by Jerry Lewis
“You sing it,” he said.
“Me?”
“You.”
I looked at the sheet, the piano went into the intro, I opened my mouth—and out came Yiddish. Double-talk. “Vay-meen o soy needle rachmon-eetz. . . .” Dean gave me a look. The laughs were coming stronger now.
“Oh, I only sing in Jewish,” I said. “Is that okay?”
“Jewish?” he said. I nodded. “I’m Italian,” Dean said. “You’re Jewish?”
I nodded again, with the Idiot face. Dean was smiling. The people were laughing. Hard. Christ, what a sweet sound! More intoxicating than any booze. “Someone told me you had your nose fixed,” I said in my nine-year-old voice.
“Yeah,” Dean said, pointing to his cheek. “It used to be here.”
This got a roar of laughter. And I blinked. Something had happened in that instant, something only I had seen, and it was giving me goose bumps. Dean’s ad lib had been not just fast but instantaneous. I’d already been in the business long enough to know how incredibly rare that was. Over the next sixty years, I would come to understand it better and better. The vast majority of comedians with good rhythm use beats—small hesitations, often with some comic business or other—to set up their jokes. Dean didn’t use beats.
I was in the presence of magic.
I can’t tell you what this looks like to somebody whose life is predicated on rhythm. Once we became a team, after we’d been together four or five years, there would be shows where I’d look at Dean and go, “Holy fuck.” It was like being in a lab, watching this magnificent experiment come to life. Nobody, I swear, ever had it in his bones like Dean had. My dad used to agree with me. Danny Lewis worked with straight men all through his career. Good ones. But nobody could touch Dean.
George Burns saw us at the Sands in the mid-fifties, and said to me over dinner one night, “He’s the greatest straight man I’ve ever seen.”
George Burns! Who lived through all the two-acts—Smith and Dale. Olsen and Johnson. Gallagher and Shean.
Not to mention Burns and Allen.
George used to tell the classic self-deprecating joke about straight men—namely, that all you really had to do to hold up your end was repeat what the comic said. If the comic says, “I lost my shoes,” you say, “You lost your shoes?” George joked, “It’s terrible, because I was at the beach, and there was a kid in the water yelling ‘help-help-help,’ and I yelled ‘help-help-help?’ And by the time I got to him, he drowned.”
George was so much better than that, of course. And George thought that Dean was the greatest of them all.
Who knew this on July 24, 1946?
July 25, actually—midnight had passed, and we had the twenty-four audience members of the second show at the 500 Club in the palm of our hands. The people roared as I ran over tables in my busboy jacket, smashing dishes and snipping neckties with a scissors. Our pastrami-bag cue sheet sat on the piano where we’d left it, just in case, but we’d abandoned our plan long before. We were in some different territory, some previously unexplored zone—way out on a limb, streaked with stardust. By the time I glanced at my Timex, I realized we’d been on for close to an hour and a half.
And they still wanted more.
By the time we finally were able to get off, we’d been on for over two hours. And this time, it was just Skinny who ducked into our dressing room—the Wolf had stayed away from our door. Skinny was all smiles.
“Now, that’s what I call lightning in a bottle!” he said. It was the first time I’d heard the expression. It wouldn’t be the last. “How come you guys didn’t tell me what you could do together?” Skinny asked.
“Because,” I answered, “we didn’t know it ourselves.”
Atlantic City had a split personality in those days. On the beach side of the Boardwalk, it was all family sun and fun. The inland side was all grown-up pleasures, 24/7. But AC, on both sides of the Boardwalk, was a tightly knit place, the type of place where, if anything out of the ordinary happened, word got around fast.
The following night, there were 200 people at the first show, out of a possible 240 seats. And they loved everything we threw at them—they went ballistic as they watched us trip and fumble through our wares, knowing full well that they were in on something special.
We were on fire. Not only did we remember the stuff from the first night (and do it better), we pulled new things out of the air. The second-night crowd was as enthusiastic as the people the night before—except that 200 people are so much louder than twenty-four! They bellowed with laughter, they didn’t want us to stop. After two hours and twenty minutes, we finally had to.
Soon there were lines around the block for all three shows at the 500 Club, including the two-thirty A.M. Dean and I couldn’t walk on the beach without people stopping us to say, “Bravo.”
But we weren’t leaving anything to chance, either. Forty years earlier, when the great W. C. Fields had played Atlantic City as a young juggler, he’d come up with a publicity stunt known as “the drowning gag.” My dad told me about it, I told Dean, and we brought it back. When the beach was good and crowded, I’d wade out into the surf up to my chest, then suddenly start waving my arms and yelling in distress. Dean would splash out, drag me back to shore, throw me down on the sand, apparently comatose, and act like he was about to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. By this time, we’d have a nice crowd around us. But before he’d begin, I’d sit bolt upright and say, “I’d rather have a malted, sir!”
With Gary Lewis, Atlantic City, 1946. Thank God for Tums.
“We’re fresh out,” Dean would say, smooth as silk. Then: “Hey, don’t I know you?”
“I’m Jerry Lewis!”
“And I’m Dean Martin!”
“I know that—I’m at the 500 Club with you, first show is at eight o’clock!”
And we’d jump up and run like madmen, all the way back to the Princess Hotel.
