Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  It was that night when it first started, when he brought himself to the point of cracking up. He'd be talking about something and then he'd stop and he'd start giggling. Giggling like a kid. He'd try to get the joke out but every time he said a word, he giggled more. And his face got all flushed and sweaty. He was thinking about something and it was so hysterical that he couldn't utter it. So he waited for that to settle down and then he went on with the act. This kept happening; almost every time he did stand-up there was a point when he was cracking up inside.

  And he talked endlessly about Vic. As if Vic was still there. He did a parody of a Johnny Venice movie and did an imitation of some other person in this imaginary scene—Lyndon Johnson, Everett Dirkson, or Cary Grant. He'd try to veer the material away from Vic, but it always got back to him. Dean Corolla wrote that he sounded like a jilted lover, talking about Vic so much, but then Ziggy just used that to make fun of Dean. You simply could not criticize him.

  The other bad thing was that Variety mentioned in the review that Ziggy had sung “The Hang of It.” So Vic—don't forget: Vigorish was still handling Vic—had Shep Lane fire off a very threatening letter to Ziggy, who Vigorish was also still handling. The letter was sent from our office on Wilshire Boulevard to our office on Wilshire Boulevard! Ernie Beasley I don't think gave a damn if Ziggy was singing it or if even Madame Chiang Kai-shek was singing it, but Vic insisted Ziggy cease and desist. Which he didn't.

  We got Ziggy booked in New York—Lanie Kazan opened for him, I think—and in Boston, Miami, and Chicago. Pete Conifer booked him for the Oceanfront. It was the beginning of a whole new life for him. You know how some comics have tag lines? Rodney Dangerfield has “I don't get no respect,” and Marty Allen had “Hello, dere.” Well, in the ads for Ziggy's shows, sometimes there was a little black-and-white picture of him, with his hair and his eyes going all over the place, and then it said in quotes under his name: “And another thing about Vic . . .”

  LULU FOUNTAIN: Vic and I, even though we were divorced, we still were close. Some couples, they divorce, and then it's all over between them, like they was never married. But with us, it was like we weren't divorced. We went to a few premieres together, we went to some charity events, and we took care of the kids. We never stopped talking to each other.

  He'd be seeing some actress or some girl from Vegas, but I didn't want to hear about it. He dated [actress] Lynda Wills Benson for a few months, she was never brought up once. He had a fling with Faye Kendall—I found out about it in the paper, not from him. One time Vicki came home and she was wearing this little blue cap and I asked her where she got it. She told me that Faye Kendall got it for her. That cap was in the garbage can in ten seconds.

  More than the girls, it was the gambling that worried me. He spent months in Vegas, when he wasn't on the road or makin' a film. Every time he performed there he lost more money. He'd tell me when he won, he'd call me up and say, “Honey, I won twenty grand last night at the Silver Slipper,” but he never told me that the next night he lost twice that. Hunny or Guy or Ices Andy would tell me. I told his mom about it one time, I told her to talk to Vic, but she didn't really seem to care. “He grew up with no money,” Violetta said, “so what if he maybe die with no money?” But she was livin' in the lap of luxury in Santa Monica, she had a Rolls and a driver. And, believe me, she wasn't spending a dime.

  One time I was home and Tony Fratelli shows up at my front door. I invite him in, I make him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He tells me how much Vic owes one of his bookies. It's over a hundred grand. “And this is just one of 'em, Lu,” he tells me. “There's plenty others out there too.” I say to him, “What are you gonna do if he don't pay? Break Vic Fountain's legs, Tony? You gonna shoot him in his kneecaps?” He chewed almost as loud as Arnie and said to me, “It's crossed my mind at times, Lu, I gotta admit that to you.”

  So I talked to Vic about it on the phone. He was in Vegas. He didn't like it that Tony had dropped in on me at home. More than that, he didn't like it that Tony was talkin' his own personal business to me. But even more than that, he didn't like it that Tony had thought about shooting his kneecaps. “They're the Fratellis, not the Patellas,” he said, but he was scared. I said to him, “Look, could you just try to not gamble so much? Not for me, but for the kids.” And he said he'd try. Then he said he had to go, he had a show to put on. “How long are you there for,” I asked, and he said a week. I asked him how much he was getting for the week—maybe he could turn it over to the Fratelli brothers and his knees'd be safe. But Vic told me he wasn't gettin' a dime. He was doing it 'cause he owed the casino.

