Funnymen (73 page)

Well, it was time for me to dry up too. My physician told me about the Hope Springs Clinic just outside Los Alamos, New Mexico, and, after
much deliberation, denial, and, yes, getting blitzed, I packed my bag and went. I was there for six weeks and haven't had a drop to drink since.

One day at the clinic, I was talking to one of the orderlies there, a tall, goateed black man from Alabama named John Timmons. Big John, everyone called him. I was bragging about all the famous people I knew and somehow I mentioned Vic and Ginger Bacon. When I said Ginger Bacon I saw a tiny silvery twinkle in John Timmons's eye, and I said, “Do you know her?” He was reluctant to talk about it, probably because of patient confidentiality and all that rigmarole, but I kept pressing him.

[He told me] that Ginger Bacon had been a patient at Hope Springs about three years before. How do I know it was the same Ginger? Big John described her; the Ginger he described was a chain smoker, a mess of wrinkles and furrows and gray hair—which was
not
my Ginger, except for the smoking—but she had, he said, the longest legs he'd ever seen. And she still was a strawberry blonde. She'd gone through their rehab program and was just a week from being discharged when she bolted. They issued an APB for her but the police and state troopers couldn't find her. A week after she'd vanished, the clinic got a phone call from the Albuquerque police. Ginger had been found in a cathouse in Reno, Nevada . . . she'd worked there almost ten years before, it seems, and had fled back there. But poor Ginger—she was one of the dearest friends I ever had—had slit her wrists and was dead.

When I was discharged from the clinic, I went back to L.A. I sold my house in Malibu and moved to West Hollywood, to a much less grand place. I gave up the cars, the binge buying, and got a simple gray Honda Accord. I still had some money coming in—I never was broke, I'm glad to say. I lived within my means. I stopped letting younger men use me, except for every once in a while when the loneliness became too unbearable.

One day I was driving past the Riviera Country Club and I saw a location van; they were filming one of those horrendous
Golfing With Vic
shows. I got out of my car and made it to where they were filming . . . and there was Vic with Helen Reddy. I hadn't seen Vic for months. He came over to me and gave me a big hug and we did some brief catching up. A makeup girl was working him over and someone else took off his rug and replaced it with a new one. His real hair, I saw, was thinning and receding and was turning silver. But I only got a quick peek because there was only a half a second when he didn't have a toup on.

“So you cleaned up, huh, Bease?” he said to me. “No more booze.”

I shrugged. I was proud of being clean but also, in Vic's presence, strangely embarrassed.

“You look good,” he told me. “You must've lost a few pounds in that joint.”

“I did. And I try to exercise too,” I said.

“You should try this,” he said, brandishing a putter. “This'll keep you in shape.”

I refrained from mentioning that he was about thirty-five pounds overweight and that golfing seemed to me as much a means to losing weight as did eating cheesecake.

“Ginger Bacon,” I said. “Remember her?”

“Oh sure,” he said. “How could I ever forget Ginger? Gams like knitting needles.”

“Well, she—” I began.

“And nipples just like nectarines too. How could I ever forget Ginger? Baby, we used to rip the town up, every single night. You couldn't stop me and her with quicksand.”

“She's dead. I found out that she's dead.”

He leaned forward in the canvas chair he was sitting in. The chair said vic on the back of it in turquoise-blue lettering; the
V
was two crossed golf clubs and the
i
was dotted with a golf ball.

“Ginger's dead?” Already he was pale.

I nodded to him. I could feel tears welling in my eyes. It was a hot, sunny, cloudless day and I was sweating and so was Vic.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said.

He wanted to know how she died and I told him I didn't know. But I am not a good liar, so he insisted on knowing. When I told him, I could see that he was shaken, genuinely shaken.

The director told him that it was time to start filming. Vic stood up and started walking away from where they were supposed to film. He was doubling over . . . it was like he was in pain, his stomach must have been cramping or throbbing with agony. He made it to his trailer and had to lean on it for a second, then he walked in, slammed the door, and didn't come out.

SALLY KLEIN:
After I don't know how many performances of the
Bamboozled
play, Ziggy took some time off. He'd head over to Germany once in a while to make one of those silly sex farces, he'd appear in a lounge someplace, he'd tape a
Love Boat
episode. He did a little turn on a
Cannon
episode and he really did think he'd get an Emmy nomination for it, but they passed him by and he was disconsolate. He also did a
Baretta
and hoped that the role would be recurring, but at the very last minute they decided to kill off his character. Then he began touring in something called
Va-Va-Vamoose.
More jiggling, more bulging eyes.

After years and years of being banished from the talk shows, radio as well as TV, we got a call from people working for someone named Rick Dees, who had a late-night talk show for a few minutes on ABC, I think.
They would love to have Ziggy go on the show, they said. “When do you want him?” Arnie asked, and they said, “What's he doing tonight?” “Did someone drop out of your lineup or something?” Arnie asked them, and the guy admitted that, yes, some young comic had had to cancel at the last second. Ziggy did the show and he was okay for a few minutes, on the couch talking. He wore a red wig now and it was pretty obvious it was a wig. And he'd lost weight . . . he wasn't round, he was barely oval. He had a slight paunch and that was all. He sweated up a storm as he spoke and, sure enough, after five or so minutes he started carping about Vic. At one point he got up and began talking to the audience and he was very funny and then it happened: He wanted to say something, he had a joke inside his head and it was hysterical, but he couldn't bring himself to say it.

