by Ted Heller
“Latch, you're still my guy,” he told me.
“We go back a long ways.” “We sure do, Vic,” I said to him. “Remember jumping off that train in the Catskills together?”
“I think I still got the black-and-blue marks,” he said. “So, uh, are you my guy, Latch? You'll still handle me and all?”
“What? I got something else going on in my life?
” But I did. I did.
Because the night before, I'm in bed and the phone rings and Estelle tells me, “It's Ziggy.”
“Ziggeleh, darling,” I said.
“Arnie, you spoken to Vic of late?”
“Well, uh, you know, I, uh . . .” I was new at this thing, this high-wire balancing act. I didn't know what to say, what not to say, and to whom to say it and not say it to.
“Are you still gonna be my guy, Latch?” Ziggy asked me.
And I said to him, “What? I got something else going on in my life?”
You know, one thing that's very important to an entertainer is consistency. You need a sense of flow. Any change you make, it can't be one inch bigger than a nuance. And that's what Vic did in his movie career: He kept the flow. The motion pictures he made with Ziggy were at best passable and at worst unwatchable, and now he picked up just where he left off. He did three Johnny Venice private-dick movies with Paramount. The first one wasn't all that bad, the second one wasn't terrible, the third one wasn't god-awful. Johnny Venice was this ex-L.A. cop, kicked out of the force for banging the commissioner's daughter or something, and now he takes on all kinds of sordid cases and clients. Skullduggery, shoot-outs, fistfights, high jinks, and kissing ensue. “I'm gonna be professional, Latch,” Vic told me before they started shooting the first one, Johnny Venice. “None of that destructive behavior or anything.” And he was true to his word. Not a camera, not a prop, not a lens or the body part of a director was destroyed. He had a reputation by then, thanks to the Fountain and Bliss pictures, and it was as if the crew was showing up on the set with bulletproof vests, clenching their teeth and bracing themselves for a hail of bullets or a pie fight. But it never happened. I think a lot of that was due to the fact that Vic knew he had to make a good impression. Another factor was he was maybe too gassed to do too much damage a lot of the time. In these movies, Johnny Venice walks around with a flask in his holster instead of a pistol. Well, that wasn't Cel-Ray tonic in that flask, you can take my word for it.
BILLY WILSON [body double for Vic Fountain]: I'd been knocking around Hollywood for a few years. My first flick was The Naked and the Dead, the Aldo Ray film. I get killed in that movie; a shell explodes and I drop my rifle and crumple to the ground, in that order. I did lots of war pictures, cowboy pictures, some beach and biker movies, a biblical epic now and then. Once in a while I got to say a line too. I was just a big lug but I knew how to draw a gun, ride a horse, and throw and take a punch. God, I must've crumpled to the ground in a hundred pictures.
Someone from Paramount saw me in Cry of Battle —this was the flick that Lee Harvey Oswald was seeing when he got caught, did you know that?—and must have said, “Hey, that galoot's the spitting image of Vic Fountain!” So I was sent to [director] William Calloway's office and I read for the first Johnny Venice flick. After flubbing a few lines I said to him, “Mr. Calloway, I usually don't speak in the movies—I just fall a lot.” “Well,” Bill said, “there'll probably be a lot of falling in this movie too.”
I had the reputation of a “guy's guy” in Hollywood, a Ben Johnson, Steve McQueen, or Slim Pickens type, just 'cause I could ride a horse or race a Harley. I could stay out with the boys all night and get wasted. Well, all that was true, but I was and am still very gay. I was married and had two kids but my wife and I had an arrangement. And everything worked out fine for us.
I'd heard that working with Vic Fountain could be an ordeal; he doesn't ever rehearse his lines and he only does one take, people said, he shows up late, he doesn't show up at all. Well, all this was sounding good to me, I must say. The less he did, the better it would be for me. And I was right. I have Johnny Venice, The Case of the Boom-Boom Brunette, and The Killer Wore Go-Go Boots on videotape and I can show you which one is me and which one is Vic in the scenes. By the third movie, I'd say there's barely any Vic. Johnny Venice has his back turned to the camera or is in profile in half the scenes, when he's talking to Dina Merrill, Elke Sommer, and Jay C. Flippen—well, that was me. The car chases, the shoot-outs and fistfights, the kissing scenes with Dina and Elke . . . all me. (Elke nearly choked me with that tongue of hers.) Johnny Venice's hobby was golfing; everybody thought Vic would've wanted to film those scenes but he passed on those too. It was tons of fun, it really was, making those movies because after years of being ignored by John Ford, Howard Hawks, Duke Wayne, and Ward Bond, here I am being treated like a star because I'm doing all the work! As a joke, people were calling me Vic Fountain on the set and at parties. It was fun for a while. But, you know, I had a little thing with a very, very famous actor one night and after we were through he said to me, “Gee, I always suspected Vic Fountain was sort of gay.”
By the final movie in the series—I'd say this was maybe '67—Vic had put on a few pounds, so they taped a little pillow to my stomach and also on the back. For the love handles. Vic found out about that and hit the ceiling. Vanity, I guess. So most of that movie was shot from the waist up. And it was very dark, even though it was in color. I remember someone telling me that the French critics loved that flick, they thought it was “noirish” and existential or some kind of claptrap, I don't know. Also, for that movie, I was given a wig to wear, something with very dark, almost blue hair. This was because Vic was starting to lose his hair. He saw me in this contraption one day and I thought, Uh-oh, he's going to put the kibosh on this too, but instead he wound up ordering a few of the wigs for himself.
GUY PUGLIA: When Ziggy and Vic called it quits, I really did think that Vic was gonna somehow settle down. I was hoping so, 'cause sometimes those late nights and all that drinkin' and going to this club and that one, it can wear you down. I wasn't no kid anymore. But maybe he still was, 'cause he didn't settle down any.
One thing that really got to him was the divorce. This is a guy that grew up with no money, who worked himself up from nowhere, and now he's turnin' over every buck he makes to Lulu. And what's she doin' with it? Nothing. She didn't buy clothes, she didn't buy cars. She did buy a small house in Palm Springs, near where Vic'd recently got one, and another very small one in Vegas . . . and that was just so when Vic decided he wanted to be her husband again and run back into her arms, her arms would be conveniently located nearby. But Lulu was basically socking all the dough away for the kids. “If she's hoping my career will hit the skids and I'll have to go back to her,” Vic said, “fat chance.”
I met this makeup gal on the set of Johnny Venice. She was a nice girl and was small, like maybe five feet. Her name was Edie Smith, which was funny 'cause she looked a little bit like that French singer Edith Piaf when she was young. And me and this Edie, we hit it off good. You know, I didn't ever once have a girlfriend. I'd wind up with whores or with Vic's girlfriends' girlfriends. And then when I lost my nose, that was it for me. So I just kept it up: Vegas showgirls and hookers and fat married broads who thought if they slept with me they could sleep with Vic. His rejects. I didn't know their names, they didn't know mine, and Vic wanted to nail these slobs like he wanted to nail a porcupine. And now here's this Edie Smith and she don't care how little I am or what my face looks like or nothin' like that. We hit it off and finally, here I am in my forties, and I got a girlfriend.
One thing I liked about Edie was, I knew she wasn't with me just on account of Vic. She already knew Vic from the movie set, although she said to me he was hardly ever there. She's the one who told me that Vic wore a wig now. I didn't believe it at first. You know how, like, you see someone every single day for a hundred years and you don't ever notice anything different—they're eighty but still they look lik
e they're seventeen to you? That's what this was like. But then I noticed, yeah, what happened to that bald spot of his?
SALLY KLEIN: The premiere of Johnny Venice was a very big deal. Vic was on the cover of Look and this was the first time he was on a major magazine cover without Ziggy. A lot of stars turned out; Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were there, so were Dean Martin, Natalie Wood, Sidney Poitier, Burt Bacharach and Angie Dickinson, and Army Archerd was interviewing everybody walking in. Ziggy was invited but he told me to tell Vic that he had a prior commitment.
“What's the prior commitment?” I asked him a week before the event.
“The prior commitment,” he told me, “is that I'm stayin' home.”
The very first minute of the movie was very arresting: It's just Vic against a pitch-black background. He's got on a white dress shirt and his tie is undone. He lifts a pistol up and points it close up into the camera, just like The Great Train Robbery. He shoots the gun and then he's surrounded by clouds and clouds of smoke. He disappears in the smoke, and they run the opening credits. “She's Dangerous” was the song, which Ernie wrote and was almost a hit for Vic—it did make it into the Top 20. After that, though, the movie goes downhill very quickly.
When the lights came up at the premiere, I said to Jack, “So? What did you think?”
He whispered, “Exactly as bad as I thought it'd be.”
Jack and I went home that night—we skipped the party—and sure enough Ziggy called and wanted a review. “Do I look like Charles Champlain?” I asked. He said, “Well? Is it a bomb?” And I told him it wasn't very good and it wasn't terrible. Well, he could read between the lines of that and was overjoyed.
JANE WHITE: He was disconsolate as soon as he heard Vic had signed a movie deal. He felt it was an utter act of betrayal. “How could he do this to me?” he said. “Victor Benedict Arnold he is!” I reminded him that he and Vic were no long partners; I said that it was like a divorce, that once a couple broke up, each person was free to do as he and she pleased. “But I ain't Lulu,” he said. “I'm Ziggy.”
Frankly, I felt he was being very hypocritical. Because he'd made the rounds of the studios and tried to land a movie deal. Arnie, Sally, and Murray Katz tried everything. He was offered a few things here and there—he turned down [Vincente Minnelli's] Good-bye, Charlie —but it was never a starring role. This crushed him. Hank Stanco from WAT sent him the script for A Distant Trumpet and he read it and told Hank, “The part of the lieutenant is perfect for me! Let's do it!” Hank had to tell Ziggy, “Well, uh, that's the lead role . . . that's Troy Donahue's. Your part is on page thirteen and the lower half of page forty-two.” He was just crushed.
I remember Joanie Pierce telling me that it was Ziggy's “tragic flaw”—his success was backfiring on him. What had made him so famous was his ability to be anything, to go from character to character, but in the long run he was no character. So they would send him I'll Take Sweden or Muscle Beach Party and there was nothing there for him. “Bob Hope gets the lead role and I'm supposed to play a goddamn smorgasbord chef!” he yelled. “This is criminal!”
When the Johnny Venice movies came out, though, Ziggy was overjoyed. They weren't any good. Vic was trying to be Paul Newman or Michael Caine but couldn't pull it off—they were younger than him. And a lot thinner.
[Ziggy was] offered a part in What a Way to Go, that Shirley MacLaine movie. He read for the role and they liked what he'd done. “This is it, honey,” he said. He was as happy as a lark! But when the word got around that Ziggy might be in the picture, the other actors said they didn't want to work with him. That reputation of his. So the offer was withdrawn and Dick Van Dyke got the part.
“There's just no hope for me,” he said. And for a long time he had trouble-getting out of bed or doing anything but looking at the wall and walking-around in a trance.
SNUFFY DUBIN: Buzzy Brevetto was booked into the Hungry i in San Francisco but he came down with some kind of virus and had to cancel. He calls me up and says, Snuffy, can you sub for me? But I couldn't—I had something going in Miami Beach and I was filming a bit part of a nightclub owner in that horrible Go-Go Boots thing that Vic did, the Johnny Venice vehicle. So I said to Buzzy, “Hey, what about Ziggy?” Buzzy asked me what Ziggy was doing lately and I said nothing whatsoever. So I called Sally Klein and she said she would extend the offer.
“He says he'll do it,” she said to me.
That surprised the living piss out of me, Ziggy going on alone.
Let me tell you . . . when Ziggy found out I was doing that movie with Vic, he hit the ceiling. Now, we'd had our run-ins over the years but he really let me have it this time. In the past he would call me a lousy, dirty, stinkin', no-good, unfunny, joke-stealing sonuvabitch bastard and then hang up on me, but then ten minutes later we're on the phone talking about everything under the fucking sun. But this was bad . . . he took it real, real personal that I was doing this picture. I say to him, “I do three days' work, I get fifteen grand,” and he says, “You're a backstabbing, buddy-fucking shitheel, Snuffles, to do this to me!” He thought I was doing this to him! He thought I was doing this lousy five minutes of work to sink a knife into his back! The fifteen grand? Nothing to do with it? A movie career? Nothing to do with it? It was all about him. Well, let me tell you: I was getting back at him! I was! I was offered the degenerate part in The Dirty Dozen, the part that went to Telly [Savalas], and I turned it down just to be in a movie with Vic. It's true, and if that makes me Satan or Lucifer or a bad person, then God strike me down right now. Yep, I did it on purpose and, man, did it ever feel good.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: Ziggy tells me he'll play the Hungry i and I told him he had a few days to put an act together. “We gotta circle the wagons,” I told him. But to tell the truth, there weren't too many wagons left. Sid Stone was dead and there was just Danny McGlue, so it wasn't much of a circle either. Betsy was in and out of the hospital, still having problems, but Danny pulled through for us and we put together some semblance of an act for Ziggy. “Look,” Ziggy told us, “alls I need is the frame. You give me that, I'll supply the picture.” I couldn't believe how confident he was. It was fantabulous!