  He'd try to reassure me . . . he'd say, “Look, any time I'm ever short of dough, I'll just make another lousy movie. All right? So don't you worry.”

  REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV: With Fountain and Bliss no longer a partnership, with them not speaking to each other, it made my tasks all the more difficult. Arnie and Sally put me in charge of keeping them away from each other, not because they feared violence, but because they feared unpleasantness. For example, if Vic was playing a venue in Miami Beach and if, at the same time Ziggy was performing at, say, the Saxony Club there, I had to keep both of them informed of their close proximity. If Ziggy made dinner reservations at a particular restaurant, I had to inform Vic so that he would not make reservations for the same time. It was understood that Vic took three hours to eat and that Ziggy took at the most forty-five minutes, so there was some leeway. There was one occasion, I recall, in 1967 when Vic was taping a Christmas special for CBS and was singing “Hooray for Hollywood” near the famed Hollywood sign. And Ziggy, ironically, was also taping there immediately afterward, for a Christmas special for ABC. It was my task to make sure that there was no overlapping. Weddings and funerals were the most difficult to manage. When Murray Katz died, it was a logistical nightmare.

  Arnie and I met at the Polo Lounge one afternoon and we chatted about Vic's gambling problems. As a celebrity, Vic attracted many people to the tables at which he was betting. He would—as he was losing thousands of dollars—engage in witty repartee with them; he was always jesting with them, keeping them entertained. There were many occasions when, at a blackjack table, say, drawing a card on seventeen and losing over a thousand dollars, he would include Ziggy in his jokes. “Oh well, I guess I gotta team up with the fat kid again,” he'd say to much laughter. He would also make alimony jokes too. He would crap out at a dice table and say, “There goes Lulu's next sable coat.” But the barbs were usually reserved for his ex-partner.

  “Is there any way,” Arnie now asked me at the Polo Lounge, “that you could prevent Vic from gambling?”

  “Well,” I replied, “he does play Las Vegas a lot and this, naturally, places him just an elevator ride away from the gaming areas. So I would say that the only way to keep him from gambling is to handcuff him to the bed.”

  “Hey, you're funny, Cat! Hangin' around with us is finally rubbing off on you.”

  “Thank you. But I wasn't joking.”

  “Handcuffs, huh? Hmm, maybe you got a point.”

  On the set of his first western—it was The Return of Jack Slade —Vic told me in his trailer, “The Fratellis are givin' me all kinds of trouble. They think I owe 'em a ton of money.”

  “And what is the veracity of that?”

  “Huh? The wha—?”

  “Do you in fact owe them money?”

  “Well, sort of but not really. Like, I'll make a bet on a football game and the Browns don't cover the spread 'cause Ernie Greene fumbles and they think that means I owe 'em dough. But, Cat, it's a football game, see? It's a game, that's all. A buncha guys in helmets runnin' around. And besides, I thought the Fratellis were my pals.”

  I couldn't follow his reasoning. For it seemed to me that he did owe them money.

  “And where do I come in?” I inquired.

  “Well, they're runnin' this illegal operation, right? They run most of the bookmaking rackets around here. So they could go to jail.
”

  “Are you thinking of going to the police?”

  “Well, gee, Cat, yeah. I am. I mean, I owe 'em a ton. They say. But if they get tossed into the slammer, then I don't owe 'em nothin', is the way I see it.”

  “I think this is problematic,” I told him. I said that by turning them in and testifying against them, he not only enhanced the chances of some sort of violent retaliation against his person—particularly his kneecaps—but that he also would furthermore engender the possibility of bad public relations. It would be detrimental to his career.

  “You know, there's another bad thing about it too,” he said, putting out his Chesterfield and getting ready to film a scene. “If the Fratellis go to jail, who the hell am I gonna bet with?”

