Authors: Ted Heller
When the Johnny Venice movies came out, though, Ziggy was overjoyed. They weren't any good. Vic was trying to be Paul Newman or Michael Caine but couldn't pull it offâthey were younger than him. And a lot thinner.
[Ziggy was] offered a part in
What a Way to Go,
that Shirley MacLaine movie. He read for the role and they liked what he'd done. “This is it, honey,” he said. He was as happy as a lark! But when the word got around that Ziggy might be in the picture, the other actors said they didn't want to work with him. That reputation of his. So the offer was withdrawn and Dick Van Dyke got the part.
“There's just no hope for me,” he said. And for a long time he had trouble-getting out of bed or doing anything but looking at the wall and walking-around in a trance.
SNUFFY DUBIN:
Buzzy Brevetto was booked into the Hungry i in San Francisco but he came down with some kind of virus and had to cancel. He
calls me up and says, Snuffy, can you sub for me? But I couldn'tâI had something going in Miami Beach and I was filming a bit part of a nightclub owner in that horrible
Go-Go Boots
thing that Vic did, the Johnny Venice vehicle. So I said to Buzzy, “Hey, what about Ziggy?” Buzzy asked me what Ziggy was doing lately and I said nothing whatsoever. So I called Sally Klein and she said she would extend the offer.
“He says he'll do it,” she said to me.
That surprised the living piss out of me, Ziggy going on alone.
Let me tell you . . . when Ziggy found out I was doing that movie with Vic, he hit the ceiling. Now, we'd had our run-ins over the years but he really let me have it this time. In the past he would call me a lousy, dirty, stinkin', no-good, unfunny, joke-stealing sonuvabitch bastard and then hang up on me, but then ten minutes later we're on the phone talking about everything under the fucking sun. But this was bad . . . he took it real, real personal that I was doing this picture. I say to him, “I do three days' work, I get fifteen grand,” and he says, “You're a backstabbing, buddy-fucking shitheel, Snuffles, to do this to me!” He thought I was doing this to
him
! He thought I was doing this lousy five minutes of work to sink a knife into
his
back! The fifteen grand? Nothing to do with it? A movie career? Nothing to do with it? It was all about him. Well, let me tell you: I
was
getting back at him! I was! I was offered the degenerate part in
The Dirty Dozen,
the part that went to Telly [Savalas], and I turned it down just to be in a movie with Vic. It's true, and if that makes me Satan or Lucifer or a bad person, then God strike me down right now. Yep, I did it on purpose and, man, did it ever feel good.
ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Ziggy tells me he'll play the Hungry i and I told him he had a few days to put an act together. “We gotta circle the wagons,” I told him. But to tell the truth, there weren't too many wagons left. Sid Stone was dead and there was just Danny McGlue, so it wasn't much of a circle either. Betsy was in and out of the hospital, still having problems, but Danny pulled through for us and we put together some semblance of an act for Ziggy. “Look,” Ziggy told us, “alls I need is the frame. You give me that, I'll supply the picture.” I couldn't believe how confident he was. It was fan
tab
ulous!
MICKEY KNOTT:
My band was playing the Hollywood Bowl and Ziggy rings me up at my hotel and we talk old times. I was always closer to Vic than to Ziggy so to be honest, some of these old times, I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, man. Then he asks me if I had a pill connection. I told him I didn't mess with that stuff, I was just into grass. He said to me, “Aw, come on, Mick, you're a musician . . . you gotta know where I can score some pills.” And I said to him, “Ziggy, that's a slur against musicians
the world over.” He said, “I apologize. You really don't know
one
person who could get me some amphetamines?” I thought about it and said, “Well, there's the trumpeter, the bass player, two of the sax men . . .”
Huffy Davis, my bassist, comes to me that night and tells me he'd just come back from the airport. Ziggy was about to board a place for San Francisco. Huffy handed him two pounds of pills and Ziggy gave him a grand. “Man,” Huffy said to me, “that motherfucker was so keyed up, he didn't even need to take no goddamn plane to get there!”
SALLY KLEIN:
Except for an appearance on a Fritz Devane TV special and two minutes goofing around with Herman's Hermits on
Hollywood Palace
, this was pretty much Ziggy's first thing since he and Vic had broken up. I went up to San Francisco with Arnie and Estelle. Jack had business in Los Angeles. I cannot tell you how crucial this was, for Ziggy's career, for his self-esteem, for everyone. Ziggy said it best: “I gotta blast off on the right foot here.”
