by Jerry Lewis
A few weeks later, we found out that the shouting at our Palladium opening had been started by two left-wing students, and that most of the booing had been directed at their rudeness. But those headlines dogged us for the next two weeks, as we continued to play to standing-room-only crowds at the Palladium. Meanwhile, Dean seemed to keep getting angrier and angrier. I was mad too, but because Dean was taking it so hard, I tried to lighten things up in order not to make him feel worse.
“They’ll never see me in London or Hong Kong, or even Burberry’s in New York,” Dean swore. “The English press are whores, parasites, and just low-down filthy scum.” And the sad thing was, I had to admit he was right. Remember, Fleet Street in London was the mother of tabloid journalism—and when you’re in that spotlight, it isn’t much fun.
After England, we toured the U.S. military bases in France, then stopped in Paris for some R&R. Time had passed, but Dean and I were both still stinging. When Art Buchwald, then writing for the International Herald Tribune, came to interview us over lunch at the Hotel George V, we didn’t hold back. When I ordered my lunch, I asked for “a nice roasted English reporter garnished with lots of French-fried potatoes.”
“I’m never going back to England,” Dean said, “on account of the British press stinks. And you can tell them I said so. They tell you how much they like you to your face and what great admirers they are of yours, and then the next day you read in the paper that you stink.”
Dean sailed back to New York the next day, while Patti and I took a much-needed vacation in France and Italy. I was mostly out of touch for the next few weeks, so I was unaware—at first—of how difficult my partner was finding it to let sleeping dogs lie. Dean just kept complaining about England to the American papers, and unfortunately, it didn’t take too long for his bitterness to backfire.
He was stoking the headlines: “DEAN MARTIN CALLS LONDON GARBAGE CAPITAL OF EUROPE,” one read. “MARTIN AND LEWIS WILL NEVER GO BACK TO ENGLAND,” said another. Dean was quoted in one piece vowing, “I will use all my power to see that no Martin and Lewis film will ever play in England again!” I began to worry that this kind of talk could affect our worldwide ticket sales, a major part of our income. Of course, Wallis was beside himself. I later found out he was phoning Dean, sending him telegrams, telling him, begging him, ordering him to cease and desist. And Jack Keller was frantically trying to get in touch with me. “We’ve really got a problem here,” he said when we finally connected.
So I called Dean at home in L.A. “Dean, please let it go,” I said. “You’re making this a very tough situation for us—”
He cut me off. “Listen, pal, I’ve just begun.” I’d never heard him like this. Part of me wondered where all this anger was coming from. “These motherfuckers can’t get away with this bullshit!” he yelled. “They’re gonna be sorry they didn’t go after Cohn and Schine instead of Martin and Lewis!”
I could see I wasn’t going to cool his anger on a staticky international phone. Patti and I continued our vacation, and I did my best to put the whole thing out of my mind. I did face some local press now and then, and they all had the same question: “What really happened at the Palladium?” I said the same thing to all of them: “We were great at the Palladium, and the English people loved what we did. The whole incident has been blown completely out of proportion.”
I was trying to put the best possible face on the situation, but I was still worried. When I got back to Los Angeles, Dean and I had a meeting at NBC about our radio show. It was the first time I’d seen him in three weeks. We hugged, but I immediately saw something different—the twinkle in his eye had dimmed. I tried desperately to jolly him out of his mood, to do whatever I could to ease the pain of what he’d had to read in the papers for the last few weeks.
But the American press was in full swing. The San Francisco Chronicle ran an editorial taking us to task for not being up to dealing with negative press. Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper—the two biggest noise-makers in America at that point—both went after us. Winchell accused us of “a Major Bubu: You never publicize the raps.” Hopper said we should have made fun of the bad reviews on the Colgate Comedy Hour. Dean was taking a lot of the heat. Ironically, he was getting all kinds of unwanted attention from the same people who usually ignored him.
