The Man Who Died Laughing Read Free

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