by Ted Heller
I asked Vic one day there, “So was it really you who crash-landed the plane outside the Pantages Theater? Come on. Tell.”
“Me? Ha!” Vic said, slapping me on the back. “Danny boy, you gotta be kidding me.”
The only bad thing was, the more we had fun, the more we started clicking and meshing, the worse mood Reina got in.
But we came up with about an hour's worth of new stuff. And Ernie was there and Vic was singing too. There was a piano in the office. “Are they gonna have a big band at the Oceanfront?” Vic asked. “'Cause if it's okay, maybe just Ernie could accompany me. I don't need all them horns and stuff.” We all agreed. And it was strange, because we realized that Ernie and Vic had never once performed together live.
Ziggy and Vic . . . they still had it. The chemistry. The stuff you couldn't bottle or sell or manufacture or concoct. They still had it.
We were sure they'd be socko.
SNUFFY DUBIN: It was my retirement year. My last year in the business. You know, in all the years I did comedy, all the hundreds of clubs and thousands of people I performed for, I never took more than a week off. Not once. But in ‘93 Debbie says to me, “You know, Snuff, I'd like to go to Italy for a while. With you.” I say, “Okay, get Yvette”—our travel agent—“on the phone and we'll go to Rome and Florence for three days.” “Darling, I said a while,” she said to me. “You know, maybe spend more than ten minutes in one town?” And then it hit me like a fucking freight train. This woman saved my life, a thousand times she saved my life . . . it's time Snuffy Dubin did something for her other than buy her her tenth mink coat or a new BMW. So I call up Yvette and tell her to book us into the Italy—Christ, even my vacations sounded like nightclub engagements!—into Italy, I mean, not for three days, not for a week, but a half a year. And what the hell, while I was at it, I'd buy Debbie a new mink coat and a BMW too, just for the hell of it.
Two months before my final performance of all time—it was at Caesar's—Arnie calls me and tells me Fountain and Bliss are performing at the Oceanfront. Well, thank God they didn't time their swan song with mine—I would've cashed in a few mob favors and had the both of 'em rubbed out.
“Why are they doing this?” I asked Arnie.
“Snuffles,” he says, “I haven't the vaguest idea in the world.”
ARNIE LATCHKEY: A day before the engagement I check in with Wanda Conifer, in her office. We talked about the usual stuff, the money, sound and lighting, how many songs Vic would sing. “Do we still have to get everything done in turquoise for Vic?” she asked me, and I said, “I don't think he can tell turquoise from mauve anymore.”
When the news hit that Fountain and Bliss were reuniting, it was gigantic. It was bigger than gigantic. It was mammoth. All the networks covered it, all the papers and magazines. Every channel showed clips of their old movies and TV shows, they showed old black-and-white stills of them mugging and goofing around. It gave me a chill to watch it, not only because of all the fantastic ballyhoo it was creating, but because I knew that when Ziggy or Vic passed away, they would show these same clips and pictures. Here they were, being reborn, but it was like they'd already died.
Wanda also told me that the explosives experts, the demolitionists, were still finding some of her late husband's little trap doors, double mirrors, and passageways around the hotel. “They found a camera in a toilet bowl on the fourth floor, Latch,” she said. “And they uncovered some juicy videotapes from Vic's suite.” “Do me a favor, Wanda,” I bade her, “could you toss those tapes out?” And she said, “Half the time, Vic isn't even there anyway. He's with four broads, then he gets up and leaves and lets them finish up with one another.”
In one week to the very minute, Wanda told me, the hotel complex we were standing in would be blown to dust.
GUY PUGLIA: I didn't go. I had no desire to. Sally calls me, says she can get me and Edie in, can fly us there for free, get us a great room. I says to her, “No thanks, Sal, I got a business to run.” You know who was helping me out now? Little Guy, Vic's grandkid. Me and him in the shack. I tell him, “You wanna see your granddad perform, you can take a few days off.” He says to me it's okay, he'd rather work. But I told him that he had to go—Vic was his nonno and it was his duty.
