Funnymen (79 page)

We worked out some routines, we updated them. Dr. Louie Kablooie, the Slow-Witted Cowboy, the Cockney Barber . . . we brought them all out and shook the dust off. Ziggy had done a Japanese gardener bit during the war—that was a little racist, so we canned that. A lot of times we just sat around and reminisced about the old days. The stories we told! Vic mentioned this one incident in Washington with some sheriffs and we were all in stitches, and Ziggy told us about the time that, when Hilda Fleury died, he literally went out to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn to pee on her grave and stumbled upon Snuffy Dubin who was already at her grave zipping up. “The puddle was still smokin', guys,” Ziggy said. We spoke about how Ziggy and Vic had gradually turned George S. Collier into a pirate with all their antics on the set. Pernilla would pop in on us with Ziggy's medicine and some food from Canter's for all of us and, you know, she was just the perfect wife for him. She would join in with us too.

I asked Vic one day there, “So was it really you who crash-landed the plane outside the Pantages Theater? Come on. Tell.”

“Me? Ha!” Vic said, slapping me on the back. “Danny boy, you gotta be kidding me.”

The only bad thing was, the more we had fun, the more we started clicking and meshing, the worse mood Reina got in.

But we came up with about an hour's worth of new stuff. And Ernie was there and Vic was singing too. There was a piano in the office. “Are they gonna have a big band at the Oceanfront?” Vic asked. “'Cause if it's okay, maybe just Ernie could accompany me. I don't need all them horns
and stuff.” We all agreed. And it was strange, because we realized that Ernie and Vic had never once performed together live.

Ziggy and Vic . . . they still had it. The chemistry. The stuff you couldn't bottle or sell or manufacture or concoct. They still had it.

We were sure they'd be socko.

SNUFFY DUBIN:
It was my retirement year. My last year in the business. You know, in all the years I did comedy, all the hundreds of clubs and thousands of people I performed for, I never took more than a week off. Not once. But in ‘93 Debbie says to me, “You know, Snuff, I'd like to go to Italy for a while. With you.” I say, “Okay, get Yvette”—our travel agent—“on the phone and we'll go to Rome and Florence for three days.” “Darling, I said a
while,”
she said to me. “You know, maybe spend more than ten minutes in one town?” And then it hit me like a fucking freight train. This woman saved my life, a thousand times she saved my life . . . it's time Snuffy Dubin did something for her other than buy her her tenth mink coat or a new BMW. So I call up Yvette and tell her to book us into the Italy—Christ, even my vacations sounded like nightclub engagements!—
into
Italy, I mean, not for three days, not for a week, but a half a year. And what the hell, while I was at it, I'd buy Debbie a new mink coat and a BMW too, just for the hell of it.

Two months before my final performance of all time—it was at Caesar's—Arnie calls me and tells me Fountain and Bliss are performing at the Oceanfront. Well, thank God they didn't time their swan song with mine—I would've cashed in a few mob favors and had the both of 'em rubbed out.

“Why are they doing this?” I asked Arnie.

“Snuffles,” he says, “I haven't the vaguest idea in the world.”

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
A day before the engagement I check in with Wanda Conifer, in her office. We talked about the usual stuff, the money, sound and lighting, how many songs Vic would sing. “Do we still have to get everything done in turquoise for Vic?” she asked me, and I said, “I don't think he can tell turquoise from mauve anymore.”

When the news hit that Fountain and Bliss were reuniting, it was gigantic. It was bigger than gigantic. It was mammoth. All the networks covered it, all the papers and magazines. Every channel showed clips of their old movies and TV shows, they showed old black-and-white stills of them mugging and goofing around. It gave me a chill to watch it, not only because of all the fantastic ballyhoo it was creating, but because I knew that when Ziggy or Vic passed away, they would show these same clips and pictures. Here they were, being reborn, but it was like they'd already died.

Wanda also told me that the explosives experts, the demolitionists, were still finding some of her late husband's little trap doors, double mirrors, and passageways around the hotel. “They found a camera in a toilet bowl on the fourth floor, Latch,” she said. “And they uncovered some juicy videotapes from Vic's suite.” “Do me a favor, Wanda,” I bade her, “could you toss those tapes out?” And she said, “Half the time, Vic isn't even there anyway. He's with four broads, then he gets up and leaves and lets them finish up with one another.”

In one week to the very minute, Wanda told me, the hotel complex we were standing in would be blown to dust.

GUY PUGLIA:
I didn't go. I had no desire to. Sally calls me, says she can get me and Edie in, can fly us there for free, get us a great room. I says to her, “No thanks, Sal, I got a business to run.” You know who was helping me out now? Little Guy, Vic's grandkid. Me and him in the shack. I tell him, “You wanna see your granddad perform, you can take a few days off.” He says to me it's okay, he'd rather work. But I told him that he had to go—Vic was his
nonno
and it was his duty.

Edie says to me, “You sure you don't want to go?”

Not after those things he said to me, I didn't.

SALLY KLEIN:
I was with Ziggy, Pernilla, and Danny in Ziggy's dressing room backstage and we could hear the crowd, we could hear the electricity brewing. Wanda and her staff knew not to send any booze in. There was no champagne. There was fruit, tea, and ginger ale. Ziggy had his wigs out, his two red Brillo ones and the others he needed for the rest of the act. He was a little nervous and Danny and I tried to relax him, to keep him talking. Pernilla was very reassuring to him. She'd gotten a Swedish masseur to come in and work over his back for ten minutes, to loosen him up. “I'm loosened up, sure,” Ziggy said after the guy left, “but I think that Masseur de Sade just fractured three of my vertebras.”

