Dean and Me

by Jerry Lewis

  Then I hit on a genius solution—or what seemed at the time like a genius solution. One night, at a New Jersey resort where my parents were doing their act, a friend of mine, an aspiring performer, Lonnie Brown—the daughter of Charlie and Lillian Brown, resort hotelkeepers who were destined to become very important in my life—was listening to a record by an English singer named Cyril Smith, trying to learn those classy English intonations. I had a little crush on Lonnie, and, attempting to impress her, I started to clown around, mouthing along to the music, rolling my eyes and playing the diva. Well, Lonnie broke up, and that was music to my ears. An act was born.

  After a couple of hard years on the road, playing burlesque houses where the guys with newspapers on their laps would boo me off the stage so they could see the strippers, I became a showbiz veteran (still in my teens) with an act called “Jerry Lewis—Satirical Impressions in Pantomimicry.”

  I had perfected the act, and to tell the absolute truth, it was pretty goddamn funny. I would put on a fright wig and a frock coat and lipsynch to the great baritone Igor Gorin’s “Largo Al Factotum” from The Barber of Seville. I’d come out in a Carmen Miranda dress, with fruit on my hat, and do Miranda. Then into a pin-striped jacket, suck in my cheeks, and I’d do Sinatra singing “All or Nothing at All.” I knew where every scratch and skip was on every record, and when they came up, I’d do shtick to them. I had gotten better and better at contorting my long, skinny body in ways that I knew worked comedically. I practiced making faces in front of a mirror till I cracked myself up. God hadn’t made me handsome, but he’d given me something, I always felt: funny bones.

  And I never said a word on stage.

  The dumb act was a rapidly fading subspecialty in those rapidly fading days of baggy-pants comedy, and my own days doing it were numbered. There were a few of us lip-synchers out there, working the circuit, and while I liked (and still like) to think that I was the best of the bunch—nobody could move or pratfall or make faces like Jerry Lewis— I only had around three to eleven audience members per show who agreed with me. Those three or four or nine people would be wetting themselves while I performed, as the rest of the house (if anyone else was there) clapped slowly, or booed. . . . Bring on the strippers!

  And I never said a word.

  The truth is, funny sentences were always running through my brain: I thought funny. But I was ashamed of what would come out if I spoke—that nasal kid’s voice. So I was funny on stage, but I was only part funny: I was still looking for the missing piece.

  Room 1412 at the Belmont Plaza Hotel was more like a cubicle than a room—there was a bed, a couch, a chest of drawers, and . . . that was it. You couldn’t go to the john without bruising your shin. Sonny and I were visiting with Dean, who was fresh from a not-so-hot date.

  “She had a roommate,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Where the hell can a fella get laid in peace and quiet in this damn town?”

  He poured himself a Scotch to calm down, then gave us a look. “You’re not gonna let me drink this all by myself, are you?”

  Hot cocoa was about the strongest thing I’d had at that point in my life, but I gamely accepted a bathroom tumbler half-filled with what smelled like cleaning fluid. I even pretended to take a sip or two as Dean put some 78s on his record player and the three of us proceeded to get into an all-night bull session. To the sounds of Billie Holiday, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong, we sat and shot the breeze till all hours—or, I should say, one of us did. After Sonny nodded off, I just sat in awe as Dean held forth.

  The time of night and a glass or two of Scotch had put him in a philosophical mood, and he proceeded to tell me the story of how Dino Crocetti had emerged from Steubenville, Ohio, and become Dean Martin. It all sounded like a fairy tale to me: the rough-and-tumble Ohio River town full of steel mills, speakeasies, and whorehouses. The close-knit Italian family, his father the barber giving shaves and haircuts all day at a quarter apiece while his mother made pots of spaghetti and meatballs for all the relatives. Dino dropping out of school (“That wasn’t for me,” he said) and going to work in a foundry, then quickly realizing he wasn’t cut out for factory work. He ran liquor for a bootlegger ; he fought as a professional boxer called Kid Crochet. He dealt blackjack and poker in the biggest of Steubenville’s many illegal casinos, the back of the Rex Cigar store. He quit boxing before that face got ruined. And he sang.

