Funnymen (70 page)

“I just stood there, Guy,” Vic says to me. “He looked at me, I looked at him. And we both just stood there. It was like a boxin' match, but with no boxin'.”

“You didn't say nothing to each other?” I asked him.

“I couldn't think of anything to say. And neither could he.”

Vic and Taffy . . . it was just like when the first marriage ended. He come to my restaurant at closing time. Chinese Joe [Yung] drove him. Vic was bagged, it was maybe 2:00
A.M.

I see him gettin' out of his Rolls, I go to take the big plastic swordfish off the wall. But then I say to myself, Aw, what the hell? And I leave it up.

“It's over,” he says to me.

“What is?” 'Cause by this time I didn't know if he meant his marriage or the TV specials or the record contract.

“Me and Taff. Dead and buried.
Morto.”

“I can't say that I'm too surprised. Or too upset.”

“My mother was right,” he told me. “Taffy and I have a big fight, we scream at each other, then I buy her a big necklace to make up for it. And she goes out and bangs a thirty-year-old.”

“Hey, if it was up to your mother, you'd be married to Lulu still. Or to Angie Crosetti.”

“Yeah. Remember her? Goddamn Angie Crosetti. Firmest tits in Codport.”

I did some paperwork for a few seconds and he said to me, “What's up with you and that makeup girl, huh? That Frieda girl?”

“You mean Edie. Yeah, you know, we still go out and all.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Hey, when are you gonna make this place a steak or pasta joint? I never could stand it that this place does seafood.”

“Vic, you know, the place has been successful so far. I'm goin' through some tough times here lately and—”

“Don't forget, Gaetano, I was the backer here. I put up most of the dough. And I come in and what do I see? I gotta look at the goddamn Pacific Ocean. You know how I hate that.”

“Vic, it ain't the Pacific Ocean. It's Mount Vesuvius explodin' over the Adriatic. And it's a mural. We're on the water. The customers could at least have a mural of the water.”

“I wish you'd get rid of the thing. I really do. And that goddamn swordfish on the wall.”

“I don't wanna get rid of it. It's up to me, I get rid of the mural and I put windows there and people can see the real goddamn water, which is only twenty fuckin' yards away! And I'd have twenty fuckin' fish on the wall.”

“Hey, maybe I should get rid of
you,
” he said, “maybe that's what I should do.”

BILLY WILSON:
Vicki Fountain made a movie called
Motor Psycho Nightmare
for Roger Corman. By coincidence, I was in this flick too. It was sort of a hippies-meet-Hell's Angels thing and it was a pretty big mess. Vicki was one of the hippie chicks on a commune and I was one of the badass bikers who invade the commune. There was this two-minute psychedelic trip sequence in it . . . the cameraman had different color gels and jellies and squirted them at the camera and blurred everything while Vicki took her top off and danced in slow motion—you couldn't tell if you were looking at Vicki's nipples or at two splotches of raspberry jam.

Vicki knew me because Vic had introduced us a few times on the set of his movies or while filming
Golfing With Vic.
(Did you know that a lot of the time that you saw Vic golfing, driving the ball, or putting from far away, with Tony Hampton, that was really me driving and putting?) There were no drugs on the set of
Motor Psycho Nightmare
—we were all pretty straitlaced, but there was tons of drinking. And Vicki was after me. In the worst way. She was seeing Tip Farlow at the time. We were filming out in Death Valley and there wasn't much to do except drink tequila. Vicki knew I was gay and that I was married, but that didn't stop her. And she looked fantastic in tight shiny leather pants, just like Marlon Brando in
The Wild One.
She'd come over to my motel room at night and we'd have a few shots of tequila—we did some flaming shots too—and then she'd start to
seduce me. We were both sloshed and it got a little funny. She damn near succeeded one time . . . we were in the bed with our tops off and were kissing. The damnedest thing . . . she wanted to know if I had Vic's wig and the fat pillow too. I said to her, “We're doing a biker and hippie flick, not a Vic film. Why would I have the rug and the pillow?” She said to me, slurring her words, “Come on, Billy. Put it on. Put it on for Princess Vicki.” I told her I didn't have the stuff. She wobbled over to the dresser and was flinging the drawers open, looking for the blue toup and the pillow. She was really disappointed she couldn't find them. “Can you call someone,” she asked me, “and have them send you the stuff?” We did a few more shots and she was near unconscious. I carried her to her motel room and put her to bed there. “Call me ‘puddin',” she said when I set her down. She kept coming on to me until we finished the movie, but she gave up on the rug and the pillow.

