Funnymen (63 page)

“So it's all over,” Ziggy said.

“You never know,” Danny said.

“Oh, I know. I know.”

“It might not be such a bad thing,” I said.

“They said that about Pearl Harbor, Sal,” Ziggy said.

“No,” Danny said, “I don't think they did.”

“It must have been the Malibu Moon,”
Ziggy sang,
“that made me fall in love with you. It must have been that light in your eyes, those cocktails of silver and blue.”

“Hey, if the comedy thing doesn't work out,” Danny joked, “you could always try your hand at singing.”

Ziggy lay back, it was like it was daytime and he was trying to get a tan . . . he had his arms behind him and his head in his hands. Then he sat back up and said, “So how miserable has it been? How miserable?” I looked at him, didn't say anything. “For twenty-five years now. This is a nightmare for you, for the two people who're the closest to me.”

“Ziggeleh, this isn't the time for this,” Danny said.

“What? You want we all should go surfing now?!”

Danny took some sand in his hands and let it sift out.

Ziggy said, “About ten years ago Vic and I were playing Baltimore. We're between shows. A stagehand comes to my dressing room and says to me, ‘There's a fella here says he'd like to meet you.' I say to him, ‘There's lotsa fellas like that.' The stagehand says, ‘This guy says he knew your parents. He knew them from vaudeville.' I looked at my watch . . . I had a half hour to kill and nuttin' to kill it with, so I say, sure, show the fella in.”

A cloud passed by the moon and Ziggy started humming “Malibu Moon” again for a few bars.

“So this little fella comes in and he's maybe in his seventies or eighties and he's in a tux. But this tux had seen much better days, like in maybe 1830. He's very shy. I tell him to sit down anywheres, even though there's only one place to sit down. The old man has a handlebar mustache and this thing had more wax on it than a candle factory. He says to me, ‘I've wanted to meet you for the longest time.' And I said, ‘Oh yeah. Why's that?' But he didn't answer. He says to me he knew my parents, he knew them a long time ago. He was a magician, he says, way back when, in that vaudeville troupe Harry and Flo used to bomb in regularly.”

“The Bratton company?” I said.

“Yeah. Them. So this little guy—and what kinda accent he's got, I don't know—asks me if I ever by any chance saw him perform his magic act. I told him the truth, I said, ‘Uh-uh. My parents never took me on the road. I saw 'em perform only once and that was the night I got my start. As I unnerstand it, I wasn't missin' nuttin'.' He sort of grimaced and said, ‘You shouldn't talk that way about them. They were nice people. They worked very hard.' I said to him, ‘Well, now
I'm
workin' hard, carrying on the tradition.' He told me he'd been following my career, he'd seen me perform up and down the East Coast, from Miami Beach to Boston. ‘Your parents would be very proud of you,' he said to me. I says to him, ‘They wouldn't even recognize me, pal.' He started tellin' me about some of the other acts in the troupe . . . he talked about this brother-and-sister regurgitating act; they could swallow anything and bring it back up and had even worked it out somehow so's the brother swallows a champagne glass and then the sister brings it up. I say to him, ‘Jesus, I am sure glad I've made it in the big time.' And he says to me, ‘And so am I.' He stood up and buttoned his jacket . . . except the button fell to the floor. I say to this little old guy, ‘Buddy, why don't you let me get you a new tuxedo?' and I pull out a wad as thick as
Webster's Dictionary.
But he waved his hands over it. He don't want my dough. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and—can you believe this?—he reaches down and kisses my head! He
kissed my hair! This guy did that! I looked up at him and he was crying. Not like sobbin' or nuttin', just crying.”

“This guy had been a magician since before the dawn of time,” Ziggy said. “He'd probably been makin' rabbits disappear on the boat over, wherever he came from. Can you imagine that? Probably never made more than ten bucks a show and he stuck at it.”

“Whatever happened to him?” I asked. “Did you ever see him again?”

“No. He was on his last legs. You could tell he'd be dead in a year.”

I heard footsteps behind me. I looked back. It was Jack in his black pajamas. He saw me with Danny and Ziggy. I told him everything was all right, that I'd be in soon, and he went back to bed.

