by Jerry Lewis
“I saw you guys on Ed Sullivan!” the clerk told Dean and me. “You were great!”
As we thanked him, Keller made a remark too obscene to repeat— believe me—about Sullivan and a nice lady singer of the 1930s named Ruth Etting. We all screamed like chimps at a banana festival, and the night clerk stared some more.
But I was the one who couldn’t stop laughing. Dean explained to me, in between my giggles, that a new pot smoker is very vulnerable and can stay high for days. I remember now that he had a worried look as he said it—he was thinking about our show—but at the time, I couldn’t have cared less about any of it. As Dean and the security guys helped me up to our suite, I was singing my head off through the halls of the sleeping hotel. The guys tried desperately to quiet me, but to no avail. I was still singing as they bundled me into bed.
Finally, the house detective came up to ask what was going on. I jumped out of bed and proceeded to tell him all about smoking pot, informing him that I would be all better in a couple of days. Eventually, Dean got me settled again.
The next morning, he came into my room to see if I was all right. Oddly enough, I felt perfectly fine, but I still had the sillies—I couldn’t stop laughing.
Dick walked in. “For God’s sake,” Dean said. “Is there anything we can give him to settle him down?”
“Hair of the dog,” Dick said.
“What?” Dean said.
Dick assured him that he had done it before—that it balanced the high. He took a joint out of his pocket, lit it, and handed it to me. “Okay, Jer,” he said. “Nice and easy. Just one or two small puffs, and you’ll feel like a new man.”
Well, I took the puffs, and I was anything but a new man. In fact, I was right back to being Errol Flynn. I couldn’t wait (I told Dean and Dick) to get to the rehearsal and let the band know I had tried pot!
Dean looked aghast. “You can’t say that to anyone,” he told me. “It’s against the law.” His expression turned to concern. “Jer, are you going to be all right? I don’t want to let you go on stage and humiliate yourself.”
I bit my lip. “I’ll be okay,” I assured him.
He watched me like a hawk during the rehearsal. Now I had totally lost my bubble—I was dopey and tired, not even sure I could do the show. And we were five hours from curtain.
“Take a walk with me, Jer,” Dean said.
Dean never walked if he could help it (before golf carts, he played gin), so I knew this was serious. We headed out across the campus. The bright sun reflecting off the snow was killing my bloodshot eyes, but the fresh, cold air began to revive me a little. As we walked, Dean explained what pot does to the body, and some of the differences between reefer and alcohol. Even high, I couldn’t help but marvel at his big-brotherly wisdom, and at my good luck in being the recipient of it.
Then he looked me right in the eye. “Look, Jer,” he said. “If you don’t feel like you can make it tonight, I’ll cancel the whole gig.”
“Not on your life!” I said. The auditorium’s 3,000 seats had sold out, and now that we were just across from the theater, I could see hundreds of people waiting for standing-room tickets. “I’ll be fine, Paul,” I told him.
Dean walked me around for quite a while, through the local park and then finally backstage to our dressing rooms. The orchestra played “Blue Nocturne,” then Dick introduced me. As I came out, the crew, the staff, the electricians, the soundmen, prop men, curtain pullers, dressers, and makeup people watched anxiously. They all knew about my pot party of the evening before.
I did the normal welcoming remarks, then went into a pretty funny gag about Dean and me being in college again. . . . Again? Not hardly! I segued into a bit about “I will never go into politics because I do comedy already!” The audience laughed long and hard, while I went on to blast the U.S. government for taxing us so heavily, saying that if they weren’t careful, everybody would wind up on food stamps and they’d wind up having to support us anyway.
This somehow transitioned into a rant about sex and youth versus sex and the elderly. I was aware the audience had quieted down, aside from some nervous coughing. I felt a little like I was working to an audience of Arabs and they knew what I was.
And then, thank God, my partner stuck his head out from stage right and yelled, “If you don’t hurry, I’ll be too old to sing!” The relieved audience ate it up, and it certainly cued me. I introduced Dean, who came and did his three songs to huge applause.
We actually did one of our better shows that night, but we went slow, Dean establishing the tempo so I wouldn’t run on—especially at the mouth!
