Funnymen (54 page)

SNUFFY DUBIN:
It used to
kill
Vic that Ziggy had this reputation as a lady-killer. Christ, it'd kill me too! The guy was a medicine ball, sure, but he was a medicine ball with a firehose attached. The showgirls in Vegas, they all knew about it. That piece-of-crap boxing film they did? Ever wonder why Vic's boxing trunks only go down halfway to his knees, but Ziggy's go almost to the ankle? They were covering up a lot more than just his flabby knees.

I was playing in Vegas, at the Gray Grotto on the Strip. When my show was done I'd go over to the Oceanfront and catch their act. They were a little tired from everything—the movies, Vic's records, the whoring around, flying to New York, Cuba, and Florida—so I'd seen them better. After one show—Jesus, it's maybe three in the morning—me, Ziggy, and Hun are hangin' at the bar and we decide we wanna goof on Vic. Hunny told us he was with two showgirls—the old double-decker—and he gave us the room number. Ziggy goes to the guy working the desk and he gets the key. Why? How can he just do that? 'Cause he's one half of Fountain and Bliss and they're bringing in millions of bucks.

Me and Ziggy go to the room and barge in with two fire extinguishers we swiped from the hallway. Me and Ziggy were soaring on amphetamines. So we burst in and we run to the bedroom and I see one female
body and then another, all these legs and arms and feet and bosoms. Then I can discern another broad . . . it's kind of like picking out letters in a bowl of alphabet soup or something, right? Then I notice there's a fifth breast and I figure this is either Ripley's Believe It or Not or Vic's got three broads in the sack. Me and Ziggy are just too stunned to start spraying them all. Somewhere underneath all that pile was Vic, I'm pretty sure of it.

Pete Conifer told me that Vic was now up to triple-deckers. Look, one is enough. Two is really pushing it. But three? If you ask me, Vic was so pissed off that Ziggy had this rhino dong reputation, he was now taking on three at a time.

DANNY McGLUE:
When I got the script for
A Couple of Lightweights
there was nothing I could do with it. They were asking me to raise Lazarus from the dead, but I don't think this Lazarus had ever been alive. The first two Fountain and Bliss movies were profitable; they made about seven million each and maybe cost a tenth that to make. Somewhere under a leaning tower of dusty paper was the script that was perfect for them:
The Three of Us,
the Noël Coward
Design for Living
knockoff. But Gus Kahn wouldn't look at it again.

While
Lightweights
was being shot, Fountain and Bliss signed for the
Johnson Wax Star Parade
show for [the] Dumont [Network]. Len Coles hosted this show twice a month, and every two weeks they brought in Ziggy and Vic to host. It was done live in New York City. So Sid, Norman, and I and a few other gag writers would concoct a show, then Ziggy and Vic would fly east to put the thing on.

We wrote skits for all the usual Fountain and Bliss characters. Dr. Kablooie, Professor Gobbledygook, the Cockney Barber, the Slow-Witted Cowboy. There would be guests too, usually musicians and singers and dancers. Tony Martin, Julie Mansell, Nat Cole, Julie London, Cyd Charisse, Dinah Washington, Miss Leslie Wilson, when she was only sixteen years old. People like that. But we had a problem: Ziggy and Vic could rarely get any rehearsals in. They were filming the movie, they were playing Vegas. They had their personal lives. By the time they came to New York there was barely any time. Not that Vic would rehearse anyway. He went from one rehearsal per show to just reading things fresh off the TelePrompTer. He did that better than anyone; unless you caught him squinting, you wouldn't have known he was doing it.

Ed Kapler was our director. He and the writers would work and work and we'd get the skits and everything into place, razor sharp. But when Ziggy saw the script he'd have a fit! He'd yell how lousy the material was. “You're gonna crucify me on live TV!” Now, this was bad enough . . . but we were doing the show in two days. So back to the drawing board we'd go.

Ziggy was very cruel. Writers would get called at four in the morning to get bawled out, they'd get fired by a note slipped under their doors, or Ziggy would actually go to their buildings and tell their doormen to tell them they'd been let go. One poor guy had turned in very poor material and Ziggy decided they would use it, just to embarrass him on national TV. Well, not only was the guy humiliated and forced to quit, but this skit made Vic look very bad too.