“I ruined you guys' lives, didn't I?” Ziggy said.

I swallowed, I heard Danny swallow. Danny started to say something but Ziggy said, “Nah, it's the truth. I ruined you guys' lives.”

“I happen to be very happy with Jack,” I said.

“But if it wasn't for me, you could be with Danny.” He shook his head, then said, “Hey, look at me! I got a wife who didn't even let me circumcise my own son and who's got magnets on her fingers when she walks into Bergdorf Goodman. I make whores laugh, I buy 'em chinchilla and sable and diamond earrings and make 'em laugh, and they permit me to sleep with 'em. What a life I've got. But you two . . . Jesus, I'm sorry.”

“Things have worked out,” Danny said. “They have.”

He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, “What am I gonna do?”

“About what?” Danny asked him.

“About everything. I gotta chart the rest of my life out. I gotta make a map. And I've started on it. And right now, all roads are leadin' me straight into the grave.”

“That is nonsense,” I said. “That is utter nonsense.”

“Then where do I go? Where the hell do I go?”

“Ziggy, I really believe,” Danny said, “that you can go as far as you want to.”

“I do. Sally?”

“I think so too,” I said.

Ziggy said, “Straight into the grave.”

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
For over twenty years, a hundred times a day I got asked the same damn question: “Will Fountain and Bliss ever get back together again?” I answered it the same way every single time: “God, I hope not.”

After Vic did the Cal-Neva engagement he and I had dinner. I wanted to get everything straight, I wanted to know where I stood with him or if I still stood at all. He was with some girl, I don't even remember who she was, I don't think she said a word the entire meal.

“Latch, you're still my guy,” he told me.

“We go back a long ways.” “We sure do, Vic,” I said to him. “Remember jumping off that train in the Catskills together?”

“I think I still got the black-and-blue marks,” he said. “So, uh, are you my guy, Latch? You'll still handle me and all?”

“What? I got something else going on in my life?

” But I did. I did.

Because the night before, I'm in bed and the phone rings and Estelle tells me, “It's Ziggy.”

“Ziggeleh, darling,” I said.

“Arnie, you spoken to Vic of late?”

“Well, uh, you know, I, uh . . .” I was new at this thing, this high-wire balancing act. I didn't know what to say, what not to say, and to whom to say it and not say it to.

“Are you still gonna be my guy, Latch?” Ziggy asked me.

And I said to him, “What? I got something else going on in my life?”

You know, one thing that's very important to an entertainer is consistency. You need a sense of flow. Any change you make, it can't be one inch bigger than a nuance. And that's what Vic did in his movie career: He kept the flow. The motion pictures he made with Ziggy were at best passable and at worst unwatchable, and now he picked up just where he left off. He did three Johnny Venice private-dick movies with Paramount. The first one wasn't all that bad, the second one wasn't terrible, the third one wasn't god-awful. Johnny Venice was this ex-L.A. cop, kicked out of the force for banging
the commissioner's daughter or something, and now he takes on all kinds of sordid cases and clients. Skullduggery, shoot-outs, fistfights, high jinks, and kissing ensue. “I'm gonna be professional, Latch,” Vic told me before they started shooting the first one,
Johnny Venice.
“None of that destructive behavior or anything.” And he was true to his word. Not a camera, not a prop, not a lens or the body part of a director was destroyed. He had a reputation by then, thanks to the Fountain and Bliss pictures, and it was as if the crew was showing up on the set with bulletproof vests, clenching their teeth and bracing themselves for a hail of bullets or a pie fight. But it never happened. I think a lot of that was due to the fact that Vic
knew
he had to make a good impression. Another factor was he was maybe too gassed to do too much damage a lot of the time. In these movies, Johnny Venice walks around with a flask in his holster instead of a pistol. Well, that wasn't Cel-Ray tonic in that flask, you can take my word for it.

