Funnymen (74 page)

I moved out. I got a lawyer who is telling me to divorce him. But I think of my life without Ziggy, without him making me laugh, singing silly songs to each other and eating meals and waking each other up, without all the funny times we have, and it's a very sad life. I did not want to divorce Ziggy and a year later I am living with him again.

SALLY KLEIN:
It came on the news that night, it was the last story. I couldn't watch. They played some old footage from
Anchors Oy Vey,
they showed Ziggy performing with Vic at a nightclub, then they showed a few seconds of one of the movies he was making, the dirty movies.

There was no Morty Geist anymore to clean this mess up. There wasn't even a Bertie Kahn. And now my husband was dead too.

I had nobody to talk to. I would wake up and the bed was empty, it was just me. I'd go to bed at night and there was no one. Just me. Everyone
thought that Jack would die of a heart attack, but somehow that didn't happen. But he went quickly and painlessly, thank God.

When Jack passed away, Jane White called me up, tried to offer me some solace, a few friendly words. She said that after I was through with my mourning we should go out for lunch, maybe go someplace for a few days, like Acapulco or Palm Springs. She said we should go shopping. And when she said that, it came back to me: I had never liked this woman. So I told her I would call her and I never did.

But Lulu, sweet Lulu . . . she was so nice to me. She came over every day with food, with flowers. She cleaned the house, she answered the mail and the phone. She cooked for me. And all the time talking as though Vic would come back to her.

One day she was making me a sandwich and the news came over the radio: The Fratelli brothers were dead. It was some big mob thing. They'd rubbed each other out, shot each other in the kneecaps and died. Lulu didn't seem too upset about it.

DANNY McGLUE:
Ziggy called me up one night, put on Oliver Hardy's voice, and said, “Now look at the fine mess I've gotten myself into.” I told him this wasn't a mess, it was a landfill.

“I'm the world's biggest idiot,” he said to me.

“If that didn't sound like the name of one of your old movies,” I told him, “I might agree with you.”

“Where did I go wrong?” he asked me. “Exactly where?”

“I think we might need a world atlas to work that one out,” I answered.

SNUFFY DUBIN:
Jesus fucking Christ, I'm thinking when this story breaks, how the hell did they black out that
shvantz
of his in the papers? There must be a massive shortage of black ink in the world right now!

I was headlining at Caesar's in Vegas at the time . . . Vic was playing somewhere, I think the MGM Grand, I'm not sure. He calls me up and we spoke about the whole thing.

“He's going through a bad time right now, Vic,” I said.

“He must be. That big Swede he's married to. You'd think that'd be enough for him.”

“
You're
telling me this?! You of all people! There's a hundred chicks in this town with your fingerprints permanently embedded into their shoulder blades!”

I asked him if it had occurred to him to call up Ziggy and maybe offer a word of support and all he said was, “Yeah, it occurred to me.”

But this is America, the Land of the Second Chance. A few months after this whole porno thing, Ziggy becomes a hot commodity again. It actually
boosted his career. I'm playing Caesar's again and he's working the lounge there. And he hadn't played Vegas in years!

I stopped in and saw the act. Life is one strange fucking journey, ain't it? Ziggy's not telling jokes, there's no punch lines, no one-liners. He's talkin' about Vic, he's talkin' about growing up and playing the Catskills years ago, he's telling funny stories about the whole porno movie thing, poking fun at himself. Christ, at one point he was about to say something and I thought he was gonna blow to bits, it seemed so funny. What he's doing is excavating his life, digging way, way deep into the wounds and sores that hurt if you even look at them. Decades ago, Ziggy would call me up in a panic 'cause he needed jokes. He wanted me to help him out. And here he was, in front of maybe seventy people, and he was doing my act!

• • •

VICKI FOUNTAIN:
I'd put out two albums and then a
Greatest Hits
LP but things weren't going well: two failed marriages, two failed children.
The Spy from B.L.O.N.D.E.,
which I did for NBC and which I thought would last forever, was canceled in its second season. So the last thing I needed in my life was to be worrying about what Vincent was up to. There were times when he vanished, when we didn't know where he was for weeks at a time. Daddy would hire private detectives to find him, but they never could. He would resurface every once in a while—he looked terrible, like he hadn't slept for a week—and tell me he was trying to put another band together, and then he'd disappear again.

But Donny Klein dying was one great big slap in the face for Vincent. He did a complete U-turn in his life.

He cut his hair. He put all his hippie clothes into a garbage can and burned them. He and Daddy spent a long weekend together in Palm Springs. Me, Mom, Grandma, Vincent, and Daddy had dinner a few times together too. He gave up smoking, he wouldn't even drink coffee . . . he was very serious about cleaning himself up.

You wouldn't know it was the same Vincent. He lost his baby fat, was lean, handsome, and serious. Daddy was almost proud of him. There'd always been this tension between the two of them—it's that way a lot between fathers and sons. Daddy and Arnie made a few phone calls, and Vince did a demo for Pacific Coast Records. It wasn't the acid hard rock he'd been doing; it was the kind of classic American standards that Daddy sang. Vincent had a beautiful voice. I heard Daddy once say, “The kid sings better than me.” But he never admitted that in public or to the newspapers.

Vincent cut an album—
Vince on Vic
—and did a lot of interviews to promote it. He told all the stories about what it was like to be Vic Foun
tain's kid, he told about the rock music and the drugs. He looks great on the album cover, in a tuxedo holding a cocktail, underneath a photo of Daddy. The record is Vincent singing all of Vic's big hits, “The Hang of It,” “Malibu Moon,” “Lost and Lonely Again,” “Moonlight in Vermont.” There are moments, many of them, when you could swear it was Daddy singing. It was eerie.

