by Ted Heller
“Why's that, Gus?” I'm bracing myself.
“I got a call last night at two in the morning,” he tells me. “A woman was arrested at the Sands in Las Vegas last night. She was shootin' dice. Won five grand as a matter of fact. Was cursing up a storm . . . the pit boss even had to tell her to pipe down. She was tellin' men to kiss the dice, to suck on the dice, to shove the dice down their Jockey shorts, all for good luck. She didn't pipe down. Customers were leaving, it got so dirty. In Las Vegas it got too dirty! They summon Jack Entratter, he tells her to kindly leave. She told him—and this is a direct quote—to ‘stick his little wang in a meat grinder.’”
“Cut to the part with Vic, Gus. My red-hot chili's gettin' . . . chilly.”
“Okay, so this lady, who is as drunk as you can be without passing out, moves to the blackjack tables. And she's starting to make a scene there too now. She begins losin' all the dough she made with the dice. And she starts yelling at the dealer. ‘You goddamn whore!’ she yells. ‘You take it up the ass from Ethel Merman with a strap-on dildo!’ Things such as this, things that make me blush just to repeat them to you, Latchkey, as you can no doubt see. So now a few guards mosey on over and they're going to toss her outside. And she's a big woman so it was probably more than a few guards. She sees them approaching so what does she do? Well, what would you do? She stands up, stands on the blackjack table, and rips the felt to shreds with her high heels, pulls down her skirt, and shows them her ass. ‘Grab a good piece of it, boys, 'cause it's the best thing you'll ever have!’ she yelled out. So these ten guards lift her up and carry her out kicking and screaming onto the Strip and throw her there like she's a sack of turnips. It was quite a thud, you can imagine.”
I joked, “So that was the noise I heard in my house last night on Cañon Drive, eh?”
“Do you know who this woman was?” Gus asked me, chugging on his cigar.
“Enlighten me.”
“It was Clotilde Sturdivandt. Now go back to your chili. It's gettin' . . . red hot.”
Dissolve. A few months later I was in New York at the WAT offices, meeting with Murray Katz. I knew the news was bad when he didn't want to take me out for lunch to the Russian Tea Room or “21.” I said to him, “Murr, maybe we could go to the Automat?” But he said, “Latch, we better meet here.” Very loud gulp.
The upshot was with the Galaxy deal done, the forecast was for heavy flooding, followed by famine, plague, and pestilence. Galaxy won't renew, he told me. I said to Murray, “What about this Cleopatra thing going on? All that money flushed right down Liz Taylor's bidet! I could finance the next three world wars for what they're wasting on that thing!” I reminded him that no Fountain and Bliss movie ever lost a penny and, boy, did he ever put me in my place. He said, “Latch, at one time people said, ‘No Fountain and Bliss movie ever lost a dollar.’ Then they started saying, ‘No Fountain and Bliss movie ever lost a dime’ Now it's down to a penny. See where we're heading on this?”
“What about we renew for three pictures? Three pictures?” I implored. “Please?”
“Gussie won't bite.”
“Two. Two pictures,” I begged. “They can be the worst movies ever made.”
“The boys already made those. No soap.”
“One picture! We'll do a one-picture-at-a-time deal. No commitment. One picture. And, Jesus Christ, if Gussie wants it, Clarence Gilbert can even direct it!”
“Ned's dead ten years, Arnie. You think I don't know that?”
“Yeah, but maybe Gussie don't. All right, all right. I refuse to beg about this thing.”
He reminded me that I had indeed been begging. I agreed that, yes, I had been.
But guess what? I must have somehow found one small fraying, dangling heartstring of Murray's—he was an agent and probably didn't have too many of 'em—and tugged at it the right way. Because a week later he got the boys a deal at Paramount. One picture. Three hundred grand apiece. “What kind of material will it be?” I asked Murray. He said, “What do they want it to be?” I said, “Well, there's this thing been floatin' around since before Noah's ark washed ashore. It's called Three of a Kind.” “Sid and Norman's old thing?” he said. “Yep,” I replied. He said, “Jesus, that thing was perfect for them,” to which I tersely responded, “Precisely.”
