by Ted Heller
“Jesus, what the fuck wazzat?” Vic asked.
“That, my friends,” Arnie said, “was the army. They test atomic bombs out here, didn't you know that?”
• • •
DANNY McGLUE: The day I married Betsy was the happiest day of my life, because that was also the day that Fountain and Bliss canceled their radio show. I know that might seem mean, but at the small, simple ceremony we had—Betsy insisted that Sally not be invited, and Sally understood—I had this nagging sense of doubt. About the marriage, not the radio show.
Film scripts started arriving by the truckload. You should see some of the garbage I was reading. Galaxy would send us everything, even if it wasn't tailored for Fountain and Bliss. We'd get swashbuckler scripts, war scripts, sports scripts, tons of romance scripts, scripts that may have been perfect for Vic and a romantic lead actress but not for Vic and Ziggy. I remember Sally read one, came into my office, and said, “This is a musical comedy about dying—it's Dark Victory with Ziggy as Bette Davis and Vic as George Brent!” She was exaggerating, I think.
Sid Stone and Norman White, meanwhile, had reworked The Three of Us —the play that would've been drop-dead perfect for Fountain and Bliss—into a comedy script for the movies. They'd added characters, opened it up, taken out some of the music. It was a wonderful screenplay. For Fountain and Bliss, you could do no better. It was silly yet mature, sophisticated but also slapstick, and it would have played perfectly on the tension between Ziggy and Vic. Sid and Norman asked me to add some jokes and I did. Murray Katz sent it to Galaxy and a week later we got it back with not even a note.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Oh, the boys would have loved that to be their first picture! They adored the script. “This is us, Latch, this is us,” Ziggy said. When we sent it to Gus Kahn, it didn't even occur to me that the script would get rejected.
Dissolve. Two weeks later. Murray calls me, tells me that Gus and Ezra Gorman, the producer, had decided on a script titled Robin Hood and His Merry Morons for the boys. When I heard the name of this vehicle it was like someone was trying to sell me a berth on the Lusitania. I told Murray, “This sounds like The Dunce of Life to me all over again!” And he said, “It was called Shall We Dunce? and anyway, Ezra swears it's not.”
But how did Ezra Gorman know it wasn't? I mean, nobody had ever seen that picture!
ERNIE BEASLEY: I was going through a rough time. I had money coming in from Vic's records—they were huge hits—but my personal life was falling apart. My lover Mike and I were no longer together. What happened was, I'd been invited to a party at a certain movie producer's house in Bel Air. Well, this producer was gay, I knew that—everybody pretty much knew that. I brought Mike along and when we went to the swimming pool in the back, I couldn't believe my eyes. There were boys on the patio and the pool was filled with boys, gorgeous, tanned blond boys with blue eyes, all very muscular. Something out of a Leni Riefenstahl movie! Also in the pool were some older, flabbier men, who certainly did not mind sharing the water.
I went into the house and had a few Manhattans. I really got smashed. There was a piano there and when I've had a few I simply cannot resist a piano. I sang a few songs and mingled and it began to get dark. I made my way back to the patio and was looking for Mike to take me home. I couldn't find him . . . I was asking people where my date was. Then I saw Mike in the pool and was about to say, “Hey, there you are!” when I noticed James J. Pierce, a sixty-three-year old producer at MGM who resembled a fat chipmunk, right behind him. They were both in the deep end. And I don't have to tell you what Jimmy Pierce was doing to Mike.
I was terribly upset. I drove back to the Beverly Hills Hotel and I'm lucky I made it there in one piece, I was so smashed. I went to Vic's bungalow and only Ginger was there. I bawled like a baby, for hours. Ginger was so sweet . . . she was a tough broad but had a good heart. I remember saying to her, “What's Mike doing with that ugly man?” But then I realized: I'm five foot five, I'm completely bald, I wear glasses, and I'm thirty pounds overweight. Mike was young and handsome. What was Mike doing with me?!
Ginger and I had a few and we were just complaining about our lives . . . I knew it was over with me and Mike, and she just didn't know what to do. “I know Vic's married, Bease,” she said, “but I just love him to death.” I told her I thought Vic should leave Lulu and marry her. I told her I wasn't the only one who thought that.
