Funnymen (50 page)

And all eyes shifted to Ziggy's crotch.

“This is a goddamn catastrophe!” Kahn screamed.

They then looked at
all
the scenes they'd shot. As Little John, Ziggy had to wear these very tight green leotards, and you could see it in every scene he was in. It really did look like he had a big salami stuffed in his tights.

They shut down for a week. Monsieur Joffre—he was the Galaxy costume designer—had to go back to the drawing board. (How he had not noticed this, I don't know.) A week later they had a new costume. Ziggy wore a codpiece in some scenes or a long green waistcoat that went down to his knees, where things were “safe,” in others. And they reshot all the old scenes.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Bertie Kahn calls me and says that everybody and his kid sister knows about Ziggy and Mandy Crane. Mandy's blabbing about it like she'd just won the lottery, which, if you're a nymphomaniac, maybe you had. Now, don't forget, Jane is about to give birth to Freddy. Grayling Greene calls Millie in New York one day and tells her he's going to print it that Ziggy and Mandy are engaging in “she-nanigans,” as he called it, that fat
momzer
.

Morty Geist, who meanwhile is trying to gloss over a fight that Vic had with a reporter at Romanoff's, flies to New York and he's telling Greene that if he prints this story—albeit this true story—then who knows what's
going to happen to Jane? Does Grayling Greene, Morty asks him, want it on his conscience that Jane gives birth early and the baby dies?

“
What
conscience, Morty?” Greene says to him, “I'm a gossip columnist.”

So the item runs in about a dozen Scripps-Howard papers across the country.

And it worked out beautifully, in the end. Jane saw it, she read it, and she gave birth to Freddy about one month too soon. By now, Morty had written what he called “The Ten Standard Denials and Apologies for Fountain and Bliss.” For this situation he picked Denial Number Three, fiddled with it here and there to adapt it to the situation, and issued it. “Lots of stuff is being said about me and Miss Crane. Fortunately I do not read the papers. But Janie does. She knows that all this stuff is garbage. Janie and I are as happy a couple as can be. And a certain columnist has to live with himself that he almost killed my baby boy. Freedom of speech is one thing. Infanticide is another.”

When Morty flew back to Hollywood he called me and said, “Latch, these two have got me at the end of my rope.” I could hear his teeth grinding together.

“Then you gotta get a new rope,
bubeleh,”
I said to him.

JANE WHITE:
I was so mad at that Grayling Greene. To go and print that rubbish at such a time! All he had to do was wait another four weeks.

When Freddy was a month old and strong enough, I took him to Los Angeles. We kept the place in New York. Galaxy sent a limo to the airport to pick us up. I loved the new house, it was a dream come true. When the limousine pulled in, there was a Mercedes-Benz with a big red ribbon around it and a sign that said
FOR LIL' FREDDY. AND JANIE TOO.
I opened the door and waited for Ziggy to run up and shower Freddy and me with hugs and kisses, but he was filming the
Merry Moron
movie.

ERNIE BEASLEY:
The dynamic had changed. Vic and Ziggy were husbands and fathers now—Vincent was born when the Robin Hood movie wrapped shooting. Everybody but Danny McGlue had moved to Los Angeles. Vic spent as many nights at the Beverly Wilshire with Ginger as he did at his home with Lulu, probably more. But then Vic figured out that he really didn't have a place all his own, so he got another suite at the Ambassador.

This wasn't easy for anyone involved. I had to constantly be on my toes. I'd eat with Vic and Lu and have to keep mum about Ginger. I'd go out with Vic and Ginger, and Lu was pretty much a forbidden topic, and so were Lana Turner and Deena Moore and Sheila Owens. Vic would drag me
to a nightclub with Sheila Owens, a contract player at Warners and a gal who cursed like a sailor, and I wasn't allowed to talk about Ginger or Lana or Deena. There was a different protocol every night!

