by Jerry Lewis
The drinks got served, and down they went. First Jackie, then Dean. Jackie said, “What a joy! Round One is completed.” He then remembered that no bet had been mentioned. Jackie said to Dean, “How much are we wagering on this little sojourn?” Dean, of course, had to play this out. “Make it easy on yourself,” he said.
Without a second thought, Jackie said, “How about a grand?”
Without taking a breath, Dean agreed. “You got it!” he said. I rolled my eyes, with visions of this all winding up in Hollywood Confidential (the National Enquirer’s ancestor). I thought Dean wouldn’t be sober till Labor Day!
Just as things were getting interesting, Leo Durocher walked in with the most gorgeous goddamn woman ever seen on earth! Legs up to her ears, breasts (if they were real) far out enough to ring her own doorbell! Every man in that joint had a community erection. Then Dean hit on her. Jackie Gleason hit on her. Leo loved to laugh (guess he liked comedy better than sex), because he forgot she was with him the minute he saw Gleason. So she became fair game, and most everyone there that night was trying to get her attention.
Guess who left Toots Shor’s with her?
About 4:15 A.M., Dean strolled into our suite and entered his room. I heard him moving about while I was still busily engaged in explaining to this lovely lady how my wife didn’t understand me. There was a knock on the door. I continued sipping Dom Pérignon along with my new friend, and I heard, “Hey, Jer, you in there?”
I didn’t answer. I told her to be very quiet.
“Come on, Jer, I know you’re in there!”
We let Dean knock and knock, and I finally yelled out, “What do you want?”
“I want sharesies!” he said. “Don’t we always share everything?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We share sandwiches, makeup, towels, tux ties, but we never share ladies. I would never let you near mine, and you would never let me near yours.”
“Did you ever hear of an amendment?” Dean laughed.
George Burns understood the depth of my partner’s comic genius. Danny Lewis understood it. Millions of people—including some otherwise quite intelligent people—had no clue. “In the bones” funny is a gift: You’re either born with it or you’re not. Gleason had it. Milton Berle had it. Sid Caesar and Stan Laurel had it. Charlie Chaplin had more of it than anyone else. Discussing Chaplin’s genius would be like measuring the ocean with a cup.
Dean had it, too, yet he never understood the depth of his own skill. He was insecure about it; at the same time, he was never one to betray his insecurities. So he was stuck in kind of a hard place—one that became progressively harder as the press wrote about the comic brilliance of “the funny one.” And that was how our reviews went: “The handsome one comes out and sings pretty nicely—although he’s no Bing Crosby. Then the kid comes out, and the act really catches fire.” Time after time after time, Dean had to read those words.
And you wonder why he never bought a newspaper?
It got worse when we began making our movies. After My Friend Irma, the august Bosley Crowther (you think he made that name up?) of the august New York Times opined as follows: “We could go along with the laughs which were fetched by a new mad comedian, Jerry Lewis... the swift eccentricity of his movements, the harrowing features of his face and the squeak of his vocal protestations . . . have flair. His idiocy constitutes the burlesque of an idiot, which is something else again. He’s the funniest thing in it. Indeed, he’s the only thing in it that we can expressly propose for seeing the picture.” Crowther, that sniffy bastard, called Dean my “collar ad partner.”
Meaning: Handsome but empty. A mannequin. A prop.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Examiner said Dean would “undoubtedly be more at home on the screen with added experience,” but “he shouldn’t oughta listen to any more Bing Crosby records.”
Cruel, cruel, cruel. And what was my partner’s reaction? He didn’t react, not at first. You have to understand: Even though Dean had saved me from a lifetime of lip-synching, even though he had in many ways made me into what I became, he didn’t have a speck of ego about it. He didn’t have enough ego, really. There was a big part of him that felt supremely lucky to have made it to where he had. The money, the broads, the life—why should he give a shit about what some pointy-headed schmucks wrote about him in the papers?
If the shoe had been on the other foot, if I had been the kind of target for the press that Dean was, I wouldn’t have lasted anywhere close to ten years. I’d have been out of there by the third year, at the latest—and I would have made it that far only because the loot was so good. If I had to go back and pull all the written material on Martin and Lewis, it would read like a bunch of writers had gotten together and decided, “Let’s kill the singing part of that team.”
