by Jerry Lewis
We thought we might get in and see the best singer around do his thing, but the crowds of fans were so great we couldn’t get near that theater, much less get tickets.
Then the proverbial lightbulb flashed on over my head.
Stella Ardis, a nice lady who worked in the administration office at the Belmont Plaza, was my very first all-out fan. She would come down to the Glass Hat to see my show at least three times a week; she told me she thought I could be a big star one day. I would smile and nod, thinking: Mouthing to records? I don’t think so, honey.... Still, it was nice to hear.
When you’re on the lower rungs of show business, you’re constantly around people who aspire upward—hangers-on, wannabes, and (sad but true) mostly never-will-bes. But everybody seems to have an angle, a connection. So when Stella, the nice lady in the administration office, said, “You know, Jerry, I’m kind of in show business myself,” I responded politely.
“Oh, really, Stella?” I said. “How so?”
“Well,” Stella said proudly, “my cousin, Mark Leon, is the head usher at the Paramount Theater.”
Needless to say, this conversation came back to me in full force when Dean and I found we couldn’t get near the Sinatra show.
Did I want to see Sinatra? You bet. Did I want to impress the hell out of Dean? You bet. I made a beeline for the administration office at the Belmont Plaza and told Stella I had a little favor—oh, hell, a big favor—to ask her.
She smiled. “For my brilliant Jerry? Anything.”
Two hours later, Dean and I were standing at the employees’ entrance of the Paramount with a watchman who told us to stay right where we were, since Mr. Leon had to come back from a meeting through the very door we were standing by. Long minutes afterward, the door opened and an important-looking fellow emerged. “Mr. Leon,” the watchman said, “these two young fellows were looking for you.”
I was worried for a second, but as soon as I mentioned Stella, the head usher beamed. “My cousin says you’re a very talented young man.”
Pay dirt! We were not only going to get in, we were going to get in for free. We were like little kids being given a treat. A very big treat.
Soon Mr. Leon was whisking us to a spot—standing room, of course—in an alcove on the first mezzanine. Naturally, there wasn’t a seat in the house, since most of the audience had been there all day anyway.
And so we waited. Through the coming attractions, some announcements about social events of the season to be held at the Paramount, and then, of course, the newsreel. MacArthur in Japan ... President Truman creates Atomic Energy Commission...
Then the houselights came up, and a roar from the audience told us, “Here he comes!”
The lights slowly dimmed, and we heard the strains of “I’ll Never Smile Again.” The big band headed by Axel Stordahl blew all the notes that made your heart stop.
The opening act was Phil Silvers, the comedian. Phil was in fine form, telling a series of jokes about Sinatra and his thin frame. The crowd loved him, but only for about eight minutes.
Then the lights came all the way down.
The band hit “Put Your Dreams Away,” and out he came! No announcement... no nothing. Just Frank in a dark-blue suit, cuff links, a flower handkerchief in his breast pocket.... He reeked of California— sunshine, bucks, style. And he started to sing the moment the crowd stopped screaming. They settled in and just listened for a while, but screamed at the end of every song.
Frank did forty-five or fifty minutes, and the theater exploded once again as he thanked the audience, shouting to make himself heard above the tremendous uproar. Then he went off, and the stage descended into the gigantic pit and out of sight, to the last strains of “I’ll Never Smile Again.”
Dean and I didn’t say a word all the way back across town, a pretty long walk from Times Square back to the Belmont Plaza. (Cabs weren’t that expensive, but they were definitely over our budget.) When we got to the hotel, Dean said, “You wanna get coffee?” It was the first time either of us had spoken in half an hour.
We went into the drugstore next door and sat in a booth. The waitress brought his coffee (and my usual, a vanilla milk shake), and I thought about what we had just seen. It was all so perfect: the band uniforms; the light cues; Sinatra’s newly shined loafers; the way his bow tie flopped loosely, with studied carelessness, under that bobbing Adam’s apple....
Dean shook his head. “Man, I couldn’t believe the way that guy phrases a lyric,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It makes you feel—”
“Jealous!” Dean said. “That’s what it makes you feel!”
“Yeah—I guess you’re right,” I sighed. “I kept seeing myself up there in front of four thousand screaming fans.”
“It’s great to live in a country where a kid from Hoboken, New Jersey, can have the world in the palm of his hand,” Dean said.
“Well, I guess we can dream,” I said.
Dean banged the table with his palm, making me jump. “Dreaming is for loafers who never do anything. I don’t have time for dreams,” he said. “I want action. I want a car and a home and all the things you get when you get there. If you don’t push through the crowd, you’ll be stuck here your whole life.”
I had never heard him talk this way. I didn’t know how to respond. “Well,” I finally said. “I bet my impression of Sinatra will be better tonight than it ever was before.”
But Dean was barely listening. His gaze had drifted to some far-off place. . . .
By our fourth week at the Copa, we’d introduced so many celebrities from the stage that it was getting ridiculous. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re thrilled and honored to have in our audience tonight... Mr. Yul Brynner! Miss Ethel Merman! Mr. Lee J. Cobb!”
But there was one celebrity we hoped for beyond all others: Frank Sinatra. It was right around then that Frank was beginning to get in some very public hot water about Ava Gardner, as well as his supposed Mob associations. As to the latter, I’ll maintain till the end of my days— which of course will be a long, long time from now—that in the 1940s and ’50s, before the Mob lost its hold on nightclubs and Vegas, it was literally impossible for an entertainer, any entertainer, not to deal with them. I also maintain that they were a class of men who could, under their own particular set of rules, be very honorable. Dean and I had our own strategies for handling the wiseguys. As for Frank, maybe he romanticized them a little. Maybe he hobnobbed a bit too much. But ultimately, he was always his own man.
The next five years wouldn’t be good to Frank. But just then no one was a bigger or brighter star, and one night there he was, ringside at our show at the Copacabana!
Everyone in the place knew that Sinatra was sitting dead center. I was starting to give my “Ladies and gentlemen” speech when he popped up and said, “They know I’m here!” That got a big laugh. He strolled to the mike, looking ultra-natty in a dark suit and tie, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, in case you’re just occasional visitors to the world of nightclubs, I want to tell you a little something about what you’ve seen up here tonight. Now, I’ve been around the block once or twice”—he smiled as he got his laugh—“but I have to tell you that in terms of sheer showmanship, I’ve never seen the likes of the performance these two guys have done for you.” This got a big round of applause, and after a minute, Frank smiled and said, “All right. All right, already.”
The clapping died down. “Anyway,” Frank said, “I just want to tell you that these guys are going straight off into the stratosphere. They will be the biggest stars in our business.”
As the Copa Girl photographer snapped a picture of the three of us, the applause began again. I was thrilled at Frank’s graceful speech—all the more since I had never met him at that point. Dean had talked to him once, briefly, after he’d filled in for Sinatra at the Riobamba. But the moment that Frank came up, I could see something strange happen, just for a second, to my normally unflappable partner: He got rattled. It was only for
a second, and only the man who was closer to Dean Martin than anyone else would be capable of seeing it, but it happened. The moment was so big that for a split second Dean simply couldn’t get his mind around it.
Fifteen years later, and long after our breakup, I snuck into the Sands with a few pals to watch the Rat Pack perform.
Frank, Dean, Sammy, Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford were headlining the midnight show. And I was at a table a discreet distance from the stage, along with Buddy Lester, Harold J. Stone, and my bandleader, Dick Stabile. I didn’t want Dean to know I was there... only because I knew how I’d have felt if the shoe had been on the other foot: nervous and uncertain. Why do that to one another?
Well, we had a ball. Frank, Dean, and the guys were absolutely fabulous. My pals and I snuck out, went back to our hotel (the Frontier), ordered room service, and sat around my suite discussing the show. Frank was looser than I had ever seen him. Peter was Peter (he would have been a Star Search loser). Joey was always terrific, and Sammy was in his own orbit standing next to Frank (his first hero; I didn’t mind that I was his second).
Three friends for half a century.
But the spine of the Rat Pack was my partner.
Dean gave what was happening a sense of mischief, and his glib, laid-back air undercut any idea that these great entertainers were being self-important. He never lost his suave manner, but he enjoyed himself like a kid on the town. He was the heart and soul of that act.
Frank looked to Dean for bits and extras that only a comic force like Dean could supply. Sammy played off Dean as well as I did—and that’s a compliment to both of us. One of the great things about the Rat Pack was that they all knew, instinctively, that Dean was the real power on that stage—a different kind of power from Sammy, who was always so strong on his own as well as with those guys.
I think that what Dean brought to that group was his half of Martin and Lewis—he just replaced Jerry with four other guys. And he made it work, big-time, for all of them. In the past, in his own act, Frank would rarely talk: He would just sing and, from time to time, announce the composer of the song. That was it.
Dean showed Frank how to play on stage. How to make a party. The secret to Martin and Lewis’s success was that we had fun together. People who hated their jobs, and even people who didn’t, loved seeing that.
Dean brought that same quality to the Rat Pack. He even brought along many of the bits and lines that he and I had done, and they worked again for the same reason they had worked for us: fun!
And here I sit in the early years of the twenty-first century, listening to the CD of the Rat Pack at the Sands—a recording probably made at that very date—and marveling at its timelessness. Marveling, too, at the way Frank felt about Martin and Lewis.
Frank was always very gung ho about the team, and he had tremendous respect for both of us as individuals. Where Dean was concerned, I’ll say this: Frank Sinatra idolized very few men—but Dean was certainly one of them. It was complicated. Frank was a softie under a brass exterior, a mama’s boy who never felt, despite his many conquests, that he was manly enough. Dean was a man’s man, a big jungle cat, totally easy in his skin—or at least very, very good at convincing the world that he was.
The reality was, this was his way of keeping the world at arm’s length.
The truth behind the spaghetti-and-meatballs Steubenville myth was (I learned as I got to know my partner better) that Dean came from a cold, calculating, insensitive Italian family. Doesn’t match up with the cliché, right? Well, there are all kinds of Italians—scientists, statesmen, artists . . . and killers.
His mother and his father told him the following: One: “You’re going out into the real world; there is no one there that will care for you.” Two: “Be sure that the money you have in your hand goes in your pocket.” Three: “You cry, you’re a fag. You show people any kind of warmth, and they will get closer to you. If you show them that you have your own persona and you’re happy with it, they will stay away.”
Dean got squat from his mother, father, brother, aunts, uncles. He was lonely, unhappy, and felt totally unloved. Throughout his previous career as a casino dealer, small-time boxer, and semisuccessful singer, he was always alone.
And so was I. Even though I had the love of my Grandma Sarah, who kept me weekends . . . my Aunt Rose, who kept me Mondays and Tuesdays . . . my Aunt Betty, who kept me Wednesdays and Thursdays, and my fat Aunt Jean, who kept me Fridays only, because she had Saturday-night poker parties with six Jewish ladies. I was known as the Pony Express kid, shipped from one place to another—always traveling, because my mom and dad were always on the road, to burlesque, vaudeville, concert dates, the Borscht Circuit; to Lakewood, New Jersey, in the winter months.
And so Dean and I understood each other. Deeply. He maintained that distance from everybody except me. Our closeness worked for us, bonding us in the way that audiences loved, and—over time—against us.
But where Frank was concerned, Dean could never totally let down his guard. And—in a not totally healthy way—Frank was drawn to that reserve. It made Dean more manly and fascinating in Frank’s eyes. When Frank saw the way Dean handled the Mob, he was amazed. Dean never gave them the time of day; he played dumb or drunk, or he was just off playing golf. He referred all business decisions to “the Jew,” anyway. Frank, on the other hand, was drawn to the wiseguys’ mystique because it made him feel tougher. But he was also a very smart man, smart enough to know that it was a crutch, one that Dean didn’t need.