  “I just had it in me,” Dean said simply. Wherever there was a chance to use his pipes—at a bar, a party, or just cruising down the street with his gang—he didn’t have to be persuaded. Before long, his reputation got around and a bandleader from Cleveland, named Sammy Watkins, hired him. And then an amazing thing happened: Frank Sinatra canceled a gig at the Riobamba nightclub in New York, and the Music Corporation of America, MCA, whose man in Cleveland liked Dean’s act, hired him to come east and fill in. He’d been Manhattan-based ever since.

  He’d already drunk a fifth.

  It sounded like a fairy tale, but then I wondered: What was he doing in this shoe box of a hotel room? Like me, Dean had made it to the big town but not the big time. From traveling the circuit, I was all too aware of how long the odds were against really making it. You had to really want it, for one thing. I wanted it so badly it affected my breathing. But I wasn’t so sure about this guy.

  And as dazzled as I was by him, I could see there was still a lot of Steubenville in Dean. Those red-and-white patent leather shoes he was wearing, for example—pimp shoes! And from time to time, I noticed, his speech lapsed into deze-dem-and-dose accents—partly his Italian-immigrant heritage (he spoke no English till age five, he told me), with a touch of Southern from West Virginia, right across the river from Steubenville. I noticed those big hands of his again, hands that had carried steel, fought in a ring, dealt cards. Life was tough, and this guy, great-looking as he was, knew it.

  “They call me the Boy with the Tall, Dark, and Handsome Voice,” he said with a smile that was half proud, half self-mocking.

  I just stared at him. The name certainly fit.

  “And look at me, a family man, too,” he said, pulling out a couple of snapshots. His wife, Betty, was pretty—she looked like the girl next door in an MGM movie. And there were three little kids: a boy, Craig, and two girls, Claudia and Gail. Quick work for a young guy! The fact that he’d been out looking for quiff earlier that evening didn’t faze me: This was showbiz.

  “I’ve got a kid on the way, too,” I told Dean.

  He snapped out of his reverie. “You’re kiddin’ me,” he said. “How old are you, pally?”

  Suddenly, I felt as shy as a girl. “I just turned nineteen,” I said. “But I’ve been married to Patti since October, and we have a baby due in July.” I couldn’t help smiling proudly. “How old are you?” I asked, like a kid at grade school.

  “Gettin’ up there,” Dean said. “About to turn twenty-eight.”

  Nine years’ di ference, I thought. He could be my big brother. I smiled at the idea.

  While Patti got more and more pregnant, I ran up and down the Eastern Seaboard, doing my act in little clubs and old theaters in Baltimore and D.C. and Philadelphia, always for the same princely salary: a hundred twenty-five a week. The big money came from the Big Apple, where my periodic gigs at the Glass Hat landed me an extra ten bucks per. And I was happy for that sawbuck, believe me: It bought Patti a maternity dress, which she wore until the eleventh month. The baby came, but a dress is a dress when you take it in.

  It was funny—wherever I happened to land a job that spring and summer of 1945, Dean always seemed to be there, too, usually a week or two ahead of me or behind; it was like the two of us had a minicircuit within the circuit. Sometimes, if I saw he was booked after me, I’d leave a note for him in the dressing room (which was a nail on the wall), something about the classy surroundings we were privileged to work in. I never got a note back. He didn’t seem like much of a one for writing.

  Then I returned to New York, t
his time to a nightclub on Broadway between Fiftieth and Fifty-first called the Havana-Madrid—to find that, miracle of miracles, Dean and I were both booked there at the same time, March of 1946.

  The Havana-Madrid was one of a number of Latin-themed clubs that had sprung up in Manhattan with the rise of the rumba craze in the late thirties. The owner was a guy named Angel Lopez, and he liked to alternate Anglo and Hispanic acts. Dean was the singer; I was there with my fright wig and records. On the bill with us were a dance team called the Barrancos, Pupi Campo and his orchestra, and the headliner, the great Cuban singer Diosa Costello.

  I was thrilled to be on the same show, at last, with my fantasy big brother. But it wasn’t enough for me to just be in the same place with him at the same time. Like all little brothers, I craved attention. And one night during the third show, as Dean stood on the Havana-Madrid stage entrancing the audience (but especially the ladies) with his honeyed version of “Where or When,” I figured out how to get it.

