Funnymen (67 page)

Before I knew it I had a stylist, a makeup artist, and a hairdresser working me over all the time. It was like having surgery every day. They had me wearing the sixties clothing, the boots, the miniskirt, and hoop earrings that nearly pulled my ears off. I was in
Vogue
and
She
and
Seventeen.
I went on
Laugh-In
and
Shindig
and Clay Cole and Lloyd Thaxton's shows and I did
Hullabaloo
too. And, of course, I was on Daddy's TV specials. Morty Geist and Bursley-Bates were my publicists and they got my name all over the place, in everyone's columns. In London I started dating Keith, who'd had that hit song “98.6.” Mmmm mmm, he was a real dreamboat, a very sweet bloke, as they say. But I also started seeing the former manager of Wayne Fontana [no relation] and the Mindbenders. It really was a crazy time for me. I went to Europe again with “Come Frug Some More With Me,” the follow-up hit, and I had a little thing going with Jean-Luc Henault, the French pop singer. And with Gunter Böll, who I think was a skier or a race car driver or something and was so gorgeous.

“When am I gonna get my shot?” Vince asked Dad one night. “I can sing too.” We were having our Thanksgiving dinner, me, Grandma, Vincent, Mom, and Dad, who was sometimes there for the holidays. Hunny was there, too . . . I remember that Mom had to cut his turkey for him.

“Your shot?” Dad said to Vince. “You want a shot? Get over here.”

And Vince got up and went to where Dad was sitting and Daddy punched him in the shoulder. “That's your shot right there. Now go finish your lasagna.”

SALLY KLEIN:
I thought it was horrible what they did to Vicki. Lulu thought so too, but she wanted to make her daughter happy. Besides, she knew this was what Vic wanted and she figured if Vic was happy with Vicki then he'd come back to her. “They're dressing her up like a cheap
puttana!
” Lulu said when Vicki went on
Shindig.
“That skirt barely makes it below her belly button!”

But the horrible thing was we all knew it wouldn't last. Vicki did not have a great voice . . . she'll read this and never talk to me again, but I think she knows it's true. Larry Galen would do things with her voice in the studio, to fix it, and she had the backup singers too, who actually could sing. Poor girl, she must have sung those frug songs a hundred thousand times.

She was the most boy-crazy girl I've ever seen. I told Danny that once
and he said, “Boy crazy? Ha! That's a very polite way of putting it.” Maybe he was right. She went from man to man, and most of them treated her like dirt. I think they got a big kick out of it, that she was Vic Fountain's daughter. Men, right? She had a fling with a married movie star, an actor who was then in his late forties—I won't say his name. He used her for a few days and then passed her along to a friend, a less famous actor. It was sad. But let me tell you . . . the one she really wanted was Vic. No, I don't mean it that way, not at all. Vic was hardly ever at home when Vicki was growing up, and she utterly craved his attention. So she tried to make up for it with other men and, boy, did she ever succeed. All over town and the rest of the world she succeeded!

The sad thing was Vincent. Vic never gave him a moment's thought. He was such a nice boy. His father was Vic Fountain, the actor and the singer, the great womanizer and boozer, and now his older sister is on
Laugh-In
and is topping the charts. Vincent had by far the best singing voice of anyone in that family. I wasn't surprised that he started doing all those drugs.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Vic was more concerned with Vicki's career than his own, let me tell you. He hated the music she was doing, but it was selling. As a matter of fact, it was selling a lot better than Vic's. They did a Steinberg & Jones tune together [“Hey You, You're My Angel”], which went into the Top 20 for a moment. Morty had the idea to get Vicki's name in the papers by linking her with this fella and that fella and so he called all the columnists, but then we found out that we didn't have to really work too hard at this, she was doing a fine enough job on her own. Boy, was she ever! After a year, Morty was going the opposite route: He was denying relationships. They had her with some fella on
Peyton Place
and with Joe Namath when he was filming
C.C. and Company
and then a week later she'd never met either one of them. “No, Vicki and Mike [
sic
] Jagger are not an item,” he'd have to tell everyone. “No, Vicki Fountain is not seeing the drummer from the 13th Floor Elevators.” The problem was, most of the time, it was true. So Morty pulled out all the stops, but then he had to plug them all right back in again.