When he was talking about Vic and making fun of him and his movies—and Vic hadn't done a movie for years—you could practically hear every television producer and every booking agent take their hands off their phones and lose interest.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
The more fathoms their careers sank, the closer they got to the bottom of the sea, the more people would ask if Fountain and Bliss would ever reunite. When Pacific Coast Records dumped Vic, a few reporters asked him, “Does this mean you and Ziggy might consider teaming up again?” Vic shot them a look that took ten years off their lives.

But Ziggy, he made up these stories, that he and Vic were still close buddies. I saw him on Dinah Shore's show, I couldn't believe it. “Do you ever see Vic?” Dinah asked Ziggy, and Ziggy said that he and Vic had had dinner together only a few weeks ago. I called up Vic and asked him, “Did you have dinner with Ziggy recently?” And Vic said, “Yeah, as recently as twenty-three years ago.”

DANNY McGLUE:
Brillo was going to ink Ziggy to do commercials for them in the mid-eighties but the deal fell through at the last second. I don't know what it was. It could have been because they realized his hair wasn't really his hair anymore, and that was the whole connection with Brillo to begin with. It would have been a great thing for Zig, the commercials, it would've put him right back in the public consciousness. There's also the possibility that the old Ziggy resurfaced, the Ziggy who raised hell on the set, who would spray the director with seltzer or something. I don't know what happened.

I kept seeing comics all the time on TV who owed so, so much to Ziggy. They'd grown up seeing him on television, they'd seen the movies. All the comics who switch characters in the blink of an eye, who just start riffing away to the edge of nowhere, who get up there and
shpritz
themselves dry
to the point that it's like bleeding—they all, every single one of them, owe a great big debt to Ziggy Bliss.

JANE WHITE:
Ziggy and I were always very courteous with each other, after the divorce. When you love someone, I don't know if you ever can really stop loving that person. Whenever I needed him, he was always there for me. And I tried to be there for him. One time I went to his house on North Irving—I couldn't believe how humble it was. It wasn't a house, it was one of those smallish apartment complexes. He had only three rooms there and there was a small pool that everyone in the building shared. The pool Ziggy had put in when we were married, at the house where I was living and still live, was in the shape of a great big smile. But this pool was like a postage stamp! And he had a Ford, I think, an Escort.

Pernilla and I got along, considering. We wanted to make things easy for Freddy. But . . . Freddy and I drifted apart. He pretty much stopped speaking to his mother. (As I understand it, a year or two ago he even had himself circumcised and bar mitzvahed. Can you believe that?)

I was at a spa one day and I saw a headline in one of those horrible tabloids. The headline was something like “former funnyman found filming x-flix.” I was stunned.

He was arrested in Oklahoma, at a motel, where he was touring with the
Vamoose
play. He'd been making those nasty, atrocious movies with video equipment, with a camera. The girls in the play were the actresses and I guess there was no trouble getting actors to do that sort of thing, the way that most men are. But what must have been terrible to Ziggy was that he was in some of the movies too. And there were pictures of him in the paper—in many papers all over the country—naked with some young woman. It was very sad, seeing the way he looked. I was only three years younger than he but he had wrinkles and, even though he was surprisingly thin, he still had pockets of flab all over his thighs. Fortunately, they blacked out his private parts. Someone told me you could send away for a bootleg tape for $29.99.

He got out on bail and returned to Los Angeles. I called him and told him that I would do anything I could for him, that I didn't believe what I was reading. I asked him if Pernilla—who was not involved—was “standing by her man,” and he told me she'd left him. He sounded very depressed to me. He didn't even sound like him. There was no anger—it was just resignation.

I said if he needed anything, to just let me know. He said, “I want my old life back.”

PERNILLA BORG:
I knew that Ziggy once had liked the dirty movies. He had told me this once, when we first were a couple. But he told me that I
was his “dream come true”—that was the words he used. And that he did not need another woman because of me. I believed him.

Always I had men trying to be close with me. Always. Football players, actors, businessmen. Ever since the Top Brass ads. A man walked up to me once in a grocery store and asked me to say my line from that commercial—“I want to get it all over you.” I said it to this man and I see he is playing with himself. I remember one time in Atlantic City, Ziggy did a show in a lounge there. I did a little thing with him for five minutes, what you call a “bit.” And then a half hour later when the show is over, I hear some man in the audience say to another man, “How does an ugly Jew like that get a beautiful broad like her?” And I suppose this is what many men think.

When Ziggy and I married, he tells me that many years ago there was a woman. His first girlfriend. He tells me he used to think about her a lot, he thinks she is the only woman who ever really liked him. But now he does not think of her anymore. Because he knows I love him. I do not care if he performs in a room with one person in it or one million or if he works in a gas station. He is my Ziggy.

When I find out about Ziggy making these movies my heart is broken. I cried and cried and cried. I did everything for him. Some of those football players, maybe I should have married them, yes? But I stayed with Ziggy. And now he is making these dirty movies.

“Is it true?” I asked him on the phone. “Do you make these movies?”

“Yeah. It's true,” he said.

“Why? Why? I thought you love me.”

“I do. I swear to God I do.”

“Then why?”

“Why? I don't know. Maybe because I'm a man, I guess is the answer. And there isn't a man alive who ain't some kinda pig deep down inside.”