Dean and Me

by Jerry Lewis

  Maybe Skinny read this in my eyes. After thinking a minute, he nodded. “Okay, okay, I’ll book your buddy,” he said. “But only ’cause I’m over a barrel. And I better see some sparks fly.”

  Now that things had turned serious, I had to send Patti and Gary back to Newark. I had a tear in my eye as I put my wife and baby on the bus. . . .

  I was waiting at the terminal on Washington Street, downtown Atlantic City, and then I saw the bus. As it pulled into the inner drive, I rushed over and watched the passengers unload. First a lady, then a kid, then another lady . . . and there he was!

  “Hey, Dean! Over here!” I called. I was standing by a bench with my foot resting nonchalantly on the seat. Dean looked and smiled, because (it occurred to me later on) at that moment he remembered the milk shakes I always drank. . . . When I’d first called him about the gig, there had been a bad moment on the phone when he thought I was Jerry Lester (Buddy Lester’s brother, and, like Buddy, another excellent comic).

  Now he knew for sure it was Jerry Lewis.

  Still growing at nineteen, but with a pompadour that added another six inches, easy, thanks to about three and a half pounds of orange pomade . . . and the flies liked settling in that pomade! My pants were so pegged that they choked the blood flow to my ankles, and I was wearing my Irvington High School sweater—all wool and a little hot for Atlantic City in July at three in the afternoon. The truth was, I had no clothes to speak of, just my blue stage suit that already had a mirror shine on the ass from too much pressing. Until your suit shone in the back, you were not quite a veteran.

  I went to help Dean with his bag, grabbing it in my right hand— but then Dean extended his hand to shake, so I had to switch hands . . . except that as I switched, he went for the left hand with his left, banging into the bag. He smiled and said, “Oh, we’re gonna be all right.” I proceeded toward our transportation (Skinny had lent me the house car, a 1945 Chrysler station wagon with wood on the doors), and Dean stopped.

  “Hold on, pally, Poppa’s got another little chestnut coming.”

  And he strolled over to the bus driver, who was taking luggage out of the bus’s belly, and waited till the driver handed him his golf clubs. Dean whipped out a buck and handed it to the driver. Wow! Was he cool! A buck! I shlepped his bags to the back of the wagon and put them in.

  In the car, Dean was quite talkative. “When did you open here?” he asked. “What’s the joint like? Any broads? And what time is rehearsal? And where do I lay my curly head?”

  But here we were. I jumped out of the car, got his bag and golf clubs, and started for the lobby. Dean looked skeptically at the entrance awning, which read, “Princess Hotel and Spa.”

  The Princess was near the beach, where everything was damp. After one night of hanging in a closet at this (un-air-conditioned) palace, your clothes looked like someone had sat in them during a Greyhound bus ride from Fresno to Hartford. They didn’t have hot and cold running chambermaids, you did the bed yourself. Every other day, you found linens outside your door. I think they felt it was costly if they knocked. The bathroom (down the hall) was a delight. You only prayed that all your normal bodily functions would lock up until you checked out of this facility.

  Dean looked at the hotel lobby, then at me.

  “Is this the best we can do?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “We can do better at the Ritz-Carlton, but their suites run a little more than the twelve dollars a night we’ll be paying here.”

  Resigned to our surroundings, we decided to save a little money by splitting the tab. “Do you have anything in a double for us?” I asked the desk clerk (the same man selling cotton candy outside the hotel lobby).

  “Yeah, about thirty-five rooms,” he answered. “Take your pick. But the twelve-dollar price is only from the eighth floor up.”

  “How many floors are there?” Dean asked.

  “Eight,” the clerk said.

  “We’ll take it,” Dean said. “Can someone carry our bags up?”

  The desk clerk looked at me and said, “Sure, him.”

  After walking up the eight flights (the elevator was broken), I was perspiring pretty good into my wool sweater. I reached down and took the key out of my sneaker (“Are you sure your valuables shouldn’t be in the hotel safe?” Dean asked) and unlocked the door. . . .

  Which swung open and hit a bedpost. Dean looked at the room, then looked at me. “What are we paying here a week?” he asked.

  I told him $84, forty-two bucks apiece.

  He plopped himself on the edge of one of the beds and lit a Camel. And began to giggle. No one on the planet giggled like he did, and it was catching.

  “You wanna share with me what’s making you chuckle?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure. That little card on the dresser from ‘The Princess Management.’ Towels every other day?”

  “Sometimes they’re still damp!” I assured him.

  He laughed, so I laughed. While I had him in the mood, I told him: “Dean, so you aren’t disappointed—when we go to the club, our dressing room is a folding chair.”

  Our hotel room was so small, the mice had to go out to change their minds. (Credit: Henny Youngman.) But we were together, and that made me very happy. Loneliness was not my strong suit.

  We arrived at the 500 Club at a quarter to five, walked in, and went straight to the band. A really nice bunch of guys . . . a small bunch, but nice. In fact, the music complement was as follows: piano, trumpet, bass, and drums. The drummer was Bernie, and he had a big nose that everyone teased him about, so he and I became compadres—his nose and my entire being up for grabs. Bernie was the first one to tell a funny story about his beak. It seems he’d been drinking at a party and his girl aroused him while they were dancing. Well, he got an erection, walked into the wall, and broke his nose. Pete Miller was the bandleader. A very nice man and a terrific pianist (I was so jealous).

  Dean put his bag down, opened it, and took out the sheets for his four musical numbers. These weren’t arrangements, like stars have, but just straight sheet music, for piano only, purchased at Woolworth’s music counter. “That’s it?” Pete asked.

  “Just play and let the guys fill in,” Dean told him. “I’ve done it before. It always works.”

  It appeared that Dean was trying to comfort the band, yet deep down, I sensed that he was the one who really needed comforting. But would he ever show it? Not even close. It was my first experience with the bravado that would amaze me for the next ten years. Dean was always working, not just when he was performing but throughout his life and times. He made me understand that your life is your own—work it, nurture it, protect it. He said to me one day, “You know, the day you’re born, you get the pink slip on you—outright ownership. You must only share that life with those that you, and only you, choose. We are not brought on this earth as an object of sacrifice.”

  Often, Dean would speak philosophically, saying things that I believe had been inside him for a long, long time—things that, over the following ten years, he would tell me and very few others. No, he wasn’t a drunk or a buffoon, as many thought. He was as sharp as a shit-house rat, and he understood every move he ever made (and every move everybody else made). But he loved playacting. That’s how he became the actor he was in films like Some Came Running and Rio Bravo. I learned a great shtick from Dean early on: If you make believe you’ve had a few, or you look like you’ve misplaced your wallet, usually people will stay away. And he did it like a champ. . . .One hour to showtime, we’re waiting in the alley outside the club, and my stomach is doing the aria from Figaro. Dean shows such nerves . . . as he yawns and lights up another Camel.

  How’d they get rid of the numbers?

  Who could have thought—as we stood in that alley with the smells from the kitchen, the cats going up and down, the one folding chair between us—who could have thought that in four and a half hours, we would have changed the face of American show business? Certainly not us.

 
Restless, we walked around to the club’s main entrance and went inside for a drink. The 500 Club’s bar was huge, running from the front of the house all the way back to the maître d’s desk at the entry to the showroom. In order to sit down, you had to grease some palms. Once again, the bills came out of Dean’s pocket, and we sat.

  “Give me a Chivas Regal, water back,” Dean told the bartender.

  What the hell is that, I wondered—a dog? Meanwhile, the bartender was looking at me, waiting. I finally decided . . . here goes nothing. “Give me the same, Coke back,” I said.

  Dean watched me as I got the drink. I picked up the Coke first.

  “Have you ever done this before?” he asked.

  “Done?” I said, sipping my Coke.

  “Imbibing. Boozing. Drinking. Ever do it before?”

  “Well, not exactly. . . . Well, on Passover. . . .”

  Dean smiled and said, “Okay, just take it easy.”

  A half hour to showtime. We went outside the showroom, and I showed Dean where we were supposed to dress. He put his hands on his hips. “It is a fuckin’ folding chair!” he said.

  I paced back and forth for a few minutes, then walked into the showroom to see what was up. My heart sank. It was worse than it had been the other night, when I’d played to seven people. Now there were six. I decided not to tell Dean. I walked over to the lighting guy and said, “Please keep the brights down—we’d be better off not seeing who we’re playing to!”

  I ran back to our folding chair and got my blue suit on. Dean was sitting on the chair, napping. I had to wake him to remind him that once I went on, he had only seventeen minutes to get ready.

  I was the opening act. I went out and did my pantomimicry, and came off to polite applause from the audience, which had now swelled to maybe eleven people. (As usual, there were two or three customers doubled over with laughter; the rest smiled now and then.) Dean went on next. He did his four numbers—I remember “Where or When,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “I’ve Got the Sun in the Morning (and the Moon at Night),” and “Oh, Marie.”

  I stood in the wings, mesmerized, as he performed. He really was an amazing singer, warm and direct, with a way around a romantic tune that got to women where they lived. But the funny thing was, Dean didn’t seem to understand his own power. Some part of him was always standing back, making fun of what he did. He wasn’t yet at the point where he would stop a number to make a wisecrack (and very often, get lost in the process—that’s where the drunk act eventually came in handy), but occasionally you could see in his eyes, as he sang, that he just couldn’t take the song seriously. And he had a way of making little self-deprecating remarks between songs, almost under his breath, remarks that if you listened—and I sure did—were killer-funny. But they were throwaway, as much of his singing itself was. There was something about how ridiculously handsome Dean was—about the way he could practically get away with just standing there and being admired— that made trying hard seem almost laughable to him.

  Impressed by him but slightly confused by his attitude, the small audience gave him a reasonably warm hand. Jayne Manners, our headliner, closed the show in her inimitable fashion. Unlike Dean, she made sure the people understood exactly what her act was about. She spelled it right out for them: Big boobs—funny. A big-breasted blonde singing badly—funny. A big-breasted blonde making off-color remarks—that’s entertainment!

  Back at our folding chair, Dean and I were starving—between rehearsing and worrying, neither of us had eaten a bite since that morning. The 500 Club had what they called a runner: a Jewish kid named Morris. So Dean and I slipped Morris a couple of bucks and sent him out to score us some of the food that’s killed more of my people than Hitler: hot pastrami on rye, don’t trim the fat.

  But as Morris walked out, Skinny and Wolfie stalked in. A double visit did not seem like a good sign, and the look in both men’s eyes wasn’t promising.

  “Where’s the funny shit?” Skinny asked.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “The funny shit you said the two of you were gonna do together— where is it?”

  All the while, Wolfie is glaring at us like we’d propositioned his sister. I looked at Skinny. I looked at Dean. (Dean looked puzzled.) I cleared my throat. “Ah, actually, we were just going to discuss that, Mr. D’Amato. And Mr. Wolf,” I added weakly.

  This time it was Wolfie who spoke up. “You better,” he grunted.

  His meaning couldn’t have been clearer. Skinny was the good cop, the nice guy, the guy who’d bend over backwards to make everyone happy. Wolfie wasn’t. The word on the Boardwalk was that Irvin Wolf had some serious muscle behind him and didn’t hesitate to use it. He didn’t say the words “cement overshoes”—he didn’t have to.

  Meanwhile, I was shaking in my Florsheims. The fact is, when I’d told Skinny about the funny stuff Dean and I did together, funny stuff had been the last thing on my mind. Staying employed was the first thing on my mind, with the side benefit of getting a gig for (and seeing) Dean.

  Who, now that Skinny and Wolfie had stalked back out, was looking askance at me. “What in Christ’s name did you sell them?” Dean asked.

  The words came out in a rush. “I knew you had no gig, they asked me to suggest someone, I suggested you, and they said no, not another singer, so I said, ‘But we do things together.’”

  “Why did you do that?” Dean asked.

  “Because I wanted you to be here and work and be a friend and pay half of a double room, and I was lonely,” I said.

  “Get a dog!” Dean said.

  Just then, Skinny leaned back through the door, making me jump. “P.S.—I suggest you guys get something going for the next show,” he said. “I suggest this only because I told a number of my best customers, who will be here for the next show, that you fellas did other shit besides crooning and miming. Capeesh?”

