Funnymen (43 page)

The next day we drove around the city. The scenery in the distance was breathtaking, the air was fresh and the sky pale blue, but Ziggy took no notice. He was driving now and we spent upward of eight hours weaving in and out of the same streets over and over again. He would drive up one street, then drive back down, over and over again. Giving up on this street, he would then drive to an intersecting one and spend a half hour traversing it. Several policemen noticed this suspicious behavior, and we were stopped on several occasions. “I'm Ziggy,” he would tell them, “from Fountain and Bliss. Here's a hundred bucks.”

Ziggy had two old, somewhat faded photographs of his old flame, taken from newspapers in the Catskills. He gave me one of the pictures as well as $1,000 in twenties and tens, and he took the other. We were to stop passers-by and go into every store, shop, restaurant and ask for information. It's a good thing Laramie was not a teeming metropolis.

I had not attained anything close to a lead and had handed out about three hundred dollars to a few shrewd citizens when I heard Ziggy yell: “CAT! PAY DIRT!” I ran across the street, where Ziggy stood outside a “feed store.” There was an old man, approximately seventy-five years old, in a cowboy hat. This individual had a weathered, wrinkled face and sparse snowy white hair. “He remembers her, Cat!” Ziggy, quite excited, said to me.

We took the man—he said his name was “Ol' Zeke”—back to the motel and began a frustrating two-hour interrogation. He insisted that we ply him with liquor and he must have emptied a quart of Jack Daniel's. The more he drank, the more colorful his “memory” became. For example, he initially said, “Yeah, I 'member this girl come to town 'bout ten years ago,” but then, after having drained half the bottle, he said, “Yeah, this gal was really sumpin', she showed some of the boys at the Golden Spur a real good time.” By the time the bottle was empty, “Miss Phipps” had become the proprietor of a brothel known as Dolly's Lollies, the wife of the richest cattleman in the state—whom, rumor had it, she'd murdered—and eventually had died of an overdose of laudanum.

After we deposited, faced-down, Ol' Zeke back at the feed store—it was now about two in the morning—Ziggy's mood alternated between one of sky-high elation and dark despondency.

“She was here, Cat! The old man remembers her!” he said.

“But what about the rest of his story?” I asked.

“The way I see it is, she came here, maybe she stayed here for a while.
Dolly was very shy, see, so maybe she just disappeared and moved on. But she was here!”

“What about the brothel? The murdered cattleman? The laudanum?”

“That was Jack Daniel's talking. He was just putting the touch on us for an extra grand, that sharp coot.”

The next day, a Sunday, Ziggy and I split up. He was repeating his drive of the previous day while I made several inquiries of the local constabulary as well as a judge; the startling episode of a cattleman's wife murdering her husband and then suffering an overdose of laudanum rang only one bell. But this incident had occurred in the late 1890s. For $200 one of the town's clerks briefly combed through some property records but the name of Dolly Phipps did not surface.

Ziggy and I reconvened at the motel. “Zilch!” he said to me. I told him that I too had hit a dead end.

“See if the guy here's got any ice, would you, Cat?”

I returned from the proprietor's cabin with a bucket of ice. Ziggy, nude now, dumped the cubes into a towel and formed it into a turban and wrapped it around his head.

“I have to get back to Omaha,” I told him. I was running a beer-distribution business then, which was not doing well.

There was a small table with a lamp on it between our beds. Wearing nothing but the towel on his head, Ziggy picked up the table and threw it against the opposite wall. He lifted up the chair and threw it through the window. His naked body took on the aspect of one large palpitating tomato, and as he raved and ranted around the room his penis swung about like the trunk of an epileptic elephant. There was a dresser in the room and that soon was being hurled to and fro. I tried to restrain him, I tried holding him back . . . but I could not. He was incredibly strong; the flab on his arms belied the muscle underneath. Within three minutes the room was destroyed . . . it was splinters, shredded curtains and sheets, tiny chips of plaster, and shards of glass.

Ziggy wrote a check for $2,000 dollars to the proprietor, who said upon receipt of this largesse, “Hey, any ol' time you wanna destroy any other rooms I got, you jus' go right ahead, sir.”

