by Ted Heller
Well, it didn't end there. As everyone knows.
Cody Lee Jarrett was angry; he was humiliated, hurt, and furious. His motorcycle was parked right outside the studio and he hopped onto this beautiful red machine and sped away in the pouring rain. He made it to White Plains and kept going north. People say he was going over a hundred miles an hour. It was dark and very wet and he drove right into a lamppost in Mount Kisco. The papers couldn't run a picture of it, it was so gruesome, but the police photo did eventually leak out years later in a book called They Died With Their Leather On. Cody Jarrett's corpse, all in slick black, is laid out near a fence and his head, with no helmet, is about ten yards away, impaled on a fence.
What made it worse was that, after Jarrett had stormed off, to kill the minute that would've been taken up by the rest of the song, Ziggy and Vic said some really insulting things. They made fun of his voice and his outfit, his hair and his music. Now, they had no idea that Cody Lee Jarrett was going to die in thirty minutes. But when the world woke up the next day to find out about it, well, it just did not play well. Not at all.
Morty Geist issued a heartfelt apology for the boys. He looked over the Ten Standard Denials and Apologies but there wasn't anything in there that quite fit. “This one is a real humdinger, guys,” he said. So now there were eleven.
• • •
DOMINICK MANGIAPANE: I would go to Los Angeles once a year to see Lulu and Vicki and Vincent. To me, family is everything—there's nothing more important than your own blood. I would've given my arms and legs for those two kids. And they weren't even my own.
Vic would offer to pay my way to California, he'd offer to put me up at some fancy hotel. But I was making enough now, I didn't need his help. Besides, it wasn't even him offering—it was one of his “crowd.”
Fountain and Bliss were working on that lousy boxing picture when I was there once. I brought his kids to Knott's Berry Farm and to Disneyland. This gave Lu a chance to go shopping with Ziggy's wife and to visit Vic's mother, who had her psychic business going now on Santa Monica Boulevard. When I got home Vic was there with Ices Andy, Hunny Gannett, a few others. Now you gotta understand: I'd already been there three days and this was the first time Vic had been home. And he was acting very tenderly, like a father with the kids. But still: First time in three days, don't forget that.
I'd tried to bring up this subject with Lulu but she wouldn't answer none of my questions. The more she didn't talk the angrier I got. Vic didn't scare me, he never did. Even when he was a kid he'd have other people fight his battles for him. I can't tell you how many times Guy Puglia would go after another kid and Vic would just watch.
When I saw him pinching Vicki's cheek I felt my blood boiling. I didn't care that his buddies were there. I said to him, “Vic, you sure do love those kids, don't you?”
“They're everything to me, Dommy,” he said.
“I mean, I look at you now,” I said, “and it's like you ain't seen 'em for a week.”
He gave me a dirty look and said, “What do you know? Huh?”
“I know that these kids need a father and that you ain't ever there for 'em.”
Vic turned to Hunny and said, “Get a load of this fuckin' guy, Hun. A guy works on a dock for a living, he can tell me how to run my life.” Then he turned to me and said, “Go shuck an oyster, Dommy.”
Cursin' like that in front of his own kids.
I said to him, “Why? You'll be outta here soon and you won't be back for who knows how long!”
Vic said to Andy, “Throw this guy out on his ass, Ices.” (Andy's nonno sold ices to us kids when we was growing up, on the boardwalk.)
Andy was a big kid. Six foot three, very strong. Twenty years younger than me too. I didn't have a chance. He grabbed me by my collar and was draggin' me toward the front door. I was yelling at Vic. “You're the worst! You destroy my sister's life? I'll destroy yours! What kind of man are you, huh?!” Next thing I knew I was bouncing down Vic and Lulu's front lawn.
• • •
ARNIE LATCHKEY:A Couple of Lightweights has the distinction of being not only the worst Fountain and Bliss movie but also the worst boxing motion picture ever made. We should have had that movie done in four weeks. It took three months. There was always something going on, always someplace the boys had to be. Vic got Hunny a small part in the picture and for the life of him, Hunny couldn't remember a line. It drove George S. Collier up the wall . . . and this was the other side of the same wall that he'd already been driven up on the previous two pictures. There was one scene when Ziggy, who works as a janitor in a gymnasium and who eventually winds up winning a championship prizefight, asks Hunny a question. All Hunny had to do was say the word “yeah.” But it took about seventy takes, I exaggerate not. He either didn't know precisely when to say it, or he did know when to say it but couldn't remember precisely what to say.
