The Man Who Died Laughing

CHAPTER ONE

I WAS DREAMING ABOUT Merilee when the phone woke me up. I don’t remember the dream. I do remember my face felt all hot and I was having trouble breathing. Lulu was sleeping on my head again; a habit she got into when my landlord cut back on the heat. I pushed her off and tried to focus on the clock next to the bed. It wasn’t easy. I’d been drinking boilermakers at the Dublin House until two-thirty, which was … exactly nine minutes before.

I answered the phone. Somebody was speaking in this gravelly Brooklynese. Somebody who sounded a lot like The One.

You can write, pally. You can write.

I cleared my throat. You read my book?

"My people read it. They’re impressed. They think you’re vibrant and, whattaya call it, resonant!"

"So did Newsweek. That’s their quote off the back cover."

So let’s talk, pally.

Sure. Read the book yourself. Then we’ll talk. Also, never call me again in the middle of the night. It’s rude.

"Hey, nobody talks to Sonny Day like that. Who you think you are, me?"

I hung up and burrowed back under Lulu and the covers. I didn’t have much left anymore. Lulu and my pride were about it. I went back to sleep immediately.

The next thing that woke me up was this loud, steady pounding. At first I thought it was my head, but it was somebody at the door. Lulu was barking. I tried to muzzle her—she has a mighty big bark for somebody with no legs—but she leapt off the bed and waddled to the door and kept barking. I focused on the clock again. It wasn’t yet nine.

Who’s there?!

Sonny Day! came the reply.

I found my silk dressing gown in a pile of clothes on the chair. How’d you get in the building?

Vic is good with locks!

Who’s Vic?!

Open up, will ya, Stewart?!

I opened up, and there he was. It was strange meeting someone I’d known since I was in kindergarten. He looked just like he did on screen, only more so. He was shorter. He was wider. The furrows in his forehead were deeper, the black brows bushier, the nose bigger. He was in his sixties now, but he still wore his hair in a pompadour and he still dyed it jet black. I think he dyed his chest hair, too. Plenty of it was showing. His fur coat was open, his red silk shirt unbuttoned to the waist. His heavy beard was freshly shaved. He smelled of cologne and talc, and he was tanned and alert. He stuck out a manicured hand. I shook it. His grip was a hell of a lot firmer than mine.

Behind him stood a sandy-haired giant in a chesterfield coat. He was maybe forty and balding and had a long scar across his chin. I figured him for six feet six, maybe 250.

That’s Vic Early, said Sonny.

Vic nodded at me blandly.

I stood there in the doorway shivering. Don’t you ever sleep?

Can we come in? asked Sonny.

I let them in. The two of them filled my tiny living room. Lulu barked viciously and then ran under my desk.

Good work, Lulu, I told her.

Sonny looked around at what little there was in the way of furniture, at the piles of newspapers, the dust, the beer bottles, the stack of dishes in the kitchen sink, which dripped. Lemme see, the premise for this scene is poverty, right?

Vic laughed.

I went into the kitchen, stirred two heaping spoonfuls of instant coffee into a cup of cold water, and swallowed it down with three extra-strength Excedrin. Then I smiled bravely. Breakfast, I said, is the most important meal of the day.

Sonny bared his teeth like a rat, found a box of Sen-Sen mints in his coat, and popped two in his mouth. Get dressed, he ordered. Plane leaves in an hour.

What plane?

To L.A. You can have the guesthouse. Stay as long as you need.

Whoa—

You better step on it if we’re gonna—

Wait! What are you talking about?

I want you, he said. You’re it.

I sat down on the sofa, rubbed my eyes.

I already told my people to take care of it. Whatever deal you want, you got it. It’s done.

I don’t think you understand, I said slowly. Nothing’s done. I do your book if I decide I want to, and I haven’t decided yet.

Did I tell ya, Vic? Huh? Sonny beamed at me. You got moxie, kid. Talent, too. You’re some kind of writer.

