Funnymen
Page 49
She wound up marrying Tip Farlow. That “young rebel attorney” TV show he did was hot for a spell, but then died. I think they divorced after three years. I heard he used to mistreat her. I believe it. I remember hearing on the Golfing With Vic set that he'd hit her, slapped her around. I felt really, really bad for her. Vic's kids—I felt bad for both of them.
• • •
ANNA LIPSCOMBE [actress; Clive Bonteen's widow]: My husband was an enormous fan of the American cinema, especially the comedies. Growing up poor in Liverpool, Clive had found solace in Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, Fountain and Bliss. His first play, Disease Puddle Cripple Swimming, would have been unimaginatively different were it not for his deep affection for those wonderful clowns; the interplay of violence between Pudd, Dudd, and Thudd really does smack of the Three Stooges, whom Clive also adored. Bitch Plague Sonata, as many a critic has noted, is essentially a Laurel and Hardy scenario set during an horrific epidemic.
When Fountain and Bliss broke up, Clive told me that he would love to write a play for Ziggy Bliss, who he said was the one true child of Chaplin, Keaton, Groucho. His publisher at Webber & Holdsclaw, Desmond Thornton, contacted Ziggy Bliss's agents but Ziggy didn't seem interested and had not—or so he claimed—ever heard of my husband or his plays, a fact which delighted Clive to no end. “This only proves how truly perfect he is,” Clive said.
We were living in Paris at the time and Ziggy was in Germany filming a movie called, I believe, Honkers Over Heidelberg —that was the English title of the movie, at least. One weekend Clive and I drove to Germany in our red Renault and met Ziggy Bliss there. This was 1974 and the movie was being filmed outside Munich, despite the title. We were at first startled by Ziggy's appearance—he was much thinner in person and his famed mop of blazing red hair was sparse in places. He also had thick grayish bags under his eyes. Perhaps it was from popping his eyes out and crossing them, I suggested to Clive. “It's perfect, it's so brilliant,” Clive said. “The tragic clown, the wretched court jester to the cosmos knocked down by the gods. Food for worms, a can of laughter for vermin. So perfect.” And thus was his next play born.
PERNILLA BORG: I did not ever see any Clive Bonteen's plays but when Ziggy signed to do the Can of Hell Laughter play, I made sure to catch Drama: Mean in London. It is a very depressing and sad play, yes? Eddie Bramshill was in this play when Ziggy and I saw it—he was once the boyfriend of Julie Mansell, who had performed with Ziggy. We go backstage after play to talk to Eddie but he will not speak to us, because of some sort of thing between Julie and Ziggy and what it is, I don't know. But when Ziggy sees all the applause at the theater he says to me that he will do the Laughter in Can play. I warned Ziggy that this was complete switch in his life, to do Honkers Over Heidelberg movie and then do this drama about life on earth after atom bombs wipe out everyone but one man. But he said that he had “range,” that he can do Japanese accent, Spanish accent, German accent, he can play young baby boy and senile old woman, so why cannot he play one survivor of apocalypse then?
ARNOLD LATCHKEY: Ziggy with that loony British playwright? Oy vey! I'll tell ya something: If Ziggy Bliss ever wrote an autobiography he would never have mentioned it—it wouldn't have gotten one sentence. Why? Because he was ashamed? Because he was embarrassed? No. The reason is because I don't think he ever remembered a second of it. He was really taking those pills then, the pep pills and then the antipep pills, like he was on a seesaw.
You know, a lot of comedians are hung up on being taken seriously. So you've got Gleason doing that dumb clown Gigot movie and Jerry Lewis with his concentration camp movie that never came out. But that wasn't Ziggy . . . he didn't care if anybody took him seriously. I mean, at this point in his career he just wanted to be taken, period.