  The Barrancos had preceded Dean on the bill, finishing up with a hand-clapping, foot-stamping number that climaxed with Mr. Barranco bending Mrs. Barranco over a pot of fire. Very dramatic. They left the stage to big applause, and they also left their fire pot burning. With the houselights down low for Dean’s romantic number, the flickering flame in the pot behind him cast a cozy glow.

  The third show was in the wee hours of the morning, when there were only around eight people in the audience. In fact, at that time of night, there were more waiters in the house than customers—the waiters and captains were standing around with their napkins over their arms. It was a good time to go for broke, and that was exactly what I decided to do.

  My impression of Dom DeLuise.

  The spotlight was on Dean and the rest of the stage was in shadows, so it was easy for me to sneak out from the wings in my borrowed waiter’s suit. I’d prepped the man on the lighting board. As Dean began to sing, I suddenly went into a tremendous coughing fit, and a second spotlight shone on me. I was standing there with a three-pound hunk of raw meat stuck on a fork.

  “Who ordered steak?” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

  Needless to say, Dean was compelled to interrupt his number.

  I have to admit, there was a heart-stopping instant when I wasn’t sure how he would react. Most any serious performer would be furious at being upstaged by such an asinine prank. But I had made a calculation about Dean: Remembering the incredulous smile on his face as he told me his life story, I figured him for a guy who didn’t take himself too seriously, who saw all of life as one big crazy joke.

  And in the next instant, my calculation proved correct. Dean did a long, slow take for the audience, looked to the side of the stage where I wasn’t, and then—slowly, milking it for all it was worth—turned to face the monkey who had ruined his song. Our eyes met, and in that precious second, I saw the indulgent smile of the older brother I had always longed for. Dean was shaking his head at me, but he was grinning ear to ear.

  Now and then, over the following weeks at the Havana-Madrid, Dean and I would get up together at two or three in the morning and ad-lib some comedy for the late-night audience. After my initial foray, he had taken to retaliation, banging my record player while I was in the middle of my act, making it jump at unexpected moments. Of course, I had to retaliate back. And escalate.

  I’d put on a busboy’s jacket and run around the place at top speed, chasing the cigarette girl and dropping plates. I’d borrow a maître d’s jacket and seat people at the wrong tables. I’d take a trumpet or drum-sticks from one of the guys in the band and blow that horn or bang those drums as loudly as I possibly could. I’d come out with a mop and bucket and swab the floor, very messily, as Dean sang. And while I went nuts, Dean, with the brilliant comic instincts that nobody but me had suspected him of, flawlessly played it straight. He kept right on singing, giving me that far-off stare of his (with an indulgent smile always playing around the edges), which gave the audience the space to work itself into a frenzy. Then, when I did my act, he’d heckle me right back. The people, instantly sensing how totally we clicked, ate it all up.

  We were just screwing around, really, but an eerily farsighted journalist named Bill Smith sensed that something was cooking. “Martin and Lewis do an after-piece that has all the makings of a sock act,” he wrote in Billboard. “Boys play straight for each other, deliberately step on each other’s lines, mug and raise general bedlam. It’s a toss-up who walks off with the biggest mitt. Lewis’s double-takes, throw-aways, mugging and deliberate over-acting are sensational. Martin’s slow takes, ad libs and under-acting make him an ideal fall guy. Both got stand-out results from a mob that took dynamite to wake up.”

  Martin and Lewis, the man wrote. Those two names, together in that odd, unalphabetical order, had never appeared in print before. The phrase had a nice sound to it, but at that point, in early 1946, it was meaningless. We weren’t an act; we were just two young guys battling the show-business odds. If we’d never met that day on Broadway and Fifty-fourth, if we’d never both happened to play the Havana-Madrid, we would have gone our own middling ways through the entertainment industry. Together, we ignited, and made America scream. Why? You tell me. Chemistry is chemistry. But I have a few pretty good ideas.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ATLANTIC CITY IN THE SUMMER OF 1946 WAS A VERY DIFFERENT place than it is today. Before the Bally and the Trump Taj Mahal and the rest of the megacasinos, long before gambling got legalized and the street life went indoors, there was a lively, milling, seaside-carnival feeling about the Boardwalk: You heard the sounds of hurdy-gurdies and happily screaming kids, you smelled the salt air and hot buttered corn on the cob and sarsaparilla. Of course, there were more grown-up amusements, too. . . . And, just as Vegas used to be, AC was very much in the pocket of organized crime. Philadelphia, the closest big city, was the guiding influence.

