Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  I felt bad for Morty Geist. Ziggy got Morty to plant it in Earl Wilson and Grayling Greene that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward had agreed to play Harry and Flo. And then, of course, they both vehemently denied it. He did the same with Peter O'Toole and Maggie Smith and then Dustin Hoffman and Goldie Hawn and finally Burt Reynolds and Sally Field. Every major and minor league actor and actress had to publicly deny they were playing Harry and Flo—it became like a badge of honor. For every time he got his foot in a door, ten other doors would slam shut on him. The bangs were deafening.

  Jack, Sally, and I were watching Ziggy go on about his parents on the Griffin show, and Jack said, “Jesus, guys, I apologize for ever bringing this up.”

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: I'll tell you why this movie thing crawled into his brain and started feeding off his soul. Guilt. Guilt over the way he'd treated his parents. No doubt about it. And the other reason is because he heard that Vic was now taking a “serious” turn in his acting career.

  You know, Sinatra did all those serious motion pictures like The Man With the Golden Arm, and Tony Bennett was in The Oscar. Bobby Darin did this jail movie, Pressure Point —I got a memory like a steel cage, don't I?—and Dean [Martin] had actually done a picture with Marlon Brando. So after the Johnny Venice trilogy and two westerns—oh yeah, he did The Brigade from Hell with George Peppard, Senta Berger, and Richard Harris—some agent drops Hunny Gannett's book Punch Drunk into his lap. And you could practically measure the wattage on the lightbulbs goin' off over Vic's head when he read it. If he read it. (Well, you know, Hunny didn't really write it, so turnabout is fair play.) This thing grabbed him though. He had to play Hunny in the movie, if they ever made one. Which they did.

  Ziggy calls me up at the Vigorish office and says to me, “You know about Hunny's book?”

  “I'm aware of it,” I said to him.

  “And Vic is tryin' to play Hunny in the movie . . .”

  “I'm familiar with it.”

  “This is a joke, Arn. It's gotta be a joke. Look, I know there's a lotta water under the bridge wit' me and Vic. But some of the water, it ain't flowed all the way under the bridge yet. See, I still like the guy. I mean, he was my rock, a Goliath, a levia—”

  “Yeah, I've heard you indicate that in the past.”

  “So I say this out of love for the guy . . . he does that picture, the reviewers'll schmear him—it'll be like a Mack truck goin' over a slab of cream cheese.”

  “He really wants to do this, Zig,” I told him.

  “Arnie, they'll fill his footprints outside Grauman's Chinese Theater with new cement and it'll be like he never was.”

  “And all this is something you don't want?”

  Ziggy, to his own glee, was right. Vic couldn't pull it off. He took the Paul Newman-being-Rocky Graziano approach but it came off like Vic being Newman being Brando being Graziano being Hunny. Vincent Canby of the Times was merciless. Every reviewer said Vic's movie career was down for the count or that he should throw in the towel. Chester Yalburton wrote that if Vic Fountain can play a boxer then Jack Dempsey can play Timon of Athens. Teddy, if Lee Strasberg or Stella Adler had seen this movie, they would've shut down their acting schools and opened up a drycleaning outfit.

  GUY PUGLIA: Hunny said to me after he seen the movie for the first time, “I should've played myself, Guy. Jackie Robinson done it. Audie Murphy too.” I said to him, “Was that ever an option?” And he said that, yeah, he tried out for the role but he had trouble memorizing the lines and besides, he could never inhabit the character.

  BILLY WILSON: The worst thing I had to do was double for Vic playing Hunny Gannett in Punch Drunk. I resented it when I read interviews and when I saw Vic on The Tonight Show plugging the movie; he was crowing about all the boxing technique he had to learn, how he'd been in more than a few brawls in his life but now he had to retrain himself to fight like a real pugilist. He told Life that he ran five miles at six in the morning for weeks, but I knew from [costars] Janet Leigh and Woody Strode that he was just crawling into bed at that time. Only one time that I knew of did he strap on the Everlasts and attempt to learn how to box: He made a wisecrack and said, “How am I supposed to mix a martini with these things on?” and he shuffled a few times, worked up a sweat, and then the gloves came off. But I had to work myself into very serious shape for this movie. I'd be at Gleason's Gym in New York and at Vic Tanny's [gym] in L.A. every single day for hours. You know, it was my body doubling for Vic's body in the early part of the flick, when Hunny Gannett was young, but in the last half hour, when Hunny's washed-up and out of shape, it's Vic's body doubling for mine. Vic even told Johnny Carson he got a broken nose in the movie and they had to halt filming. Well, that was my broken nose! Julie [Jules] Cassell was the director and he was infuriated by Vic's lack of cooperation . . . he really thought when Vic signed for the movie that he would give it his all. But Vic's “all” amounted to one bead of sweat.