ANNA LIPSCOMBE: We met Ziggy in the lobby bar of his hotel, and he and Clive hit it off splendidly. We'd met Olivier, Gielgud, Burton, and Scofield but Clive always regarded them as toffs and was humbled now to be in the presence of a man he regarded as a genuine, instinctual artist. Clive mentioned Pinter, Derek Bond, Beckett, and Ionesco to Ziggy, and Ziggy expertly feigned never having heard of them. “What sort of theater do you go in for then, Mr. Bliss?” Clive asked him, and Ziggy cleverly responded, “Hellzapoppin',” which we'd never heard of but which immediately struck Clive as some sort of dark, postapocalyptic farce—King Lear amidst glowing radioactive ashes. “Hellzapoppin'!” Clive responded. “Yes, of course! Brilliant!” When we returned to our hotel room, Clive kept saying, “Hellzapoppin'!” For days he said it and he would erupt in childish giggles at the very uttering of the word. Ziggy, I remember, had told us his favorite movie ever was The Horn Blows at Midnight, a Jack Benny movie; he told us that he'd been trying to remake the movie but that nobody in Hollywood would finance or consider the project. “It bombed for Jack,” he told us, “but I just know I could make it click.” Clive asked what the movie was about, and Ziggy said it was about angels, fallen angels and musicians and blowing a trumpet and ending the world. “God, that does sound utterly magnificent,” Clive said, “angels and the end of the world.” “But it bombed for Jack,” Ziggy reminded us.
When we returned to Paris, Clive immediately began writing A Can of Laughter in Hell. Like many great artists, he enjoyed a drink every now and then and often in the moments in-between too. So, fueled by rye, espressos, and Gauloises and ultimately by Dilaudid, Clive finished the play in fourteen hours. We sent the play to Munich but did not hear from Ziggy for a week. It turned out that he had to fly to the States for a funeral. But perhaps two weeks later we received a phone call at our apartment on Rue Mabillon. “This stuff is kooky, Clive,” Ziggy told my husband, “it's completely cockamamie.” I shall never forget the sight of my husband on the phone, his beautiful long fingers stroking his long, slightly matted black beard, his eyes opening and closing almost spasmodically. “Do you not like it then, Ziggy?” he asked. “Like it?!” Ziggy replied. “I don't even get it!” And my husband burst out in laughter and said, “Yes, of course. Of course, yes.”
It was the first play that Clive ever directed. By then, he had come to feel that he and he alone could truly animate his own vision, only he could understand it and translate it from his soul, to his words, to the stage. Also, at this time, not too many directors wished to work with Clive. He resented—he detested—any slight change from the text. On one infamous occasion he stopped in at the Haymarket Theatre to see how his “trilogy” of short plays [ Corpse, Coffin, Crypt] was doing; in Coffin he noticed that instead of the semihemidemiquaver pause he'd written in at one point in the dialogue, the actor had turned it into only a semidemi pause. He got up from his seat and stormed the stage and closed the play down. He was like that, a difficult perfectionist, yes, but he was truly a brilliant, inspired artist.
A Can of Laughter in Hell is a one-man play and so Clive explained to Ziggy that he, Ziggy, was a living, moving, breathing extension of Clive's soul on the stage. “You are my words, my thoughts, my nightmares become flesh, my very breath,” he told Ziggy. “Okay, Clive,” Ziggy said, “but maybe you wanna try some mouthwash then.” Ziggy was always making Clive laugh—I can still see him laughing, the saliva cackling out of his mouth, cascading down his beard, dousing his Gauloise.
