Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  I remember when I was not named homecoming queen in my senior year. Dad went berserk. He got Tony and Jimmy Fratelli, who were in business with [gangster] Mickey Cohen, to accompany him to the school. He plucked me out of a science class and brought me down to the principal's office with the Fratellis. He was yelling at [principal] Mr. Armstrong and he was pinching my face. “How could she not be the queen?!” he was screaming. “Look at this faccia bella!” Mr. Armstrong was frightened, he didn't know what the Fratelli brothers would do. “It wasn't really up to me, Mr. Fountain,” he told Dad. “Dad, please, it's okay!” I told him. I was in tears almost, but I appreciated his love and concern and, of course, I still wanted to be homecoming queen too. Dad told Tony Fratelli to find Katie Cornwell, the girl who'd won, and Tony went stomping off. Jimmy said, “Vic, we can't have Tony beatin' up seventeen-year-old girls he don't even know! I mean, if it was a girl he knew . . . let's get outta here!” Dad grabbed the lamp on Mr. Armstrong's desk and threw it against the wall. Then Tony burst in and he had Katie by the hair. Tony said, “Hey, you know, she is kinda pretty, Vic. I don't wanna have to mess anything up here.” By that time Dad had lost his interest and he and the Fratellis just left.

  All my girlfriends had crushes on Dad. After school, someone would ask, “So what should we do today?” And everyone else would say, “Let's go over to Vicki's!”

  Dad wasn't usually there though.

  FREDDY BLISS: I was not just an only child, I was a lonely child. I know how Dad had grown up and maybe that had something to do with it. Mom had many friends, she belonged to so many clubs and organizations, she was always shopping or having lunches, and Dad was Dad, performing somewhere, making a movie, on the road. I had a housekeeper named Ruthie who I was close to, but that was it.

  You know, Dad wanted to have me bar mitzvahed but my mother said that was absolutely out of the question. She really put her foot down.

  I don't want to give the wrong impression though. He was a good father. He always called me when he was on the road. You know, on Parent-Teacher Day Dad used to come to the school and he'd work the room. Really! He'd always make sure to be the last parent to walk in—that way, every head would turn to him when he entered. And all he had to do was appear and people were giggling. It was as if a cyclone had blown into a first-grade class. He'd put on a great show, he'd do jokes with the teacher, he'd clown around with the kids, he'd do stuff with the chalk and the eraser and that map of America that rolled down. And when I was invited to other kids' birthday parties, the parents always asked for Dad to bring me; that way, he would perform for the kids. He did do it, he brought me to maybe five birthday parties, and would have everyone in stitches. But when he stopped doing that, the invitations didn't come anymore.

  CATHERINE RICCI: In 1961 Papa died of brain cancer. He'd been sick for a long time and he put up a good fight. It wasn't like him to go out like a coward. He refused all painkillers—he said they were for sissy boys.

  Vic paid for all his hospital bills. He got him two rooms at that Cedars hospital in Los Angeles, all to himself. I'd fly out there once a month to visit him, which Vic paid for. Every time my kids saw him, they thought it was for the last time.

  Mamma said to me, “He's not going to let this thing kill him.” She was right.

  He wore these very dark sunglasses, you know. He had to, it was the law. And he still wore them inside the hospital, even as he was wasting away every day.

  They found him dead in the morning, the nurses did, when they came to check on him. He had walked to a chair, near to a mirror on the wall. He sat down, took his sunglasses off, and turned on the light. It must have been a terrible struggle. He stared at himself in the mirror and stared very hard until his heart stopped.

  Vic flew the body back to Massachusetts on a private plane and Papa was buried at the Catholic cemetery. There was a wake first and even then he had to have his sunglasses on. He's got the biggest stone in the graveyard, the biggest by far. The church in charge of the cemetery didn't want it there, the priest said it was an eyesore. “It's like the Eiffel Tower!” the priest said. It is pretty showy. Vic came to the funeral, of course, but left the same night. He hadn't spent a night in Codport in years, and he never returned after that.

