by Ted Heller
We started out in A.C. [Atlantic City] at Skinny D'Amato's 500 Club and Vic and Ziggy blew everyone away, man. They smoked. The musicians and Vic and Ziggy and Arnie Latchkey and everyone stayed on the same floor . . . there was so much craziness going on there, though, that they didn't make that mistake again. I mean, you know how these rock stars and rap stars trash hotel rooms? They had us all on the tenth floor but the next morning there wasn't a tenth floor left. Anybody who wanted to get a night's sleep in that hotel, it just wasn't gonna happen. You know, maybe that wasn't A.C., it may have been Boston.
I turned Vic on to pot then, in Philly after the Earl Theater shows. It's three in the morning and we're bullshitting about the grand old days and how they really stank and I whip out this monster reefer. Wait, maybe this was in Baltimore. “You're not going to do that in here, are you, Mick?” he asks me and I said, “Why, you wanna step out on the terrace with me and do it?” Before I knew it he was puffing on this bone and his head was lost in a cloud of smoke. “Hey, this stuff ain't half bad,” he told me.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: We would often send Morty Geist to the next city we were going to a week ahead of time, to get the feel for the place and create some ballyhoo. He always made sure to have doctors and nurses and ambulances around. We traveled around with stretchers and tanks of oxygen (the tanks said oxygen but they were probably empty). He'd always hire plants for the crowd, screamers and laughers and people to run out because they were in so much pain supposedly. He got the idea for the Boston engagement to plant the rumor that the whole tour was like a wrecking ball, that hotel owners and restaurateurs were complaining the whole operation was out of control. You know, create this air of danger. Morty made up things . . . he told a columnist in the Boston Herald that in Philly Vic didn't like the hotel bed so he threw the whole thing—frame and mattress—out the window, fifteen flights down. He told them that when Ziggy heard that, he dragged the dresser to the window and tossed that out too. What happens? The Boston hotel we're supposed to be staying at, they cancel our reservations. Which gave us even more publicity. Morty was counting on that happening, so much so that we were already booked into another joint.
You know what happened? We were opening a motion picture in Miami, it was She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. And the distributor withdrew the picture! Because the word had gotten out that after sitting through Fountain and Bliss, nobody had any interest in the movie. We had a week in Florida and every night Vic and some of the boys in the band would go to Frank Costello's Colonial Inn in Hallandale to gamble and chase skirts. I went there once and what a sight it was, Vic throwin' dice with a girl and a grand in each hand. “Fifty the hard way!” he'd yell out. “A hundred on all the tough guys!” This was a big step up from the dice games he would have with the Lomax band in the parking lots of some of the joints we played. I couldn't believe the bets he was making! A hundred on hard six! This is insane asylum stuff. And the tips?! A cocktail waitress could make more in one minute from Vic than she did the rest of the month.
DANNY McGLUE: It was on this tour that Vic discovered what would become the passion of his life. Fishing, stamp collecting, Impressionist art? No, it was being with more than one girl at a time—what he called the Vic Fountain Double-Decker Sandwich. Mickey Knott, who was a wild man all to himself, told me about it in a coffee shop near the Chez Paree in Chicago. He'd just walked in on Vic with two girls in his hotel bed, in Mickey's bed! I said to him, “Mick, what can a fella do with two girls? I mean, there's only so much he can do, right?” And he said, “Maybe Vic gets creative. All I know is I walked in and I thought I was looking at a big pretzel on my bed, man, and then it started to move. It was Vic, a blonde, and a high-yellow broad.”
It was a difficult tour for me sometimes. Sally was always staying at the same hotel that I was. In every city. We'd eat with Arnie a lot, sometimes with Ziggy too, and Ernie Beasley, who was having a little fling with Mike Boley, the guitarist. Many times Sally and I would wind up alone together . . . after dinner, after a show, in the elevator. But I was seeing Betsy [Cantwell] now and Sally was going with Jack. So many times I'd be opening my hotel room door to get some coffee or get a paper and she'd be coming out of her room too. Every time that happened, I felt my heart skip a beat.
I admit it . . . sometimes I'd hear a door open and know it was her, so I left my room too, just to run into her.
