by Ted Heller
When I was discharged from the clinic, I went back to L.A. I sold my house in Malibu and moved to West Hollywood, to a much less grand place. I gave up the cars, the binge buying, and got a simple gray Honda Accord. I still had some money coming in—I never was broke, I'm glad to say. I lived within my means. I stopped letting younger men use me, except for every once in a while when the loneliness became too unbearable.
One day I was driving past the Riviera Country Club and I saw a location van; they were filming one of those horrendous Golfing With Vic shows. I got out of my car and made it to where they were filming . . . and there was Vic with Helen Reddy. I hadn't seen Vic for months. He came over to me and gave me a big hug and we did some brief catching up. A makeup girl was working him over and someone else took off his rug and replaced it with a new one. His real hair, I saw, was thinning and receding and was turning silver. But I only got a quick peek because there was only a half a second when he didn't have a toup on.
“So you cleaned up, huh, Bease?” he said to me. “No more booze.”
I shrugged. I was proud of being clean but also, in Vic's presence, strangely embarrassed.
“You look good,” he told me. “You must've lost a few pounds in that joint.”
“I did. And I try to exercise too,” I said.
“You should try this,” he said, brandishing a putter. “This'll keep you in shape.”
I refrained from mentioning that he was about thirty-five pounds overweight and that golfing seemed to me as much a means to losing weight as did eating cheesecake.
“Ginger Bacon,” I said. “Remember her?”
“Oh sure,” he said. “How could I ever forget Ginger? Gams like knitting needles.”
“Well, she—” I began.
“And nipples just like nectarines too. How could I ever forget Ginger? Baby, we used to rip the town up, every single night. You couldn't stop me and her with quicksand.”
“She's dead. I found out that she's dead.”
He leaned forward in the canvas chair he was sitting in. The chair said vic on the back of it in turquoise-blue lettering; the V was two crossed golf clubs and the i was dotted with a golf ball.
“Ginger's dead?” Already he was pale.
I nodded to him. I could feel tears welling in my eyes. It was a hot, sunny, cloudless day and I was sweating and so was Vic.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said.
He wanted to know how she died and I told him I didn't know. But I am not a good liar, so he insisted on knowing. When I told him, I could see that he was shaken, genuinely shaken.
The director told him that it was time to start filming. Vic stood up and started walking away from where they were supposed to film. He was doubling over . . . it was like he was in pain, his stomach must have been cramping or throbbing with agony. He made it to his trailer and had to lean on it for a second, then he walked in, slammed the door, and didn't come out.
SALLY KLEIN: After I don't know how many performances of the Bamboozled play, Ziggy took some time off. He'd head over to Germany once in a while to make one of those silly sex farces, he'd appear in a lounge someplace, he'd tape a Love Boat episode. He did a little turn on a Cannon episode and he really did think he'd get an Emmy nomination for it, but they passed him by and he was disconsolate. He also did a Baretta and hoped that the role would be recurring, but at the very last minute they decided to kill off his character. Then he began touring in something called Va-Va-Vamoose. More jiggling, more bulging eyes.
After years and years of being banished from the talk shows, radio as well as TV, we got a call from people working for someone named Rick Dees, who had a late-night talk show for a few minutes on ABC, I think. They would love to have Ziggy go on the show, they said. “When do you want him?” Arnie asked, and they said, “What's he doing tonight?” “Did someone drop out of your lineup or something?” Arnie asked them, and the guy admitted that, yes, some young comic had had to cancel at the last second. Ziggy did the show and he was okay for a few minutes, on the couch talking. He wore a red wig now and it was pretty obvious it was a wig. And he'd lost weight . . . he wasn't round, he was barely oval. He had a slight paunch and that was all. He sweated up a storm as he spoke and, sure enough, after five or so minutes he started carping about Vic. At one point he got up and began talking to the audience and he was very funny and then it happened: He wanted to say something, he had a joke inside his head and it was hysterical, but he couldn't bring himself to say it.
When he was talking about Vic and making fun of him and his movies—and Vic hadn't done a movie for years—you could practically hear every television producer and every booking agent take their hands off their phones and lose interest.
