Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  • • •

  THE FORMAT OF ROTATING HOSTS —among them Donald O’Connor, Abbott and Costello, and Eddie Cantor, each with their own set of writers—meant that our Martin and Lewis hour ran every four weeks. But Dean and Jerry were also playing nightclubs and doing a radio show for Liggett & Myers on behalf of Chesterfield cigarettes (“Chesterfields smoke milder, it’s my cigarette,” said Dean), which we would be writing soon. When our second show was due, they had a commitment at the Chez Paree in Chicago, which, along with Ciro’s in L.A. and New York’s Copacabana, was one of the nation’s top three supper clubs.

  We were all staying at the Ambassador East Hotel, as fancy and classy a hotel as there was in the country, which the Martin and Lewis contingent treated like a frat house. Between the food fights in the hallways and the fire hose on the wall to rinse off with, Abby Greschler, Dean and Jerry’s manager, had to write a very large check for damages before we got out of there. But that isn’t what I first think of when I recall that time in Chicago.

  One night Ed and I walked down the hall to pick up Jerry to go to dinner. When we knocked on his door he called out, “Come on in!”

  We opened the door and entered. The room was pitch-black. As our eyes grew accustomed to the dark, we heard the scratch of a match, and suddenly we were greeted with this hilarious sight. The irrepressible man-boy, Jerry Lewis, alone on the sofa, with an erection. As the lit match in his hand came down toward his penis—of which, let me tell you, he was very proud—we could make out one of those tiny birthday candles sprouting from it. And as the fire met the wick, Jerry began to sing, “Happy birthday to you, / Happy birthday to you, / Happy birthday, dear closest friend I have in the world, / Happy birthday to you.” Go forget that!

  As a comic figure, I thought Jerry Lewis possessed a touch of genius. Months later, in California, alone in his playroom, Eddie and I would throw ideas at him and he’d laugh us breathless. “You’re a bartender. A bartender with a bad limp. With a limp and a lisp. And your ass itches. Did we mention you’re Irish? But grew up in Spain. Oh, no, your aunt’s calling, you hate the bitch. But you’re afraid of her . . .” And on and on. He would incorporate it all and absolutely kill us.

  There is no doubt in my mind that Jerry Lewis added time to my life. As did Dean Martin, who was gorgeous, crooned deliciously, and was funnier than any straight man had a right to be. You may question how something can kill you and add time to your life. Hey, we’re talking comedy here.

  Did I mention that Dean had funny knuckles? I thought he did. They amused me every time he held a drink or lifted a cigarette. When he made a funny aside in the middle of a song, they provided the accent. There were times when Dean was too funny for Jerry’s good. We rehearsed for several days before we went into the studio, in a space in the West Forties. Some days Dean would come to work in a particularly amusing mood. His attitude, his view of the world and himself, and you—everything was funny.

  Often enough, when Dean was in one of those moods and the center of attention, we’d find Jerry lying on the floor in the corner, complaining of a stomachache. On a few of those occasions, Jerry’s doctor, Marvin “Miv” Levy, flew in from L.A. to treat him. Levy was an internist, but he played psychologist and confidant long enough to confirm to me that the pain in Jerry’s belly was just what we thought it was—nothing.

  • • •

  WE FINISHED OUT that first season with a few more shows from New York. By then the transcontinental coaxial cable had been laid, making coast-to-coast live broadcasts possible from both New York and Los Angeles. Considering M&L’s moviemaking schedule and the stress of flying cross-country in the pre-jet era, NBC chief Pat Weaver decided to let us broadcast from the West Coast. The decision to bring all of NBC’s comedies to Hollywood soon followed.

  As the time grew close to leave New York, we all became very sentimental. New York and television production went together, and we would miss it. We would miss the Stage Deli and Lindy’s cheesecake and the pharmacy at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, adjacent to the Alwyn Court apartment building where the brilliant comedian Fred Allen lived for many years. The Alwyn Pharmacy was particularly important to many of us who wrote for live television in those chaotic early years. Ed Simmons and I, for example, lived on Seconal and Dexedrine, the first for sleeping, the second for staying awake, and they were over-the-counter items, at least for those of us known to the people behind the Alwyn counter.

  Bud Yorkin, later to become my partner, was one of the show’s four stage managers, the others being Jack Smight, John Rich, and Arthur Penn, all of whom went on to become important directors, Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) foremost among them. We all threw a farewell party at Bud’s apartment the night before we were to leave for California. In the course of that halcyon evening a bunch of us stood around the piano and made up a parody to commemorate the event that had us all heeding Horace Greeley’s advice to—on NBC’s orders—“Go west, young man.”

  “When the transcontinental coaxial cable is laid, is laid,” we wrote and sang our hearts out to an old tune, “we’ll be on the run to the land of sun and swimming pools / the dramatic shows will be static shows if they stay, those fools . . .” I can see Pat Weaver, the man who invented the Today and Tonight shows, the most creative network president in television history, singing along with us and then, as the party ended, bidding us good-bye. We could have been his sons.

  2

  UPON OUR RETURN, Charlotte and I rented the bottom floor of a Hollywood duplex on North Orange Drive near Beverly Boulevard, a far cry from the ten-floor apartment building we’d been living in on West End Avenue in New York. It was owned, the leasing agent informed us, by Buster Crabbe, an Olympic gold medalist in 1932 and the only man to play three comic book heroes in films: Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers. It was there that I began to feel like a family man for the first time. The cottage on Kenmore had never felt like a home, and the effort to get a toehold in something concrete enough to provide a future left very little headspace for unencumbered creativity. But now our first-floor duplex made me feel cushy and safe, even a bit upscale, and as Martin and Lewis’s popularity grew, so, in our corner of the universe, did the awareness of Simmons and Lear.

  On top of all that, Ellen was six now, and her lifelong love of horses had begun. Anyone who knows L.A. but wasn’t here in the 1950s will find it hard to believe that at the corner of Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega there was a small amusement park with a pony ring. I took Ellen to her horses every Sunday and can still see my little girl coming around the far turn at a gallop, her little legs splayed wide like the smile on her face. And how I loved that face!

  Charlotte’s parents followed us out to Los Angeles and took an apartment around the corner from our duplex. Ellen didn’t have to cross any streets to get there, so on Sunday—Charlotte’s and my day to sleep late—she would walk to her grandparents, have breakfast with them, and be back in time to go to Ponyland.

  Early one Sunday morning, when she was usually with her grandparents, I was awakened by her loud voice outside our bedroom window. I pulled up the shade to see her standing there talking to the most underfed, sorriest, and scariest excuse for a German shepherd I could imagine. I cracked the window open to tell Ellen to get the hell away from that creature when she looked up at me and took me completely off guard.

  “Oh, hi, Daddy,” she said. “This is Ginger, a dog I know.”

  My friend Maurice Zolotow—the biographer of, among others, Marilyn Monroe and Billy Wilder—often talked about what a great title that would make for a children’s book: This Is Ginger, a Dog I Know.

  • • •

  AROUND THIS TIME, my mother began pleading with me to come to Hartford the next time I was in New York. “All right, so you don’t have a weekend, but you have a Friday night. Who doesn’t have a Friday night?” Mother reasoned.

  So one Fr
iday night I showed up to a packed house at 68 Woodstock. Every chair in the house was jammed into the living room, occupied by family, friends, and neighbors. The prodigal son was the center of attention, the only one in the room who had been to California, let alone Hollywood, and had flown cross-country in both directions. After a dozen or more questions, including “So they really serve hot food on those planes?” and “How many toilets do they have?” there was a long pause. Into the silence my mother’s best friend, Jeanette Aaron, asked, “So what’s with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn?”

  They were monumental stars, of course, but that was all the information I had.

  “I don’t know anything about them, Jeanette,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said caustically.

  “Norman,” my mother implored, “who is she going to tell? Answer Jeanette.”

  “Mother, I’m only there a few months, I never met Spencer Tracy or Katharine Hepburn.”

  “Tell her,” my mother repeated.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” I said.

