by Ted Heller
My first assignment I shall never forget. I went to Shepherd Lane's office, in the Fairfax area. He handed me a suitcase. He instructed me to bring the suitcase—there was $3,000 inside—to the Broadway, a department store. I was to hand the money to a Mr. Ronald Morganthau and say it was for Jane White.
“May I ask what this money is for?” I inquired of Mr. Lane.
“Yes, you may,” Mr. Lane good-naturedly responded. “And the answer is, that woman is a serious loony bird.”
ERNIE BEASLEY: Vic's first album went gold. Did you know that in Los Angeles, every copy within forty miles was sold the very first day it was available?! Vic was always saying that he now had enough cachet to go solo, although he didn't use the word “cachet.” He, Ginger, and I would hang out a few times a week. We got blitzed often. Joe Yung really took good care of him—he made the best martinis I've ever had—and he shaved Vic, drove him around, dressed him. Clotilde Sturdivandt was still giving Vic his couth training but it was like trying to teach a dead puppy how to sit, stay, and come. “That man will be the very death of me!” she said to me once at the Beverly Wilshire. She told me some of the actors and actresses she'd worked with—it was quite a roster—and she'd done a great job with them. Her first case, she told me, was Cary Grant, right before he made that movie with Mae West. I told her that, yes, Vic was going to be a very tough nut to crack, and she trilled, “Mr. Beasley, I am not a squirrel!”
Hal Gordon, Bobby Bishop, and Billy Ross agreed that Vic's second LP should be more of an up-tempo affair. “The first one was a glass of warm brandy,” Hal said, “but we should serve up some Irish coffee now, heavy on the java.” When he said that I sat down at the piano and wrote “The Java Jump,” which really took off when Vic released it as a single. “You got me jumpin', bubblin' like lava, you're like twenty cups of hot black java.” “Let's Have Some Fun,” which was on Swingin' With Vic and did very well, I also wrote. Vic's voice, I'm afraid to say, wasn't really in fine fettle during these sessions: Ginger, he, and I—and sometimes Hunny and Ices Andy [Andy Ravelli]—would be up all hours of the evening the night before. Sometimes the nights bled into the morning . . . we'd leave Johnny D'Antibes's club at six, go have breakfast at some roadside diner, and then turn up at the Pacific studios.
It wasn't easy on Billy or Hal. Because of Vic's filming schedule and because Pacific had other artists to record, they wanted to record this album quickly. But sometimes Vic was in such bad shape that they'd just have to wait for him to freshen up. Vic never thought he wasn't able to sing, though, and he insisted on getting it right—or wrong, as was the case—in one take. So there are three or four songs on that LP that sound absolutely awful. Vic had gravel in his throat—that's what it sounds like. Someone said to me they ought to call the thing Snorin' With Vic.
That bald trombonist named Cueball was in the studio again, and he and Vic exchanged some banter. But one day there was an unfortunate incident. To record this album Billy and Hal had to bring in extra musicians again, hence Cueball. But now Floyd Lomax was sitting in.
Vic was halfway through “Makin' Whoopee” when he noticed Floyd Lomax's presence. He was using that gravel in his voice as best he could, trying to make it sizzle, when suddenly his voice went from very deep to the Vienna Boys Choir. He pushed away the microphone and charged out and didn't return that day. He called Hal Gordon and told him that he would not record the rest of the record until the extra musicians were let go. So they were, right on the spot. Cueball said to Billy Ross, “There's got to be some kind of mistake—Vic wouldn't fire me.” But he was told to leave.
Hal Gordon told me several years later that Floyd Lomax, while he was packing up his horn, told him that he had a score to settle with Vic Fountain. “I thought he was talking about a musical score,” Hal said, “but then I noticed a gun with a pearl handle in his case.”
There's another aspect to this which I should mention. Vic formed a music publishing company and had convinced me that I should share credits for all my songs that he recorded. I was bombed and I agreed to it. I agreed to lots of things when I was bombed and I was bombed a lot of the time. This decision, if you could call it that—is it a “decision” if a drunk driver runs over three people?—has cost me so much money. But it's not the money, it's the prestige. Vic never wrote a note of music in his life—he never wrote a lyric. He wouldn't even have been able to come up with the simple java/lava rhyme! He could barely sing the songs on certain occasions. Yet here his name was now alongside mine. It's almost a joke, isn't it, but it is just too damned sad.
