Funnymen (46 page)

“About what?” she asked me, her eyes already sinking.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
The paper was slipped under my door at the hotel . . . I woke up to it. Why not wake me up with the news that they
dropped the H-bomb on my living room in New York and Estelle was blown to smithereens!? Because this hit me the same way.

There weren't too many words to the thing. On the top of the ad it said, “vic is my copilot.” There was a photo beneath that of Ziggy and Vic, one of those publicity photos Bertie and Morty hand out to a million places. And then Ziggy Bliss tells the world how much he loves Vic Fountain and how he thanks God Vic didn't bite it on Hollywood Boulevard. “I have been blessed with many things,” the ad said, “with beautiful, loving parents and with that most underrated and underappreciated of all of God's gifts: the gift to make people laff.” By the time I'm on this sentence I had already lost my appetite for the whole day and the next few to come. “But of all the gifts I am thankful for, it is for my fellow yukster and trouper extraordinaire Vic Fountain. You may have crashed into Hollywood but in my heart, Vic, it's always a safe landing.” And there was Ziggy's big, loopy, five-year-old's signature.

My jaw was dropping in disbelief and I'd spilled my coffee over the floor and then the phone rang. I knew it would be Sally asking me, “Can you believe this thing?!” so I picked up the phone and said, “No, Sally, I can
not
believe this goddamn thing!”

“Where does he get the chutzpah for this? Where?” she asked.

“I'd fire him,” I told her, “but then where the hell would we be?” In addition to all this airplane
mishegoss
there was also the matter of Vicki Fountain being born. Vic was getting letters, telegrams, and flowers sent to his room all the time. The fact that he wasn't with Lulu and hadn't seen the baby, Morty Geist was able to put a lid on; he just released it to the press that “mother, baby, and warbler are doing fine.” Nobody bothered to ask where Lulu was because they just naturally assumed Vic was by her side, not that Hunny and Guy were.

When Morty found out that Vic and Ginger Bacon were living together at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he hit the ceiling. “What if this gets out?!” he was saying. “What is it with these two guys?! I'm gonna hang myself!” I told him it was his job to see that it didn't get out. He told me that cleaning up after Fountain and Bliss was like being a stable boy at an elephant circus. I told him I knew exactly what he meant but that; nevertheless, he should get sweepin'.

Hey, in the same edition of
Variety
that they ran Ziggy's ad in, you know what also ran? It was a small story, maybe a paragraph. It said that Galaxy Pictures had terminated its contract with its young blond starlet Veda Lankford.

GUY PUGLIA:
We had to keep it completely hush-hush about Lulu. We checked her into French Hospital in New York under the name of Jane Q.
Doakes—Arnie come up with that name. She didn't know this though . . . I mean, Morty Geist is telling us to muffle this thing big time and Lulu's got enough worries right now, right, what with it being her first kid. So we get her her own room and the nurses and residents keep calling her Mrs. Doakes. But she's so out of it she don't even notice. Once in a while she'd ask if Vic was comin' and I told her I didn't know. Hey, I
knew!
I knew that Vic was three thousand miles away shacked up in a bungalow with Ginger Bacon.

Hunny was the one who really took care of Lu, not me. He was up till five in the morning the night Vicki was born . . . and he had a fight in Sunnyside the next day too. He didn't sleep a wink and twelve hours later he gets knocked out cold in the ring. And that fight wasn't fixed neither. He was out cold for two days, then he snapped out of it. But he wasn't really the same afterward.

SNUFFY DUBIN:
I came home one night at like four in the morning from some joint called Nick's Lagoon in Roosevelt [Long Island] and there's a telegram waiting for me from Ziggy. It's telling me to fly to Los Angeles—he's marrying Jane White. He tells me he'll pay my expenses, he wants me to be his best man. He'll put me up at the Ambassador. He tells me they're going to play a fancy club soon in L.A. and do a few shows at the Oceanfront in Vegas and he'll see to it that I open for him.

