Funnymen

by Ted Heller

  I got a phone call in 1989 at three in the morning. It was a reporter from the Los Angeles Times and he wanted my reaction to my brother's death. I thought it was a prank. (Do you have any idea how many people would call me at some ungodly hour and ask me to frug with them and then hang up the phone?!) I said to this piece of dirt, “My brother's what?” And he told me Vincent had been found dead of a heroin overdose in the front seat of his white Buick LeSabre.

  DANNY McGLUE: My one wish is that Vince would have succeeded with his rock 'n' roll band or at least been given a chance. Vic should've been more supportive. So he didn't like the music! Big deal! It was his son. You only get so many opportunities with your kids.

  I saw Vince perform his lounge thing a few times. I caught up with him in New York, at the Rainbow Room, and I saw him at Harrah's once, with Guy and Edie. Now, I'm no mind reader or anything, but I could sense something wasn't right. I just felt it. He'd sing maybe fifteen songs, he'd snap his fingers, or close his eyes and turn on the charm and romance for a slow number. But it didn't seem remotely authentic to me. It only seemed remote.

  “He's just goin' through the motions,” Guy whispered to me while Vince was singing some torch song.

  “He's got great pipes,” Edie said. “But there's something's missing.”

  “It's called conviction,” I said.

  Patti told me only a year ago that Vincent didn't like the music he was singing. It was all an act. He hated what he was doing, he despised it. He must've been on autopilot. “It's like it's not me that the voice is coming out of,” he told her.

  ERNIE BEASLEY: Vincent's death destroyed Vic. It did. Joe Yung drove us to the funeral and Vic was so shaken up, he'd left the house without his rug on. We had to go back and get it. It put ten years on his face in one day—he was a wreck. He moved back in with Lulu the day after Vincent died.

  Any chance father and son would ever truly connect was now gone forever.

  Vic took a year off from performing. He stayed in the house a lot, watched game shows, talk shows, and soap operas. After a few months Guy and I tried to rouse his interest—we said, “Hey, let's go to Vegas, we'll shoot some dice, we'll goof around with Hunny.” And he almost went. But he said, “Nah, I'll just stay here and watch General Hospital. Maybe next week.”

  You couldn't bring up Vince . . . you could never mention his name or allude to him. It was the most forbidden of all subjects. His old bandleader, Billy Ross, once expressed his condolences and Vic never spoke to him again.

  Ziggy called Vic. A few days after Vince died. He called Lulu's house and asked to speak to him, and Vic told her he'd call Ziggy back. But she insisted he get on the phone. They spoke for a minute. Ziggy offered his condolences, asked him if there was anything he could do for him. Lulu told me that Vic said, “No . . . but thanks for calling me, buddy. I really do appreciate it.”

  A few days later Vic moved out of Lulu's place.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: The press are jackals, they're vultures—sure, everyone knows that. But the key in this business is to make them your jackals, your vultures. So, Vincent isn't in the ground one week and already here come all the goddamn vultures. The press found out what we'd been doing on Vic's TV specials. I don't know who the leak was, I got no idea if it was someone on the set or in the orchestra, but if I ever find out who the Deep Throat was I'll wring it so hard it won't be so deep anymore, let me tell you, my friend! What we'd been doing, see, was that Vincent had been singing the songs. For maybe four years. And Vic was lip-synching to them. Vic didn't have the time or the energy to sit down with a band and sing “Silent Night” or “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which, by the way, is not such an easy tune to warble. But Vincent did. And, besides, he sounded a lot more like Vic now than Vic did. So we'd bring Vincent in and he'd record the songs. Even on Vic's final record with the Lodestar label, it's Vince on four or five numbers. The press found out about it and printed it.

  To reveal to the world that we were doing this, only a week after Vic lost his son, was the lowest of the low. In the old days, when these termites had some measure of class, they would have waited. Vic was down, he was in the real lower depths, boy. And now they were kicking him again and again. You get kicked in the head a hundred times like this, you're never the same.

