With the open-heart surgery, did you feel like you were dead for a while?
Well, I was—I was gone for seventeen seconds. I went into V-tach [ventricular tachycardia], which is a lock-off to the heartbeat. It stops. And the nurse in the hospital hit me a shot in the chest that brought me around. I was in surgery six minutes later.
You were conscious?
I was in intensive care under observation because I had a chest pain early that morning. DeBakey and his team were flying from Houston to operate.
Where are you?
I’m at the Desert Springs Hospital. And Michael would be landing in an hour and we couldn’t wait, ’cause I went into V-tach, so they had to rush me in. Fortunately, the man who did the surgery on me was one of Dr. DeBakey’s primary students who learned from Michael. So I was very blessed. This was Christmas ’82.
What was the psychological stress? Was there a feeling of having lost yourself in some way?
You go through a series of devastating nightmares after the surgery. People don’t understand that in order for them to save your life they have to kill you. You must be dead before they can go in to get your heart to work. You’re put on a pump. So Michael said, “You’re gonna have some devastating moments in the next three or four months. You just cannot let them bother you. They’re going to annoy you and frighten you.” And the first thing I dreamed the night I came home from the hospital was that I was lying on a bed in a clinic with nothing on. The walls and the floors were all made of glass, and my grandmother’s coming over to me in the bed with a bread knife and sticks it into my chest and rips my chest open. I wake up soaking wet, trembling. That was one. And there is no way to recount the others that I had on and off for three and a half, four months. But the fourth month I was on stage in Atlantic City doing my act.
Looking back over your whole career, do you have very specific high points you remember?
In ’77, the nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize was about all you need in your life. If you’re looking for trophies, as we all do, if you get this trophy, you don’t need anything anymore. It dwarfs everything else. But that was about the best time for me. I was just coming out of all of the drugs and shit. I had a better sense of myself. And, you know, I can’t discount opening night at the Copa with Dean. It always pops up as one of the fucking incredible nights. It was an incredible time. The ten years with him—nobody would ever understand it that way. Because we had the fun in the dressing room waiting to go on to have the fun. And then, of course, the third section of fun was counting the money. Like two fucking chimps in a zoo.
I picked up a copy of that book about Dean [Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, 1992] by Nick Tosches. It’s not a bad book.
No, it’s not a bad book—but it wasn’t accurate. It made him look like a putz. That’s not Dean. See, Tosches couldn’t write as a postscript: “I wasn’t good enough to get the balls of the character—” I called him when I got the book, and I said, “Does a cunt have trouble sleeping at night? You fucking hack!” And the answer I got from him made me doubly pissed. He said, “Well, I didn’t say anything about you.” I said, “Is that the only reason you think people’d get upset? I’m upset because this is my partner, you fucking moron.” And I hung up on him.
In that book, there’s a time which I think was Dean’s seventy-second birthday …
At Bally’s [Las Vegas casino].
You brought a cake out. The book says Dean got choked up about it.
He did. And so did I. We were both choked up. See, if I ever wrote Dean and Jerry and what they were from an outer look—staying away from the internals—it would make a hell of a book about two men who were in love with one another.
Are you going to write it?
Yes, I’m three-quarters on the way. And it’s an incredible book, because when I think of anything we did I sit down and write. So I started the book twenty years after we were over. I had to start it with what happened on the stage that night [in Las Vegas] when Frank [Sinatra] brought him out on the telethon. That was 1976 and I’m into the book and then I’m into 1949 with Dean and me. So it jumps back, and then on up to 1970. So whatever I remember at the time, I put it in—that’s the order. And it feels wonderful because you’re bathed in this glitz and then you’re shattered at what happened there—but that happened way after. And this happened way before that. I find it’s not important to be chronological. I know that I would diminish the book by trying to make it chronological. It doesn’t make any sense. Because in ’76 we were already theatrical professionals; 1947, these two putzes were hoping to have a burger for dinner.
How did the cake happen on his seventy-second birthday?
