by Ted Heller
When Morty flew back to Hollywood he called me and said, “Latch, these two have got me at the end of my rope.” I could hear his teeth grinding together.
“Then you gotta get a new rope, bubeleh,” I said to him.
JANE WHITE: I was so mad at that Grayling Greene. To go and print that rubbish at such a time! All he had to do was wait another four weeks.
When Freddy was a month old and strong enough, I took him to Los Angeles. We kept the place in New York. Galaxy sent a limo to the airport to pick us up. I loved the new house, it was a dream come true. When the limousine pulled in, there was a Mercedes-Benz with a big red ribbon around it and a sign that said FOR LIL' FREDDY. AND JANIE TOO. I opened the door and waited for Ziggy to run up and shower Freddy and me with hugs and kisses, but he was filming the Merry Moron movie.
ERNIE BEASLEY: The dynamic had changed. Vic and Ziggy were husbands and fathers now—Vincent was born when the Robin Hood movie wrapped shooting. Everybody but Danny McGlue had moved to Los Angeles. Vic spent as many nights at the Beverly Wilshire with Ginger as he did at his home with Lulu, probably more. But then Vic figured out that he really didn't have a place all his own, so he got another suite at the Ambassador.
This wasn't easy for anyone involved. I had to constantly be on my toes. I'd eat with Vic and Lu and have to keep mum about Ginger. I'd go out with Vic and Ginger, and Lu was pretty much a forbidden topic, and so were Lana Turner and Deena Moore and Sheila Owens. Vic would drag me to a nightclub with Sheila Owens, a contract player at Warners and a gal who cursed like a sailor, and I wasn't allowed to talk about Ginger or Lana or Deena. There was a different protocol every night!
At the premiere in Los Angeles, Fountain and Bliss did a half hour onstage before they ran the picture. I was sitting next to Lulu. Now, Vic had secured a small part for Ginger—she's in the movie for four minutes and has about three lines. Guy Puglia had told me that Lu knew about Ginger, so when Ginger came on the screen out of the corner of my eye I was watching Lulu. She didn't change her expression, not a jot, but that could be either because she didn't realize it was Ginger or simply because she was Lulu.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: When their first motion picture was released, that was really the closest they ever were. The two couples would even have dinner one or two times a week. So the negative reviews . . . they really hurt us. But I think it also brought them closer together, like two GIs surrounded and getting shelled in a very tight foxhole. The Times and Bosley Crowther tore us to pieces—fortunately for us, he'd forgotten the dunce picture and did not allude to it. He said that Vic passing himself off as Robin Hood would be like Ingrid Bergman playing Lucky Luciano, which, come to think of it, don't sound like a bad idea. Archer Winsten in the Post mauled us like a bear, and Chester Yalburton of the Globe —who wouldn't have liked a Fountain and Bliss movie if we paid him a hundred grand (and we gave that serious consideration)—shredded us like confetti. Justin Gilbert of the Los Angeles Mirror pulverized us.
“Comics don't ever get no respect, Latch,” Ziggy said to me when we had all the reviews in. “You make someone cry, you're a hero, a saint. You make someone laugh, you're a mongrel. You think Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera got good notices?”
“Actually, they did,” I said to him.
“Hey, who cares if any of these no-good hack bastards like the movie, as long as the people do, you know?” Vic said.
“Good point, Vic,” Ziggy said.
“I mean,” Vic continued, “the most important thing is we keep audiences laughing and tapping their toes, right?”
“Amen, brother!” Ziggy yelled out. “Say it!”
“The man is right, the man is right!” I said.
“Let's face it: The picture is probably garbage,” Vic said. “Like shit, it'll draw flies. But who cares? Because those flies are bringin' in tons of dough.”
Ziggy and I looked at each other . . . we just couldn't go that far with Vic on that, although he was probably right.
They toured in support of the movie, went to all the big cities. They also played the Copa in New York, the Chez Paree in Chicago, the Beachcomber in Miami, did three weeks in Vegas. They missed Sally and Jack's wedding but sent her flowers and got her and Jack a Cadillac. Fountain and Bliss made the cover of Look, Life, and Time. (Morty wanted to polish over Vic's rougher edges, so he tried to spread it around how smart he was; Vic told the Life guy he was a crossword fanatic and a history buff. But if you look at one of the photos carefully, you can see that the puzzle Vic is working on is upside down.) They were hotter than a pistol . . . but Time made the mistake of calling Ziggy's parents vaudevillians of minor repute and talent. Big boo-boo, that.
