A Confederacy of Dummies

“Ladies and gentleman,” said emcee Jimmy Caesar, a tuxedo-clad holdover from a distant era, “this man needs no introduction.”

Out came Jim Teter, tuxedo-clad himself and fresh from his latest cruise ship appearance, where he delighted audiences with his “presidential dummies” Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton.

What followed was something out of a vaudeville dream, at once endearing and awful. By the end of Teter’s set, you half-expected Broadway Danny Rose to leap up and hustle him off to his next booking.

But this was no dream--this was the 1998 Vegas Ventriloquist Convention, held the last weekend of July at the Imperial Palace Hotel & Casino on the Strip.

Ventriloquist convention, you say? Why yes, the 24th straight year such an event has taken place. Of course, for the first 22 years, the convention was held at the Vent Haven ventriloquism museum in Fort Mitchell, Ky., so don’t feel too out of the loop. The move to Vegas, spearheaded by a “vent” with the improbable name of Valentine Vox, is part of a campaign to attract more media and increased exposure for the art form--to create a day when Jim Teter would indeed need no introduction.

But barring a miracle comeback, that day has apparently gone the way of the eight-track tape. Today, ventriloquism survives mostly on the margins of show business, an underclass of performers working mid-market comedy clubs, cruise ships, schools, churches and Kiwanis Club banquets, even the most artful practitioners laboring under the stereotype of the “variety act”--eternally corny, available, as the saying goes, for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

It’s all a precipitous drop from the exalted era of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. In an eerie manifestation of the times, three legendary ventriloquists died during the four days of this year’s convention--Shari Lewis, “Buffalo Bob” Smith and Stanley Burns, a veteran New York performer.

Some are still alive. Sen~or Wences is 102 and lives in Spain. Paul Winchell is 75 and retired in Palm Desert.

On the phone, Winchell jokes that his famous figures Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff have taken up a new hobby--collecting dust.

“Television and its use of computers can make everything talk, so there’s no need for the art of ventriloquism anymore,” he says. “I don’t think young kids today would even understand it.”

And yet, while nothing at this year’s convention screamed “Ventriloquism Comeback,” they were there in force--an estimated 350 people in all, not including the dummies. There was a CEO of a Denver oil company, a psychotherapist from Boston, an engineering school teacher from Vienna. Grown men (and women) with real jobs who picked up a dummy when they were 8 or 9 or 10 and now, all these years later, find themselves performing in their local libraries and schools for reasons that seem slightly beyond them.

For four days, they met in a big banquet room on the third floor of the Imperial Palace, the sound of incessant bells and whistles from nearby slot machines wafting into the room. They listened to talks on “Soft Puppet Manipulation” and “The Distant Voice.” They performed in pro shows and open mikes and stole liberally from one another’s routines (a much-commented-upon convention ritual). They mingled in the Dealers’ Room, buying everything from T-shirts to legal advice, and on the final day they honored one of their own, Jimmy Nelson, who with his dummies Danny O’Day and Farfel the dog became an American icon thanks to a series of Nestle Quik commercials that ran from 1955-65.

Nelson, in his day, performed on TV shows from Milton Berle’s “Texaco Star Theater” to “Your Show of Shows”; today’s ventriloquist has a considerably harder time getting talk-show talent bookers to return phone calls.

Many of the top-line acts--Ronn Lucas, Michele LaFong, Willie Tyler, Dan Horn--lead the hardscrabble life of the road. Finding them for pre-convention interviews serves as a good introduction into their lives. Lucas phones from Chesaning, Mich., where he’s doing a week opening for the Oak Ridge Boys aboard a docked steamboat; Tyler, who once upon a time toured with Little Stevie Wonder and the Supremes in a Motown review, invites a reporter on a trip along to a mall near his Northridge home, where he buys a new shirt for his dummy Lester (Tommy Hilfiger, boys’ size 4). Tyler’s just come back from a two-week engagement at the Princess Hotel and Casino in the Bahamas. The next day, he leaves for a five-nighter at a comedy club in Albuquerque. Tyler wasn’t planning to arrive at the convention until Sunday night for the gala show. Like others, he’s of two minds about the convention--it’s great to see so many people there, but some of these people, God bless them, are a tad too dedicated to their dummies.

“The convention tends to draw an element of people who think if you go to breakfast, you’ve got to take your puppet with you, and order breakfast through the puppet,” says Jay Johnson, best known for his role as both Chuck and Bob on the long-running sitcom “Soap.”

Thanks to “Soap,” Johnson today makes a good living appearing at corporate retreats and seminars, using Bob to put a fresh spin on an otherwise dull presentation.