  “Big shot!” Jeanette Aaron fired back. I’d have thrown Mrs. Aaron a bone that night had I understood the moment better. Something like: “I was right there, Jeanette. Spence let Kate drive off in his Rolls-Royce. Don’t tell anybody, but I think he’s shtupping her.”

  • • •

  BECAUSE WE FOUND ourselves working all hours, Eddie and I took an apartment on North Flores Drive to write in. Several other writers rented apartments there to use as offices, and it was a rare moment of any day when there wasn’t a gin rummy or poker game going on somewhere in the building. And still, scripts for The Ed Wynn Show, Four Star Playhouse, Our Miss Brooks, and The Colgate Comedy Hour poured out of there.

  In addition to their TV hour, Ed and I were asked to write the weekly Martin and Lewis radio show. Writing for radio was a special treat for the imagination. Where else could you do a takeoff on A Streetcar Named Desire, having Dean Martin play the conductor, Dinah Shore a passenger, and Jerry Lewis the streetcar? The show was broadcast from the NBC studios on the corner of Hollywood and Vine streets, and there wasn’t a hotter ticket in town. We wrote for such guests as Bing Crosby, Jane Russell, Boris Karloff, Jane Wyman, William Holden, Anne Sheridan, Arlene Dahl, George Raft, and a host of others. Riding high on the Martin and Lewis carousel was great fun, but the occasional life lesson was the brass ring. Thankfully I caught one now and then, and one of them influenced my career profoundly.

  In January 1952 a guest on the radio show was the great Welsh actor Hugh Griffith, who is best known for his roles in Ben-Hur and Tom Jones. In the fifties Griffith was a bit of a tippler, and he was already high when we started the table read just after lunch. The half-hour show consisted of two comedy segments interspersed with two songs from Dean and some chitchat with the guest. Evidently Dean’s interludes gave Mr. Griffith all the time he needed to continue tippling, because within twenty minutes of the doors opening to let the audience in, it was clear that he was roaring drunk.

  Dick Mack, our veteran producer and director, who had a nervous tick that caused his head to shake slowly from side to side, was thinking about canceling the show. Dean—who had to face away from the booth when he sang because no matter how well he was sounding, his director’s tick seemed to be telling him, “No, uh-uh, no way”—just wanted to finish up and get the hell out of there.

  As Dick Mack decided there was no way he could work with a loaded Hugh Griffith, I recalled having seen the well-known character actor Hans Conried in the building performing in an earlier taping of another radio show, Fibber McGee and Molly. I felt sure that Hans, a man and an actor for all seasons, all accents, and all roles, could read the Hugh Griffith part over once and play it with ease. With Dick’s permission, I ran down the hall, found Conried, and asked him to come by our studio. An hour later we had taped our show as scheduled and were toasting Mr. Conried for saving the day.

  Alone with him for a moment, I said, “You’re a major talent with a big reputation. Why do you agree to substitute for another actor without a single question, not about billing, or even money?” His response became a marker along my career path. “I work to work, Norman, and the rest follows,” he said, adding, “When it isn’t about the money, it’s funny how much seems to come your way.”

  • • •

  EDDIE AND I WROTE for Dean and Jerry for three years, bracketed by a full-page ad they took out in Variety after we’d written three or four shows—“Writers have always been the unsung heroes of our business. This is to tell you publicly how grateful we are for all the wonderful sketches you’ve written for us, and to sing songs of praise for two great guys, as well as great talents”—and our abrupt exit from their world after a November 1953 article in TV Guide reported that we’d been given an “unprecedented” raise to $10,400 per show, making us, the article bragged, “the highest-priced writers in television.” One month later, inexplicably, Jerry picked up the phone and fired us. From that day to this, in dozens of interviews and a couple of books, he has never acknowledged that he had writers, let alone mentioned our names.

  If it seems to you that it was Jerry making all the decisions for Martin and Lewis, that’s because he was. Dean didn’t seem to know or care. Simmons and I loved Dean. And early in our relationship we were in love with Jerry. Out of his great need for that quality of love, Jerry could not have been more seductive. For the time he focused on you, he required all of you, and for a while we were happy to give all.

