Grace and Ray said, “Olsen and Johnson are looking for a lead singer.  They’re auditioning tomorrow.  Why don’t you go?  If you get the job, ask for $350 a week.”  I hung up and looked at Mary in disbelief.  $350 a week?  Nobody would pay anybody that kind of money.  On second thought, if they offered half that much that would still be twice as much as I’m making running all over the city now.  We looked at each other and began nodding.  It couldn’t hurt to audition.

I took the I. C. into Chicago and the EL way out west to some dingy 3rd floor rehearsal room with windows so streaked with soot you couldn’t see through them.  Walked in, music in hand.  Sketch-rehearsal came to a halt.  Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson quickly walked over to me, said, “Are you our singer?”  I said, “Yep.”  They took my music, handed it to their pianist, grabbed chairs and sat down, gazing at me expectantly.  I sang “Without a Song.”  They looked at each other and nodded.  Ole Olsen put his chair aside and went back to work on the sketch.  Chic Johnson shook my hand and said, “Yep, you’re our singer.  Can you start today?”

My eyes got big.  Chic said, “Okay, tomorrow.  Rehearsal pay $75 a week.  We open in two weeks at the Chicago Stadium.  Then you’ll get $200 a week.  How’s that sound?”  I ventured, “Could you make it $350?”  Chic broke into a wide grin and said, “Oh, you like to play hard ball, eh?  Okay, $250 and you’ve got a deal.”  Held out his hand.  I took it.  He said, “Tomorrow, ten o’clock, right here,” turned and went back to the sketch rehearsal.  Grace’s husband Ray patted me on the back and said, in his slightly French-Canadian accent, “Wait ‘til I tell Grace!”  And suddenly I had taken another show-business leap.  Rode all the way back home on those trains, shaking my head and wondering, “O Lord, what have I done?”

FUNZAPOPPIN' (1949)
Fortunately I was done with my classwork at Northwestern, but I did have certain obligations and responsibilities I would have to honor and work around.  When I arrived for rehearsal the next day I explained that I did radio shows on Tuesday and Thursday mornings (they said, “Good!  You can promote our show!”), and that I did rehearse and perform “Homer Herk” on TV Wednesday afternoons (they said, “You’ll be doing BIG television with us!”), and that I couldn’t stay late on Fridays because of my choir practice at Temple Beth Am (they said, “We’ll give the choir tickets!”).  Nothing fazed them.

Funzapoppin was an old-fashioned vaudeville/burlesque-style show.  All the very broad comedy centered around Chic and Ole, using endless props and funny costumes, stooges, outrageous puns, crossovers and hilarious sight gags.  No profanity or smut, just silly, home-spun Midwestern humor.  The female lead was Chic’s daughter June Johnson.  The craziest stooge was Ole’s son J. C. Olsen.  Marty May, husband of June Johnson, did his Palace Theatre act and worked in all the sketches.  Stooges included six Eastern European little people (adult midgets, former acrobats), Nina Varela (former opera singer turned baggy-pants comic), Billy Kaye and Barone Hopper (musical hall performers from Australia), Maurice Millard (female impersonator from South Africa), two second-bananas from burlesque, and six stuntmen from Hollywood doing the big fight sequence in the Western Sketch.  Also there were several circus clowns, vaudeville acts (Mata & Hari, Nirska, Gloria Gilbert, one-legged tap-dancer Jack Robbins), “flash acts” (Step Brothers, Clark Brothers).  Mayhem!  But all planned and timed to perfection.

And there was music, lots of it.  On that first day of rehearsal they asked me to sing for Choreographer Catherine Littlefield.  Musical Director Jack Pfeiffer sat down at the piano and I sang “It’s a Big, Wide, Wonderful World.”  Catherine loved it so much she immediately began creating a number around it.  June Johnson and I would be newlyweds taking our honeymoon around the world, and she would set dances from various countries where we stopped: a can-can for Paris, a tarantella for Rome, a hula for Hawaii (the dancers all interpreted while I sang “A Little Brown Gal in a Little Grass Skirt in a Little Grass Shack in Hawaii”), and a sinuous pas de deux by Ray Dorian and Georgine Darcy for Bali.  Catherine also quickly put me into another number she’d already started: I sang a chorus of “Brazil” and then the dancers did a very exotic dance to “Similau.”  They gave me one more solo: “I’d Like to Be a Sitter for a Baby Like You,” followed by a soft shoe danced by the entire company.  Everyone there could do a soft shoe, but I couldn’t, so I quickly had to learn the steps.

We did 23 performances of Funzapoppin at the Chicago Stadium, for which I was given a $500 check.  Mary and I were stunned to have that much money in one lump.  Olsen and Johnson then asked me to continue working for them as they went on tour: Indianapolis Colosseum, Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, and back to New York City to do an NBC series on the new medium of television.

I received my Master of Music Degree from Northwestern, bid farewell to all my jobs in the Chicago area, packed suitcases, and off the three of us went: my pregnant wife Mary, my one-year-old daughter Carrie, and me, a neophyte singer no longer to be billed as "William."  Surrounded by the super-relaxed atmosphere of Olsen and Johnson, I became "Bill Hayes."