Edie says to me, “You sure you don't want to go?”
Not after those things he said to me, I didn't.
SALLY KLEIN: I was with Ziggy, Pernilla, and Danny in Ziggy's dressing room backstage and we could hear the crowd, we could hear the electricity brewing. Wanda and her staff knew not to send any booze in. There was no champagne. There was fruit, tea, and ginger ale. Ziggy had his wigs out, his two red Brillo ones and the others he needed for the rest of the act. He was a little nervous and Danny and I tried to relax him, to keep him talking. Pernilla was very reassuring to him. She'd gotten a Swedish masseur to come in and work over his back for ten minutes, to loosen him up. “I'm loosened up, sure,” Ziggy said after the guy left, “but I think that Masseur de Sade just fractured three of my vertebras.”
Someone knocked on the door and said, “Five minutes, Mr. Bliss.” I saw Ziggy swallow. I poured him some tea and he drank it. “Everything's going to be all right,” Pernilla said to him. She kissed him on the cheek and then left to take her seat in the audience.
“Thank God for her,” Ziggy said when she left. “Thank God.”
“She's a great gal,” Danny said.
“I slipped up a few times in my life,” Ziggy said. “I was great at it. But marrying her was my salivation.”
Danny and I didn't say anything. Ziggy put a dab of makeup on. He adjusted his wig.
“I only wish,” he said, “I hadn't been so wrong with you two. I don't know what was wrong wit' me. I wasn't happy, so I didn't want no one else to be happy. I was funny-lookin', I was miserable, and so everybody else had to be miserable too.”
“I wasn't miserable,” I said.
He put some makeup under his eyes.
“If I could take one thing back in my life,” he said, “that's what it would be. That you two would have had just a happy marriage as I got now. That's the one thing.”
Danny said to Ziggy, “Well, I moved in with Sally a few weeks ago.”
“You did?” Ziggy asked Danny. “He did?” Ziggy asked me.
We both nodded.
“God love ya,” Ziggy said to us.
I reminded him that in a week he'd be in New York; the Friars Club had finally agreed to roast him, with or without Vic.
There was a knock at the door. “You ready for this, partner?” Vic said from behind the door.
“Nah,” Ziggy joked, “but let's do it anyways.”
A minute later from the stage I heard Ernie tickling the ivories, as they say. Then Vic started singing “The Hang of It.”
Ziggy got up and went to the door. “Jeez,” he said, “I gotta remember to not pop my eyes out. I'm ascared the glass one might actually shoot at someone.”
“Don't worry,” I said.
“Oh well. Here goes nuttin'.”
DANNY McGLUE: I stood with Arnie and Sally backstage. We had a great view. The place was packed. And it wasn't just old-timers and senior citizens, people trying to revive their fond memories; there were hundreds and hundreds of people in their forties and thirties and so on. But the front tables, it was Celebrity Row. Bob and Dolores Hope were there. So were Frank and Barbara Sinatra, Milton Berle, Lenny Pearl and Jerry Lewis and Alan King and Bill Cosby, everyone. Jan Murray, Corbett Monica and Richard Pryor were there, Vic Damone, Rickles, Liza Minnelli, Buzzy Brevetto, Tony Bennett, Miss Leslie Wilson, Shecky and Buddy, Barbra Streisand. Arnie and Wanda had to turn people away!
Vic does “The Hang of It” and then launches into another song and, just as planned, in walks Ziggy. When that happened every single person who could stand—and there were a few people in that room who couldn't—stood up and started applauding. It was like drumming, like thunder, it was completely deafening. It went on for five minutes.
“A bunch of sweet lovebirds, you two,” he said, sticking his cigar in his big smiling mouth. “If it wasn't so goddamn sickening, I'd almost be really happy for you.”
ARNIE LATCHKEY: I'm not going to lie to you. I could tell you it was as if they'd never broken up, that Fountain and Bliss didn't miss a beat. But it wasn't like that. It was like they'd been apart for only a minute, that's how goddamn tight they still were.
