Funnymen (60 page)

“So have I.”

“I don't know about this whole marriage racket sometimes.”

“I wouldn't know. You know?”

“Hey, you're smart not to ever get hitched,” he told me. “Believe me.”

“I'm smart, Vic? Nah, I ain't smart. I just don't have a fuckin' nose anymore.
Smart?
What girl you know wants to marry a guy five foot two who's got no nose?”

He drained his glass, refilled it, and shook his head.

“One day you'll get married, buddy.”

“I don't know about that,” I said.

“I love my kids. I love 'em. I look at Vicki, it's like she's a gift from God to me. All the stupid stuff I've done wrong in this world and still I get such an angel. And I think Vince's gonna have a better singin' voice than his old man.”

I said, “Hey pal, my sick beagle's got a better singin' voice than you.” I took a snort of the Jack Daniel's and said, “What about Ginger?”

“What about her?”

“She loves you, Vic. You're gonna be a free man now. Maybe you could hitch up with her eventually.”

“Well, I don't know . . . I mean, maybe I wanna live a nice sweet life as a bachelor for a while, you know?”

“You been doin' that for your whole marriage!”

“Yeah, you're right. You're right. But maybe now that I'm single, it's time to settle down.”

SALLY KLEIN:
Have you ever seen the tape of Ed Murrow interviewing Vic at home? Morty Geist did instant damage control after the divorce and arranged for a CBS
Person to Person
interview. Lulu got the house in Beachwood Canyon so Vic was living at the Beverly Wilshire. Ernie Beasley plays piano throughout the interview; you could hear it softly in the background and sometimes make him out. Now I'll tell you: Vic didn't ever have a piano in there except for this interview. As soon as they unplugged the camera, the piano went back to the shop. The first part of the interview was Vic with Vicki and Vincent. He really did look like such a proud dad, and they were both such gorgeous children. Vicki would not get off Vic's lap when Ed Murrow wanted to interview Vic alone, it was very cute, and there was another part when Vince tries to get Vic's attention by using a cigarette, but Vic ignores him. Then Ed asks Vic to sing a song and Ernie starts up “Lost and Lonely Again,” and Vic sang it and it looked like he was going to fall asleep halfway. Ed Murrow even said, “Vic . . . uh, Vic?” to stir him. Then Ed asked Vic how he was doing, living alone and being single, and Vic said, “Well, Eddie, there is a new person in my life now. A very special person.” And a few seconds later, there's Ziggy in drag and they do a hilarious ten-minute bit together.

After twenty years they could still work the same old magic.

ERNIE BEASLEY:
The big tour together in 1962 . . . there were all these rumors that it was going to be their last tour. At this point I didn't know if this was Morty Geist doing a publicity stunt or if they really meant it. And you couldn't tell by Ziggy and Vic. Sometimes they'd talk to each other backstage, sometimes they wouldn't. But it had been that way for years.

Ginger said to me, “You know how they communicate? Through one-upmanship. It's like they send signals to each other on their own private wavelength.”

What she meant was, they had these riders built into their contracts. The soda machine on their floor in the hotels, for instance: Vic insisted that the bottles had to come out with the caps to the left, not the right. Then Ziggy wanted another machine on the floor, with the caps all to the right, not the left. Vic had to have his hotel room within a certain temperature, between 62 and 65 degrees. When Ziggy found out about that, he demanded his room be
exactly
631/2 degrees. When Vic found out that
Ziggy demanded ruby red carpeting in the hotel room as well as a ruby bath mat and matching towels, Vic had it so he'd have his own handpicked furniture shipped from city to city—and everything turquoise, of course. The hotel would empty out his room, put in the furniture, then, when Vic moved on, the old furniture went back in. Ziggy went one up on this too. He would have Andy Ravelli or Reynolds Catledge go to the city ahead of time and
buy
new furniture for his hotel room, then, when Ziggy moved on, the hotel could keep it or throw it out.

It could get very, very ugly if their demands weren't met. Vic wanted twenty bottles of Dom Pérignon in his dressing room and if there were nineteen or twenty-one bottles, he would not go on. One time he didn't like the exact shade of turquoise so he and a few of his buddies destroyed the hotel suite. Vic called down, got another suite, and destroyed that one too.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
I'm at Chasen's one day with Sally, and Gus Kahn saunters in alone except for his Cohiba. He sits down and then he notices us and beckons me over.

“I got to hand it to your boy Vic Fountain, Latchkey, I really do,” he said.

“Why's that, Gus?” I'm bracing myself.

“I got a call last night at two in the morning,” he tells me. “A woman was arrested at the Sands in Las Vegas last night. She was shootin' dice. Won five grand as a matter of fact. Was cursing up a storm . . . the pit boss even had to tell her to pipe down. She was tellin' men to kiss the dice, to suck on the dice, to shove the dice down their Jockey shorts, all for good luck. She didn't pipe down. Customers were leaving, it got so dirty.
In Las Vegas it got too dirty!
They summon Jack Entratter, he tells her to kindly leave. She told him—and this is a direct quote—to ‘stick his little wang in a meat grinder.'”

“Cut to the part with Vic, Gus. My red-hot chili's gettin' . . . chilly.”