I was picked up at the airport and my driver said, “You know it’s Dean’s birthday?”—driving me from the airport to my home. I said, “No, I didn’t know that. But I do know that he’s at Bally’s.” So I ran home and I said, “Sam, I gotta get a tux on.” And while I’m changing I’m telling her what I’m gonna do. She said, “That’s wonderful. Just go and do it.” This was three in the afternoon when I got home from whatever that trip was. So I called Claudia [Stabile], I said, “Get a fuckin’ cake made. They’re probably doing it at Bally’s, but tell ’em what we’re gonna do and we’ll do it together. Whatever. Just get it to be a nice cake. And I’ll wheel it out at the end of the show.”
He had no idea.
No, of course not.
Was that after his son had been killed?
Uh-uh.
Nobody really saw him much after that.
No. I was about the only one who talked to him after that. We talked twice a week. He needed to communicate but didn’t have anything to say. He just let me talk. Because he did respect that I knew about the human condition and communicating with people. The thing that he didn’t want to do. He could probably have been very good had he wanted to.
If somebody asked, “What advice would you give in terms of living?” what would you say?
What I would say, off the top of my head, is, “Reach for the child within. The child has never died within you, you’ve just abandoned him, that’s all. Dig him out. Give him some wings and some air and you’ll fly with him.”
Back to innocence.
It’s really back to wisdom. The real wisdom. See, the nine-year-old hasn’t learned yet to be deceptive. The nine-year-old doesn’t understand why he should circumvent his feelings or why he should cap the emotions that spring from a nine-year-old. He doesn’t understand why he sees grown-ups do that. I don’t do it. I let out a yell when I’m happy [a huge yell comes out!] and I don’t give a fuck who says, “Is that man crazy?” I do it on airplanes. Sometimes I get so happy I scream out like that. And Sam looks at me and says, “Are you happy again?” But I do it. I do it downtown, in any city we go to—like in City Hall, and when visiting museums, and things are beautiful, and if I get that surge of happy, I just let it out [another gigantic yell]! And I scare half a dozen people. The other day, I’m coming out of the mall in San Diego and it’s Friday so it’s jammed with people. And walking in the mall is this sweet little lady—you never saw anything so cute in your life. She looked like [actress] Kathleen Freeman, only three times as wide. And she looked at me so I knew she knew something—was I? And I went [sings loudly, song from Camelot]: “NO, NEVER IN SPRINGTIME …” And a thousand people see it’s me, and they start laughing. And she’s just paralyzed. “NO, NEVER SHALL I LEAVE YOU.” And I gave her a kiss and I went to my car…. I do that every once in a while because it’s good for me. I’m not doing it for them. That keeps the child within me alive…. I think it would be so sad if someone that was as blessed as I am—having grown up with most of this country—if I grew up old and crotchety, without humor, without fun. That would be a terrible, disastrous thing to see. I’ve seen certain comedians that’ve gone off that way and it’s been terrible. No, before they close the box let me do one [yells, mouth wide open]: “MAILEE!!” Now close it. I couldn’t stand them clo
sing it without one “MAILEE!”
Exactly that kind of scene played over the phone with me in Jerry’s seventy-fifth year. He’d had a bad bout of pulmonary pneumonia, for which it took Dr. DeBakey again to pull him through. He had just returned from Houston a couple of days before I called him at home in Las Vegas to hear how he was doing. When he got on the line, he sounded a little breathless but otherwise with the same usual energy and cheer. He said they wouldn’t let him talk for long—did I want to hear a joke? And he launched into a lengthy setup for the punch line, and as usual with Jerry, the way he built up to the big laugh was through an increasing number of little laughs along the way. These were largely based on his performance—readings and intonations—how much or little he stressed each word.
“Late at night, in New York, this fellow comes into a subway and stops dead in his tracks. Sitting across from him in this empty car is a youngish guy in tie-dyed shirt and pants—many colors in those pants and shirt—and his hair is several colors and the guy wears it in spikes. It goes straight up—it goes dooown, it goes up—it goes dooown. He’s got about ten rings in each ear, a ring through his nose, a ring in each lip, and a spike in his tongue. On his feet he’s got multicolored socks and sandals. So the fellow’s staring at him, and the guy on the seat says, ‘What’s a matter—didn’t you ever do anything just for fun?!’ And the fellow says, ‘No, I’m sorry, I was just thinking—I remember a long time ago I fucked a parrot once, and I was wondering if you were my son!’”
