by Ted Heller
“Well, I was just wondering if you knew what it was between Gus and them. But I guess you don't. See, Arn, when the boys wrapped the last picture on the deal, Gus was elated. He said, ‘I wash my hands of this now and forever finally! May I never sully myself again.’ I said to him, ‘Hey, what did you have against them anyway?’ He told me they were incorrigible, they were unprofessional, they were spiteful and childish and had not one jot of class.”
“Yeah, but Gussie knew that before he signed them.”
“I told him that. And then he said to me, ‘You wanna know why I'm on cloud nine? I'll tell you. No, better yet, have my chauffeur drive you out to Hollywood Memorial Park, that goyishe cemetery. Ask the groundskeeper there or whoever to lead you to Veda Lankford's grave. And when you find it, Howie, you can ask Veda Lankford why!’”
How about that, boy? Old Gussie bearing that grudge like Gunga Din totin' a bucket of slop on his shoulders and rubbing Ziggy and Vic's faces in it. He wanted these pictures to bomb, to die, but they never did. So instead he made millions. The man couldn't lose.
Slow dissolve. Hillcrest Country Club. I run into Gus Kahn years after Howard Leeds had imparted this dope to me. He was playing gin rummy with a bunch of alter kockers, guys in their nineties who'd made a fortune in motion pictures going back to the silent days. He looked like a kid among them. I asked him if it was true, what Howie had told me. Gus put his cards down and said, “You really think a man of my stature, wealth, and prominence could be so easily nettled by some blond tart? You think because some sleepy dago singer with blue hair lays this broad, I'm going to jeopardize the whole operation? Shame on you, Latchkey! Shame on you!”
Fortunately the other men at the table were deaf . . . one of them had one of those old-fashioned hearing aids, like a ram's horn. I shrugged and said good-bye to Gus. But as I was moving away, he winked at me. And that little wink said to me it was all true. He'd tried to sink the ship from the get-go.
• • •
SNUFFY DUBIN: Pete Conifer ran everything at the Oceanfront. From the size of the plugs in the sinks to the temperature in the pool. And he used to audition showgirls in his office. A girl would hop off a bus in Vegas, maybe she'd won a beauty contest in Amarillo or was a dancer at some nowhere shithole in Dubuque, right? She goes into Pete's office and Pete has her slip on the outfit, the short red skirt, the black stockings, the low-cut gold lamé top. He tells her to lift up her skirt a little, to bend over and jiggle, to arch her back. Meanwhile he's soaked his thumb in Wild Turkey and he's sucking on it like a two-year-old and with the other hand he's whacking himself off under the desk. Wanda, his wife, told me this—Jesus, that's how they met.
Pete had all sorts of passageways and cameras built into the hotel. “Peeping Pete” they called him. His “thing” was watching women go to the bathroom. He would go backstage, slip into a supply closet, and watch Judy Garland, Sophie Tucker, or Dinah Shore take a dump. He ran a gigantic hotel, the casino made millions, his wife was a lovely woman, and here he is standing on a carton of coat hangers in a dark closet, looking through a hole in the wall at Totie Fields or Martha Raye wiping herself. It makes no sense to me. I just know I never let Debbie use the bathrooms there.
Fountain and Bliss made the Oceanfront. Sure, Pete would get other headliners—Tony Bennett, Tony Martin, Durante, Vic Damone—but when Fountain and Bliss were there, the high rollers poured in. Vic loved the place, he loved the excitement and the action. After a show and before a show too he'd gamble, he loved the dice. And blackjack too. Maybe they were making seventy-five grand a week but Vic would gamble with ten grand a night and a lot of times he lost. I saw it happen. He's rolling the dice, he's got some floozy next to him, he's got a fistful of hundreds and a drink. And in an hour all he has is the floozy. Sure, he'd sign markers with the hotel and they would extend his credit. They played the Oceanfront so often because Vic had to; he wasn't making any bread there, he was mostly just paying the casino back.
“They tear up Frank's IOUs at the Sands,” Vic griped to me once. “Mine, they put up at the fuckin' post office.”
