Funnymen (75 page)

The next time I saw him perform—it was a year later, in Tahoe—he was having trouble remembering the words. To songs he'd sung hundreds, thousands of times. He was slurring the words, he was making up lyrics or jumbling them. I noticed that the hand holding the mike was trembling too. When he came to the part when he had to sing “
Now, I've got the hang of it, I've got that Sturm and Drang of it, I've got the yin and yang of it,
” he garbled it, stopped the band, and then said, “So who the hell were Yin and Yang anyways, some Peking comedy team?” It got a laugh but Estelle and I were mortified.

I know what you're thinking: Vic often slurred his words, he often forgot-lyrics, that was his style. But this was different. This was an older man now. An old man. This was a guy who'd been around, who'd drank a lot and lived hard and who'd rocked and rolled atop the world, but now that very same world had run him over like a goddamn eighteen-wheeler.

GUY PUGLIA:
Nobody was coming to my seafood joint anymore. If I could get twenty people in there on a Saturday night, that was to me a good night. A lot of my usual customers, they got old, they retired, or they moved or died. And I'll be honest with you—the place was an old-style restaurant. The decor, the menu, the waiters. Me. Nobody drank old-fashioneds anymore, or Manhattans. You had all these new restaurants springing up, all these clubs, and half the patrons are in the bathroom snorting that cocaine or doing who-knows-what.

We changed the place around a little. We livened the joint up as best we
could, we spruced the menu up. But nobody knew about it because they drove right by us on the highway. I tried to get some publicity, and this reporter says to me, “Oh, is that the place with no windows, where Vic Fountain once beat up a reporter?” I hung up on the sonuvabitch bastard.

With the banks and my suppliers closing in, I shut the place down. It was a sad day for me. Thirty years of my life. Gone. I'd had some good fuckin' times in there. It used to be quite a place—the celebrities, the athletes, reporters, politicians, cops, and robbers. And now the place was boarded up and there's a crane taking off the sign that said
GUY'S SEAFOOD JOINT.

Vic—he was part owner—had been tellin' me for years to close the joint down. But I resisted. One reason was the place was like my home, it was like
me.
It was all I knew. But I was married to Edie now, so, you know, when it happened, it happened.

Edie and me, we didn't do nothin' for a while, we just drove around, went to movies and stuff. We was godparents to Vincent's little boy and we spent a lot of time with Patti and Little Guy. But alls of a sudden Edie says to me, she says, “You know, you could open up another restaurant, a smaller place.”

“Yeah? What kind of place?”

“Seafood, Guy. But maybe a shack or something. Something small.”

“Yeah,” I says to her, “we had these places on the boardwalk in Codport. Lobster rolls, fried clams and steamers, oysters, all that stuff.”

“It's not a bad idea, is it?” she said to me.

I told her that maybe I'd give it some thought.

For months that was all I thought about. I kept seein' me in this little seafood hut, slapping together an oversize lobster roll for someone, shuckin' some oysters, maybe scoopin' some Italian ices. I didn't think of nothing else. It was like when you're fifteen years old and alls you think of is girls, but now, Christ, I'm in my sixties and I'm dreaming about lobster rolls.

I says to Edie one day, “All right, I'm gonna mention it to Vic about this Guy's Seafood Shack idea.”

“You don't have to mention it to Vic!” she says to me.

“Whaddaya mean? He's gotta know about this.”

“Why?”

“Huh?

“Why?” she said. “Why does he have to know?”

And for the life of me, I couldn't answer her question.

I opened up the shack right on Venice Beach. No publicity, no press, no big ballyhoo, as Arnie would call it. Just great food, a few benches and a sign, and me in my kitchen whites. And I'll kiss your ass right now if me and Edie didn't nail that big plastic swordfish to the wall.

Oh yeah . . . you look out the little window of the hut and what do you
sea? The ocean, the great big blue Pacific Ocean. 'Cause it's all around the joint.

A month later Vic finds out about it, finds out I've got this operation goin', he hits the roof.

EDIE PUGLIA:
It might have been Hunny who told Vic. Guy and I went to Las Vegas to check up on Hunny. He was doing his greeting thing at the Oceanfront. It took him a while to remember us . . . Guy said to him, “Hey, Hunny, what's goin' on?” and Hunny said, “Thanks for coming to the Oceanfront. Good to see ya here.” “Hunny, it's me—Guy,” Guy said. “Good to see ya here,” Hunny said. “Welcome to the Oceanfront. Please come again.”

After a few minutes he realized who we were, and Guy told him about the seafood shack. I don't gamble and Guy hadn't placed a bet for years, except very rarely at the track. (He and Jack Klein would go but after Jack stopped going, Guy stopped too.) Hunny said the next time he was in Los Angeles he would stop by and get some steamers. “They're on the house, Hun,” Guy said. Then we said good-bye and Hunny said to us, “Thanks for coming to the Oceanfront. Please come again.”

Maybe it wasn't Hunny who told Vic, because maybe Hunny didn't remember it.

You know, a few months later we stopped in on him again. He wasn't standing on his own power anymore. But he wasn't sitting either. People were slipping betting chips into his jacket, tipping him, and he was tilting. Guy told me that Hunny had too much pride to be piled like an old coat into a wheelchair, so they put a hook on his gold championship belt and fastened that to the wall behind him, and that kept Hunny standing.

And he was saying less and less. He was just saying, “Good to see ya here” and nothing else. That way, Guy explained to me, he didn't have to keep track of whether people were walking into the casino or walking out.

• • •

PERNILLA BORG:
The moneys from the movies kept Ziggy going. The movies he has done with Vic, the movies he has done in Germany. But he was hardly ever making these movies now. The reason is because he did not look like himself anymore. Yes, he had the wig and he also had the fat pillow, but he still did not look like him.

There was going to be some sort of [a roast for] him in New York by the Friars Club and he gets very happy for this. But it is then canceled. They wanted to get Vic for the dais but he says he has previous engagement. Without Vic they do not salute Ziggy.

Some people would come to us with offers. There is talk of bringing back the
Tattletales
game show, but this fizzles. So does bringing back the
Win, Lose, or Draw
game show. There is talk of Ziggy in little roles in many movies, but this fizzles too.

In 1992 Ziggy woke up and has pain hurting his left eye. He could not see out of this eye. I drive him to Cedars-Sinai and he is brought into the emergency room. Many hours later a doctor tells me that we have to take out the eye right away. Does Ziggy know this? I ask, and this doctor—I did not like the way he is looking at me; he knows me from the Top Brass commercials, I can see this—tells me, no, he was unconscious. It is very tough decision for me. But I know that I have done right thing. So they operate on him and then he has a glass eye.

When I bring him home he's very sad. For a very long time. Cousin Sally comes over, Danny comes over, Arnie and Estelle come over. He does not want to see them. They are showing his old Robin Hood movie on the television one day but he wants me to shut it off. He loses more weight, walks out of house without the wig on. His head . . . there are now only a few little red hairs on it. Sally comes over one day and tells him that Vic Fountain had called her and said he hopes that Ziggy is feeling better. “Did he really say this, Sal?” Ziggy asks. “Yes, he did,” Sally says. Ziggy smiled and then he starts feeling better.

A few months later he is in Germany to make a movie. He flies to Munich but is told at his hotel they do not need him anymore. I tell him he can go to Sweden and visit my mother.

He flies to Stockholm and there they try to kill him.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Estelle and I did everything to get him out of the funk. But some funks, when they're self-inflicted, it's like a pair of really tight pants: You got yourself into them, only you can get yourself out. There was an offer from some company to do a wacky Ziggy Bliss exercise video. We tossed that his way and he said no. He actually passed on something! That's how low he was.

But he calls me one day and says, “Arnie, is there any slight, vague, faint ghost of a chance that Vic and me could team up together?”

I say to him, “Was there ever a chance that Adolf Hitler and Golda Meir would wed?”

“Nah, serious. Think about it. Me and him was lightning in a bottle.”

“Well, this is true, Zig,” I told him, “but that bottle is old and shattered and I think the lightning might now be a firefly on dialysis.”

“I disagree, Latch. When you got it once, you never lose it. And me and him, we got it. 'Member what Westbrook Pegler called us? ‘Table tennis with a comet.'”

“People still ask me every day if you two are gonna ever hook back up . . .”

“People ask me too. I bet they ask Vic. What do you tell them?”

“I tell 'em to leave me the hell alone.”

“Look, imagine how much publicity it'd generate. We do two weeks in Vegas, it'd be the biggest thing ever hit that burg since those A-bomb tests. We'd be all over the news, everywhere. People would be getting sick of us all over again.”

“I just don't know about this, Ziggy.”

“Just mention it to Vic. Would ya? Do that for me?”

I didn't do it. I couldn't bring myself. I couldn't bring myself to have to call Ziggy back up and tell him that Vic had turned him down.

Maybe he understood my untenable position because he calls me a week later and asks me, “Hey, I got an idear: Vic plays in Vegas and I open up for him. I do my
shpritz
for thirty minutes and then he comes on. He and I wouldn't even have to share a stage.”

I screwed up my courage and said, “Zig, I can't do it.”

ERNIE BEASLEY:
There was still some demand for Vic, even into the nineties. The old records still sold, the old Pacific Coast label material. And anyone in their fifties or sixties or even their forties, if they were in Vegas or Atlantic City, or if Vic was performing in their town, they were curious to see him, to see if he still “had it.”

But he didn't still have it. Everything caught up with him all at once. The booze and the Chesterfields, the broads, the late nights. He went to a doctor and they turned him inside out. He went on the talk shows—they were old Danny McGlue jokes—and said, “Traces of blood were found in my alcohol,” or “They found a liver on my spot.” The doctor told Vic to lose some weight, to give up the sauce, and Vic said he'd try, but he didn't, not right away. After they fiddled with his prostate gland, they found that there really wasn't one thing in particular that was ailing Vic, except the whole package was slowly breaking down. The only thing life-threatening was his life, I guess, and the way he'd lived it.

He was a mess in concert. At first he didn't know it. He thought it was funny. But when a man cannot remember to sing the word “moon” after singing the word “Malibu . . .”

He tried to coast on the old Vic Fountain charisma, and it worked for a while. When he screwed up, he'd just glide over it, make a booze joke. He'd say something like, “How do you expect me to know this song? I've only had four martinis!” But then, with the quivering hand and the liver spots coming in, he couldn't coast anymore.

I remember one time in Atlantic City when he couldn't get through
“Lost and Lonely Again,” a heckler stood up and yelled, “Hey, Vic! You sure
are
lost! Maybe you should get your son to sing for you!” It was a horrible, horrible thing to say, on so many levels. And I'll never forget the look on Vic's face. He was frazzled, anguished—he looked utterly devastated. He walked off and canceled the rest of the engagement.