Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  On Sunday evening, just before the taping of The Dinah Shore Show, Lemmon’s wife and mother came to visit him in his dressing room. Felicia wore a beige mink coat over a black wool dress, topped by a knitted woolfringed hat that hid most of her hair; Jack kissed her gingerly as she came in. Mildred Lemmon wore a low-cut, blue satin dress and a brown mink stole; “Hello, Minnie,” he said, kissing her. He was called out of the room for a moment. His mother sat at one end of a long sofa and his wife, after picking up a pair of socks from the floor and hanging them over a lampshade, sat at the other end. By this time, the elder Mrs. Lemmon was excitedly telling me a story about the first time she had gone to the Motion Picture Mothers’ Club, soon after her son had come to Hollywood. “I was very nervous,” she said. “I was sure no one would know who I was. And all new members had to stand up and give a speech. Well, I’ve got more guts in my little finger than Jackie has in his whole body. So I stood up and I did it.” Lemmon returned at this point and closed the dressing room door. “And afterward,” Mrs. Lemmon went on, “Lou Costello’s mother came over to me and introduced herself. She asked me whose mother I was and I said, ‘I’m Jackie Lemmon’s mother.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘what movie is she in?’” Felicia and Jack smiled and exchanged looks. “Jackie said that’s what I get for calling him Jackie.”

  Lemmon looked at me. “Ya—and she still does it,” he said, making a face. “My father was Jack, too, so to distinguish between us she always called me Jackie. But, my God, after thirty-seven years, it’s a little tough to take. Every time she does it I cringe.” Mrs. Lemmon turned from her daughter-in-law. “What did you say, Jackie?” Lemmon raised his voice. “I said after thirty-seven years you could stop calling me Jackie.” Mrs. Lemmon laughed. Jack turned to his wife. “Dinah’s got twenty-eight numbers in this thing—she’s the whole show.” Felicia smiled. “And you told me you were the whole show, John,” she said.

  “You look very pretty tonight, Feleesh,” said Lemmon. She touched her head. “You think anybody’ll be able to see over this hat?” He assured her they would, and then noticed the socks on the lampshade. “Hmmm,” he said, grinning, “I wonder who could’ve put these socks up here.” Felicia smiled. “You’re pretty calm, John, for an old man,” she said. Her mother-in-law, meanwhile, had started telling me of her TV-viewing habits. “I use earphones,” she said. “And I won’t answer the phone. People call me the next morning and ask why I didn’t answer. ‘I have news for you,’ I say to them. ‘I’m deaf. And when I watch television, I can’t hear anything else.’”

  A bearded crewmember stuck his head in the door and told Lemmon something. “Beaver!” exclaimed Mildred Lemmon. “Did you ever play Beaver?” she asked me. “Every time you see someone with a beard you yell ‘Beaver’—first one to do it gets a buck.” She smiled mischievously. “We used to play it all the time. One day, Jack, my husband, took a bunch of us to see The Man Who Came to Dinner. And when [white-bearded actor] Monty Woolley came on, I yelled ‘Beaver!’” She laughed giddily. “Jack didn’t speak to me for a month.” She paused. “But I got my buck.” Felicia was looking critically at her husband’s attire. “Aren’t you worried about your pants falling, John?” she asked quietly. “No belt or suspenders?” Jack tugged comically at his trousers. Someone knocked at the door and told Lemmon it was time to get ready, and the two Mrs. Lemmons left to take their seats in the audience.

  The show was taped. Afterward, in the corridor, Lemmon’s wife and mother congratulated him. “Was it really all right?” he asked his wife. She nodded approvingly. A small boy came up next to the actor and waited there tentatively. After a few moments, Lemmon noticed him. “Hi, there,” he said. “Could I … Mr. Lemmon, could I have your autograph?” He handed over pencil and paper. “Sure,” Jack said, smiling. “Thought you’d never ask.”

  Over the years, Lemmon and I didn’t ever spend any real time together again; he was discussed for some movies I made but it never worked out. However, the couple of times we ran into each other he was kind, pleasant and hugely complimentary. The night I didn’t win the Directors Guild Award as Best Director for The Last Picture Show, Jack passed me after the ceremony and out of the corner of his mouth, he said, “It’s all a crock of shit! You made the best film in twenty years,” and patted me on the back as he moved past. He echoed the compliment with a gesture and a look on the night I didn’t win the directing Oscar.