She wound up marrying Tip Farlow. That “young rebel attorney” TV show he did was hot for a spell, but then died. I think they divorced after three years. I heard he used to mistreat her. I believe it. I remember hearing on the
Golfing With Vic
set that he'd hit her, slapped her around. I felt really, really bad for her. Vic's kids—I felt bad for both of them.

• • •

ANNA LIPSCOMBE [actress; Clive Bonteen's widow]:
My husband was an enormous fan of the American cinema, especially the comedies. Growing up poor in Liverpool, Clive had found solace in Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton,
His Girl Friday
and
Bringing Up Baby,
Fountain and Bliss. His first play,
Disease Puddle Cripple Swimming,
would have been unimaginatively different were it not for his deep affection for those wonderful clowns; the interplay of violence between Pudd, Dudd, and Thudd really does smack of the Three Stooges, whom Clive also adored.
Bitch Plague Sonata,
as many a critic has noted, is essentially a Laurel and Hardy scenario set during an horrific epidemic.

When Fountain and Bliss broke up, Clive told me that he would love to write a play for Ziggy Bliss, who he said was the one true child of Chaplin, Keaton, Groucho. His publisher at Webber & Holdsclaw, Desmond Thornton, contacted Ziggy Bliss's agents but Ziggy didn't seem interested and had not—or so he claimed—ever heard of my husband or his plays, a fact which delighted Clive to no end. “This only proves how truly perfect he is,” Clive said.

We were living in Paris at the time and Ziggy was in Germany filming a movie called, I believe,
Honkers Over Heidelberg
—that was the English title of the movie, at least. One weekend Clive and I drove to Germany in
our red Renault and met Ziggy Bliss there. This was 1974 and the movie was being filmed outside Munich, despite the title. We were at first startled by Ziggy's appearance—he was much thinner in person and his famed mop of blazing red hair was sparse in places. He also had thick grayish bags under his eyes. Perhaps it was from popping his eyes out and crossing them, I suggested to Clive. “It's perfect, it's so brilliant,” Clive said. “The tragic clown, the wretched court jester to the cosmos knocked down by the gods. Food for worms, a can of laughter for vermin. So perfect.” And thus was his next play born.

PERNILLA BORG:
I did not ever see any Clive Bonteen's plays but when Ziggy signed to do the
Can of Hell Laughter
play, I made sure to catch
Drama: Mean
in London. It is a very depressing and sad play, yes? Eddie Bramshill was in this play when Ziggy and I saw it—he was once the boyfriend of Julie Mansell, who had performed with Ziggy. We go backstage after play to talk to Eddie but he will not speak to us, because of some sort of thing between Julie and Ziggy and what it is, I don't know. But when Ziggy sees all the applause at the theater he says to me that he will do the
Laughter in Can
play. I warned Ziggy that this was complete switch in his life, to do
Honkers Over Heidelberg
movie and then do this drama about life on earth after atom bombs wipe out everyone but one man. But he said that he had “range,” that he can do Japanese accent, Spanish accent, German accent, he can play young baby boy and senile old woman, so why cannot he play one survivor of apocalypse then?

ARNOLD LATCHKEY:
Ziggy with that loony British playwright?
Oy vey!
I'll tell ya something: If Ziggy Bliss ever wrote an autobiography he would never have mentioned it—it wouldn't have gotten one sentence. Why? Because he was ashamed? Because he was embarrassed? No. The reason is because I don't think he ever remembered a second of it. He was really taking those pills then, the pep pills and then the antipep pills, like he was on a seesaw.