Did they actually decide to do that? I doubt it, but if you read what I have in the files, you’d wonder, too. And I think the critics refused to change their minds because Dean never let them know he even read what they wrote. He carried himself like a champ, and they hated him for it.
On the morning of October 6, 1950, a golden fall Friday, Dean and I and Jeannie and Patti took a picturesque, hour-long drive: west from Pittsburgh (where we were playing a show at the Stanley Theater), across the state line and through a dog-poor sliver of West Virginia, then over a big iron bridge straddling the Ohio River and into Steubenville. The occasion was to be a weekend-long celebration of the town’s Local Boy Made Good: Steubenville had declared that Friday Dean Martin Day.
The parade began at noon. Fifty cars and several marching bands snaked slowly around narrow streets lined with thousands of locals, every other one of whom seemed to know Dean personally. Finally, we wound up at the Municipal Building, where the mayor presented Dean with the key to the city.
Dean thanked him and said, “I love getting the key to the city. When I lived here, my folks wouldn’t give me a key to the house!”
After giving a performance at the very high school my partner had dropped out of seventeen eventful years earlier, we were ushered around town, stopping in at all of Dean’s old haunts: the poolroom where he hung out, the steel mill where he worked, the after-hours club where he sang, the back rooms where he dealt poker and blackjack.
And we met his old friends. Oy, did we meet his old friends! Coming out of the woodwork were: Mindy, Ross, Jiggs, Smuggs, Ape-Head, Cheech, Vigo, Teeth, Harry the Spoon, Doggy, Spongie, Locust, Brains, Meat-Jaw, Meathead, Teeth Mancini, Breathless Andriano, Choker DiStefani, and Apples (she married Boneyard Carbieri). They could have cast The Godfather 1, 2, and 3 from this crowd.
The only Jew who lived in Steubenville didn’t show up, because he didn’t particularly care for our act.
Never before had either Dean or I had our cheeks pinched, our backs slapped as much as we did that weekend. I loved it. But Dean hated it.
He smiled, he ate, he made the small talk—but I could see that he was unhappy. He never said anything, but I know what he was feeling: He had left Steubenville. It was a gray, sooty steel town, where the best any of his old friends could hope for was a sixty-bucks-a-week job in the mill. He was the one who got away. He didn’t want to go back, not on Dean Martin Day or any other day.
And here’s the thing: My partner had made it out of Steubenville on a smile and a shoeshine and the sheer force of his personality.
And a lot of what we’d done was just about luck and moonshine and having a good time.
Dean: “Did you take a bath this morning?”
Jerry: “Why, is there one missing?”
Milton Berle: “I still don’t know what they do!”
We believed in our skill, our funniness, our chemistry—but at the same time, nobody understood how incredibly lucky we’d been. I think Dean was superstitious about our luck. Didn’t want to be reminded of it; didn’t want to think about how fragile it all was.
We were flying high, the two of us—high above the earth, with its steel mills and factories and offices, its ni
ne-to-five, grocery-buying, bill-paying concerns. Why should we ever come down?
CHAPTER EIGHT
BY THE END OF 1950, DEAN AND I HAD RELEASED THREE movies—My Friend Irma, My Friend Irma Goes West, and At War with the Army—and had another, That’s My Boy, just about in the can. That September we’d begun our new Sunday-night television show, The Colgate Comedy Hour, on NBC. Our national radio show (also on NBC) was chugging along merrily. Much of the reason we were so successful was that in a tense and conformist time, the country needed wildness, needed nonsense. Elvis and rock and roll would provide a different kind of outlet in the mid-fifties, but Martin and Lewis awoke the country to the sound of its own laughter.
In July 1951, we played the Paramount Theater on Broadway for the first time. On an unseasonably cool and rainy Thursday morning, our taxicab crept through the traffic toward Times Square, as Dean and I gawked out the window at an amazing sight: our faces on a sign as large as the building, reading, “Martin and Lewis on Stage, in Person and on the Screen.”