SALLY KLEIN: Every road has its bumps. Vic had run into Walter Winchell in Florida, gambling at the Colonial Inn. Winchell figures, I guess, while I've got Vic here I may as well get an item or two. Now, it was very late and Vic was in his cups. And he said something like “We really want to do movies and get out of radio. Movies seems like just the right racket for us.” We being Ziggy and Vic, Fountain and Bliss. Now, this was all innocent enough; it's a stretch to think that Vic was innocent—shooting craps and playing blackjack and running around with girls—but he really didn't mean anything bad.
Winchell was down there on a little vacation so there was a delay until it hit the press. We were in Chicago opening a movie at the Thalia for five nights, and Ziggy read it in the Herald-American. He knocked on my door at eight in the morning, I wasn't even awake. “Look at this! Look at this, Sally! What is this?! How can he do this?!” I read it a few times and it didn't seem like anything incendiary to me. He yells, “What is this we thing? Who is we? We want to get out of radio and do movies?! We do???”
“Ziggy, Vic was probably stewed, I'm sure he meant nothing by it,” I told him. “And you know that when you tell a reporter something, they twist it around.”
“Oh, I'll twist it around, Sal! I'll twist it around his neck!”
He was yelling and waking up people at the hotel. Danny came out into the hallway, then Arnie. Ziggy ripped the newspaper up and kept ripping up the pieces he'd already ripped.
“You gotta punish him, Arnie,” he said.
“I'm gonna do that?! He's an adult! Occasionally.”
“This is bad for the act.”
“We'll survive. Can I finish shaving now?”
“We got a show tonight, Latch.”
“I'm aware of it.”
“We got two sets to do.”
“I'm familiar with it.”
“Well, I ain't doin' it. Get someone else. We! Who's we? We don't do that, Arn, it's wrong. We don't go around and say ‘we.’”
You know, we were only four doors down from Vic's room, but there was only a one-in-three chance that Vic was in there. Maybe he heard the whole thing, maybe he was fast asleep, maybe he was with a girl—or two of them—someplace else.
Ziggy was true to his word. He didn't go on. We had to cancel the shows.
Morty Geist spun it around masterfully though. Arnie's idea was to tell the press that Ziggy merely had a cold, but Morty said, talking a mile a minute, “A cold?! A cold?! Who cares about a cold? Who's going to care he gets a cold?! Let's tell 'em that Ziggy and Vic are fighting. Let's say they don't get along. Through a stooge we'll tell the Tribune and the Sun that they don't even talk to each other or when they do, it's either through lawyers or they yell; they hate each other and it's World War Three! This stooge will tell 'em, yeah, Ziggy's saying he's got a cold but it isn't a real cold at all.”
“And what is the actual bone of contention here between them? We should get our story straight, don't you think?” Arnie said.
Morty said, “They don't get along because . . . because . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Because Vic planted a story in the press that they want to drop the radio show and do movies! I'll call Winchell now and downplay it, tell him what Vic said to him wasn't really true. Nah, better yet. I'll fly to New York, wine and dine him at Le Pavillon.”
The next day in the Sun there was a story with the headline “WILD WAR III.” It was about Fountain and Bliss. Our stooge—he played saxophone in Billy Ross's band—had done his work, not just in Chicago but also Kansas City, St. Louis, and Minneapolis, all the places where we were headed next.
So for a day we let these murmurs of war simmer about, and then Morty talked to all the people the stooge had planted the stories with and told them that the story was false, that it was just rumors and that the boys were best friends and got along fine. A Herald-American reporter got Vic at the hotel and Vic scoffed at all the reports of fighting, which, don't forget, he had never even heard of because he didn't read the news. He told the reporter, “Ziggy's gonna be godfather to my kid when he's born.” (Morty told him to tell that to everyone.) “And when will that be, Mr. Fountain?” the reporter asked him. “Gee, uh . . . Morty Geist'll call you back with that info,” Vic said.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Now, Teddy, I knew what I had to do when Vic found out that Ziggy wasn't going on at the Thalia. I had to tell Vic that Zig was very, very upset and hurt emotionally that he—Vic—had made these statements to Winchell. I had to make Vic fully understand why and how much he'd hurt Ziggy, and I had to remind him that this was a team. It was all about the team. We work together, we move together, we're like a three-headed hydrant [sic] here, and we live and breathe and joke as one. Then I had to sit Ziggy down with Vic and we had to air everything out and come to an understanding. This is what I knew I had to do and therefore this is exactly what I did not do.