  He disappeared for a while. I'd get a call every now and then from him. He told me he was taking it slow. I ran into Ices Andy one day and he told me that Vic had had a colostomy only two weeks before. I had no idea.

  The next time I saw him perform—it was a year later, in Tahoe—he was having trouble remembering the words. To songs he'd sung hundreds, thousands of times. He was slurring the words, he was making up lyrics or jumbling them. I noticed that the hand holding the mike was trembling too. When he came to the part when he had to sing “Now, I've got the hang of it, I've got that Sturm and Drang of it, I've got the yin and yang of it,” he garbled it, stopped the band, and then said, “So who the hell were Yin and Yang anyways, some Peking comedy team?” It got a laugh but Estelle and I were mortified.

  I know what you're thinking: Vic often slurred his words, he often forgot-lyrics, that was his style. But this was different. This was an older man now. An old man. This was a guy who'd been around, who'd drank a lot and lived hard and who'd rocked and rolled atop the world, but now that very same world had run him over like a goddamn eighteen-wheeler.

  GUY PUGLIA: Nobody was coming to my seafood joint anymore. If I could get twenty people in there on a Saturday night, that was to me a good night. A lot of my usual customers, they got old, they retired, or they moved or died. And I'll be honest with you—the place was an old-style restaurant. The decor, the menu, the waiters. Me. Nobody drank old-fashioneds anymore, or Manhattans. You had all these new restaurants springing up, all these clubs, and half the patrons are in the bathroom snorting that cocaine or doing who-knows-what.

  We changed the place around a little. We livened the joint up as best we could, we spruced the menu up. But nobody knew about it because they drove right by us on the highway. I tried to get some publicity, and this reporter says to me, “Oh, is that the place with no windows, where Vic Fountain once beat up a reporter?” I hung up on the sonuvabitch bastard.

  With the banks and my suppliers closing in, I shut the place down. It was a sad day for me. Thirty years of my life. Gone. I'd had some good fuckin' times in there. It used to be quite a place—the celebrities, the athletes, reporters, politicians, cops, and robbers. And now the place was boarded up and there's a crane taking off the sign that said GUY'S SEAFOOD JOINT.

  Vic—he was part owner—had been tellin' me for years to close the joint down. But I resisted. One reason was the place was like my home, it was like me. It was all I knew. But I was married to Edie now, so, you know, when it happened, it happened.

  Edie and me, we didn't do nothin' for a while, we just drove around, went to movies and stuff. We was godparents to Vincent's little boy and we spent a lot of time with Patti and Little Guy. But alls of a sudden Edie says to me, she says, “You know, you could open up another restaurant, a smaller place.”

  “Yeah? What kind of place?”

  “Seafood, Guy. But maybe a shack or something. Something small.”

  “Yeah,” I says to her, “we had these places on the boardwalk in Codport. Lobster rolls, fried clams and steamers, oysters, all that stuff.”

  “It's not a bad idea, is it?” she said to me.

  I told her that maybe I'd give it some thought.

  For months that was all I thought about. I kept seein' me in this little seafood hut, slapping together an oversize lobster roll for someone, shuckin' some oysters, maybe scoopin' some Italian ices. I didn't think of nothing else. It was like when you're fifteen years old and alls you think of is girls, but now, Christ, I'm in my sixties and I'm dreaming about lobster rolls.

  I says to Edie one day, “All right, I'm gonna mention it to Vic about this Guy's Seafood Shack idea.”

  “You don't h
ave to mention it to Vic!” she says to me.

  “Whaddaya mean? He's gotta know about this.”

  “Why?”

  “Huh?

  “Why?” she said. “Why does he have to know?”

  And for the life of me, I couldn't answer her question.

  I opened up the shack right on Venice Beach. No publicity, no press, no big ballyhoo, as Arnie would call it. Just great food, a few benches and a sign, and me in my kitchen whites. And I'll kiss your ass right now if me and Edie didn't nail that big plastic swordfish to the wall.

