by Ted Heller
I was in quite a bind, for I knew from the surveillance years before that Jane White had had a lesbianistic affair with Joan Pierce. If I told Mr. Swick this, it would have compromised my position. It opened up a can of worms, if you will. However, I did feel that it was my duty to tell the truth and I did so.
I detailed as best as I remembered—and I remembered it virtually blow by blow—what I had heard on the tapes. They sat spellbound while I told them, while I reenacted verbatim their ardent lovemaking. Both Mr. Swick and Shep Lane were very eager to know if the tapes were still extant and seemed equally disappointed—depressed, almost—to find out that they were not.
“So they did this after watching silent movies?” Mr. Swick asked incredulously. “As in, The Gold Rush and Birth of a Nation?”
“There was no sound to these movies,” I told them. “Whether they were classics of the silent screen or home movies, I do not know.”
“Hey, Mer,” Shep Lane interjected, “Ziggy was always fooling around with strippers and girls like that. You should see the headlights on some of these dames. Bet you anything it wasn't Murnau's Sunrise they were watching.”
“Why did Ziggy have you bugging his own house anyway, Mr. Reynolds?” Mr. Swick inquired of me.
I refrained from reminding him that I was Mr. Catledge and not Mr. Reynolds and instead replied, “Ziggy wasn't bugging his own house. Vic was. Vic Fountain.”
They both shifted uncomfortably in their chairs, and their faces registered what I would characterize as an amalgam of distress and amazement.
“Vic bugged Ziggy's house?” Shep said, picking up the pile of papers he'd dropped to the floor.
“Yes. That is correct,” I replied.
They huddled with each other in a corner of the office and chatted. I suppose they were discussing the admissibility of the evidence. Or perhaps they were still stunned that Vic would bug Ziggy's domicile.
“Mr. Reynolds, is there anything else you know?” Mr. Swick asked.
“Yes, Ziggy had bugs in several of Vic's places of residence, his suites and such.”
This time Mr. Swick's paperwork fell to the floor.
“What happened in Vic's hotel rooms and in his bedroom,” Mr. Swick stated, “would be of no use in Ziggy's divorce; however, I really would like to talk to you about that at a later date.”
Shep Lane and I detailed other aspects of Jane White's “character.” He and I had assiduously kept copious notation on her “shopping.” For example, she would enter the I. Magnin department store and purchase a floor-length chinchilla coat, but actually exited the store with not only this new coat but with a mink stole or another coat, a sable, for example, which she had not purchased. As best we could, Shep and I kept track of every item that Jane White had purloined.
When I was shown the door, Mr. Swick said, “With the dyke thing and the shoplifting, this thing is going to be as easy as pie.”
As I understand it, Mr. Swick immediately called Arnie Latchkey, probably within moments of my leaving his office. Informed of the various tasks I had performed for Fountain and Bliss, Mr. Latchkey granted me a most generous severance package and I was let go.
“You need to learn something about loyalty, Cat,” he said to me.
“I consider myself loyal,” I told him, “to a fault.”
“Exactly,” he said.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Letting the Cat go wasn't easy. First time we met him, he was just a young soldier boy in New Mexico. But we had to do it. Spying on each other—that was bad. I know he was only doing what he was asked, but you had to draw the line somewhere.
He was devastated. He was the straightest arrow you ever saw. Hardly drank a drop, never gambled, didn't run around with girls. Christ, he still looked like a soldier.
“I don't know what I'm going to do,” he said.
“Cat, don't make this tougher on me than it is,” I said.
“These years with Fountain and Bliss . . . it's the only exciting thing that's ever happened to me.” He was clutching the arm of his chair. I thought he might faint.
“I understand,” I told him. “Without Fountain and Bliss I'd have just been a poor schnook. But they made me a rich one.”
“I guess I should go,” he said. He stood up and we shook hands.
“What are you gonna do? With your life?”
“I don't know. I suppose I should move back to Nebraska and pick up my life where I left it. It was in pieces then. I only hope I can still find them . . . so I can throw them out.”
“Ha! You know, I do think being with us has rubbed off on you.”
He told me he would keep track of Fountain and Bliss, that he'd keep tabs on them. I told him not to bother.
JANE WHITE: When I found out about Pernilla, I was stunned. Stunned. I couldn't speak. I couldn't move. I knew he had those dirty movies . . . but I thought that by having the movies and watching them, he wouldn't be tempted to fool around. After Dr. Baer operated on me the first time, I thought that all our problems were solved. Maybe the mistake was the second operation. After that, we drifted apart in so many ways.