It has taken me a very long time (a full half-century, to tell the truth) to finally learn the sad lesson: If you knock even the most hateful human being, you will come out of the encounter looking less than heroic. People almost always side with the one being attacked.
The months passed, and as our memories of England faded, Dean and I got back up to all our old tricks. Still, my partner always seemed on edge. If he heard about someone wearing a coat made in England, he’d go off on a tirade. I’d have to work the room to get him settled. More and more I learned that there were certain resentments that seethed behind his cool facade. His tendency to bottle things up would soon come to hurt us both.
That’s twenty-twenty hindsight, of course. At the time, I just kept wondering: Where was all this anger coming from?
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE CADDY HIT THE THEATERS IN AUGUST OF 1953, AND BY THAT fall, the movie’s big hit song, “That’s Amore,” was selling out of the record stores. Naturally, Dean was thrilled. The twinkle was back in his eye, and I could see a new lift in his step. I was pleased, too, even if I felt like something of a martyr, knowing that it had all been my doing. Some small part of me wanted to tell Dean about my generosity, to get the credit for it: That’s human nature! But I also sensed that saying anything would take away from my partner’s triumph, so I kept my mouth shut.
It was complicated. Christ, everything between two human beings is complicated! And in a relationship like Dean and I had (which was unlike any relationship I’ve ever known), it was much, much more so.
I felt guilty.
Guilty that for years, Dean had had to put up with the Bosley Crowthers of the world, to listen to Jerry this and Jerry that, to grin and bear all the horseshit about what a genius I was. The press utterly ignored the fact of Dean’s genius. And many of the critics didn’t just ignore his gifts, they demeaned and humiliated the man himself. One Thomas O’Malley, staff writer for an early-fifties magazine called TV Forecast , once wrote:
Although Martin is probably the best partner Jerry could ever have teamed up with, let’s face it, Lewis could have paired off with Walter Brennan and been a sensation. He IS the team. If his stu f ever becomes ho-hum material, Dean certainly wouldn’t be able to carry the slack.
You must understand, this was what Dean had to put up with. The drumbeat was incessant, and it would have destroyed a lesser man than my partner. I sure couldn’t have lived with it for anywhere near as long as he did.
I wanted to flag-wave for Dean. I told any number of writers how brilliant he was, how much I owed him. Do you think that’s what they wrote about? No. They didn’t believe me.
So I tried to do things for Dean, to repay him, but I knew that part of his anger at the English press was really caused by the way the American critics treated him.
And I also worried that some of Dean’s anger was at me, for getting the lion’s share of the attention. If I had told him about buying him “That’s Amore” (a small voice in me reasoned), maybe he wouldn’t be mad at me. But I was also a smart fella: I thought of Lend-Lease, and how furious at America it had made some Brits feel.
So I continued to keep my mouth closed.
Dean was in a funny place that fall. With his number-one hit song, he was feeling his oats as a performer for the first time. But at the same time, all the indignities he’d suffered had built up. And there were more to come. The last straw was floating down toward the camel’s back.
In January 1954, Hal Wallis showed us the first-draft script for our next film, a circus story to be called Big Top. It was a story I had very high expectations for: I’d wanted to play a clown ever since I’d seen my idol Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 picture
The Circus. But when Dean and I read the script for Big Top, we were bitterly disappointed.
The screenplay had been done by a pal of mine, Don McGuire, who’d recently written Meet Danny Wilson for Frank Sinatra. That movie, a dark drama about an up-and-coming nightclub singer with a rough-and-tumble past, was a powerful and complicated version of Frank’s own story.
Leave it to Hal Wallis to hire a writer for Martin and Lewis who didn’t write comedies. Still, Wallis was aware of my friendship with Don, and thought it might make the project move along more smoothly to go with a writer I knew. And in fairness to Don, Wallis sat on him so heavily throughout the process that a Neil Simon would have been hard-pressed to come up with laughs.