  Oh yeah . . . you look out the little window of the hut and what do you sea? The ocean, the great big blue Pacific Ocean. 'Cause it's all around the joint.

  A month later Vic finds out about it, finds out I've got this operation goin', he hits the roof.

  EDIE PUGLIA: It might have been Hunny who told Vic. Guy and I went to Las Vegas to check up on Hunny. He was doing his greeting thing at the Oceanfront. It took him a while to remember us . . . Guy said to him, “Hey, Hunny, what's goin' on?” and Hunny said, “Thanks for coming to the Oceanfront. Good to see ya here.” “Hunny, it's me—Guy,” Guy said. “Good to see ya here,” Hunny said. “Welcome to the Oceanfront. Please come again.”

  After a few minutes he realized who we were, and Guy told him about the seafood shack. I don't gamble and Guy hadn't placed a bet for years, except very rarely at the track. (He and Jack Klein would go but after Jack stopped going, Guy stopped too.) Hunny said the next time he was in Los Angeles he would stop by and get some steamers. “They're on the house, Hun,” Guy said. Then we said good-bye and Hunny said to us, “Thanks for coming to the Oceanfront. Please come again.”

  Maybe it wasn't Hunny who told Vic, because maybe Hunny didn't remember it.

  You know, a few months later we stopped in on him again. He wasn't standing on his own power anymore. But he wasn't sitting either. People were slipping betting chips into his jacket, tipping him, and he was tilting. Guy told me that Hunny had too much pride to be piled like an old coat into a wheelchair, so they put a hook on his gold championship belt and fastened that to the wall behind him, and that kept Hunny standing.

  And he was saying less and less. He was just saying, “Good to see ya here” and nothing else. That way, Guy explained to me, he didn't have to keep track of whether people were walking into the casino or walking out.

  • • •

  PERNILLA BORG: The moneys from the movies kept Ziggy going. The movies he has done with Vic, the movies he has done in Germany. But he was hardly ever making these movies now. The reason is because he did not look like himself anymore. Yes, he had the wig and he also had the fat pillow, but he still did not look like him.

  There was going to be some sort of [a roast for] him in New York by the Friars Club and he gets very happy for this. But it is then canceled. They wanted to get Vic for the dais but he says he has previous engagement. Without Vic they do not salute Ziggy.

  Some people would come to us with offers. There is talk of bringing back the Tattletales game show, but this fizzles. So does bringing back the Win, Lose, or Draw game show. There is talk of Ziggy in little roles in many movies, but this fizzles too.

  In 1992 Ziggy woke up and has pain hurting his left eye. He could not see out of this eye. I drive him to Cedars-Sinai and he is brought into the emergency room. Many hours later a doctor tells me that we have to take out the eye right away. Does Ziggy know this? I ask, and this doctor—I did not like the way he is looking at me; he knows me from the Top Brass commercials, I can see this—tells me, no, he was unconscious. It is very tough decision for me. But I know that I have done right thing. So they operate on him and then he has a glass eye.

  When I bring him home he's very sad. For a very long time. Cousin Sally comes over, Danny comes over, Arnie and Estelle come over. He does not want to see them. They are showing his old Robin Hood movie on the television one day but he wants me to shut it off. He loses more weight, walks out of house without the wig on. His head . . . there are now only a few little red hairs on it. Sally comes over one day and tells him that Vic Fountain had called her and said he hopes that Ziggy is feeling better. “Did he really say this, Sal?” Ziggy asks. “Yes, he did,” Sally says. Ziggy smiled and then he starts feeling better.

  A few months later he is in Germany to make a movie. He flies to Munich but is told at his hotel they do not need him anymore. I tell him he can go to Sweden and visit my mother.

  He flies to Stockholm and there they try to kill him.

  ARNIE LATCHKEY: Estelle and I did everything to get him out of the funk. But some funks, when they're self-inflicted, it's like a pair of really tight pants: You got yourself into them, only you can get yourself out. There was an offer from some company to do a wacky Ziggy Bliss exercise video. We tossed that his way and he said no. He actually passed on something! That's how low he was.