Morty Geist cooked up some wonderful stunts for them—they dressed up as Robin Hood and Little John and did usher work at the theaters, Morty would get crazy people off the street and out of flophouses and tell them to shriek like they were going bananas. The movie did exceptionally well, people filled the theaters, but it didn't get one good review. Ziggy would actually read the negative reviews onstage at the nightclubs. He would read the reviews and insult whoever wrote the thing, and Vic would stand there with nothing to do but hold his mike like it was a limp putz. Vic could handle it for five minutes, but after that he wanted to strangle Zig with the cord. Morty would try to get Ziggy to stop—“You're really not helping your next movie's reception any, Zig,” he'd say—and Ziggy would let loose at the poor kid. If Ziggy couldn't cut the throats of the reviewers, well then, he'd sure try to pop Morty's eardrums.
DANNY McGLUE: I wrote a screenplay that I thought was wonderful for Fountain and Bliss. Arnie and Ziggy agreed; they were crazy about it. But Gus Kahn and Howie Leeds, the production chief, sent it back to us. At least there was a note attached this time: “All wrong for F & B.” I was baffled.
But Ziggy had other work for me to do.
He wanted me to write an autobiographical profile of him for Parade magazine. I said to him, “It's autobiographical, Ziggeleh, that usually tends to mean that you would do that.” But he said that he was too busy. Which was true. He had Freddy and Jane, and the boys were now starting their second picture, The Ego and the Idiot. Plus, Vegas and New York and Miami Beach and Chicago all the time. Now, I knew that Ziggy was furious about what Time had written about Harry and Flo, but I also knew that what Time had said was the truth. I wanted to impart this to Ziggy but I knew better.
“We gotta tell the whole story, Danny, we gotta set the record straight for posterior,” he said. (I taught him that horrible pun, I confess.)
“And that's where I come in, is it?” I asked.
“That's where we come in. Don't forget, it's me writin' this, not you, even though you're writin' it.”
I had two weeks to turn this thing in to him so he could turn it in to Parade. And for the life of me, it was the most difficult thing I ever had to do. He was asking me for Ovid's Metamorphoses! He wanted me to create myths, to turn him into a swan, a hyacinth, or a pomegranate! You think that's easy?! I'd sit down at my old Olympia and nothing would come out. Betsy and I were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel then and I'd sit there from nine to five and by five o'clock there wasn't one word on the page. What am I supposed to write? How much Ziggy—or “I”—loved and worshiped “my” parents? How talented and influential and successful they were? I mean, Ted, I might as well have been trying to write Eleanor Roosevelt's memoirs and cover her years as a geisha girl in the forties. It just wasn't coming.
Betsy had landed a small role in The Ego and the Idiot and wasn't around in the daytime. And by nine at night she'd be smashed. She'd wake up with a throbbing hangover, then go off to the set. So she had the movie, the booze, the headaches, and all I had was a blank piece of paper. Meanwhile, Sally was pregnant and living happily with Jack. My life was not doing so well.
The night before it was due I wrote it. It was like writing a short story. I made everything up . . . I said that my parents Harry and Flo were the most talented people to ever grace a st
age, “the Lunt and Fontanne of vaudeville.” Burns and Allen had lifted their act from them, I wrote, biting so hard on a bullet that I could taste the gunpowder. I wrote that they were obsessed with bringing Ziggy into showbiz and always brought him on the road with them; they nurtured him and nearly spoiled him to death. I went with the line Ziggy always said: “My parents may have been small of stature, but they were titans when it came to talent and heart.” Ziggy had been perpetuating a myth in the press for years now, that Harry and Flo died, not when they saw the O'Hares onstage with their son, but when they saw Vic perform with Ziggy. Now, he was actually starting to believe it. “They knew I'd be safe now, they knew I'd be successful, so they died and did so happily,” I wrote, “knowing their precious boychick would hit it big.” It was nonsense, it was baloney from the first letter to the last period, and Ziggy loved it. And so did Parade's readers.