He told me he'd throw it Paramount's way. He did. And like Willie Mays goin' after Vic Wertz's fly ball, they caught it. Finally! Someone wanted to do it!
But if there's only one thing in this business that I've learned, it's this: Never, ever get too excited about anything. Enthusiasm can act like a poison.
JANE WHITE: After Lulu and Vic got divorced, I tried to continue being friends with her. But I really don't know why he married her. She wasn't pretty, she wasn't very smart, she wasn't terribly sweet or nice and was not pleasant company; she was like a waitress at a truck stop.
What was I saying? Oh yes. Our friendship.
I came by with Freddy one day so he could play with Vicki and Vincent. The last time I'd done this, though, do you know what happened? Vicki and Freddy were near the pool and Vicki lifted up her skirt. She was ten and he was eight. I saw it, Lulu saw it, Joe Yung saw it. And Freddy started crying. And when he was crying Vicki pushed him into the pool. That was Vicki.
So I drove up with Freddy one morning. I remember I was wearing a wonderful white Oleg Cassini dress. And a pillbox hat, just like Jackie Kennedy. I rang the door and Lulu answered. “I was just passing by,” I told her, “and thought I would drop in.”
“Look,” she said to me, “we never liked each other. I ain't Vic's wife no more. And maybe one day you won't be Ziggy's. And maybe one day Vic and Ziggy won't be together no more. So really, Jane, you don't have to come around.” And she closed the door in my face.
Well, I never!
DANNY McGLUE: I hadn't looked at the Three of a Kind script since well before Norman White passed away. It had really been through some kind of life. It could've been a wonderful Broadway play, a musical, a movie, a TV play. But it had never been anything except a dust magnet. So when Arnie told me that Paramount was hot to do it, I pulled it out of a file drawer.
I read it. There was something “off” about it. So I read it again. The plot was good, most of the jokes were still fresh, the characterizations were rich. But still, there was something not right about it.
I put it away and then Betsy and I went out to dinner, to Tony's on Seventy-ninth Street. She'd just spent another two weeks at Payne Whitney. I should tell you that Stevie had just died. He was gone. My poor boy had never been truly healthy. Betsy drank a lot when she was pregnant with him . . . I really would prefer not to talk about this . . .
During dinner, it hit me. I knew what was wrong. I told Betsy I had to make a phone call and went to a phone near the bar. I called Arnie in L.A. and said, “Arnie . . . Arnie . . . Listen to me.”
“All ears, Danny boy,” he said.
“The script . . . it's for two guys in their early twenties! It's for two guys who are twenty-two, twenty-three years old!”
“Oy vey iz mir,” he said. “You're right!”
“They're twice the age they need to be!”
“Well, they're more than doubly qualified then,” he said. “Look, can't you rejigger things? Get an eraser, a pencil, some glue, change things around.”
“Arnie, this would be like casting Rock Hudson as Lassie.”
He didn't say anything for a while and I could tell he was actually thinking that might be a good idea.
“Okay,” he said after a while. “I'll see what Paramount says.”
“Arnie,” I said, “if they do this picture, it'll kill them. Vic's put on a little-weight. Ziggy isn't as perfectly round as he used to be. Did you know that Vic has to dye his hair blue now? They can't do it. It'll destroy their careers.”
There was a pause again . . . maybe he was thinking that might be a good idea too.
• • •
ERNIE BEASLEY: Vic and Ginger truly loved each o
ther, there was no doubt about that to me. She was a real “man's woman”; she could drink anyone under the table, she went to the casinos and didn't just play the slots, she knew how to have a good time. She hadn't had an easy life, growing up so poor in Kentucky. Her father was an alcoholic and abused his wife.
[We] spent more time on the phone with each other than any two people-in the world. If we were hanging out with Vic's crowd, we'd go home at 3:00 A.M. and then be on the phone until five or six in the morning. You know, she had the tough exterior but she really was very sweet and girlish. “I've got a hunch that you can take a punch, that you've got that kind of hide. But with all those hits, you break to bits, 'cause you're so tender deep inside” —I wrote the lyrics to “The Dame Can Take It” based on her.