Collier and [producer] Ezra Gorman took Vic aside and said to him, “Do we absolutely need Hunny in this movie?” and Vic said, “He's a pal of mine, so yeah, we do.” The more times Hunny flubbed his lines, the more Vic would crack up. Vic's entourage would crack up too. But everybody else there—and I include myself among their number—was getting fed up.
Ziggy would complain to me, “We could find a rock and it'd do better than Hunny!” What could I say? I side with him, I'm in Vic's bad graces. I defend Vic, I got Ziggy starin' daggers to my heart. He really had it in for Vic then . . . Vic had been named the number two vocalist in a Metronome and Downbeat poll and he was second in Billboard. “Let's Have Some Fun,” the tune he wrote with Ernie, went to number one and was on the Hit Parade for something like three centuries. Reporters were always asking Ziggy to his face, “Are you jealous? What do you think of Vic's success?” and Zig always had the same response: “Hey, I'm Vic's biggest fan.” But it was eating up his insides like that eagle peckin' at Prometheus's innards every day.
Lightweights got eviscerated. The L.A. Times disemboweled it. Justin Gilbert of the Mirror wrote that it was featherweight entertainment, and every other shmegegie with a pencil wrote that the movie scored no knockout. How imaginative, huh? But they were right. Intrusion [magazine] ran an article about Ginger and Vic and about Vic and girls in Vegas, and Morty denied everything a hundred times and threatened to sue. Ginger was humiliated. Vic didn't really give a damn. He told Reynolds Catledge to find out who was leaking all this stuff out. I told Cat to not waste his time: Nobody was leaking it, it was common knowledge. Millie Roth in New York told me she thought Ziggy had told Intrusion everything, but I don't know. Vic showed up all over town with Ginger on his arm, and when he was in Vegas putting together those double- and triple-decker heros of his, he probably did it with the door open. So Vic lowered the boom on Morty Geist big time. He threatened to fire him, called him all kinds of names. You ever see a grown man wilt to the size of an M & M? That's what this was like.
“It's my job to get you in the papers and magazines,” Morty said to him, “and now you've got it so it's my job to keep you out.”
“Hey, you don't even have a job anymore, Morty!” Vic said.
“So I'm fired, Vic? Is that it?” Morty's knees are knocking so hard the furniture is rattlin'.
“Nah,” Vic said.
Confidential and Intrusion had both mentioned that Joe Yung was running a one-man ferry service to Mexico, getting abortions for Vic's girlfriends. Well, this was news to me but it was the kind of news like you hear it's going to snow in February in Vermont. I wasn't terribly startled.
Gus Kahn gave me a brutal keelhauling in his office. The man yelled for an hour straight and he must have had some hidden oxygen tank hooked up to his lungs because he didn't stop one time to take a breath. And this while huffing on a Cohiba, no less! George S. Collier had lost a hand helming Lightweights and was suing the studio. “I don't blame him!” Gus screamed. “He's got an eye patch already and now he's got a hook for a hand! You're turnin' the man into a goddamn pirate!” I said I was sorry on
behalf of the boys. “Why don't they just kill the man all at once,” Gus yelled, “instead of this whittlin' him down to nothing?!”
Vic was showing up late [on the set]. He was sleeping late, he was golfing early, the hangovers—he had all the excuses. So Ziggy would get the crew all riled up . . . he was always manipulating. “Can you believe how unprofessional Vic is?” he'd ask the property master. “Have you ever worked with anyone this bad before?” he'd ask the script girl. And when Vic did show up, Ziggy's mood would change to rotten and surly just like that, because there went his excuse to stir up trouble. You didn't want to be within a mile of him. The worst days were when Vic showed up on time and acted professional! That really made Ziggy miserable.
At the time we had five more movies left on the contract.
“Hey, Latch,” Vic asked me one day, “is there any kind of escape clause in this thing?”