With Frank and me, it was different. We shared a huge regard for each other’s talent, and a deep personal affection: Our personalities dovetailed. Very often he and I would be alone, on a plane trip to a benefit somewhere, or at Paramount, in my office or dressing room, while Dean was playing golf. Frank was always very open about his love affair with Martin and Lewis, and when we split as a team, he had to make a choice. It had to be one or the other. Dean and I were not talking, and Frank knew that Dean needed a friendship with substance.
For a while after July 24, 1956, people thought I would be just fine (even if I didn’t always know it myself). But they worried about Dean.
CHAPTER SIX
IN TERMS OF OWNERSHIP, BACKING, AND PATRONAGE, ORGANIZED crime played a central role in the nighttime world of cabaret entertainment in the 1940s and ’50s. Inevitably, Dean and I came to know, usually on quite friendly terms, every major figure in the Mob, from Bugsy Siegel in Vegas to the Fischetti brothers, Tony Accardo, and Sam Giancana of Chicago, to Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano in New York. And while it may not be politically correct to say so, I found the great majority of these guys to be men of their word, far less hypocritical about their business than most of the politicians of the day. (As a young comic still wet behind the ears, I racked up a huge gambling debt at Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo in Vegas—but paid it off, to the penny, over the next two years, forever earning the respect of the Organization. And the word came down: Anytime we can do something for you, just let us know.)
It was usually the lackeys who made trouble.
Take the time that Dean got into a slightly sticky situation with the wrong guy’s girlfriend. This was in Miami in 1950, and the guy was . . . Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Dean Martin in real life was much the way everyone perceived him: cool, relaxed, unfazed by most anything. The guy who could take a nap during a gang war. But beneath that unflappable exterior was a different man, a man I began to understand over our ten years together.
Dean had a number of chinks in his armor, as we all have. And one of them almost led to a disaster. He loved the ladies (as we all do and did and always will), but he didn’t care about the where or when. In fact, I constantly teased him that “Where or When” was the one lyric he had committed to memory.
We were playing a Miami nightclub that shall go nameless (I don’t know who might still be around and reading this!), when Dean spotted a lovely young lady sitting ringside with her grumpy-looking
boyfriend, and proceeded to do what he always did when he spotted a pretty woman in the audience: He performed entirely to her. Sang and flirted, as if he were all alone with her.
When the show was over, I went into the men’s room—and saw Dean standing face-to-face with the grumpy-looking boyfriend, who was pointing a .38 Special directly at Dean’s stomach, about one inch away from the pasta he had eaten before the show.
The gun scared me all the more because I knew exactly who this man was, and what Dean and I were dealing with. The man—call him Harold Francis—was a low-level hood, a peripheral associate of Meyer Lansky’s, but more to the point, he was one of the crazy gangsters, a guy very much like the one Joe Pesci played in Goodfellas, only taller. A hood with a hair-trigger temper, for whom knocking someone off, especially someone who had pissed him off, would mean less than nothing.
And so without thinking, I stepped between my partner and the man’s gun (the gun that was now pointed into my stomach) and proceeded to do the verbal tap dance of my life.
I knew he was a mobster, and I knew what a handshake meant. I said, “Harold, you have to understand something. People make mistakes—that’s why they have erasers on pencils. Now, I’m going to admit to you that my partner made a mistake. I know Dean did what you said he did, but I’m going to offer you my hand, to give you my word of honor that I know my partner, and I know that out of respect for you, out of the same respect I have for you, he would never have done this if he had known who this young lady was.”
I was lying through my teeth. But I had no alternative, because Harold Francis was very serious. And as I stood there with my hand extended, I saw something in his eyes change, and I exhaled for the first time since I’d walked into that men’s room.
