The Man Who Died Laughing (2 page)

“Say,” he said from the side of his mouth. “Her breath smells kind of …”

“She has kind of strange eating habits.”

Lulu took another bite at the treat. This time he let her take it from him. She stretched out and began to munch happily. He patted her. Her tail thumped.

Sonny stood up, swiped at the lint on his trousers, and grinned at me triumphantly. “So whattaya say, pigeon? Planes waiting.”

Maybe you’d already heard of me before I got mixed up with Sonny. I used to be a literary sensation. In reviewing my first novel,
Our Family Enterprise, The New York Times
called me “the first major new literary voice of the eighties.” I won awards. I spoke at literary gatherings. I got a lot of attention.
Esquire
was interested in what my favorite flavor of ice cream was (licorice, and it’s damned hard to find).
Vanity Fair
wondered who my favorite movie actor was (a tie between Robert Mitchum and Moe Howard).
Gentlemen’s Quarterly
applauded me as a man of “easy style” and wanted to know what I wore when I worked (an Orvis chamois shirt, jeans, and mukluks). For a while there, I was as famous as John Irving, only he’s shorter than I am, and he still writes.

Or maybe you’d heard of me because of Merilee. Ours was a match made not so much in heaven as in Liz Smith’s column. Liz thought we were perfect for each other. Maybe we were. She was Merilee Nash, that strikingly lovely and serious and oh-so-hot star of Joe Papp’s latest Tony winner. I was tall and dashing and, you’ll recall, the first major new literary voice of the eighties. We did London, Paris, and most of Italy on our honeymoon. When we got back, we bought a magnificent art deco apartment on Central Park West. I cultivated a pencil-thin mustache and took to wearing a Brooks Brothers tuxedo and grease in my hair. She went for that white silk headband that everybody copied. Together we opened every play and dance club and museum showing and rib joint in town. We were featured in the new Mick Jagger rock video (we were the couple he chauffeured through hell). We got a red 1958 Jaguar XK 150 for zipping out to the Hamptons, and a basset hound puppy we named Lulu. Lulu went everywhere with us. She even had her own water bowl at Elaine’s.

I kept my old, drafty fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street as an office and filled it with a word processor and a personal copier. I started going there every morning to work on book number two, only there wasn’t one. They call it writers block. Believe me, there’s nothing there to get blocked up. Only a void. And a fear that you no longer know how to do the only thing you know how to do. My juices had dried up. I just couldn’t get it up anymore—for the book or, it soon turned out, for Merilee. She met my little problem head on, so to speak. She was patient, sympathetic, and classy. That’s Merilee. But after eighteen months she began to take it personally.

I moved back into my office. I kept Lulu and the mustache. Merilee got the rest. A dancer friend of hers called me and made it plain she was interested. That’s when I found out it wasn’t just Merilee I couldn’t get it up for. The cocktail-party friends fell away fast. I managed to alienate the few genuine ones by dropping in on them unexpectedly, drinking all the liquor in their house, and passing out. The advance on the second book melted away. My check to the Racquet Club bounced. A few weeks after the divorce became final, Merilee married that hot new playwright from Georgia, Zack something. I read about it in Liz Smith’s column.

It’s amazing how quickly your life can turn to shit.

I’d fallen three months behind on my rent, and by the time my next royalty check filtered down, I’d be living in a shopping cart in Riverside Park. I was on my ass when I got the call from my agent about helping Sonny Day, The One, write his memoirs.

“Who cares about Sonny Day anymore?” I said.

“His publisher thinks plenty of people will, dear boy,” she replied. “They’re paying him one point three million.”

“Well, well.”

“The ghost gets a hundred fifty, plus a third of the royalties.”

“Well, well, well.”

All I knew about Sonny Day was what I had seen on the screen. Or read in the newspaper—which, of course, doesn’t have to be the truth. When I was a kid, I thought he was the funniest man in America. I grew up on the dozen or so movies he and his partner, Gabe Knight, made together. Knight and Day. The critics never thought too much of them. After all, they did little more than make the same slaphappy, rags-to-riches picture over and over again, always with that same bouncy version of the Cole Porter song “Night and Day” as their theme song. But who cared? I didn’t. They were funny. Everybody loved Sonny then, especially kids. He was a big kid himself, a brash, pudgy Brooklyn street urchin loaded with schemes and energy and no couth. Always, he was out of his element in the polite world, the adult world. It was Gabe who was Sonny’s entry into civilized society. Gabe was the football hero in
Big Man on Campus,
the ski instructor in
Alpine Lodge.
He sang the songs. He got the girls. Sonny got the laughs. Everything Sonny did was funny—the way he jabbed people in the chest with his index finger when he got excited, or whinnied when he got exasperated, or got the hiccups when he was nervous. Who can forget Sonny the klutz taking the wrong turn and going down the advanced slope in
Alpine Lodge?
Or Sonny the Romeo trying to act suave on his blind date with Joi Lansing in
Jerks?