Well, there was a lot of hubbub about it. Morty Geist was really playing it up. He was spreading rumors in Herb Caen's column that there was a chance that Vic was going to surprise everyone and get onstage with Ziggy. But he also told Dean Corolla of the
Chronicle
that there was a good chance that Ziggy wouldn't be able to perform. “He's so heartbroken about Vic,” Morty told him, “that he doesn't think he can do more than ten minutes. It's gonna be a nervous collapse, live onstage.” So the room was filled every night, both shows; half the people were there to see if Vic would pop in, the other half to see if Ziggy would pop apart.
Arnie and I were in the dressing room before he went on and Ziggy was rarin' to go. Now I knowâand Arnie knowsâthat he was taking those pills. So that was maybe a part of it. But I don't think the pills gave him anything that he didn't already have to begin withâit just maybe gave him a lot more of it.
We killed a few minutes by talking about the old times, some of the places Ziggy had played, with Vic and with Harry and Flo. He brought up Dolly Phipps . . . he did that often. He even told me to look for her in the crowd. He said, “Maybe Dolly moved to Frisco years and years ago, Sal, and she just wants a little look-see at her first beau. You never know.” Arnie asked me a few minutes later, when Ziggy was out of earshot, “So this Dolly Phipps dame . . . was she all she's cracked up to be?” I told him she wasn't, that she was sort of Ziggy Bliss's Rosebud, and Arnie said, “Oh, she looked like a sled, did she?”
The lights came down and Ziggy was introduced and the lights stayed down. It was pitch-black . . . people couldn't even see their own cigarettes except when they inhaled. Ziggy played it so perfect . . . the timing was just
wonderful. He waited for the applause to die down and then he didn't say another word. I have to admit, I was getting nervous. I didn't even really know if he was on the stage. “Jesus,
do
something,” Arnie softly muttered. But Ziggy was so funny that he could make silence hysterical, and people started laughing. And he let them laugh. “It was like the silence was his partner now”âDean Corolla wrote that, not Sally Kleinâ“and so who needed Vic Fountain?” Then when the laughs settled down, all of a sudden you heard Vic singing “The Hang of It.” But it wasn't Vic, it was Ziggy! He sang “The Hang of It” and he was just imitating and caricaturing Vic and the crowd loved it. The spotlight came on and he finished the song and now it was time for the act. And it was just as he said; Danny and he had come up with the frame but Ziggy did the artwork. He went off in tangents, he did a little political stuff, he did impressions, told some off-color stories. He did lots of two-man routines, but he was only one person. You know, you had Bob Newhart, who was brilliant, and Shelley Berman, and they would do their acts on an imaginary phone, but Ziggy would be
both
peopleâhe'd do both voices. I guess he was still very scared of going on alone.
It was that night when it first started, when he brought himself to the point of cracking up. He'd be talking about something and then he'd stop and he'd start giggling. Giggling like a kid. He'd try to get the joke out but every time he said a word, he giggled more. And his face got all flushed and sweaty. He was thinking about something and it was so hysterical that he couldn't utter it. So he waited for that to settle down and then he went on with the act. This kept happening; almost every time he did stand-up there was a point when he was cracking up inside.
And he talked endlessly about Vic. As if Vic was still there. He did a parody of a Johnny Venice movie and did an imitation of some other person in this imaginary sceneâLyndon Johnson, Everett Dirkson, or Cary Grant. He'd try to veer the material away from Vic, but it always got back to him. Dean Corolla wrote that he sounded like a jilted lover, talking about Vic so much, but then Ziggy just used that to make fun of Dean. You simply could not criticize him.
The other bad thing was that
Variety
mentioned in the review that Ziggy had sung “The Hang of It.” So Vicâdon't forget: Vigorish was still handling Vicâhad Shep Lane fire off a very threatening letter to Ziggy, who Vigorish was also still handling. The letter was sent from our office on Wilshire Boulevard to our office on Wilshire Boulevard! Ernie Beasley I don't think gave a damn if Ziggy was singing it or if even Madame Chiang Kai-shek was singing it, but Vic insisted Ziggy cease and desist. Which he didn't.
