Director-writer Frank Tashlin in a characteristic look of dubious amusement as Jerry Lewis does some pre-shooting shtick on the set of The Disorderly Orderly (1964), one of their funniest collaborations.
Lewis, Tashlin and I sat in the comedian’s portable dressing room on the set of It’s Only Money:
PB: What do you think of television, Jerry?
JL: Television is an infantile medium trying to do in eight years what we’ve done in fifty.
FT: Let’s get the years right, Jerry, it’s not eight years. It came in in ’48 …
JL: … In fourteen years what we’ve done since 1920.
FT: Since 1910.
JL: You would remember. It was when you and McKinley were there. Go ahead, Mr. Bog-Bogavin …
PB: What do you think of psychoanalysis?
JL: For myself, I think it’s dangerous: someone who has inner sad feelings about certain things which—instead of them burying him—can be put to better use. If I were to find out that these sad things are truly not sad, I think people would no longer find me funny, ’cause funny had better be sad somewhere.
PB: What do you think of Hollywood?
JL: It has to be what it is. It’s everything it’s supposed to be. ’Cause if you had five thousand Abe Lincolns living in Hollywood, you’d have no lovely Hollywood—then you’d have Greensboro, North Carolina. But you gotta have a lotta phonies, and a lotta liars, and a lotta brown-nosers, and a lotta yes-men, and a lotta the crap we hate, or you haven’t got Hollywood. And it’s the very crap that makes everyone wanta come here. ’Cause nobody wants to go to Greenland, where God built a beautiful substance—they wanta go to where all the crap is.
PB: What is art to you?
JL: Art? A man with a brush, a man with a theme, a man with a song, a woman with a cry. I think a puppet, a puppy, anything tender. A woman is art … a man’s desire for her is even more arty … and when they do it together is the most art!
FT: How do you feel about being a director as well as an actor?
JL: I love it. It’s me, ain’t it?
FT: Which end of the camera do you like most?
JL: Dependin’ upon what end I’m at. When in front of it, there’s nothin’ better. When I’m on the other end, the actor’s a schmuck.
PB: Who’ve you been most influenced by in your direction?
JL: Mr. Tishman, spelled T-A-S-H-L-I-N. He’s my teacher.
PB: What kind of pictures do you like, other than your own?
JL: I like good entertainment, nothin’ sordid. I keep all the sordid things in the confines of a room with a broad; nobody sees that. I don’t wanta go sit with two hundred people and watch someone do what I think I’d like to do sometime alone. Because it not only embarrasses me, but then I won’t do it alone for fear that she saw that same movie…. And I ain’t gonna sit in a theater for heartache. I can go into my own room and close the door and look at myself and cry.
PB: What do you think of money?
JL: Money’s a pain in the ass. And I can prove it if you stay with me a few days. You’ll see how I love it.
FT: You love what it gives you.
JL: No, not really. Money completely disallows me to contribute and give what I have inside, ’cause the moment money’s involved I’m being paid to deliver it.
PB: Why, for instance, do you have ten to fourteen cars? JL: I don’t know, it’s just a lotta cars. I like to have a lot of anything, ’cause it’s proof that you’re doin’ swell. I used to have two cars. Then I heard a lotta guys have two, then I hadda have four. Then, when I found out there were fellas that had four, I hadda have what they don’t have. So now that I got it, they’re enjoying their four and I’m stuck with ten.
FT: If you like having a lot of everything, how do you feel about having one wife?
JL: Because I have all of the wives in the world in the one. I picked the best. I have very good taste. I went into a store—you know where it says “Jewelry” in a store, this one said “Wives.” I went to every counter, and then there was one that had guards around it, and you couldn’t look into the case ’cause it was covered. And I asked the man, “Would you let me see?” and he unrolled this velvet and there she was, smiling. And there was a big price tag that said “Two Billion Dollars.” And she took the tag off and she looked at me and she said, “You can have me for free if you’ll love me.” All the other wives lyin’ around, they were all bulldogs.
“You know, Jerry got a Gold Record for ‘Rock-a-Bye Your Baby,’” said Keller after Lewis had gone. “It sold over a million copies. But the first time he ever sang that song publicly was the turning point in Jerry’s career.” Keller sipped his coffee. “Three weeks after his separation from Dean was final, Patti, Jerry, my wife, and I went to Las Vegas for no other reason than to get away from Los Angeles because, as I told you, the split was a traumatic thing for Jerry. He was floundering. He’d spent ten years with a partner. He was thinking what the hell would he do. Well, it was delightful in Vegas; we went to shows, kibitzed, lay in the sun, had a ball. The last day we’re all packed, ready to take the eight o’clock plane back, when Sid Luft, Judy Garland’s husband, calls Jerry in the afternoon and says, ‘Judy’s got laryngitis; you gotta bail us out tonight.’ Jerry says he’ll call him back. He turns to me and says, ‘What d’ya think?’ I said, ‘What d’ya mean, what do I think? You haven’t got an act. You haven’t done a single for over ten years.’ Still, we talk about it and Jerry decides, against my better judgment, to help Garland out. He calls Luft and tells him he’ll do it on one condition. ‘I realize she can’t sing,’ he says, ‘but people paid to see Garland. If she’ll come out and sit on the stage—she doesn’t have to say a word—I’ll go on for her.’ They agreed, and that night Jerry played the whole show to her.” Keller lit a cigarette and went on. “I was pacing the aisles like a father in a maternity ward. Suddenly I stop. I realize we forgot one thing. You can have a great act, but you gotta have something to get off with. Jerry was extremely funny for a whole hour. He was a real pussycat up there. Came the moment of truth: How’s he gonna get off? Well, he leaned over to the bandleader and asked him Garland’s repertoire. He looked through it and the only song he knew the lyrics to was ‘Rock-a-Bye.’ So he sang it, and in her key yet. Well, he pulled out all the stops, he belted it out, got down on one knee, he was really flamboyant. It was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. Even gave me shivers, and you know what a cynical son-of-a-bitch I am. Well, when he was finished nine hundred people stood up and applauded like the Third World War had just been won.” Keller paused. “And I’ll tell you, that night when we were flying back home, you can’t imagine how we all felt. We knew he’d made it. We knew he’d be all right.”
Not too long after this article was printed in 1962, Lewis came to New York for two weeks to host The Tonight Show. Jerry invited me and my family to one of the broadcasts. I introduced my tongue-tied young sister Anna to him after the uproarious show that she and Polly Platt and I had watched. It was that way every night, and Lewis became the talk of the town again. For the first time since his early days with Dean Martin at the Copacabana, Jerry was suddenly chic in jaded New York. (It didn’t happen again until the mid-nineties when he appeared on Broadway, a smash replacement as the Devil in Damn Yankees.) Polly and I visited him and Patti in his suite at the Essex House. He was still in bed, invited us to the bedroom and made a couple of lewd jokes that were outrageous and funny, as usual.
Shortly after the Tonight Show gig, ABC signed Jerry to a huge deal for his own weekly two-hour comedy series, which, unfortunately, was a big flop. But the president and founder of ABC, Leonard Goldenson, threw a large dinner party in New York to celebrate the signing. Jerry invited us to sit at his table—along with Mr. and Mrs. Goldenson, and the president (and Mrs.) of Gillette, and the then president of Pepsi-Cola, Joan Crawford. At the end of the meal, Polly went to the restroom and Joan Crawford came over to the empty seat beside me, sat and looked intently at me, then picked up a
teaspoon, took some of the bubbles of coffee at the cup’s side into the spoon, saying, “Good luck!” and started feeding this to me. Jerry, who watched the whole thing, explained later that the bubbles meant good luck.
After we moved to Los Angeles in mid-1964, we became frequent guests at the Lewis mansion in Bel Air, and Jerry was, as always, wildly generous. At one point, just as the first Mustangs were selling like hot-cakes, Lewis bought three of them and insisted on lending us one. We were broke and had a terrible 1952 Ford convertible, originally yellow, badly spray-painted black, with a cracked block. He said to me one evening, “I don’t want that filthy car of yours coming through my gate and sitting in my front yard anymore, so will you please take one of the fucking Mustangs? You need a phone in it? You don’t need a phone—I’ll take that out—and you can have the red convertible.” I couldn’t believe what he was saying. “But you need your car,” I protested. “What’re you talking about,” Jerry yelled, “I got fourteen cars. I can afford one so I don’t have to see your goddamn broken-down piece of shit drive in here again.”