At the premiere in Los Angeles, Fountain and Bliss did a half hour onstage before they ran the picture. I was sitting next to Lulu. Now, Vic had secured a small part for Ginger—she's in the movie for four minutes and has about three lines. Guy Puglia had told me that Lu knew about Ginger, so when Ginger came on the screen out of the corner of my eye I was watching Lulu. She didn't change her expression, not a jot, but that could be either because she didn't realize it was Ginger or simply because she was Lulu.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
When their first motion picture was released, that was really the closest they ever were. The two couples would even have dinner one or two times a week. So the negative reviews . . . they really hurt us. But I think it also brought them closer together, like two GIs surrounded and getting shelled in a very tight foxhole. The
Times
and Bosley Crowther tore us to pieces—fortunately for us, he'd forgotten the dunce picture and did not allude to it. He said that Vic passing himself off as Robin Hood would be like Ingrid Bergman playing Lucky Luciano, which, come to think of it, don't sound like a bad idea. Archer Winsten in the
Post
mauled us like a bear, and Chester Yalburton of the
Globe
—who wouldn't have liked a Fountain and Bliss movie if we paid him a hundred grand (and we gave that serious consideration)—shredded us like confetti. Justin Gilbert of the Los Angeles
Mirror
pulverized us.

“Comics don't ever get no respect, Latch,” Ziggy said to me when we had all the reviews in. “You make someone cry, you're a hero, a saint. You make someone laugh, you're a mongrel. You think
Duck Soup
and
A Night at the Opera
got good notices?”

“Actually, they did,” I said to him.

“Hey, who cares if any of these no-good hack bastards like the movie, as long as the people do, you know?” Vic said.

“Good point, Vic,” Ziggy said.

“I mean,” Vic continued, “the most important thing is we keep audiences laughing and tapping their toes, right?”

“Amen, brother!” Ziggy yelled out. “Say it!”

“The man is right, the man is right!” I said.

“Let's face it: The picture is probably garbage,” Vic said. “Like shit, it'll draw flies. But who cares? Because those flies are bringin' in tons of dough.”

Ziggy and I looked at each other . . . we just couldn't go that far with Vic on that, although he was probably right.

They toured in support of the movie, went to all the big cities. They
also played the Copa in New York, the Chez Paree in Chicago, the Beachcomber in Miami, did three weeks in Vegas. They missed Sally and Jack's wedding but sent her flowers and got her and Jack a Cadillac. Fountain and Bliss made the cover of
Look, Life,
and
Time.
(Morty wanted to polish over Vic's rougher edges, so he tried to spread it around how smart he was; Vic told the
Life
guy he was a crossword fanatic and a history buff. But if you look at one of the photos carefully, you can see that the puzzle Vic is working on is upside down.) They were hotter than a pistol . . . but
Time
made the mistake of calling Ziggy's parents vaudevillians of minor repute and talent. Big boo-boo, that.

Morty Geist cooked up some wonderful stunts for them—they dressed up as Robin Hood and Little John and did usher work at the theaters, Morty would get crazy people off the street and out of flophouses and tell them to shriek like they were going bananas. The movie did exceptionally well, people filled the theaters, but it didn't get one good review. Ziggy would actually read the negative reviews onstage at the nightclubs. He would read the reviews and insult whoever wrote the thing, and Vic would stand there with nothing to do but hold his mike like it was a limp
putz.
Vic could handle it for five minutes, but after that he wanted to strangle Zig with the cord. Morty would try to get Ziggy to stop—“You're really not helping your next movie's reception any, Zig,” he'd say—and Ziggy would let loose at the poor kid. If Ziggy couldn't cut the throats of the reviewers, well then, he'd sure try to pop Morty's eardrums.

DANNY McGLUE:
I wrote a screenplay that I thought was wonderful for Fountain and Bliss. Arnie and Ziggy agreed; they were crazy about it. But Gus Kahn and Howie Leeds, the production chief, sent it back to us. At least there was a note attached this time: “All wrong for F & B.” I was baffled.

But Ziggy had other work for me to do.

