by Ted Heller
“I understand.”
“See, if he leaves Fountain and Bliss, there ain't no more act. And if there ain't no more act, there ain't no more me. Or you. I'm tryin' to avoid full-scale obliteration.”
He told me that I should “bug” Vic's various domiciles, his house in Beverly Hills, his suites at the Beverly Wilshire and the Ambassador, and so on, his table at Guy's Seafood Joint, his room at the Oceanfront in Las Vegas, even his mother's fortune-telling business in Santa Monica. He wanted all the dope, he said.
I told him I would get right on it. He told me that this was authorized—he pronounced it “arthurized”—by Arnold and Sally, but that I should under no circumstances ever mention this to them, which I construed to mean that it was in fact not authorized by them.
I contacted various individuals in the small private detective community in Los Angeles. I did not reveal the name of the “client.” After several days of research I settled on a man named Casper Nuñez, whose offices were in Culver City. Using an assortment of guises, a variety of clever tactics, and a plethora of cash that Ziggy had entrusted me with, we were able to gain access to the various locations. However, we were told now not to place a bug in Vic's house, Ziggy instructed me, because “he ain't never there for the most part ever,” as Ziggy put it.
The results were as disappointing as they were entertaining. Casper Nuñez and I spent hours listening to the tapes. Some of the material was indecipherable: The technology was crude then and Vic often was inebriated and enjoying the company of several giggling women. In addition, he would have drinking parties with friends and acquaintances of his; at these gatherings, the men present would often explode in uncontrollable laughter—Vic would merely have to crack some sort of jest and the individuals present would burst into paroxysmal hysterics. As so often happens with a group of men acting childishly, the first hour of these sessions usually entailed Vic and his cohorts recapping the ribald events of their previous gathering, and this proved a labor for me to listen to as I'd already listened to the actual events themselves.
I remember that Vic watched a lot of television—he was a baseball fan—and was quite partial to Lenny Pearl's show. When I informed Ziggy of this fact, it was as if I'd told him I'd discovered an act of the highest treason. “Aha!” he shouted. “That traitor! Vic Quisling he is!” Unlike myself and Casper Nuñez, Ziggy had no interest in the various dalliances of his partner; he was much more concerned with Vic's business dealings. But, as Mr. Shepherd Lane and Arnold Latchkey were in charge of Vic's business affairs—as well as Ziggy's own—there really was nothing to listen to other than Mr. Lane telling Vic how much money was coming in. Vic owed an enormous amount of money to casinos and bookmakers in Las Vegas and California, I learned.
It was while listening to these tapes that Ziggy found out that Vic had to occasionally dye his hair a dark shade of blue, due to the recent onset of a slight salt-and-pepper effect in his hair. Too vain ever to be caught buying this dye, Vic would send someone else to effect the purchase. That someone was occasionally myself. Several times Ziggy and I listened to Vic instructing me to buy this dye.
“Why didn't you tell me about this, Cat?” Ziggy asked me.
“You never asked me,” I responded.
It was also through the tapes that Ziggy found out that Vic would be recording a fifth album and also that Vic's father had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.
After a year of this surveillance, Ziggy abruptly put an end to it. He handed me a startlingly generous check to give to Casper Nuñez to ensure discretion.
I must confess that I had then what you might call a “crush” on Miss Ginger Bacon, who was Vic's primary mistress. Ginger and he would often chat about some of his other “conquests,” and then, after this discussion was done, immediately engage in intercourse, as if fueled by the conversation. While engaged in coitus, Vic would tell her that he loved her, and she often told him likewise. On one such occasion they said it to each other at the exact same instant.
“You're the only one, puddin',” he would tell her. “No one else comes close.”
As for the Oceanfront sessions, Vic would bring three, four, sometimes five women into bed with him. There would be soft music playing in the background. You would hear breathing, an occasional giggle, more breathing. On one tape a woman whispered, “Come on, Vic, come on.” And another woman murmured, “Oh Vic, please. Come on, baby, do it to me.” To which a third woman said, “Honey, Vic's not even here.”
