1948, then, starting in 1949, The Ed Sullivan Show, where he racked up at least 48 appearances across the run of the program.^[6] Vent Haven's own museum put the mechanics plainly: Wences and his wife Tally lived a couple of blocks from the Ed Sullivan Theater, so when an act bailed at the last minute, he was the one who could be there in ten minutes.^[7] Talent got him in the building. Geography kept him coming back.

He never changed the act, and the audience never minded. Vent Haven's museum made the comparison I love best: nobody complains that a concert pianist plays the same signature piece every night. An audience that came to watch a master work doesn't want new material. It wants the master.^[8] Nineteen minutes, with a one-minute encore, a card table and a glass of water, nothing more requested of the promoter.^[5] No jokes in the ordinary sense either, just what one writer called bizarre, farcical, Spanish-accented patter.^[5] And a trick nobody in this family ever solved: fellow ventriloquist Jimmy Nelson said flat out that most of them stood in awe of Wences, and that he still didn't know how the man got perfect smoke rings out of Johnny's mouth.^[5]

Ninety, a hundred, and still going

By 1978 he was headlining the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris. At 84, in 1980, he sat down with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. He kept touring into his early 90s.^[6] By 1998, at 102, he lived two blocks from a street in New York that had been renamed Señor Wences Way in his honor.^[9] He split his year between that apartment and Spain the way he had for years.^[10]

His 90th birthday party was thrown in Rochelle Park, New Jersey, organized by Al Getler, who had gotten to know Wences and Tally as a neighbor visiting their Manhattan apartment. The guest list crossed every boundary this art has: Jeff Dunham, then a young comedian decades before his own arena tours; Alan Semok, the figure maker known as the Dummy Doctor; collector-historian Stanley Burns; and Jim Henson.^[10] Getler's three-year-old daughter sat on Wences's lap through nearly the whole party while he entertained her making napkin sculptures and drawing pictures. Off duty, at ninety, he was still making a character out of whatever was on the table.^[10]

At his 100th birthday, celebrated at the Hollywood Improv, ventriloquist Jay Johnson watched Paul Winchell, then in his own mid-seventies, light up like a kid over a cocktail napkin Wences had drawn for him: two eyes and a mop of hair that, draped over a fist, became a small black-and-white version of Johnny. Winchell tucked it inside a book like it was an original Picasso.^[11]

Jeff Dunham, 1989

A young Jeff Dunham at a testimonial luncheon Al Getler organized in Wences's honor, April 2, 1989. Decades before the arena tours, in a room built entirely around one elder statesman.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Johnny sells margarine

Wences and Johnny, still working, still in character, in a Parkay margarine commercial. The catchphrase outlived the variety-show era it was born in.

Photo via Travalanche

A ventriloquial family, and the last bow

Wences wasn't the only Moreno with this gift. His older brother, Felipe Moreno, from that same town of Peñaranda de Bracamonte, worked as a ventriloquist his whole career too, billed as "el ventrílocuo musical," playing violin and xylophone alongside a parrot puppet named Kiko, performing across Spain and France until he retired in the 1950s and died in Madrid in January 1966.^[12][13] The Morenos were, by more than one account, one of the great ventriloquist families of Spain.^[14] And when a blog reader once pressed the family on whether either brother secretly used pneumatic bulb controls to work their figures, Wences's own granddaughter, Marcela Moreno, answered plainly: neither of them ever did. "Just plain old fashion and with their hands."^[15] That's a family answering for its own, on the record, and it's exactly the answer you'd hope for.

Wences kept teaching past his own act. Michele LaFong, a ventriloquist and comedienne, is remembered as his official protégée.^[16] He entertained four presidents, toured with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, did a Broadway show with Danny Kaye, and played every casino in Vegas.^[5] He died at his home in New York City on April 20, 1999, three days past his 103rd birthday. A memorial service and burial were held in Spain.^[5][2]

A bull couldn't finish him, a train wreck couldn't finish him, and a hand with a face drawn on it outlasted every carved figure in this archive. Some of us built empires. Wences built one out of a thumb.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy