Funnymen (68 page)

When Ziggy found out I was doing Vic's show he hit the roof. And believe me, I enjoyed every minute of it.

When Olds dumped Ziggy in '68, nobody would go near him. Nobody was watching the show—Marlin Perkins tickling a gerbil was outdrawing him. He did this sketch in his last Christmas show . . . it was him and Mitzi Gaynor dressed up as a quarreling couple, two vaudevillians in their living room. And the sketch was something about her lousy cooking, about how her brisket stunk up the entire northern half of New York State. It was Harry and Flo they were playing, this was his tribute, and it stank worse than that brisket.

When he lost his TV shows, that's when a lot of other things went bad. He still had engagements all around the country. If I was around and had free time I'd stop in and watch. Half of Ziggy's act was him talking about Vic. Imitating Vic, relating funny stories about Vic, putting Vic in weird situations, like on the moon or in the White House or something. Couple times I saw him and he did something real unprofessional: He started laughing at his own material. Actually it wasn't material that he said aloud; it was stuff up in his brain. He never did get it out, he just thought about it and I thought he was gonna completely explode. Very unprofessional.

He told reporters he was taking a break from the clubs for a while. Takinga break. But, you know, he'd been playing the Latin Casino in Cherry Hill [New Jersey] or the Royal Box in New York and the joints were empty. Except for the hecklers. “. . . And another thing about Vic,” Ziggy would say, and some drunk from Paramus would throw an ice cube at him and yell out, “No.
Enough
about Vic!” People were taking a break from
him.

PERNILLA BORG [Ziggy's second wife]:
It is famous story of how Ziggy meets me. I was Miss Sweden in 1964. I was twenty-three years old. From this I get to do commercials for the Top Brass, the hair cream. Some man is putting the Top Brass in his hair at his gym and I appear in a white towel and I put the Top Brass over him. I say one line: “I want to get it all over you.” It was very steamy, very hot. When I sign for this Top Brass campaign, Earl Wilson prints my picture in the
Post.
“Bustacious, chestacious, bosomicious, lustacious Pernilla Borg will be steaming things up for Top Brass,” it says. The picture of me is with the white towel and my cleavages. Ziggy calls up Earl Wilson and he gets my publicist's phone number from him. Then Ziggy calls me up at home! I did not believe it was Ziggy Bliss. The funny half of Fountain and Bliss. We are on phone for an hour and he has me laughing so much it is hurting me. He tells me he will be in New York sometime soon and would like to meet me. I say to him, “When
will you be in New York?” and he says, “Will you be there tomorrow?” and I say to him yes and then he says, “Then so will I.” And he was.

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
Morty calls me, tells me we got trouble: Ziggy's been seen around New York with Pernilla Borg.
Who?
I mean, at this point, I don't know Pernilla Borg from Ingmar Bergman. He tells me, “It's that big Swede in the Top Brass ads.” Do you remember that campaign? In the locker room with all the steam and the white towel? Jesus, ten million boys must have gotten their first hard-ons watching a stupid commercial for hair cream. I bet you some of them haven't even subsided yet, it was that hot. (Christ, that whole campaign backfired too, because nobody could tell what the commercial was for: hair cream, towels, Swedish tourism, or steam.) Anyway, as soon as I realized who Pernilla Borg is, I said to Morty, “This has got to be it for Jane White. She's dead in the water.”

“Arnie,” he says to me, “do you have any idea how much I've done for Fountain and Bliss?”

“Yes I do, because I've asked you to do most of it.”

“I just can't take this anymore.”

“Morty,” I said, “I know you're gonna cover this lousy burnt flank steak with rich luscious icing, with fresh strawberries and sweet sugary flowers and fluffy cream and we're gonna make it through. I just know it. So, please, get bakin'.”

So the next day Ziggy calls me up from New York. He's in a rage. He's yelling so goddamn loud, his spit was practically squirtin' through my ear piece. “Morty's fired!” Ziggy said. “I want Morty fired and I want him to never work at any job anywhere ever again!” I told Ziggy this would be a little tough to arrange and asked him what had happened. He read to me from Bud Hatch's column. Guess what Morty Geist had done? He'd called up columnists all over New York and L.A. and told them that Ziggy Bliss was having an adulterous sexual relationship with Pernilla Borg, she of the Top Brass ads, and that his wife didn't know about it and it would probably be the end of their marriage even though he'd cheated on her numerous times, and that nobody really thought this would be injurious to Ziggy's career because his career wasn't doing particularly good anyway. That's what Morty told everyone.
The truth!
And they went with it.

“Morty told me,” I said to Ziggy, “that he was at the end of his rope.”

“Did you tell him to get a new—” he started to ask me.

“Yes, I most certainly did.”

“I want him dead, Latch.”

“Look, do you have any idea how much he's done for us? Covering up the abortions and the shoplifting, George S. Collier's peg leg, the dozens of fights, the girls, all the hanky-panky and
mishegoss.
”

“Okay . . . okay,” he said. “I unnerstand.”

“You do?” I said, for it did not seem characteristic of him.