  “Yes sir, Mr. D’Amato,” I said.

  No pressure!

  As Skinny turned to leave, he almost collided with Morris the runner. I took the greasy brown bag and told Morris to keep the change. He gave the fourteen cents in his hand a fishy look, shook his head, and left. Dean and I were alone, with two hours until the midnight show.

  I opened the bag, took a pastrami sandwich, and held one out to Dean. “Hungry?” I said.

  He grabbed the sandwich. “Gimme that!” he barked. “Of course I’m hungry—hungry and scared shitless. What the hell are we gonna do here?”

  “Relax,” I said around a mouthful of pastrami and rye. “I have a plan.”

  While Dean watched, I took a makeup pencil from my table, ripped the greasy bag open to make a flat sheet, and began to write, avoiding the grease spots.

  I wrote “Filler.”

  I wrote “Busboy.”

  I wrote “That Old Gang of Mine.”

  I wrote “Italian Lumberjack.”

  I wrote “April Showers.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Dean asked.

  “Okay,” I told him. “This is material. I’m writing down bits I remember from my dad, from burlesque, from all over. ‘Filler’ is how we get from your intro to the Busboy bit, which I think you remember. . . .”

  “What’s that say?” he asked, pointing at the bag. “What’s the— what’s that say? The Italian Lumberjack?”

  “A variation on a theme,” I explained. “Whatever we do, I’m the kid and you’re the big brother. I’m the busboy, you’re the captain. You’re the organ-grinder, I’m the monkey. You’re the playboy, I’m the putz. Follow?”

  He was smiling. “Sure, putz,” he said. Smiling.

  “In the Italian Lumberjack, you’re the lumberjack,” I told him.

  He grinned. “Naturally.”

  “And I’m the kid brother. I say, ‘What do you do for a living?’ You say, in a nice, old-country accent, ‘I cut down the trees.’”

  He gave it a whirl in his best Italian accent. “I cut-a down the trees.”

  I pitched my v
oice up a couple of octaves so I sounded maybe eight, nine years old. “Yeah? And what do you do after that?”

  Dean narrowed his eyes menacingly at me. “Then ... then I cut ’em up,” he said.

  “Bingo!” I told him. “We’re on fire!”

  Dean, eating, looked at me as though he knew we’d be OK. I liked that.

  Okay: twelve midnight, that night.

  The joint is jammed, maybe twenty-four people. My God, they must have been giving something away. Anyway, the orchestra plays its timid overture—the orchestra being the aforementioned piano, trumpet, bass, and drums. Once they started playing, it didn’t take long to realize they sounded just like a piano, trumpet, bass, and drums.

  And I was on. I did my seventeen minutes of miming to recordings, and heard what sounded like some applause. They also could have been calling for a waiter.

  Then Dean came on.

  He took center stage and sang Song One: “Oh, Marie.” Nice! Then he began Song Two: “Pennies from Heaven.”

  I’d combed my hair straight and parted it dead center, put on my street jacket, and sat at one of the ringside tables. As Dean finished the number, I caught his eye and nodded at him. Don’t do anything yet was what that nod was saying. He read me, started to introduce his next song.

  “I got a special request,” he told the audience. “But I’m gonna sing anyhow.”

  A couple of laughs from out in the dark.

  As Dean sang the first few notes of “Where or When”—that nice, quiet, romantic tune—I suddenly banged my table as hard as I could. The china and silverware danced. “Waiter!” I yelled in my Idiot voice. “Where’s my Chateaubriand for two, for Chrissakes?”

  Dean stopped the band. “Hold it,” he said. And to me: “Hey, I’m tryin’ to make a living up here.”

  “Doing that?! Hah-hah-huh-huh!”

  “You think it’s easy?” he asked me.

  “It’s a piece of cake—you’re stealing the money!” I yelled.

  He motioned me to come up to the stage. I looked around—me?— then stood and went up there. Did some shtick with squinting into the lights. Got a laugh, did it some more. Dean went over to the piano, took some sheet music, handed it to me.