BILLY WILSON [body double for Vic Fountain]:
I'd been knocking around Hollywood for a few years. My first flick was
The Naked and the Dead,
the Aldo Ray film. I get killed in that movie; a shell explodes and I drop my rifle and crumple to the ground, in that order. I did lots of war pictures, cowboy pictures, some beach and biker movies, a biblical epic now and then. Once in a while I got to say a line too. I was just a big lug but I knew how to draw a gun, ride a horse, and throw and take a punch. God, I must've crumpled to the ground in a hundred pictures.

Someone from Paramount saw me in
Cry of Battle
—this was the flick that Lee Harvey Oswald was seeing when he got caught, did you know that?—and must have said, “Hey, that galoot's the spitting image of Vic Fountain!” So I was sent to [director] William Calloway's office and I read for the first Johnny Venice flick. After flubbing a few lines I said to him, “Mr. Calloway, I usually don't speak in the movies—I just fall a lot.” “Well,” Bill said, “there'll probably be a lot of falling in this movie too.”

I had the reputation of a “guy's guy” in Hollywood, a Ben Johnson, Steve McQueen, or Slim Pickens type, just 'cause I could ride a horse or race a Harley. I could stay out with the boys all night and get wasted. Well, all that was true, but I was and am still very gay. I was married and had two kids but my wife and I had an arrangement. And everything worked out fine for us.

I'd heard that working with Vic Fountain could be an ordeal; he doesn't ever rehearse his lines and he only does one take, people said, he shows up late, he doesn't show up at all. Well, all this was sounding good to me, I must say. The less he did, the better it would be for me. And I was right. I have
Johnny Venice, The Case of the Boom-Boom Brunette,
and
The Killer Wore Go-Go Boots
on videotape and I can show you which one is me and
which one is Vic in the scenes. By the third movie, I'd say there's barely any Vic. Johnny Venice has his back turned to the camera or is in profile in half the scenes, when he's talking to Dina Merrill, Elke Sommer, and Jay C. Flippen—well, that was me. The car chases, the shoot-outs and fistfights, the kissing scenes with Dina and Elke . . . all me. (Elke nearly choked me with that tongue of hers.) Johnny Venice's hobby was golfing; everybody thought Vic would've wanted to film those scenes but he passed on those too. It was tons of fun, it really was, making those movies because after years of being ignored by John Ford, Howard Hawks, Duke Wayne, and Ward Bond, here I am being treated like a star because
I'm
doing all the work! As a joke, people were calling me Vic Fountain on the set and at parties. It was fun for a while. But, you know, I had a little thing with a very,
very
famous actor one night and after we were through he said to me, “Gee, I always suspected Vic Fountain was sort of gay.”

By the final movie in the series—I'd say this was maybe '67—Vic had put on a few pounds, so they taped a little pillow to my stomach and also on the back. For the love handles. Vic found out about that and hit the ceiling. Vanity, I guess. So most of that movie was shot from the waist up. And it was very dark, even though it was in color. I remember someone telling me that the French critics loved that flick, they thought it was “noirish” and existential or some kind of claptrap, I don't know. Also, for that movie, I was given a wig to wear, something with very dark, almost blue hair. This was because Vic was starting to lose his hair. He saw me in this contraption one day and I thought, Uh-oh, he's going to put the kibosh on this too, but instead he wound up ordering a few of the wigs for himself.

GUY PUGLIA:
When Ziggy and Vic called it quits, I really did think that Vic was gonna somehow settle down. I was hoping so, 'cause sometimes those late nights and all that drinkin' and going to this club and that one, it can wear you down. I wasn't no kid anymore. But maybe he still was, 'cause he didn't settle down any.

One thing that really got to him was the divorce. This is a guy that grew up with no money, who worked himself up from nowhere, and now he's turnin' over every buck he makes to Lulu. And what's she doin' with it? Nothing. She didn't buy clothes, she didn't buy cars. She did buy a small house in Palm Springs, near where Vic'd recently got one, and another very small one in Vegas . . . and that was just so when Vic decided he wanted to be her husband again and run back into her arms, her arms would be conveniently located nearby. But Lulu was basically socking all the dough away for the kids. “If she's hoping my career will hit the skids and I'll have to go back to her,” Vic said, “fat chance.”