They had a two-week stint there once and the place was packed. Businessmen, doctors, teamsters, Texas oil cowpokes, Jews from Florida, people tossing money around like it's air. It was the last night of the engagement. I was appearing at the Golden Nugget, opening for Eddie Fisher. I was walking through the lobby at the Oceanfront and I hear a cat say, “Hey, you're Snuffy Dubin!” I see this guy, I don't know him from John Foster fucking Dulles. He tells me he's Seymour Greenstein from Echo Beach, Ziggy's old turf. He's there with his wife and other people from the neighborhood. He was in the notions business, he told me—he manufactured buttons and stuff. He asked me if I could tell Ziggy that he was there with old friends of his. “Tell Zig ol' Stinky is here,” he said. They weren't able to get tickets to the show, he told me.
So I go backstage and relayed the message and—Jesus, I just remembered it—Ziggy had about three vials of Benzedrine on his table. He nodded and said he'd take care of it. Sure enough, these six or seven people get the best seats in the house.
But you know what he did? In the middle of a Slow-Witted Cowboy sketch, he comes over to the table and starts goofing on this guy Stinky and his wife. It was funny at first but then it got serious—he started insulting button making and what the wife looked like. It got cruel. Vic came over and whispered something to him and then Ziggy let them alone. But the damage had been done.
Look, I've played every joint there is . . . and it's a law: You never insult your audience. Never. This is your cathedral, this is your flock. You lose the flock, you're dead. If Ziggy's insulting a guy who makes buttons here, then he's also insulting a nurse over there and a guy who makes thumbtacks up there and a teacher down here and so on. You're dead.
But Fountain and Bliss tore the roof off the joint that week. The two of them do an hour and a half and at the end of the set—this was par for the course—the lights go low and Ziggy steps front and center. He starts getting all choked up. The place is pitch black and all you see is his head hovering in the air, like fucking Tinkerbell dyed strawberry red. And he says the usual shpiel. First he apologizes if he's hurt anyone's feelings. He goes into this soppy thing and he thinks people are gonna start crying. Then he starts in about Vic: “This man here is my rock. This man is a giant, a Goliath, a leviathan. This man has saved my life. The Rock of Gibraltar is like a pebble compared to him. I'm nothing without this man.” I can't describe to you how quiet the place would get when he did this. You could hear stomach acid gurgling. “Men are embarrassed to show love,” he says. “We're embarrassed to talk about love. We hug our kids, we hug our wives, once in a while we tell them we love them. But I love this man. You cannot measure the love. There is no tool, there's no device, no measuring stick. Vic, you know how I feel. You know.” And then he'd go silent for a while, while he weighed it all over and felt the love. Or maybe he was feeling the broad with big tits he'd laid the night before. But he was feeling something. And then he'd end this silence by shouting, “Good night, everybody! Thanks for coming to the Oceanfront! You're a wonderful audience!” And the band would strike up some music, the lights come on, and Ziggy and Vic go their ways, which were usually separate because, despite that orgy, the two of them were barely speaking.
You know, a couple of times he did that and Vic wasn't even on the stage anymore.
That Reynolds cat who did security for them? And Andy Ravelli? Ziggy had given them photos of Dolly Phipps! The daffy broad he ran around the Catskills with two decades previous! The two of them were told to comb the crowd every single night to see if she'd shown up. You'd see them walking up and down the aisles, looking at the picture, looking at the faces.
Hey, if I was married to Jane White I might've done the same thing.
JANE WHITE: Ziggy and Vic were touring in Miami, New York, and London for a few weeks. Freddy and I had spent a week in New York—I had a wonderful time at Tiffany's and Van Cleef & Arpels�
��but then we had to go back to Los Angeles so Freddy could attend school. So I was alone for a while.
There were two rooms in the back of our house which were off-limits for me. Ziggy even had two jokey signs made up that actually said OFFLIMITS; they had that radioactive sign on it, the yellow-and-black emblem. Well, this was like Pandora's box to me—I couldn't resist it. With Freddy at school and with the house virtually to myself—Ruthie and the maid had the day off—I thought to myself, Well, it's my house too, gosh darn it. I called a locksmith and he got the doors open in such a manner that, when I closed them, Ziggy would not know they'd ever been opened.
One room was just a den, a study. There were boxes and boxes of reviews and articles about Fountain and Bliss, and also about Ziggy's parents. Every interview Ziggy had ever given, he had saved. Every interview Vic had given too. I was very meticulous as I combed through things—I didn't want him to know I'd been there. (I was good at it too, like I was a master thief!) There was a desk and a typewriter and over the desk on the wall was a framed photograph of Ziggy with his parents. It was very sweet except that his parents were just so Jewish-looking. It was unsettling. There was also a photo on the wall—it was gray and yellowed—of a thin woman with blond hair and big teeth. Maybe it was a cousin of his, I don't know.