When we got back to the hotel, Dean ordered me to take a nap, and I almost instantly fell into a sound sleep—and (of course) dreamed I was awake.
From then on, I swore to myself, I would stick to an occasional cocktail.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DEAN’S THIRTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY WAS A VERY DIFFERENT AFFAIR from his thirty-fifth. On June 7, 1953, we were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, aboard the beautiful new Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth, heading for our first-ever overseas engagement, at the London Palladium. Hal Wallis, a charter member of the Dress-British-Think-Yiddish sect of Judaism, adored all things English, and since there was no Colgate Comedy Hour in Great Britain to goose our movie-ticket sales, Wallis figured we’d better get over there and show them the merchandise in person. After extended three-way talks between Wallis, his pal Val Parnell, the manager of the Palladium, and our new agents at MCA, we were booked at the great theater for a week at seven thousand pounds sterling.
I’d had to do a little bit of explaining to Dean about the gig—first about that seven-thousand figure, which made him howl until I told him that a pound (at that time) was worth five bucks.
London Palladium, 1953.
Then he asked me about the Palladium. “Is it any good?”
“Good?” I said. “My dad says there are only four theaters in the world that you’ll play if you really make it in show business—the Paramount and the Palace in New York, the Olympia in Paris, and the London Palladium.”
He shrugged, always Mr. Cool. “Okay.”
So there we were aboard the great liner, a party of twenty-four—we took up three full tables in the first-class dining room! Patti and our two sons, Gary and Ronnie, joined us, along with the musicians, writers, dressers, and the rest of the group. The one person who did not make the trip was Jeannie: She and Dean had been having a little trouble lately, and though they’d kissed and made up, she decided to stay back in L.A. and take care of the kids.
Leaving her husband free to have the kind of fun he was so fond of having.
To begin with, the Queen Elizabeth had an elegant gambling salon, which Dean said he and I should enjoy. Major mistake! In less than three days playing gin rummy, I owed my partner $684,700. As always, he was most happy to assist me by letting me postdate the check, which I did. I made it out on June 5, 1953, but dated it August 5, 1956 (all in fun, little realizing what any date after July 24, 1956, would mean to us). For the next three years, Dean held on to that check, hoping to do something ridiculous with it one day. He never did. (He may have kept it longer, but I once asked Jeannie if she’d ever seen it, and she said no.)
The night of Dean’s birthday, we had dinner with the ship’s captain. That made me nervous. A captain away from the bridge for two hours, wining and dining and chatting with everyone that came over to say hello to him.... Who was watching out for icebergs?
We were seated apart from the rest of our entourage, and in those days, when my wife wasn’t there, the Idiot was! Dean was squeezed between two old biddies, Mae and Clara. I remember their names to this day because—I later learned from the ship’s social director—they owned a chain of department stores in Texas, making them two of the richest women in that very rich state. They were also (the social director said) on the lookout for husbands! We bird-watched those two for the whole trip. They had some pretty good moves, but no takers.
Also at our table were Anastas Mikoyan, trade minister of the Soviet Union (and later its premier), and Mrs. Mikoyan. Oh, they were a barrel of laughs... not!
The dinner started with a ceremonial hand-washing—hot towels passed all around. “I just left my room—how dirty could I get?” Dean said. I kicked him under the table. Then the caviar was served—real Iranian caviar, about $11,000 a spoonful, and with it a nice small glass of vodka, which the Russian pushed away, motioning for the waiter to get him a tumbler, which he did. We watched in disbelief as Mikoyan held up the water glass, toasted everybody at the table, and gulped it down like Coca-Cola.
Dean took a sip and made a face. “That boy’s got a cast-iron stomach,” he said. “This stuff is lighter fluid.”
I shushed him. “Let’s be polite,” I said. “Just not too polite.”
Suddenly, my partner was wearing a very familiar grin and staring over my shoulder. I didn’t have to be told what was going on; I just needed to know where she was. The answer was two tables away, sitting with a bunch of very theatrical types: an absolutely glorious, dark-haired young lady, twenty-one years old at the very most. She and Dean had locked eyes, and she was smiling in a way that told me I’d be seeing very little of him for the next few nights.