“Okay, so this lady, who is as drunk as you can be without passing out, moves to the blackjack tables. And she's starting to make a scene there too now. She begins losin' all the dough she made with the dice. And she starts yelling at the dealer. ‘You goddamn whore!' she yells. ‘You take it up the ass from Ethel Merman with a strap-on dildo!' Things such as this, things that make me blush just to repeat them to you, Latchkey, as you can no doubt see. So now a few guards mosey on over and they're going to toss her outside. And she's a big woman so it was probably more than a few guards. She sees them approaching so what does she do? Well, what would
you
do? She stands up, stands on the blackjack table, and rips the felt to shreds with her high heels, pulls down her skirt, and shows them her ass. ‘Grab a good piece of it, boys, 'cause it's the best thing you'll ever have!'
she yelled out. So these ten guards lift her up and carry her out kicking and screaming onto the Strip and throw her there like she's a sack of turnips. It was quite a thud, you can imagine.”

I joked, “So that was the noise I heard in my house last night on Cañon Drive, eh?”

“Do you know who this woman was?” Gus asked me, chugging on his cigar.

“Enlighten me.”

“It was Clotilde Sturdivandt. Now go back to your chili. It's gettin' . . . red hot.”

Dissolve. A few months later I was in New York at the WAT offices, meeting with Murray Katz. I knew the news was bad when he didn't want to take me out for lunch to the Russian Tea Room or “21.” I said to him, “Murr, maybe we could go to the Automat?” But he said, “Latch, we better meet here.” Very loud gulp.

The upshot was with the Galaxy deal done, the forecast was for heavy flooding, followed by famine, plague, and pestilence. Galaxy won't renew, he told me. I said to Murray, “What about this
Cleopatra
thing going on? All that money flushed right down Liz Taylor's bidet! I could finance the next three world wars for what they're wasting on that thing!” I reminded him that no Fountain and Bliss movie ever lost a penny and, boy, did he ever put me in my place. He said, “Latch, at one time people said, ‘No Fountain and Bliss movie ever lost a dollar.' Then they started saying, ‘No Fountain and Bliss movie ever lost a dime' Now it's down to a penny. See where we're heading on this?”

“What about we renew for three pictures? Three pictures?” I implored. “Please?”

“Gussie won't bite.”

“Two. Two pictures,” I begged. “They can be the worst movies ever made.”

“The boys already made those. No soap.”

“One picture! We'll do a one-picture-at-a-time deal. No commitment. One picture. And, Jesus Christ, if Gussie wants it, Clarence Gilbert can even direct it!”

“Ned's dead ten years, Arnie. You think I don't know that?”

“Yeah, but maybe Gussie don't. All right, all right. I refuse to beg about this thing.”

He reminded me that I had indeed been begging. I agreed that, yes, I had been.

But guess what? I must have somehow found one small fraying, dangling heartstring of Murray's—he was an agent and probably didn't have too many of 'em—and tugged at it the right way. Because a week later he got the
boys a deal at Paramount. One picture. Three hundred grand apiece. “What kind of material will it be?” I asked Murray. He said, “What do they want it to be?” I said, “Well, there's this thing been floatin' around since before Noah's ark washed ashore. It's called
Three of a Kind.
” “Sid and Norman's old thing?” he said. “Yep,” I replied. He said, “Jesus, that thing was perfect for them,” to which I tersely responded, “Precisely.”

He told me he'd throw it Paramount's way. He did. And like Willie Mays goin' after Vic Wertz's fly ball, they caught it.
Finally!
Someone wanted to do it!

But if there's only one thing in this business that I've learned, it's this: Never, ever get too excited about anything. Enthusiasm can act like a poison.

JANE WHITE:
After Lulu and Vic got divorced, I tried to continue being friends with her. But I really don't know why he married her. She wasn't pretty, she wasn't very smart, she wasn't terribly sweet or nice and was not pleasant company; she was like a waitress at a truck stop.

What was I saying? Oh yes. Our friendship.

I came by with Freddy one day so he could play with Vicki and Vincent. The last time I'd done this, though, do you know what happened? Vicki and Freddy were near the pool and Vicki lifted up her skirt. She was ten and he was eight. I saw it, Lulu saw it, Joe Yung saw it. And Freddy started crying. And when he was crying Vicki pushed him into the pool. That was Vicki.

So I drove up with Freddy one morning. I remember I was wearing a wonderful white Oleg Cassini dress. And a pillbox hat, just like Jackie Kennedy. I rang the door and Lulu answered. “I was just passing by,” I told her, “and thought I would drop in.”

“Look,” she said to me, “we never liked each other. I ain't Vic's wife no more. And maybe one day you won't be Ziggy's. And maybe one day Vic and Ziggy won't be together no more. So really, Jane, you don't have to come around.” And she closed the door in my face.

Well, I never!

DANNY McGLUE:
I hadn't looked at the
Three of a Kind
script since well before Norman White passed away. It had really been through some kind of life. It could've been a wonderful Broadway play, a musical, a movie, a TV play. But it had never been anything except a dust magnet. So when Arnie told me that Paramount was hot to do it, I pulled it out of a file drawer.

I read it. There was something “off” about it. So I read it again. The plot was good, most of the jokes were still fresh, the characterizations were rich. But still, there was something not right about it.

I put it away and then Betsy and I went out to dinner, to Tony's on Seventy-ninth Street. She'd just spent another two weeks at Payne Whitney. I should tell you that Stevie had just died. He was gone. My poor boy had never been truly healthy. Betsy drank a lot when she was pregnant with him . . . I really would prefer not to talk about this . . .

During dinner, it hit me. I knew what was wrong. I told Betsy I had to make a phone call and went to a phone near the bar. I called Arnie in L.A. and said, “Arnie . . . Arnie . . . Listen to me.”

“All ears, Danny boy,” he said.

“The script . . . it's for two guys in their early twenties! It's for two guys who are twenty-two, twenty-three years old!”