  After Irma La Douce, the highlights in Lemmon’s career continued to come for Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards: The Great Race for Blake, with Tony Curtis, Peter Falk and Natalie Wood; and, for the first time with Walter Matthau, in Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie. This was followed up two years later with their second pairing, the hugely successful film of Neil Simon’s Broadway smash The Odd Couple. Lemmon directed once—Matthau in Kotch in 1970. But his biggest triumphs in the seventies were both dramas: Save the Tiger (won Best Actor Oscar), at the start of the decade and The China Syndrome at the end. In the eighties and nineties, Jack plowed right on with quality work such as Missing and Tribute (both Oscar nominations), Edwards’ That’s Life, Glengarry Glen Ross, Grumpy (and Grumpier) Old Men—both with Matthau again. The two were great friends and did ten pictures together. Walter’s death was very hard on Jack. He had a great triumph on television with a dramatization of the best seller Tuesdays with Morrie. As he got older, the slight hunch to his shoulders off-camera gave way to a pronounced stoop that got worse and worse. A coworker in Jack’s last years remembered that Lemmon would walk around slumped over terribly and then when they said, “Action!” he’d rise up to his full height and play the scene. As soon as he heard, “Cut!” he stooped right over again. He and Felicia stayed together through thick and thin, their son Christopher is a good actor, and Jack just kept working right to the end, which I’m certain is how he wanted it.

  Jack Lemmon destroys a greenhouse in frustration over his and his wife’s (Lee Remick) alcoholism in Blake Edwards’ Days of Wine and Roses (1962), among Lemmon’s best and most personal performances.

  Especially certain when I remembered something from our first youthful conversation at the Polo Lounge forty years before. In front of the hotel, waiting for our cars to be brought from the parking lot, Lemmon had looked at me, smiled, and said, “You know, I’ll tell you something. Here I am at thirty-five and—though, believe me, everything’s wonderful that’s happened—I can only play two parts a year. I yearn for those days when I was doing a different TV role every week. You know, I’m an actor, I like to work.”

  The cars arrived, we said good-bye, and both of us drove away in the night. We met again at the first red light. From his convertible sports car, he yelled, “Driving is wild in this town, isn’t it?” And we raced down Sunset Boulevard until a red light separated us and he raised his fist in the air with the middle finger extended in a gesture of comic defiance as he sped away from me down the dark, empty boulevard.

  Born John Uhler Lemmon III, February 8, 1925, Newton, MA; died June 27, 2001, Los Angeles, CA.

  Selected starring features (with director):

  1954: It Should Happen to You (George Cukor)

  1955: Mr. Roberts (John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy); My Sister Eileen (Richard Quine)

  1957: Operation Mad Ball (Quine)

  1959: Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder)

  1960: The Apartment (Wilder)

  1962: Days of Wine and Roses (Blake Edwards)

  1963: Irma La Douce (Wilder)

  1965: The Great Race (Edwards)

  1966: The Fortune Cookie (Wilder)

  1968: The Odd Couple (Gene Saks)

  1973: Save the Tiger (John G. Avildsen)

  1979: The China Syndrome (James Bridges)

  1982: Missing (Costa-Gavras)

  1986: That’s Life! (Edwards)

  1992: Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley)

  1993: Grumpy Old Men (Donald Petrie)

  8

  JERRY LEWIS

  When Jerry Lewis and I met in January 1961, he was at
the peak of his career, the king of the Paramount lot, among the biggest box-office attractions in the world. He was as misunderstood during this golden period—which had already lasted for more than a dozen years (people forget that Lewis was a huge star by the time he was twenty)—as he was misunderstood when some of his home country turned on him with savagery by 1970, as if his earlier success had all been some sort of clerical error. As though he hadn’t been wildly, outrageously funny, first in nightclubs, then on television, radio, films; even comic books featured Lewis in the fifties, and to his mainly young fans (age seven to twenty-five), he had the sex appeal and personal charisma of today’s rock stars.