Ziggy uttered not one single word on the long drive back to Omaha. A week later in the mail a check came to me from California. It was from Ziggy Bliss and was for the sum of $5,000. There was no note attached.

• • •

MICKEY KNOTT:
For a cat who could carry a tune, Vic didn't have too much interest in music. He did a souped-up version of “Night and Day”;
everyone snapped their fingers and swayed in their seats. He'd flick the sleepy Perry Como switch and croon “Malibu Moon” and it's like a lullaby. But when we were in Kansas City some of the boys [in the band] were going to check out Dizzy and Bird, and I asked Vic if he wanted to come along. He thought I was talking about two circus clowns. I thought he was joking. I say to him, “Come on, man, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach!” I said to him, “You ever heard of Lester Young or Billie Holiday?” He said, “Oh sure. Wasn't she the blonde in
Born Yesterday
?” And then he asked for another dose of weed—he called it “loony tea”—which I served right up.

SALLY KLEIN:
By the time we made it to California, we were starting to fray at the edges. Personally, it was very tough on me, Danny being everywhere. I still carried a torch for him. If he was staying on the same floor as I was, sometimes I'd hear his door opening—maybe he was going to get a coffee or a paper—and I would then emerge from my room and we'd just pass a few minutes together in the hallway or elevator.

Ziggy had disappeared for a few days after we played Nebraska—to this day nobody knows where he went—and he was sullen and not very communicative when he rejoined us. Arnie tried everything, Ernie and Billy Ross tried, I tried. I would ask him what's wrong and he'd just say, “Nuttin'! Leave me alone.” I said, “But you seem lonely,” and he'd say, “I am! That's the problem! So please let me be by myself.”

Vic was pretty angry, because Ziggy had given one or two interviews on the phone to columnists in New York and to some local reporters in Seattle and San Francisco. “He gets on me,” Vic said to me, “'cause I accidentally said something to Winchell when I was bagged one night, and now he's yapping to every clown with a Remington [typewriter].” Ziggy was pretty sly in these interviews; people would ask him, “Why are Fountain and Bliss so funny?” and in the answers he would always say something like, “I've been doing comedy since I was a kid. My parents, God bless their souls, were comedians. They taught me everything I know.” Or he might answer, “Me and Danny McGlue spend hours and hours and weeks perfecting this stuff. It's like Michelangelo with a chisel.” But he never would mention Vic.

There was some trouble in Seattle. The band and the rest of us were waiting outside our hotel, about to board a bus to San Francisco . . . it was drizzling and we had no idea where Vic was. Ziggy said, “Oh, let's just go without him!” Mickey Knott took Arnie aside and they spoke for a minute. Then Arnie told me, “Mickey and Vic picked up a few girls last night after the show. Mick thinks Vic's probably still with 'em.” But Mickey, Arnie told me, was so tight the night before he didn't remember where they'd gone. It was a roadside joint somewhere, he remembered.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Mickey and I “commandeered” a car very quickly. That is, I slipped the
faygeleh
concierge two C-notes and in five minutes I'm behind the steering wheel of God knows whose Packard. Mickey had sort of a vague idea where this place was but the previous night was mostly one smoky fog for him (and you can guess what kind of smoke that was). After a futile search for an hour, I'm ready to give up and head back to the hotel and take Ziggy up on his offer to forget Vic, when Mickey pops up like he's got springs in his
tuches
and yells, “There it is!”

It was a two-story juke joint called Spike's Bed of Nails. The place smelled like beer and urine twenty yards away, even with our windows closed. I pulled up, got out, and knocked on the door but the place was closed. “A place like this doesn't even open till midnight, man,” Mickey told me.

“Vic! Vic! Are you up there?” Mickey is yelling up to the second floor.

I hear Vic yell back, “Mickey baby, is that you? You gotta help me!”

“Latch is here too!” Mickey yells up to him.

“Guys, can you get in?” Vic calls out. “I can't get loose!”