We got Ziggy booked in New YorkâLanie Kazan opened for him, I thinkâand in Boston, Miami, and Chicago. Pete Conifer booked him for the Oceanfront. It was the beginning of a whole new life for him. You
know how some comics have tag lines? Rodney Dangerfield has “I don't get no respect,” and Marty Allen had “Hello, dere.” Well, in the ads for Ziggy's shows, sometimes there was a little black-and-white picture of him, with his hair and his eyes going all over the place, and then it said in quotes under his name: “And another thing about Vic . . .”
LULU FOUNTAIN:
Vic and I, even though we were divorced, we still were close. Some couples, they divorce, and then it's all over between them, like they was never married. But with us, it was like we weren't divorced. We went to a few premieres together, we went to some charity events, and we took care of the kids. We never stopped talking to each other.
He'd be seeing some actress or some girl from Vegas, but I didn't want to hear about it. He dated [actress] Lynda Wills Benson for a few months, she was never brought up once. He had a fling with Faye KendallâI found out about it in the paper, not from him. One time Vicki came home and she was wearing this little blue cap and I asked her where she got it. She told me that Faye Kendall got it for her. That cap was in the garbage can in ten seconds.
More than the girls, it was the gambling that worried me. He spent months in Vegas, when he wasn't on the road or makin' a film. Every time he performed there he lost more money. He'd tell me when he won, he'd call me up and say, “Honey, I won twenty grand last night at the Silver Slipper,” but he never told me that the next night he lost twice that. Hunny or Guy or Ices Andy would tell me. I told his mom about it one time, I told her to talk to Vic, but she didn't really seem to care. “He grew up with no money,” Violetta said, “so what if he maybe die with no money?” But she was livin' in the lap of luxury in Santa Monica, she had a Rolls and a driver. And, believe me, she wasn't spending a dime.
One time I was home and Tony Fratelli shows up at my front door. I invite him in, I make him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He tells me how much Vic owes one of his bookies. It's over a hundred grand. “And this is just one of 'em, Lu,” he tells me. “There's plenty others out there too.” I say to him, “What are you gonna do if he don't pay? Break Vic Fountain's legs, Tony? You gonna shoot him in his kneecaps?” He chewed almost as loud as Arnie and said to me, “It's crossed my mind at times, Lu, I gotta admit that to you.”
So I talked to Vic about it on the phone. He was in Vegas. He didn't like it that Tony had dropped in on me at home. More than that, he didn't like it that Tony was talkin' his own personal business to me. But even more than that, he didn't like it that Tony had thought about shooting his kneecaps. “They're the Fratellis, not the Patellas,” he said, but he was scared. I said to him, “Look, could you just try to not gamble so much? Not for me, but for the kids.” And he said he'd try. Then he said he had to go,
he had a show to put on. “How long are you there for,” I asked, and he said a week. I asked him how much he was getting for the weekâmaybe he could turn it over to the Fratelli brothers and his knees'd be safe. But Vic told me he wasn't gettin' a dime. He was doing it 'cause he owed the casino.
He'd try to reassure me . . . he'd say, “Look, any time I'm ever short of dough, I'll just make another lousy movie. All right? So don't you worry.”
REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV:
With Fountain and Bliss no longer a partnership, with them not speaking to each other, it made my tasks all the more difficult. Arnie and Sally put me in charge of keeping them away from each other, not because they feared violence, but because they feared unpleasantness. For example, if Vic was playing a venue in Miami Beach and if, at the same time Ziggy was performing at, say, the Saxony Club there, I had to keep both of them informed of their close proximity. If Ziggy made dinner reservations at a particular restaurant, I had to inform Vic so that he would not make reservations for the same time. It was understood that Vic took three hours to eat and that Ziggy took at the most forty-five minutes, so there was some leeway. There was one occasion, I recall, in 1967 when Vic was taping a Christmas special for CBS and was singing “Hooray for Hollywood” near the famed Hollywood sign. And Ziggy, ironically, was also taping there immediately afterward, for a Christmas special for ABC. It was my task to make sure that there was no overlapping. Weddings and funerals were the most difficult to manage. When Murray Katz died, it was a logistical nightmare.