  GUY PUGLIA: A few weeks [after Bruno died] there was another piece of bad news. Gino Puccio died in New York. I called Vic in Chicago and told him that. He said, “Who the fuck is Gino Puccio?” And I said, “Pooch! The guy at the Monroe! He put us up for free at the hotel and at his house in Long Beach, you fuckin' idiot!” And he said, “Oh yeah . . . Pooch! With that red-hot daughter of his!” I said, “Huh? Vic . . . she's a nun,” and he said, “So how's old Pooch doin' anyways?”

  Man, sometimes talkin' to him was just like talkin' to a cloud.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: Clubs were starting to close down. The Blue Beret went belly-up in '59 and the last I heard of Barney Arundel he was being pushed around in a wheelchair in Miami. Man's fate, I suppose. All the clubs were sick, dying, or dead. See, it was the idiot box, the television, that's what it was. Going out, donning your fancy threads, dancing and making merry—what was the big deal about that when you could watch Bonanza in your bedroom and suck down a frozen Swanson TV dinner?

  Morty Geist to the rescue.

  “Let's spread the rumor, Arnie, that Fountain and Bliss are calling it quits,” he said.

  Genius. Absolute genius.

  SNUFFY DUBIN: It's four in the morning, I've just finished a big show at the Fountainebleau opening for Andy Williams, my brain is boiling like crazy on pills. I called Debbie in L.A. after a show every single night, that was the law, it didn't matter what time it was. I've got a TV in my room and who knows if there was even a show on—with all the bennies and the Jack Daniel's I could look at all them dots and static swirling around and somehow turn it into King Lear. So I get off the phone with Debbie and the phone rings. I picked it up and it was some newspaper reporter. At four in the fucking morning this cat is calling me! He says is it true that Fountain and Bliss are calling it quits? I said to him, “I don't know—is it?” It's the first I've heard about it. He said that he'd just been told Ziggy and Vic are going their separate ways. I told him, “Look, buddy, I don't know and I don't care. Adios!”

  I hung up and laid my head down on the pillow. I don't know if it was all the pills and the booze but I didn't fall asleep. Not for hours. I kept thinking about Ziggy and Vic.

  SALLY KLEIN: It was vintage Morty Geist. Spread the word that Fountain and Bliss were breaking up, then have them deny it. Variety had it as their headline. Then Ziggy and Vic called a press conference to say it was all untrue. The boys loved it. It made the press look stupid and venomous, which is what Ziggy and Vic thought they were. Bud Hatch called up Ziggy, and Ziggy unleashed a three-hour tirade on the phone. Bud made it the whole column, something he would normally reserve only for something like Gary Cooper dying. “How can they say these things about us? How? Vic says they're not even scum; I say they're not even mildew,” he said. “And all 'cause we make people laugh. That's our mortal sin. It's, like, you make someone laugh so they nail you to the cross. That just don't seem fair, Bud.” I was in his office when Ziggy was talking to him . . . as his tirade went on and on, he got more vehement, more agitated. By the end he was standing and his hand was in a fist.

  He hung up and I said to him, “Ziggy, you know, that was very convincing. But we did purposely spread this rumor.”

  And I could tell from his face that he'd completely forgotten that.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: After Cody Lee Jarrett got killed on his bike—that really hurt the ratings. They never would book anyone for the young crowd . . . they wouldn't even put Pat Boone on. Ziggy would've put Elvis Presley or Cal [sic] Perkins on, I really believe that, but Vic hated that stuff; so we wound up with “the Prince of Wails,” Johnny Ray, people like that. But conversely, Ziggy would never put Jan Murray, Snuffy Dubin, or Shelley Berman on the show either.

  The killer wa
s that in 1958 or so, NBC gave Fritz Devane a sitcom, Daddy's Home. Aptly enough, Geritol was the sponsor. That wig of his you thought any minute would sprout wings and fly off the top of his head. Every man and woman over the age of fifty years old watched the Devane show, which, of course, was in the time slot opposite us.

  So this is what happened. Our show bit the dust. Their movies were bringing in less money. The last motion picture they did for Galaxy was the baseball/science-fiction movie, with the somewhat unwieldy title of One, Two, Three Strikes, You're Out of This World. Try fitting that onto your marquee, boy. See, Damn Yankees had done well and you had that play Visit to a Small Planet. So naturally the Hollywood logic is: Hey, why not make a movie about a baseball player from outer space?

