Funnymen (69 page)

Shep Lane and I detailed other aspects of Jane White's “character.” He and I had assiduously kept copious notation on her “shopping.” For example, she would enter the I. Magnin department store and purchase a floor-length chinchilla coat, but actually exited the store with not only this new coat but with a mink stole or another coat, a sable, for example, which she had not purchased. As best we could, Shep and I kept track of every item that Jane White had purloined.

When I was shown the door, Mr. Swick said, “With the dyke thing and the shoplifting, this thing is going to be as easy as pie.”

As I understand it, Mr. Swick immediately called Arnie Latchkey, probably within moments of my leaving his office. Informed of the various tasks I had performed for Fountain and Bliss, Mr. Latchkey granted me a most generous severance package and I was let go.

“You need to learn something about loyalty, Cat,” he said to me.

“I consider myself loyal,” I told him, “to a fault.”

“Exactly,” he said.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Letting the Cat go wasn't easy. First time we met him, he was just a young soldier boy in New Mexico. But we had to do it. Spying on each other—that was bad. I know he was only doing what he was asked, but you had to draw the line somewhere.

He was devastated. He was the straightest arrow you ever saw. Hardly drank a drop, never gambled, didn't run around with girls. Christ, he still looked like a soldier.

“I don't know what I'm going to do,” he said.

“Cat, don't make this tougher on me than it is,” I said.

“These years with Fountain and Bliss . . . it's the only exciting thing that's ever happened to me.” He was clutching the arm of his chair. I thought he might faint.

“I understand,” I told him. “Without Fountain and Bliss I'd have just been a poor schnook. But they made me a rich one.”

“I guess I should go,” he said. He stood up and we shook hands.

“What are you gonna do? With your life?”

“I don't know. I suppose I should move back to Nebraska and pick up my life where I left it. It was in pieces then. I only hope I can still find them . . . so I can throw them out.”

“Ha! You know, I do think being with us has rubbed off on you.”

He told me he would keep track of Fountain and Bliss, that he'd keep tabs on them. I told him not to bother.

JANE WHITE:
When I found out about Pernilla, I was stunned. Stunned. I couldn't speak. I couldn't move. I knew he had those dirty movies . . . but I thought that by having the movies and watching them, he wouldn't be tempted to fool around. After Dr. Baer operated on me the first time, I thought that all our problems were solved. Maybe the mistake was the second operation. After that, we drifted apart in so many ways.

Buford Chatham was my lawyer. I think he was very frustrated with me the first few times we met . . . I was crying all the time. My life had suddenly come crashing down. He was a very, very flamboyant lawyer, from South Carolina. Always wore white. White everything. He told me that Ziggy was the adulterer, he'd abandoned me, and that there was no way in the world I could come out of a divorce hurting for anything. “We'll take him to the cleaners, Mrs. Bliss,” he said to me, “and shrink him down to extra-extra-small, so don't you worry.”

He and Ziggy's lawyer met several times, trying to work out a settlement. Every day Mr. Chatham would tell me how well things were going, that Merwyn Swick was shrinking right before his eyes. “We got them at subpetite now, Jane. We're gonna keep shrinking them down to munchkin size.” But one day everything suddenly changed. “They may have us by the
nuts, I'm afraid,” he said. “Do you want to tell me a little bit more about your marriage?”

I will not discuss any more aspects of the case with you. I've told you enough.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
The case never went to court. Thank
God.
That would've been the ugliest thing to hit Hollywood since Fatty Arbuckle and the bottle of sarsaparilla or whatever it was. Ziggy never talked about it, Shep never talked about it, and as for Jane, well, with her out of Ziggy's life now, there was never a reason for me or Estelle to utter so much as a phoneme to her ever again, that loony
gonif.

What I think happened is that Merwyn Swick was about to unload some sort of gargantuan dump truck on Jane. All over her. It's like she was on her driveway on her back, on the ground, and the truck was slowly, slowly lowering the load, about to let loose. But just when the gate was about to open, she leaned back and lifted the garage door and there was a dump truck in there with Ziggy's name on it. And there was enough dirt in there, my friend, to sift over the entire Himalayas like so much parmigiana cheese, two times over.

So after months—nay, years—of bickering and threatening and then sober, earnest discussion, and, finally, putting cocked bazookas to each other's heads, Ziggy raised the white flag. His legal fees were killing him. It was eating away at him emotionally. Jane made away with the whole ball of wax. She got a living allowance that the Sultan of Brunei would have refused as too generous. Ziggy had to sell stock, he had to mortgage his pension fund and future. The house in Vegas? Gone. The house in Beverly Hills? Jane's. Ziggy wound up getting a one-story spread on North Irving. If Pernilla Borg was expecting a mansion, a palatial manor, she didn't get it. And if she was expecting a big-time celebrity husband, well, she didn't get much of that soon either.

SALLY KLEIN:
By the early seventies no talk show would have Ziggy on. Merv Griffin's producer told me they'd rather get a ticking H-bomb on their couch. It was Ziggy talking about Harry and Flo, it was him going on about Vic. He went on with Pernilla a few times and they certainly cut an interesting figure; her bust practically shattered the glass of your television screen. And she towered over him; his head came right up to her chest. It was funny for a while, her Swedish accent and blond hair, and his New York accent and red hair, which was starting to thin a bit. Danny would write stuff for them, he would write malapropisms for Pernilla to say purposely, but she couldn't pull it off. Instead of saying something cute like “Oh, I would Kaopectate my Ziggy with a one-two brunch” as she was
supposed to, she'd say “kayo” and “punch” so there was no laughter at all. It was a sort of [humorist] Jack Douglas and [wife] Reiko act. Ziggy and Pernilla did the
Tattletales
game show with Bert Convy a few times too, but they had trouble even getting on that after a while. They also filmed two
Love, American Style
episodes but only one was aired.