The other room was large but sparsely designed. I only wish he would have let me furnish these rooms! (What I did for the rest of the house—I could have been one of the best interior decorators in California.) This one was a private screening room. When I opened the large metal cabinets, I saw hundreds of cans of film.
Well, I didn't know how to run a projector! I was a girl, after all. So I called my best friend, Joanie Pierce—she and I were on many charity committees together—and Joanie, who I knew would be able to run the projector, came over right away. Joan was [producer] Jimmy Pierce's wife; she grew up in Texas, was a complete tomboy, she told me. She loaded a reel and I turned off the light—oh, we were giggling just like a bunch of schoolgirls—and we watched the movie.
We couldn't believe it. I was aghast. I'd never seen anything like it. A very well-endowed woman was dancing and shaking her body parts . . . she was in a dentist's office . . . she was nude and was a nurse supposedly. “Gosh, I think I'm going to be sick, Joanie,” I said. Three young men, dressed as dentists—they were not dentists, you can take my word for it—walked in and began to kiss her all over. “Please,” I said, “turn it off.” But Joanie said, “Let's just watch this, Janie.” The dentists took their clothes off and before you know it they were on top of, underneath, and alongside this nurse. “I've had quite enough of this,” I said. “Well, I sure as hell haven't!” she responded.
We watched the whole thing together and eventually I got used to it and Joanie and I had a good laugh. She rewound it and placed the movie back in the cabinet and said to me, “Hey! Let's watch this one!” and she put another movie on. This one was about two policemen and a lonely housewife. It was amazing you could even fit this woman's chest on the screen! We watched this movie too and then a few others. By the time we finished, it was like we'd been to some film festival! We wound up just laughing and giggling and hugging each other and having a good old-fashioned time.
“Let's go shopping!” I said.
We went to nearly every fancy department store that day and I could hardly fit all the bags of clothing and jewelry in the car! I'd never bought so much in my life. Then Joanie came over again the next day and we watched more movies. I gave Ruthie and the help the day off again. Well, some of those movies could get you quite hot and bothered! I would look over to Joanie and sometimes she'd be fanning herself, and this was with the air conditioner on. In the four weeks that Ziggy was on the road, Joanie and I would watch those movies every day and after that we would go shopping.
GUY PUGLIA: When Vic come back from London, I was in New York with him, Ices Andy, Hunny, and some of the usual guys. Vic had kept his suite at the St. Regis and we'd end the night there. It was a nonstop party. The only thing that stopped it was when Vic had to go perform. He was appearing at the Copa at night with Ziggy and he was recording a new album in the morning. He wasn't using the Billy Ross band on the records anymore, he said he didn't like their sound. But when he had to let Billy go, he didn't have the balls to tell Billy—he had someone else do it. Anyways, Hunny had a bartender from the Hunny Pot in Vic's suite around the clock. And there were girls coming in and out, beautiful girls. And famous people would drop by, actors and actresses and lots of athletes. Sinatra and Jilly [Rizzo] showed up one day and as they were walking out, Gleason walked in. Mickey Mantle, he come in one day and there was a hundred people in there and Mickey, who'd never met Ziggy or Vic before, asked, “Hey, where's Ziggy Bliss?” And Vic said, “Who the fuck knows or cares, Mick?” People was always asking Vic, “Where's Ziggy?” For years. Lots of people thought they were really friends.
One night Lou the Ape was up there. Lou Manganese. It was maybe five in the morning. The week before, his father-in-law, Al Pompiere, was shot in the foot getting his shoes shined on Sullivan Street. Anyway, we're all hanging around and we're just rattling off stories, stories about broads and booze and stuff. And Vic had some great ones. He told us about this one actress—I ain't gonna tell you who it was—who wanted to do it with a dog in front of Vic. He'd tell us that this one liked to get tied up, that one liked to tie other people up, these two liked to tie each other up. Ices Andy was there and he couldn't believe some of the stories. Vic and Ziggy had recently put their prints outside Grauman's Chinese Theater—it was Vic's shoes and Ziggy's hair in the cement there—and a few nights after that, Vic brings a broad to the spot at four in the morning and stands where his footprints are and gives her the sausage parmigiana standing up.