With all this craziness, the show initially had great ratings.

You know, any time anything they were doing got them in trouble, they could just toss out the script. That was the incredible talent they had. Ziggy could just wing it and Vic could play along. Sometimes, though, Vic didn't realize that Ziggy was ad-libbing and Vic would still be reading off the TelePrompTer. When that happened Vic and Ziggy would engage in the nastiest fighting after the show was done. They'd be in Vic's dressing room and they'd be yelling at the top of their lungs. “You do that to me again, I'll fuckin' kill ya!” Vic would yell. And Ziggy would yell right back at him, “You're lost up there! You're an embarrassment!” The crew would go silent . . . we would just listen to them going at it. “I don't need you, Ziggy! I could make twice as much doing half the work!” And Ziggy yelled back at him, “You're not doing
any
work! How do you divide zero in half?!”

They did this show for four seasons. By the third season the ratings began to fade. Of course, their movies still did well. No Fountain and Bliss movie ever lost a quarter, did you know that? And no Fountain and Bliss movie ever was any good, you could add that to the equation.

In the third season, Arnie thought we should aim for a younger crowd. We put on, finally, a rock 'n' roll act—Cody Lee Jarrett and the Magnificats. Their big hit was “(Let's Make) The Rubble Bounce.” Jarrett was maybe nineteen years old, very handsome. Vic was dead set against having any rock 'n' and roller on the show—he hated the music. Detested it. “It just ain't music,” Vic would say. But Arnie, the Dumont people, and [ producer] Artie Conway prevailed.

Ziggy and Vic did a skit, they brought out a ventriloquist, did a Louie Kablooie routine. After another sketch, which Vic pretty much sleepwalked through, they brought on Cody and the Magnificats. Ziggy did the intro and Vic kept purposely yawning and sneering. The group came on, did their “Rubble” song, and it went over well. When it went back to Ziggy and Vic, Vic was curled up on the floor pretending to be asleep. Backstage, Cody told Artie Conway he was insulted. “I'd never do that to him, he shouldn't do it to me,” he said. Artie said what any producer would say: “It's their show, kid. Sorry.”

Twenty minutes later Ziggy and Vic bring out the group again, and Cody did a slower, softer song, very twangy and sultry. While he was
singing this,
behind
him and the Magnificats, were Ziggy and Vic dancing close to each other! And the group didn't realize it. Toward the end—when he heard laughter—Cody Lee turned around and caught them. Then he slammed down his guitar and stormed off the stage, on live TV. Much to the delight of Fountain and Bliss.

Well, it didn't end there. As everyone knows.

Cody Lee Jarrett was angry; he was humiliated, hurt, and furious. His motorcycle was parked right outside the studio and he hopped onto this beautiful red machine and sped away in the pouring rain. He made it to White Plains and kept going north. People say he was going over a hundred miles an hour. It was dark and very wet and he drove right into a lamppost in Mount Kisco. The papers couldn't run a picture of it, it was so gruesome, but the police photo did eventually leak out years later in a book called
They Died With Their Leather On.
Cody Jarrett's corpse, all in slick black, is laid out near a fence and his head, with no helmet, is about ten yards away, impaled on a fence.

What made it worse was that, after Jarrett had stormed off, to kill the minute that would've been taken up by the rest of the song, Ziggy and Vic said some really insulting things. They made fun of his voice and his outfit, his hair and his music. Now, they had no idea that Cody Lee Jarrett was going to die in thirty minutes. But when the world woke up the next day to find out about it, well, it just did not play well. Not at all.

Morty Geist issued a heartfelt apology for the boys. He looked over the Ten Standard Denials and Apologies but there wasn't anything in there that quite fit. “This one is a real humdinger, guys,” he said. So now there were eleven.

• • •

DOMINICK MANGIAPANE:
I would go to Los Angeles once a year to see Lulu and Vicki and Vincent. To me, family is everything—there's nothing more important than your own blood. I would've given my arms and legs for those two kids. And they weren't even my own.

