Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  • • •

  VICKI FOUNTAIN: You know, despite the rock 'n' roll and those psychedelic motorcycle movies I made, I never once took any drug other than penicillin. But Andy Ravelli told me that Dad took LSD two times. Before he married Taffy McBain, he had a wild year or two. You know, he once substitute-hosted The Tonight Show for Johnny Carson and came out in a Nehru jacket and love beads. People forget that. Now, he hated rock 'n' roll music but this was like a second childhood for him. He was going out with Imogen Driscoll, the British model, at the time—she was the famous Rodolfo Negri model. Cary Grant had told Daddy about LSD and Dad had said, “Sounds like a few Manhattans too many. That don't scare me.” He asked Vincent if he knew where he could get some and, an hour later, Daddy had some. He made sure, though, to never tell the press that he'd taken it. I guess he understood that he was a role model; back then you expected your role models to drink a lot, to chase girls and gamble and fight, but that was it.

  He and Imogen took the LSD together. “This stuff has got me all wacky,” he said. Ices Andy was there with them—he didn't take anything, just in case there was trouble.

  “You okay, Vic?” Andy would ask him.

  “Oh, baby, I'm soarin' all over the place over here, man,” Dad said.

  Everybody said Imogen was gorgeous, they called her the British Verushka, but I thought she was just a little too stringy. And it would've helped, a shower every now and then.

  “You okay, Imogen?” Andy asked her.

  “Everything's just smashing over here, luv,” she said.

  “Hey, puddin',” Vic suggested, “let's fly to Vegas. Right now.”

  “Oh, God no,” Imogen said. “Let's not.”

  “Hey, Ices, put on some of my old music,” Daddy said. “Let's see how ‘Malibu Moon’ sounds on this zany stuff.”

  “Oh, God no,” Imogen said again. “Let's not.”

  I think after that experience, he got rid of Imogen Driscoll.

  I married Johnny Hylan in 1973. Dad didn't like Johnny, but I don't think he ever approved of any of my boyfriends or husbands. Johnny was a child star, he'd been on The Big Ranch on NBC when he was a kid and had done a couple of movies since then. He was very, very handsome but he drank a lot. He was moody and had a horrible temper.

  We'd been married for two years and one night, for no reason at all, Johnny hit me. Well, it wasn't for no reason—I knew he was cheating on me with [actress] Pam Newford. Now, to be honest, I'd been no angel either, but he had no idea about that! So I accused him about Pam—who was my friend—and he hit me and then, as soon as he hit me, he ran out of the house. I called Dad and he wasn't home but Joe Yung picked me up and brought me over. When Andy Ravelli saw the way I looked, well, he knew what'd happened. I asked him where Daddy was and he said that Pete Conifer had died and that Daddy was in Vegas. (Pete had died in one of those autoerotic stunts; he was doing something to himself with a toaster and another thing with panties around his neck.) Joe Yung put some ice on my face to ease the swelling, and I asked him, “So what's in the cellar here?” He said, “I not know, I not know. No one allow down there.” I said, “Let's go check it out.” He shook his head and waved his hands and said, “No one allow down there.” I asked Joe if my father ever went down there and he said, “Yes. Many times. He in cellar many times. But he always alone.”

  Ices Andy called Dad at the Oceanfront and told him about me and Johnny.

  It was sad how he reacted . . . it revealed to me how old people were getting. Daddy called Hunny and told him to work over Johnny so he never could get an acting part again unless it was in a commercial for mashed potatoes. But Hunny was in such bad shape—he couldn't beat anyone up! He couldn't even swat a mosquito anymore. It was sad to me that Daddy still thought that Hunny could hurt anyone.

  It went all wrong. A week later I was back home, with Johnny. The doorbell rang and Johnny got it and it was Hunny at the door. Hunny had tried to sort of “goon” himself up; he had a black woolen ski mask on his head. But his head was so big that he had to slit the mask so it fit, and you could completely see his face. Johnny even said to him when he answered the door, “Hey, Hunny. What are you doing here?”

  Hunny said, “I wanna speak to Johnny Hylan.”

  “It's me—Johnny,” Johnny said. “What's with the Halloween getup?”