You know, a lot of comedians are hung up on being taken seriously. So you've got Gleason doing that dumb clown
Gigot
movie and Jerry Lewis with his concentration camp movie that never came out. But that wasn't Ziggy . . . he didn't care if anybody took him seriously. I mean, at this point in his career he just wanted to be
taken,
period.

ANNA LIPSCOMBE:
We met Ziggy in the lobby bar of his hotel, and he and Clive hit it off splendidly. We'd met Olivier, Gielgud, Burton, and Scofield but Clive always regarded them as toffs and was humbled now to be in the presence of a man he regarded as a genuine, instinctual artist.
Clive mentioned Pinter, Derek Bond, Beckett, and Ionesco to Ziggy, and Ziggy expertly feigned never having heard of them. “What sort of theater do you go in for then, Mr. Bliss?” Clive asked him, and Ziggy cleverly responded, “
Hellzapoppin',”
which we'd never heard of but which immediately struck Clive as some sort of dark, postapocalyptic farce—
King Lear
amidst glowing radioactive ashes. “Hellzapoppin'!” Clive responded. “Yes, of course! Brilliant!” When we returned to our hotel room, Clive kept saying, “Hellzapoppin'!” For days he said it and he would erupt in childish giggles at the very uttering of the word. Ziggy, I remember, had told us his favorite movie ever was
The Horn Blows at Midnight,
a Jack Benny movie; he told us that he'd been trying to remake the movie but that nobody in Hollywood would finance or consider the project. “It bombed for Jack,” he told us, “but I just know I could make it click.” Clive asked what the movie was about, and Ziggy said it was about angels, fallen angels and musicians and blowing a trumpet and ending the world. “God, that does sound utterly magnificent,” Clive said, “angels and the end of the world.” “But it bombed for Jack,” Ziggy reminded us.

When we returned to Paris, Clive immediately began writing
A Can of Laughter in Hell.
Like many great artists, he enjoyed a drink every now and then and often in the moments in-between too. So, fueled by rye, espressos, and Gauloises and ultimately by Dilaudid, Clive finished the play in fourteen hours. We sent the play to Munich but did not hear from Ziggy for a week. It turned out that he had to fly to the States for a funeral. But perhaps two weeks later we received a phone call at our apartment on Rue Mabillon. “This stuff is kooky, Clive,” Ziggy told my husband, “it's completely cockamamie.” I shall never forget the sight of my husband on the phone, his beautiful long fingers stroking his long, slightly matted black beard, his eyes opening and closing almost spasmodically. “Do you not like it then, Ziggy?” he asked. “Like it?!” Ziggy replied. “I don't even
get
it!” And my husband burst out in laughter and said, “Yes, of course. Of course, yes.”

It was the first play that Clive ever directed. By then, he had come to feel that he and he alone could truly animate his own vision, only he could understand it and translate it from his soul, to his words, to the stage. Also, at this time, not too many directors wished to work with Clive. He resented—he detested—any slight change from the text. On one infamous occasion he stopped in at the Haymarket Theatre to see how his “trilogy” of short plays [
Corpse, Coffin, Crypt
] was doing; in
Coffin
he noticed that instead of the semihemidemiquaver pause he'd written in at one point in the dialogue, the actor had turned it into only a semidemi pause. He got up from his seat and stormed the stage and closed the play down. He was like that, a difficult perfectionist, yes, but he was truly a brilliant, inspired artist.

A Can of Laughter in Hell
is a one-man play and so Clive explained to
Ziggy that he, Ziggy, was a living, moving, breathing extension of Clive's soul on the stage. “You are my words, my thoughts, my nightmares become flesh, my very breath,” he told Ziggy. “Okay, Clive,” Ziggy said, “but maybe you wanna try some mouthwash then.” Ziggy was always making Clive laugh—I can still see him laughing, the saliva cackling out of his mouth, cascading down his beard, dousing his Gauloise.