Vic would offer to pay my way to California, he'd offer to put me up at some fancy hotel. But I was making enough now, I didn't need his help. Besides, it wasn't even him offering—it was one of his “crowd.”

Fountain and Bliss were working on that lousy boxing picture when I was there once. I brought his kids to Knott's Berry Farm and to Disneyland. This gave Lu a chance to go shopping with Ziggy's wife and to visit Vic's mother, who had her psychic business going now on Santa Monica Boulevard. When I got home Vic was there with Ices Andy, Hunny Gannett, a few others. Now you gotta understand: I'd already been there three days and this was the first
time Vic had been home. And he was acting very tenderly, like a father with the kids. But still: First time in three days, don't forget that.

I'd tried to bring up this subject with Lulu but she wouldn't answer none of my questions. The more she didn't talk the angrier I got. Vic didn't scare me, he never did. Even when he was a kid he'd have other people fight his battles for him. I can't tell you how many times Guy Puglia would go after another kid and Vic would just watch.

When I saw him pinching Vicki's cheek I felt my blood boiling. I didn't care that his buddies were there. I said to him, “Vic, you sure do love those kids, don't you?”

“They're everything to me, Dommy,” he said.

“I mean, I look at you now,” I said, “and it's like you ain't seen 'em for a week.”

He gave me a dirty look and said, “What do you know? Huh?”

“I know that these kids need a father and that you ain't ever there for 'em.”

Vic turned to Hunny and said, “Get a load of this fuckin' guy, Hun. A guy works on a dock for a living, he can tell me how to run my life.” Then he turned to me and said, “Go shuck an oyster, Dommy.”

Cursin' like that in front of his own kids.

I said to him, “Why? You'll be outta here soon and you won't be back for who knows how long!”

Vic said to Andy, “Throw this guy out on his ass, Ices.” (Andy's
nonno
sold ices to us kids when we was growing up, on the boardwalk.)

Andy was a big kid. Six foot three, very strong. Twenty years younger than me too. I didn't have a chance. He grabbed me by my collar and was draggin' me toward the front door. I was yelling at Vic. “You're the worst! You destroy my sister's life? I'll destroy yours! What kind of man are you, huh?!” Next thing I knew I was bouncing down Vic and Lulu's front lawn.

• • •

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
A Couple of Lightweights
has the distinction of being not only the worst Fountain and Bliss movie but also the worst boxing motion picture ever made. We should have had that movie done in four weeks. It took three months. There was always something going on, always someplace the boys had to be. Vic got Hunny a small part in the picture and for the life of him, Hunny couldn't remember a line. It drove George S. Collier up the wall . . . and this was the
other
side of the same wall that he'd already been driven up on the previous two pictures. There was one scene when Ziggy, who works as a janitor in a gymnasium and who eventually winds up winning a championship prizefight, asks Hunny a question. All
Hunny had to do was say the word “yeah.” But it took about seventy takes, I exaggerate not. He either didn't know precisely when to say it, or he did know when to say it but couldn't remember precisely what to say.

Collier and [producer] Ezra Gorman took Vic aside and said to him, “Do we absolutely need Hunny in this movie?” and Vic said, “He's a pal of mine, so yeah, we do.” The more times Hunny flubbed his lines, the more Vic would crack up. Vic's entourage would crack up too. But everybody else there—and I include myself among their number—was getting fed up.

Ziggy would complain to me, “We could find a rock and it'd do better than Hunny!” What could I say? I side with him, I'm in Vic's bad graces. I defend Vic, I got Ziggy starin' daggers to my heart. He really had it in for Vic then . . . Vic had been named the number two vocalist in a
Metronome
and
Downbeat
poll and he was second in
Billboard.
“Let's Have Some Fun,” the tune he wrote with Ernie, went to number one and was on the
Hit Parade
for something like three centuries. Reporters were always asking Ziggy to his face, “Are you jealous? What do you think of Vic's success?” and Zig always had the same response: “Hey, I'm Vic's biggest fan.” But it was eating up his insides like that eagle peckin' at Prometheus's innards every day.