Someone knocked on the door and said, “Five minutes, Mr. Bliss.” I saw Ziggy swallow. I poured him some tea and he drank it. “Everything's going to be all right,” Pernilla said to him. She kissed him on the cheek and then left to take her seat in the audience.

“Thank God for her,” Ziggy said when she left. “Thank God.”

“She's a great gal,” Danny said.

“I slipped up a few times in my life,” Ziggy said. “I was great at it. But marrying her was my salivation.”

Danny and I didn't say anything. Ziggy put a dab of makeup on. He adjusted his wig.

“I only wish,” he said, “I hadn't been so wrong with you two. I don't
know what was wrong wit' me. I wasn't happy, so I didn't want no one else to be happy. I was funny-lookin', I was miserable, and so everybody else had to be miserable too.”

“I wasn't miserable,” I said.

He put some makeup under his eyes.

“If I could take one thing back in my life,” he said, “that's what it would be. That you two would have had just a happy marriage as I got now. That's the one thing.”

Danny said to Ziggy, “Well, I moved in with Sally a few weeks ago.”

“You did?” Ziggy asked Danny. “He did?” Ziggy asked me.

We both nodded.

“God love ya,” Ziggy said to us.

I reminded him that in a week he'd be in New York; the Friars Club had finally agreed to roast him, with or without Vic.

There was a knock at the door. “You ready for this, partner?” Vic said from behind the door.

“Nah,” Ziggy joked, “but let's do it anyways.”

A minute later from the stage I heard Ernie tickling the ivories, as they say. Then Vic started singing “The Hang of It.”

Ziggy got up and went to the door. “Jeez,” he said, “I gotta remember to not pop my eyes out. I'm ascared the glass one might actually shoot at someone.”

“Don't worry,” I said.

“Oh well. Here goes nuttin'.”

DANNY McGLUE:
I stood with Arnie and Sally backstage. We had a great view. The place was packed. And it wasn't just old-timers and senior citizens, people trying to revive their fond memories; there were hundreds and hundreds of people in their forties and thirties and so on. But the front tables, it was Celebrity Row. Bob and Dolores Hope were there. So were Frank and Barbara Sinatra, Milton Berle, Lenny Pearl and Jerry Lewis and Alan King and Bill Cosby, everyone. Jan Murray, Corbett Monica and Richard Pryor were there, Vic Damone, Rickles, Liza Minnelli, Buzzy Brevetto, Tony Bennett, Miss Leslie Wilson, Shecky and Buddy, Barbra Streisand. Arnie and Wanda had to turn people away!

Vic does “The Hang of It” and then launches into another song and, just as planned, in walks Ziggy. When that happened every single person who could stand—and there were a few people in that room who couldn't—stood up and started applauding. It was like drumming, like thunder, it was completely deafening. It went on for five minutes.

Arnie looked at Sally and me . . . he noticed that our hands were clasped.

“A bunch of sweet lovebirds, you two,” he said, sticking his cigar in his
big smiling mouth. “If it wasn't so goddamn sickening, I'd almost be really happy for you.”

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
I'm not going to lie to you. I could tell you it was as if they'd
never
broken up, that Fountain and Bliss didn't miss a beat. But it wasn't like that. It was like they'd been apart for only a minute, that's how goddamn tight they still were.

Ziggy waddled onto the stage in the middle of Vic's chirping. When the place erupted, Vic pretended for a minute that the applause was for him. We didn't plan that. He just did it. And it was goddamn hysterical, boy. The applause dies down and Vic sees Ziggy and does a double take that you could have sent to the Smithsonian, it was so classic. And he says, “You . . .
again
?”

Ziggy doesn't say anything. He's got the sheepish look on, the baby look. He starts inching toward Vic, centerstage. “Yeah, me again,” he says.

Vic said, “So, uh, Zig . . . exactly
why
are we doing this?”

“I know why, Vic,” Ziggy said.

“You do?”

“Yeah. I know why.”

“Why?”

“'Cause we're desperate and flat fuckin' broke, that's why!”

More yuks, followed by guffaws, followed by chuckles. That big long train of theirs was just gettin' a-rolling.

“It's working,” Danny whispered to me.

“Oh my God,” Sally said. She gasped slightly.

“What?” I said.

“I just realized it!” she said. “Look at them! Ziggy is now skinnier than Vic! Vic is the round one.”

It was true. God, I hadn't noticed it until then.

“So why did we break up again?” Vic was asking Ziggy. “I forgot.”

“Oh, nothin' personal . . . except we couldn't stand the sight of each other.”

“But things have changed now, Zig.”

“They sure have . . . now we can't stand the sight of ourselves either.”

“You know, Zig,” Vic said, “I just heard that another comedy team was playing here tonight.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“And which comedy team was that?”

“Stugatz and Bubkes. I just heard a guy outside saying that Stugatz and Bubkes were playing here tonight.”

“That's us, Vic.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. 'Cause you don't got
stugatz
and I've got
bubkes.”