I didn't even bother to call the manager of the club I was playing to tell him I couldn't finish out the week. That fucking
chozzer
hadn't paid me a dime. My agent called him up and said, “My guy isn't being paid.” And this pig says, “Your guy isn't being funny either.” I was playing to the same thirty drunks for two weeks and you could hear the sound of men vomiting in the bathroom every five minutes. That'll tend to throw your timing off, you know.

Now, we all know why Ziggy married Jane when he did. This is no government state secret. It was
murdering
him inside, all the attention Vic was getting—Vic piloting the plane and Vicki being born. Well, Ziggy wasn't about to stage his own airplane crash—although I bet he thought about it—so this is how he gets even. He does a quickie marriage in Nevada, invites some of his Hollywood big-shot buddies, and makes sure every reporter from Tehachapi to Timbuk-fucking-tu knows about it.

I show up with my beat-up old valise at the Ambassador—the only time I'd ever been to Los Angeles before this was right before I got sent overseas—and they didn't have me registered there. I went to the phone booth in the lobby and tried to reach Ziggy at the Beverly Hills but they wouldn't put me through. Oh Christ, I'm thinking, was this some practical joke being playing on me? What the fuck am I doing in Tinseltown with two
pair of underwear and forty bucks in my wallet? I call the WAT offices in L.A. and Hank Stanco's girl says Hank will call me back right away. She asks me where I'm staying.
Where I'm staying?!
I'm staying in this fucking phone booth! And how long am I supposed to wait for an agent to call me back?!

So twenty minutes later I'm in some fleabag like the Hotel Cucaracha on Franklin. I fluff the pillows and bedbugs sprinkle out like there's snow flurries. And then I realized: Damn it, I only have five more bennies left to my name.

I called the Beverly Hills again and this time I reached Arnie. “Is Ziggy really getting married or is this a gag?” And Arnie said, “Of course he is! And Vic just cut a record yesterday with Pacific Coast Records!”

“Wha—?” I said.

“Yeah,” Arnie said, “there was all this stuff about Ziggy getting married to Jane White, so Vic went out and recorded a song with Billy Ross's band. ‘The Hang of It.' Bease's number. Boy, this seesaw for attention is veering out of control, Snuff. Every day some new dung is hitting the fan.”

“Look,” I said to him, “this hotel I'm—even the desk clerk has got antennas. Ziggy told me he'd put me up at the Ambassador, but I go there and they don't know me from Judge Crater.”

“I'll make some calls. Go back to the Ambassador. The wedding is tomorrow.”

“So tell me: What do I have to do as Ziggy's best man?”

“Huh?”

“I'm Ziggy's best man . . . ain't I?”

“No . . . so far as I know it,” he said to me, “Vic is.”

REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV:
I was in my office in Omaha when Ziggy called me from California. I asked him how he was, and he told me that he wanted me to do something. He gave me the phone number of two reporters; one man was named Bobby Hale and the other was a woman named Hilda Fleury in New York.

Ziggy wanted me to call these two journalists and tell them that someone named Ginger Bacon was living with Vic Fountain in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I asked him why he wanted me to do this, and he told me that Vic's wife had recently given birth, that Vic was out of control and needed to settle down. “It'd be good for the act, sure,” Ziggy said, “but most of all, it'd truly be the best thing for his family.”

“I just don't know if this is right,” I said to him.

“Oh, it ain't right, Cat,” Ziggy concurred, “but that don't mean you shouldn't do it.” He then proceeded to give me a lecture on loyalty and friendship.

When I contacted Mr. Hale he was quite brusque with me. He said to me, “I know this already and I don't care! And you can tell Ziggy Bliss I said so!”

It took a while before I could actually reach Mrs. Fleury in New York City—her secretary was not easy to get past. Mrs. Fleury, when I finally was conversing with her, did seem genuinely interested in the information I possessed. She asked me who I was, how I had come upon this information, and I followed Ziggy's instructions and told her, “It's me . . . Hunny Gannett, the prizefighter,” and hung up.