MICKEY KNOTT: My band was playing the Hollywood Bowl and Ziggy rings me up at my hotel and we talk old times. I was always closer to Vic than to Ziggy so to be honest, some of these old times, I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, man. Then he asks me if I had a pill connection. I told him I didn't mess with that stuff, I was just into grass. He said to me, “Aw, come on, Mick, you're a musician . . . you gotta know where I can score some pills.” And I said to him, “Ziggy, that's a slur against musicians the world over.” He said, “I apologize. You really don't know one person who could get me some amphetamines?” I thought about it and said, “Well, there's the trumpeter, the bass player, two of the sax men . . .”
Huffy Davis, my bassist, comes to me that night and tells me he'd just come back from the airport. Ziggy was about to board a place for San Francisco. Huffy handed him two pounds of pills and Ziggy gave him a grand. “Man,” Huffy said to me, “that motherfucker was so keyed up, he didn't even need to take no goddamn plane to get there!”
SALLY KLEIN: Except for an appearance on a Fritz Devane TV special and two minutes goofing around with Herman's Hermits on Hollywood Palace, this was pretty much Ziggy's first thing since he and Vic had broken up. I went up to San Francisco with Arnie and Estelle. Jack had business in Los Angeles. I cannot tell you how crucial this was, for Ziggy's career, for his self-esteem, for everyone. Ziggy said it best: “I gotta blast off on the right foot here.”
Well, there was a lot of hubbub about it. Morty Geist was really playing it up. He was spreading rumors in Herb Caen's column that there was a chance that Vic was going to surprise everyone and get onstage with Ziggy. But he also told Dean Corolla of the Chronicle that there was a good chance that Ziggy wouldn't be able to perform. “He's so heartbroken about Vic,” Morty told him, “that he doesn't think he can do mor
e than ten minutes. It's gonna be a nervous collapse, live onstage.” So the room was filled every night, both shows; half the people were there to see if Vic would pop in, the other half to see if Ziggy would pop apart.
Arnie and I were in the dressing room before he went on and Ziggy was rarin' to go. Now I know—and Arnie knows—that he was taking those pills. So that was maybe a part of it. But I don't think the pills gave him anything that he didn't already have to begin with—it just maybe gave him a lot more of it.
We killed a few minutes by talking about the old times, some of the places Ziggy had played, with Vic and with Harry and Flo. He brought up Dolly Phipps . . . he did that often. He even told me to look for her in the crowd. He said, “Maybe Dolly moved to Frisco years and years ago, Sal, and she just wants a little look-see at her first beau. You never know.” Arnie asked me a few minutes later, when Ziggy was out of earshot, “So this Dolly Phipps dame . . . was she all she's cracked up to be?” I told him she wasn't, that she was sort of Ziggy Bliss's Rosebud, and Arnie said, “Oh, she looked like a sled, did she?”
The lights came down and Ziggy was introduced and the lights stayed down. It was pitch-black . . . people couldn't even see their own cigarettes except when they inhaled. Ziggy played it so perfect . . . the timing was just wonderful. He waited for the applause to die down and then he didn't say another word. I have to admit, I was getting nervous. I didn't even really know if he was on the stage. “Jesus, do something,” Arnie softly muttered. But Ziggy was so funny that he could make silence hysterical, and people started laughing. And he let them laugh. “It was like the silence was his partner now”—Dean Corolla wrote that, not Sally Klein—“and so who needed Vic Fountain?” Then when the laughs settled down, all of a sudden you heard Vic singing “The Hang of It.” But it wasn't Vic, it was Ziggy! He sang “The Hang of It” and he was just imitating and caricaturing Vic and the crowd loved it. The spotlight came on and he finished the song and now it was time for the act. And it was just as he said; Danny and he had come up with the frame but Ziggy did the artwork. He went off in tangents, he did a little political stuff, he did impressions, told some off-color stories. He did lots of two-man routines, but he was only one person. You know, you had Bob Newhart, who was brilliant, and Shelley Berman, and they would do their acts on an imaginary phone, but Ziggy would be both people—he'd do both voices. I guess he was still very scared of going on alone.