Vic walked in and saw the shape we were in and said immediately, “Okay, who died?” Ginger told him what had happened. He saw how badly I was doing. And do you know what he said? “Aw, just write me a song about it. That'll make you feel better.” That was it! Not another word. I'd been his buddy, his confidant, from New York to Florida to Chicago to L.A., and here I am falling to pieces and he tells me to write him a song.
“Puddin', let's go to Johnny D'Antibes's joint,” he said to Ginger.
The thing is, I did write a song about it. I wrote “Lost and Lonely Again” for him. I couldn't listen to that song for years, it was so sad. When I played it for Vic the first time he said, “Great weepy number, Bease. It'll sell like hot cakes.” He was right. But Vic never really got it.
Sometimes he was so shallow I thought he might implode at any given second. But still, you couldn't help but love him somehow. He simply was what he was, and there aren't too many people about whom you can say that.
Last year at an ASCAP dinner for me, a reporter asked me how I felt that millions of men all across the world have put on “Lost and Lonely Again” when they were heartbroken, when their wives and girlfriends broke up with them. I told him I thought it was nifty. But let me tell you: I always got a secret thrill out of it, that here's some sorry lug crying his eyes out in his bed, pitying himself and drinking himself silly over a woman, and he's listening to a song about a guy getting fucked up the ass in a pool in Bel Air.
LULU FOUNTAIN: What? You think I didn't know about the girls? All those whores he ran around with?
Vic was in Hollywood filming his first picture and Hunny drops by the apartment with presents for Vicki. I was pregnant with Vincent then. He was playing on the floor with her and we were eating Chinese food and I said, “I hope Vic is doing good out there in Hollywood.”
And Hunny, who was starting to lose his marbles, said, “Aw, I'm sure Ginger's treatin' him real good.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. This was the first whiff I ever got of her. “You think so?”
“Oh yeah, sure,” he said.
“Who's Ginger?”
“That broad he met on your honeymoon night. At the Latin Quarter.”
But you know, I didn't care. I didn't say nothin'. We had this apartment and Vic was providing for the kids. He wants to run around with whores, the less I knew about that the better. I knew he had the suite at the St. Regis. He never told me what it was for and I never asked. It was a good marriage. The most important thing to me was that he be a good father to his kids.
See, I knew that Vic loved me, and the others was just garbage to him. Garbage. I knew he'd come back to me.
JANE WHITE: I got pregnant on my honeymoon and before I was even showing, everybody could tell because I was looking so radiant! Dr. Baer really saved my life.
Ziggy and I moved to a large apartment on Central Park West and Seventieth Street. We would go out for dinner often, sometimes with Danny and Betsy, but she used to upset me because she drank so much. She was a wonderful girl when she was sober but after a few glasses of wine she became nasty. She'd embarrass Danny, humiliate him and say the meanest things. We'd eat with Lulu and Vic sometimes—that was good for Fountain and Bliss because it gave them a chance to see that not only did they not always get along, but their wives really did not like each other, either. Ziggy and I would eat with Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon or the Frank Loessers. We'd go over to the [Broadway producer] Norman Barasches too. One time Gloria Barasch, such a dear, called us after we got home and told Ziggy that some of their silverware was missing. He looked at me and somehow some kni
ves and forks had fallen into my pocketbook.
Ziggy went to Los Angeles to film The Moron the Merrier [sic] and I stayed in New York. He offered to take me along but I didn't want to be a burden. I trusted him.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Ziggy banged Mandy Crane the first day he met her. In his dressing room. It was like Ezra Gorman and Gus Kahn had a map of the innermost recesses of Ziggy's mind or of some other parts of him, that she was cast for this picture. Here's a platinum blonde with blue eyes and bazoombas in a different time zone than her back. She could've had ziggy stenciled on her forehead. And that Tweety Bird voice of hers, like a six-year-old. Well, the word was all around Hollywood about Ziggy's shvantz, let me tell you. Producers, agents, actors, and directors, they would walk up to me in restaurants, ask me how everything was going, tell me they'd seen Fountain and Bliss at Mocambo, tell me they'd had the most marvelous time, and then ask, “Hey, is it true that Ziggy's got a putz like a Louisville Slugger?”
George S. Collier directed the picture; he'd been at Warners for years and had moved over to Galaxy. He was the typical rugged, silver-haired, professional director. The man had the classic look—he even used a cigarette holder—everything but the eye patch and jodhpurs. He had a deft touch for comedy but, to tell you the truth, I don't think he liked comedians per se. Or actors. Or anybody. “I've heard about these two,” he said to me on the very first day of filming. “If there's any troublemaking on this set, I'll nail 'em so hard they won't be able to breathe. I've worked with the best and these two sons of bitches are rookies. I'm running the shots here and they better realize that. They wanna raise Cain after hours, I don't give a rat's ass. But I run a tight ship on my sets.”
“Look,” I said, “there were no hijinx when they did that dunce film with Clarence Gilbert.”
“They made a movie with Ned?”
“Yeah, a while ago. A short.”
“I didn't know that. Jesus, that's too bad.”
Some script girl or continuity girl brings something over to George to sign and all of a sudden there's this yelp that comes from down a hallway. It sounded like a toy poodle getting its foot stepped on by a sumo wrestler. And then there's another.
“Will someone see what the hell that's about?” George snapped.
So a flunky goes behind the set and this yelping continues. And the guy comes back a minute later and says—and it was obvious he was lying—he couldn't find the source. Then the yelping stops and a minute later out steps Mandy Crane fixing her hair and her makeup, and ten seconds after that, enter Ziggy Bliss.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, it's already starting,” George Collier groaned.
For this picture Collier got off easy. Except for the final day of shooting-—when Ziggy and Vic really got to goofing on everybody and wound up destroying the set—there was really no untoward behavior. “I don't think we should get a reputation as mischievous scamps yet,” Ziggy said to me and Vic one day, and we agreed. Well, that was a remarkable display of maturity on his part, but I soon was witness to the ulterior brilliant strategy: We won't wreak havoc and raise hell on our own set, but who's to say what we can do elsewhere? So whenever there was a break in shooting, they'd go driving around the Galaxy lot and pretty much destroy every other thing being filmed. Robert Spivey was directing Me, Nero and every day Ziggy and Vic would sneak on over there. It was one of those “cast of thousands” epics and the boys would don togas and sandals and just sneak into the background. But when filming began they would run to the foreground and disrupt the shoot. Spivey was not amused and neither were the two leads, but that cast of thousands behind them was in hysterics!
SALLY KLEIN: Vic bought the house in Beachwood Canyon. Jack handled that deal and he waived his fee for Vic. Vic also had his “rumpus suite” at the Beverly Wilshire. Ziggy got a place in Beverly Hills, also thanks to Jack. I was living with Jack at his house in Malibu—we were engaged now—and Estelle and Arn were living at the Hollywood Plaza until they could close on the Cañon Drive house.
Howard Leeds, the head of production at Galaxy, called me one day and said there was a problem with Vic, that he was having problems with his lines. Not only remembering them but saying them. Now, I knew that Vic was never ever going to be big on reading the script and committing it to memory—if they made a movie about someone rattling off a horse's past performances from the Daily Racing Form, then maybe Vic would've won an Oscar. But I didn't understand what Howie meant.
Merry Morons was a Robin Hood spoof. Vic was Robin Hood and Ziggy was—well, Danny, who did a wonderful job punching up the script, called the character “Sir John Falstaff of Grossinger's,” but the character was really named Little John. The movie took place in Plotzingham, in Sherman Forest and in and around a castle. (Sherman Forest was a Hollywood in-joke because he was a production designer at Galaxy.) Now, Ziggy was superb with dialects, but Vic was having trouble. He could imitate Cary Grant or Ronald Colman but he couldn't for the life of him come up with his own voice. George Collier would have them do a few takes and they thought they had it in the can, but then someone would say, “George, Vic dropped the British accent the last five takes.” So it was ultimately decided that Vic would do the entire picture with his normal American accent.