He wanted me to write an autobiographical profile of him for
Parade
magazine. I said to him, “It's autobiographical, Ziggeleh, that usually tends to mean that
you
would do that.” But he said that he was too busy. Which was true. He had Freddy and Jane, and the boys were now starting their second picture,
The Ego and the Idiot.
Plus, Vegas and New York and Miami Beach and Chicago all the time. Now, I knew that Ziggy was furious about what
Time
had written about Harry and Flo, but I also knew that what
Time
had said was the truth. I wanted to impart this to Ziggy but I knew better.

“We gotta tell the whole story, Danny, we gotta set the record straight for posterior,” he said. (I taught him that horrible pun, I confess.)

“And that's where I come in, is it?” I asked.

“That's where
we
come in. Don't forget, it's me writin' this, not you, even though you're writin' it.”

I had two weeks to turn this thing in to him so he could turn it in to
Parade.
And for the life of me, it was the most difficult thing I ever had to do. He was asking me for Ovid's
Metamorphoses!
He wanted me to create myths, to turn him into a swan, a hyacinth, or a pomegranate! You think that's easy?! I'd sit down at my old Olympia and nothing would come out. Betsy and I were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel then and I'd sit there from nine to five and by five o'clock there wasn't one word on the page. What am I supposed to write? How much Ziggy—or “I”—loved and worshiped “my” parents? How talented and influential and successful they were? I mean, Ted, I might as well have been trying to write Eleanor Roosevelt's memoirs and cover her years as a geisha girl in the forties. It just wasn't coming.

Betsy had landed a small role in
The Ego and the Idiot
and wasn't around in the daytime. And by nine at night she'd be smashed. She'd wake up with a throbbing hangover, then go off to the set. So she had the movie, the booze, the headaches, and all I had was a blank piece of paper. Meanwhile, Sally was pregnant and living happily with Jack. My life was not doing so well.

The night before it was due I wrote it. It was like writing a short story. I made everything up . . . I said that my parents Harry and Flo were the most talented people to ever grace a stage, “the Lunt and Fontanne of vaudeville.” Burns and Allen had lifted their act from them, I wrote, biting so hard on a bullet that I could taste the gunpowder. I wrote that they were obsessed with bringing Ziggy into showbiz and always brought him on the road with them; they nurtured him and nearly spoiled him to death. I went with the line Ziggy always said: “My parents may have been small of stature, but they were titans when it came to talent and heart.” Ziggy had been perpetuating a myth in the press for years now, that Harry and Flo died, not when they saw the O'Hares onstage with their son, but when they saw Vic perform with Ziggy. Now, he was actually starting to believe it. “They knew I'd be safe now, they knew I'd be successful, so they died and did so happily,” I wrote, “knowing their precious boychick would hit it big.” It was nonsense, it was baloney from the first letter to the last period, and Ziggy loved it. And so did
Parade
's readers.

Not long after this I also wrote an autobiographical profile of Vic for
Parade.

SNUFFY DUBIN:
You know, the first time I played Vegas, it was at the Last Frontier. Pete the pervert wouldn't hire me for the Oceanfront. Jack Entratter wouldn't hire me for the Sands. I couldn't get arrested at the Sahara or the Dunes. So I did the Last Frontier and it was no different than
some of the places back east, except this place had a western motif, so instead of just puke there was sawdust on the floor. And puke too.

I was living out of a motel in Santa Monica then, the Starbrite Inn. Small square rooms, a Philco radio, a bed like a Samsonite suitcase, and a window. Oh, there was a pool but you should see some of the swill that was floating in there. Frogs would jump in and die on the spot. I worked Strip City, the Ruby Room on La Cienega, and the Colony Club. I always tell everybody that's how I met my wife, which is true, but she was no stripper. Debbie went there with her then-boyfriend, some hard-on lawyer for Paramount, and before the week was out she was all mine. Lenny Bruce used to play these places, so did Buzzy Brevetto. The girls working the joint, they weren't bad. Marty Dahl ran the Ruby but Mickey Cohn and the Fratellis were behind it. A lot of the strippers were hookers and the stories they told me I could sell now for a million bucks.