“Before you meet him,” Jack Keller said, “I better tell you there’s a couple of things he’s sensitive about.” Keller had been handling Jerry Lewis’ publicity for more than sixteen years. “One of them is Dean Martin, though the antagonism is all on Dino’s part. Jerry’s always a little shocked, even now, when Dean lams into him. He’s got a scrapbook called ‘Dean Shoots His Mouth Off.’” Keller lit another cigarette. “I was there the day they split up in 1956—July 25th, ten years to the day. They did their last show at the Copa and that was it. It was a traumatic experience for the kid, and to make it worse, he could never understand Dean’s antagonism.” Keller paused. “But Dean’s a tough one—I’ll tell you a weird story.
“A couple years ago, Jerry and Patti, his wife, were in a Las Vegas club. And Dean was filling in for somebody that night. They hadn’t spoken, remember, for about four years, not a word. Suddenly Dean sees Jerry sitting at a table, comes over and sits down. He’s very friendly, and they talk about old times. He tells Jerry he’s got a train to catch, and asks him whether he’d fill in at the end of the show. Jerry says sure. Anyway, comes time for Dean to go on, he gets up there and announces, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a fella sitting in the audience I’d like you to meet, my partner, Jerry Lewis.’ Not my former partner, ‘my partner.’ Well, it’s a pretty moving scene—everybody’s bawling. He and Jerry re-create some of their old routines; you know, they ask each other, ‘Did we really do this shit,’ they do a soft-shoe. Then Dean leaves to catch his train and Jerry finishes the show. Now get this. Not long afterward, in a U.P.I. interview, Dean slams into Jerry like crazy. So go figure.”
He smiled. “But Jerry’s a pussycat. Not that it’s always waltz time. Like sometimes he’ll call me up at two in the morning. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘I want you to hear something.’ He wrote a new proverb maybe, and he wants me to hear it. Jesus! What do I want to hear at two in the morning!” He chuckled. “Jerry and me are like water and oil—we don’t mix. I guess that’s why we like each other.”
After a quick phone call, Keller turned back to me. “I’ll tell you something you people in New York don’t realize about Jerry. He is the only star in the history of the industry who’s never had a flop. That’s a fact. Take any of our big stars—Cary Grant or Gary Cooper or Clark Gable, any of them—they’ve all had at least one picture in their careers that didn’t make money. Jerry’s made twenty-six films and not one has grossed less than five million dollars. Deedle-dee. You know what he gets for an hour on television? $400,000. For a week in a nightclub, his minimum is $40,000. And you can’t even talk to him for less than that.” Keller paused to let the facts sink in.
“In 1960,” he continued, “they had this picture, CinderFella, and they were a little worried about it. Jerry wanted to release it for Christmas—the fantasy angle and all that, he thought would be good for the holidays. Well, Paramount wanted to release it in July, and Jerry said it’d die in the summer. See, they always release one Lewis picture for the summer holidays and one for Christmas vacation, the best timing for the pre-teenage audience. Only this time they didn’t have any product for the July slot. Anyway, Jerry was on his way to Florida to appear at the Fontainebleau, and on his way he stopped in New York to see Barney Balaban, the head of Paramount. Jerry told him how he wanted CinderFella released in December, and Balaban said he needed a Lewis film for the summer. So right there Jerry stands up and says he’ll make Balaban a picture while he’s down in Florida; he says he’s got the story and everything. And right there he made up the basic outline for The Bellboy. On the spot. He had nothing when he walked in.” Keller chuckled at the recollection.
“Anyway, I’m sitting here in Hollywood, resting, when I get a call from Jerry. He says to me, ‘Jack, you better come down here right away, we’re starting a picture on Monday.’ I said, ‘Where are you?’ He says, ‘I’m in Florida.’ I say, ‘What picture? We ain’t got no picture!’ ‘We do now,’ he says. ‘The trucks are already on their way.’ So that’s how he got to direct his first picture—he produced and wrote it as well. You shoulda seen that production. I asked him, ‘Who’s gonna be in it?’ He says, ‘What’s the difference? We’ll cast it from Celebrity Service.’ Every scene was written the night before he shot it—for whomever was in town. That’s Jerry. I gotta hand it to him, he’s really got guts. The picture was made for $900,000. To date it’s grossed 8 million. Isn’t that a pussycat?!”