It's pouring out now, Teddy, and we're practically in the woods and any second some two-ton grizzly might pop out of a tree and maul our heads off. Mickey kicks to pieces a closed window and we climbed inside this joint. Typical late-forties, early-fifties roadhouse—sticky floors, splintered furniture, a cracked mirror, discarded bric-a-brac, a wobbly staircase, which the great drummer and I were soon ascending. On the wall going up the stairs were about twenty photographs; it was their “Tart of the Month Club.” But the girls looked like Ethel Rosenberg, Rosa Luxemburg, and Dillinger's Lady in Red. No great beauties, any of 'em.

We found Vic in a room on the second floor with nothing in it save a warped, disheveled four-poster bed. Vic, buck naked, was in this bed, each hand and each foot handcuffed to a post. And, may I add, there was not one stitch of his expensive threads inside this entire hostelry?

“It's a long story,” he said. “Can you get me outta here?”

“You think I got the keys to your handcuffs, Vic?” I snapped.

Mickey went downstairs and found a rusty old hacksaw . . . this thing had tetanus written all over it. He's sawing the bed while Vic is stretched out on it like it's a torture gizmo right out of the Marquis de Sade. He tells me the two girls he picked up—
two of them!
—the night previous had taken him to this roadhouse operation and how they'd all emptied a gallon of scotch. “A gallon?” I said. “You stretch the limits of credulity.” He admitted, “Well, it was a lot.”

Mickey is sawing away and the dust is going all over the place and the smell of booze, urine, cigarettes, sweat, and other testimony of summer nights is unbearable. Vic is telling us that he's in the sack with the two girls
and they're putting on quite a show, boy; they're shakin' and shimmyin' and flickin' their tongues like they're cobras, when all of a sudden two sheriffs bust in. These two lawmen come across as real no-nonsense . . . the fact that Vic is one half of Fountain and Bliss, that means as little to them as “I was Martin Van Buren's vice president.”

The girls, it turns out, are both sixteen years old.

“These sheriffs said I was looking at ruin, scandal, and damnation,” Vic told us, “which didn't really bother me, but also at maybe twenty years in stir, which did. I told 'em I could make it worth their while to let me go. I said how did five grand sound and they Jewed it up—no offense, Latch—to ten.” So Vic called and woke up Morty Geist, who was in Frisco now, and Morty was going to, first thing, call Shep Lane in New York and have Shep wire ten grand to the two corrupt John Laws. Morty also had to make sure this thing was kept buried press-wise. The sheriffs then left Vic cuffed to the bed and told him if they didn't receive the dough by noon the next day, they'd either haul him in or burn the roadhouse down with him in it. Which was doubtful as it seemed they most likely ran the joint. As a matter of fact, Vic said to me and Mickey, “The two girls were probably their daughters, those fuckin'
figlie di puttane.”

By now we've got Vic free but he's still got the cuffs around his wrists and ankles. Mickey swathed him in these musty sheets and the three of us piled into the Packard and made it back to the hotel. Just in the nick of time too because as we were heading back the way we'd come, Vic espied the two shakedown guys in an unmarked Ford heading toward the roadhouse.

Back at the hotel, the concierge called a locksmith and we got Vic unbound and back into his threads, $10,000 the poorer but probably not one IQ point the wiser.

• • •

ERNIE BEASLEY:
I called Hank Stanco at the Worldwide American Talent offices on Wilshire. Hank was Fountain and Bliss's man on the West Coast. I told him that Vic was looking into cutting a record. (Don't forget: Everything was 78s then.) Hank was up for the idea and knew that Fountain and Bliss would be in Los Angeles at the Pantages Theater and Ciro's. He said that he'd make some calls. He was meeting that day, as a matter of fact, with Bobby Bishop, who was doing A & R with the Pacific Coast label then. Hank said he might be able to get Vic some studio time and I told him that Billy Ross and the boys would love to record. He asked me what song, and I said that Vic could do either “Malibu Moon” or “The Hang of It.” Hank had seen the act many times and was familiar with both numbers. He said, “Of course, I'd have to look at some of the paperwork
about this, contractually . . . to see if it's okay that Vic can do this without Ziggy.” I told Hank that I certainly did not wish to be the one to tell Vic that he could
not
record, nor did I wish to be the one to tell Ziggy that Vic
could.
“Well, I guess that's what Arnie and Sally are for, huh?” Hank said to me.