SALLY KLEIN: Several times I thought about quitting. Jack did very well for himself as a real-estate lawyer in Los Angeles, you can imagine. I had a son now. Donny. I even tried it once for a month . . . I took a leave of absence. We had a wonderful house in Malibu and I adored being around Donny. But after a few weeks, I missed it all. With Ziggy and Vic, you never knew what was going to happen. Every second a disaster might hit. On Anchors Oy Vey George Collier had to get a peg leg after Ziggy accidentally shot him with a prop cannon that turned out to not be a prop cannon, and the next day Vic destroyed a hotel room at the Oceanfront because Pete Conifer forget to paint the walls turquoise and have matching sheets and pillowcases and carpets.
When they began work on Anchors Jack and I invited both Ziggy and Vic, their wives, and kids over for a big dinner. Arnie and Estelle were in Paris on vacation at the time, and we invited Danny and Betsy but Danny told me he had personal business and couldn't come.
Vic showed up without Lulu, but Hunny and Ernie Beasley came. Ziggy was with Jane and little Freddy. I tried to get Donny to play with Freddy but they didn't really get along. Freddy was always lonely and shy, even then.
We were eating dinner and I tried everything to get conversation going, talking about politics, and Jack was talking about football and the track and we talked about celebrities and the old days in New York. Vic and Ziggy had recently crashed Fritz Devane's TV show, which was live, and Devane was absolutely outraged. It was in the middle of a sketch and after thirty seconds the whole thing was ruined. We laughed about that. Vic started talking to me and Jack about singing “Ain't She Sweet” with this trio or quartet back in Boston, and then Ziggy was talking to me about some of the places he played with Harry and Flo in the Catskills.
Ted, we were at that dinner table for close to three hours and there wasn't one second when somebody wasn't talking.
Jack and I were cleaning up after everyone had left, and Jack said to me, “Honey, did you notice something weird about Ziggy and Vic tonight? They didn't say one single word to each other, not the entire night.”
He was right. They had not directly spoken to each other.
An hour later Jack and I were settling into bed and he told me he didn't feel too well. Now, when a man who's had three heart attacks tells you this, you take notice. Ten minutes later he tells me he's having chest pains, so we get into the car and I'm racing toward Cedars of Lebanon. I checked him in and, yes, he was having a mild heart attack.
I was walking around the hospital, just going from hallway to hallway, floor to floor, I was in a daze. And who do I run into? Danny! He saw me and he figured it out instantly—he said right away, “Is Jack okay?”
“It's a mild one, Danny, this time,” I said. “He'll live.”
“Should I go in and say hello?”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
We sat down in a lounge, like a waiting area.
“Why are you here?” I asked him.
“It's Betsy,” he told me.
“Is she okay?”
“Yes. No. Well . . . God, I don't know.” He rubbed his face with his hands.
“What is it, dahlink?” I asked him, trying anything to help.
“She starts drinking before lunch now,” he said. “She's drunk almost every day.” He had to put her in the hospital for a week, to dry out. “She gets crazy sometimes,” he said.
I put my arm around him, I held his hand. He was crying and then I started crying too.
A nurse walked by. “She probably thinks we're brother and sister,” Danny said.
“Oh, who cares what anyone thinks?” I said.
After a few minutes we both stood up and went our separate ways. I must tell you . . . it felt good to hold his hand again. Even in a hospital, even with everything going on. It felt good.
GUY PUGLIA: Hunny stopped fighting around '56. He was about forty years old then. Nobody knew how many fights he'd won or lost, even he didn't have any idea. “I probably couldn't count that high anyways,” he said to me once. Jesus, you know what they called him? Jack Dempsey they once called “the Manassas Mauler.” Hunny they called “the Molasses Mauler.”
He thought about retiring a few times. But Vic always goaded him into fighting again. “Come on, Hun, one more shot,” he'd say. “You still got it, champ.”