Then we were stopped by an incredible spectacle: a huge mob of fans filling Times Square, waiting to get into the Paramount. Most of them, we later learned, had been there since six A.M. I knew there’d be pandemonium when we got out of the cab, but there was nothing to be done— we had to get as close to the backstage door as possible, as quickly as possible. The driver edged through the crowds, up to the curb, and we started to scramble. We were recognized before we even left the cab.
“It’s them!”
Dean’s prized Aquascutum trench coat sticks in the cab door as the screaming fans grab the side of his coat; the driver isn’t sure he’s going to get his fare....
“Leave the coat, for Christ’s sake!” I yell to Dean. “We’re making enough to buy the company!”
The coat frees itself into the hands of a happy fan—leaving Dean free to dash into the theater. We rush backstage and into the elevator, which runs us up to the sixth-floor dressing rooms—which, at the Paramount Theater, are shoe boxes instead of a nail.
Dean and I have one room on the sixth floor, and our bandleader, Dick Stabile, has another . . . and that’s it. All the rest of the company are on seven, eight, and nine; the band is on ten, and their horns and music stands are in the basement.
We get dressed as quickly as possible, because the movie is just about done. The audience is primed and ready for us. We finish getting into our tuxes (at 9:45 A.M.!) and hit the stairs. Why the stairs? Because the goddamn elevator always gets stuck. And we have four thousand people out there, waiting. . . .
The band hits the Dick Stabile theme song, “Blue Nocturne,” as the hydraulic platform they’re sitting on starts its mighty rise from the bowels of the orchestra pit to its triumphant high finish. They wind up the theme just as the platform stops moving. Then Dick steps downstage and introduces our opening act: “And here they are, Barr and Estes!”
Their official billing was Barr & Estes, Eccentric Dancers, and their official reason for being there was that Leonard Barr was Dean’s uncle. That was it, pure and simple: Leonard was Dean’s mother’s brother (Barra was the original family name). Barr & Estes were our insurance. Both Dean and I felt that if anyone was going to get rotten tomatoes, it might as well be the opening act!
Dean’s Uncle Leonard was a very big-nosed, funny-looking guy, skinny and crazy-limbed. His partner, Marie Estes, was a contortionist. They danced around the stage, twisting their bodies to the sound of “Song of India”—and light titters and coughing.
Well, Barr & Estes finished their twelve minutes, and Dick, as always, introduced me: “The first half of this great comedy team, please welcome Jerry Lewis!” The band played me on with a jazz riff, to enthusiastic screaming.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I finally said when the noise died down. “I’m the first half you’ll see tonight of the team of Dean and Jerry, and I have to clarify one thing—I’m Jerry.”
This got the reaction I was looking for, allowing me to peer around the theater with a hurt face. “Because a lot of people mistake me for Dean,” I insisted—and then I gave them the Idiot laugh, which got a big laugh from them.
“But,” I said at last, “but my partner will come out here, and, God willing, he will sing.” And then I had to wait another couple of minutes until the cheers died down before I finally introduced my partner.
You wanna talk loud? You wanna talk electric? You wanna talk pandemonium? It was all of that when he walked onto the stage. Then, when we finally got them back in their seats, we did a routine together, finishing with a bit of business where I begged Dean to sing.
Dick hit the downbeat, I wandered into the wings, and Dean sang— as well as he could over the screaming. I looked on in wonder from stage left: My God. It’s Sinatra at the Paramount all over again.
Then I bounced back on stage and Dean and I did our forty-five-minute routine of singing, dancing, leading the band, playing our instruments—trumpet for me, trombone for Dean. Dean played the trombone about as well as I played the trumpet, but no one cared.
After we finished, our latest movie came on—That’s My Boy . When the first credit came up on the screen, the audience exploded again.
The band platform sat back at the bottom of the great orchestra pit, and the musicians hustled off to grab some breakfast. After all, it was almost 10:40 A.M.! Dean and I hurried back to our dressing room, where we would literally be prisoners until the next show, in precisely two hours.
Prisoners because six stories down, outside the Paramount’s stage door on Forty-fourth Street, was a crowd of at least 20,000 people, waiting to catch a glimpse of us. To clear the theater between shows, the Paramount management had told each audience that Dean and I would be giving out pictures backstage.
