Funnymen (59 page)

All my girlfriends had crushes on Dad. After school, someone would ask, “So what should we do today?” And everyone else would say, “Let's go over to Vicki's!”

Dad wasn't usually there though.

FREDDY BLISS:
I was not just an only child, I was a lonely child. I know how Dad had grown up and maybe that had something to do with it. Mom
had many friends, she belonged to so many clubs and organizations, she was always shopping or having lunches, and Dad was Dad, performing somewhere, making a movie, on the road. I had a housekeeper named Ruthie who I was close to, but that was it.

You know, Dad wanted to have me bar mitzvahed but my mother said that was absolutely out of the question. She really put her foot down.

I don't want to give the wrong impression though. He was a good father. He always called me when he was on the road. You know, on Parent-Teacher Day Dad used to come to the school and he'd work the room. Really! He'd always make sure to be the last parent to walk in—that way, every head would turn to him when he entered. And all he had to do was appear and people were giggling. It was as if a cyclone had blown into a first-grade class. He'd put on a great show, he'd do jokes with the teacher, he'd clown around with the kids, he'd do stuff with the chalk and the eraser and that map of America that rolled down. And when I was invited to other kids' birthday parties, the parents
always
asked for Dad to bring me; that way, he would perform for the kids. He did do it, he brought me to maybe five birthday parties, and would have everyone in stitches. But when he stopped doing that, the invitations didn't come anymore.

CATHERINE RICCI:
In 1961 Papa died of brain cancer. He'd been sick for a long time and he put up a good fight. It wasn't like him to go out like a coward. He refused all painkillers—he said they were for sissy boys.

Vic paid for all his hospital bills. He got him two rooms at that Cedars hospital in Los Angeles, all to himself. I'd fly out there once a month to visit him, which Vic paid for. Every time my kids saw him, they thought it was for the last time.

Mamma said to me, “He's not going to let this thing kill him.” She was right.

He wore these very dark sunglasses, you know. He had to, it was the law. And he still wore them inside the hospital, even as he was wasting away every day.

They found him dead in the morning, the nurses did, when they came to check on him. He had walked to a chair, near to a mirror on the wall. He sat down, took his sunglasses off, and turned on the light. It must have been a terrible struggle. He stared at himself in the mirror and stared very hard until his heart stopped.

Vic flew the body back to Massachusetts on a private plane and Papa was buried at the Catholic cemetery. There was a wake first and even then he had to have his sunglasses on. He's got the biggest stone in the graveyard, the biggest by far. The church in charge of the cemetery didn't want it
there, the priest said it was an eyesore. “It's like the Eiffel Tower!” the priest said. It
is
pretty showy. Vic came to the funeral, of course, but left the same night. He hadn't spent a night in Codport in years, and he never returned after that.

GUY PUGLIA:
A few weeks [after Bruno died] there was another piece of bad news. Gino Puccio died in New York. I called Vic in Chicago and told him that. He said, “Who the fuck is Gino Puccio?” And I said, “Pooch! The guy at the Monroe! He put us up for free at the hotel and at his house in Long Beach, you fuckin' idiot!” And he said, “Oh yeah . . .
Pooch!
With that red-hot daughter of his!” I said, “
Huh?
Vic . . . she's a nun,” and he said, “So how's old Pooch doin' anyways?”

Man, sometimes talkin' to him was just like talkin' to a cloud.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Clubs were starting to close down. The Blue Beret went belly-up in '59 and the last I heard of Barney Arundel he was being pushed around in a wheelchair in Miami. Man's fate, I suppose. All the clubs were sick, dying, or dead. See, it was the idiot box, the television, that's what it was. Going out, donning your fancy threads, dancing and making merry—what was the big deal about that when you could watch
Bonanza
in your bedroom and suck down a frozen Swanson TV dinner?

Morty Geist to the rescue.

“Let's spread the rumor, Arnie, that Fountain and Bliss are calling it quits,” he said.

Genius. Absolute genius.

SNUFFY DUBIN:
It's four in the morning, I've just finished a big show at the Fountainebleau opening for Andy Williams, my brain is boiling like crazy on pills. I called Debbie in L.A. after a show every single night, that was the law, it didn't matter what time it was. I've got a TV in my room and who knows if there was even a show on—with all the bennies and the Jack Daniel's I could look at all them dots and static swirling around and somehow turn it into
King Lear
. So I get off the phone with Debbie and the phone rings. I picked it up and it was some newspaper reporter. At four in the fucking morning this cat is calling me! He says is it true that Fountain and Bliss are calling it quits? I said to him, “I don't know—
is it
?” It's the first I've heard about it. He said that he'd just been told Ziggy and Vic are going their separate ways. I told him, “Look, buddy, I don't know and I don't care. Adios!”

I hung up and laid my head down on the pillow. I don't know if it was all the pills and the booze but I didn't fall asleep. Not for hours. I kept thinking about Ziggy and Vic.

SALLY KLEIN:
It was vintage Morty Geist. Spread the word that Fountain and Bliss were breaking up, then have them deny it.
Variety
had it as their headline. Then Ziggy and Vic called a press conference to say it was all untrue. The boys loved it. It made the press look stupid and venomous, which is what Ziggy and Vic thought they were. Bud Hatch called up Ziggy, and Ziggy unleashed a three-hour tirade on the phone. Bud made it the whole column, something he would normally reserve only for something like Gary Cooper dying. “How can they say these things about us? How? Vic says they're not even scum; I say they're not even mildew,” he said. “And all 'cause we make people laugh. That's our mortal sin. It's, like, you make someone laugh so they nail you to the cross. That just don't seem fair, Bud.” I was in his office when Ziggy was talking to him . . . as his tirade went on and on, he got more vehement, more agitated. By the end he was standing and his hand was in a fist.