“Using ventriloquism, we can bring up issues that probably couldn’t be approached any other way,” he says. “I mean, Bob can call the president [of a company] a penny-pinching skinflint.”

Still, Johnson says, he’s forever outrunning the stigma of being a ventriloquist in the ‘90s.

“When someone sees a bad singer, they don’t assume all singers are bad. With ventriloquists, you see a bad one, and it seems to taint the entire genre. I’m continually fighting the worst act you’ve ever seen.”

And yet, spend enough time with a group of people and their various dummies and an odd thing happens to the outsider: The experience goes from funny to surreal to sad, then becomes strangely uplifting.

Of course, to cycle all the way through to the uplifting stage, you have to stay at the convention for at least three days, which most outsiders aren’t willing to do. Never mind that the Imperial Palace isn’t one of the classier joints on the Strip. Most outsiders--the media, that is--have a very definite agenda: They swoop in, get lots of video of wacky-seeming people, then swoop out. This year’s contingent included NBC’s “Today” show, CNN and “Access Hollywood.”

The TV crews had irresistible footage everywhere they looked: a 20-year-old Michigan farm girl named Alicia Dacoba, who throws her voice into a “talking pig” named Porkchop (“When ‘Babe’ came out, I about had a nervous breakdown,” said her mother, Deborah); a San Francisco police officer who walks his North Beach beat with his dummy, Brendan O’Smarty (“I only take him out on soft domestic violence calls,” said Officer Bob Geary); and 75-year-old Ruth Means, who plays the winter parks of Tucsonwith her sequin-clad dummy, Ms. Trixie.

But it wasn’t all ham and cheese; every now and then, amid the acts that bludgeoned you into a kind of giddy submission, real talent would suddenly reveal itself.

It happened on Friday morning, when a 39-year-old pro from Phoenix named Dan Horn gave a workshop on soft puppet manipulation and made his dummy Orson come breathtakingly alive. It hardly mattered that you could see Horn manipulating Orson to frown, blanch, guffaw and attack his master with a flurry of blows. Watching Horn, you could sense the awesome power a ventriloquist can have, an ability to get a roomful of people to suspend their disbelief that a puppet can come to life.

“Orson’s based on my relatives,” said Horn. “For 91, he’s pretty spry.”

Hip enough to play comedy clubs and colleges, Horn is among those pros who can pull in several thousand dollars a week onstage. He’s not in the category of a Jeff Dunham, the highest-paid ventriloquist in the country, but Horn’s not doing library dates while holding down a full-time job, either.

“It’s not as recognizable to the public, but some of these people are out there making as much money as comics and well-known singers,” says Marty Fischer, who manages Tyler and LaFong.

Others, meanwhile, have recently quit their day jobs to chase a dream. Stephen Knowles, 28, from Nashville, was a computer programmer until eight months ago, when he decided to pursue ventriloquism full time. His act, he stressed, is G-rated (“I’m clean, which corporate customers want”). He’s also a devout Christian, something that opens an entirely separate market to him.

“You call a church and book a show and it adds a little to the travel fund,” he said.

Though Knowles is not one of the “gospel vents”--so called because they teach Scripture through their puppets--they make up one of the larger subsets of the ventriloquism community. But they were conspicuously missing from this year’s convention.

The event’s move from Kentucky to Vegas has had its consequences--not only chasing away the Christian ventriloquists but leaving others to wonder whether the purity of the event has become as sullied as a whiff of casino air.

By many accounts, Fort Mitchell provided the setting for a far clubbier, more congenial affair, not least because there was nothing else to do there but sit around the lobby of the Drawbridge Inn and talk shop. In Fort Mitchell, say the vents, people held “jam sessions” in their rooms--passing a dummy among four or five people, improvising a voice and personality.

The reasons for the move from a small town on the banks of the Ohio to the capital of sin are multilayered. Suffice it to say that the more ambitious vents did not find Fort Mitchell entirely to their liking. There were murmurs every year that the convention could be better publicized, that the Drawbridge Inn didn’t offer the best in accommodations. Then, in 1996, when the convention’s director retired, Valentine Vox, who happens to have his own vent museum in Vegas, seized the opportunity to recast the annual gathering in a glitzier format.

Still, if anything divides the vent community these days, it’s whether Vegas is a suitable place for the convention. Attendance, many noticed, was down this year. Apparently wanting no part of Vegas, the gospel vents have started their own convention in Kankakee, Ill.

But Vegas, and Vox, the author of a book called “I Can See Your Lips Moving: The History and Art of Ventriloquism,” have their defenders. Fort Mitchell, after all, doesn’t have blackjack tables and showgirls. Last year, Winchell came up from Palm Desert, and this year’s convention was being filmed for a British Broadcasting Corp. documentary.