  I felt bad for Hunny Gannett. I wasn't a buddy of his but I did get to spend some time with him. He was really a sad figure. His bar, the Hunny Pot, had just closed down, and the game show he'd been on was canceled too. He lived in a one-room apartment now. Didn't have any family. I realize he didn't write his autobiography, but whoever did, he probably got more money for it than Hunny did. Julie Cassell said to me at the premiere, “Poor guy . . . he's going to end up shining shoes one day. You watch.” And then we turned around and Hunny was right there. He'd heard us. “Nah, guys,” he said. “Too dumb to shine shoes.”

  Now, here's an ironic story for your book. I had that “fat pillow” back on for this movie. Vic was about twenty or thirty pounds overweight now . . . he said he had to drink chocolate milk shakes and eat french fries for the part but, well, I knew from the westerns and from the Johnny Venice flicks that he liked to drink chocolate milk shakes and eat french fries before. I was having lunch one day at a Chinese restaurant in West Hollywood with my then-lover, Pete Golyadkin, who, by the way, had been Cary Grant and Randolph Scott's doubles. And I had the pillow on. And the wig too. Well, who walks in but Ziggy Bliss! When he walked by our table I stopped him and told him who I was—well, not actually who I really was, but who I was supposed to be. “Vic's double, huh?” Ziggy said in that babyish way he had. “Hey, maybe your double and my double could team up.” He noticed the rug I had on and I also told him about the fat pillow. Now, Ziggy had lost weight over the years, I guess. Maybe twenty, twenty-five pounds—he wasn't nearly as round as he'd been in the Fountain and Bliss flicks. His face was even thinner, and so was his hair. So he asked me about the pillow and you know what I did? I let him have it! I unstrapped it from my belly and gave it to him! He said that now that he was thinner he didn't look like himself anymore so he needed it. “You sure you can spare this spare tire?” he asked me. And I said there were about twenty more where that came from. So for the next few years Ziggy wore Vic Fountain's fat pillow when he performed on TV and in clubs.

  And he wanted the name of the place that made the toupee too.

  ERNIE BEASLEY: For Punch Drunk, guess who crawled out of the woodwork? They needed someone to play a woman in her mid- to late sixties. They tried to get Shirley Booth but she passed, and so did Thelma Ritter. It was a very important scene; Hunny kills a handsome fighter from Ohio in the ring, and the fighter's mother drops by where Hunny works out, to make peace. (“Never happened,” Hunny told me. “Them writer fellas made it up.”) So a week before they start shooting, Jules Cassell tells Vic, “I'm bringing in a lady for this meaty scene . . . she's classically trained. She's done theater in England, done radio too. I think she can pull it off.”

  “It's a boxin' picture,” Vic says, “it ain't Anne of the Thousand Days.”

  The next day, Miss Constance Tuttle walks in and reads for the part.

  “Bease, I was so goddamn scared she was gonna pour a dollop of relish on me,” Vic said to me, “and bite off Mr. Baciagaloop's head. I couldn't even tell Julie Cassell to get rid of her. I just sat there w
ith the script on my lap, wishin' it was made of steel.”

  She got the part, and I really think she did put the fear of God into Vic. In the movie, you can tell by his expression he's absolutely scared stiff of her. He's supposed to be shadowboxing in the gym in the scene, but he's only using one hand—the other was covering his crotch.

  GUY PUGLIA: I brought Edie to the premiere of Punch Drunk. For years we'd been goin' out and you know what? Nobody knew. I told Hunny but that was it—I never told Vic. “Are you embarrassed of me?” Edie asked me one day and when she said that, Jesus, I almost started cryin'. I says to her, “Edie, doll, it ain't you I'm embarrassed of. It's me.” And I stared weepin' like a baby . . . I had to put a fuckin' pillow to my eyes. I was embarrassed 'cause of the life I led and 'cause of what I looked like. And she thought I was embarrassed of her.

  You know what she done? Don't forget, she worked in a makeup department. She had some people at Paramount make a nose, a fake nose. It was very convincing . . . it was made of latex and a little plaster or putty or something. But I couldn't bring myself to put it on. I'm a fuckin' jerk is what I am. She would ask me to try it on and I'd get angry . . . I said, “No! I won't do it!” For years and years I had the Band-Aid over my face, where the schnoz would be. So this phony nose was in my kitchen drawer for weeks, like it was some kind of turkey baster or something you only take out but once a year. Then one day I says to myself, Aw, what the fuck. And I put the thing on. (Now, it wasn't perfect, right? Well, that was the thing: It was perfect, but my real nose wasn't. But still, it looked good.) And when Edie come over that night, I answered the door with the thing on and she threw her arms around me and I'm thinking to myself, Okay, Lord, this is the girl I should marry.

  And you know what she done? She had them make changes in it. The color and the shape . . . so it fit better and looked better. And I'll tell you another thing: By this time, I needed glasses, to see far, to see close, to see everything. So we went and we got me some real big fancy eyeglasses, and with those things takin' up half my mug, the nose looked even realer. And I started wearin' that thing all the time. At work, at home, drivin' around, at the track or at the ballpark. It was strange, you know . . . I wasn't ashamed to be what I was no more.

  When Vic saw me at the premiere he did a double take. He wasn't expecting me to be in the company of Edie Smith or any girl and he also wasn't expecting me to be in the company of a nose either. You know, he sort of ticked me off that night, at the party afterward. Why? 'Cause he didn't spend too much time with his old buddy. I saw him for twenty seconds, tops.

  “Edie, you know Vic, right?” I said, reintroducing them. “Edie's my girl.”

  “Hi, Vic,” Edie said.

  “What's up with the schnoz, Guy?” Vic said.

  “It's just—” I began.

  “I gotta go talk to someone over there,” Vic said. “I'll catch up with you two later.”

  But he didn't.

  • • •

  VICKI FOUNTAIN: Mom never wanted me to go into show business. If it was up to her I'd have just become a married mother of ten. But one time Dad was driving me and Vincent to a golf course and Louis Armstrong singing “Hello, Dolly” came on the radio and I began singing along. “Hey, princess, you got a great set of pipes,” Dad said to me. And then my brother started imitating Armstrong, and Daddy said to him, “Hush up back there, wouldja?”

  He started me on piano and singing lessons when I was about thirteen. I couldn't stand the piano and had no talent for it, but I liked singing. I didn't like having to be at some voice coach's house after school though; the boys were crazy for me and, to tell the truth, I was crazy for them too. [TV star] Vernon Blaine's son went to my school and we had the biggest crushes on each other. Tommy Deakins, whose father had produced Route 66 and 77 Sunset Strip, was in love with me too. Another problem was that Dad wanted me to sing the songs that he sang, but nobody under twenty listened to those anymore. I would listen to records by the Beatles and Pet Clark, and Dad would look at them and say, “What is this garbage?”

  He had Arnie and Sally make a bunch of phone calls and I auditioned for Larry Galen of Mendocino Records. (His father, Noël, had been a bandleader years before, someone told me.) I was seventeen and had just graduated from high school. They had a song for me to sing called “It Could Be Me,” which was sort of slow, sort of Leslie Gore. There was a band, maybe seven guys, and the guitarist was cute—so was the bassist—and the drummer was very muscular and dangerous-looking in a nice way. We did about ten takes of the song, and then Larry, who was eyeing me up and down the whole time, said we'd gotten it right. “Hey, I've got this other thing here,” he said, “a Steinberg and Jones tune, we could do.” Well, that song was “Come Frug With Me” and it wound up selling two million copies and being in the Top 10 for fourteen weeks! And I wound up going out not only with the guitarist, but the bassist and drummer too.

  Before I knew it I had a stylist, a makeup artist, and a hairdresser working me over all the time. It was like having surgery every day. They had me wearing the sixties clothing, the boots, the miniskirt, and hoop earrings that nearly pulled my ears off. I was in Vogue and She and Seventeen. I went on Laugh-In and Shindig and Clay Cole and Lloyd Thaxton's shows and I did Hullabaloo too. And, of course, I was on Daddy's TV specials. Morty Geist and Bursley-Bates were my publicists and they got my name all over the place, in everyone's columns. In London I started dating Keith, who'd had that hit song “98.6.” Mmmm mmm, he was a real dreamboat, a very sweet bloke, as they say. But I also started seeing the former manager of Wayne Fontana [no relation] and the Mindbenders. It really was a crazy time for me. I went to Europe again with “Come Frug Some More With Me,” the follow-up hit, and I had a little thing going with Jean-Luc Henault, the French pop singer. And with Gunter Böll, who I think was a skier or a race car driver or something and was so gorgeous.

  “When am I gonna get my shot?” Vince asked Dad one night. “I can sing too.” We were having our Thanksgiving dinner, me, Grandma, Vincent, Mom, and Dad, who was sometimes there for the holidays. Hunny was there, too . . . I remember that Mom had to cut his turkey for him.

  “Your shot?” Dad said to Vince. “You want a shot? Get over here.”

  And Vince got up and went to where Dad was sitting and Daddy punched him in the shoulder. “That's your shot right there. Now go finish your lasagna.”

  SALLY KLEIN: I thought it was horrible what they did to Vicki. Lulu thought so too, but she wanted to make her daughter happy. Besides, she knew this was what Vic wanted and she figured if Vic was happy with Vicki then he'd come back to her. “They're dressing her up like a cheap puttana!” Lulu said when Vicki went on Shindig. “That skirt barely makes it below her belly button!”

  But the horrible thing was we all knew it wouldn't last. Vicki did not have a great voice . . . she'll read this and never talk to me again, but I think she knows it's true. Larry Galen would do things with her voice in the studio, to fix it, and she had the backup singers too, who actually could sing. Poor girl, she must have sung those frug songs a hundred thousand times.

  She was the most boy-crazy girl I've ever seen. I told Danny that once and he said, “Boy crazy? Ha! That's a very polite way of putting it.” Maybe he was right. She went from man to man, and most of them treated her like dirt. I think they got a big kick out of it, that she was Vic Fountain's daughter. Men, right? She had a fling with a married movie star, an actor who was then in his late forties—I won't say his name. He used her for a few days and then passed her along to a friend, a less famous actor. It was sad. But let me tell you . . . the one she really wanted was Vic. No, I don't mean it that way, not at all. Vic was hardly ever at home when Vicki was growing up, and she utterly craved his attention. So she tried to make up for it with other men and, boy, did she ever succeed. All over town and the rest of the world she succeeded!

  The sad thing was Vincent. Vic never gave him a moment's thought. He was such a nice boy. His father was Vic Foun
tain, the actor and the singer, the great womanizer and boozer, and now his older sister is on Laugh-In and is topping the charts. Vincent had by far the best singing voice of anyone in that family. I wasn't surprised that he started doing all those drugs.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: Vic was more concerned with Vicki's career than his own, let me tell you. He hated the music she was doing, but it was selling. As a matter of fact, it was selling a lot better than Vic's. They did a Steinberg & Jones tune together [“Hey You, You're My Angel”], which went into the Top 20 for a moment. Morty had the idea to get Vicki's name in the papers by linking her with this fella and that fella and so he called all the columnists, but then we found out that we didn't have to really work too hard at this, she was doing a fine enough job on her own. Boy, was she ever! After a year, Morty was going the opposite route: He was denying relationships. They had her with some fella on Peyton Place and with Joe Namath when he was filming C.C. and Company and then a week later she'd never met either one of them. “No, Vicki and Mike [sic] Jagger are not an item,” he'd have to tell everyone. “No, Vicki Fountain is not seeing the drummer from the 13th Floor Elevators.” The problem was, most of the time, it was true. So Morty pulled out all the stops, but then he had to plug them all right back in again.

  Vincent was another case entirely. Now, unless you have balls of tungsten and have four of 'em, don't ever bring up Vincent and the drug thing to Lulu. She'll shoot you.