  This movie stank, Teddy. I mean, it reeked to the rafters. They should've fumigated the theaters after the first reel. When it wrapped, Ziggy even said, “Whew! We can breathe again!” Variety embalmed it, Chet Yalburton of the Globe put the shroud on it, the Times of Los Angeles dug the hole, Time and Newsweek flung it into the ground, and the New York Times piled the dirt onto the coffin. They insulted Vic's singing, they insulted the direction, the makeup, the costumes—they said that Ziggy Bliss swinging a bat managed to make William Bendix as Babe Ruth look like an Oscar-caliber performance. That hurt big time. I mean, in a word: Ouch!

  Ziggy and Vic went on the road to push the movie but you can only push a dead twenty-ton carp so far. Now, this was the first time they ever went out in support of a movie separately. Ziggy I thought was gonna have an infarction when Sally came up with this masterstroke. “Two people traveling separately,” she reasoned, “can cover more ground.”

  “She's right, Zig,” Vic said.

  Ziggy slumped in his chair. I thought he was gonna literally deflate.

  So Vic went his way and Ziggy went his. They agreed on one thing: No performing. Vic wasn't going to sing, Ziggy wasn't going to do any stand-up, which he, emotionally, couldn't have done yet solo anyways. So Vic would go on Jack Paar and Dave Garroway and he did a surprise walk-on on What Is It? —it took ten minutes before Hunny recognized him—and Ziggy went on Barry Gray's [radio] show and Irv Kupcinet and Long John Nebel.

  The timing was good too. Because Lulu and Vic were now legally separated. She'd had enough of Vic. Or she didn't have enough of Vic—I don't know which one it was. Lulu tells everybody—to this day—that all she wanted out of Vic was for him to be a provider . . . but he was the only man she ever loved and he broke her heart every day. Look, Vic really did love the kids, he spent as much time with Vicki as he could, but it just wasn't that much time. He'd go on golfing jags, he was always golfing with [PGA champions] Tony Newport and Tony Hampton. He'd bring Vicki and Vincent to the golf course, sometimes let them take time off from school too, which I don't think their teachers approved of. But it was Vic Fountain so it was okay.

  LULU FOUNTAIN: You think I cared about all the girls? I don't care if he was keeping one zoccola or a thousand! I'd call him up in Vegas to tell him that Vicki got a bad report card or that Vincent had a cold . . . sometimes a broad would answer and in the background I'd hear Vic saying, “Who is it, doll?” I got used to it. I had to. What I cared about was, what made me sick was . . .

  One time I was having lunch with Hunny and Joe Yung at the house. And the kids were there too . . . it must've been a weekend. At the end of the lunch, Joe got up and said, “I gotta get going now. You're going to stay around, Hunny?”

  “Yeah sure, Chinese Joe,” Hunny said.

  Then Joe took off and Hunny started playing with Vincent's electric trains, trying to make them move.

  “Why was Joe in such a rush?” I asked him.

  “He's gotta bring someone to Mexico, Lu, some friend of Vic's,” he said. “Vinnie, something's wrong wit' your trains.”

  “Why?” I asked him.

  “Some doctor there fixes 'em,” he told me. He said to Vincent, “Your train set is broke.”

  “Why do these girls need fixin'?” I asked him.

  “So's they don't get babies, Lu.”

  Vincent put the trains back on the tracks and then they started moving.

  • • •

  GUY PUGLIA: Vic drives up in his new Bentley to my restaurant, he gets out with Ginger. It's one, two o'clock at night, I'm closing the place up.

  I see him and what's the first thing I do? I take the big plastic swordfish off the wall.

  “I need to get a word with you, goomba,” he says to me.

  I'm thinkin', Okay, what's he want me to do for him now?

  We go into my little office behind the kitchen.

  “Me and Lulu—it's finito,” he said.

  I opened a drawer in my desk and pulled out a bottle of bourbon and two glasses.

  “I'm sorry about that,” I said.

  “I've known her since I was a fuckin' kid, Guy.”

  “So have I.”

  “I don't know about this whole marriage racket sometimes.”

  “I wouldn't know. You know?”

  “Hey, you're smart not to ever get hitched,” he told me. “Believe me.”