Buford Chatham was my lawyer. I think he was very frustrated with me the first few times we met . . . I was crying all the time. My life had suddenly come crashing down. He was a very, very flamboyant lawyer, from South Carolina. Always wore white. White everything. He told me that Ziggy was the adulterer, he'd abandoned me, and that there was no way in the world I could come out of a divorce hurting for anything. “We'll take him to the cleaners, Mrs. Bliss,” he said to me, “and shrink him down to extra-extra-small, so don't you worry.”
He and Ziggy's lawyer met several times, trying to work out a settlement. Every day Mr. Chatham would tell me how well things were going, that Merwyn Swick was shrinking right before his eyes. “We got them at subpetite now, Jane. We're gonna keep shrinking them down to munchkin size.” But one day everything suddenly changed. “They may have us by the nuts, I'm afraid,” he said. “Do you want to tell me a little bit more about your marriage?”
I will not discuss any more aspects of the case with you. I've told you enough.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: The case never went to court. Thank God. That would've been the ugliest thing to hit Hollywood since Fatty Arbuckle and the bottle of sarsaparilla or whatever it was. Ziggy never talked about it, Shep never talked about it, and as for Jane, well, with her out of Ziggy's life now, there was never a reason for me or Estelle to utter so much as a phoneme to her ever again, that loony gonif.
What I think happened is that Merwyn Swick was about to unload some sort of gargantuan dump truck on Jane. All over her. It's like she was on her driveway on her back, on the ground, and the truck was slowly, slowly lowering the load, about to let loose. But just when the gate was about to open, she leaned back and lifted the garage door and there was a dump truck in there with Ziggy's name on it. And there was enough dirt in there, my friend, to sift over the entire Himalayas like so much parmigiana cheese, two times over.
So after months—nay, years—of bickering and threatening and then sober, earnest discussion, and, finally, putting cocked bazookas to each other's heads, Ziggy raised the white flag. His legal fees were killing him. It was eating away at him emotionally. Jane made away with the whole ball of wax. She got a living allowance that the Sultan of Brunei would have refused as too generous. Ziggy had to sell stock, he had to mortgage his pension fund and future. The house in Vegas? Gone. The house in Beverly Hills? Jane's. Ziggy wound up getting a one-story spread on North Irving. If Pernilla Borg was expecting a mansion, a palatial manor, she didn't get it. And if she was expecting a big-time celebrity husband, well, she didn't get much of that soon either.
SALLY KLEIN: By the early seventies no talk show would have Ziggy on. Merv Griffin's producer told me they'd rather get a ticking H-bomb on their couch. It was Ziggy talking about Harry and Flo, it was him going on about Vic. He went on with Pernilla a few times and they certainly cut an interesting figure; her bust practically shattered th
e glass of your television screen. And she towered over him; his head came right up to her chest. It was funny for a while, her Swedish accent and blond hair, and his New York accent and red hair, which was starting to thin a bit. Danny would write stuff for them, he would write malapropisms for Pernilla to say purposely, but she couldn't pull it off. Instead of saying something cute like “Oh, I would Kaopectate my Ziggy with a one-two brunch” as she was supposed to, she'd say “kayo” and “punch” so there was no laughter at all. It was a sort of [humorist] Jack Douglas and [wife] Reiko act. Ziggy and Pernilla did the Tattletales game show with Bert Convy a few times too, but they had trouble even getting on that after a while. They also filmed two Love, American Style episodes but only one was aired.
But I don't want to give the wrong impression about Pernilla. She really did love Ziggy, she took care of him. I loved her and still do. And, unlike with Jane, when Jack and I had them over for dinner, I didn't have to count the forks afterward.
After the divorce—it was right around when the whole Watergate craziness was going on—Ziggy got sent a play called Bam-Bam-Bamboozled. It was a very cheesy sex farce, lots of girls running around with their tops falling off. Lots of jiggling and bumping. Arnie and I read it and it was very depressing—not the play but the fact that this was what Ziggy was being sent. Oh, he'd do guest spots on some TV shows now and then. He did That's Life, with Bobby Morse and E. J. Peaker, a few times, and he did a Marcus Welby episode and an Owen Marshall. And he'd still do the standup act but now fewer and fewer people wanted him to open for them. Once he got going he would run a half hour over, an hour over. Now, if you're the main attraction, that's all right—who's going to complain if Frank Sinatra decides he wants to sing four or five extra songs? But he'd be opening up for Enzo Stuarti somewhere and then he begins a thirty-minute tirade against the hotel he's staying at, and it louses up everything for Enzo and the band and the club. Vic Damone didn't want him, neither did Sergio Franchi or Julie Mansell.