Not long after this I also wrote an autobiographical profile of Vic for Parade.
SNUFFY DUBIN: You know, the first time I played Vegas, it was at the Last Frontier. Pete the pervert wouldn't hire me for the Oceanfront. Jack Entratter wouldn't hire me for the Sands. I couldn't get arrested at the Sahara or the Dunes. So I did the Last Frontier and it was no different than some of the places back east, except this place had a western motif, so instead of just puke there was sawdust on the floor. And puke too.
I was living out of a motel in Santa Monica then, the Starbrite Inn. Small square rooms, a Philco radio, a bed like a Samsonite suitcase, and a window. Oh, there was a pool but you should see some of the swill that was floating in there. Frogs would jump in and die on the spot. I worked Strip City, the Ruby Room on La Cienega, and the Colony Club. I always tell everybody that's how I met my wife, which is true, but she was no stripper. Debbie went there with her then-boyfriend, some hard-on lawyer for Paramount, and before the week was out she was all mine. Lenny Bruce used to play these places, so did Buzzy Brevetto. The girls working the joint, they weren't bad. Marty Dahl ran the Ruby but Mickey Cohn and the Fratellis were behind it. A lot of the strippers were hookers and the stories they told me I could sell now for a million bucks.
Celebrities would come in—it wasn't just raincoat artists jackin' themselves off. Marlon Brando had just done Julius Caesar, he'd come by a lot. Liz Taylor, Desi Arnaz, and Nat Cole. Lots of doctors too, with their nurses. There was a motel across the street and you had lots of married couples drifting in and out, but they usually weren't married to each other.
Ziggy dropped in one Saturday night at the Ruby and, man, I really needed to put a show on. You know who's there? Jack Entratter from the Sands. Joe DeWolfe from the Aladdin. Moe Dalitz is there too, so's Lee Rosenfeld from the Tidal Wave Hotel, which had just opened on the [Vegas] Strip. All these hotshots who could book me into joints in the blink of an eye. Ziggy's with this girl who used to do blue movies, her name was Nina Mellon, but the real last name was Melendez, I think. Ziggy was addicted to these movies, he had a vault full of 'em. So all these big shots are in the crowd and I know I gotta load up all the guns, I'm gonna go all out and murder every single person in that room. And I've got the act down. I relate anecdotes, I tell stories, no punch lines, no mugging, no Catskills shtick. It's me being me and if I screw up, then execute me. And none of that flop sweat—that's when the audience sees you working so hard to make you love them that they wind up hating your fucking guts. There's none of that. I'm gonna hurt 'em so much they're gonna love me.
But I'm five minutes into my set and suddenly Ziggy bounces onto the stage. Jesus Christ, this is the last thing I need! I need this like I wanna team up with Mahatma Gandhi and we sing love songs to each other like Sandler and fucking Young. Now, what's the worst thing I can do at this point? If I tell Ziggy to take a hike, it makes me look so bad it's like I'm erased right in front of your eyes. So I gotta just roll with this. I gotta roll with it and run with it and play along. Except for this: It wasn't rolling, it wasn't running, it wasn't playing. This was death. You ever wonder why there's a straight man and a funnyman and not two funnymen? Well, if so, you should've been at the Ruby that night. It was like bringing Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams up to the plate at the same time! You got a righty and a lefty and do they hit the ball? Nope, they wind up banging each other's brains to applesauce with the first swing. Absolute death.
I went to my dressing room afterward. I had my door open because I was just too festunkt to close it. And all these strippers are walking by with their getups, it was like I was in a bird zoo or something, all these feathers and stuff. This could've been my night! I had all those heavy hitters out there! And I got flattened, I'm a latke underneath a steamroller.
Ziggy came in. He said, “Snuffles, remember all them years I wanted to double with you?”
“How could I forget?” I said.
“I guess it was a good thing it never happened, huh?”
“Joe DeWolfe and Jack Entratter were in the audience tonight.”
“Izzat right?”
“Yeah, they were,” I said. “Lee Rosenfeld too, from the Tidal Wave.”