There were a couple of other big problems. The biggest was that as the screenplay was written, Dean and I didn’t have a lot of scenes together. The first twenty pages of the script—twenty full minutes on the screen—had ten minutes of my character, then ten minutes of Dean’s, before the two of us even met.
When you have a Martin and Lewis picture without the “and,” you don’t have much.
For a few weeks, Dean and I let preproduction go on without us. In other words, we staged a sit-down strike, and for a while it looked as though the only Big Top Hal Wallis was going to get was the top he’d wind up blowing.
While Dean and I agreed we hated the first draft of Big Top, the fact is, we hated it for totally different reasons—selfish reasons on both our parts. At first we didn’t really discuss what each of us found problematic. We should have, but we didn’t. The truth is that Martin and Lewis lived very different lives when we were at home than when we were on the road. On the road, we worked together, ate together, lived in adjacent hotel suites. Back in Los Angeles, we had families, offices, agents, distractions. Dean had golf—lots of golf. Whole days went by when we didn’t talk or see each other.
And where Big Top was concerned, all I could think about was how excited I was to be doing a circus movie, and about how really involved I would be in the moviemaking process. Selfish? Sure. Shortsighted? Absolutely.
Meanwhile, Dean stayed on the golf course, at a safe distance from unpleasantness. I think he knew, deep down, that coming clean about why he disliked this script was going to require a big-time confrontation. As a matter of fact, if he was to be completely truthful, he would have to face me with his dissatisfactions, which would be the hardest thing of all. That bottle stayed corked for a little while. The easier showdown (but still a very hard one for Dean) was with Hal Wallis.
We were both coming to hate the cookie-cutter scripts that Wallis wanted for all our movies. The formula had at least given me more room for experimentation than it had given Dean. In Big Top , he’d once more be playing my handsome sidekick, except that this time his character had fewer songs than usual and was even more of a heel.
After avoiding Wallis for a few weeks, having our secretaries field ever-angrier phone calls mentioning breach of contract, we finally agreed to a script meeting at Paramount. It was a big conclave in Wallis’s office, full of agents, lawyers, and writers; the atmosphere was, to put it mildly, tense. I spoke my piece, but what shocked me was that Dean finally spoke his.
With Hal Wallis, 1948. First screen test for crotchety producer.
More than that: He really let our producer have it. Tapping all too easily into the reservoir of anger that seemed to have built up over the last six months, he said that he didn’t want to play a cheat, that he didn’t even know what he was doing in the picture. “Huntz Hall could play this part,” he told Wallis.
Wallis, no shrinking violet, gave as good as he got. He reprimanded us both for our “belligerent attitude.” We shouted right back that he was selling us short with this script. After a lot of back-and-forth, we finally hit on what appeared to be a compromise that we could all live with. Dean and I would get into line and do our wardrobe and color tests for the picture, and I would work with our TV writers, Arthur Phillips and Harry Crane, on a revision of the script. Dean seemed completely satisfied with this solution.
More likely, he was just in a hurry to get back to the golf course.
We shot on location in Phoenix, Arizona, with the Clyde Beatty Circus, which should have been a delight. Unfortunately, the making of the movie that would eventually be released as Three Ring Circus was troubled in every way. (For starters, Hal Wallis only wanted to pay for one ring, not three! Fortunately, our director, Joe Pevney, was able to convince him that One Ring Circus didn’t exactly cut it.)
But the shoot’s main problems were between my partner and me. Things got off on a bad footing a few days after production started, when Look magazine published a photograph taken on the set of our soon-to-be-released picture, Living It Up. The photograph was originally of Dean and me with our costar, Sheree North. But for some idiotic reason, Look cropped Dean out of the photo so that only Sheree and I appeared together.
Dean was furious, justly so. He crumpled up a copy of the magazine and threw it in Jack Keller’s face. The slight seemed all too symbolic of the neglect he’d been enduring for years, a neglect that I can see came to a head with Three Ring Circus. The writers and I had worked hard on the script, but no matter how hard we tried, we just couldn’t find much for Dean’s character to do in the story. We tried to beef up his scenes and emphasize the musical numbers, but there was no getting around the fact that this was a circus picture and I was playing Jerrico the clown.