So this Bamboozled play—it was promising for him, even though it was absolute dreck.
“We could tell Zig the truth, that the play should be in the sewer, or we could let him just do it,” Arnie said to me and Danny.
“Doesn't he know it should be in the sewer?” Danny asked him. “He can't possibly think it's any good, can he?”
There comes a time when you can't tell those sorts of things about people-anymore. It's usually the same time when you can't tell those sorts of things to people either.
We never told him that the play was the pits. He was the lead, Jack Harris played the evil Lothario, and there were tons of girls in it. The show went to all the small-time theaters, all over the country. In some places it did well, it some places it didn't get noticed. The ad was Ziggy dressed up as a doctor—he's got the white coat on and the stethoscope and that round surgical mirror on his forehead—and three blondes are popping out of their tight white uniforms. And, of course, Ziggy's eyes were popping out too. It was a naughty romp and it wasn't funny and I bet you he played it two thousand times. I saw the show once, in Warren, Pennsylvania. It was a dinner theater, maybe two hundred people there. Sometimes you couldn't hear the dialogue above the plates and silverware and belching. There was a lot of laughter when Ziggy had to pass himself off as a nurse—he put on a blond wig and put two cantaloupes in his dress. I didn't laugh though.
“What did you think, Sal?” he said to me backstage, when he was taking his makeup off.
“It was . . . good, Ziggy,” I said.
“And how was I?”
He still wanted to be told he was funny . . . decades and decades he'd been doing this and he still needed to hear those words.
“You were very, very funny,” I told him, and when I got into my car I almost started to cry.
VICKI FOUNTAIN: Taffy McBain was nice to me, but I didn't like her. But I was polite about it. She would get me all sorts of things, jewelry and shoes and clothing. “She's a zoccola, a troia,” Grandma would tell me. A slut. I would tell Grandma that Dad was married to her and so we had to be nice, but Grandma would say, “Okay then. Be nice. But she's still a zoccola.”
I don't think that Taffy was really buying the gifts for me—I'm pretty sure it was Ices Andy or Joe Yung, that Taffy would tell Joe what to get and then he'd go to the Broadway or to Greene's [Jewelers] and get it for me. Mom once insisted I return some earrings that Taffy had given me and when I took them back, the man at the counter said, “That Chinese guy was certain you were going to like them.”
After a year of this—I don't know if she ever got Vince anything (maybe Daddy told her not to)—Mommy just started taking the stuff and throwing it away. Taffy gave me two beautiful ruby earrings and Mom pulled them off my ears and literally flushed them down the toilet . . . “Where they belong!”
“So didn't you simply adore those emerald earrings, darling?” Taffy said to me the next time I saw her. She, Daddy, and I were having dinner at Musso and Frank.
“Yes, I did,” I told her, “but my mother flushed them down the toilet. And they were ruby earrings, Taffy.”
“Vic,” she said, “did you hear what Lulu did? My God!”
“Huh? What?” Daddy said.
He hadn't been listening to a word of it.
When it was on the news that he and Taffy were divorcing, my mother danced around the house. “I knew it!” she shrieked with joy. “I knew it! He'll come crawlin' back to me.”
GUY PUGLIA: What was it? Two years with Taffy McBain? Three? Vic dropped out of my life then. They'd go all over the world together, those two. Paris, Rome, Spain. All over. She wanted something, she points at it, it's hers. Look, you know what Vic liked to do most of all when he hit fifty? Golf. Like lots of guys. He had no interest in goin' to France and staying at the most expensive hotel in the history of the world. If he went to London, it was 'cause he had an engagement there, to sing or to film a picture. But now she was dragging him up and down the world just so she could buy stuff and hang around with famous people.
Once, he come back from staying in London for a week and told me that him and Taffy had met the queen. I says—like I could give a shit—to him, “Oh yeah. How's Her Majesty doin' anyway?” And he says to me, “Saggy tits.”
He and Taffy was on their way to Italy one time. This wasn't a trip so's she could buy more Yves Saint Laurent or Pucci, it was 'cause he was filming a cowboy movie there with George Kennedy, Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, and Diane Cilento. And what's-his-face, the guy who did them pictures and looked like he just stepped out of a deep fryer? Lee Van Cleef. And Vic and Taffy are at the Los Angeles Airport and who do they run into? Ziggy Bliss and Pernilla.