In the fifties, nobody was more popular than Knight & Day. Their movies made millions. They had their own hit TV variety show on CBS. They headlined in the top nightclubs and in Las Vegas, where they were charter members of the Rat Pack. They were gold. Of the two, it was always Sonny who got the acclaim. Sonny was the biggest of them all. Milton Berle was Uncle Miltie, Jackie Gleason was The Great One. Sonny Day was The One. Gabe Knight was a good-looking straight man who got very lucky, or so everyone thought.

“Here’s the best part,” my agent said. “He’s agreed to tell what The Fight was about.”

Knight & Day broke up in 1958. Their fight—The Fight—was probably the most famous in show business history. It happened in Chasen’s in front of half the stars and moguls in Hollywood. Sonny and Gabe had to be pulled apart after actually throwing punches at one another and drawing blood. They split up the next day. They never appeared together again. Jerry Lewis tried to reunite them on his telethon twenty-five years later, but Sonny refused to show.

Ordinarily, there are no secrets when celebrities are involved. I know. I used to be one. But
nobody
knew the real reason Knight & Day broke up. Neither of them would tell. If anyone close knew, they kept quiet. It wasn’t the most important secret around, like who really shot JFK or what’s the mystery of Oil of Olay. But a lot of people did still wonder about it.

Especially when you considered what happened to the two of them. Gabe surprised everyone by proving that Sonny hadn’t carried him all of those years. He starred in a Broadway musical. He recorded a string of easy-listening platinum records. He produced and starred in his own long-running TV sitcom,
The Gabe Knight Show,
in which he played a harried small-town portrait photographer with a wife, two kids, and a pet elephant, Roland. Gabe blossomed into a Beverly Hills squire. He was prosperous, dignified, well-liked—a man, in short, who had a Palm Springs celebrity tennis tournament of his very own. The biggest charities and political fund-raisers sought him out as an after-dinner speaker. Most recently, the President had gone so far as to nominate him as America’s envoy to France. Ambassador Gabriel Knight. It seemed an entirely appropriate choice now that the French were getting their own Disney World—though I personally would have gone all the way and named Annette.

Certainly it was Gabe’s highly publicized stride into public service that had spurred some publisher’s interest in a book by Sonny Day. Sonny, after all, went the opposite direction of Gabe after The Fight.

He became, as Lenny Bruce coined it, “the man who put the ick in shtick.” Starting with
The Boy in the Gray Flannel Suit,
Sonny made a string of films on his own—wrote them, directed them, starred in them. He even sang. Horribly. His films were all disasters, not just because they were bad—and even his fans knew they were
bad—
but because he’d lost the sweet, naive charm that had made him so lovable. Sonny no longer wanted to be Sonny the klutz. He wanted to be Sonny the smoothie, too, down to the Hollywood tan, the nail gloss, the fancy clothes. He wanted to get the girl. His ego demanded it. The box office demise of his grand comic history of organized crime,
Moider, Inc.,
which he wrote, directed, and played five roles in, finished him as a filmmaker. I never saw it. Like most of America, I had stopped going to Sonny Day movies by then.