ARNIE LATCHKEY: The more fathoms their careers sank, the closer they got to the bottom of the sea, the more people would ask if Fountain and Bliss would ever reunite. When Pacific Coast Records dumped Vic, a few reporters asked him, “Does this mean you and Ziggy might consider teaming up again?” Vic shot them a look that took ten years off their lives.
But Ziggy, he made up these stories, that he and Vic were still close buddies. I saw him on Dinah Shore's show, I couldn't believe it. “Do you ever see Vic?” Dinah asked Ziggy, and Ziggy said that he and Vic had had dinner together only a few weeks ago. I called up Vic and asked him, “Did you have dinner with Ziggy recently?” And Vic said, “Yeah, as recently as twenty-three years ago.”
DANNY McGLUE: Brillo was going to ink Ziggy to do commercials for them in the mid-eighties but the deal fell through at the last second. I don't know what it was. It could have been because they realized his hair wasn't really his hair anymore, and that was the whole connection with Brillo to begin with. It would have been a great thing for Zig, the commercials, it would've put him right back in the public consciousness. There's also the possibility that the old Ziggy resurfaced, the Ziggy who raised hell on the set, who would spray the director with seltzer or something. I don't know what happened.
I kept seeing comics all the time on TV who owed so, so much to Ziggy. They'd grown up seeing him on television, they'd seen the movies. All the comics who switch characters in the blink of an eye, who just start riffing away to the edge of nowhere, who get up there and shpritz themselves dry to the point that it's like bleeding—they all, every single one of them, owe a great big debt to Ziggy Bliss.
JANE WHITE: Ziggy and I were always very courteous with each other, after the divorce. When you love someone, I don't know if you ever can really stop loving that person. Whenever I needed him, he was always there for me. And I tried to be there for him. One time I went to his house on North Irving—I couldn't believe how humble it was. It wasn't a house, it was one of those smallish apartment complexes. He had only three rooms there and there was a small pool that everyone in the building shared. The pool Ziggy had put in when we were married, at the house where I was living and still live, was in the shape of a great big smile. But this pool was like a postage stamp! And he had a Ford, I think, an Escort.
Pernilla and I got along, considering. We wanted to make things easy for Freddy. But . . . Freddy and I drifted apart. He pretty much stopped speaking to his mother. (As I understand it, a year or two ago he even had himself circumcised and bar mitzvahed. Can you believe that?)
I was at a spa one day and I saw a headline in one of those horrible tabloids. The headline was something like “former funnyman found filming x-flix.” I was stunned.
He was arrested in Oklahoma, at a motel, where he was touring with the Vamoose play. He'd been making those nasty, atrocious movies with video equipment, with a camera. The girls in the play were the actresses and I guess there was no trouble getting actors to do that sort of thing, the way that most men are. But what must have been terrible to Ziggy was that he was in some of the movies too. And there were pictures of him in the paper—in many papers all over the country—naked with some young woman. It was very sad, seeing the way he looked. I was only three years younger than he but he had wrinkl
es and, even though he was surprisingly thin, he still had pockets of flab all over his thighs. Fortunately, they blacked out his private parts. Someone told me you could send away for a bootleg tape for $29.99.
He got out on bail and returned to Los Angeles. I called him and told him that I would do anything I could for him, that I didn't believe what I was reading. I asked him if Pernilla—who was not involved—was “standing by her man,” and he told me she'd left him. He sounded very depressed to me. He didn't even sound like him. There was no anger—it was just resignation.
I said if he needed anything, to just let me know. He said, “I want my old life back.”
PERNILLA BORG: I knew that Ziggy once had liked the dirty movies. He had told me this once, when we first were a couple. But he told me that I was his “dream come true”—that was the words he used. And that he did not need another woman because of me. I believed him.
Always I had men trying to be close with me. Always. Football players, actors, businessmen. Ever since the Top Brass ads. A man walked up to me once in a grocery store and asked me to say my line from that commercial—“I want to get it all over you.” I said it to this man and I see he is playing with himself. I remember one time in Atlantic City, Ziggy did a show in a lounge there. I did a little thing with him for five minutes, what you call a “bit.” And then a half hour later when the show is over, I hear some man in the audience say to another man, “How does an ugly Jew like that get a beautiful broad like her?” And I suppose this is what many men think.