Ziggy waddled onto the stage in the middle of Vic's chirping. When the place erupted, Vic pretended for a minute that the applause was for him. We didn't plan that. He just did it. And it was goddamn hysterical, boy. The applause dies down and Vic sees Ziggy and does a double take that you could have sent to the Smithsonian, it was so classic. And he says, “You . . . again?”
Ziggy doesn't say anything. He's got the sheepish look on, the baby look. He starts inching toward Vic, centerstage. “Yeah, me again,” he says.
Vic said, “So, uh, Zig . . . exactly why are we doing this?”
“I know why, Vic,” Ziggy said.
“You do?”
“Yeah. I know why.”
“Why?”
“'Cause we're desperate and flat fuckin' broke, that's why!”
More yuks, followed by guffaws, followed by chuckles. That big long train of theirs was just gettin' a-rolling.
“It's working,” Danny whispered to me.
“Oh my God,” Sally said. She gasped slightly.
“What?” I said.
“I just realized it!” she said. “Look at them! Ziggy is now skinnier than Vic! Vic is the round one.”
It was true. God, I hadn't noticed it until then.
“So why did we break up again?” Vic was asking Ziggy. “I forgot.”
“Oh, nothin' personal . . . except we couldn't stand the sight of each other.”
“But things have changed now, Zig.”
“They sure have . . . now we can't stand the sight of ourselves either.”
“You know, Zig,” Vic said, “I just heard that another comedy team was playing here tonight.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And which comedy team was that?”
“Stugatz and Bubkes. I just heard a guy outside saying that Stugatz and Bubkes were playing here tonight.”
“That's us, Vic.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. 'Cause you don't got stugatz and I've got bubkes.”
They did ten minutes, made fun of each other, they made fun of the marriages, the booze, the lousy movies, all the problems. Just when you thought it was getting too personal, too nasty, one of 'em would crack a joke, and the whole room started to shake. I could hear the ghosts, boy, ghosts from that hotel and from all the hotels and from every joint they ever played. Ghosts the world over. And these ghosts were locked and lost in such paralyzing laughter that they couldn't do anything but laugh their goddamn ghostly heads off.
Ziggy went off and changed into a costume while Vic did another song. Yeah, he screwed up on the lyrics and both of his hands were trembling, but he made it through. Ziggy came back on and they did a Louie Kablooie routine. It wasn't getting the same-size yuks as just Ziggy and Vic, but it was working. Ziggy goes off, Vic tries another song. They do another bit.
When Ziggy went off, Vic started acknowledging some of the people there. He'd joke around with them. He noticed Fritz Devane's widow and said to her, “You know, your husband was very instrumental in helping my career. Really. Many years ago, do you know what he did? I was a kid, not even twenty, and I wanted to tell him how much I admired him. And he called me a greaseball. He did. And when he did that, that's when I knew I was gonna make it in this business. 'Cause I was gonna make it so nobody could ever treat me like dirt again. So to your late husband I not only say thank you but I say, ‘Vafancul'!’” And you know what? People stood up and applauded! Well, everyone but the Widow Devane, that is, who couldn't have stood up even if she wanted to, which she certainly didn't.
The lights went down and Ziggy came on, as Ziggy. Solo. We were about two-thirds the way done. It was going over much, much better than we'd hoped. Ziggy thanked some people. Pernilla stood up and people applauded. He saluted some of the younger comics and said, “I wanna sincerely thank you guys for rippin' me off and makin' tons more dough at it than me.”
Then he told the lighting guy to turn the lights down and shine the spotlight on Lenny Pearl. “Lenny, I just wanna tell you,” Ziggy said, “they canceled your career thirty years ago—so it's okay for you to drop dead now.” When he got off that line, he was cooking. Yeah, they were best when they were together, Ziggy and Vic, but still, this was working.