Perhaps after seven years as a team, Dean and I were displaying the classic symptoms of Seven-Year Itch. Our ideas about who and what Martin and Lewis were had begun to fray. For seven years, it had been enough for me to bounce around nightclub and theater stages like a crazy person while Dean smiled indulgently. Dean felt that still was enough. I didn’t.
I was approaching thirty. I wanted to grow as a comedian, as an actor. I had, as Shakespeare said, immortal longings in me. Was Chaplin my idol? You bet your ass he was. If you’re going to aim for the stars, why not pick the best? And the one thing that Charlie had—in spades—was something I’d barely tapped into: pathos.
Great comedy, in my mind, always goes hand in hand with great sadness: This is the grand Circle of Life, the mixture of laughter and tears. You can be funny without tapping into strong emotion, but the humor is more superficial. Funny without pathos is a pie in the face. And a pie in the face is funny, but I wanted more.
Dean didn’t agree. In his mind, what we did wasn’t broke, so why should we fix it? We were pulling in money by the bushel; why risk that by getting artistic?
Pathos was, to Dean Martin, the worst kind of flag-waving. Just keep ’em laughing, was his philosophy. Keep it cool and superficial. Audiences don’t want to think when they see us. They don’t want tears. If they want pathos, let them go to a Chaplin movie.
There was a skit we did on our TV show where I played a poor schnook who joins a friendship club. I tried desperately to make friends, but when everyone paired off to go get something to eat, I wound up alone, dancing with a mannequin. Dean hated that skit. He just kept saying, “Why don’t you cut out this sad stuff and just be funny?”
So in Dean’s eyes, I was committing a double sin, flag-waving and acing him out at the same time. The problem had been simmering, and now—encouraged by some of his friends—it was all coming out. Dean kept losing his temper at me and everyone else on the shoot, saying he’d had it with playing a stooge. He often showed up late for work: One afternoon he came in at three o’clock, did a single scene, then walked off the set, saying, “That’s all you’re gonna get from me.” Another morning, he came in an hour late, gave me a look that could kill, and said, “Anytime you want to call it quits, let me know.”
I tried to tease my way out of it. “But, Paul,” I said, “what would I ever do without you?”
“Fuck yourself, for starters.”
This all felt like a nightmare. Literally. I couldn’t sleep; I could barely eat. It was a schizophrenic existence: I loved hanging around with
the circus people, I learned a ton from the Clyde Beatty clowns. I enjoyed shooting my scenes. But when the working day was over, that feeling of doom returned. My partner was drifting away from me. Or had he drifted away already? The uncertainty tapped into my childhood fear of being deserted. An icy look from Dean would turn me into a scared nine-year-old. My adult self knew how badly he was hurting, but the child in me could hijack my peace of mind in an instant.
And I was angry, too. It’s satisfying, in a negative way, to lash back when you’re being attacked. To think how right you are. But all the time I knew how dangerous this was, how unnecessary. One afternoon I summoned all my courage and knocked on Dean’s door at the hotel. He was wearing his golf clothes. His face froze when he saw me, and I knew that he was struggling to control his anger. He didn’t want to hate me. “Look, Jer, I’m headed out to the country club,” he said.
“We really have to talk, Paul.”
He sighed. “Why don’t you ride out with me.”
It was good luck, really, that he was on his way to play golf: It wouldn’t have been half as easy to sit down and hash it out face-to-face as it was to talk sitting side by side in his car. I began by telling him how right I thought he was.
“I know there’s less in this role than you deserve,” I said. “I believe in you, Paul. I believe you could carry a movie all by yourself if you wanted.”
A glance at his face told me that this was something he’d given thought to but hadn’t totally worked out. I felt certain that other people had told him this, and I could see that it confused him for me to say it. “Well—” He hesitated. “I don’t know ’bout that.”