Oh, yeah?

"Yeah. I read your book last night after we talked. I apologize. I’m not used to working with New York talent. I forget. You people are very—what?—sensitive. Anyways, I stayed up all night and read it. Never went to sleep, I’m impressed. I don’t agree with you. I mean, your conclusion at the end. But that’s cool. Point is, you tell a good story, you have real smarts, and you’re no phony with big words."

I had nothing to add.

Ever sell that book as a movie? The father’s a great part. I could play the hell out of it.

Orion optioned it for Paul Newman.

Yeah, he can act, too, Sonny kidded.

Vic laughed. Clearly it was one of the things he was paid to do.

We’ll have to have a literary discussion sometime, pally. Time I got plenty, of, now that I’m off the stuff. You like to run? Me and Vic do five miles every morning. We already ran in Central Park this morning. Vic used to play offensive line for the Bruins.

Vic looked down at me impassively. He didn’t scare me. I knew in a fair fight I’d last at least one point two seconds.

I turned to Sonny. Can we have a minute alone?

He tugged at the gold chain buried in the hair on his chest. Vic, wait down in the limo.

Vic headed out, which got Lulu barking again from under the desk, where she was still cowering.

Sonny cleared a space on the love seat and sat down. What do they call you? Stu?

Hoagy.

As in Carmichael?

As in the cheese steak.

He narrowed his eyes at me. You kidding me?

No.

Good. Never kid a kidder. You know why?

No.

We bleed. On the inside. What’s on your mind, Hoagy? What’s the problem?

No problem. This is rather sudden, that’s all. I have to decide if I really want to do it.

What else you doing?

Professionally? Not much. But it means leaving town for a few months and—

Got a girl?

Not right now.

I hear you used to be married to Merilee Nash.

Yes.

He shook his head. It’s tough to get over. I know. I had two marriages fall apart. Deep down inside, you always figure it was your fault.

"It was my fault."

Don’t be that hard on yourself, kid. One thing my doctors at Betty Ford told me I’ll never forget—take the blame, don’t take the shame.

They give you sweatshirts with that printed on it?

You’re a sour guy.

You noticed.

You’re too young to be so sour. I’m gonna have to take you in tow. See, I used to be a sour pickle myself, a real kosher dill. But I got a much more positive attitude about life now.

About your book …

Yeah?

Why are you writing it?

Got a lot I wanna get off my chest.

You’ll tell the truth?

Only way to tell it, pally. I’m prepared to be totally upfront. And this is my top priority, if that’s what you’re wondering. I’m yours—for as long as it takes. He jumped to his feet, paced into the kitchen, prodded the dishes in the sink, and paced back again. It’s part of my healing process, see? It’s very important to me. And I won’t shit you—my career could use a shot in the arm, too. I need the exposure. The dough. But that’s all secondary. True story.

My agent said you’re having trouble finding someone. Why?

"Because those Hollywood entertainment writers are all liars and scum. All they care about is the bad, the negative. They print lies and everybody who reads that crap thinks it’s true. And they expect me to cooperate with ’em. They’re whores who hide behind the constitution. You, you’re a real writer. You dig into what makes people tick. That’s what I want."

Are you planning to use other sources?

What are those?

Can I talk to your ex-partner?

Sonny stiffened at my mention of Gabe Knight. He didn’t answer me for a second. Then he stuck out his lower lip like a kid—a trademark gesture—and said, Gabe’s off limits. That’s the only ground rule. I hear you’ve spoken to him once and you’re fired.

Why?

Because I don’t want him involved in it, he snapped, reddening.

But you’ll talk about why the two of you broke up?

Yeah. I’ll do that. And you can talk to anybody else you want. Ask anything you want, of any of ’em. Connie, my first wife. We’re getting friendly again. Vic, he’s been through the bad years. There’s my lawyer. There’s Wanda. You can talk to Tracy, if you can find her. Last I heard she was off in Tunisia, shtupping some prince.

Has she retired from the business?

Her tits fell, if that’s retiring.

He waited for me to laugh. He expected me to laugh. It was a habit of his that came from thirty years of being a famous comic. But I’ve never been an easy laugh. That put him off, I think. So he turned serious.

That broad almost destroyed me. I loved her, gave her everything. She was sweet, beautiful, my whole life. One day she just packs up and leaves me—not even a word of warning. Says she has to go find herself. He heaved a deep, genuine sigh of pain, then abruptly winked at me, man to man. Not that it should be such a great fucking discovery, huh? He looked around. Jeez, this place is a real dump. Reminds me of the old neighborhood. Plaster falling down. No heat. He motioned toward the kitchen. Roaches?

Thanks, I got plenty.

That’s hysterical, he said, not smiling. You like living here?

As much as I like living.

What’s that, New York intellectual bullshit?

Of the highest order.

So whattaya say? You’ll do it?

I don’t know if we’ll be compatible.

He frowned. Is that so important?

We’ll be spending a lot of time together. We’ll be like …

His face darkened. Partners?

Partners.

Look, pally. Me, I make instant judgments about people. Always have. Sometimes it gets me in trouble, but I’m too old to change. I like you. I think you’re talented. I think we’ll be good for each other. Okay? Now throw some stuff in a bag. Plane leaves in—

My head was thudding. I’ll have to think it over. If I decide yes, I’ll catch up with you in a week. I have to straighten some things out here, board Lulu.

Bring the dog with you. Space I got lots of.

Really?

Sure.

I don’t think she likes you. Lulu was still under the desk.

"Nonsense. Kids and dogs love me. Know why? Because I’m one of them—an innocent. Only the critics hate me. I got no use for them either. My contract is with the audience. My audience. You a gambling man, Hoagy?"

I am.

Tell you what. I get Lulu to like me, you’ll take the job. Deal?

She’s never steered me wrong. If she okays you, I’ll do it. Deal.

Sonny grinned. My kinda guy. He snapped his fingers. Get me a piece of candy or something.

I got him a doggie treat out of the cupboard. Sonny put it between his lips, leaving one end sticking out. Then he went to the desk and got down on his hands and knees in front of her. That started her barking again.

Kiss Sonny, Lulu, he cooed. Give Sonny a kissy-kissy. He crawled to her on his hands and knees, the doggie treat between his lips—just like when he tried to tame the lion in The Big Top, Knight & Day’s circus picture and their first in color.

I couldn’t believe it. Sonny Day, The One, was crawling around on my living room rug, trying to feed my dog mouth to mouth. Even more amazing was that it was working. Lulu stopped barking. Her tail began to thump. When Sonny got nose-to-nose with her, she took a tug at the treat. He held on to it, teasing her. She yapped playfully at him. He yapped back.

Say, he said from the side of his mouth. Her breath smells kind of …

She has kind of strange eating habits.

Lulu took another bite at the treat. This time he let her take it from him. She stretched out and began to munch happily. He patted her. Her tail thumped.

Sonny stood up, swiped at the lint on his trousers, and grinned at me triumphantly. So whattaya say, pigeon? Planes waiting.

Maybe you’d already heard of me before I got mixed up with Sonny. I used to be a literary sensation. In reviewing my first novel, Our Family Enterprise, The New York Times called me the first major new literary voice of the eighties. I won awards. I spoke at literary gatherings. I got a lot of attention. Esquire was interested in what my favorite flavor of ice cream was (licorice, and it’s damned hard to find). Vanity Fair wondered who my favorite movie actor was (a tie between Robert Mitchum and Moe Howard). Gentlemen’s Quarterly applauded me as a man of easy style and wanted to know what I wore when I worked (an Orvis chamois shirt, jeans, and mukluks). For a while there, I was as famous as John Irving, only he’s shorter than I am, and he still writes.