“Tonight? Just now?”
“They were probably scouting me.”
“I didn't know that, Snuff.”
Well, I found out that wasn't true. Because Debbie had seen Ziggy and Joe DeWolfe talking to each other five minutes before I came on. The liar.
“Well, anyways, Snuff, maybe you'll kinda bathe in my refracted glory,” he says.
Bathe? I almost got drowned in it.
“What are those?” he asked me.
“These?” I said. “Oh, they're just pep pills. I got another set to do. They help me do it.”
“So what is it? It's like coffee?”
“Yeah, it's like coffee. Like lots of fuckin' coffee.”
“Could I get a few of those, Snuffles? I got the movies and the clubs and everything.”
I passed him about ten bennies.
“So how do you get this funny fuel?” he asked. Great name for the stuff, huh?
“Doctors come in all the time. After a set, I sit with them, make them giggle, they write me a script.”
“Oh yeah? They do that for you? Just for makin' 'em laugh?”
“What, you think all those girls with big tits fuck you because they love you?”
Two hours later I'm all keyed up for the second set. But all of the big shots were gone.
ARNIE LATCHKEY:The Ego and the Idiot was a slapsticky farce about psychiatry and mistaken identities. It was the Three Stooges meet Spellbound —in other words, a catastrophic head-on collision. Ziggy played Sigmund Floyd, a Viennese analyst but actually a schizo bricklayer from Milwaukee. Vic was a crooner—a real stretch, huh?—who suffered from stage fright and needed help. Penny Rhodes and Sondra Webb, who Ziggy and Vic, respectively, were shtupping on the side, were the female leads. George Collier was helming again, but this time he never warned the boys about goofing around on the set. So they went crazy. Vic doesn't rehearse and has to do five takes to get a sentence out. Ziggy gets impatient and screws around with the camera, the script girl, the props. He did this thing with the mike boom one day; he pretended to be rowing with it and swung it around, right into Collier's eye. Smashed his glasses.
So now the man finally had the eye patch.
The boys were being overworked, no doubt about it. They took on more than they could handle. Sometimes on the weekends, they'd fly to New York to do the Copa or to Florida to play the Fontainebleau. It was crazy, believe me. They played three shows at the Hollywood Bowl. Shep Lane worked a clause into the contracts so they could break if they had a week-long club date lined up. They did, they broke, the filming was all farkakte.
It began to wear on them. They did a week at Ciro's during the last week of the Idiot flick. They were lackluster shows. I'd never seen them so off. Now, it could've been because they were just so tired from all the shooting, the drinking and carousing, and from being husbands and fathers, which they did manage to squeeze in every now and then, but it a
lso could have been because . . . they were getting along with each other! They were allies now, they were buddies, you could almost say. Almost.
[George S. Collier's] lawyer called Shep Lane because he wanted damages for the eye, and I tell Shep, Okay, why fight this thing, we'll give Cyclops B. DeMille what he wants. The sum they settled on I could buy ten new eyes with! While that was going on, Bobby Hale ravaged Fountain and Bliss in the Examiner. He said that that they were almost as bad at Ciro's as they were on screen. Vic had just released his first LP, Midnight With Vic, and Hale really let him have it about that. He said Vic had three modes when he sang: sleepy, very sleepy, and fast asleep. Vic was really the target—he mostly left Ziggy alone.
GUY PUGLIA: I went to the The Ego and the Idiot premiere at the Egyptian [Theater]. After the movie there was a party at Johnny D'Antibes's joint, where Ziggy and Vic got up and thanked everybody for coming and for putting up with the movie, which I guess they could tell wasn't so great. I was walkin' around this party—man, there were so many famous people and beautiful girls there—and I run into Lulu, she's with Bruno, who now wears black sunglasses all the time, and Violetta. And alls of a sudden Ernie Beasley walks past and he's got Ginger on his arm.
Ernie was already pretty smashed—what else is new?—and Ginger had had a few too. Ernie introduces Ginger to everybody and says she had a bit part in the Idiot movie, which was true, she's in it for maybe four scenes as a nurse.
“. . . And this is Lulu Fountain, Vic's wife,” Ernie said.