“He's the only guy I ever really flipped for,” she told me once. She'd had boyfriends before, but they didn't mean anything to her, but Vic she was nuts for. She knew she was his mistress, of course, and she knew how devoted Vic was to the kids. But every once in a while—actually, quite often—she would say something like “Well, maybe they'll get a divorce one day.” You know, Ginger knew about all of Vic's other girls. But she said to me, “Let him have his fun. Believe me, I have mine too. We're still the loves of each other's lives.”
When the divorce came through, she was the happiest thing. “I'm not going to put any pressure on him,” she told me on the phone. “I know men . . . if I push him, he'll fade away from me.” She said those words to me and two nights later I wrote “He'll Fade Away,” which was a big hit for Miss Leslie Wilson. So Ginger's plan was to lay low, to never mention marriage, and hopefully Vic would pop the question and they'd live happily ever after.
The day the divorce came through, Vic, Guy, Andy Ravelli, and I went to Johnny D'Antibes's club and went on a real bender. We got completely blind. Joe Yung had to drive us all home . . . I don't even remember that night. Or the next. Then Vic moved into his new house in Beverly Hills, a Spanish-style, stucco palace that had once belonged to Omar Caballero, the silent film star. The house was close enough to the kids but far enough so he wasn't constantly running into Lulu. He had twenty rooms and a cellar that, for some reason, he never let anyone into or even see. He eventually took out the swimming pool and had another one installed in the shape of a martini glass. Joe Yung lived in the guest house, which was big enough for a family of four.
A week after he moved in I got a call from Ginger. “Have you heard from Vic?” she asked me. “I'm worried about him.”
“He's putting together a new record, baby,” I said.
“But how long does that take each day?”
“For him? Maybe twenty minutes.”
“Would you tell him to call me? I call, and the maid or Joe Yung says that he'll call back.”
I saw Vic at the recording studio a few hours later and said that Ginger was worried about him. He said, “Oh, Bease, Jesus . . . I've been so busy lately . . . I got all this paperwork about the divorce and the house and stuff. I'm writing out checks to every single person Lulu ever looked at. Tell her I'll call her.”
So I called Ginger right away and told her that. But two or three days later she told me he hadn't called.
“She's still waiting for you to call,” I told Vic. He told me he'd tried calling her but I could tell he hadn't.
Two weeks went by and he didn't call her. She told me one night at Romanoff's that she had the idea to drive up to Vic's new pad and just barge in and confront him. “But if I do that then I reduce myself to nothing,” she said. “That shows no class.” I held her hand on the table that night—she seemed very fragile. “Lulu always said I was Vic's whore, I know that,” she said. “But she has no idea how happy we made each other.” I said to her, “Look, baby, maybe it's not over . . . you know, he just went through the divorce. Give him some time.”
The next day I was at Vic's suite at the Ambassador, which he still kept. He said to me, “You're still close with Ginger, right?”
“I am.”
“Look, can you tell her I don't wanna see her anymore?”
“Um, that's for you to do, Vic.”
“Come on, Bease. I say it, she'll get mad at me. You say it, she won't get mad at you.”
“Well, that's true, yes. But it's not me that's getting rid of her—it's you.”
“Just do it for me. Tell her if she wants me to take care of her, you know, like with dough and stuff, I'll do it. She wants a planet, I'll get her one.”
“I don't think she'd take a cent from you.”
“Yeah, she was always a classy broad,” Vic said. “You gotta hand it to her.”
Vic never called her. He didn't send a letter. He tried to deposit $10,000 in her bank account, but she got the money back to him through Shep Lane. After three months—and she was a wreck that time, an absolute wreck, on pills and vodka all the time—she moved back to New York. She gave me her phone number and we spoke often. I went to New York and we had dinner at “21.” A week later I called and the number had been disconnected. I called information and they didn't have a listing for her. I called up Millie Roth and had her go to Ginger's apartment, on Fifty-fourth Street off Lexington. But she didn't live there anymore. She'd disappeared.
I'm sorry if I keep plugging my own songs but I wrote the song “Vanishing Lady” about her. It was sort of bittersweet and very Jacques Brel-y and is, in my opinion, my best song. Vic had a big hit with it. Serge Ballard was now Vic's arranger—it was a lovely, lush, ambient production. The song was in the Top 10 for over fifteen weeks. He sang that song hundreds and hundreds of times. But I don't think he had any idea who or what it was about.
REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV: In September of 1963 Vic Fountain and I had lunch in his suite at the Beverly Wilshire. Also present at this encounter were Andy Ravelli, Ernie Beasley, and three other individuals.
“I wanna do a solo thing, Cat,” he told me. “I wanna just get a taste of it.”
“A solo show?” I asked. “This means without Ziggy?”
When I said this all of the others present burst out laughing, and I felt momentarily shamed. I merely had been trying to ascertain the facts.
“Solo, Cat,” he said. “When Lindbergh flew to Paris, did he have Ziggy in the cockpit with him feeding him coffee and one-liners?”
“No, he did not.”
“See, I haven't told anybody about this thing yet,” he said (despite the five other people present). “It's all set for the Cal-Neva Lodge in Tahoe. They got me penciled in for five nights. But nobody knows about it. Latch don't know, neither does Sally or Shep Lane. If I had a goddamn psychiatrist, I wouldn't have even told him. That's how secret this thing is.”
“I understand.”
“Although I might tell my bartender or caddy.”
This caused most of those present to incur another fit of annoying, inexplicable laughter.
“Is there a way we could keep this from them?” Vic asked me.
I informed him that if he performed at such a venue, there would no doubt be many hundreds of people present, thousands over the course of the five nights. Newspapers and magazines would surely find out about it, as would television and radio.
“So it don't sound too promising then?” he said.
“If you wanted to perform in Siberia in a frozen tundra,” I told him, “if it was without Ziggy, the news would get out, I'm afraid.”
“Nah, I don't want to play any tundra in Siberia,” he said. “Although who knows how many shekels they'll pay . . .”
“You mean, I believe, rubles.”
“Yeah, Cat. Rubles.”
He walked me to the door and slapped me on the back. He said, “Well, I guess if it's gonna happen, it's inevitable.”
SALLY KLEIN: Bertie Kahn called me in L.A. at three in the morning, his time. I hated getting calls late like that . . . Jack would always wake up in a panic and I never knew what it would do to his heart.
“Vic's doing a solo,” he told me. “At Tahoe.”
“Earl Wilson did. Ten minutes ago.”
“Maybe he got it wrong.”
“SL just called. She backs it up.”
“Who?”
“The Slobbering Lush.”
“I don't know, Bert,” I said. “Maybe this is one of Morty's stunts.”
“It's legit. I feel it.”
“I better call Morty right away.”
“I did. He's shaking like a leaf.”
“How could Vic just do this?”
“Pretty easily, it seems,” Bertie said.
“Oh, this is bad. This is very bad.” I think I was actually groaning, like I was in physical agony. “Who the hell is going to tell Ziggy this?”
“Sally?” Bertie said.
“Yes?”
“I have to go.”
ARNIE LATCHKEY: By the time Sally called me at seven in the morning, four people had already called me. Mickey Rudin, Sinatra's lawyer, called me, because Frank had such a big stake in the Cal-Neva. Pete Conifer called me—the guy was probably tied up with a diaper on and being spanked as he was talking. Shep Lane called too.
“Honey, if four people know, then twenty people know,” Estelle told me over my morning grapefruit. “And if twenty people know, then a thousand people know.”
Sally called Ziggy's house and Jane answered the phone. By then, Ziggy knew. I don't know who had the baytsim to call him, but someone did, and Ziggy probably never spoke to the man again.
I called the house and asked Jane, “How's he takin' it?”
“Oh, he'll be all right, Arnie.”
“Yeah, but how's he doing now?”
“I don't know. He's sealed himself in the bedroom. But he'll be all right.”
“Well, can you go outside and peek in through the window and see if he's alive?”
I told her that just 'cause Vic was doing one little solo gig, it didn't mean that Fountain and Bliss were kaput. But she said that Ziggy hadn't seen it that way.
Ziggy I didn't hear from for three days. Jane would call us, we'd call Jane, and it was generally agreed that he was still among the living. He relayed a message to us through her: “I can't believe he'd do this to me. Vic Iscariot is who he is.”