SALLY KLEIN: We were at the office on Wilshire, and Danny and Sid Stone were trying out some new material for the act. (Norman White had recently passed away.) It was fun when we got everyone together and started joking around . . . we needed to do that more. But sometimes it wasn't easy to get everybody in the same room at the same time.
In the middle of going through a new routine, Vic looked at his watch and said, “Aw, Jesus, I gotta go.”
Arnie said, “But we're just getting started.”
“I gotta go. I lost track of the time.”
Vic went to the door. For a time he did what Jackie Gleason used to do: have two or three limos wait for him, so no matter what exit he used when leaving a building, there'd be a car there.
“This is ridiculous, Vic,” Danny said. “You can't leave now.”
“I gotta go, all right?! I got things, okay? Hey, who knows? I might be back in an hour.”
“Aw, come on,” Ziggy said, “You're gonna record a whole song in an hour?”
Vic said to him, “How did you know that's where I was goin'? I didn't tell nobody in this room I was recording a new record.”
“I just guessed, Vic, that's all.”
Vic looked at Ziggy up and down and shook his head. Then he left.
DANNY McGLUE: I remember one time, I was with Ziggy, Betsy, and [my son] Steve at Guy's restaurant. Betsy was doing okay then. She'd recently gotten out of the Payne Whitney [psychiatric] Clinic and things seemed to be all right for a time. Stevie's illness would often have a jarring effect on her, sometimes for the better. Sometimes not.
Vic, Ginger, and Hunny happened to be at the next table, and after they were done, they came to our table and we spoke for a while. Hunny had just been named a panelist on What Is It?, the old CBS game show hosted by Bob Kincaid. So we all chatted briefly and then Vic said, “I've gotta be off now.” And Ziggy said, “Tell Bruno I said get well quick, Vic. I'm sure that tumor's gonna turn out to be nuttin' but a harmless golf ball.”
“How'd you know about my old man?”
“Huh?”
“I didn't tell nobody my old man was sick.”
Hunny said, “Vic, you told me Bruno was sick.”
“Ziggy, I didn't tell nobody my old man had a tumor.”
Hunny said, “You told me he had a brain tumor too, Vic. And you told me not to never tell no—”
“Quiet, Hunny. Jesus!”
Vic gave Ziggy the strangest look. Ziggy just looked down at his crab cakes and then Vic left, utterly bewildered.
REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV: Several months into the surveillance, Vic summoned me to the Ambassador Hotel. I had to act as though I hadn't ever been on the premises before—I had been, of course, since, dressed as an exterminator, I'd placed two microphones there. This suite was entirely the antithesis of Ziggy's, in terms of decor. Some sort of martini machine was built into the wall. Vic would press an array of buttons and levers and a martini would be made; however, as this was the 1950s and automation was in its infancy, it really did seem like more work than to have merely shaken up the cocktail by hand.
At this meeting Vic was with an individual that I recognized from the newspapers as Tony Fratelli, whose brother at that time was serving time for assaulting an aggressive fan of Vic's. The fan had wanted an autograph and Jimmy, as per Vic's suggestion, took care of the woman, who was in her seventies.
“Cat, remember Los Alamos and that big party and that big bomb goin' off?” Vic said to me.
“I certainly do,�
� I informed him.
“Man, that was some kinda blast, wasn't it?”
I said to him, “It sure was, Vic,” but I could not discern whether he meant the big party in the mess hall or the actual explosion of the bomb. I knew that he was off the base for the latter, but I did not know if he was still cognizant of that fact.
He got down to business. He told me he thought that Ziggy was snooping-around, spying on him. “The guy's a complete nut job, Cat,” he told me. “He's got more screws loose than Tony's goddamn Edsel.” Whereupon he and Tony Fratelli almost choked to death laughing. I immediately recognized Mr. Fratelli's hearty laughter from the tapes.
“Look, we spy on the Russians, right?” he asked me. “We probably got some kinda microphone in Khrushchev's vodka cabinet.”
“That is probably the case,” I said, “yes.”
“Right. So this is what I want you to do . . .”
Within a week, Casper Nuñez and I had tapped Ziggy's house as well as his suite at the Biltmore. This was quite easy to do and we did not have to pay anyone off or dress in various guises to do so. Rather, we secreted these new bugs while Ziggy was himself occupied listening to the tapes of Vic.