  But he calls me one day and says, “Arnie, is there any slight, vague, faint ghost of a chance that Vic and me could team up together?”

  I say to him, “Was there ever a chance that Adolf Hitler and Golda Meir would wed?”

  “Nah, serious. Think about it. Me and him was lightning in a bottle.”

  “Well, this is true, Zig,” I told him, “but that bottle is old and shattered and I think the lightning might now be a firefly on dialysis.”

  “I disagree, Latch. When you got it once, you never lose it. And me and him, we got it. 'Member what Westbrook Pegler called us? ‘Table tennis with a comet.’”

  “People still ask me every day if you two are gonna ever hook back up . . .”

  “People ask me too. I bet they ask Vic. What do you tell them?”

  “I tell 'em to leave me the hell alone.”

  “Look, imagine how much publicity it'd generate. We do two weeks in Vegas, it'd be the biggest thing ever hit that burg since those A-bomb tests. We'd be all over the news, everywhere. People would be getting sick of us all over again.”

  “I just don't know about this, Ziggy.”

  “Just mention it to Vic. Would ya? Do that for me?”

  I didn't do it. I couldn't bring myself. I couldn't bring myself to have to call Ziggy back up and tell him that Vic had turned him down.

  Maybe he understood my untenable position because he calls me a week later and asks me, “Hey, I got an idear: Vic plays in Vegas and I open up for him. I do my shpritz for thirty minutes and then he comes on. He and I wouldn't even have to share a stage.”

  I screwed up my courage and said, “Zig, I can't do it.”

  ERNIE BEASLEY: There was still some demand for Vic, even into the nineties. The old records still sold, the old Pacific Coast label material. And anyone in their fifties or sixties or even their forties, if they were in Vegas or Atlantic City, or if Vic was performing in their town, they were curious to see him, to see if he still “had it.”

  But he didn't still have it. Everything caught up with him all at once. The booze and the Chesterfields, the broads, the late nights. He went to a doctor and they turned him inside out. He went on the talk shows—they were old Danny McGlue jokes—and said, “Traces of blood were found in my alcohol,” or “They found a liver on my spot.” The doctor told Vic to lose some weight, to give up the sauce, and Vic said he'd try, but he didn't, not right away. After they fiddled with his prostate gland, they found that there really wasn't one thing in particular that was ailing Vic, except the whole package was slowly breaking down. The only thing life-threatening was his life, I guess, and the way he'd lived it.

  He was a mess in concert. At first he didn't know it. He thought it was funny. But when a man cannot remember to sing the word “moon” after singing the word “Malibu . . .”

  He tried to coast on the old Vic Fountain charisma, and it worked for a while. When he screwed up, he'd just glide over it, make a booze joke. He'd say something like, “How do you expect me to know this song? I've only had four martinis!” But then, with the quivering hand and the liver spots coming in,
he couldn't coast anymore.

  I remember one time in Atlantic City when he couldn't get through “Lost and Lonely Again,” a heckler stood up and yelled, “Hey, Vic! You sure are lost! Maybe you should get your son to sing for you!” It was a horrible, horrible thing to say, on so many levels. And I'll never forget the look on Vic's face. He was frazzled, anguished—he looked utterly devastated. He walked off and canceled the rest of the engagement.

  “I don't have it anymore, Bease,” he said to me.

  “Sure you do,” I said.

  “Nah,” he said. “It's over. I lost it, baby.”

  GUY PUGLIA: Vic hated it, that I was runnin' my seafood shack. It really got under his skin. He didn't like that it was seafood, that it was on the beach; he didn't like that it was doing well. Mostly, I think he didn't like it that I was finally doing something without him. But he didn't ever come out and say that.

  “You should come check the place out, Vic,” I said to him once.

  “I'll pass, thank you.”

  I'd been seein' him less and less. That all started when Vince died. I tried to help him out. I tried but he didn't want no help. He just wanted to watch soap operas and game shows and drink. And I understood that.