Vincent was another case entirely. Now, unless you have balls of tungsten and have four of 'em, don't
ever
bring up Vincent and the drug thing to Lulu. She'll shoot you.

He didn't ask for his old man's help or for mine or Sally's. You got to respect that. He wanted to go the rock 'n' roll route too, but nobody would let him. But not the Vicki Fountain or Petula Clark thing; he was more like that Joe [
sic
] Morrison of the Doors or somebody. “You're name is Vince Fountain,” they'd remind him, “not Vince Hendrix.” He put together some kind of psychedelic rock combo but they couldn't get a record deal. They
played the Whiskey-A-Go-Go a few times and the Philmont [
sic
]. I offered to help him out, so did Morty and Hank Stanco, but he didn't want our help. From what I understand—Sally's son saw them perform—they were good, if that sort of sound was to your taste. But nobody would give them a contract.

I asked Vic if he ever saw Vince sing with Shocking Turquoise—that was his combo's name—and Vic said to me, “That ain't singin', that's howling.”

Now, I don't believe everything I hear. I don't even believe half of what I hear, and the half I
do
believe, I don't even believe that. But someone told me that those two hoodlums Tony and Jimmy Fratelli had gone around with satchels full of Vic's dough to get record companies to
not
sign Vince. It was a “Lady or the Tiger” thing—the dough was the lady and the Fratelli brothers were the tiger. Everybody went with the lady, you can take my word for it.

Now, why would Vic do that, you inquire? Why would he gum up the works for his own son? Look, I'm no socio-anthropologist but it could've been because he was the big dominant male in his family—the king bee, if you will—the chief of his tribe, and here's the young potent male trying to seize the throne. Here was Vic, starting to lose his hair and his voice, gaining weight and losing his audience, and here was the young stud, the handsome young buck in leather pants and love beads with the smooth voice. And so the old man slays the pretender to the throne. Yeah, it could've been that.

Or maybe he did it just because Vic was Vic.

DANNY McGLUE:
Vincent moved into some flophouse apartment in San Francisco; he tried to make it with his rock band, but it didn't happen. And he started doing LSD all the time. I ran into him in Los Feliz one night and who knows what he was seeing when he was looking at me? Maybe he saw thirty of me. He was the one who got Donny Klein into the drugs too. It's just a shame. They'd smoke pot and take the drugs and disappear for days at a time.

Did you know a cop picked Vincent up in Berkeley once? He had some drugs on him, I think it was pot. The cop recognized his name and said to him, “Hey, you're Vic Fountain's kid, aren't you?” And Vincent said, “No.” The cop says to him, “Sure you are.” “If I am, does that mean you're not going to arrest me?” Vincent asked, and the cop said, “I'm your dad's biggest fan. I've seen him at Harrah's in Tahoe three times. I conceived my son to ‘Malibu Moon' and when my wife left me I listened to ‘Lost and Lonely Again' a hundred times.” “Look, Vic Fountain's not my old man,” Vincent said to the cop, “so just bust me, okay? I don't give a fuck about anything.” But the cop wouldn't do it. He even gave him the pot back.

The poor kid couldn't get a break.

“I made it on my own,” Vic said to me once, “so can he, even though he won't.”

FREDDY BLISS:
There was pressure on me ever since I was a kid. Adults would meet me and bend over and tickle me and say, “You goin' to become a comic too?” I heard that a million times. Even if I fell down while trying to walk or if someone threw a ball to me and I dropped it—I was a very klutzy kid—people would laugh and say, “He's gonna be just as funny as Ziggy.” Often I didn't even have to do something funny or stupid and people would laugh. I'd be trying to do homework and maybe Van Johnson was at the house or George Burns or Agnes Moorehead, who was close friends with Mom, and they'd look at me and laugh. But I wasn't funny, there really wasn't anything funny about me. If I tried to be funny, probably no one would laugh. By the time I was a teenager I was ready to punch the next person who said I was funny or who asked me if I was going to become a comic. But, you know, even if I punched them, they'd probably start laughing.