• • •

ERNIE BEASLEY:
The recording session was very professional. Bobby Bishop got Hal Gordon to produce, and they used Billy Ross's arrangements. Vic did the tune in two takes. Billy wanted the song to really, really swing so he brought in a few extra musicians. And one of them knew Vic from a previous band.

“Cueball Swenson! You sonuvabitch, give us a hug,” Vic said when he saw this bald man, a trombonist.

“Vic,” Cueball said, giving him a big bear hug, “when I heard this recording date was for you I jumped at the chance.”

They talked about the old days for a minute or two, and I recall Vic telling Cueball that he was going to make sure that Bobby Bishop and Hal Gordon would pay him three times what they would normally pay. Cueball was up to date on the success of Fountain and Bliss and said to Vic, “I even saw that short movie you two did.”

“What? That
Gotta Dunce
thing?” Vic said. “You know, I didn't think it was as bad as everyone said.” (When people say things like that, I've found, it usually was as bad.)

“So . . .” Cueball asked him, indicating Ginger Bacon, who was in the studio that day, “is that the missus? Is that Lulu Fountain?”

“That's just a friend. Lu's with the kid. So whattaya hear about Pip Grundy? And those Siamese twins?”

“Ah, they all split up soon after you left us, Vic. But you know, I ran into Floyd Lomax in Las Vegas a few months ago . . .”

“Uh-huh. Yeah?”

“And we got to talking. He said that if I ever saw you that I should tell you he sends his regards and that he hasn't forgotten.”

“Well, Cue, thanks for passing the message along. If you see Floyd again, would you tell him that I
have
?”

The band did the song and then recorded an old Harold Arlen number for the B-side. Hal and Bobby wanted Vic to do another take, but Vic said he'd get to that after we broke for lunch. He, Ginger, and I went to
Chasen's and got positively gassed over martinis and chili. Vic couldn't believe he'd recorded a song on his own. At one point he got up and phoned Lulu in New York to see how she and the kid were doing.

“Don't ever become anybody's mistress, Bease,” Ginger said to me then, lighting up a cigarette. “It's just pure damn hell.”

When we got back to the studio Vic had no interest in doing the Arlen song again. He simply refused. Billy Ross took Hal and Bobby aside and said to them, “I know Vic . . . he won't do it.” So Hal said, “Okay, then . . . can we do ‘Malibu Moon' now?” Well, that's such a slow, languid, torpid song that I chimed in and said that since Vic was half in his cups, now would be the perfect time. So Billy busted out the charts for ‘Moon,' the band went over it a few times, and then Ginger woke up Vic and he did it in one take. I was slightly annoyed that he slurred over a word here and there but he really captured the essence of the song. It's one of my best lyrics, one of my best songs:
“It must have been the Malibu moon, that made me fall in love with you. It must have been that light in your eyes, those cocktails of silver and blue.”
The third time he sang the words “those cocktails” he somehow turned it into one syllable.

Still, when Hal and Bobby were shaking my hands that day as Vic, Ginger, and I were leaving, Bobby Bishop said to me, “Ernie, we recorded two hits today.”

JANE WHITE:
I can't believe that I was ever so impulsive. Ziggy called me up one day from L.A. and said, “Jane, let's you and me make it official, how about it?” Well, I'd been envisioning a long engagement and wonderful parties and dinners with my mother and him, perhaps a cruise to Europe . . . but he said that he would have a ring over to my apartment in a matter of minutes.

I expressed my reservations and he said to me, “Janie, Shep Lane'll put you and your mother on a plane to California today. And the ring too. Except the ring'll be so big it might need a separate plane. I'll put everybody up at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” I asked him about my bridesmaids and my maid of honor and he said to me, “I don't have time for this, sweets. I wanna marry you. I want you to have my kids. And I wanna do it now.”