Maybe a week after this, what happens? Vic was filming
Monza: 180 MPH
with Camilla Sparv, Omar Sharif, and Alain Delon, and he began a dalliance with Taffy McBain, who's in that forgettable racecar picture for about two laps. Taffy and Vic were seen all over the place, holding hands, smooching, actin' like kids. The paparazzi were all over them like potato on a knish. He'd be singing in Vegas and they'd bring the lights down except for one soft light on her in the crowd and he'd sing to her. Very tender, very sweet, very sickening. After four weeks of this relationship he tells Morty to announce to the world he's marrying Taffy McBain, who, by the way, is twenty years younger than him. So do you know what Morty does? He calls up every columnist there is and—for no reason whatsoever known to mankind—he issues the Eleven Standard Denials and Apologies! About the marriage, about the relationship, about gambling and drinking. About everything under the goddamn sun, it was like! All Vic wanted him to do was to call up Bud or Earl or the Slobbering Lush and say, “Taffy McBain and I are deeply in love and will be getting married in a private ceremony at an undisclosed location at Harrah's in Tahoe next month.” But Morty—you gotta love him—he just flipped out! “I am not marrying Taffy McBain because she is expecting my child,” he had Vic saying. But nobody had ever said that! Grayling Greene ran this: “My marriage to Taffy, whom I love and adore, is not an act of bigamy. I was never married to Faye Kendall.” But nobody ever said that Vic and Faye Kendall had ever tied the knot!

“Latch,” Vic says to me on the phone from Palm Springs, “my kids'll read this, Lulu'll read this, my mother'll read this. I want him dead. He's dead. Morty's in Forest Lawn.”

“Do you have any idea how much—”

“Even if I wasn't gonna strangle him, even if my mother wasn't gonna chew his Adam's apple, do you honestly think that the Fratellis won't go after him?! Look, this is my second marriage, Latch. That's really important. It should be the second happiest day of my life.”

“I'll talk to him. Maybe he can apologize for the denials and deny the apologies.”

Poor Morty Geist. He
made
Fountain and Bliss. And he remade them, over and over again, whenever there was trouble. All the stunts he pulled. I don't know when it was but in Philly once he'd gotten hold of three people who were in the hospital for trying to kill themselves by jumping. And he puts them all up in the balcony and in the middle of a Fountain and Bliss sketch, all three of them dive off at once. Tell me that isn't genius.

Dissolve. Four nights later. I get a phone call in the middle of the night,
it's Bertie Kahn. Bertie's retired, he's livin' in Fort Lauderdale, he moseys about with a solid-gold, diamond-studded walker. Bertie tells me that Morty had committed suicide.

“Why now?” I asked. “I mean, I see why he'd kill himself, Bertie, but why now and not five years or ten years ago?”

“The accumulation, Arnie.”

All the dozens, the hundreds of things. They had all piled up and collapsed on him. The poor guy. Never married, never had a girl. The kid had no family that we knew of, and Vic and Ziggy—separately, of course—picked up the tab for the funeral.

“How'd he do it, by the way?” I asked Bertie.

“Hanged himself.”

“Damn,” I said. “With what?”

“A rope. It took two though. The first one snapped.”

SALLY KLEIN:
When I read that Vic was marrying Taffy McBain my first thought was: Poor Lulu. That flame was still burning inside her, but it must have died down when Vic told her what he was doing. Although I think he didn't tell her; Joe Yung did. That's what personal valets are for, huh?

I said to Jack, “I give this marriage three years. Not a day more.”

Well, I was off by a year. Because it was over in two.

REYNOLDS CATLEDGE IV:
When the nature of Ziggy and Pernilla Borg's “friendship” became common knowledge, I was contacted by Shep Lane and Merwyn Swick, the prominent Los Angeles divorce lawyer. Mr. Swick informed me that this case could get unsightly or ugly or hideous. “We want to keep it down to unsightly at best, ugly at worst,” he said.

Mr. Swick asked me what I knew about Jane White. Did she ever fool around, he wanted to know, did she drink, use narcotics, or take pills?

I was in quite a bind, for I knew from the surveillance years before that Jane White had had a lesbianistic affair with Joan Pierce. If I told Mr. Swick this, it would have compromised my position. It opened up a can of worms, if you will. However, I did feel that it was my duty to tell the truth and I did so.

I detailed as best as I remembered—and I remembered it virtually blow by blow—what I had heard on the tapes. They sat spellbound while I told them, while I reenacted verbatim their ardent lovemaking. Both Mr. Swick and Shep Lane were very eager to know if the tapes were still extant and seemed equally disappointed—depressed, almost—to find out that they were not.

“So they did this after watching
silent
movies?” Mr. Swick asked incredulously. “As in,
The Gold Rush
and
Birth of a Nation
?”

“There was no sound to these movies,” I told them. “Whether they were classics of the silent screen or home movies, I do not know.”

“Hey, Mer,” Shep Lane interjected, “Ziggy was always fooling around with strippers and girls like that. You should see the headlights on some of these dames. Bet you anything it wasn't Murnau's
Sunrise
they were watching.”

“Why did Ziggy have you bugging his own house anyway, Mr. Reynolds?” Mr. Swick inquired of me.

I refrained from reminding him that I was Mr. Catledge and not Mr. Reynolds and instead replied, “Ziggy wasn't bugging his own house. Vic was. Vic Fountain.”

They both shifted uncomfortably in their chairs, and their faces registered what I would characterize as an amalgam of distress and amazement.

“Vic bugged Ziggy's house?” Shep said, picking up the pile of papers he'd dropped to the floor.

“Yes. That is correct,” I replied.

They huddled with each other in a corner of the office and chatted. I suppose they were discussing the admissibility of the evidence. Or perhaps they were still stunned that Vic would bug Ziggy's domicile.

“Mr. Reynolds, is there anything else you know?” Mr. Swick asked.

“Yes, Ziggy had bugs in several of Vic's places of residence, his suites and such.”

This time Mr. Swick's paperwork fell to the floor.

“What happened in Vic's hotel rooms and in his bedroom,” Mr. Swick stated, “would be of no use in Ziggy's divorce; however, I really would like to talk to you about that at a later date.”