Frank Tashlin* had directed Jerry Lewis in five films, including the last Martin-Lewis movie, and one of their best, Hollywood or Bust. “They didn’t speak to each other during the whole picture,” he told me. “It was a bitch.” Tashlin was in the process of directing his sixth Lewis picture, It’s Only Money, when I met him lounging on a couch. “There’s a side of Jerry Lewis you probably don’t know about,” he said. “He’s really an electronics genius. You see those television monitors over there?” He pointed at two TV sets near the camera. “That’s really a marvelous thing Jerry made. At the side of the movie camera he mounted a small-size TV camera. It’s lined up with the movie camera so that when you’re shooting a scene you don’t have to look through the viewfinder; you just look into one of the monitors and there’s the shot just as it’ll appear on the screen—it’s like seeing your rushes as they happen. Jerry’s used it since The Bellboy, and when he told me about it I said I didn’t want to bother with it. He begged me to try it just one day on this picture. Well, the first day I didn’t take my head out of that thing.” The director put a stick of gum in his mouth. “Another thing is the boom mike.” He frowned slightly. “This is a real horror—such an antiquated thing. For Ladies’ Man, Jerry bugged his whole set with fifty or sixty mikes and cut his shooting time tremendously. You see, a director actually works maybe one hour out of eight—and four of those other seven hours are literally spent lighting for the boom—so there won’t be shadows and so on. Jerry eliminated this problem. Paramount says that it worked and still they refuse to let us have it on this picture. It’s ridiculous; this is 1929 sound.”
Tashlin’s secretary came over with a gin drink she gave him. “Jerry hates to do serious scenes. I think he’d rather jump off a bridge to get a laugh. In CinderFella we had a scene where he’s all alone and he sings a kind of serious little song. He was so nervous about doing that goddamn thing, he procrastinated one day from nine in the morning till four in the afternoon. Then at four he did it, one take, and it was beautiful.”
For a moment, Tashlin looked over his script, then said, “Jerry never rehearses. Just one take and that’s it. You rehearse with Jerry and you’ll die. So you can’t really do anything interesting with the camera—his habits dictate your style. Sometimes when I have to repeat a scene, he’ll change it around and do something completely different. And that’s his charm, you see—you never know what he’s going to do next. He doesn’t look at his dialogue until he walks on the set, and then he never sticks to the lines anyway—usually he makes them better. I just tell him roughly what the scene is and he does it, kind of hit-and-run, and it’s very successful. But you get no credit for doing a Lewis picture.”
The director was called away to check a camera setup, then returned, and said gently, “But there’s no dreaming for Jerry—all he has to do is think of something and he can go out and buy it. Up in Vegas once he bought a hundred cashmere sweaters—he wears them a few times and gives them away.” He sipped his drink. “Wait till you get out to his house—it’s Louis B. Mayer’s old mansion out in Bel Air. Jerry left all the décor just as Mayer had it. All he did was change the initials on the ashtrays.” Tashlin smiled. “When you drive up, you’ll think there’s a crowd there, but it’s all his cars. He’s got something like fourteen of them. And you’ve never seen so many leather-bound books in your life—it’s a complete record of everything he’s ever done, like the Pharaohs.” The director chuckled. “His wife, Patti, she’s a rare woman. They’ve been married eighteen years. She’s like a person in a cyclone holding o
n to the kite—that’s how strong she is.”
Tashlin looked around him abstractedly. “Comedians always have an entourage. It’s the need for constant laughter, even though you’re paying for it. But don’t misunderstand, Jerry’s compassion is as large as his extravagance. It often gets him in trouble, too: I’ll tell you a story. Somewhere, Jerry met this guy who really needed a couple operations. Jerry felt sorry for him, paid for his trip to the Coast, paid for the operations. And then he gave the guy a job as a gagman. The stuff he turned out was no good, but Jerry kept him on the payroll anyway. One day he’s on the set, kidding around, and this guy suddenly appears, rushes over to Jerry, puts his hands on Jerry’s throat and literally starts choking the kid—he’s trying to kill him. It took four guys to pull him off. Jerry was white; he was shaking. And this guy is screaming, ‘I’ll get your kids, I’ll kill your kids.’ Well, from then on there’s been a policeman guarding his home twenty-four hours a day. You know what Jerry did? He paid this guy’s plane fare back to his hometown and, I swear, to this day Jerry doesn’t understand why the man did that.” Tashlin looked sadly around and finished his drink.
Jerry Lewis was born Joseph Levitch in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey. In 1962, he was a millionaire a few times over. On the door to his private office at Paramount the sign reads: “Jerry Lewis—The Chief.” The office itself was spacious, simply furnished in modern style; on its oak-paneled walls hung hundreds of photographs of his wife, his five sons, himself with various friends and personalities, mementos, plaques, awards, and the Gold Record he received for “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” When I met with him the first time, he was sitting behind a long, wide desk, surrounded by a typewriter, phones, Dictaphone machine, and assorted gadgets, tanned and looking at least ten years younger than he was. He wore a powder-blue sweater, white shirt, gray slacks, white socks, heavy dark suede shoes, and a pair of black thin-rimmed glasses that he took off a few minutes after we began our conversation and never put on again. When he talks or listens he looks directly at you, and uses his professional high-pitched voice only rarely for an effect; his normal speaking voice, still nasal, is a good deal lower.