With his delivery, he got me completely, and I laughed loud and long. Jerry said, “Isn’t that a great one?” As I was catching my breath, he said, “OK, I gotta go now. They’ve got me on oxygen and they say I gotta get back on it.” I cried out, “They’ve got you on oxygen and you just told me that whole long story?! What’re you doing?” “I thought you’d get a kick out of it. I love you. ’Bye now.” That was Jerry.
While he was getting better (which took three grueling years, and a great deal of attention and love from his devoted wife, Sam, and his adoring daughter, Dani, as well as his sons), Lewis continued working nearly full time on his detailed and vivid memoir of his days with Martin. I’ve read a couple of hundred manuscript pages and it is riveting, funny and touching. Never before has someone right smack in the eye of a show-business cyclone written about the experience, much less with such candor and narrative skill. It’s like hearing Jerry tell you the whole thing from the inside. For someone who was growing up in the late forties and early fifties, these memories are like black jelly beans or cherry Life Savers—you can’t get enough. It’s also a unique opportunity to share again that magical friendship they had. Recently I saw nearly all twenty-eight of their Colgate Comedy Hours (soon to be released on DVD), and a lot of the stuff is still fall-down-on-the-floor hilarious. Usually, it’s Lewis who ad-libs a line or some piece of comic business that makes Martin laugh, which in turn often causes Jerry to fall apart, too; he always got a big kick out of breaking up Dean. These moments are not only infectiously funny, they sparkle with a delightfully unfettered sense of loving camaraderie and joy. When I mentioned this to Jerry, he said quietly, “Yeah, if you could bottle that, you could change the world.”
Born Joseph Levitch, March 16, 1926, Newark, NJ.
Selected starring features (with director):
1950: At War with the Army (Hal Walker)
1951: That’s My Boy (Walker)
1952: Jumping Jacks (Norman Taurog)
1953: The Stooge (Taurog); Scared Stiff (George Marshall); The Caddy (Taurog)
1954: Living It Up (Taurog)
1955: Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin)
1956: Hollywood or Bust (Tashlin)
1958: Rock-a-Bye Baby (Tashlin); The Geisha Boy (Tashlin)
1960: The Bellboy (Jerry Lewis)
1961: The Ladies’ Man (Lewis)
1962: It’s Only Money (Tashlin)
1963: The Nutty Professor (Lewis); Who’s Minding the Store (Tashlin)
1964: The Disorderly Orderly (Tashlin)
1965: The Family Jewels (Lewis)
1966: Three on a Couch (Lewis)
1967: The Big Mouth (Lewis)
1969: Hook, Line & Sinker (Marshall)
1970: Which Way to the Front? (Lewis)
1981: Hardly Working (Lewis)
1983: The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese); Cracking Up (Lewis)
1995: Funny Bones (Peter Chelsom)
* This became known as the Video Assist, now standard equipment on the shooting of nearly every picture made; see pages 148 and 192 and the photograph on page 187.
* See Tashlin chapter in Who the Devil Made It.
* Tashlin had been a cartoonist and a cartoon director.
9
DEAN MARTIN
When Dean Martin died, on Christmas Day 1995, at the age of seventy-eight, it seemed strangely inconceivable. Dean was such an integral part of our youth, our coming of age, our idea of cool and funny, how could he die, he who always seemed so impervious to care or age? But there was also the question of our own mortality. If Dean, who not? Since I first saw all the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies and live TV shows in my pre-teen to late teen years when I was an unequivocal fan of theirs, I do admit to nostalgic sentimental attachments. Yet that is what pop culture has always been, and always will be: what gets to you as you age is eternally about who and what you grew up with. You ache not just for the performers’ past, but for your own.