When Ziggy and I married, he tells me that many years ago there was a woman. His first girlfriend. He tells me he used to think about her a lot, he thinks she is the only woman who ever really liked him. But now he does not think of her anymore. Because he knows I love him. I do not care if he performs in a room with one person in it or one million or if he works in a gas station. He is my Ziggy.
When I find out about Ziggy making these movies my heart is broken. I cried and cried and cried. I did everything for him. Some of those football players, maybe I should have married them, yes? But I stayed with Ziggy. And now he is making these dirty movies.
“Is it true?” I asked him on the phone. “Do you make these movies?”
“Yeah. It's true,” he said.
“Why? Why? I thought you love me.”
“I do. I swear to God I do.”
“Then why?”
“Why? I don't know. Maybe because I'm a man, I guess is the answer. And there isn't a man alive who ain't some kinda pig deep down inside.”
I moved out. I got a lawyer who is telling me to divorce him. But I think of my life without Ziggy, without him making me laugh, singing silly songs to each other and eating meals and waking each other up, without all the funny times we have, and it's a very sad life. I did not want to divorce Ziggy and a year later I am living with him again.
SALLY KLEIN: It came on the news that night, it was the last story. I couldn't watch. They played some old footage from Anchors Oy Vey, they showed Ziggy performing with Vic at a nightclub, then they showed a few seconds of one of the movies he was making, the dirty movies.
There was no Morty Geist anymore to clean this mess up. There wasn't even a Bertie Kahn. And now my husband was dead too.
I had nobody to talk to. I would wake up and the bed was empty, it was just me. I'd go to bed at night and there was no one. Just me. Everyone thought that Jack would die of a heart attack, but somehow that didn't happen. But he went quickly and painlessly, thank God.
When Jack passed away, Jane White called me up, tried to offer me some solace, a few friendly words. She said that after I was through with my mourning we should go out for lunch, maybe go someplace for a few days, like Acapulco or Palm Springs. She said we should go shopping. And when she said that, it came back to me: I had never liked this woman. So I told her I would call her and I never did.
But Lulu, sweet Lulu . . . she was so nice to me. She came over every day with food, with flowers. She cleaned the house, she answered the mail and the phone. She cooked for me. And all the time talking as though Vic would come back to her.
One day she was making me a sandwich and the news came over the radio: The Fratelli brothers were dead. It was some big mob thing. They'd rubbed each other out, shot each other in the kneecaps and died. Lulu didn't seem too upset about it.
DANNY McGLUE: Ziggy called me up one night, put on Oliver Hardy's voice, and said, “Now look at the fine mess I've gotten myself into.” I told him this wasn't a mess, it was a landfill.
“I'm the world's biggest idiot,” he said to me.
“If that didn't sound like the name of one of your old movies,” I told him, “I might agree with you.”
“Where did I go wrong?” he asked me. “Exactly where?”
“I think we might need a world atlas to work that one out,” I answered.
SNUFFY DUBIN: Jesus fucking Christ, I'm thinking when this story breaks, how the hell did they black out that shvantz of his in the papers? There must be a massive shortage of black ink in the world right now!
I was headlining at Caesar's in Vegas at the time . . . Vic was playing somewhere, I think the MGM Grand, I'm not sure. He calls me up and we spoke about the whole thing.
“He's going through a bad time right now, Vic,” I said.
“He must be. That big Swede he's married to. You'd think that'd be enough for him.”
“You're telling me this?! You of all people! There's a hundred chicks in this town with your fingerprints permanently embedded into their shoulder blades!”
I asked him if it had occurred to him to call up Ziggy and maybe offer a word of support and all he said was, “Yeah, it occurred to me.”
But this is America, the Land of the Second Chance. A few months after this whole porno thing, Ziggy becomes a hot commodity again. It actually boosted his career. I'm playing Caesar's again and he's working the lounge there. And he hadn't played Vegas in years!