Jack Keller was sprawled on a couch nearby, and Lewis was discussing certain journalists with him. “Those guys have got chutzpah,” he was saying. “You know what chutzpah is, don’t you?” he asked me. “Chutzpah is a man who kills his mother and father and then pleads mercy to the court ’cause he’s an orphan.” He shook his head twice. “If I’ve been unkind and I know the other fella knows it, I wanta go bury my head in the sand.” I asked him why no one had thought of his TV-monitoring system before. “Too simple,” he answered. “Same thing with the boom mike. On Errand Boy I used the boom very little. The sound department came in here—four very tall heads. ‘We hear you’re rebelling,’ they said. ‘When I’m through,’ I said, ‘you will, too.’” Lewis tore a sheet of paper with his caricature on it from a memo pad and took a sharp pencil from one of the four glasses filled with them on his desk. He made a drawing to illustrate his points, explaining as he went along. “Now watch how sweet this is,” he said. “If you’re told not to open a door on the set twenty-five feet away from where we’re shooting ’cause the boom’ll pick it up—why shouldn’t a mike, held eight feet away from the actor, out of camera range, be able to pick up the actor’s voice as clearly as the boom over his head? We took a test and I showed them how well it worked—they still won’t buy it. I use it on my own productions though, which It’s Only Money ain’t.” He folded the piece of paper neatly in half, then tore it in half again, threw it in a wastebasket, and replaced the pencil in the glass.
“In order for people to justify their position,” he continued seriously, “they have to complicate it. Comes from thirty or forty-five years of working one way. Whenever I’m ready to roll a scene, some poor guy will run on to put something in the scene that he could’ve put in before; it’s quite sad. It’s his way of calling attention to his little duty. People gotta learn.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “I say if I pay you from Monday to Friday and if you can deliver in three days, you got the other two off. They’ll stretch it out to five days.” He shook his head. “One of my biggest peeves is fear. If everyone figures they can’t do something, they’ll never do it. You gotta try.” He paused. “I know what you’re thinkin. ‘You’re thinkin’ it’s easy for somebody who’s well off like me to talk. But I was fired from every job when I really needed bread. And I feel this way: a person can tell me to go to hell, that’s OK, but he better know what he’s talkin’ about.”
Keller sat up slowly on the couch, got up, and quietly left the office. Lewis glanced at him as he closed the door. “I think that in this day and age,” he went on suddenly, “considering all that’s happened in the industry, what we need is peace of mind. I want people to leave my movies with a happy heart. I think when you depict the ticket buyer, it’s sad. Two and a half hours of cold-water flat and then he leaves and goes home to his cold-water flat—that’s unfair, it’s unjust, it’s a terrible rap.” He paused to pour himself a glass of water from a plastic pitcher nearby. “I have a dedication to the people I make my pictures for. I make a picture without a plot so the kids can come down the aisle with mommy or uncle anytime. They don’t have to worry about gettin’ there at the beginning. A thin plot, OK, but otherwise it gets in the way.”
Keller returned and sprawled on the couch again. Lewis put his feet up on the desk. “Did you ever read The Catcher in the Rye?” he asked. I told him I had. “Well, you never saw a more Holden Caulfield guy than you’re sittin’ with right now.” He grinned slightly. “And Salinger’s sister told me she used to call him ‘Sonny.’ That’s what my grandmother used to call me. It’s frightening.”
Keller began practicing golf strokes as I asked about Tashlin. “Tish,” Lewis said, smiling warmly. “Frank Tashlin made me understand the use of the word ‘friend.’ I hear his name and I get tears in my eyes. I hate him and he’s a son of a bitch.” He drank the rest of the water. “Frank’s my teacher.”
The comedian went on to discuss the duality in his own mind between his screen personality and the man who plays him; he spoke of the person on the screen as “him.” “Sometimes I write a memo in the morning,” he explained, “and then later on the set when it’s carried out, I rebel against it—I’ve forgotten that it was me who asked for it.” The intercom buzzed, Lewis flicked a switch, and his secretary’s voice informed him that Mrs. Lewis was on Two. Quickly reaching for the receiver, he fumbled it, dropped it on the desk, retrieved it, and said, “Did you hear Graceful pick up the phone?” On the wall behind him I noticed an autographed photo of President Kennedy.