“I think Valentine did what needed to done--he let the media in,” said Carla Rhodes, a 16-year-old vent from Charlestown, Ind. But letting the media in comes with a price. Media exposure at a ventriloquist convention has a way of leading people to the conclusion that vents are a bit off as a group. You know, like the guy in that “Twilight Zone” episode who becomes possessed by his dummy, or Anthony Hopkins, driven to murder by Fats, his demonic sidekick in the movie “Magic.”

Maybe that’s why the theme of Jeff Dunham’s lecture had the feel of a plea. “Put down the dummy,” he commanded his fellow vents, “and pick up a pen.”

In other words, be funny. Please. Don’t just get up and talk in a squeaky voice through some animal puppet. Forget about your technique, forget about whether your lips are moving. Think character. Bergen, after all, the biggest act of all time, wasn’t terribly proficient with his lip movement. But, in Charlie McCarthy, he created a character so vivid the pair actually hit it big on radio.

“Edgar Bergen was the Seinfeld of his time,” Dunham is fond of saying. “People thought Charlie was really alive.”

At 36, Dunham is a modern-day oddity--a millionaire ventriloquist who, with his dummy Walter, a scowling old curmudgeon, plays to sold-out houses, largely in the South and Midwest. Dunham is generally considered a master marketer among comics and managers, someone who comes to his job with equal parts business savvy and artistry. He lives in a swanky development above Tarzana, waiting for the TV gods to summon him to the valley below. He’s got big-time Hollywood management in the Gersh Agency, but he knows what he’s up against--the sense in the entertainment industry that ventriloquism went the way of “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

“The Hollywood view of ventriloquists is that they speak through puppets because they can’t handle [comedy] on their own,” Dunham says. “But I’m telling jokes like any other comic, I just happen to have a dialogue going instead of a monologue.”

Dunham’s managed to break through this barrier somewhat. His promo tape includes a guest spot with Walter on ABC’s “Ellen” and half a dozen appearances on “The Tonight Show.” But the new guard--Dave, Jay, Conan--are more apt to look at a ventriloquist and think, “How can I mock this?”

“Middle America loves what we do, but the gatekeepers in New York and L.A. who define what is and isn’t hip, they automatically assume ventriloquist isn’t a hip thing to be,” says Ronn Lucas.

Back at the convention of ‘94, Dunham and Lucas had an infamous altercation in a coffee shop. Lucas accused Dunham of stealing a routine in which you take your puppet through a series of emotions. The image of two ventriloquists fighting over ownership of a bit has the tragicomic feel of two crew mates arguing semantics on a sinking ship. Then again, that mix of tragedy and comedy may be the sole lifeline to the show-business world that ventriloquism has left.

“It’s one of those unsung art forms,” said Fred Casella, who was at the convention as part of the film crew shooting a forthcoming documentary for the BBC called “On the Other Hand.”

It was the morning of Day 3 of the convention, and Casella had set up a shot of six vents and their dummies playing craps. A crowd had gathered, strangers taking a break from the serious, frenetic business of gambling. Even the sullen-faced pit bosses were warming to the scene.

“You know,” Casella said, struck by a thought, “it’s honorable, but also tragic, and that makes it all very romantic.”

That night, Jake Sills, 45, a psychotherapist from Boston, sat in the back of the banquet room while a series of amateurs performed in the nightly open mike show. The hour was getting along toward midnight, and Sills wasn’t sure if he wanted to go on stage.

When he was 21, Sills was in a car accident that left him with such severe retinal damage that today he can only see vague patches of light. It took him five or six years, he said, before he had accepted his blindness and could begin to function in the world again. He went back to school to finish his college degree, went on to become a psychotherapist.

Sills did something else, too--he picked up a dummy and started to do ventriloquism again. It was something he’d taught himself to do as a kid, inspired by Winchell and Mahoney.

“When the vent bites you,” Sills explained, “you become obsessed with learning the art and developing your skills.”

Today, Sills is one of the part-time vents, performing to kids mostly, in schools and libraries, with his dummy Oty McGuinness.

“Uh, Jake,” Oty will say to the blind man, “I’ve got some bad news for you. The audience just got up and left.”

“Oty’s one of those warm-hearted wise-cracking kids,” Sills said.

Open mikes at a ventriloquist convention can leave you either depressed or with an uncontrollable case of the giggles. But the deeper Sills got into his story, the less all of that seemed to matter. Suddenly, you didn’t care whether the art of ventriloquism was dead or dying or mounting a comeback. What seemed to matter was that Jake Sills had gotten on a plane and come out here, and that he’d lugged his dummy with him.