Instantly famous Terry Fator finally finds success offstage, too

“Oh, no! A ventriloquist!”

It was nearly 10 years ago that David Hasselhoff made that snap judgment while watching Terry Fator walk onstage with his little puppet friend for his “America’s Got Talent” audition.

But it didn’t take long for the Dallas native to turn mockery into triumph.

Fator’s store-bought Muppet-like companion, Emma Taylor, opened her big mouth and let rip a spot-on imitation of the great Etta James singing her signature hit, “At Last.”

In just two career-defining notes, Fator went from uncool to very cool, from zero to hero.

The Hoff was rendered speechless, aside from an occasional “Wow!” Before the performance was over, Hasselhoff and the other celebrity judges — and the audience, too — leapt to their feet and cheered.

That moment aired June 19, 2007, introducing Fator to a national audience. His life hasn’t been the same since. He won Season 2 of “America’s Got Talent” and collected a $1 million prize. Then he signed a five-year, $100-million deal to headline at the Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas.

Today, after nearly nine years as one of the biggest acts on the Vegas Strip, he’s still going strong.

Weeks ago, when Fator and I grabbed a booth at his favorite Tex-Mex restaurant, El Fenix on McKinney Avenue in Dallas, plenty of other customers took notice of him as he walked in. But no one said, “Oh, no! A ventriloquist!” Instead, it was, “Oh, my god! Terry Fator!”

The customer in the booth behind us seized the opportunity to tell Fator how much he meant to her. “We watched you on TV every week and loved you so much,” she gushed.

Then she got a photo with him before the chips and salsa arrived and the interview officially got underway.

“Winning ‘America’s Got Talent’ turned my entire world upside-down, in all the best ways,” he says. “I was playing tiny little county fairs in the middle of nowhere. Even the couple of times that I did the Texas State Fair, I was just a nobody act stuck on a small stage somewhere, next to the petting zoo.

“To go from that to, all of a sudden, almost overnight, kaboom, being someone who walks in the room and people start whispering my name, it’s surreal,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s great. I’m not complaining one bit. But it’s something that did take a little getting used to.”

Impressions plus puppets equals success

Fator was 10 years old when he came across a library book about ventriloquism, bought his first dummy and put together a rudimentary act, winning a $25 prize for his performance in a church picnic. By age 14, he was dreaming of becoming a headliner in Las Vegas.

The first step toward making the dream a reality came in 2005, two years before going on “America’s Got Talent,” when he had a eureka moment.

“I figured out that people were amazed by my ability to do impressions through puppets,” he says. “I had puppets that would do impressions since I was 10, but that never was a key component of the act.

“Up until then, I would be playing at these small fairs and I would never get more than 20 or 30 people. But whenever I’d pull a puppet out and have him do an impression, the crowd would start to build. Then I would go back to my normal show and people would move on.”

Eventually, Fator put two and two together: What if every puppet did impressions?

“I re-did my act and suddenly everything changed,” he says. “I would still start the show with a small crowd, because nobody knew who I was yet, but the audience would get bigger and bigger, and by the time I was done, it was standing room only as far as you could see.

“When all of my puppets started doing impressions, it energized everything. People would stay because they wanted to know what impression I would do next.”

Today, Fator’s show at the Mirage, scheduled to run another five years, features a large lineup of puppets, including such fan favorites as Walter T. Airedale (the singing cowboy figure that Fator’s mother bought for him when he turned 18), Winston the Impersonating Turtle, Maynard Tompkins (“the world’s greatest Elvis impersonator who doesn’t actually know any Elvis songs”), Monte Carlo (“an original member of the Rat Pack”), Julius (“a legend from the Apollo Theatre”) and, of course, Emma Taylor.

Together, they pay tribute to a wide variety of musical artists and styles, from Elvis and Roy Orbison to Justin Timberlake and Bruno Mars, from Louis Armstrong to Garth Brooks to Cher to Kermit the Frog.

Fator also has introduced a Donald Trump puppet (with hair that seems to have a mind of its own) into the act. It has been “yugely” popular with audience members, regardless of their party affiliation.

“I don’t get into politics with it,” he says. “I just have fun with the bigness of his character. One of my favorite parts is when he comes out and keeps telling the band to play ‘Hail to the Chief.’ I keep trying to talk and he says, ‘Play that song again.’

“That’s the kind of humor I’m doing: how much he’s enjoying being president. The way I see it, I’m not making fun of Donald Trump, I’m having fun with Donald Trump.”

The routine, by the way, has received a presidential stamp of approval.

“Trump himself has seen the routine,” Fator says with pride. “He thinks it’s funny and likes it.”

Rocky personal life

Fator wrote a book about his life in 2008. It’s called “Who’s the Dummy Now?” He really should do an update, because there have been big changes in his life during the past few years.

First and foremost, he has finally learned how to be happy.

“I started the book by saying, ‘What did Willy Wonka say to Charlie: Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted. … He lived happily ever after.’ But the truth is, when I wrote that book, I wasn’t happy. I was happy on the outside. But I was dying on the inside.”

How can that be? His dreams had come true. What was there to be unhappy about?

“That’s what everyone thinks,” Fator says. “But until you know what it means to be loved — really, really loved by someone who loves you not for your external self but for who you really are — you don’t know happiness. I never had that. Not from my family, not from my wife at the time, not from anyone.”

He and first wife Melinda made each other miserable after they moved to Las Vegas.

“The reason my first marriage lasted as long as it did is, before ‘America’s Got Talent,’ I was gone all the time,” Fator says. “Always on the road: Gone for three weeks and then home for two days. Gone again for a month and then home for four days. We saw each other maybe a month out of the year.

“But once I got the contract at the Mirage, a deal where I played the same place every night and went home to sleep in my own bed, yes, it was amazing, it was everything I had wanted, but it also made it obvious that we couldn’t stand to be with each other and we needed to make a change.”

After making their divorce official in 2010, Fator leaped into a rebound marriage that didn’t work either. “We wanted different things out of life,“ he says. “Luckily we had this wonderful, amicable separation and divorce, after which I decided, ‘You know what? I’m done. I’m just going to be single’.”

Then, about two years ago, he met Angie, his current wife.

“I played a show in Corsicana, one of my hometowns,” Fator says. “I lived there when I was about 14. I did a benefit show there for the theater I grew up playing in. And through a mutual friend, I hired this girl from Dallas as a caterer. Best food I’ve ever tasted, by the way.

“Anyway, next morning, this same friend says, ‘Hey, you’re single, she’s single. Do you want to meet her?’ And I thought, ‘Well, it isn’t going to hurt to date.’ So we get together and I tell her right away, ‘I’m kind of over the whole relationship thing.’ And she’s like, ‘You know what? Me, too.’

“But no more than a week later, we were like, ‘We’ve found it. This is the real thing’.”

They made it official in September 2015.

“I used to tell her, ‘I just want you to know. I’m really annoying. Everybody tells me so. You’re going to get sick of me one day.’ And she’s like, ‘I don’t know why you keep saying that.’ Here we are, two years later, and she loves being with me. We do everything together.

“And I finally know what it feels like to be completely happy. She has completely filled that emptiness I felt on the inside and it’s incredible. I’ve got to say: Money, fame, none of it makes you happy if you aren’t with the right person to share it with.”

This story was originally published February 28, 2017 at 12:46 PM with the headline "Instantly famous Terry Fator finally finds success offstage, too."