Casper Nuñez and I had a problem now but it was easily rectifiable. For Vic, we had to delete the tapes of Ziggy listening to the tapes of Vic, and for Ziggy, we had to delete the tapes of Vic listening to the tapes of Ziggy.
Of particular interest to Vic—and also to myself and Casper Nuñez—was Ziggy's wife, Jane White. At the time the surveillance was under way, she was engaged in a lesbianistic relationship with a neighbor of hers named Joan Pierce. The two women, who served on assorted committees of Episcopalian women in the Los Angeles area, would watch silent movies and then proceed to enjoy sapphist relations. “Listen to this broad go—she sounds like a cowboy on a buckin' bronco,” Vic would say as the Texas-born Mrs. Pierce would have coitus with Jane White. (I should mention that Jane White, after much consultation and agonizing with Mrs. Pierce, decided to surgically reverse the effects of an operation that a Dr. Howard Baer had performed on her some years before.) Of lesser interest was Ziggy ranting and railing to his wife, to his young son, and to his household staff and other individuals, about Vic. We would hear Ziggy making statements like “Do you hear this song?! He's gonna put the whole world to sleep!” and “It took Vic ten takes today to button his shirt!” I would look at Vic while he listened to this but he registered little expression. On more than one occasion he admitted, “Well, the guy's right, you know.”
After eight months Vic had us remove the bugs in Ziggy's suite at the Biltmore and in the dining room, living room, and bedroom at his Beverly Hills home. After an additional two months we removed the one in Jane White's private screening room.
It was often a tricky assignment and one had to constantly be on one's toes. I played a tape to Ziggy about Vic belittling Ziggy's sexual prowess. Vic stated to his acquaintances Ernie Beasley and Hunny Gannett that Ziggy “may have the salami, but he uses it like a toothpick.” Ziggy heard that and then commented to his friends, comedians Snuffy Dubin and Buzzy Brevetto, that he knew that Vic went around badmouthing his sexual technique. Casper Nuñez played that tape for Vic, who could not quite figure things out. There was also a segment, for example, wherein Ziggy told his son's nanny that Vic used blue hair dye to dye his hair. When Vic heard that, he looked at me suspiciously. Yes, it was very tricky.
When both assignments were terminated, Casper Nuñez and I were very relieved.
• • •
DANNY McGLUE: Ziggy and Vic treated the writers with so much disrespect, it nauseated you. The writers couldn't sleep, they were angry, they were humiliated constantly. I was the head writer and was spared this cruelty, but what they did to those guys was sadistic. But you know, only two guys ever quit. They were making more money than they had in their entire lives. We'd be up for three days straight sometimes without sleep, fine-tuning the script. We'd craft these funny sketches and then Ziggy would scrap them, just for the sake of scrapping them.
I'd go to bat for the writers but it was no use. In the final season, we had ten writers and none of them had ever met Fountain and Bliss face-to-face. There was this guy Tommy Orso—he wound up making a fortune in TV in the sixties and seventies. He'd been with the show since day one. After two dozen shows I went to Vic and said, “Tom Orso would really like to meet you.” And he had no idea who I was talking about.
Ziggy told Artie [Conway] that he didn't want any more Dr. Louie Kablooie sketches. Artie knew not to fight Ziggy. We all did. So Artie told us and we did as Ziggy wished. Then at the last minute, two days before we went on, we got the order to come up with a Louie Kablooie sketch. Tommy Orso said, “You know, I don't need this crap. I'm walking.” And the other nine writers got up and walked out too. I told Artie and he and I went to Ziggy's suite at the Sherry-Netherland. Ziggy told us to call each writer and have them come in. He would, he said, show up at the meeting tomorrow and personally apologize. He'd done wrong, he knew.
So the next day the guys are all assembled and Millie Roth pops in. She tells us to go downstairs. The writers pile into the elevator and then we're on Broadway and what's there? Ten new cars! Ziggy—who didn't ever apologize to us—had arranged it with the sponsor, which was Pontiac by then, to get ten new Bonneville convertibles, one for each of us.