“Why'd Zig cancel tonight, Latch?” Vic asked me. He called me in my room at the Blackstone [Hotel], from where I do not know.
“He's got a cold, I think it is,” I said.
DANNY McGLUE: It took a few days to get all the steam coming out of Ziggy's ears to settle down. Sally and I had to baby-sit him. In the hotel, at restaurants, backstage. He'd rant for twenty minutes, pout and sulk and stare at the wall for an hour. He'd snap out of it, grab the phone, and call Millie Roth in New York and have flowers sent to Janie's apartment or he'd call Jane sometimes and they'd talk baby talk to each other for a few minutes . . . or maybe it was just him baby talking to her. One thing he'd do was pace around like he was an expectant father. He'd walk around and around and say, “I got to get back at him. Vic can't do this, he can't do this.” Sally would say to him, “He didn't do anything in the first place! You've got nothing to get back at him for.” And Ziggy would say, “That's beside the point, Sal.”
In St. Louis, Ziggy returned fire. He did a walk-on on a local radio show on KMOX. Didn't tell anybody he was doing it, not me or Sally or Arnie. I wouldn't have known about it except it got some ink in the papers. Morty Geist went berserk—I thought he was going to have a stroke. By this time, Morty had spread it around that the rumor he'd originally spread around about there being rumors about Fountain and Bliss being at war was just a rumor. So now here's Ziggy on the radio and he's saying that the rumors were all true. The announcer talking to him says, “Wait . . . which rumors? The rumor that you don't get along with Vic or the rumor that you do?” And Ziggy said, “Yeah! Those!”
Mickey Knott sees this in the newspapers and goes to Vic, and this is really the first wind that Vic had gotten of all this mishegoss.
MICKEY KNOTT: I say to Vic in his room, “Buddy, did you read this stuff that Ziggy's saying about you?” And he said to me, “What kinda stuff?” And for the fifth or sixth time I looked at this article and I said, “I can't really tell, man. It's confusing.” He grabbed the paper from me and read it a few times . . . each time he read it he tilted it a different way, hoping maybe that it'd make more sense that way.
“The nerve of that fuck!” he said.
“Yeah, I know,” I told him. “But what exactly is he saying?”
“All kinds of things, Mick! He says that I thought it was unprofessional that he didn't go on when he had a cold!”
“But didn't you think it was?” I asked him.
“But it turns out he never had a cold! He even says that here. I would've thought it was unprofessional if he said he had a cold and he didn't have one, but I didn't know that till now. He says there was a rumor that I had someone plant rumors that he'd told the press that I planted a rumor about us not getting along. And he says it isn't true what Winchell printed about it not being true. I got no idea what Winchell printed, Mick! So how don't I know that it isn't not true?”
“Talk to Ziggy. I can't keep track of this stuff.”
“Nah, you know what? You go into Latch's room and tell him I ain't going on tonight! I got a cold suddenly.”
So we didn't play that night in St. Loo.
MILLIE ROTH: Shep Lane had to fly to St. Louis to talk to Ziggy because Jane White had gone to a car dealership in Manhattan to test-drive a Buick. It was in the Post and the Globe. She inadvertently, so she said, drove the car home from the dealership rather than around the block. Shep had given the car salesman $500 to hush him up—and he returned the car, which Jane swore to God she'd only taken home by accident—but the real problem was that she did not have a license yet. She'd driven the car onto Fifty-seventh Street and right into a doorway, not too far from the Russian Tea Room. So the police only took her in for that.
DANNY McGLUE: There was another incident in Detroit. They opened a movie at a large theater there and they got a scathing review in the paper. It said that Vic's singing was like a sleeping pill and that Ziggy's antics were juvenile. “Ziggy Bliss manages to offend everybody and is not even funny when he does so,” the man wrote. It admitted that the two of them did have good chemistry but that two chemicals when mixed together right could create a toxic odor. The reviewer had recently seen Phil Silvers and Jimmy Durante and said that Fountain and Bliss were rank amateurs in comparison.