Generosity was very much Jerry’s thing. I was trying to see as many older films as possible by directors I was interested in, or featuring noteworthy performances, so I asked Jerry if he could arrange for me to see on the big screen some of the great stuff Paramount had in its vaults. Jerry did indeed set it up and I ran original studio prints—nearly all on nitrate stock—of almost every classic that Paramount had in its vaults; several a week, for quite a while. Finally, Jerry called me explaining that his production people were on his ass and we had to quit running films, because we had screened eighty-two movies on the account of Jerry Lewis Pictures. I apologized but he cut me off, apologized, said it wasn’t my fault, and he wished we could go on screening films forever. I thanked him profusely. Later, he asked if I wanted to direct a documentary about him. Of course, I did, but the studio wouldn’t approve it. At that point, before I’d ever directed a film, the offer from Jerry was in itself an enormous encouragement.
That was another of Lewis’ great virtues—he knew how and when to give encouragement. After I had directed and produced my first picture in 1968 (Targets), he asked Polly and me over—she had worked on the story and was production designer—and screened a 35mm print for his family in his living room, where he had state-of-the-art projection facilities. When the lights came up, Jerry spent two hours with us going over the work in detail and praising it to the skies. This kind of selfless generosity to a young artist remains unique in my experience.
Our lives and careers pulled us apart. While the seventies became my most illustrious decade, the same period became Jerry’s worst. Significantly, the last time I saw him for more than twenty years was when he visited me on the Warner Bros. set of What’s Up, Doc?, which I produced and was directing. Everyone was happy to see him, but he didn’t really look happy at all. By then, it had already been over a year since he’d had a picture released. After twenty years of starring in an average of two pictures a year like clockwork (and through the sixties also directing, producing or writing as well), he had for the entire seventies only one release—in 1970.
Another was unfinished—a famous debacle—The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown in a Nazi concentration camp, which got a lot of play when the 1997 Italian Oscar-winner, Life Is Beautiful, covered similar ground. Lewis had been savagely criticized—without anyone ever seeing one foot of the film—for the very idea itself. Drugs, ulcers and a heart condition, plus a couple of huge business reversals, plagued Jerry for two decades. Except for one surprise hit, Hardly Working (1981), and his dramatic triumph in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy in 1983, Lewis’ picture work really didn’t pick up again until the nineties, and that was mainly fueled by remakes of pictures he had written, produced, directed and starred in, like Eddie Murphy’s hugely successful version of The Nutty Professor and its sequel. But he never has missed the Annual Muscular Dystrophy Telethon—for more than fifty years now.
Seeing him on Broadway in Damn Yankees in 1995 was an emotional experience for me, and I knew it would be, but not to the degree that it was. By then, I hadn’t actually been with Jerry for more than two decades. Of course, we had both of us lost many of those years in sadness—and show business is like that anyway, in its normal divergence of lives—yet when we saw each other backstage, we both were excited but certainly not strangers. Within moments, the years melted away. His hair was a little less abundant on the very top and it was finally graying a bit, and he was slightly more slumped over, but it was still Jerry.
On stage, he had been mesmerizing and given a brilliantly calculated star turn that was still within the confines of the well-crafted musical comedy of which he was only one part. His character doesn’t even sing until the second act—but then, of course, he has two surefire show-stoppers. With Jerry Lewis, these weren’t just that, they became the show! Yet when he first appeared and for virtually the entire first act, Lewis stayed completely in the guise of the supernatural character he was playing—the Devil in red socks. He effortlessly got all the laughs written for the part, but did not for a moment play with Jerry Lewis mannerisms or shtick. Indeed, so clever was his calculation that by mid-point of act one, you’re privately wishing that maybe he would do a little of the old Idiot routine. And then—just at the perfect moment, near the end of the first act—he suddenly let out a big, familiar Jerry Lewis, “La-a-a-a-a-dy!?” and the whole place fell apart.