[Ziggy had to] affect a Cockney accent in the play and he did not need any coaching at all—it was miraculous how he just did it. And he had no problem committing the words to memory. Even though he was the only actor in the play, there was much for him to say—he interacts with props, such as chairs, shoes, a wireless, a broom, and with unseen creatures such as mice, cockroaches, and the ghosts of his lover and others. It's no exaggeration to say that after reading the play three times and rehearsing it but twice, he knew the play as well as the playwright himself. “It's almost as if he himself had written it,” Clive told Ken Tynan. “At last, I have found my amanuensis [sic]! He makes my words sing, he dances my dance with limbs of fire.�
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There were two weeks of previews and things went very well in the first week. An audience usually left a Clive Bonteen play disturbed and dismayed, sometimes disgusted even, and this was Clive's desired effect. “No person should ever desire to see one of my plays twice,” he once said. “If that happens, I have failed miserably.” He told John Osborne once that he knew he'd succeeded if he ever saw a patron retching immediately upon leaving the theater. However, just a few days before the play opened—it was at the Old Vic, by the way—Ziggy granted an interview to the Evening Standard and told the reporter that he had no idea what the play was about, other than a man talking to a broom. “No idea at all, Mr. Bliss?” the reporter inquired. “Can you not even tell us the basic thrust?” “It's basically about me making a paycheck,” Ziggy said. Clive read this but was not bothered by it—he even told Ziggy he appreciated that sort of ironical detachment. “He entirely inhabits his character off the stage,” he wrote to Ken Tynan, “and it is frightening.” However, two nights before the play opened, Ziggy gave another interview—it was to the Guardian this time—and he took it several steps further. He said that Clive had tried to write slapstick and vaudevillianesque sight gags but had failed embarrassingly. “I'm supposed to dance with a broom in a certain way, to do like a tango,” Ziggy said, “and I do, just like Bonteen tells me to. But if it was up to me, I'd do it my own way and I'd get five times the laughs.” The reporter asked him, “Mr. Bliss, do you know what the play is about?” and Ziggy Bliss replied, “Oh yeah . . . it's about forty-five minutes too long.”
Well, Clive and he had a real, old-fashioned row about it the night before the premiere, a slanging match the likes of which I'd never seen before or since. When Ziggy raised his voice, it really was like a cannonade . . . he even broke the stage manager's glasses. Ziggy stuck to his guns; he told Clive that he really did not understand the play, that he thought when it tried to be tragic it was funny, and when it tried to be funny it was tragic. Clive at first refused to believe this but then he accepted it and said, “All right . . . but please do not tell every person in London that you do not understand it! It makes you look the idjit you apparently are!” Further complicating the matter, Ziggy was refusing to wear the cushion he was supposed to wrap around his waist; he said it was making him sweat too much. But Clive insisted that he wear it. “Without the cushion,” Clive screamed at him, “you just look like any fifty-five-year-old Yid wasting away!”
They shouted and railed at each other for nearly an hour. It was brutal, absolutely brutal. Clive could not stop stroking his beard, and Ziggy said to him, “Keep lookin', Bonteen—maybe you'll find a cigarette in there.” “You were my vision and now you're nothing but an arsehole!” Clive yelled at him, and Ziggy yelled back, “Hey, maybe it ain't me, maybe it's your vision.”
Well, Ziggy wore the lard cushion for opening night. For the first act only. Actually, he took it off in the middle of the first act . . . and I must say, this got the most laughter all night. “I don't need this girdle,” he said as he stripped himself of it. The audience thought it was part of the play and erupted in laughter. I whispered to Clive, “Perhaps you should keep that in, darling.” But he said, “Shut the bloody hell up, Annie.”
• • •
SALLY KLEIN: In 1973 my son and Vince were on LSD together in Los Angeles, at a friend of their's house. I knew that Vince was doing drugs and I knew that Donny and he were friends, but it didn't occur to me that Donny was into that garbage too. He didn't dress like a hippie, he didn't talk like one. He had a job, he had short hair, he wore a suit and tie, and was a college graduate. It just didn't occur to me. When a policeman called me and told me that my son was in the hospital because he had jumped out of a window—even then it didn't occur to me.