Dad sent me to a military academy in Massachusetts when I was fifteen years old. I don't know why; I thought you only did that to kids who are either potential generals or potential criminals, and I was neither. It probably was my mother's idea. It's very possible she just wanted me out of the house for some reason. So I was never a part of the “Hollywood kids” scene. I didn't go to parties with Frank Sinatra's or Liz Taylor's kids. I didn't go driving around with Tuesday Weld or Ann-Margret or Peter Fonda or anyone like that. As a matter of fact I never went to parties and rarely drove around with anyone.

But I don't want to give the wrong impression. I saw the way Vic Fountain was with Vince, and Dad was not like that with me. He wasn't distant, he wasn't unaffectionate. He was there for me when he could be and was very nurturing. The one person in the entire world who never once asked if I was going to become a comedian was Dad.

You know, Ted, there's a lot of pressure on a famous person's kid to follow in his father or his mother's footsteps. I don't know if you realize that. A lot of time the pressure comes from within, but a lot of times it comes from other people. Mom and Dad—they'd rather I become a doctor or a lawyer, I think, than start singing or telling jokes.

Well, what I found out is this: I couldn't do anything. I'm a pretty incompetent guy . . . I've always been that. I went to UCLA and for a year I was premed, but I just couldn't get the biology down. So I switched majors and took lots of politics classes, thinking maybe I'd go to law school. But my grades were pretty bad. I worked hard, I studied and studied, but I just wasn't any good. The other kids would invite me out, to clubs and bars and places, but they were all expecting me to pop my eyes out and make funny faces. Which I didn't do. They wanted me to tell jokes and be funny. When I didn't, they stopped asking me out.

I did graduate, barely. But—well, I guess I'll never know if this is true or not—I maybe graduated only because my dad made a very generous bequest to the university. He donated about a half a million dollars to start a comedy library there. The Harry Blissman and Florence Blissman Memorial Comedy Library, it was called. It was supposed to cover the history of comedy and comedians from Aristophanes to vaudeville to the present day. Dad was very involved in the planning of this, and I. M. Pei was brought in to design a building. There was talk about a fellowship and establishing a permanent “chair” or something, where they would bring in a visiting professor to teach. (Dad had a typical idea for him: “The chair should have, like, a whoopee cushion on it!” he said.) I think the only person they could get was Henny Youngman, but finally he passed on it. Lenny Pearl, the old-time comic, had given millions to the university too over the years; as I understand it, though, he scuttled the entire project. They never did start the library or the fellowship. And the building was never built. But somehow I did manage to graduate.

Eventually something was built. Ziggy Bliss's Harry Blissman and Florence Blissman Museum of the Comedic Arts was opened up in Loch Sheldrake in 1990. It's full of all kinds of interesting history about the Catskills, the whole entertainment scene, and the history of American comedy. We've got thousands of tapes and records and articles. It's actually quite a marvelous place. I should know. I manage it. Finally, I found something I can do.

• • •

SNUFFY DUBIN:
You know, Ziggy did maybe two specials a year for ABC. There was always a Christmas show and sometimes one in the spring too. The geniuses at the networks more than a few times would put Ziggy's Christmas special up against Vic's. Vic would outdraw Ziggy two to one sometimes . . . later it was three to one. And then it was no contest because Oldsmobile, which sponsored Zig's shows, dropped out. But by that time, Andy Williams's or Perry Como's specials were mopping the floor with both Ziggy
and
Vic. A few times my agent tried to book me on Ziggy's shows, but not one time did Zig ever let me on. And I was getting hot in the late sixties; instead of me opening up for Sandler and Young, now those two Canadian
putzes
were opening up for me! But I never got on a Ziggy show. So I did what anyone would've done: I started going on Vic's specials. That cat never turned me down one time. He also never turned up for rehearsal one time either. He wouldn't even read from the TelePrompTer anymore! It was his TV show but he put in a total of five minutes work on it. He'd started that syndicated golf program of his and
that sapped up a lot of his energy, which shows you just how much energy he had.