In the second act, he let himself go a little more and the audience adored each second. Virtually every night he would purposely set out to break up the other cast members at least once, and never failed. I saw two of them go to pieces and lose it over a slight look of Jerry’s, and naturally the crowd joined right in and stopped the show yet again. When he sang his two numbers, while everyone was cheering, I was moved to tears. It was Jerry Lewis on Broadway—twenty-five years after being dismissed in his own country—proving once more that his phenomenal early success was no coincidence. And to me it seemed like a vindication for our generation—all of us who had fallen in love with Martin and Lewis, and then Jerry and Dean separately. We were right: the kid was a thrilling entertainer and a comic genius.
Backstage, I told him all this. With slightly shaking hands, Jerry showed me some of the amazingly positive press he had accumulated on Damn Yankees. He was proudest of the reviews that pointed out how understated the performance actually was, what restraint he displayed. The hugely successful Broadway run was coming to an end, and he had just turned seventy-one, though looking ten years younger. I knew he was taking it on the road but I made a special trip to New York because I wanted to see Jerry in a Broadway musical, which he would tour in successfully for over a year, both in the United States and Canada, and finally in London, where he was an equal smash. After this we stayed in touch again. He told me he wouldn’t mind doing this show for ten years and he wasn’t kidding. And he probably could have, but after London, business troubles and producers’ disagreements sabotaged all the company’s plans and Jerry had to say good-bye prematurely to one of the greatest triumphs of his career. As he went along, he knew exactly how many performances they had done, and he thanked God that it eventually reached something over nine hundred.
We kept talking about getting together. He wanted me to meet his second wife, Sam, and his daughter, Dani. They had saved his life, he said. Finally an assignment—this time from a weekly German newspaper—did the trick in the spring of 2000, and filled in so many things that had happened since he was the clown prince of Hollywood. By the time I got to Las Vegas, Jerry was suffering from walking pneumonia. Nevertheless he did his final show (of four) at the Orleans Hotel, where he has a twenty-year exclusive Vegas deal. He did two hours without a break and all the old magic was still there, if a trifle feverish from the pneumonia. He was right now probably the last of a show-business tradition that encompassed Jolson and Sinatra and Garland, Laurel and Hardy, and Chaplin.
On April 25, Jerry an
d I talked for several hours in the office at his Las Vegas home, the inside of which looked very much like his old Bel Air mansion—lots of leather-bound scripts and pictures, awards, photos, plaques, and a lot of paintings of clowns. He drove us himself to a restaurant for dinner—popping jelly beans coming and going. Then, in Los Angeles, at CBS Television City, as he was preparing his annual Muscular Dystrophy Telethon (this was year fifty-one), we spoke again for an hour in his office there, on August 28. He was feeling pretty good and made me laugh as hard as ever. A shortened, though still extremely long, version of our talks appeared as an entire issue of the weekly magazine section of Süddeutsche Zeitung.
PB: Do you remember when you got your first laugh?
JL: Yeah. I was five years old.
You remember it?
Yes. I was in a tux—how do I not remember the first time I was in a tux? My mom and dad had my tux made—I worked in the borscht circuit with them—and I came out and I sang, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” which was the big hit at the time. I was five, it was 1931, and I stopped the show—naturally—a five-year-old in a tuxedo is not going to stop the show? And I took a bow and my foot slipped and hit one of the floodlights and it exploded and the smoke and the sound scared me so I started to cry. The audience laughed—they were hysterical. That was my first laugh. So I knew I had to get the rest of my laughs the rest of my life, breaking, sitting, falling, spinning.
Was your father supportive?
All he had to do was walk out on the stage. That was my college education. I just watched him. People used to ask my mother why I was so intense that I never laughed, never reacted. She said, Because he’s studying. Eight, nine years old I’d sit in the front like this [totally engrossed expression]. I watched his skin, I watched the gooseflesh when they would sing a great song, that’s how close I was. I mean, I had Brandeis, I had Northwestern, I had Colgate, Columbia, Purdue, it was all in front of me: an education of what to do in front of an audience.
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