Wednesday: Wearing sunglasses, Lewis stood in a corner conferring about script changes with Tashlin and Zachary Scott. On the first take, the action was off its mark and the camera missed some of it. A bald-headed makeup man applied some tan to Lewis’ nose. The second and third takes were spoiled because the boom mike threw shadows. “Everything’s gonna be fine technically,” said Lewis testily. “And the only thing that’ll be no good will be the actors. I’m getting stale.”
Thursday: “Jerry raised a stink about the boom mike,” Frank Tashlin told me. “So you’ll notice there’s no more boom mike.”
Friday: Paul Jones, producer of It’s Only Money, was talking to Keller. A short, kind-looking man with a bulging stomach and an always-worried expression, Jones wore an outsize suit and a large felt hat. The fanfare sounded, and Lewis arrived dressed in an eggshell-white suit. “Hiya, Jerry,” said Jones. Without a word, the comedian walked over to him, took off his hat, squashed it, and replaced it on his head sideways, then went on to untie the producer’s bow tie and pull his jacket back over his shoulders by the lapels. This done, he gave away four baseball tickets to members of the crew, and then picked up two medium-sized boxes that were tied together and tossed them across the set to Tashlin. They landed at his feet. “That’s your Care package for the week,” Lewis announced. “It’s filled with one dirty sock, some rusty razor blades and a couple of broken shoelaces, and a lotta dirt.” Tashlin grunted quietly; Lewis wheeled and left, three people in tow. “Yesterday he gave me a pair of sweat sox,” the director told me later. “I’d never worn them before, and he told me they were very comfortable to wear on the set. First thing this morning he pulls up my pants leg to see if I’ve got them on. I did, and I made the mistake of telling him they really were comfortable. You know what’s in those boxes? Ten or twelve dozen sweat sox he went out and bought. That’s the way he is.”
Monday: Lewis arrived wearing false buck teeth. “My mother,” he said, “was scared by a beaver during the pregnancy.” The comedian’s father, Danny Lewis, who looks a bit like his son, came on the set wearing a blue blazer, white shirt, dark tie. He went over to Jerry, who sat in an armchair drinking a chocolate malted, told him that he had a spot on Ed Sullivan’s television show next week, then asked advice on lighting and camera angles for the show while he stood in front of his son. Jerry slumped lower in the chair and answered the questions politely and quietly between sips of the malted.
“So how you been, Jerry?”
“All right.”
“Everything all right?”
“Yeah, everything’s swell.”
“That’s good.”
Lewis sipped his malted.
“Watch me on the show,” said his father.
“Yeah, Dad.”
“So everything’s OK, huh?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I’ll see you.”
“Yeah, Dad.”
Danny Lewis walked away from his son and left by the nearest exit. Jerry sat silently drinking his malted. After a few minutes, Tashlin came over, smiled gently, and asked him what he knew about painters. Lewis’ face brightened. “Everything,” he said.
“What about Van Gogh?” asked Tashlin. “Why’d he cut off his ear?”
“He didn’t wanta hear all the crap on that side of the room.” Two women and a little girl came on the set. “Hello, little missy,” said Lewis, and immediately began to play with the child. He offered her some of his malted. “Can I give you a hug, huh?” he asked her. She nodded shyly and he put his arms around her. “Oh, God,” he said. “So that’s what they feel like. Boys are harder.” The unit photographer came over and started snapping pictures of the comedian with the little girl. “Hey, come on, cut it out,” Lewis said to him seriously. “You take pictures and all this looks like a phony bit.”
Tuesday: The whole company moved out to the ocean for some location sequences on a pier at Paradise Cove. The sky didn’t clear until after lunch, and Lewis amused himself playing football. At one o’clock the fanfare sounded and he drove to the end of the pier in a little red golf cart. “Hiya, Tish,” he called to Tashlin. “Another big day! Yes, sir, this activity is drivin’ me crazy. When I got loot involved, no sun.” He walked over to the director, who was sitting in a canvas chair, patted him on the head and sat in his lap. “Kiss me on the lips. Try it once. You never tried it.” Tashlin snorted, and called, “Hey, Carl, bring out the fish. You know, the big one.” Four technicians brought out a huge crate filled with ice and a gigantic dead sea bass weighing 500 pounds; they pulled the fish out onto the pier. Lewis was to put his head into its mouth, and he walked over to look at it, leaned over, pulled the fish’s mouth open and looked inside. “John L. Lewis says the strike is over,” he yelled into it. “You men can come out.” He stood up and surveyed the fish critically. “There’s enough fish here to feed 300,000 Catholics,” he said and shook his head. “This poor schmuck had to get killed to be in a picture.” After two short takes, Lewis got into the golf cart and sped around the pier, chasing crew members who jumped madly out of his way. “This all started,” Tashlin remarked, “because someone asked him to move that car out of the way.” Finally, Lewis stopped the cart, jumped out, picked up a broom and hurled it at a technician, who ducked; Jerry ran after another, pulled off his cap and threw it over the railing into the water. Running flat-footedly over to Tashlin, he kissed him on the cheek. “Good night, Tish,” he said, walked bouncily back to the golf cart and got in. The crew was gathered around him, smiling. “Good night, Jerry,” they said in unison. “There’s too many good nights!” said Lewis, jumping out of the cart. “What’d you do, you bastards? What’d you do to the car?” He got back in tentatively and turned on the ignition. The wheels began to turn, but the car didn’t move—the men had put it up on blocks. After Jerry had driven away, zigzagging crazily down the pier, Tashlin meandered over to me. “How’d you like to have his energy?” he said. “This morning golf, then baseball, then football, then the car, and he’s not through yet.” All the way back to Hollywood in his Lincoln Continental, Lewis drove sixty to seventy miles an hour with one hand and spoke on the phone with the other. Passing through the Bel Air shopping district, he pulled over to the curb. “I’m stoppin’ at the florist’s,” he said, “to get Patti violets.”
On the door of the Jerry Lewis home on St. Cloud Road was a mezuzah on a gold plaque with an inscription: “Our House Is Open to Sunshine, Friends, Guests and God.” A maid opened the door and led me into the library. As Frank Tashlin had said, there were six or seven shelves of different-colored leather-bound volumes in the library, each with gold lettering, detailing the contents. The top shelf began with the scripts of Lewis’ films, starting with My Friend Irma (1949) and continuing to the present. There were books of photographs, whole picture-stories of performances Lewis had given, with Martin and alone, as well as volumes devoted to his wife and children, a complete record of his life and career since around 1946. Behind the couch on which I sat were glass cabinets overflowing with awards, plaques and gold and silver cups that spilled out onto shelves in the room. On the wall opposite me was a framed painting of Lewis dressed as Emmett Kelly, the clown. One whole wall was a sliding glass door that looked out upon the pool, and further back was a recreation area with pinball machines, tennis, Ping-Pong, sun chairs; trees were everywhere. Facing each other, at opposite ends of this area, were statues of St. Anthony and of Moses. On a little table in front of the glass wall lay a silver-covered copy of the Old Testament in Hebrew, a copy of the complete Bible, and a leather-bound autographed script of C. B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.
“Jerry and Jack will be down in a couple of minutes,” said Patti Lewis, coming into the room. A petite, effervescent woman, she wore a simple red dress, and her dark hair flecked with gray (“It started to gray when I was twenty”) was casually combed; she sat in an armchair near the couch. “People always say I’m the rock of this marriage,” she told me after a while. “Jerry s
ays that, too. But I don’t feel that way at all. Jerry has provided everything for me and my family and I receive from him just as much as I give. Believe me.” She smiled. “Jerry was playing at the Waldorf one time,” she said, recalling the days before Lewis made it. “All I had to wear was this one brown maternity dress—that was when I was pregnant with Gary. I washed that thing so many times it was all shiny by the time Gary was born; there was no nap to the fabric anymore. I used to go down and watch Jerry do his act and I’d look around and envy the other women’s clothes. The first present Jerry gave me was this secondhand fur coat—I think it was dyed squirrel. Well, I just thought it was the most elegant thing I’d ever seen and I wore it, you know, with great pride.” She smiled warmly. “One night we went to a nightclub and I was wearing the coat and I caught some woman looking at it and kind of making a face. Well, I don’t know, it just ruined the coat for me. Not because of her attitude or anything, but because it reflected on Jerry. It destroyed his gift.”
During dinner, Ronnie Lewis, twelve, came into the spacious dining room (also overlooking the pool), sat next to Jack and began talking with him about guns; Jack promised to take him duck shooting the next week. Jerry was on a phone that stood on a chair next to his place at the head of the table. Scotty Lewis, six, came down and shyly handed me a ballpoint pen (with a Lewis caricature on it) wrapped in paper; Jerry kissed him for that. The governess appeared carrying Anthony Lewis, three, who wore fire-red pajamas, followed by a slightly bewildered-looking Christopher Lewis, soon to be five, also in pajamas. Anthony was whimpering. He looked at Mrs. Lewis and said, heartbroken, “Mommy.” Jerry jumped up. “Oh, God. When he says ‘Mommy’ like that I’m destroyed.” He went over to the child and talked him out of his tears. Then the three younger children were taken to bed and, a little later, Ronnie finished his discussion with Jack, said goodnight and went quietly upstairs. During the roast beef, Gary Lewis, seventeen, came into the room and showed his father a comedy sketch he had just written. Jerry looked it over, laughed several times, and then asked us to listen to it; he and Gary read it. Jerry congratulated him and told him to retype it, double-spaced. Gary nodded and left. By this time everyone but Jerry had finished the main course, and the black maid came in to collect the plates. Jerry ran over to her and kissed her comically on the cheek. “She’s so beautiful,” he announced. “She does something to me.” The woman laughed, embarrassed. “We’ll kiss in the kitchen later,” he said conspiratorially, “like before.” Patti smiled and Jack said, “Deedle-deedle-deedle.”
After the apple pie, Jerry took me on a tour of the house, and later, in the L-shaped stereo room (“The Jerry Lewis ‘Loud’ Sound Studios. If It’s A Jerry Lewis Recording, We Dare You To Hear It”), Lewis spoke of his annoyance with visitors to the set who pretend not to be impressed when they are standing next to a movie star; he thought it hypocritical. “If John Wayne walked on my set, I’d shit!” he said. “I’d be impressed.” Discussing money, he told me he always carried a thousand dollars with him in hundred-dollar bills, that he loved shopping and going through stores. Concerning his extravagance: “I discovered a few years ago that I can’t buy what I really want, so I buy everything else.”
And then, suddenly, he was speaking of Dean Martin: “The only contract we ever had,” he said, “was a handshake. That was it. ’Cause I always say if I can’t trust your handshake I can’t trust you.” He talked of the “complete emotional breakdown” between the singer and himself. “After the breakup, I asked Patti why she’d never said anything against Dean, and she told me that Dean was like a second wife to me and that she had no right to speak against him. Isn’t that something?” And later: “I still love Dean, but I don’t like him anymore.”
Concerning his ego: “When I wake up in the morning,” he remarked, “I think of me first and then my wife and then my children. I’d like to meet the guy that can honestly admit he does differently.” He paused. “They say to me, I’m an egomaniac; what do I wanta do four things for? Why do I have to direct, produce and write, too? D’ya think it’s so easy? D’ya think it’s such a pleasure? For each cap I wear, it’s eight hours work. So I’m doing four things, that’s thirty-two hours a day—there ain’t that many. Why do I do it? ’Cause I’d rather work that way than work with incompetents. I’m gettin’ the best people I know for the job. I can’t get Frank all the time.”
And much later, around three in the morning, over a can of beer, Lewis talked of his birth, his youth, his parents, his grandmother whom he adored and who died when he was eleven; his eyes watered when he spoke of her and how she had called him “Sonny,” and how, when the hospital told him she had “expired,” he asked if that meant she was going to be all right. He spoke of his reluctance to hate anyone (“I always say, do you love ’em enough to hate ‘em”), of the various aunts he had lived with while his show business parents were on the road, of the way his grandfather had searched curiously for him behind the TV set the first time he was on, of his love for children, particularly his own (“they’re nice people”), and how he would always have a baby in the house. “When I’m ninety and in a wheelchair, we’ll still have babies in the house. I’ll adopt them.” And finally: “If you’re deprived of love when you’re young,” he said, “you can never have it given back to you. And that’s what I don’t want to happen to my kids.”
It was after four-thirty in the morning, in front of his house, that Lewis said goodnight to Keller and me. And at six he was in his office at Paramount, ready for another big day.
One Saturday afternoon around four, Lewis was to go to a rehearsal at UCLA for a benefit he was to give that evening to raise money to send needy children to summer camp. I was to meet him at his house and shortly after I arrived he walked into the library in a black mood: he had a migraine. “I’m such a sucker,” he grumbled about the benefit. “I can’t turn my back on anybody. And people know it.” Parked in front of the house was a brand-new maroon Lincoln Continental, with the dealer’s invoice still taped to a side window. Lewis surveyed it critically. He opened the door and looked in. “Well, what the hell did they do,” he said, annoyed. “Nothing. No initials, no phone.” He grunted and pulled off the invoice. “They couldn’t even take this off.” He walked around to the rear, opened the trunk and gazed into it for a few minutes. “There’s nothin’ more beautiful than a new car,” he said. As we drove to the university, I asked whether the car had been custom-built for him. “No,” he answered. “Harry Ford, Jr., is a good friend of mine and he always sends me what I like.”
The rehearsal in the 2,000-seat auditorium consisted of Terry Gibbs’ seventeen-piece orchestra playing a couple of numbers, and some halfhearted clowning. As Jerry was leaving, Gibbs told him the band had to be at a recording date that night by nine-thirty. Lewis nodded and said he would start exactly at eight and do forty-five minutes. “If they ain’t ready and if they don’t like it,” he said, “that’s tough.”
That evening, at seven-fifty-five, the auditorium was filled to capacity, mainly with college students who had paid $1.50 to get in. At eight sharp the curtains parted to the tune of a loud song that Gibbs’ band played with gusto; there was a Lewis caricature on the bass drum. An offstage voice came through the loudspeakers. “Ladies and gentlemen,” it announced, “Jerry Lewis.” The band struck up “When You’re Smiling,” a follow spot hit Stage Left, and into it stepped the performer, wearing a shiny black tuxedo with a red handkerchief, a red bow tie on an eyelet lace button-down dress shirt and black suede Romeos. The applause was loud. He did impersonations of folk singers, boxers who sing, made cracks at the audience (“How can you look so clean and laugh so dirty”), sang “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” in honor of Al Jolson, donned funny hats and threw out one-liners, played a tiny trumpet, conducted the orchestra, sang “Come Rain or Come Shine,” looking occasionally at Patti Lewis, who sat in the wings, did a tap dance, jumped in the air and fell on his side with a crash, threw ten or twelve twirling bl
ack canes in the air, missed them and, when he wanted to, caught them. Then the lights dimmed except for a pinspot on him sitting on a high stool, cigarette in one hand, microphone in the other, singing a melancholy song called “What Kind of Fool Am I.” As he finished, he laid the mike down on the stool, the spot moved to it, and he walked off the blacked-out stage. The applause was thunderous. All the lights came up. Lewis returned, bowed twice and waved good-bye. The applause continued as the curtains pulled slowly together. It was eight-fifty and he still had a migraine.
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