BARBARA NORDQUIST [actress, stripper]: I first met Ziggy at the Velvet Rabbit in L.A. in maybe '54 or '55. I performed under the name Soozie Svenson, “The Swivelin' Swede.” I did three shows a night there and would work in San Francisco too.
I guess you could say I had everything that Ziggy wanted. I was a 36D, a blonde, and I had a nice round can. I could've used a few more inches in the legs—I'm only five three—but believe me, I could do things with my chest that spun men's heads.
I used to do movies for a guy named Emmett Strang around San Diego. We filmed in an old airplane hangar. It started off with me just stripping for the camera. There was no sound; believe me, nobody watching these things cared about sound. They were 16-millimeter films. I'd shake and shimmy and take my clothing off. I'd put on all kinds of getups . . . I'd dress as Cleopatra or a Swedish nurse or a French maid and I'd get fifty bucks. After I did a few of these, he brought in another girl one day and it was the two of us stripping and shimmying. “Kiss her, kiss her!” Emmett would say. “How much do I get for that?” I'd say while the camera was rolling, and he'd say, “Seventy-five bucks.” One day I dressed like a nurse and did my routine . . . I thought that was it but then Emmett said he had another movie to make. In walked this blond guy, a kid about eighteen years old, he went to UCLA. This kid was built, let me tell you—the spitting image of Buster Crabbe when he was young. Emmett started filming and a minute later this kid is kissing me, licking my ears, and he's got his hands all over me. “Just do it, just do it,” Emmett said. “Touch the damn thing!” “How much for this?” I asked back—all this while the camera was filming! Emmett said he'd give me two hundred. Before I knew it this college kid was making love to me with his cock between my tits and a minute later there was a quart of sperm all over my neck. I got my two hundred and Buster Crabbe Jr. got twenty.
Snuffy introduced me to Ziggy. Snuffy wasn't playing the Velvet Rabbit-—they didn't use comics, they just brought the girls out. But Snuffy knew me 'cause I'd worked the Colony Club. He and Ziggy were in the audience and after the show the two of them came backstage. Snuffy was a gentleman, he never hit on any of the girls. You wouldn't believe some of the comics I'd worked with, you've never seen men so horny. Maybe there's a lot of pressure to be funny—maybe when you bomb onstage it gets to you, and all the tension builds up down there. The girls were always with the comics, the musicians too. Chuckie Williams, the impressionist, would get made love to orally every night, sometimes as John Wayne, sometimes as Gary Cooper.
Anyway, Ziggy told me he'd seen my work and I thought he meant me stripping. But he said he'd seen me in movies and liked my acting. “Acting?” Snuffy said. “Is that what they call it?” Ziggy said to him, “You think what Soozie does is easy?” Ziggy told me that Fountain and Bliss were about to begin work on a boxing movie and could use a girl like me, to play a moll. He said I should visit him at the Biltmore, where he had an office, and we could look at the script. I asked him what day should I be there, and he said he meant I should visit him right now.
We became lovers that night. I must say, it was painful at first but also wonderful. He wasn't very romantic . . . it was just right down to business. He really liked to bury his head in my chest—a lot of men did—but he was the only one who seemed to want to be dead and buried there.
I was in A Couple of Lightweights for maybe two minutes. I didn't have any speaking lines. I don't think I ever said a w
ord in any movie I ever made and I must've made a hundred of them. But Ziggy took care of me, he always took good care of me.
He had lots of my movies . . . he had many others too, believe me. He had two rooms at the Biltmore and one of them had a projector and a screen. He told me there were more movies at his house. Ziggy and I would watch the movies and he would get very excited. I didn't get that excited, to tell the truth. He'd turn off the projector eventually and we would move to the couch to make love. He was enormous, he was gigantic in his pants. I had to slather him in Crisco vegetable shortening—the Crisco had to be prewar, when it still came in tins. He liked me to get on top of him and shake, but the thing he liked most was to kiss my chest and nipples and make love to himself. He sounded like a pony when he was doing that, like a young horse whinnying. He'd finish up and three minutes later I was walking out the door. He always had a chauffeur drive me home. He was a gentleman in some respects. He also bought me a Buick Roadmaster.