But the album didn't sell and neither did the next one,
In-Vince-ibly Yours,
which was for RCA Victor. He toured all over the country, he knocked his brains out. He'd play some club in the middle of nowhere and there'd be only twenty people there. Daddy put him on his final Christmas special . . . but Daddy always had to get a dig in. After they finished a duet, he said, “Hey, you ain't bad, kid.” And Vince said, “Gee, thanks, Pop.” And Dad said, “You ain't bad, you're
terrible!
”

The charade went on for years. He married Patti, they had a son [Little Guy]. They lived in Venice, had a small place there near the beach. Only rarely did I get a hint that something was wrong. If we had a lunch date, for instance, he'd turn up late or cancel at the last minute. After RCA let him go he left Patti for a month, vanished, then went back to her. Snuffy Dubin would do favors for him and have Vincent open for him often, in Vegas, Tahoe, Atlantic City. But usually Vincent was opening for worse, a lot worse. The hecklers were merciless; they'd shout to him in the middle of the song, “Get lost, kid! Where's your father?” Or sometimes even, “Where's Ziggy?” There were no record deals. One clue that let me know something was wrong was that he'd ask me for money. It'd be $200 one week, $30 the next. There'd be a few weeks when he didn't need any, then he'd call me up and tell me he needed another hundred. In 1985 or ‘86, he left Patti and moved into a small motel in Redondo Beach. Patti would call me up, telling me that Vincent wasn't giving her money for Little Guy, so I'd call Daddy and Daddy would have Shep Lane write her a check. “What's with that crazy boy sometimes?” Daddy said to me.

I got a phone call in 1989 at three in the morning. It was a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
and he wanted my reaction to my brother's death. I thought it was a prank. (Do you have any idea how many people would call me at some ungodly hour and ask me to frug with them and then hang up the phone?!) I said to this piece of dirt, “My brother's
what?”
And he told me Vincent had been found dead of a heroin overdose in the front seat of his white Buick LeSabre.

DANNY McGLUE:
My one wish is that Vince would have succeeded with his rock 'n' roll band or at least been given a chance. Vic should've been more supportive.
So he didn't like the music!
Big deal! It was his son. You only get so many opportunities with your kids.

I saw Vince perform his lounge thing a few times. I caught up with him in New York, at the Rainbow Room, and I saw him at Harrah's once, with Guy and Edie. Now, I'm no mind reader or anything, but I could sense something wasn't right. I just felt it. He'd sing maybe fifteen songs, he'd snap his fingers, or close his eyes and turn on the charm and romance for a slow number. But it didn't seem remotely authentic to me. It only seemed remote.

“He's just goin' through the motions,” Guy whispered to me while Vince was singing some torch song.

“He's got great pipes,” Edie said. “But there's something's missing.”

“It's called conviction,” I said.

Patti told me only a year ago that Vincent didn't like the music he was singing. It was all an act. He hated what he was doing, he despised it. He must've been on autopilot. “It's like it's not me that the voice is coming out of,” he told her.

ERNIE BEASLEY:
Vincent's death destroyed Vic. It did. Joe Yung drove us to the funeral and Vic was so shaken up, he'd left the house without his rug on. We had to go back and get it. It put ten years on his face in one day—he was a wreck. He moved back in with Lulu the day after Vincent died.

Any chance father and son would ever truly connect was now gone forever.

Vic took a year off from performing. He stayed in the house a lot, watched game shows, talk shows, and soap operas. After a few months Guy and I tried to rouse his interest—we said, “Hey, let's go to Vegas, we'll shoot some dice, we'll goof around with Hunny.” And he almost went. But he said, “Nah, I'll just stay here and watch
General Hospital.
Maybe next week.”

You couldn't bring up Vince . . . you could never mention his name or allude to him. It was the most forbidden of all subjects. His old bandleader, Billy Ross, once expressed his condolences and Vic never spoke to him again.

Ziggy called Vic. A few days after Vince died. He called Lulu's house and asked to speak to him, and Vic told her he'd call Ziggy back. But she insisted he get on the phone. They spoke for a minute. Ziggy offered his condolences, asked him if there was anything he could do for him. Lulu told me that Vic said, “No . . . but thanks for calling me, buddy. I really do appreciate it.”

A few days later Vic moved out of Lulu's place.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
The press are jackals, they're vultures—sure, everyone knows that. But the key in this business is to make them
your
jackals,
your
vultures. So, Vincent isn't in the ground one week and already here come all the goddamn vultures. The press found out what we'd been doing on Vic's TV specials. I don't know who the leak was, I got no idea if it was
someone on the set or in the orchestra, but if I ever find out who the Deep Throat was I'll wring it so hard it won't be so deep anymore, let me tell you, my friend! What we'd been doing, see, was that Vincent had been singing the songs. For maybe four years. And Vic was lip-synching to them. Vic didn't have the time or the energy to sit down with a band and sing “Silent Night” or “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which, by the way, is not such an easy tune to warble. But Vincent did. And, besides, he sounded a lot more like Vic now than Vic did. So we'd bring Vincent in and he'd record the songs. Even on Vic's final record with the Lodestar label, it's Vince on four or five numbers. The press found out about it and printed it.

To reveal to the world that we were doing this, only a week after Vic lost his son, was the lowest of the low. In the old days, when these termites had some measure of class, they would have waited. Vic was down, he was in the real lower depths, boy. And now they were kicking him again and again. You get kicked in the head a hundred times like this, you're never the same.

He disappeared for a while. I'd get a call every now and then from him. He told me he was taking it slow. I ran into Ices Andy one day and he told me that Vic had had a colostomy only two weeks before. I had no idea.