I won’t say the girl’s name here, but she was a celebrated young actress whose future seemed full of promise—yet would, in fact, be filled with heartbreak. At that moment, though, she was like the most beautiful blossom in a meadow, ripe for the plucking. She was also in the midst of a very public love affair with another one of Hal Wallis’s actors, Kirk Douglas. Who was not aboard the Queen Elizabeth.
Dean’s smile, and the young lady’s, grew broader.
The next morning, the entire cruise staff were out rounding up pigeons for shuffleboard, horse-racing games, swimming contests, and, of course, the perennial amateur shows. At breakfast (Dean was still grinning), the two of us decided to enter the show in disguise. We had our bag of tricks with us—makeup, hats, wigs, beards, musical instruments ... Christ, we could go on stage as anyone at all!
Dean decided to do his Bing Crosby impression (which he did quite well), in wig, golf hat, and mustache, and I would do my Barry Fitzgerald imitation (remember the little Irish actor who always played a priest? Well, believe it or not, I did a mean Barry Fitzgerald), in wig, mustache, and turnaround collar.
We auditioned in the Queen Elizabeth’s mammoth showroom and were accepted for the show that night. Just what we were going to do in the show was another question—it wasn’t as if we had a screenplay of Going My Way lying around!
Day turned into evening gradually and gorgeously, as it does at that latitude on the Atlantic: a soft twilight that seems to last forever. And then it was showtime.
At first, back in costume, we were laughing, but as the master of ceremonies got things going, it suddenly hit us again: What the hell were we going to do?
Then I had an idea. We watched the other acts. The juggler needed a day job. The trainer for the dog act forgot the doggie treats. The dog did nothing, except backstage he left us a gift.
Now it was the singer’s turn. She was a beautiful blonde with flowing locks and extra lipstick on her teeth. She sounded like Tallulah Bankhead in heat. Thank God this was almost over. We were scheduled to follow the mind reader, who couldn’t find his blindfold. A waiter was walking by backstage and I stopped him, gave him a twenty-dollar bill, and took his cummerbund. I slipped through the curtain and handed it to the mind reader, who was most grateful! Until the cummerbund’s metal clips started pinching his temples. He went on, wincing in pain, until his assistant arrived with enough gas to go to Cleveland. I mean, she was whacked out of her mind, so everything the mind reader did, didn’t work. They were on and off in short order, leaving the crowd hysterical. Now it was our turn.
We had the MC introduce us as O’Keefe and Merritt—the billing we’d finally settled on after going through McKesson and Robbins, Harris and Frank, and Liggett and Myers...anything but Martin and Lewis! (I’d wanted to use Dill and Doe, but Dean said no.)
We entered at the same time, Dean from stage right and I from stage left. I was carrying a small wooden box, which I put on the lectern in front of us. Then Dean sang “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ra” while I did a lot of face-making with the big meerschaum pipe I had clamped between my teeth. Then Dean kept on humming the song as I recited an ad-lib hunk of the speech Barry Fitzgerald gave in Going My Way.
CBS was never happier!
When we finished, the audience went ballistic... for English people. Which is to say, more correctly, that they demonstrated a high degree of enthusiasm—most of them being, after all, rather prim and proper and stuffy types who looked like they should have had their pictures on Yardley Soap. The best part was, they didn’t know we were who we were. As they applauded, I opened up the wooden box, removed a small bottle of whiskey and two shot glasses, and poured us each a drink. We toasted each other and drank, then took our bows and exited backstage. Both Dean and I thought we were a shoo-in to take first prize: We knew we had at least twenty-two people out there in our pocket! Then all the acts walked back out onto the stage so the MC could see who got the loudest applause.
He put his hand over the dog act first. Applause was sparse. Next, he indicated the mind reader and his drunken assistant, who got a polite hand. Then it was us. Thunder from our two tables in the back—and polite nods from the rest of the audience. Then the MC put his hand over the head of the singing blonde ... who got a standing ovation! Dean and I slowly walked backstage, pondering our worst failure in quite a while. It might have been sad if it hadn’t been so funny—of course, it took us a few minutes to see the humor.