We were together for maybe seven months. He wanted me to stop doing the movies. He said he'd have Emmett Strang taken in. But he decided to pay him off instead. So he wrote out a check for $10,000 and when I handed it to Emmett I told him I wasn't doing any more movies. Emmett gave me a thousand from Ziggy's ten and I made four more movies for him.
One day a man named Reynolds came to my house. He looked to me like a Bible salesman when I opened the door, but he wasn't.
He told me that I was not to see or talk to or communicate with Ziggy Bliss ever again. He told me that if it ever made it into the papers that I was involved with Ziggy Bliss, it would destroy me. I was thinking: I'm a stripper, I shimmy my bust for men beating off under the table, I do these movies they show at bachelor parties—what can possibly destroy me? He gave me five grand in cash. Well, this was nothing compared to everything that Ziggy had given me, but I got the message. He then told me that, in the course of his work, he'd seen some of my work and had admired and respected it. “You're very good at what you do, Miss Svenson,” he said to me. Ha! I knew what that meant, so I closed the door on him before he tried anything. I mean, I'd just woken up, for Jesus' sake!
I figured the guy was on the level. Maybe some reporter had gotten wind that Ziggy and I were lovers and this Reynolds guy was paying me to get lost. I didn't want to end Ziggy's marriage. But then through the grapevine—all the girls at the clubs talked—I found out that Ziggy was seeing Honey Graham, a big busty girl who worked at the Diamond Mine in San Francisco. This was Ziggy's way of ditching me.
Believe me, I wasn't heartbroken. I kept all the dough and the Buick Roadmaster and the jewels and I threw out the three tins of Crisco.
SNUFFY DUBIN: It used to kill Vic that Ziggy had this reputation as a lady-killer. Christ, it'd kill me too! The guy was a medicine ball, sure, but he was a medicine ball with a firehose attached. The showgirls in Vegas, they all knew about it. That piece-of-crap boxing film they did? Ever wonder why Vic's boxing trunks only go down halfway to his knees, but Ziggy's go almost to the ankle? They were covering up a lot more than just his flabby knees.
I was playing in Vegas, at the Gray Grotto on the Strip. When my show was done I'd go over to the Oceanfront and catch their act. They were a little tired from everything—the movies, Vic's records, the whoring around, flying to New York, Cuba, and Florida—so I'd seen them better. After one show—Jesus, it's maybe three in the morning—me, Ziggy, and Hun are hangin' at the bar and we decide we wanna goof on Vic. Hunny told us he was with two showgirls—the old double-decker—and he gave us the room number. Ziggy goes to the guy working the desk and he gets the key. Why? How can he just do that? 'Cause he's one half of Fountain and Bliss and they're bringing in millions of bucks.
Me and Ziggy go to the room and barge in with two fire extinguishers we swiped from the hallway. Me and Ziggy were soaring on amphetamines. So we burst in and we run to the bedroom and I see one female body and then another, all these legs and arms and feet and bosoms. Then I can discern another broad . . . it's kind of like picking out letters in a bowl of alphabet soup or something, right? Then I notice there's a fifth breast and I figure this is either Ripley's Believe It or Not or Vic's got three broads in the sack. Me and Ziggy are just too stunned to start spraying them all. Somewhere underneath all that pile was Vic, I'm pretty sure of it.
Pete Conifer told me that Vic was now up to triple-deckers. Look, one is enough. Two is really pushing it. But three? If you ask me, Vic was so pissed off that Ziggy had this rhino dong reputation, he was now taking on three at a time.
DANNY McGLUE: When I got the script for A Couple of Lightweights there was nothing I could do with it. They were asking me to raise Lazarus from the dead, but I don't think this Lazarus had ever been alive. The first two Fountain and Bliss movies were profitable; they made about seven million each and maybe cost a tenth that to make. Somewhere under a leaning tower of dusty paper was the script that was perfect for them: The Three of Us, the Noël Coward Design for Living knockoff. But Gus Kahn wouldn't look at it again.