Nobody wanted to work with him after that. He was arrogant and difficult. He hosted his own short-lived TV variety show, and an even shorter-lived syndicated talk show. He became a regular for a while on
The Hollywood Squares,
always smoking a big cigar and wearing an obnoxious leer. He popped up on
Laugh-In,
dressed like Spanky McFarland. He did a solo act in Las Vegas and grew into more and more of a monster. One night in Vegas he jumped off the stage and punched some guy who was heckling him. They settled out of court. Another time someone parked their car in his space at a TV studio and Sonny emptied a loaded revolver into it. He became an ugly kind of celebrity, the kind who thinks he can get away with anything. He clashed constantly with the press, which got even by reporting his stormy personal life in gleeful detail. In the mid-sixties he divorced his first wife, actress Connie Morgan, so he could marry Tracy St. Claire, a starlet barely out of her teens. She soon became an international film star. And promptly dumped Sonny. What little press Sonny got after that was mostly due to his daughter, Wanda, a model, an actress, and briefly, a singer, thanks to her hit bossa nova version of “Night and Day.” Wanda appeared nude in a Roger Vadim film and in
Playboy.
Sonny called her a “slut” in the
Enquirer,
denied it, sued, and lost. Then she went on the
Tonight
show and told America she’d taken LSD more than a hundred times. She married a rock star and got her ankle tattooed, then she moved in with a member of the Black Panthers. Wanda was a wild and crazy gal. Seriously crazy. There were a couple of botched suicide attempts. When my agent called, Wanda had been out of the public eye for several years. Sonny had been getting less and less attention himself, other than for the odd celebrity roast, until a few months before, when it was revealed he’d checked into the Betty Ford Clinic. Turned out he’d been addicted to liquor and pills for a long time. Now he was on the road back.

“They say he’s really picked himself up off the floor,” my agent assured me. “He’s supposed to be a changed man.”

“Think he’s looking to stick it to Gabe?”

She chuckled devilishly. “I’d say it’s an excellent possibility.”

“He’ll be candid about the fight?”

“It’s in his contract. Face it, Day has no career right now. An honest book will get him right back on the circuit—Carson, Donahue. Look what it did for Sid Caesar. He even has his own shape-up tape now. What do you think, Hoagy? Shall I tell them you’re interested?”

“What made you think of me?”

“He wants someone serious and distinguished.”

“Like I said, what made you think of me?”

“Stop it, Hoagy. Want to meet him?”

“I don’t think so. I’m no ghostwriter.”

“I know. But this might be just the thing to get you started really writing again. It’ll get you out of the house, give you some focus. And it won’t be hard work. All you have to do is sit by his pool for a couple of months with a tape recorder. You can even leave your name off. What do you think?”

I wavered. Sonny Day wanted America’s sympathy and understanding. Sonny Day wanted to be loved again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to help him. He was pretty much my idea of a pig. I also wasn’t so sure I wanted to be a ghost. Ignore the blurbs on the book jackets—there’s no such thing as an honest memoir. There’s only the celebrity subject’s own memory, and while memory doesn’t exactly lie, it does preserve, protect, and defend against all painful truths. The ghost is brought in to make the celebrity’s writing style, anecdotes, and various uplifting personal revelations seem candid and authentic, even if they aren’t. The ghost also has to make the celebrity feel good about the book so that he or she or it will go on tour to promote it and the publisher will have some hope of breaking even on its seven-figure investment. I’d always equated ghosting with prostate trouble—I never thought it would happen to me. I wasn’t even sure I could pull it off. I’m not very good with people. I became a writer so I wouldn’t have to be around them. I’m also not very good at telling my ego to go on vacation. Actually, I tell it just fine, but it refuses to listen to me.

But it wasn’t like I had much of a choice. I was on a first-name basis with the Ty-D-Bol man. I was desperate. So I told my agent it was okay to send Sonny a copy of
Our Family Enterprise.
She said she’d messenger it right over to the Essex House. Sonny was in town to roast Mickey Rooney.

“What could it hurt?” she said.

“What could it hurt?” I agreed.

L
ULU AND I FLEW OUT
to L.A. three days later. We rode first class. No matter what Sonny’s financial situation was like, he always went first class. Lulu even got her own seat next to me, though she had to stay in her carrier. It wasn’t much of a flight. The food was gluey, the stewardess ornery. Clouds covered the entire Midwest. Flying just doesn’t seem as exciting as it used to be. But then nothing in the world does, except maybe baseball.

I spent most of the flight reading
You Are the One,
a gossipy, unauthorized biography of “those fun-loving, swinging partners who kept the fifties laughing.” It had been written in the late sixties and was filled with the ego clashes, feuds, and jealousy that went on between Gabe and Sonny. There were lots of stories about money and how they blew it. Like how they went out and bought matching red Cadillac convertibles with their first big money—and paid for them with ten-dollar bills. Like how Sonny owned as many as five hundred pairs of shoes at a time and gave them away as soon as he’d worn each pair once. Mostly, I was interested in the reason the writer gave for The Fight. His theory was that Sonny, who was a compulsive gambler, owed somebody a lot of money and used the team as a kind of promissory note—forcing Gabe to work with him at a mob-owned Las Vegas casino for no money or be blackballed.