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: He was starring with Faye Kendall in that oater that Preston Coover directed and he was seeing her too. I never liked her, Teddy, and to tell the truth, I don't think Vic was too crazy about her either. But lemme tell ya: In tight pants on top of a horse, with blond hair flying around and her drawing a six-gun, she stole your breath away and kept it. I think one reason Vic wanted to do The Return of Jack Slade so bad was because it meant a lot of horseback riding, a lot of fighting in saloons, and shoot-outs . . . which meant a lot of Billy Wilson, his double. Jack Slade was this character that'd been around since I don't know when—Sonny Tufts was the last guy to play him. But by the time Jack Slade returned, nobody really remembered that he'd ever gone away or had even been there in the first place.

  “She don't really like you, Vic,” Hunny said to him one day about Faye Kendall. “She just likes bein' around Vic Fountain.”

  “Hey, I ain't marrying her, Hun,” Vic said. “And besides, don't you just like being around Vic Fountain?”

  “I don't know. Who's Vic Fountain?”

  Vic looked at me and said, “One too many shots to the dome, huh?”

  “Nah, that ain't it,” Hunny said. “I meant it. Who's Vic Fountain? Really?”

  Snuffy Dubin was in this Slade picture; he does a two-minute traveling salesman bit; you know, he's dressed like a dandy, selling elixirs, trying to pick up the local lasses too. Oh yeah . . . in the original script, one of the elixirs was made of Gila monster saliva, which would grow your hair back supposedly. But since Vic was now sportin' a rug, he forced them to change it so it would stop hair growth. [Snuffy was] on the road a lot with Vic now. He'd open up for Vic in Vegas, the Fontainebleau, in Westbury [Long Island], in Tahoe, all over. And Ziggy was incensed . . . oh, he was really steaming, boy. Ziggy was playing clubs too, he had a schedule that gave you goose bumps. But he'd play smaller rooms than Vic. You know, they had the rock music now, the Beatles and the Beards [sic] and the Stones, and Vic wasn't selling as much as he used to. He'd very, very stealthily sneak a song into the Top 20, but then the next week it would just as stealthily sneak out. He cut a bossa nova album called Vic-a-Nova but the only place it went was nowhere. But he still had the charisma, he was still a big draw in the clubs.

  Anyway, these rumors start percolating about Snuffy Dubin. From nowhere. I pick up a Bud Hatch column and it says that Snuffy and Debbie are on the rocks because he's cavorting with a showgirl. Nonsense, I said. (Snuffy and Debbie Dubin is one of the great, great marriages in this business.) I pick up another paper, I see that Snuffy's got a gambling problem and that Vic is as magnanimous as Jesus Christ because he's helping him earn all the dough to pay back the loan sharks at his door. Snuffy goes to whores, Snuffy's a dope fiend, Snuffy raped the Sabine women and shot McKinley, Archduke Ferdinand, and JFK.

  I called Morty Geist and I said to him, “Morty, if you're putting this into the papers for Ziggy, this is the end of our business and personal relationship.”

  “I'm not doing it, Latch,” he said. “I swear on my mother's grave.”

  “Okay then, you're off the hook.”

  “But he did ask me to.”

  SNUFFY DUBIN: All this stuff starts coming out and after the fifth or sixth time, it became a joke. I'd pick up Earl Wilson or Sidney Skolsky's “Tintypes” and ask myself, Okay, which ten-year-old boy did I molest today? Which poodle am I leaving my wife for now? The thing that hurt the most was the pill thing. That really stung. I mean, I was the one who told Ziggy about them in the first place! He'd have never started taking that crap if it wasn't for me! And here he is blabbing to everyone about it. That was the unkindest cut of all. And so that was when I kicked. It was the worst week of my life. This was when the Democratic [National] Convention was goin' on, all those riots in Chicago. Well, I missed out on all the fun 'cause I was in my bed shaking like a fucking leaf and my pores were churning out more water than the Bay of fucking Bengal. So yeah, I owe Ziggy big time, right? He saved my life by trying to destroy it.

  DANNY McGLUE: Ziggy and Jane were over at Sally and Jack's house for lunch. So was I . . . Betsy was [at the hospital in] in Santa Barbara. Jack had retired from real estate . . . he was just taking it slow, reading a lot, going to the track occasionally. Ziggy had brought over three huge scrapbooks with every tidbit and snippet in it ever written about Harry and Flo. It was some transformation; years and years ago they were the bane of his existence and now he had canonized them.

  It was Jack's fault, I guess, but it started innocently enough. He said, “Someone should make a movie about those two.”