  Paul D’Amato (everyone called him Skinny; he’d picked up the nickname in his teenage years and held on to it even after he filled out a bit) was a rough-and-tumble character with a good heart, a guy who stayed on the right side of some very influential people by minding his business. He was always suspected of being—as they say—a friend of the friends, but no one ever knew for sure. That was a big part of Skinny’s mystique: He kept you guessing. Still, his hand-tailored suits, Parisian silk ties, and custom-made shoes seemed like a big clue. With a little help from his Philadelphia pals, and along with a partner, Irvin “Wolfie” Wolf, Skinny ran the biggest nightclub in Atlantic City, in a yellow-brick-fronted building with a theater-style marquee on South Missouri Avenue, just a couple of blocks up from the Boardwalk. The marquee read “500 Café,” but most everyone knew it as the 500 Club, or the Fives, for short.

  Inside were sixty tables, zebra-skin bar stools, an ever-present blue cloud of cigarette smoke, and an off-the-books gambling casino in the back room. Nightclub paradise. The Fives was where Abner Greshler had booked me that July, for the princely sum of a hundred fifty bucks a week, on a bill with the headliner, Jayne Manners, a busty blonde who told a few jokes and sang a few songs and wound up in the papers a lot, and a long-lashed tenor named Jack Randall.

  A hundred fifty a week! It may not sound like much, but it was a 50 percent raise over what I’d been earning. And when you consider that a dollar in 1946 was worth about ten today, 150 per meant I could bring my bride and my almost-one-year-old Gary down for a real beach vacation, complete with a twelve-dollar-a-night room at the Princess Hotel, one block off the Boardwalk. And this, my friends, was paradise.

  Except that there was trouble in paradise. Skinny, who micromanaged every detail of what went on in his club, from the precise proportion of water in his watered-down Scotch to the exact depth of the décolletage on Jayne Manners’s gown, hated Jack Randall with a passion. “Christ, what was I thinking when I booked this finocchio?” Skinny said. “He sings like his nuts are caught in his zipper.”

  Nor did he seem any too pleased with me.
“You’re running short, kid,” he told me as I came off stage to polite applause from maybe thirty people. “Throw in a couple more impressions, see if you can stretch it to twenty minutes.”

  Then I watched Skinny’s face as he watched Randall sing. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  And then, one cool July morning, as a fog bank rolled in off the Atlantic, Jack Randall came down with laryngitis.

  On one hand, Skinny was overjoyed. On the other, he was out one-third of his show. When I heard him bitching about it to Wolfie, I couldn’t help piping up. “Excuse me, Mr. D’Amato, Mr. Wolf,” I said. “But how about Dean Martin?”

  Skinny winced. “Another crooner?” he said. “Christ, I need that like I need a third ball.”

  “Oh no, Mr. D’Amato,” I said. “Dean doesn’t just sing. We worked together lots of times—he and I did all kinds of funny stuff together.”

  I was tap-dancing, but fast, for two reasons: One, I was worried about my own spot on the show. I knew that Skinny’s partner, Wolfie— a sharp-eyed, heavyset fellow who would just as soon have your thumbs broken as look at you—was not my biggest fan. In fact, Skinny wasn’t my biggest fan, but at least he chuckled now and then at my record act. Wolfie didn’t chuckle. As I stood on stage in my fright wig, he kept shooting me looks that said he wouldn’t mind breaking me like a stick.

  The child no one would claim.

  But the other reason I was pushing for Dean was that I missed him. I was telling the truth about the funny stuff. We’d had fun together. You didn’t see that too often in show business. People tried hard, performed skillfully, but fun was for the audience.