Donny had severed his spine—he'd broken his legs and ruptured his spleen too. He was paralyzed. I didn't tell Jack that night . . . it would've killed him for sure. I went to the hospital alone and I saw Donny in his bed and he didn't open his eyes and I kissed him on his hair—he had such beautiful brown curly hair. I spent the whole night holding his hand. Vince was there and they had him on tranquilizers. The policeman told me what had happened . . . there was a party, there were drugs, Donny was having a bad LSD trip and freaking out or whatever you call it. And he jumped out the window. My beautiful, wonderful boy lived for six months more but then he caught pneumonia and died.
When I told Jack that Donny was paralyzed he took it like he always took bad news. He kept it in. He didn't scream, he didn't cry or throw anything. He just withdrew into himself. To tell you the truth, after this happened, he didn't really say much afterward. He just kept to himself. He stopped going to the track, stopped reading the papers. He was a sad, broken man.
Ziggy was in Germany when Donny died and flew over with Pernilla for the funeral. Vic was at the funeral, so were his sister Cathy and his mother and many people from the old days: Billy Ross, Mickey Knott, Marty Miller. Vic and Ziggy did not exchange a word to each other, they didn't shake hands or hug or anything. Vince had trouble looking me in the face. He felt guilty and I don't blame him. Ziggy came over and hugged me. I looked at him and it was the first time I saw him as an adult, as a man, not as my funny-looking cousin from Echo Beach who peed on my father's couch. He was crying and he said, “Sally . . . poor Cousin Sally. I love you so much.” He was devastated. Me, I wasn't devastated. You know what I was? I was dead inside.
Vic sent Guy Puglia over to me. Guy was also in tears. He and Donny had played softball and run on the beach together when Donny was a kid. And when we'd eat at Guy's restaurant he always put Donny on his shoulders and brought him into the kitchen. Guy gave me a hug and said he'd come over to sit shivah but that Vic couldn't. Because he knew that Ziggy would be there and that he didn't want to create an awkward situation. “He doesn't want to create one or he doesn't want to be in one?” I asked, and Guy shrugged.
Three months after this, I went to London to see Ziggy in that silly play he was doing for that nutty playwright. It had gotten tepid reviews. I'd seen a Clive Bonteen play in Los Angeles years before; it was about two mental patients in an insane asylum who turn out to be the same person, I think. Leaving the theater I'd asked Jack, “So? What did you think?” And he said, “I was thinking about the Dodgers, frankly.”
But by the time I saw Laughter in the Can it wasn't really a Bonteen play anymore. He'd disavowed it, he had his name taken off the marquee and off the ads in the papers. You really would have thought that nobody wrote the play; the marquee just said ZIGGY BLISS IN . . . The play would never be staged again—no great loss. And it was funny now! I suppose Ziggy sort of kept to the script at first but then he just made the play his own. He gave it all he had—well, he was taking the pills then and I think that was a big part of it. He'd be dancing with a broom and then he'd toss the broom down and then he'd bring girls from the audience up on the stage and dance with them. He would lead games of Simon Says with the audience, and you know what else he did? He would sing “The Itty-Bitty Ditty,” Danny's old song. And, of course, he'd toss in a few Vic references as well, like putting a noose around his head and singing “The Hang of It.” Ziggy would be doing some of the original Bonteen dialogue—I guess you'd call it a monologue, since it was a one-man play—and then break into Yiddish or other accents. There were some people who'd seen the show four or five times, Ziggy told me, because you never did know what would happen. But after three months, Clive Bonteen closed it down—it wasn't his show anymore. And it was a good thing because I think it was exhausting Ziggy.
He came back to the States and toured with Bam-Bam-Bamboozled again. He had Hank Stanco contact Bonteen—for a brief while it looked like Ziggy might be able to put together a musical version of the Jack Benny bomb The Horn Blows at Midnight. Ziggy for some reason thought that Clive Bonteen might want to write the book for it. “The man loved it,” Ziggy told me. “He said it was utterly magnificent.” But Bonteen never returned Hank's calls.