Funnymen (41 page)

SALLY KLEIN:
Every road has its bumps. Vic had run into Walter Winchell in Florida, gambling at the Colonial Inn. Winchell figures, I guess, while I've got Vic here I may as well get an item or two. Now, it was very late and Vic was in his cups. And he said something like “We really want to do movies and get out of radio. Movies seems like just the right racket for us.”
We
being Ziggy and Vic, Fountain and Bliss. Now, this was all innocent enough; it's a stretch to think that Vic was innocent—shooting craps and playing blackjack and running around with girls—but he really didn't mean anything bad.

Winchell was down there on a little vacation so there was a delay until
it hit the press. We were in Chicago opening a movie at the Thalia for five nights, and Ziggy read it in the
Herald-American.
He knocked on my door at eight in the morning, I wasn't even awake. “Look at this! Look at this, Sally! What is this?! How can he do this?!” I read it a few times and it didn't seem like anything incendiary to me. He yells, “What is this
we
thing? Who is
we? We
want to get out of radio and do movies?!
We
do???”

“Ziggy, Vic was probably stewed, I'm sure he meant nothing by it,” I told him. “And you know that when you tell a reporter something, they twist it around.”

“Oh, I'll twist it around, Sal! I'll twist it around his neck!”

He was yelling and waking up people at the hotel. Danny came out into the hallway, then Arnie. Ziggy ripped the newspaper up and kept ripping up the pieces he'd already ripped.

“You gotta punish him, Arnie,” he said.

“I'm gonna do that?! He's an adult! Occasionally.”

“This is bad for the act.”

“We'll survive. Can I finish shaving now?”

“We got a show tonight, Latch.”

“I'm aware of it.”

“We got two sets to do.”

“I'm familiar with it.”

“Well, I ain't doin' it. Get someone else.
We!
Who's
we?
We don't do that, Arn, it's wrong. We don't go around and say ‘we.'”

You know, we were only four doors down from Vic's room, but there was only a one-in-three chance that Vic was in there. Maybe he heard the whole thing, maybe he was fast asleep, maybe he was with a girl—or two of them—someplace else.

Ziggy was true to his word. He didn't go on. We had to cancel the shows.

Morty Geist spun it around masterfully though. Arnie's idea was to tell the press that Ziggy merely had a cold, but Morty said, talking a mile a minute, “A cold?! A cold?! Who cares about a cold? Who's going to care he gets a cold?! Let's tell 'em that Ziggy and Vic are fighting. Let's say they don't get along. Through a stooge we'll tell the
Tribune
and the
Sun
that they don't even talk to each other or when they do, it's either through lawyers or they yell; they hate each other and it's World War Three! This stooge will tell 'em, yeah, Ziggy's
saying
he's got a cold but it isn't a real cold at all.”

“And what is the actual bone of contention here between them? We should get our story straight, don't you think?” Arnie said.

Morty said, “They don't get along because . . . because . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Because Vic planted a story in the press that they want to drop the radio show and do movies! I'll call Winchell now and downplay it, tell him what Vic said to him wasn't really true. Nah, better yet. I'll fly to New York, wine and dine him at Le Pavillon.”

The next day in the
Sun
there was a story with the headline
“WILD WAR III.”
It was about Fountain and Bliss. Our stooge—he played saxophone in Billy Ross's band—had done his work, not just in Chicago but also Kansas City, St. Louis, and Minneapolis, all the places where we were headed next. So for a day we let these murmurs of war simmer about, and then Morty talked to all the people the stooge had planted the stories with and told them that the story was false, that it was just rumors and that the boys were best friends and got along fine. A
Herald-American
reporter got Vic at the hotel and Vic scoffed at all the reports of fighting, which, don't forget, he had never even heard of because he didn't read the news. He told the reporter, “Ziggy's gonna be godfather to my kid when he's born.” (Morty told him to tell that to everyone.) “And when will that be, Mr. Fountain?” the reporter asked him. “Gee, uh . . . Morty Geist'll call you back with that info,” Vic said.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Now, Teddy, I knew what I had to do when Vic found out that Ziggy wasn't going on at the Thalia. I had to tell Vic that Zig was very, very upset and hurt emotionally that he—Vic—had made these statements to Winchell. I had to make Vic fully understand why and how much he'd hurt Ziggy, and I had to remind him that this was a team. It was all about the team. We work together, we move together, we're like a three-headed hydrant [
sic
] here, and we live and breathe and joke as one. Then I had to sit Ziggy down with Vic and we had to air everything out and come to an understanding. This is what I knew I had to do and therefore this is exactly what I did not do.

“Why'd Zig cancel tonight, Latch?” Vic asked me. He called me in my room at the Blackstone [Hotel], from where I do not know.

“He's got a cold, I think it is,” I said.

DANNY McGLUE:
It took a few days to get all the steam coming out of Ziggy's ears to settle down. Sally and I had to baby-sit him. In the hotel, at restaurants, backstage. He'd rant for twenty minutes, pout and sulk and stare at the wall for an hour. He'd snap out of it, grab the phone, and call Millie Roth in New York and have flowers sent to Janie's apartment or he'd call Jane sometimes and they'd talk baby talk to each other for a few minutes . . . or maybe it was just him baby talking to her. One thing he'd do was pace around like he was an expectant father. He'd walk around and around and say, “I got to get back at him. Vic can't do this, he can't do
this.” Sally would say to him, “He didn't do anything in the first place! You've got nothing to get back at him for.” And Ziggy would say, “That's beside the point, Sal.”