After a few moments of quiet conversation, Lewis hung up and smiled. “That’s the third time today we’ve talked. She’ll probably call twice more.” He lit a cigarette. “Patti calls me the Jewish Sir Lancelot. I derive pleasure from giving happiness to people. She always asks me, ‘Who’d you give an apple to this morning?’” The comedian went on to say that when he was busy he ignored people, even his friends, and that he knew he was ignoring them. “If you turn your back on me when I’m busy, don’t come around when I’m havin’ fun,” he said. “And if a person ain’t genuine, I know it. I can spot a dirty, lying, phony rat—I can smell ’em.” He smiled.
When I asked whether he ever thought he’d do a dramatic picture, he said, “Why?” and paused. “Five thousand people are far more capable of it than me,” he explained rationally, putting out his cigarette. “Why should I compete with them? But there’s only eight guys who do what I do. Ha-ha-ha, that’s my responsibility. Why should I do Sammy Glick or something like that? For what? So dat four Park Avenue dames can go see it and say, ‘Didn’t I tell you, John?’” he mimicked effeminately. “They can go see Charles Laughton belching at Elsa Lanchester if they want, but when they come to see me, they come to see the Idiot, and they’re rootin’ for me ’cause I’m the underdog.” He paused and blew some ashes fr
om a memo pad, tore off the top piece and threw it away. “I gotta lot of loyal people,” he continued. “There’re three-year-olds that grew up and now they bring their three-year-olds to see my pictures. There’s this seven-year-old kid and his mother called me up this morning—he’s deaf, but he reads me and he laughs. How can I take that away from him?” he asked rhetorically. “You’re sayin’ to yourself, ‘Can this schmuck be genuine?’ Well, if not, I’m foolin’ myself.”
“This is not a Closed Set. Come On In. You’re Most Welcome,” reads a sign on the entrance door to whatever sound stage Jerry Lewis works on. On the set every day is a man hired by Lewis to play electronic mood music or sound effects on a huge tape machine.
Tuesday: An extended fanfare resounded through the set. “That’s his music,” said Frank Tashlin, and Lewis walked jauntily in, saying hello to everyone, wearing sky-blue pants (a hundred dollars a pair) and a tan windbreaker. Drums sounded and he walked to their beat. A bed had been placed on a waist-high platform for a close-up of Lewis underneath, snoring. Tashlin took him aside and quietly explained the shot to him: while he was under the bed, someone would sit on it, out of camera range; the someone was supposed to be an actress, but would actually be one of the heavier technicians so that the mattress springs would sag lower and hit Lewis. This explained, Tashlin attempted to get Lewis under the bed, but Jerry began imitating a monkey and jumping all over the director. “Did ya ever see a Jewish monkey?” he asked, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Tashlin coaxed him: “C’mon, Jerry. C’mon, little boy. Get under the bed and make your funny little faces. C’mon, be funny.” Finally under the bed, Jerry suddenly yelled, “I’m hooked. Lift the bed up, ya guinea faggot!” A couple of technicians lumbered over, lifted it, and Lewis unhooked himself from a spring. The lighting man put a light meter near Lewis’ face to gauge the reading and Lewis bit his hand. “C’mon, Jerry,” said Tashlin quietly, “get your little arm out of the way so it won’t cover your little face.” Lewis asked sarcastically whether the bed would collapse on him: “If the whole goddamn thing comes down, I’m outta business.” Tashlin assured him it wouldn’t. “From where you’re standing you’re very confident,” yelled Lewis. “Why don’t you get under here, you big giraffe!” Tashlin told him again to put his head under the bed. Lewis made faces at him. “How far did you read the director’s manual after it says ‘Roll’?” “Page one,” Tashlin replied and Lewis chortled. The director fixed Lewis’ hair so that it was more comical looking. “That’s the first affection I’ve had from you all day,” said Lewis. Tashlin called for the take to begin; Lewis started a symphony of snores. Some onlookers laughed quietly. The technician was poised to sit on the bed, but Tashlin held off giving the cue and Lewis continued to snore. “You’re going crazy waiting, aren’t you, you little bastard,” said Tashlin. Lewis laughed and continued his snoring. The director gave a hand cue, the technician sat, Lewis reacted comically. “That’s it, cut it,” Tashlin said, and Lewis tried to scramble out from under the bed, but some crew members had tied his shoelaces to the bedposts. “You shits! Who did that?!” he screamed. “Who tied my shoes to the bed? Chained! Like a goddamn Jew mouse!” Someone untied the laces and Lewis crawled out. “You’re through for today,” Tashlin told him, and Jerry imitated a monkey again. “Put me on my bar,” he said, climbing onto Tashlin.
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