  “Is this 430 South Holt?” Hunny said. “I'm lookin' for Vicki Fountain's home.”

  “Hunny,” Johnny said, “it's me. Johnny Hylan. Vicki's on the couch.”

  “Hi,” I said with a wave to him. “Why are you wearing a ski mask that's split open?”

  And then Hunny threw a punch at Johnny. He missed him by two feet and fell to the ground. He hit his head against the open door. Johnny and I dragged Hunny into the house and put towels on his forehead. His head felt so strange—it wasn't like touching a person's flesh, it was more like foam padding, like in a car seat.

  GUY PUGLIA: You know, before Hunny got the job as a greeter in Vegas, he moved back to New York, back to Yorkville. What Is It?, that game show he did for years, had been off the air for, Jesus, it had to be fifteen years by then. But you know what he'd do? At nine o'clock in the morning, which is when they used to tape that show, he'd still show up. He'd go to the theater to tape the show and the guard at the front desk would have to tell him that the show wasn't on the air no more. For five years, that went on.

  And it was the same thing with his bar. For years after it closed, he still showed up at the Hunny Pot, thinking he had business to do. But it'd become a Chinese takeout joint by then. This big palooka with no teeth and with scars all over his big square head shows up every day at this place, and the Chinese guys—they didn't know what to make of Hunny—they had to turn him away. Once in a while they even called the cops. “My bar was right here,” Hunny told the cops. “It was here yesterday, I swear it.”

  SNUFFY DUBIN: Who got Hunny the greeter gig? You think it was Vic? No way. Uh-uh. Vic never got anything for Hunny but girls and another round. I did it. When Pete Conifer bought the fucking farm with the toaster and the soiled panty hose, Wanda [Mrs. Pete Conifer] took over as entertainment director. First thing she did was hire Hunny as a greeter. No, that was the second thing. The first thing she did was have workmen seal up and plug up all the little peepholes and secret nooks and crannies that Pete had been using. The man had cameras over beds and over toilet stalls, for Christsake. It was a big job undoing all that.

  So Hunny became a greeter. And it was pretty sad. He stands in front of the entrance to the casino with his gold silk robe on and championship belt. On the robe it said in red stitching THE MOLASSES MAULER. “Hey, champ,” people would say to him and then slip a few casino chips into his jacket pocket. Five-dollar chips usually. And the thing is, Hunny'd never been a champion. He never contended for the crown. But still, they had this big gold belt and jewels made up for him, and there was more paste in that belt than in the Elmer's glue factory.

  “Thanks for coming to the Oceanfront,” he would say when he shook people's hands as they walked in or walked out. “Good to see ya here. Please come again.” Jesus, it took the guy two weeks before he could even commit that to memory.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY:Golfing With Vic was the one constant, the port in the storm. And it was Vic's idea too. See, Minnesota Fats had this Celebrity Billiards TV show for a while and each week he'd take on a celebrity in pool. Believe me, it wasn't Laurence Olivier or Dame Edith Evans chalking up their pool cues every week. Vic called me up one morning and told me to watch this show. I turned it on and said, “Yeah? So what? Dan Blocker is shootin' eight ball. Big deal.” And he said to me, “Latch, we move this thing outdoors, you put a six-iron in my hands and replace Blocker with Jimmy Stewart, it's a gold mine.”

  He was right. And he could have used a gold mine at that point because the records were dying. Pacific Records dropped him and there were actually two years that Vic didn't have a contract, before we signed with Sherm Kaplan's Lodestar label. But thos
e records didn't move either. You know, Frank Sinatra, when his career was in the dumps, recorded a song with a barking dog. And Vic was worried that this was also his fate. “Latch, if it ever comes to that,” he said to me once, “just have me put to sleep.” But in the seventies he was saying, “Latch, if it ever comes to that, just make sure the dog don't sing better than me.”