So we're all shootin' the shit and we're laughing and acting like jerks and someone—I think it was Nick Vitale, who worked the door at the Copa—says to Vic, “Hey, wasn't you once a soda jerk?” and Vic says, “Best job I ever had.” And Vic laughs and slaps his knee and starts telling about how he used to do it to girls in Codport at the soda parlor. Then Nick says, “Hey, what about the guy—you laid his wife? He sold ices on the boardwalk? And paid you?” And Vic just froze up. And so did I 'cause I knew the fella who sold the ices was Joe Ravelli, Ices Andy's grandfather. Vic said, “Nah, that wasn't me. That wasn't me.” And Hunny said, “Yeah, it was, Vic. You once told me you banged Ices Andy's grandma and not to ever mention it to no one.” “What the hell are you talking about, you big fuckin' idiot?!” Vic snapped. “Well, that's what you told me, Vic,” Hunny said.
I looked at Andy and his face was a blank. No eyes, no mouth or color. Nothin'. You couldn't tell what was going on in there.
“This party's over, guys,” Vic said. “I'm gonna turn in.”
But nobody stood up.
“Izzat true, Vic?” Andy said.
“Nah. It ain't.”
“Come on. Izzat true?”
“Hey, Andy boy, you know Hunny. He's all stupid in the head. Ain't that right, Hunny? Too many left hooks, right?”
Hunny nodded.
Vic said, “Hunny don't know what's what, Andy. “
Andy said, “Hunny's too stupid to make things up.”
Hunny nodded again.
“Stand up, Vic,” Andy said.
Vic grabbed his crotch and said, “Right here, Ices . . . take a fuckin' walk.”
Andy walked to the couch Vic was lyin' on and grabbed him by the collar. He lifted Vic up off the couch and stood him up.
“Hunny, come on!” Vic said. He was trying to get Hunny to protect him. But Hunny had been drinkin' six hours straight. He wasn't gonna help.
“Hey! Gaetano, come on!” Vic said to me.
“I'm tired. Hunny, let's go.”
Me, Hunny, and Lou and a few others left the suite.
“Ain't that big kid Vic's bodyguard?” Lou said to me in the hallway.
I nodded.
“And his own bodyguard's beatin' hi
m up?”
I said, “Yeah, I guess he is.”
“Some hirin' practices he's got,” Lou said. “Dumb fuckin' Vic.”
But Ices Andy never hurt Vic. Never even hit him. Vic denied it, he lied his way out. And he doubled Andy's salary, which didn't hurt either.
REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV: Soon after Vic Fountain's fourth album—The Other Side of Vic —was released, I was summoned to Ziggy Bliss's rooms at the Biltmore Hotel. I would characterize his behavior that day as extremely agitated, although I would always characterize his behavior as that. The album was doing well and it was common knowledge that Ziggy was envious of his success. I recall now that Arnie and Sally were saying things like “Batten down the hatches” when the album hit the stores; they were accustomed to Ziggy's mood swings and tantrums and knew that they often corresponded with Vic's concomitant successes and failures.
“Cat, you and me go back a long ways,” Ziggy said to me at the Biltmore. It was a suite but was spartan at best, the walls were bare. One would never have surmised that the person who rented space here was a millionaire. “First time we met, remember that?”
“How could I forget?” I responded, probing my memory for the particulars of that occasion.
“You doin' okay, Cat? You like Hollywood? This kinda fast-paced life? Nuttin' bothering you?”
I informed him that these were the most content times of my life. He then asked me if I was “gettin' any” and I responded that, as I was now a member of the Fountain and Bliss entourage, I occasionally was.
“Look, you're in charge of security for this outfit,” Ziggy said. “And you do a great job. And part of that work is not only keepin' Fountain and Bliss safe and alive, but keepin' Fountain and Bliss together. Right?”
“Yes,” I responded, “that would seem of paramount importance to me.”
He made an obvious, unfunny movie-related pun on the word “paramount” and then continued: “I think Vic is thinkin' of goin' solo. I'm almost sure of it. And I want you to nose around. I want you to find out everything you can. Everything. I don't care what you have to do. You see a stone left unturned, you unturn it.”