I stopped in and saw the act. Life is one strange fucking journey, ain't it? Ziggy's not telling jokes, there's no punch lines, no one-liners. He's talkin' about Vic, he's talkin' about growing up and playing the Catskills years ago, he's telling funny stories about the whole porno movie thing, poking fun at himself. Christ, at one point he was about to say something and I thought he was gonna blow to bits, it seemed so funny. What he's doing is excavating his life, digging way, way deep into the wounds and sores that hurt if you even look at them. Decades ago, Ziggy would call me up in a panic 'cause he needed jokes. He wanted me to help him out. And here he was, in front of maybe seventy people, and he was doing my act!
• • •
VICKI FOUNTAIN: I'd put out two albums and then a Greatest Hits LP but things weren't going well: two failed marriages, two failed children. The Spy from B.L.O.N.D.E., which I did for NBC and which I thought would last forever, was canceled in its second season. So the last thing I needed in my life was to be worrying about what Vincent was up to. There were times when he vanished, when we didn't know where he was for weeks at a time. Daddy would hire private detectives to find him, but they never could. He would resurface every once in a while—he looked terrible, like he hadn't slept for a week—and tell me he was trying to put another band together, and then he'd disappear again.
But Donny Klein dying was one great big slap in the face for Vincent. He did a complete U-turn in his life.
He cut his hair. He put all his hippie clothes into a garbage can and burned them. He and Daddy spent a long weekend together in Palm Springs. Me, Mom, Grandma, Vincent, and Daddy had dinner a few times together too. He gave up smoking, he wouldn't even drink coffee . . . he was very serious about cleaning himself up.
You wouldn't know it was the same Vincent. He lost his baby fat, was lean, handsome, and serious. Daddy was almost proud of him. There'd always been this tension between the two of them—it's that way a lot between fathers and sons. Daddy and Arnie made a few phone calls, and Vince did a demo for Pacific Coast Records.
It wasn't the acid hard rock he'd been doing; it was the kind of classic American standards that Daddy sang. Vincent had a beautiful voice. I heard Daddy once say, “The kid sings better than me.” But he never admitted that in public or to the newspapers.
Vincent cut an album—Vince on Vic —and did a lot of interviews to promote it. He told all the stories about what it was like to be Vic Foun tain's kid, he told about the rock music and the drugs. He looks great on the album cover, in a tuxedo holding a cocktail, underneath a photo of Daddy. The record is Vincent singing all of Vic's big hits, “The Hang of It,” “Malibu Moon,” “Lost and Lonely Again,” “Moonlight in Vermont.” There are moments, many of them, when you could swear it was Daddy singing. It was eerie.
But the album didn't sell and neither did the next one, In-Vince-ibly Yours, which was for RCA Victor. He toured all over the country, he knocked his brains out. He'd play some club in the middle of nowhere and there'd be only twenty people there. Daddy put him on his final Christmas special . . . but Daddy always had to get a dig in. After they finished a duet, he said, “Hey, you ain't bad, kid.” And Vince said, “Gee, thanks, Pop.” And Dad said, “You ain't bad, you're terrible!”
The charade went on for years. He married Patti, they had a son [Little Guy]. They lived in Venice, had a small place there near the beach. Only rarely did I get a hint that something was wrong. If we had a lunch date, for instance, he'd turn up late or cancel at the last minute. After RCA let him go he left Patti for a month, vanished, then went back to her. Snuffy Dubin would do favors for him and have Vincent open for him often, in Vegas, Tahoe, Atlantic City. But usually Vincent was opening for worse, a lot worse. The hecklers were merciless; they'd shout to him in the middle of the song, “Get lost, kid! Where's your father?” Or sometimes even, “Where's Ziggy?” There were no record deals. One clue that let me know something was wrong was that he'd ask me for money. It'd be $200 one week, $30 the next. There'd be a few weeks when he didn't need any, then he'd call me up and tell me he needed another hundred. In 1985 or ‘86, he left Patti and moved into a small motel in Redondo Beach. Patti would call me up, telling me that Vincent wasn't giving her money for Little Guy, so I'd call Daddy and Daddy would have Shep Lane write her a check. “What's with that crazy boy sometimes?” Daddy said to me.