  We took the Golfing With Vic idea to all the networks and nobody bit on it. “Come on,” I said to some hotshot programming virtuoso at ABC half my age, “Vic Fountain on a golf course! Golfing with Hank Fonda! Talkin' Tinsel Town and tee shots! This couldn't sink if you filmed it aboard the Andrea Doria!” The guy wouldn't go for it, that shmendrick. And ABC was the one with that American Sportsman show! You had Curt Gowdy and some guest like Ernie Borgnine or Chad Everett stalking the wild Chihuahua in the wilds off Baffin Bay. I said to this Einstein in a Pierre Cardin suit, “Look, no rifles, no bullets, no carcasses, just fairways and greens and Vic.” Nope. Threw us out on our asses. For years we shopped this around, knowing that this was beluga caviar at the end of our fishing line, not chopped liver. In 1972 I got a phone call from MIS-TV, which syndicated a few shows here and there, and they said they were interested. They were very wary, however, of working with Vic; they'd heard all the rumors about the drinking and gambling and skirt-chasing. I said to the man, “Look, that's the old Vic. You put Vic on a golf course and it's like you're working with a baby on sedatives with a pacifier in his mouth.”

  Within a year this show was on in every state in the country, including Alaska, and who knows if Alaska even has golf? Or grass! The show usually ran on Saturday mornings and was a half hour long. We got some bigname people too . . . Vic called in a lot of favors he'd done for people over the years. After the first two seasons, Vic got his golf buddy Tony Hampton to join up, to ease his burden. And then the next season we put Joe Yung on to drive them around in a cart and make everyone highballs. It was a fantabulous arrangement. You film for four days a month, you bring in George Peppard or Joey Heatherton, and then you edit and play around with the thing to give it some shape, texture, and oomph. A lot of times we'd have to bring Vic back in to the studio to do some narration since there really wasn't much going on at all. Or we'd film his half of a conversation he'd supposedly been having with a guest.

  Like I said, this was a godsend for us, for Vic. It was an easy buck. And by the late seventies and early eighties, Vic was only taping one special a year for CBS. It used to be Vic would have an Easter special, a Christmas special, a Super Bowl special, a Thanksgiving special. Little by little they whittled it down. “They're takin' all the holidays away from me,” Vic bemoaned to me once. They always let him do a Christmas show though. But then they finally took that one away too.

  • • •

  ERNIE BEASLEY: I'm an alcoholic. I was even an alcoholic as far back as the Brill Building days, when I heard all that laughter and jollity coming from the Vigorish offices. I lived in Greenwich Village then, on Jane Street in a little walk-up, and I had three things in that apartment: a mattress, a radio, and always a bottle of Jim Beam.

  I needed to get help now. My money was going. I was just pissing it all away. For years I hung around with Vic, rode along on his coattails, and believe me that roller-coaster ride was a ball, but it was first-class and expensive. We'd go to Paris and stay at the Ritz or some other place and, sure, Vic footed the tab for the room but, still, I'm in Paris and I'm eating the best food and buying antiques and wining and dining boys. One week in 1964, we stayed at the Crillon and I met this beautiful boy named Phillippe, maybe nineteen years old. What a face this boy had, what gorgeous, smooth skin. We went everywhere together; I bought him clothing, furniture, anything he wanted; when Vic went back to California, Phillippe and I went to Honfleur together and spent a marvelous five days there, driving along the coast in a Citroën, drinking and eating and buying little tchotchkes. On the last morning, I woke up in our room and the bed was empty except for the bottle of Dom Pérignon I was cuddling. It was windy and the balcony doors were open and the curtains were blowing around. I went out to the balcony but Phillippe wasn't there either. He wasn't anywhere and there was no note and my wallet was empty.

  Vic's music publishing company was called Straight Up With a Twist Music. Every song I wrote after 1952 was for Straight Up Music and was a Beasley and Fountain tune. Once in a while Vic would pass on a song and someone else would do it—Miss Leslie Wilson, Andy Williams, Vic Damone, Barbara McNair—but Vic always had the right of first refusal. Leslie Wilson had a hit with “He'll Fade Away” and when Vic found out I'd written it, he hit the roof.

  “Why didn't you give me this song, Bease!?” he yelled at me. “Why didn't you show me this song first?! That's our deal!”

  “I did,” I told him. “I played it for you at the Ambassador two months ago. You said you weren't interested.”