But I don't want to give the wrong impression about Pernilla. She really did love Ziggy, she took care of him. I loved her and still do. And, unlike with Jane, when Jack and I had them over for dinner, I didn't have to count the forks afterward.

After the divorce—it was right around when the whole Watergate craziness was going on—Ziggy got sent a play called
Bam-Bam-Bamboozled.
It was a very cheesy sex farce, lots of girls running around with their tops falling off. Lots of jiggling and bumping. Arnie and I read it and it was very depressing—not the play but the fact that this was what Ziggy was being sent. Oh, he'd do guest spots on some TV shows now and then. He did
That's Life,
with Bobby Morse and E. J. Peaker, a few times, and he did a
Marcus Welby
episode and an
Owen Marshall
. And he'd still do the standup act but now fewer and fewer people wanted him to open for them. Once he got going he would run a half hour over, an hour over. Now, if you're the main attraction, that's all right—who's going to complain if Frank Sinatra decides he wants to sing four or five extra songs? But he'd be opening up for Enzo Stuarti somewhere and then he begins a thirty-minute tirade against the hotel he's staying at, and it louses up everything for Enzo and the band and the club. Vic Damone didn't want him, neither did Sergio Franchi or Julie Mansell.

So this
Bamboozled
play—it was promising for him, even though it was absolute dreck.

“We could tell Zig the truth, that the play should be in the sewer, or we could let him just do it,” Arnie said to me and Danny.

“Doesn't he know it should be in the sewer?” Danny asked him. “He can't possibly think it's any good, can he?”

There comes a time when you can't tell those sorts of things about people-anymore. It's usually the same time when you can't tell those sorts of things
to
people either.

We never told him that the play was the pits. He was the lead, Jack Harris played the evil Lothario, and there were tons of girls in it. The show went to all the small-time theaters, all over the country. In some places it did well, it some places it didn't get noticed. The ad was Ziggy dressed up as a doctor—he's got the white coat on and the stethoscope and that round surgical mirror on his forehead—and three blondes are popping out of their tight white uniforms. And, of course, Ziggy's eyes were popping out too. It was a naughty romp and it wasn't funny and I bet you
he played it two thousand times. I saw the show once, in Warren, Pennsylvania. It was a dinner theater, maybe two hundred people there. Sometimes you couldn't hear the dialogue above the plates and silverware and belching. There was a lot of laughter when Ziggy had to pass himself off as a nurse—he put on a blond wig and put two cantaloupes in his dress. I didn't laugh though.

“What did you think, Sal?” he said to me backstage, when he was taking his makeup off.

“It was . . . good, Ziggy,” I said.

“And how was I?”

He still wanted to be told he was funny . . . decades and decades he'd been doing this and he still needed to hear those words.

“You were very, very funny,” I told him, and when I got into my car I almost started to cry.

VICKI FOUNTAIN:
Taffy McBain was nice to me, but I didn't like her. But I was polite about it. She would get me all sorts of things, jewelry and shoes and clothing. “She's a
zoccola,
a
troia,”
Grandma would tell me. A slut. I would tell Grandma that Dad was married to her and so we had to be nice, but Grandma would say, “Okay then. Be nice. But she's still a
zoccola.”

I don't think that Taffy was really buying the gifts for me—I'm pretty sure it was Ices Andy or Joe Yung, that Taffy would tell Joe what to get and then he'd go to the Broadway or to Greene's [Jewelers] and get it for me. Mom once insisted I return some earrings that Taffy had given me and when I took them back, the man at the counter said, “That Chinese guy was certain you were going to like them.”

After a year of this—I don't know if she ever got Vince anything (maybe Daddy told her not to)—Mommy just started taking the stuff and throwing it away. Taffy gave me two beautiful ruby earrings and Mom pulled them off my ears and literally flushed them down the toilet . . . “Where they belong!”

“So didn't you simply adore those emerald earrings, darling?” Taffy said to me the next time I saw her. She, Daddy, and I were having dinner at Musso and Frank.

“Yes, I did,” I told her, “but my mother flushed them down the toilet. And they were ruby earrings, Taffy.”

“Vic,” she said, “did you hear what Lulu did? My God!”

“Huh? What?” Daddy said.

He hadn't been listening to a word of it.

When it was on the news that he and Taffy were divorcing, my mother danced around the house. “I knew it!” she shrieked with joy. “I knew it! He'll come crawlin' back to me.”

GUY PUGLIA:
What was it? Two years with Taffy McBain? Three? Vic dropped out of my life then. They'd go all over the world together, those two. Paris, Rome, Spain. All over. She wanted something, she points at it, it's hers. Look, you know what Vic liked to do most of all when he hit fifty? Golf. Like lots of guys. He had no interest in goin' to France and staying at the most expensive hotel in the history of the world. If he went to London, it was 'cause he had an engagement there, to sing or to film a picture. But now she was dragging him up and down the world just so she could buy stuff and hang around with famous people.

Once, he come back from staying in London for a week and told me that him and Taffy had met the queen. I says—like I could give a shit—to him, “Oh yeah. How's Her Majesty doin' anyway?” And he says to me, “Saggy tits.”

He and Taffy was on their way to Italy one time. This wasn't a trip so's she could buy more Yves Saint Laurent or Pucci, it was 'cause he was filming a cowboy movie there with George Kennedy, Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, and Diane Cilento. And what's-his-face, the guy who did them pictures and looked like he just stepped out of a deep fryer? Lee Van Cleef. And Vic and Taffy are at the Los Angeles Airport and who do they run into? Ziggy Bliss and Pernilla.