  “I'm smart, Vic? Nah, I ain't smart. I just don't have a fuckin' nose anymore. Smart? What girl you know wants to marry a guy five foot two who's got no nose?”

  He drained his glass, refilled it, and shook his head.

  “One day you'll get married, buddy.”

  “I don't know about that,” I said.

  “I love my kids. I love 'em. I look at Vicki, it's like she's a gift from God to me. All the stupid stuff I've done wrong in this world and still I get such an angel. And I think Vince's gonna have a better singin' voice than his old man.”

  I said, “Hey pal, my sick beagle's got a better singin' voice than you.” I took a snort of the Jack Daniel's and said, “What about Ginger?”

  “What about her?”

  “She loves you, Vic. You're gonna be a free man now. Maybe you could hitch up with her eventually.”

  “Well, I don't know . . . I mean, maybe I wanna live a nice sweet life as a bachelor for a while, you know?”

  “You been doin' that for your whole marriage!”

  “Yeah, you're right. You're right. But maybe now that I'm single, it's time to settle down.”

  SALLY KLEIN: Have you ever seen the tape of Ed Murrow interviewing Vic at home? Morty Geist did instant damage control after the divorce and arranged for a CBS Person to Person interview. Lulu got the house in Beachwood Canyon so Vic was living at the Beverly Wilshire. Ernie Beasley plays piano throughout the interview; you could hear it softly in the background and sometimes make him out. Now I'll tell you: Vic didn't ever have a piano in there except for this interview. As soon as they unplugged the camera, the piano went back to the shop. The first part of the interview was Vic with Vicki and Vincent. He really did look like such a proud dad, and they were both such gorgeous children. Vicki would not get off Vic's lap when Ed Murrow wanted to interview Vic alone, it was very cute, and there was another part when Vince tries to get Vic's attention by using a cigarette, but Vic ignores him. Then Ed asks Vic to sing a song and Ernie starts up “Lost and Lonely Again,” and Vic sang it and it looked like he was going to fall asleep halfway. Ed Murrow even said, “Vic . . . uh, Vic?” to stir him. Then Ed asked Vic how he was doing, living alone and being single, and Vic said, “Well, Eddie, there is a new person in my life now. A very special person.” And a few seconds later, there's Ziggy in drag and they do a hilarious ten-minute bit together.

  After twenty years they could still work the same old magic.

  ERNIE BEASLEY: The big tour together in 1962 . . . there were all these rumors that it was going to be their last tour. At this point I didn't know if this was Morty Geist doing a publicity stunt or if they really meant it. And you couldn't tell by Ziggy and Vic. Sometimes they'd talk to each other backstage, sometimes they wouldn't. But it had been that way for years.

  Ginger said to me, “You know how they communicate? Through one-upmanshi
p. It's like they send signals to each other on their own private wavelength.”

  What she meant was, they had these riders built into their contracts. The soda machine on their floor in the hotels, for instance: Vic insisted that the bottles had to come out with the caps to the left, not the right. Then Ziggy wanted another machine on the floor, with the caps all to the right, not the left. Vic had to have his hotel room within a certain temperature, between 62 and 65 degrees. When Ziggy found out about that, he demanded his room be exactly 631/2 degrees. When Vic found out that Ziggy demanded ruby red carpeting in the hotel room as well as a ruby bath mat and matching towels, Vic had it so he'd have his own handpicked furniture shipped from city to city—and everything turquoise, of course. The hotel would empty out his room, put in the furniture, then, when Vic moved on, the old furniture went back in. Ziggy went one up on this too. He would have Andy Ravelli or Reynolds Catledge go to the city ahead of time and buy new furniture for his hotel room, then, when Ziggy moved on, the hotel could keep it or throw it out.

  It could get very, very ugly if their demands weren't met. Vic wanted twenty bottles of Dom Pérignon in his dressing room and if there were nineteen or twenty-one bottles, he would not go on. One time he didn't like the exact shade of turquoise so he and a few of his buddies destroyed the hotel suite. Vic called down, got another suite, and destroyed that one too.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: I'm at Chasen's one day with Sally, and Gus Kahn saunters in alone except for his Cohiba. He sits down and then he notices us and beckons me over.

  “I got to hand it to your boy Vic Fountain, Latchkey, I really do,” he said.