  “Well . . . yeah! I mean, the song is that ‘ he'll fade away.’ I sing this song, they'll think I'm some kind of candy-assed finocchio. No offense.”

  “When I sang it for you, Vic,” I told him, “it was ‘ she'll fade away.’ You passed on it, Miss Leslie Wilson's people liked it, and I changed the lyrics and retailored it for her.”

  “Well, enough of these alterations with my lyrics!”

  But, of course, they were not his lyrics. They were mine. All of them.

  When the hits dried up for him, when his records failed and when others succeeded, I was the whipping boy. When “Moon River” came out and was a huge hit, Vic took it personally.

  “Why didn't you write this song?!” he called me on the phone and yelled.

  “Because Henry Mancini already did,” I explained to him.

  “This is gonna be a smash for Andy Williams! And my last single didn't even make it past forty on the charts.”

  “I'm sorry. I'm trying.”

  “‘Moonlight in Vermont.’ ‘Malibu Moon.’ You used to do swell songs about the moon, Bease,” he said to me. “What happened?”

  “I don't know, Vic. I guess the moon dried up for me. And I didn't write ‘Moonlight in Vermont.’”

  “See! That's what I mean!”

  And, my God, when the Rolling Stones or the Beatles had a big hit, he would let me have it even then too. He loathed that music. He had [folk singer] Melanie sing one of her hits on his Christmas special once—he mistakenly called her Melanzane —and I thought he was going to barf backstage. He always thought if I could get him the right song, he could top them.

  So in the late sixties he stopped recording my songs. I tried everything I could for him, bossa nova, calypso, even a few country-and-western tunes for his A Nashville Kind of Vic LP. But it didn't work. So he passed on everything. And—and this was what destroyed me—he used his right of first refusal to prevent me from passing anything on to anybody else. He merely had to say he would consider recording a song, and then nobody else would be able to hear it. And nobody else did. Or, if someone wished to record one of my older standards, Vic used his power as “lyricist” to deny them use. If you've ever wondered why Sinatra never recorded “Someone Such as You,” this is why.

  It was a low point for me. I could not succeed and after a while, I could not write. I had a boy named Bradley living with me then, helping me around the house, driving me, dining with me. My weight was out of control . . . I was drinking morning to night and through the night if I couldn't sleep, which was the usual case. My weight—I went from a balloon to a blimp. Bradley left me too . . . he drove off in my Mercedes one day and was gone. You know, many of Vic's big songs were “signature” songs. “The Hang of It” was his “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”—you rarely hear anyone but Tony Bennett sing that song because who else would dare to? So nobody else was singing these songs but Vic. And the money was drying up.

  Well, it was time for me to dry up too. My physician told me about the Hope Springs Clinic just outside Los Alamos, New Mexico, and, after much deliberation, denial, and, yes, getting blitz
ed, I packed my bag and went. I was there for six weeks and haven't had a drop to drink since.

  One day at the clinic, I was talking to one of the orderlies there, a tall, goateed black man from Alabama named John Timmons. Big John, everyone called him. I was bragging about all the famous people I knew and somehow I mentioned Vic and Ginger Bacon. When I said Ginger Bacon I saw a tiny silvery twinkle in John Timmons's eye, and I said, “Do you know her?” He was reluctant to talk about it, probably because of patient confidentiality and all that rigmarole, but I kept pressing him.

  [He told me] that Ginger Bacon had been a patient at Hope Springs about three years before. How do I know it was the same Ginger? Big John described her; the Ginger he described was a chain smoker, a mess of wrinkles and furrows and gray hair—which was not my Ginger, except for the smoking—but she had, he said, the longest legs he'd ever seen. And she still was a strawberry blonde. She'd gone through their rehab program and was just a week from being discharged when she bolted. They issued an APB for her but the police and state troopers couldn't find her. A week after she'd vanished, the clinic got a phone call from the Albuquerque police. Ginger had been found in a cathouse in Reno, Nevada . . . she'd worked there almost ten years before, it seems, and had fled back there. But poor Ginger—she was one of the dearest friends I ever had—had slit her wrists and was dead.