While Lightweights was being shot, Fountain and Bliss signed for the Johnson Wax Star Parade show for [the] Dumont [Network]. Len Coles hosted this show twice a month, and every two weeks they brought in Ziggy and Vic to host. It was done live in New York City. So Sid, Norman, and I and a few other gag writers would concoct a show, then Ziggy and Vic would fly east to put the thing on.
We wrote skits for all the usual Fountain and Bliss characters. Dr. Kablooie, Professor Gobbledygook, the Cockney Barber, the Slow-Witted Cowboy. There would be guests too, usually musicians and singers and dancers. Tony Martin, Julie Mansell, Nat Cole, Julie London, Cyd Charisse, Dinah Washington, Miss Leslie Wilson, when she was only sixteen years old. People like that. But we had a problem: Ziggy and Vic could rarely get any rehearsals in. They were filming the movie, they were playing Vegas. They had their personal lives. By the time they came to New York there was barely any time. Not that Vic would rehearse anyway. He went from one rehearsal per show to just reading things fresh off the TelePrompTer. He did that better than anyone; unless you caught him squinting, you wouldn't have known he was doing it.
Ed Kapler was our director. He and the writers would work and work and we'd get the skits and everything into place, razor sharp. But when Ziggy saw the script he'd have a fit! He'd yell how lousy the material was. “You're gonna crucify me on live TV!” Now, this was bad enough . . . but we were doing the show in two days. So back to the drawing board we'd go.
Ziggy was very cruel. Writers would get called at four in the morning to get bawled out, they'd get fired by a note slipped under their doors, or Ziggy would actually go to their buildings and tell their doormen to tell them they'd been let go. One poor guy had turned in very poor material and Ziggy decided they would use it, just to embarrass him on national TV. Well, not only was the guy humiliated and forced to quit, but this skit made Vic look very bad too.
With all this craziness, the show initially had great ratings.
You know, any time anything they were doing got them in trouble, they could just toss out the script. That was the incredible talent they had. Ziggy could just wing it and Vic could play along. Sometimes, though, Vic didn't realize that Ziggy was ad-libbing and Vic would still be reading off the TelePrompTer. When that happened Vic and Ziggy would engage in the nastiest fighting after the show was done. They'd be in Vic's dressing room and they'd be yelling at the top of their lungs. “You do that to me again, I'll fuckin' kill ya!” Vic would yell. And Ziggy would yell right back at him, “You're lost up there! You're an embarrassment!” The crew would go silent . . . we would just listen to them going at it. “I don't need you, Ziggy! I could make twice as much doing half the work!” And Ziggy yelled back at him, “You're not doing any work! How do you divide zero in half?!”
They did this show for four seasons. By the third season the ratings began to fade. Of course, their movies still did well. No Fountain and Bliss movie ever lost a quarter, did you know that? And no Fountain
and Bliss movie ever was any good, you could add that to the equation.
In the third season, Arnie thought we should aim for a younger crowd. We put on, finally, a rock 'n' roll act—Cody Lee Jarrett and the Magnificats. Their big hit was “(Let's Make) The Rubble Bounce.” Jarrett was maybe nineteen years old, very handsome. Vic was dead set against having any rock 'n' and roller on the show—he hated the music. Detested it. “It just ain't music,” Vic would say. But Arnie, the Dumont people, and [ producer] Artie Conway prevailed.
Ziggy and Vic did a skit, they brought out a ventriloquist, did a Louie Kablooie routine. After another sketch, which Vic pretty much sleepwalked through, they brought on Cody and the Magnificats. Ziggy did the intro and Vic kept purposely yawning and sneering. The group came on, did their “Rubble” song, and it went over well. When it went back to Ziggy and Vic, Vic was curled up on the floor pretending to be asleep. Backstage, Cody told Artie Conway he was insulted. “I'd never do that to him, he shouldn't do it to me,” he said. Artie said what any producer would say: “It's their show, kid. Sorry.”
Twenty minutes later Ziggy and Vic bring out the group again, and Cody did a slower, softer song, very twangy and sultry. While he was singing this, behind him and the Magnificats, were Ziggy and Vic dancing close to each other! And the group didn't realize it. Toward the end—when he heard laughter—Cody Lee turned around and caught them. Then he slammed down his guitar and stormed off the stage, on live TV. Much to the delight of Fountain and Bliss.