He hung up and I said to him, “Ziggy, you know, that was very convincing. But we
did
purposely spread this rumor.”

And I could tell from his face that he'd completely forgotten that.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
After Cody Lee Jarrett got killed on his bike—that really hurt the ratings. They never would book anyone for the young crowd . . . they wouldn't even put Pat Boone on. Ziggy would've put Elvis Presley or Cal [
sic
] Perkins on, I really believe that, but Vic hated that stuff; so we wound up with “the Prince of Wails,” Johnny Ray, people like that. But conversely, Ziggy would never put Jan Murray, Snuffy Dubin, or Shelley Berman on the show either.

The killer was that in 1958 or so, NBC gave Fritz Devane a sitcom,
Daddy's Home.
Aptly enough, Geritol was the sponsor. That wig of his you thought any minute would sprout wings and fly off the top of his head. Every man and woman over the age of fifty years old watched the Devane show, which, of course, was in the time slot opposite us.

So this is what happened. Our show bit the dust. Their movies were bringing in less money. The last motion picture they did for Galaxy was the baseball/science-fiction movie, with the somewhat unwieldy title of
One, Two, Three Strikes, You're Out of This World.
Try fitting
that
onto your marquee, boy. See,
Damn Yankees
had done well and you had that play
Visit to a Small Planet.
So naturally the Hollywood logic is: Hey, why not make a movie about a baseball player from outer space?

This movie stank, Teddy. I mean, it reeked to the rafters. They should've fumigated the theaters after the first reel. When it wrapped, Ziggy even said, “Whew! We can breathe again!”
Variety
embalmed it, Chet Yalburton of the
Globe
put the shroud on it, the
Times
of Los Angeles dug the hole,
Time
and
Newsweek
flung it into the ground, and the
New York Times
piled the
dirt onto the coffin. They insulted Vic's singing, they insulted the direction, the makeup, the costumes—they said that Ziggy Bliss swinging a bat managed to make William Bendix as Babe Ruth look like an Oscar-caliber performance. That hurt big time. I mean, in a word:
Ouch!

Ziggy and Vic went on the road to push the movie but you can only push a dead twenty-ton carp so far. Now, this was the first time they ever went out in support of a movie separately. Ziggy I thought was gonna have an infarction when Sally came up with this masterstroke. “Two people traveling separately,” she reasoned, “can cover more ground.”

“She's right, Zig,” Vic said.

Ziggy slumped in his chair. I thought he was gonna literally deflate.

So Vic went his way and Ziggy went his. They agreed on one thing: No performing. Vic wasn't going to sing, Ziggy wasn't going to do any stand-up, which he, emotionally, couldn't have done yet solo anyways. So Vic would go on
Jack Paar
and
Dave Garroway
and he did a surprise walk-on on
What Is It?
—it took ten minutes before Hunny recognized him—and Ziggy went on Barry Gray's [radio] show and Irv Kupcinet and Long John Nebel.

The timing was good too. Because Lulu and Vic were now legally separated. She'd had enough of Vic. Or she didn't have enough of Vic—I don't know which one it was. Lulu tells everybody—to this day—that all she wanted out of Vic was for him to be a provider . . . but he was the only man she ever loved and he broke her heart every day. Look, Vic really did love the kids, he spent as much time with Vicki as he could, but it just wasn't that much time. He'd go on golfing jags, he was always golfing with [PGA champions] Tony Newport and Tony Hampton. He'd bring Vicki and Vincent to the golf course, sometimes let them take time off from school too, which I don't think their teachers approved of. But it was Vic Fountain so it was okay.

LULU FOUNTAIN:
You think I cared about all the girls? I don't care if he was keeping one
zoccola
or a thousand! I'd call him up in Vegas to tell him that Vicki got a bad report card or that Vincent had a cold . . . sometimes a broad would answer and in the background I'd hear Vic saying, “Who is it, doll?” I got used to it. I had to. What I cared about was, what made me sick was . . .

One time I was having lunch with Hunny and Joe Yung at the house. And the kids were there too . . . it must've been a weekend. At the end of the lunch, Joe got up and said, “I gotta get going now. You're going to stay around, Hunny?”

“Yeah sure, Chinese Joe,” Hunny said.

Then Joe took off and Hunny started playing with Vincent's electric trains, trying to make them move.

“Why was Joe in such a rush?” I asked him.

“He's gotta bring someone to Mexico, Lu, some friend of Vic's,” he said. “Vinnie, something's wrong wit' your trains.”

“Why?” I asked him.

“Some doctor there fixes 'em,” he told me. He said to Vincent, “Your train set is broke.”

“Why do these girls need fixin'?” I asked him.

“So's they don't get babies, Lu.”

Vincent put the trains back on the tracks and then they started moving.

• • •

GUY PUGLIA:
Vic drives up in his new Bentley to my restaurant, he gets out with Ginger. It's one, two o'clock at night, I'm closing the place up.

I see him and what's the first thing I do? I take the big plastic swordfish off the wall.

“I need to get a word with you,
goomba,”
he says to me.

I'm thinkin', Okay, what's he want me to do for him now?

We go into my little office behind the kitchen.

“Me and Lulu—it's
finito,”
he said.

I opened a drawer in my desk and pulled out a bottle of bourbon and two glasses.

“I'm sorry about that,” I said.

“I've known her since I was a fuckin' kid, Guy.”