  “What kind of movie?” Ziggy asked.

  “Oh, you know, some biographical thing. Like The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle or The Seven Little Foys.”

  “Hmmm. Who would you get to play my dad?” Ziggy asked. He was on the couch but leaning in, intently. He was already hooked on the idea.

  “Paul Muni maybe?” Jack said. “He was great as Louis Pasteur and Alexander Graham Bell.”

  “Sweetie,” Sally said, “Don Ameche played Alexander Graham Bell, and Paul Muni's dead.”

  Jack was slow now . . . don't forget: the four heart attacks, and he had twenty years on Sally to begin with.

  “A movie about my parents,” Ziggy said. “I think that's a great idear. What do you think, Janie?”

  “I don't know,” Jane said. “Who wants to pay three bucks to see a bunch of tiny Jews from fifty years ago who never amounted to anything?”

  “But what about Funny Girl?” Ziggy said, ignoring her. “Hey, Streisand'd be perfect for Flo. And if it was a musical, that'd add more punch. What do you think, Danny?”

  I was afraid I'd get drawn into this. So I stalled and said, “And who would play Harry? What with Paul Muni being so unavailable.”

  “What about Paul Newman maybe? Or Peter O'Toole?”

  “Uh-huh . . .” And why not cast Wilt Chamberlain as Lenny Pearl? I was thinking.

  Sally and I were glancing at each other. We knew that Ziggy was hooked.

  For the next few weeks, for the next few months, this was all he could talk about, although he did manage to take some time out to insult Vic's new albums and movies. He met with every producer, every director, every big actor and actress. See, even though he wasn't making movies anymore, he still had the reputation, the cachet, and could get these meetings. He met with people at Paramount, United Artists, MGM, everyone. He always brought along the scrapbook too. Listen, the story of two struggling, old-time, married troupers is not a bad idea for a movie. But not these two. There was no arc. A flat line from nowhere to nowhere is just not an arc. Ziggy had me concoct a treatment and he'd show that to people. After Ziggy saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? he got it into that silly head of his that Liz Taylor and Richard Burton were absolutely perfect for the roles, and he arranged a meeting with them in London. He met them at the bar at Claridge's and kept them there for six hours! They kept trying to sneak off—they had an event to go to—but he would not let them go. “I got on my knees, Danny,” he told me. “I was on my knees and beggin' 'em to get interested in this thing. I thought I almost had 'em at one point too—I seen Burton's eyes light up like a baseball park at night—but it was just him eyeballing a delivery of a case of Chi
vas.”

  The people at Columbia got so tired of him bothering them that they commissioned a screenplay to be written, just to shut him up. I read the thing and, you know, it wasn't bad for what it was, but Ziggy hated it. And now he was bothering them more than he'd been before.

  Ziggy would go on The Tonight Show often, maybe four times a year, to plug an appearance. If he was opening up for Phil Ford and Mimi Hines, say, he'd go on Carson, yuk it up on the couch, then plug the appearance. And he'd go on Steve Allen, Merv Griffin, or Joey Bishop's show when Joey had a show on ABC. But now all he was doing was talking about Harry and Flo. (Oh, he would do this funny thing though; if he was the first guest he'd point to the empty space on the couch next to him and say, “Uh, Merv, me and Vic broke up a few years ago.” That always got a big laugh.) The stuff about his parents was endless . . . he'd relate tale after tale of their lives and of them schlepping him around from town to town, putting him onstage when he was three . . . and it was all nonsense! It was all made up! And I should know because I spun most of these tales for him. Ziggy would say how he was putting together The Story of Harry and Florence Blissman, and whoever was hosting the show, well, their eyes would glaze over. He did a skit once on The Mike Douglas Show one day—he was Harry, and Ethel Merman was Flo—and Douglas, Buddy Greco, Skiles and Henderson, and Jackie Susann, who were guests that day, winced as one. “He keeps bringing up his parents and this nonexistent motion picture,” Arnie muttered to me and Sally when we were watching him on The Tonight Show, “they won't even let him on Captain Kangaroo.” It was sad to see . . . you have to remember how truly knockout, drop-dead, paralyzingly funny Ziggy was. But he was becoming something that I thought it was impossible for him ever to be: He was tiresome.