  We loved spending time with him. Shopping with him, for example. Long before we saw it as megalomaniacal we thought it irrational, but not without its beguiling boyish charm, to see him walk into Sy Devore’s on Vine Street and order two dozen made-to-order suits of a certain style in as many fabrics, and all the accoutrements—shirts, socks, ties, etc.—to go with them. There was a lot of that. But over time this behavior became less beguiling, especially as it began to intrude on our work together and, most particularly, on the quality of his comedy.

  There are seeds in every great comedian from which, depending on how he responds to his worshipful fans, he grows either to become a pure clown or to assume the papacy. When we laugh together we are one. The ability to elicit that feeling of oneness from a huge crowd, and at a whim, is an enormous power, a power that can humble one entertainer and make a pope of another. The pope/comic, not unlike the world’s understanding of the real pope, is all-knowing and all-controlling. Nothing tends to destroy comedy like certainty. Certainty is the realm of the straight man. I will leave it to the readers who have observed Jerry Lewis throughout his career—especially, for example, Jerry as himself, hosting the muscular dystrophy telethons over the years. That person we all watched Jerry Lewis grow into brought with him what remained of the clown, appearing over time more and more like an abused child, senselessly kicking and screaming along the way.

  Nowhere was Jerry’s route to the all-knowing more pronounced than in the ceremonious way he gave and received gifts. He was very generous, but his gifts came with a price: his full name or initials embroidered, imprinted, or otherwise permanently attached to just about every gift item. Ernie Glucksman, a comedy veteran from the Catskills (also known as the borscht belt) and producer of the Martin and Lewis TV show, was once gifted at Christmas with a floor-model television set. I visited Ernie sometime later and there it was. Large, elegant, costly, with a signed brass plate bolted to the top reading: “Thank you, Dean and Jerry.” I still have my “Thank you, Dean and Jerry” cuff links.

  Behind the Lewises’ house on Amalfi Drive in the Pacific Palisades, there was the Garron Playhouse, named after Jerry and wife Patti’s sons, Gary and Ron. Regulars on weekends included Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Danny Arnold, and Ed and me. We must have made a dozen wild and crazy short films and celebrated everyone’s birthday there, one of which, Jerry’s twenty-seventh, in March 1953, is particularly
memorable.

  In addition to his close friends, Jerry had developed an entourage who sought to outdo one another, presenting him with costly tokens of their affection—from an expensive hunting rifle (because he once joked about being the only Jew who hunted) to a three-thousand-dollar tennis racquet that once belonged to Wimbledon champ Jack Kramer. Not wishing to compete in this game, we racked our brains to come up with something funny, preferably relevant and funny.

  On Jerry’s birthday the landlord of the apartment building where we had our office sent us a carpenter to fix a window that was stuck. He was a rugged little man in his sixties or seventies, a Popeye look-alike if ever there was one. Suddenly I had an idea, then a quick talk with Eddie, and together we asked him if he’d like to work that night. He said yes, but it would cost us fifty dollars, which in the fifties was a handsome fee for an evening’s work.

  We took him down to a gift-wrapping establishment on Melrose near Fairfax and had him measured for a box he could fit into so that we could give Jerry Lewis the gift of a lifetime, his very own human being. The gift card accompanying it read: “You have a lease on a few of these already, Jerry, but here now is 100% of one—your very own, full-time human being, lock, stock and barrel. Happy birthday.”

  When they finished it, the box, with a tube through which our squatting little man could breathe, looked like it contained a tabletop television set. It was gift-wrapped so that the ribbon would fall into place when the top was put on, and the gift itself didn’t have to get in the box until the last minute.

  We drove out to Jerry’s house and left Popeye in the car. When Jerry was getting to the end of the present-opening ceremony, we ran out, put our little guy in the box, placed the cover on so that the ribbon fell neatly in line, and said, “Remember, you want to look serious. We’ll make it a hundred dollars if you don’t smile.” He said okay and we carried the box inside.