Only once did I sit alone with Martin—for about a half-hour in his dressing room on the M-G-M lot in January 1961—when he was forty-three and shooting Ada, among his most forgettable pictures. I had seen him in person one time before, during the second half of 1953 at New York’s old Paramount Theater on Broadway at Times Square. He and Jerry did about a half-hour version of their act between showings of a terrible Glenn Ford picture (Plunder of the Sun). It was so unspeakably boring that, although I had intended to sit through it twice in order to see their show twice, I just couldn’t face even another five minutes of the thing. (In those days, unlike today, one ticket automatically bought you as many consecutive shows as you cared to watch.) Certainly, that movie was carefully selected to be a chaser, the trade term for an act or film that will automatically empty a house—chase the audience out—in this case, allowing room for a fresh set of ticket-buyers.
With Martin and Lewis, Paramount was learning from their mistakes. The first time (late 1950) that the team had appeared live at the Paramount, with Dick Stabile and His Orchestra, they couldn’t get the audience out. Kids would just sit through the movie over and over; it, too, featured Dean and Jerry. Finally, in desperation, Martin and Lewis announced from the stage that they would do a free show off the fire escape outside their dressing room window on West 44th Street. That did it.
Dean Martin in the opening sequence of his twelfth starring vehicle with Jerry Lewis, Artists and Models (1955), not only among their best, but one of Martin’s most likeable performances, bringing out what director Frank Tashlin called his “Cary Grantish qualities”.
However, while the houses emptied, the Times Square area became gridlocked with thousands of fans on the street outside, extending onto Broadway, snarling traffic up to 59th Sreet. Dean and Jerry did their impromptu bits, tore off clothes and ripped newspapers, dropped them into the crowd, scattered thousands of fan photos! It was a sensation and became part of the show-business lore around Martin and Lewis—how they literally stopped traffic on Times Square.
When they came back to the Paramount and I saw them less than three years later, the bloom was off the rose, and there was not the wild crowd or the need for a fire-escape show, though a dedicated little group of fans did wait hopefully outside the fabled 44th Street window, but to no avail. Infrequently some photos would come flying out. Between the first Paramount appearance and this one, six more Martin and Lewis musical comedies had been released to huge box office, each among its year’s top grossers. By the time of the Paramount engagement I attended
, they had had two top grossing films in both 1951 and 1952; they had three in 1953. My own personal exposure to Martin and Lewis throughout 1953 was like so many others’ in the United States and abroad: I went to first runs of The Stooge and Scared Stiff, then saw the boys in person, plus watched them live once a month on TV’s Colgate Comedy Hour, and then the first run of The Caddy (twice) as well as seeing their cameo appearance in the Bob Hope–Bing Crosby hit Road to Bali (twice), and listening to Dean’s numerous recordings, among which “That’s Amore” (from The Caddy) went to number one.
What I saw them do onstage at the Paramount was much like what they are seen doing at the end of The Caddy, and for the last ten minutes of each of their Colgate Comedy Hours: the boys in tuxedos (even during Paramount’s morning and afternoon shows), their bow ties untied, fooling around in front of Dick Stabile’s orchestra, their caricatures displayed throughout the band. Dean sings—Jerry disrupts. They sing together. They throw things into the audience or Jerry runs into the auditorium. They do jokes putting each other down. Dean sings as if he’s sending up crooners and doesn’t mean a word, Jerry screeches hysterically for attention and his outrageousness becomes contagious. For a privileged minority, Dean was as funny in his own dry way as Jerry was so obviously. In fact, even Frank Sinatra had originally missed the self-deprecating wit behind Dean’s comedy. When Frank saw the act the first time at New York’s Copacabana, he reportedly said, “The wop’s not much, but the Jew’s funny.”
When I sat down with Dean, he had had ten years (1946–1956) of unparalleled success as half of the most successful comedy team in history, a rocky moment or two as a solo (1957), and then three major Hollywood pictures in a row that proved he could act as well as play straight or funny, and sing. With Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift in The Young Lions (1958), the demands on him were not too taxing—as an entertainer who becomes a soldier—he had already been in uniform for three early Martin and Lewis hits. Again, with Some Came Running (1958)—superb as he is—the role wasn’t far from his Vegas-gambler persona (he had been a dealer in his youth). Nevertheless, Vincente Minnelli’s widescreen production of the James Jones novel is one of Dean’s best and among the finest of fifties American films—Martin’s first with Frank Sinatra, and his second with Shirley MacLaine (he had starred with Lewis in one of her first movies, Artists and Models).
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