Funnymen (80 page)

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.

The worse Vic's health got, the more she pushed him. A few months after his second stroke—and this one was not so tiny—she began dragging him around the country.
A Night With Vic
was the name of the show. At first he could do his shows standing up but then—I read about it in
People
—he had to do them sitting down on the stage, with the microphone pulled halfway down. He would sing, tell jokes. Sometimes you could hardly hear him, he spoke in a hoarse whisper, very slowly. All the cigarettes, all the drinks, the strokes, his age. People would leave his shows and they hadn't been entertained, they'd been horrified.

Vicki tried lawyer after lawyer. Vic's remaining brother and sister did the same. They spent so much money. They tried to show that Vic was being tortured, abused. Joe Yung was the only one of the household staff to testify to that effect, the others just fell in line with Reina. Of course they did!—she controlled the purse strings. They wheeled Vic up to the witness
stand, and the attorneys and the judge spoke to him. He denied being abused. He said he loved Reina. They asked him if Reina forced him to perform at clubs and in theaters against his will, and Vic summoned up enough strength to say, “You call that performing?”

“Apparently, Mr. Fountain,” the judge said, “you fall asleep sometimes while singing?”

“Your Honor,” Vic replied, “I was doing that forty years ago too.”

The court ruled for Reina.

I think it was in 1996 . . . Reina launched a Vic Fountain Web site. I don't have a computer but I was told that for $19.99 you could watch tapes of Vic from thirty years ago at the Oceanfront, tapes from Pete Conifer's stash. The tapes were of him gallivanting about in bed with a few showgirls. They had videotapes of him alone with Ginger too, them telling each other how much they loved each other.

I had dinner with Lulu a few weeks before Vic did that celebrity cruise. Poor Lu. “He's lost to me now,” she cried. “I've been lying to myself my whole life.”

ARNIE LATCHKEY:
I couldn't believe when I saw the ad in the paper. Don't forget how Vic hated the water! The man never ate seafood in his life, not so much as a prawn. I remember I once said to him, “The world is your oyster,” and he told me never to use that expression ever again. He was serious. He'd been living in Los Angeles for almost fifty years and the closest he'd ever been to the beach was when Gussie Kahn's chauffeur took us there. And I pick up a paper now and I see that Vic Fountain is going to perform on some celebrity cruise ship?!

Estelle and I drove to Guy's shack one day, in Venice. Except now it was called Two Guys Seafood Shack, 'cause Vincent's kid, Little Guy, worked there. I showed Guy the ad in the paper. I said, “How the hell is Vic going to go on a boat?! We couldn't get him to do swashbuckler movies and that wasn't even real water! How's he gonna do this?!” All Guy could do was shake his head.

FREDDY BLISS:
I boarded the ship in New York, and the first time I saw Vic was in the dining room. He and Reina Harbin had a table all to themselves. So did the other talent. Vic was the biggest name of all the entertainers, by far—there was an impressionist who couldn't even imitate himself, he was so bad, and a few other lesser talents. Reina would wheel Vic around the ship and the passengers would walk up to him, ask him for his autograph. There weren't too many young passengers, to tell the truth. “I really love you, Vic,” an elderly woman would say as she shook his hand. “I saw you sing once at the Smokestack Lounge, Vinegar Hill,
Brooklyn,” a man said, “and now here we are on a big ship.” But Vic had no idea what or where the Smokestack Lounge was. Some old guy would grab Vic by the shoulder and say, “Mr. Fountain, I want to thank you for recording ‘Lost and Lonely Again.' It saved my life.” And Vic would nod and try to smile. But by then the right half of his face was paralyzed. After three days at sea, nobody would approach Vic anymore—they just watched Reina wheel him around, and the passengers would look at each other. They couldn't believe how old he looked. They were pitying him, putting their hands to their hearts, shaking their heads and pitying him.

Reina would wheel him over to the edge of the deck and leave him there. She'd go off for as much as an hour at a time. Sometimes she put the brake on the wheelchair, so he wouldn't slide around. But two times she didn't. The first time, I caught him . . . just as the chair was sliding back. He looked completely terrified. His eyes . . . he looked so helpless and scared. I caught the chair and turned him away from the water and put the brake on. He didn't recognize me. The second time it happened, I saw a man pop out of nowhere and catch the chair. He put the brake on and turned Vic away from the water, just as I'd done.

I walked up to him the next day and said, “I saw what you did for Vic Fountain. Thanks.”

He shrugged and walked away.

I went up to the ship's captain the next day. I told him that I thought Vic's wife was trying to scare him into having a heart attack. He didn't believe me. He thought I was crazy.

The next night in the lounge, it was “Vic Fountain Night.” Reina wheeled Vic up to the stage. He got lots of applause. I was surrounded by a bunch of
alter kockers,
Italians and Jews and Irish and everything else. I was the youngest person at the table by thirty years.

“His wig is backwards,” an old man said. “She's got his wig on backwards.”

Vic told some jokes, told some stories, sang three songs. I don't think he got too many words right. Before the last song Reina and Vic tried to engage in some funny banter, but it just didn't work. They had this bit about how she was hard up for sex and he was too old to perform. It didn't get too many laughs from that crowd. Then they sang a duet of “Makin' Whoopee” and Vic moved his hands up and down, like a baby in a highchair. Reina was really hamming it up, shaking her hips and swinging her chest and her gold necklace, and Vic was just moving his lips. That necklace of hers was straight out of
The Land of the Pharaohs
and her hips were nothing to be shaking, believe me. Especially on a boat.