The last fight was against Willie Ray Dixon, this colored guy out of Mississippi. Me, Ices Andy, and Vic was in the training room with Hun before the fight. He was sweating up a storm. Davey Rennick was his trainer and he had a cut man too, this guy named Jimmy “O Positive” Dobbs, not 'cause of the blood type but because he was always so optimistic. But this Dobbs guy takes me aside—he knew me and Hunny was close pals—and he says to me, “If Dixon opens up a cut on Hunny's face, it's all over. His head's a balloon but with blood and not air.” And Rennick was telling Hunny his only hope was to get to Dixon early, very early. If the fight went more than one round, it was all over. “It's already all over, it seems,” Hunny said while Davey was greasing him down.
“You sure you wanna fight, Hun?” I asked him. “If you don't wanna fight, you just don't fight, okay?”
“I ain't no quitter,” he said to me.
I looked at him. He didn't have no muscle tone left. He had a roll of flab around his stomach and his thighs were like cheese. His chin practically had a fuckin' bulls-eye target on it.
“Vic, tell Hunny he don't have to fight if he ain't up for it,” I said, and Vic said to him, “Hunny, you wanna fight?” Hunny didn't answer, and Vic said, “He wants to fight.”
“Get him early, Hun, get him early,” Davey told him.
The fight didn't even last a half a round. Hunny took one wild swing at Dixon and missed by a mile. Hunny lost his balance . . . he was reelin' around just from the punch he threw. Dixon stood there and watched. In Hunny's corner, O Positive was like O Negative now 'cause he was putting away his equipment, and Davey threw in the towel. Hunny went into the ropes, knocked his head against the ballast and went down. The referee counted him out.
“Was that fight fixed?” Vic asked me on the way back to the Beverly Wilshire. Joe Yung was driving us in Vic's new T-bird.
“I think if the fight was fixed,” I said, “Hunny would've done a better job in losing.”
We pulled up to the hotel. I said, “I'm kinda worried about Hunny. He ain't all there. Sometimes he don't even know what day it is.” Vic said, “Hey, you think I do?” “Nah, I'm serious,” I told him, “We gotta convince him to hang up the gloves.”
He was out of the car now, bending over and talking to me in the car.
“Awright, listen,” he said, “this is what we gotta do . . . “
“Yeah?”
“I got this girl in trouble. But Joe Yung can't take her to Mexico, he's doin' other stuff for me. So can you take her instead?”
• • •
ARNIE LATCHKEY: When Howard Leeds moved from Galaxy to Universal he and I went to lunch . . . we went to Guy's restaurant. This was after Fountain and Bliss had broken up. Now, Gus Kahn and Howie did not have a gentle parting of the ways, you can take my word o
n it, unless you consider Gussie threatening to have Howie castrated and have his balls fed to him on a piece of melba toast gentle. So what Howie told me that day I maybe take with a grain of salt.
“Did Gus ever have a falling out with Ziggy and Vic?” Howie asked me.
I thought about it. Ziggy and Vic may have loathed the sight of each other at times but they did usually get along with most other people, including Gus Kahn, who couldn't get along with Mary's little lamb.
“No, I don't think so. Ziggy entertained Gus's kids at their birthdays. So did Vic. Everything was glatt kosher.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yeah. Sure. I think so. Why?”
“Gus had it in for them, Arnie. He did from day one.”
“We're talking about Fountain and Bliss here, Howie?”
“We sure are.”
“They never lost a dime for Gus. It didn't matter how bad those films were, they always made dough.”
I wracked my brain . . . I thought back to our first meeting, at the racetrack. Gus bought the horse, the roan colt, then had it destroyed. All had gone well, it seemed. I thought of subsequent dealings. Nothing seemed off-kilter.
“He told me when we signed you guys,” Howie said, “he was going to put them in the worst movies he could. It's only some kind of luck or happenstance or whatever that the Fountain and Bliss movies all made money.”
“I am not believing what I'm hearing, Howie. You're saying Gus purposely shot himself in the foot? And missed?”
“You know that script that Sid Stone and Norman White wrote? Three of a Kind? Why do you think Gus always passed on it and gave them dreck like A Couple of Lightweights and those terrible service comedies they did? You think Gus thought Gung Ha! and Two Goofballs were going to be good movies?”
“I'm stunned at what you're telling me here, Howie. I mean, I'm taken aback here. I'm stupefied. You name it and I'm it.”