Then . . . in the middle of a sentence he stopped talking. Right in the middle. He was looking at the crowd, staring. Just fixated. This wasn't in the plan, this wasn't part of the bit. His face started getting all flushed . . . it was as red as a tomato, boy. He was sweating, shvitzing like a typhoon. And he was giggling! He was giggling and laughing and staring. I looked at his stomach, at his legs. They were rattling! The man had something funny to say, something downright hilarious was going on in that brain of his. But it was inside there, he wasn't letting it out. He was in hysterics but only within himself.
He froze up. There was no noise now. There was just the staring and his face frozen in a smile. The lights didn't come down. They thought it was the act—people were even laughing. But after he didn't move for a minute, they realized it wasn't any act.
He dropped to the ground. It hardly made a noise. He toppled like a house of cards, like the cards at the bottom had been kicked out from underneath.
The lights came down at once. There were murmurs, there was darkness.
He was dead.
A few hours later a doctor tells me what I'd suspected. Ziggy had had a stroke.
Jesus, I thought of all those people, years and years ago . . . Fountain and Bliss had been so goddamn funny that people literally had died laughing watching them. And now Ziggy had done the same thing to himself.
He was buried in the same mausoleum as his parents, at Home of Peace Memorial Park. We kept it a low-key affair. Vic showed up. He threw a pebble into the grave and crossed himself. He was in tears and had to be helped around. I'm not kiddin' you when I tell you he was more shaken up than anyone else there.
Carved into the mausoleum under a Star of David it now says: THE BLISSMANS. COMEDIANS. FAMILY.
SNUFFY DUBIN: I cried for days. I had known this cat for fifty years. You know, he was the funniest performer I ever saw. Hands down. Nobody but nobody could touch him, onstage or off. Look, some nights, Jan Murray was the best comic in the world. Another night it might be Buddy or Shecky. Some other night, hey, maybe it was even me. But night for night, pound for pound, the funniest was Ziggy Bliss, and it ain't even close to a contest. We'd had our run-ins, we hated each other at times. The guy said terrible things about me behind my back, but he also said them to my face too. When he died, an enormous chunk of me died with him.
I never told anybody this. I'll tell you now. Some people think that Ziggy laughed himself to death, that he had a joke in his mind and that's what caused him to die. And that might be true. It might be. I believed it. And to some extent I still do. But what I wanna know is: What the hell was he staring at?
A few days after it happened, the day before they blew the Oceanfront to smithereens, Wanda Conifer showed me the list of people in the audience, the names of everyone who'd reserved a seat. I wanted it as a souvenir to send to Freddy Bliss, for that comedy museum of his.
So I'm lookin' this thing over and one name sticks out like the sorest fucking thumb in a forest of sore thumbs: D. Phipps.
What the hell. Who knows? Who knows anything?
I had a few more shows to do, then it was all over for me. And, man, I couldn't wait.
• • •
ERNIE BEASLEY: After Ziggy died, Vic'
s health got worse. I see things like this in the obituaries often. A couple that's been married for forty years—the wife dies and then a week later, even though he'd been in perfect health, the husband dies. I had two cats, one was twelve, the other four. The older one died and a month later the younger one was gone.
Vic retreated. He disappeared. The crone he was married to kept a tight leash on him. And that's what it was like too, a leash. Joe Yung told me horror stories. She was a tyrant. “She yell at him all day,” Joe told me. “She make him sleep on floor.” She'd humiliate him in public. Vic had health problems and she wouldn't take him to a doctor. But Joe did, when Reina would leave the house. Vic had a small stroke, a tiny one. A year after that, he had a pacemaker installed.
I tried to visit him but Reina and her household staff wouldn't let me. She tried to fire Joe Yung but good old Joe, loyal to the end, simply pretended he didn't understand her. She fired a maid and the maid told me that Reina was always, always snooping around, trying to find the key to the cellar. “She must think Vic's got Fort Knox down there,” the maid said to me. “What is down there, do you know?” I asked. But nobody knew.