It was a little white lie, but it got them all out of the theater. (Had we not done it, they’d have stayed there for six shows.) Up in our dressing room, we’d throw up the sash, sit on the ledge, and bask in the excitement. We would yell jokes, sing (both of us!), play our horns, throw stuff down to the crowd: T-shirts, hats, handkerchiefs. And thousands upon thousands of black-and-white, five-by-seven publicity photos.
The crowds were backed down Forty-fourth Street and around the corner onto Broadway. The mayor himself, the honorable Vincent Impellitteri, came to personally welcome us to New York—and to personally plead with us to cut out the dressing-room shows. His cops couldn’t handle the traffic!
And the musicians couldn’t get out the door to get breakfast. We had to begin bringing in food for the crew, the band, the acts. Dean and I would have deli sent in from the Stage Delicatessen (naturally, we patronized the restaurant that named a sandwich after us: tongue and ham!).
We had contracted to do six shows a day. But at the conclusion of our sixth show on opening day, Bob Weitman, the shrewd, stingy managing director of the Paramount, came up to our dressing room with a bottle of champagne and some glasses and said, “Today, you guys smashed every record held at the Paramount! Now, here’s my problem— we have 4,000 seats in this house. With the Fire Department’s blessing, we can stand 800 in the orchestra and 600 in the balcony. So for all intents and purposes you played to just about 30,000 people today. But we turned away more than 50,000 people! Now, what do I do, pray tell? I have to get a seventh show tomorrow!”
Cross-eyed at the concept of trying to work a seventh show into an already very full day, we left Bob Weitman at the backstage door and shoved our way through to our car. Twenty police officers were on hand to help. When we finally got into the car, our chauffeur said, “Hey, guys, I can make five hundred bucks if you give me the used blades you shaved with this morning!”
And Dean and I, in unison, said, “Take us home, please!”
We were staying in our favorite hotel, the Hampshire House, in two adjoining penthouse suites. Around eighteen people in our entourage were staying on the floor just below us, and we rented a huge storage room in the hotel basement for stage props, music cases, and cartons and
cartons of those publicity photos.
The next day, after seven shows, it was back to the hotel to try and get some rest. But needing rest and getting it, in those days, were two very different things. We were on such a rush after performing that we had to come down before trying to sleep. So we played, and we played hard! Drinking, women, fun, parties—the whole “we’re rich and famous” bit. One night the managing director of the Hampshire House came up to inquire respectfully if we might consider using their basement ballroom for our after-theater parties so we wouldn’t be keeping the other guests awake half the night!
We said we’d be more careful. That night we cut the crowd visiting us in the penthouse down to forty.
At around four A.M. we would crash—only to remember that we had a 6:30 A.M. wake-up call so we could get to the Paramount by 8:00 and have a half hour in the dressing room before the first show. . . .
And that’s how it went for two solid weeks—to the tune of around $150,000. That was just our end. We let the Paramount Theater have the rest, and it was substantial.
Back in the fall of 1948, when we first went out to Hollywood, Capitol Records approached us. Their idea was to put our act on disk, meaning that Dean would sing straight, then I would chime in in a few of my 897 different voices. Our first Capitol recording was a novelty number, chacha-style, called “The Money Song,” and the chorus went:
Funny, funny, funny what money can do....
And the funny thing about that song was what money was doing to us, and for us, even as we sang it—and what it would continue to do, only much, much more so.
Three years later, September of ’51, we were doing five shows a day at the Roxy Theater in New York and two shows a night at Ben Marden’s Riviera, in Fort Lee, New Jersey. We were taking vitamin C and B12 shots to try to enlist some energy from our exhausted bodies.... Believe it or not, we didn’t look at a girl for the entire two weeks!
We called those two gigs our Bataan Death March. The first four shows, at the Roxy, were at ten A.M., noon, 3:45 P.M., and eight P.M. The eight-o’clock show was a problem. We went on at 8:05 and finished at 9:15—then jumped into a car with a police escort to drive across the George Washington Bridge to the Riviera.