“I just stood there, Guy,” Vic says to me. “He looked at me, I looked at him. And we both just stood there. It was like a boxin' match, but with no boxin'.”
“You didn't say nothing to each other?” I asked him.
“I couldn't think of anything to say. And neither could he.”
Vic and Taffy . . . it was just like when the first marriage ended. He come to my restaurant at closing time. Chinese Joe [Yung] drove him. Vic was bagged, it was maybe 2:00 A.M.
I see him gettin' out of his Rolls, I go to take the big plastic swordfish off the wall. But then I say to myself, Aw, what the hell? And I leave it up.
“It's over,” he says to me.
“What is?” 'Cause by this time I didn't know if he meant his marriage or the TV specials or the record contract.
“Me and Taff. Dead and buried. Morto.”
“I can't say that I'm too surprised. Or too upset.”
“My mother was right,” he told me. “Taffy and I have a big fight, we scream at each other, then I buy her a big necklace to make up for it. And she goes out and bangs a thirty-year-old.”
“Hey, if it was up to your mother, you'd be married to Lulu still. Or to Angie Crosetti.”
“Yeah. Remember her? Goddamn Angie Crosetti. Firmest tits in Codport.”
I did s
ome paperwork for a few seconds and he said to me, “What's up with you and that makeup girl, huh? That Frieda girl?”
“You mean Edie. Yeah, you know, we still go out and all.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Hey, when are you gonna make this place a steak or pasta joint? I never could stand it that this place does seafood.”
“Vic, you know, the place has been successful so far. I'm goin' through some tough times here lately and—”
“Don't forget, Gaetano, I was the backer here. I put up most of the dough. And I come in and what do I see? I gotta look at the goddamn Pacific Ocean. You know how I hate that.”
“Vic, it ain't the Pacific Ocean. It's Mount Vesuvius explodin' over the Adriatic. And it's a mural. We're on the water. The customers could at least have a mural of the water.”
“I wish you'd get rid of the thing. I really do. And that goddamn swordfish on the wall.”
“I don't wanna get rid of it. It's up to me, I get rid of the mural and I put windows there and people can see the real goddamn water, which is only twenty fuckin' yards away! And I'd have twenty fuckin' fish on the wall.”
“Hey, maybe I should get rid of you,” he said, “maybe that's what I should do.”
BILLY WILSON: Vicki Fountain made a movie called Motor Psycho Nightmare for Roger Corman. By coincidence, I was in this flick too. It was sort of a hippies-meet-Hell's Angels thing and it was a pretty big mess. Vicki was one of the hippie chicks on a commune and I was one of the badass bikers who invade the commune. There was this two-minute psychedelic trip sequence in it . . . the cameraman had different color gels and jellies and squirted them at the camera and blurred everything while Vicki took her top off and danced in slow motion—you couldn't tell if you were looking at Vicki's nipples or at two splotches of raspberry jam.
Vicki knew me because Vic had introduced us a few times on the set of his movies or while filming Golfing With Vic. (Did you know that a lot of the time that you saw Vic golfing, driving the ball, or putting from far away, with Tony Hampton, that was really me driving and putting?) There were no drugs on the set of Motor Psycho Nightmare —we were all pretty straitlaced, but there was tons of drinking. And Vicki was after me. In the worst way. She was seeing Tip Farlow at the time. We were filming out in Death Valley and there wasn't much to do except drink tequila. Vicki knew I was gay and that I was married, but that didn't stop her. And she looked fantastic in tight shiny leather pants, just like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. She'd come over to my motel room at night and we'd have a few shots of tequila—we did some flaming shots too—and then she'd start to seduce me. We were both sloshed and it got a little funny. She damn near succeeded one time . . . we were in the bed with our tops off and were kissing. The damnedest thing . . . she wanted to know if I had Vic's wig and the fat pillow too. I said to her, “We're doing a biker and hippie flick, not a Vic film. Why would I have the rug and the pillow?” She said to me, slurring her words, “Come on, Billy. Put it on. Put it on for Princess Vicki.” I told her I didn't have the stuff. She wobbled over to the dresser and was flinging the drawers open, looking for the blue toup and the pillow. She was really disappointed she couldn't find them. “Can you call someone,” she asked me, “and have them send you the stuff?” We did a few more shots and she was near unconscious. I carried her to her motel room and put her to bed there. “Call me ‘puddin’,” she said when I set her down. She kept coming on to me until we finished the movie, but she gave up on the rug and the pillow.