I met this makeup gal on the set of
Johnny Venice.
She was a nice girl
and was small, like maybe five feet. Her name was Edie Smith, which was funny 'cause she looked a little bit like that French singer Edith Piaf when she was young. And me and this Edie, we hit it off good. You know, I didn't ever once have a girlfriend. I'd wind up with whores or with Vic's girlfriends' girlfriends. And then when I lost my nose, that was it for me. So I just kept it up: Vegas showgirls and hookers and fat married broads who thought if they slept with me they could sleep with Vic. His rejects. I didn't know their names, they didn't know mine, and Vic wanted to nail these slobs like he wanted to nail a porcupine. And now here's this Edie Smith and she don't care how little I am or what my face looks like or nothin' like that. We hit it off and finally, here I am in my forties, and I got a girlfriend.

One thing I liked about Edie was, I knew she wasn't with me just on account of Vic. She already knew Vic from the movie set, although she said to me he was hardly ever there. She's the one who told me that Vic wore a wig now. I didn't believe it at first. You know how, like, you see someone every single day for a hundred years and you don't ever notice anything different—they're eighty but still they look like they're seventeen to you? That's what this was like. But then I noticed, yeah, what happened to that bald spot of his?

SALLY KLEIN:
The premiere of
Johnny Venice
was a very big deal. Vic was on the cover of
Look
and this was the first time he was on a major magazine cover without Ziggy. A lot of stars turned out; Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were there, so were Dean Martin, Natalie Wood, Sidney Poitier, Burt Bacharach and Angie Dickinson, and Army Archerd was interviewing everybody walking in. Ziggy was invited but he told me to tell Vic that he had a prior commitment.

“What's the prior commitment?” I asked him a week before the event.

“The prior commitment,” he told me, “is that I'm stayin' home.”

The very first minute of the movie was very arresting: It's just Vic against a pitch-black background. He's got on a white dress shirt and his tie is undone. He lifts a pistol up and points it close up into the camera, just like
The Great Train Robbery.
He shoots the gun and then he's surrounded by clouds and clouds of smoke. He disappears in the smoke, and they run the opening credits. “She's Dangerous” was the song, which Ernie wrote and was almost a hit for Vic—it did make it into the Top 20. After that, though, the movie goes downhill very quickly.

When the lights came up at the premiere, I said to Jack, “So? What did you think?”

He whispered, “Exactly as bad as I thought it'd be.”

Jack and I went home that night—we skipped the party—and sure enough Ziggy called and wanted a review. “Do I look like Charles Champlain?”
I asked. He said, “Well? Is it a bomb?” And I told him it wasn't very good and it wasn't terrible. Well, he could read between the lines of that and was overjoyed.

JANE WHITE:
He was disconsolate as soon as he heard Vic had signed a movie deal. He felt it was an utter act of betrayal. “How could he do this to me?” he said. “Victor Benedict Arnold he is!” I reminded him that he and Vic were no long partners; I said that it was like a divorce, that once a couple broke up, each person was free to do as he and she pleased. “But I ain't Lulu,” he said. “I'm Ziggy.”

Frankly, I felt he was being very hypocritical. Because he'd made the rounds of the studios and tried to land a movie deal. Arnie, Sally, and Murray Katz tried everything. He was offered a few things here and there—he turned down [Vincente Minnelli's]
Good-bye, Charlie
—but it was never a starring role. This crushed him. Hank Stanco from WAT sent him the script for
A Distant Trumpet
and he read it and told Hank, “The part of the lieutenant is perfect for me! Let's do it!” Hank had to tell Ziggy, “Well, uh, that's the lead role . . . that's Troy Donahue's. Your part is on page thirteen and the lower half of page forty-two.” He was just crushed.

I remember Joanie Pierce telling me that it was Ziggy's “tragic flaw”—his success was backfiring on him. What had made him so famous was his ability to be anything, to go from character to character, but in the long run he was
no
character. So they would send him
I'll Take Sweden
or
Muscle Beach Party
and there was nothing there for him. “Bob Hope gets the lead role and I'm supposed to play a goddamn smorgasbord chef!” he yelled. “This is criminal!”