“His normal American accent?” Arnie said when he heard about this. “He don't have a normal American accent!”
They closed the set down for a week. Very expensive. And they brought in Clotilde Sturdivandt.
DANNY McGLUE: She made Margaret Dumont look like Jean Harlow. She was what they called a couthier. There were a few of these Emily Post/Amy Vanderbilt-like women in Hollywood. They taught couth; that is, they taught people how to not be uncouth. These women were all society grande dames . . . one of them, I heard, had even had an operation on her pinkie to get that perfect teacup-lift pose. Harry Cohn called these women “silk purses,” because what they were paid to do was essentially make silk purses out of sow's ears.
So a few days a week Miss Sturdivandt would meet Vic at the Beverly Wilshire and for about two hours a day she would work him over from the toes to the hair. “This fat old dame's like a fuckin' drill sergeant, Danny boy,” he said to me. She threw out his personal wardrobe—said it made him look like a gangster—and he bought about two hundred new suits. She had him walking down the hall at the hotel balancing a pea on his nose. She told him how to cut steak, fowl, and fish at the proper angles. Every time he said “eatin'” or “takin” instead of “eating” or “taking,” she would rap him on the knuckles with a ruler and call him a silly goose. She had him saying “Ramiro Rodriguez rarely river-rafts down the roaring Raritan River” ten times, trying to get him to roll his r's, and when he couldn't pull it off, she had him do it with three eagle talons under his tongue. She would show him movies of Herbert Marshall smoking cigarettes and say that this was the correct way to inhale. Every rule of etiquette there was, she taught him.
“I tell you what that fat dame needs, Ziggy,” he said one day on the set, grabbing his crotch. “She needs Mr. Baciagaloop.”
“Gee, I guess them lessons ain't really takin',” Ziggy said.
But Ziggy was having his own problems.
Collier, Gus Kahn, and some production people were looking at the rushes one day and Kahn stood up and said, “Hey! What the goddamn hell is that?!” And Collier said, “What the hell is what?” Kahn yelled to the projectionist to stop and they froze on this one frame of Ziggy in costume with Mandy Crane and Vic—it was a scene on a bridge going over a moat.
“Look at that, goddamn it!” Kahn barked out. “This is a disaster! The little fat red basketball's got a prick like a Shmulka Bernstein salami!”
And all eyes shifted to Ziggy's crotch.
“This is a goddamn catastrophe!” Kahn screamed.
They then looked at all the scenes they'd shot. As Little John, Ziggy had to wear these very tight green leotards, and you could see it in every scene he was in. It really did look like he had a big salami stuffed in his tights.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Bertie Kahn calls me and says that everybody and his kid sister knows about Ziggy and Mandy Crane. Mandy's blabbing about it like she'd just won the lottery, which, if you're a nymphomaniac, maybe you had. Now, don't forget, Jane is about to give birth to Freddy. Grayling Greene calls Millie in New York one day and tells her he's going to print it that Ziggy and Mandy are engaging in “she-nanigans,” as he called it, that fat momzer.
Morty Geist, who meanwhile is trying to gloss over a fight that Vic had with a reporter at Romanoff's, flies to New York and he's telling Greene that if he prints this story—albeit this true story—then who knows what's going to happen to Jane? Does Grayling Greene, Morty asks him, want it on his conscience that Jane gives birth early and the baby dies?
“What conscience, Morty?” Greene says to him, “I'm a gossip columnist.”
So the item runs in about a dozen Scripps-Howard papers across the country.
And it worked out beautifully, in the end. Jane saw it, she read it, and she gave birth to Freddy about one month too soon. By now, Morty had written what he called “The Ten Standard Denials and Apologies for Fountain and Bliss.” For this situation he picked Denial Number Three, fiddled with it here and there to adapt it to the situation, and issued it. “Lots of stuff is being said about me and Miss Crane. Fortunately I do not read the papers. But Janie does. She knows that all this stuff is garbage. Janie and I are as happy a couple as can be. And a certain columnist has to live with himself that he almost killed my baby boy. Freedom of speech is one thing. Infanticide is another.”