  I loved him right from the moment I was first exposed to him in At War with the Army (1950), his initial starring-role picture opposite his partner Dean Martin, which was—not insignificantly—an independently produced movie, only distributed by Paramount. Lewis always made smart deals. What is now a common practice was anything but normal in Hollywood at this very early date in the history of the picture business’s huge upheavals between 1945 and 1962, around which time the original long-term-contract studio system finally collapsed. Stars had declared their independence from the studios, which had been, of course, exploiting the talent. So what else is new? (Now the situation is reversed.)

  This is another of the reasons why Lewis’ career is so interesting—it spans seismic re-orderings of the vast entertainment industry. Also—unlike all but two others in this book: Chaplin and Cassavetes—Lewis very successfully starred in pictures he wrote, directed and produced. One of the biggest of the mindless jokes about Lewis—or France—is the supposed aberration of the French loving Jerry Lewis. Well, the Germans, the Italians, the Spaniards do, too, just for starters. No, we’re very good at turning on our own popular culture, dealing with it as disposable and constantly having to renew itself through degrading last season’s product. It took the French to explain jazz to us, as well as mainstream American movies (circa 1912–1962), genre by genre (a French word). Yet what seems to be forgotten here is that jazz, mainstream American movies, and Jerry Lewis were also extraordinarily popular in the United States before the French explained them to us. Indeed, the explaining often happened after these had stopped being popular, had gone out of fashion—a word which resonates in the U.S.A.

  Jerry Lewis is an out-of-work circus clown trying to make good as a bartender in Lewis’ popular return to the big screen (after a decadelong absence), Hardly Working (1981), which he co-wrote and directed.

  That Lewis was misunderstood during two long eclipses (1970–80, 1984–95) is at least not surprising in revisionist times; but that even in his glory days he was almost equally misunderstood—by critics, reviewers, even most of the audiences which loved him—is more unique. What the huge public recognized almost immediately—on an unconscious level—was that Jerry Lewis represented the frightened or funny nine-year-old in everybody, most especially the male, adult or not. As life gets tougher perhaps in one’s second half-century, you sometimes find yourself wanting to have, or resorting to, a private Jerry Lewis moment: some “MAILEEE!” scream; translation: “HELP!” Lewis touched the truth in every guy, no matter what age, but as his audience got older, they often turned on their own youth, and rejected it as kid stuff. The truth is they were actually hiding a secret desire to resort to some form of infantilism in order to survive the knocks of life. Men are taught to keep their deepest feelings always in check. How refreshing if more guys copped to being scared: there is humility to that. Which is why Jerry was so appealing to women—they recognized his vulnerability in themselves. At his peak, Lewis was often referred to as a spastic, a retard, The Idiot (but a little sexy); never admitting that the reason you laugh at his openly expressed fears is because you’ve felt them, recognize his reactions as ones you’ve had inwardly yourself. That’s why the Lewis laughs were often so gut-busting: Jerry’s behavior touched some true identification. Yet who would own up to it?

  That Lewis did all this instinctually is both true and not. Right from the start, he knew exactly what to do to be funny; and when he saw what could be done with a partner like the conventionally handsome, dry, wry, older, suave and satiric ladies’ man that Dean Martin was, together they struck a vein of gold that was never fully mined, yet yielded during its initial decade billions of dollars, and billions of laughs. What he did with himself alone for nearly fifteen years was another gold mine (as was Dean’s alone). And Lewis knew that, too: when the twosome should leave ’em laughing. Dean took a major part of Jerry’s act—breaking up the joint—to his Rat Pack days.

  Here’s most of the first thing I ever wrote about Lewis (part of a long piece on Hollywood), published in Esquire in August 1962:

  One morning at Paramount, I was taken to The Ladies’ Man sound stage where Jerry Lewis was directing, producing and starring. The area was buzzing with technicians, actors, actresses, signs, props, television cameras and electrical equipment, TV monitors, motion picture cameras, cables, booms, chairs, and other paraphernalia….