In St. Louis, Ziggy returned fire. He did a walk-on on a local radio show on KMOX. Didn't tell anybody he was doing it, not me or Sally or Arnie. I wouldn't have known about it except it got some ink in the papers. Morty Geist went berserk—I thought he was going to have a stroke. By this time, Morty had spread it around that the rumor he'd originally spread around about there being rumors about Fountain and Bliss being at war was just a rumor. So now here's Ziggy on the radio and he's saying that the rumors were all true. The announcer talking to him says, “Wait . . .
which
rumors? The rumor that you don't get along with Vic or the rumor that you do?” And Ziggy said, “Yeah! Those!”

Mickey Knott sees this in the newspapers and goes to Vic, and this is really the first wind that Vic had gotten of all this
mishegoss.

MICKEY KNOTT:
I say to Vic in his room, “Buddy, did you read this stuff that Ziggy's saying about you?” And he said to me, “What kinda stuff?” And for the fifth or sixth time I looked at this article and I said, “I can't really tell, man. It's confusing.” He grabbed the paper from me and read it a few times . . . each time he read it he tilted it a different way, hoping maybe that it'd make more sense that way.

“The nerve of that fuck!” he said.

“Yeah, I know,” I told him. “But what exactly is he saying?”

“All kinds of things, Mick! He says that I thought it was unprofessional that he didn't go on when he had a cold!”

“But didn't you think it was?” I asked him.

“But it turns out he never had a cold! He even says that here. I would've thought it was unprofessional if he said he had a cold and he didn't have one, but I didn't know that till now. He says there was a rumor that I had someone plant rumors that he'd told the press that I planted a rumor about us not getting along. And he says it isn't true what Winchell printed about it not being true. I got no idea what Winchell printed, Mick! So how don't I know that it isn't not true?”

“Talk to Ziggy. I can't keep track of this stuff.”

“Nah, you know what? You go into Latch's room and tell him I ain't going on tonight! I got a cold suddenly.”

So we didn't play that night in St. Loo.

MILLIE ROTH:
Shep Lane had to fly to St. Louis to talk to Ziggy because Jane White had gone to a car dealership in Manhattan to test-drive a Buick. It was in the
Post
and the
Globe.
She inadvertently, so she said,
drove the car home from the dealership rather than around the block. Shep had given the car salesman $500 to hush him up—and he returned the car, which Jane swore to God she'd only taken home by accident—but the real problem was that she did not have a license yet. She'd driven the car onto Fifty-seventh Street and right into a doorway, not too far from the Russian Tea Room. So the police only took her in for that.

DANNY McGLUE:
There was another incident in Detroit. They opened a movie at a large theater there and they got a scathing review in the paper. It said that Vic's singing was like a sleeping pill and that Ziggy's antics were juvenile. “Ziggy Bliss manages to offend everybody and is not even funny when he does so,” the man wrote. It admitted that the two of them did have good chemistry but that two chemicals when mixed together right could create a toxic odor. The reviewer had recently seen Phil Silvers and Jimmy Durante and said that Fountain and Bliss were rank amateurs in comparison.

Ziggy came onstage and read the review aloud. Vic didn't even open up with a few songs, it began with Ziggy and the paper. Ziggy began this long
shpritz
against the press . . . he called the writer a coward who hid behind his typewriter. He said that two thousand people had been rolling in the aisles the night before but obviously one idiot was too stupid or too self-important to know how to laugh. I was watching this . . . I thought it was going to end any second—I kept thinking it would—and it didn't. Ziggy said that any person who questioned Vic's singing talent had to be stone-cold deaf. Then Vic started in and urged the people in the audience that night to write the editor of this paper and demand that the reviewer be fired. “This guy is a rodent, this guy is a rat, and you know what you do with rats? You kill 'em,” Vic said. “But this is America and so you can't just kill a guy.” If the newspaper got two thousand letters maybe that would do it, Vic said. Then the both of them went offstage and they showed the movie, which I believe was
On the Town.

I don't think anybody sent a letter. Because you had two thousand people-leaving the theater that night who thought Fountain and Bliss were even less funny than the reviewer had said.

ERNIE BEASLEY:
I became Vic's confidant on the tour then. Before he began his nightly carousing after a show, he'd like to have a few drinks in the hotel bar. Some quiet time. He was lonely. Right around the time he got married, he'd met a lovely, vivacious southern gal named Ginger Bacon. She was a dancer at the Latin Quarter, had gorgeous blue eyes and strawberry blond hair and just the longest legs. He was crazy about her. So he was seeing her and he missed her terribly, and Hunny and Guy were his
best pals but they were three thousand miles away. Guy was now managing the Hunny Pot, and Vic would call there and make prank calls. He'd put on an accent and say, “I've got Harry Truman and a party of twenty coming in . . . can you get a table ready in five minutes?” And Guy and Hunny'd scramble around, throw a few people out, and of course Harry Truman never showed up.

At the hotel bar, Vic told me he thought he was ready to record a few songs. He said, “When I do ‘The Hang of It' and ‘Someone Such as You' and ‘Moonlight in Vermont,' you've seen what happens; they eat it up, man.”

I told him that when we made it to Los Angeles I could call a few people I knew and that he could call Murray Katz and maybe set something up.

“This comedy thing, sometimes it drags me down,” he said.

“You're great at it though,” I told him.

“Ah, you know, I just hit my marks and let the little rhino take over.”

“You're one half of this show.”

“Who knows, maybe one day I'll get a show of my own and I'll be both halves of it.”