We should have only known what lay just ahead of us.
For about ten days after landing, we went sightseeing in England and Scotland: Dean loved those great old Scottish golf courses. Then we headed for London. On Monday evening, June 22, we opened at the Palladium. Everybody who was anybody in England was there that night, with the exception of the Queen, who would come a few days later. But Princess Margaret was in attendance, along with many other royals, most of Parliament, and a wagonload of British celebrities, including Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Morecambe and Wise, Benny Hill, Robert Morley, Alec Guinness (not Sir yet!), Jack Hawkins, Hermione Gingold, along with many friends from Paris ... Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, and Pierre Etaix.
We did a terrific show, one of our best. Dean sang wonderfully and thought I had never been funnier. Dick and the band were great, and we played around with them, tooting along on our trumpet and trombone. We had that crowd in stitches. Then, as we were taking our curtain calls, I stepped to the microphone to thank the audience.
“When we return—” I started.
“Never come again!” someone shouted from the balcony.
That stopped me in my tracks.
“Go home, Martin and Lewis!” someone else shouted.
And then the boos began. It’s one thing to bomb in front of an audience—to hear an awful silence instead of laughs and applause. But boos are something else again. Something ugly and assaultive. All at once, it seemed as though that whole London audience was going nuts: a ton of applause and cheers, along with some very audible booing. Was it Dean and I who were being booed, or were our loyal fans showing their disapproval of the people who’d shouted at us? It was impossible to tell. Dean and I looked at each other, totally baffled, just as the curtain dropped. What was going on?
We went back to our dressing room, which looked like rush hour. There were Larry and Vivien and Alec and Jack and Hermione and Benny and Maurice and Edith, all smiling and drinking champagne. Had Dean and I heard wrong? Had none of the happy celebrities in our dressing room heard the boos? We didn’t ask any questions. We were too busy shaking hands and talking to the press. It was bedlam!
We had to dress for the opening-night party Val Parnell was throwing for us at the posh Savoy Hotel. When we got there, we met with Jack Keller
, who hadn’t the faintest idea about the who or why of the booing. He spoke to a few of his English press pals but got no answers. And so the party proceeded, the good feelings gradually washing away the bad.
Then, next morning, came the London papers.
Jack Keller phoned us and said he’d meet us in Dean’s suite. When I walked in, I found them in the living room, where Jack had spread the front pages of all eight London newspapers over the floor, every one blaring a variation of the same huge, black headline:
MARTIN & LEWIS BOOED AT PALLADIUM OPENING
Jack was shaking his head, looking like he’d just taken a swift kick to the balls.
“What in Christ’s name is this all about?” I asked him.
Dean chimed in: “We did the best show of our lives, and they run headlines like that!” For once he had lost his cool. I’d never seen him so furious.
It turned out that a number of the papers ran great reviews, but not on the front page. Those headlines eclipsed everything.
Jack sat us down and tried to explain. “Look, you guys,” he said. “As great a job as you did last night, you’ve got to understand that ever since Lend-Lease, anti-Americanism has run pretty strong over here.” He was referring to the program that started the year before the United States entered World War II, when England was getting beaten up pretty badly by the Nazis, and we began sending them ships, planes, tanks, guns, food, and other supplies. Great Britain was going to make good on all of it, but file it under No Good Deed Goes Unpunished—lend someone money and, without fail, the recipient feels like a turd for needing it in the first place, then blames you for having it to give him.
Once again: Being the receiver of generosity isn’t always the easiest thing in the world.
Now, though, something else was going on. The Red Scare was at its peak in America and Joe McCarthy was trying to prove everyone a Communist. Only days before we arrived, McCarthy’s chief goons, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine, had stopped in London as part of their European tour to root out subversives. Both the English and European press had a field day making fun of these two turkeys. In addition, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of giving American atom-bomb secrets to the Russians, had just been executed at Sing Sing. U.S. prestige, Jack reminded us, was at an all-time low overseas—especially in England.