Ziggy came onstage and read the review aloud. Vic didn't even open up with a few songs, it began with Ziggy and the paper. Ziggy began this long shpritz against the press . . . he called the writer a coward who hid behind his typewriter. He said that two thousand people had been rolling in the aisles the night before but obviously one idiot was too stupid or too self-important to know how to laugh. I was watching this . . . I thought it was going to end any second—I kept thinking it would—and it didn't. Ziggy said that any person who questioned Vic's singing talent had to be stone-cold deaf. Then Vic started in and urged the people in the audience that night to write the editor of this paper and demand that the reviewer be fired. “This guy is a rodent, this guy is a rat, and you know what you do with rats? You kill 'em,” Vic said. “But this is America and so you can't just kill a guy.” If the newspaper got two thousand letters maybe that would do it, Vic said. Then the both of them went offstage and they showed the movie, which I believe was On the Town.
I don't think anybody sent a letter. Because you had two thousand people-leaving the theater that night who thought Fountain and Bliss were even less funny than the reviewer had said.
ERNIE BEASLEY: I became Vic's confidant on the tour then. Before he began his nightly carousing after a show, he'd like to have a few drinks in the hotel bar. Some quiet time. He was lonely. Right around the time he got married, he'd met a lovely, vivacious southern gal named Ginger Bacon. She was a dancer at the Latin Quarter, had gorgeous blue eyes and strawberry blond hair and just the longest legs. He was crazy about her. So he was seeing her and he missed her terribly, and Hunny and Guy were his best pals but they were three thousand miles away. Guy was now managing the Hunny Pot, and Vic would call there and make prank calls. He'd put on an accent and say, “I've got Harry Truman and a party of twenty coming in . . . can you get a table ready in five minutes?” And Guy and Hunny'd scramble around, throw a few people out, and of course Harry Truman never showed up.
At the hotel bar, Vic told me he thought he was ready to record a few songs. He said, “When I do ‘The Hang of It’ and ‘Someone Such as You’ and ‘Moonlight in Vermont,’ you've seen what happens; they eat it up, man.”
I told him that when we made it to Los Angeles I could call a few people I knew and that he could call Murray Katz and maybe set something up.
“This comedy thing, sometimes it drags me down,” he said.
“You're great at it though,” I told him.
“Ah, you know, I ju
st hit my marks and let the little rhino take over.”
“You're one half of this show.”
“Who knows, maybe one day I'll get a show of my own and I'll be both halves of it.”
I said that it might not be legally possible for him to make a record if Ziggy somehow was not involved. He said, “What? I'm glued to this guy, Bease? And when the fuck did I ever care what some contract said?”
He asked me if I had some more songs and I told him that if he made a record he didn't have to use just my songs. He did marvelous versions of “Begin the Beguine” and “Always.” I told him the way he sang under or behind the music, the way he shaded the song beneath the beat, was really unique as was the way he got inside the lyric. “Oh yeah? I really do that?” he said. And I said, “Yeah, you do.” And then he said, “Hmmm, how about that. Maybe I'm a singer after all if I can really do all that shadin' stuff.”
He got back to the subject of comedy. He said he felt he didn't get the respect that Ziggy got. “I'm like that lion tamer guy Clyde Beatty and he's the lion. The guy with the whip gets no credit.”
“In the long run,” I told him, “everybody remembers Clyde Beatty and nobody cares about the lion.”
“Maybe so,” he said, draining his glass. “All right, baby, off into the jungle.” And then he went out on his nightly revel, gambling, womanizing, drinking, and who knows what else.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Vic and Ziggy were talking to each other onstage and also backstage but not elsewhere, on those rare occasions when their paths crossed. It's my fault, mea culpa all the way. So hang me for it, why don't you? I should've gotten them together as soon as the first turd hit the fan. I should've pooh-poohed all the negative positive publicity that Morty was spreading. But this publicity . . . it was working! We were playing towns we'd never been to, places that the radio show never aired in, and we were drawing hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of people. We killed them in Des Moines, absolutely killed them. Davenport, Iowa? Slew 'em. Council Bluffs? Assassinated. In Davenport, another man had a heart attack the first night and it was like an epidemic: the next night another guy has another one. It got into the papers too. Morty made sure of it. The way he spun things—he was the second coming of Arachne.