“What a real sweetheart that bastard is,” Tom Orso said.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: After the fourth or fifth movie in the Galaxy deal, everything caved in like an outhouse getting bombed. Nobody wanted to work on the crew; we couldn't get a cameraman or a key grip or anything. I mean, if you worked on one Fountain and Bliss picture then that was it—you wouldn't do another. Gus Kahn was livid. George Collier—or what was left of him—had given up, and we even had trouble getting a director. It took a while but Ezra Gorman, who was still producing the movies, scraped something together.
Around this same time I thought our ship might sink. The theory was that if any single one of us—Vic, Sally, Ziggy, myself—gets off the ship, then the whole damn thing would sink. And now someone—oh, we'll call him Samuel Goldwyn—approached Vic, through me, about starring in the movie version of Guys and Dolls. [Director] Joe Mankiewicz and [writer] Abe Burrows were really touting him to Goldwyn. Now, I could've turned it down flat and never even mentioned the offer to Vic, but I didn't do that. Why? Because of my profound conscience? Because I knew I had to do good by my talent? No. It was because I knew he'd have found out about it and chewed my head off for not telling him.
So I told him about Goldwyn's interest and, much to my dread, his face lit up. He'd seen the play. He said the Nathan Detroit role was perfectly suited to him. “That's me, baby!” he said. “I could do that part in my sleep.”
Well, now my face also lit up too. “And you want I should tell them that?” I said.
“Yeah, tell them that.”
I told Goldwyn that Vic felt he could do the part in his sleep. As I'd hoped, he didn't seem very happy. He relayed the line to Mankiewicz and Burrows. And Frank Sinatra—who they weren't worried about being awake or not—got the part.
• • •
DAVID GRAN [employee at Galaxy]: I started working at Galaxy in their commissary as a busboy. One day Arnie Latchkey plucked me out of the commissary and asked me if I'd like to work on the set of Two Goofballs. I said, “Wow! Sure! When can I start?!” and the man said to me, “Please . . . don't get too excited, kid.”
Before you know it I was a best boy for a Fountain and Bliss movie.
Now, even in the commissary I'd heard that they could be difficult. I'd hear it when people were on line with their trays. You could tell from people's expressions that they were working on a Fountain and Bliss picture, just from their dazed looks and silences. Still, I jumped at the opportunity.
Latchkey told me my job was simple: “The director wants you to tell Ziggy and Vic something, you tell Ziggy. If Ziggy then wants you to tell Vic something, then you tel
l it to me first. If Vic wants to say something to Ziggy, either tell me or the director.”
The director—it was Stanley London—rarely addressed them both publicly at the same time. Or privately. Ezra Gorman didn't either. Fountain and Bliss almost never talked to each other. A lot went through me. There were times when I honestly felt I was by far the most important person on the set of the movie. And I was making less than anyone there.
There was one very serious complication on this picture. Every Fountain and Bliss movie had a large musical number, but Gorman could not convince any choreographer to work on the movie. So one day a woman showed up and was introduced to us as the choreographer. She was in her late fifties and her name was Mary Beaumont. She'd choreographed some Broadway musicals and done summer stock too.
For some reason, this did not sit well with Ziggy Bliss. He refused to come out of his trailer if Mrs. Beaumont was to choreograph the big dance number. The set closed down for a week. I had to relay messages from him to Gorman to London to Arnie Latchkey and then back to Ziggy. Ziggy said that he would choreograph the dance. Finally he gave up. He walked onto the set to meet Mrs. Beaumont. “Hi, Mary. 'Member me?” he said, talking like a baby. And she said, “Ziggy, how could I ever, ever forget you! Please, give an old flame a kiss!” Ziggy stood on his toes to reach up to kiss her—she was in remarkable physical shape—and Mary spat on his face. “There! I've wanted to do that for years!” she said and then triumphantly walked off.
In the end, there was no big musical number in Two Goofballs.
• • •
VICKI FOUNTAIN: You can imagine what it was like growing up Vic Fountain's daughter. I had everything I could ever ask for. Edith Head and Irene, the MGM designer, used to design clothing for my dolls, and every day a driver would drop me off at school in a Rolls. Vincent wasn't nearly as pampered as I was. Dad really lavished most of the presents and attention on me. He always called me his little princess.