  Atop a huge crane, with an added extension, at the end of which was the camera, sat Jerry Lewis, screaming instructions, insults, jokes, and exchanging quips with the cast and crew. Painted in large white letters on the side of this mountainous piece of equipment was the notice: Jerry’s Toy. Next to the camera was an old-fashioned car horn that Lewis intermittently sounded as a sign of approval or anger. When he wished to get down to the ground, he screamed to a man at the rear of the machine, who controlled the crane’s raising and lowering. Whenever Lewis was making a movie, I was told, it was “a free-for-all set,” and yet The Bellboy, made under even more haphazard circumstances, was one of the studio’s biggest money-makers.

  I watched Lewis throw cigarettes down at technicians and then demand them back. Almost at the opposite end of the stage, facing the vast four-story boardinghouse set and running from one wall to the other, was a huge banner colorfully lettered: Very Happy Holidays from the Lousy Producer-Director, followed by a caricature of Lewis’ profile, which, I noticed, was also to be found on walls, pieces of equipment, instruments, and even on the shirts of some of the personnel. Suddenly Lewis screamed: “That’s no damn good! Two demerits for Jim!” On the side of Lewis’ portable dressing room there was a bulletin board marked with a sign, Little Bits of Information We Couldn’t Do Without, surrounded by a jumble of ads, press layouts, stills, and so forth, from Lewis’ last two comedies. Near the set were two rows of bleachers where, someone informed me, children were allowed to watch shooting; two or three small children were there now along with a couple of bewildered parents. Nearby was a large display cabinet filled with old comedy and vaudeville props, each separately labeled. On a side wall were some hundred-fifty coffee mugs, each with a person’s first name under it; at Lewis’ request, each member of the cast and crew had his own cup.

  After a while, Lewis dismounted his crane, changed his shirt, and was ready for a take. He called for quiet, climbed the spiral staircase in the boardinghouse, entered a second-story room, and comically began cleaning with a feather duster. The camera recorded his moves. Suddenly he stopped. “Cut!” he screamed. “What the hell is this crap doing here?” he demanded, indicating a little table on which stood a small spray bottle. “Hey, Jim,” he yelled, “what are you, some kind of a nut?” A heavyset technician lumbered into the room and Lewis started squirting him with the contents of the atomizer. Running away, the man cried, “Hey, come on, Jerry, cut it out! Hey, cut it out, Jerry!” Instead, Lewis chased him zanily around the set as other technicians and actors chuckled wearily. Then, hiding behind a jog in the set, he waited until the winded man rounded the corner and gave him a good squirt full in the face.

  This attended to, the comedian repeated the scene, expressing satisfaction with the take when it was completed, and went into his dressing room, followed by an entourage of five or six. A bit later, he reappeared in an insane Indian disguise, which, I was told, was not for the picture but for the g
eneral amusement. After checking a new setup, he took the costume off, and looked at some rushes of the previous day’s shooting on a large screen behind his dressing room.

  I asked him why the three or four TV sets were on the stage. “We use them to set up the shots,” he answered seriously. “We can see better what the shot’ll look like with them.”* Then, grabbing a baseball, he began tossing it around the area with some technicians. I lingered long enough to see him mischievously set up an inflatable toy clown behind a large carton and amuse the company, as, seemingly on its own rubber legs, he made it rise and fall from behind the box like a grotesque dwarf. Exchanging some droll comments with it, he called him Melvin. (Lewis’ shrill “Melvin!?!” had become a catch-phrase with Martin in the early fifties.) A moment later he was screaming instructions again, and climbing aboard his expensive “Toy,” from where he could survey his make-believe kingdom.

  The prescient, legendary editor of Esquire’s peak years, Harold Hayes, called me after he read that (in the lengthy article it was part of) and said that not only was he going to publish the piece, but he would be interested to see what would happen if I did a full-blown portrait of Jerry. This resulted in only my second visit to Hollywood, where I spent nearly three weeks following Lewis around.

  It was the beginning of a friendship that happily survives to the present, as ever-young Jerry—unbelievably—nears his seventy-ninth year. Having been a hopeless fan of Martin and Lewis, as a teenager, I built up a 300-page scrapbook, for God’s sake. Here’s a shorter, revised version of the Lewis profile Esquire published in September 1962: