The Man Who Died Laughing Read Free Page A

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 his daughter, Wanda, a model, an actress, and briefly, a singer, thanks to her hit bossa nova version of “Night and Day.” Wanda appeared nude in a Roger Vadim film and in Playboy. Sonny called her a “slut” in the Enquirer, denied it, sued, and lost. Then she went on the Tonight show and told America she’d taken LSD more than a hundred times. She married a rock star and got her ankle tattooed, then she moved in with a member of the Black Panthers. Wanda was a wild and crazy gal. Seriously crazy. There were a couple of botched suicide attempts. When my agent called, Wanda had been out of the public eye for several years. Sonny had been getting less and less attention himself, other than for the odd celebrity roast, until a few months before, when it was revealed he’d checked into the Betty Ford Clinic. Turned out he’d been addicted to liquor and pills for a long time. Now he was on the road back.
    “They say he’s really picked himself up off the floor,” my agent assured me. “He’s supposed to be a changed man.”
    “Think he’s looking to stick it to Gabe?”
    She chuckled devilishly. “I’d say it’s an excellent possibility.”
    “He’ll be candid about the fight?”
    “It’s in his contract. Face it, Day has no career right now. An honest book will get him right back on the circuit—Carson, Donahue. Look what it did for Sid Caesar. He even has his own shape-up tape now. What do you think, Hoagy? Shall I tell them you’re interested?”
    “What made you think of me?”
    “He wants someone serious and