Or maybe you’d heard of me because of Merilee. Ours was a match made not so much in heaven as in Liz Smith’s column. Liz thought we were perfect for each other. Maybe we were. She was Merilee Nash, that strikingly lovely and serious and oh-so-hot star of Joe Papp’s latest Tony winner. I was tall and dashing and, you’ll recall, the first major new literary voice of the eighties. We did London, Paris, and most of Italy on our honeymoon. When we got back, we bought a magnificent art deco apartment on Central Park West. I cultivated a pencil-thin mustache and took to wearing a Brooks Brothers tuxedo and grease in my hair. She went for that white silk headband that everybody copied. Together we opened every play and dance club and museum showing and rib joint in town. We were featured in the new Mick Jagger rock video (we were the couple he chauffeured through hell). We got a red 1958 Jaguar XK 150 for zipping out to the Hamptons, and a basset hound puppy we named Lulu. Lulu went everywhere with us. She even had her own water bowl at Elaine’s.

I kept my old, drafty fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street as an office and filled it with a word processor and a personal copier. I started going there every morning to work on book number two, only there wasn’t one. They call it writers block. Believe me, there’s nothing there to get blocked up. Only a void. And a fear that you no longer know how to do the only thing you know how to do. My juices had dried up. I just couldn’t get it up anymore—for the book or, it soon turned out, for Merilee. She met my little problem head on, so to speak. She was patient, sympathetic, and classy. That’s Merilee. But after eighteen months she began to take it personally.

I moved back into my office. I kept Lulu and the mustache. Merilee got the rest. A dancer friend of hers called me and made it plain she was interested. That’s when I found out it wasn’t just Merilee I couldn’t get it up for. The cocktail-party friends fell away fast. I managed to alienate the few genuine ones by dropping in on them unexpectedly, drinking all the liquor in their house, and passing out. The advance on the second book melted away. My check to the Racquet Club bounced. A few weeks after the divorce became final, Merilee married that hot new playwright from Georgia, Zack something. I read about it in Liz Smith’s column.

It’s amazing how quickly your life can turn to shit.

I’d fallen three months behind on my rent, and by the time my next royalty check filtered down, I’d be living in a shopping cart in Riverside Park. I was on my ass when I got the call from my agent about helping Sonny Day, The One, write his memoirs.

Who cares about Sonny Day anymore? I said.

His publisher thinks plenty of people will, dear boy, she replied. They’re paying him one point three million.

Well, well.

The ghost gets a hundred fifty, plus a third of the royalties.

Well, well, well.

All I knew about Sonny Day was what I had seen on the screen. Or read in the newspaper—which, of course, doesn’t have to be the truth. When I was a kid, I thought he was the funniest man in America. I grew up on the dozen or so movies he and his partner, Gabe Knight, made together. Knight and Day. The critics never thought too much of them. After all, they did little more than make the same slaphappy, rags-to-riches picture over and over again, always with that same bouncy version of the Cole Porter song Night and Day as their theme song. But who cared? I didn’t. They were funny. Everybody loved Sonny then, especially kids. He was a big kid himself, a brash, pudgy Brooklyn street urchin loaded with schemes and energy and no couth. Always, he was out of his element in the polite world, the adult world. It was Gabe who was Sonny’s entry into civilized society. Gabe was the football hero in Big Man on Campus, the ski instructor in Alpine Lodge. He sang the songs. He got the girls. Sonny got the laughs. Everything Sonny did was funny—the way he jabbed people in the chest with his index finger when he got excited, or whinnied when he got exasperated, or got the hiccups when he was nervous. Who can forget Sonny the klutz taking the wrong turn and going down the advanced slope in Alpine Lodge? Or Sonny the Romeo trying to act suave on his blind date with Joi Lansing in Jerks?

In the fifties, nobody was more popular than Knight & Day. Their movies made millions. They had their own hit TV variety show on CBS. They headlined in the top nightclubs and in Las Vegas, where they were charter members of the Rat Pack. They were gold. Of the two, it was always Sonny who got the acclaim. Sonny was the biggest of them all. Milton Berle was Uncle Miltie, Jackie Gleason was The Great One. Sonny Day was The One. Gabe Knight was a good-looking straight man who got very lucky, or so everyone thought.

Here’s the best part, my agent said. He’s agreed to tell what The Fight was about.

Knight & Day broke up in 1958. Their fight—The Fight—was probably the most famous in show business history. It happened in Chasen’s in front of half the stars and moguls in Hollywood. Sonny and Gabe had to be pulled apart after actually throwing punches at one another and drawing blood. They split up the next day. They never appeared together again. Jerry Lewis tried to reunite them on his telethon twenty-five years later, but Sonny refused to show.

Ordinarily, there are no secrets when celebrities are involved. I know. I used to be one. But nobody knew the real reason Knight & Day broke up. Neither of them would tell. If anyone close knew, they kept quiet. It wasn’t the most important secret around, like who really shot JFK or what’s the mystery of Oil of Olay. But a lot of people did still wonder about it.

Especially when you considered what happened to the two of them. Gabe surprised everyone by proving that Sonny hadn’t carried him all of those years. He starred in a Broadway musical. He recorded a string of easy-listening platinum records. He produced and starred in his own long-running TV sitcom, The Gabe Knight Show, in which he played a harried small-town portrait photographer with a wife, two kids, and a pet elephant, Roland. Gabe blossomed into a Beverly Hills squire. He was prosperous, dignified, well-liked—a man, in short, who had a Palm Springs celebrity tennis tournament of his very own. The biggest charities and political fund-raisers sought him out as an after-dinner speaker. Most recently, the President had gone so far as to nominate him as America’s envoy to France. Ambassador Gabriel Knight. It seemed an entirely appropriate choice now that the French were getting their own Disney World—though I personally would have gone all the way and named Annette.

Certainly it was Gabe’s highly publicized stride into public service that had spurred some publisher’s interest in a book by Sonny Day. Sonny, after all, went the opposite direction of Gabe after The Fight.

He became, as Lenny Bruce coined it, the man who put the ick in shtick. Starting with The Boy in the Gray Flannel Suit, Sonny made a string of films on his own—wrote them, directed them, starred in them. He even sang. Horribly. His films were all disasters, not just because they were bad—and even his fans knew they were bad—but because he’d lost the sweet, naive charm that had made him so lovable. Sonny no longer wanted to be Sonny the klutz. He wanted to be Sonny the smoothie, too, down to the Hollywood tan, the nail gloss, the fancy clothes. He wanted to get the girl. His ego demanded it. The box office demise of his grand comic history of organized crime, Moider, Inc., which he wrote, directed, and played five roles in, finished him as a filmmaker. I never saw it. Like most of America, I had stopped going to Sonny Day movies by then.

Nobody wanted to work with him after that. He was arrogant and difficult. He hosted his own short-lived TV variety show, and an even shorter-lived syndicated talk show. He became a regular for a while on The Hollywood Squares, always smoking a big cigar and wearing an obnoxious leer. He popped up on Laugh-In, dressed like Spanky McFarland. He did a solo act in Las Vegas and grew into more and more of a monster. One night in Vegas he jumped off the stage and punched some guy who was heckling him. They settled out of court. Another time someone parked their car in his space at a TV studio and Sonny emptied a loaded revolver into it. He became an ugly kind of celebrity, the kind who thinks he can get away with anything. He clashed constantly with the press, which got even by reporting his stormy personal life in gleeful detail. In the mid-sixties he divorced his first wife, actress Connie Morgan, so he could marry Tracy St. Claire, a starlet barely out of her teens. She soon became an international film star. And promptly dumped Sonny. What little press Sonny got after that was mostly due to