The bit was corny as hell, but it piqued the curiosity of a showbiz legend named Sophie Tucker, who happened to be walking along the beach one day and caught one of our “drownings.” Sophie was a contemporary of Fields—she probably remembered that publicity stunt from when he first pulled it—who billed herself as “The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas.” She was playing the 400 Club, on the Boardwalk, that July. After her last show, she’d come to see our last show.
She liked what she saw. A lot. She told the local paper, “These two crazy kids are a combination of the Keystone Kops, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello. They will leave their mark on the whole profession.”
There was a little vest-pocket park down Missouri Avenue from the 500 Club. Before shows and in between, Dean and I would hang out there, sitting around on a park bench and shooting the breeze, reminiscing about the past but mostly dreaming about the future.
Our future was closing in on us fast. One night, Skinny came up to the bench, a little out of breath. “I been looking for you turkeys everywhere,” he said. “I got a surprise for you.”
I went into the nine-year-old voice. “Tell us, oh tell us, oh please, Mr. D’Amato,” I screeched. “We love surprises!”
“Wolfie and I decided we want to hold you for the rest of the summer,” he said. “Four more weeks. Seven hundred fifty a week.” He gave us a look, dead serious. “Apiece.”
We went nuts. We kissed Skinny, kissed each other, kissed our lucky park bench. As soon as we really hit it big—and it wouldn’t be long— Skinny had that bench put in the club, bolted to the floor, with a plaque on it. The plaque read: “Here, on the stage of the 500 Club, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis became a team in the summer of 1946.”
Oh—by the way. I still have that brown-paper pastrami-sandwich bag. (I keep it in my safety-deposit box.) Sixty years on, the grease spots are still there. Apparently, great comedy, and pastrami grease, are forever.
CHAPTER THREE
FROM THE BEGINNING OF SHOW BUSINESS, IT’S BEEN UNDERSTOOD that you’re only as good as your billing.
You’re on top, you’re on the bottom, or you’re in the middle. If you’re just starting out, your name goes anywhere. When you knew you’d arrived, there was only one place to look—on top. Billing matters. A lot.
In late August of 1946, Dean and I knew we were on our way (only five weeks after we’d begun!), and we were discussing that very interesting and always somewhat sensitive matter. We both knew “Crocetti and Levitch” wasn’t going to make it . . . that was a no-brainer. Because I’d brought Dean into the mix, the 500 Club had made up early posters that read, “Lewis & Martin.” I knew that was wrong. Why? I’ll never know, but it was wrong. So we talked.
“What about alphabetical order?” Dean said.
“Then we’re back to Lewis and Martin,” I said.
“Not if you go by first names.”
“Just ‘Dean and Jerry’?” I asked.
“No, idiot—‘Martin and Lewis,’ but we use the first names, too, so it’s ‘Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis,’ and we make that contractual. We demand that it can’t ever appear otherwise.”
I thought about it. I reminded Dean that it was never “Bud Abbott and Lou Costello”; it was always just “Abbott and Costello.”
“But they had alphabetical working both ways!” Dean exclaimed.
“Yeah, and L is before M,” I said.
And Dean said, “You wanna call this act ‘Dean Lewis and Jerry Martin’?”
We both laughed at that, and I still laugh thinking about how sharp Dean’s mind was. We ultimately agreed that “Martin and Lewis” sounded great, but that “Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis” sounded better. So it was written into all contracts and agreements, and the billing could not ever be compromised.
We went back to the Havana-Madrid that fall and scored big-time with our nonsense. And it was nonsense—just the same tomfoolery I described earlier, with improvements and variations: The maître d’ and the busboy. The drill sergeant and the recruit. Don Juan and the monkey. The playboy and the putz.
Dean was always the suave one, the cool one, the one in charge. I was the wacked-out, terminally insecure (but dangerously uninhibited) nine-year-old.
What he did, his singing and comedy, could have worked without me—if he’d had the self-confidence. But what I did would never have worked without him.
Because everything that I did, I did off Dean. Every move I made was because he went, “Ah, ah.” No one understood what “Ah, ah” did. It stopped the body of a wildcat.
For Christ’s sake, if he wasn’t there, you’d have had a loose cannon! They’d have had me living in a rubber room!
He watched me breathe. He knew my breath. He was so intent, always watching for the exact right second to come in. He knew that there were a couple of breaths coming after this one; he knew to lay back until just the right moment.
I could time anything. Never once, in ten years, did he ever get in the way. Never once stepped on a line, spoiled a joke.
He was, quite simply, impeccable at what he did.
He was yin to my yang. Bedrock to my wildfire. His own natural comic instincts dovetailed perfectly with mine and made the sum of one and one into two million.
The more successful we got, the bolder we got. We’d squirt seltzer on each other (and the audience); we’d dump pitchers of water on each other—and the audience. The audience howled.
Please realize that these were very uncertain times. No matter how many images you conjure of the triumphant armies marching home, the sailor kissing the girl in Times Square, the years just after the war were dark and uncertain ones. Millions had been killed and maimed. Russian communism was looking like a very bad thing. Nuclear weapons were being tested. The Red Scares were beginning.
Meanwhile, our G.I.s, back from the war, were encouraged to embrace peace and prosperity. Everybody was supposed to get into harness and turn the U.S.A. into paradise on earth. There was a lot of unease and rebellion just under the country’s placid surface.
And so the sight of two grown men in a nightclub squirting water at each other and making silly jokes was a very welcome one. But our appeal went way beyond that.
What audiences saw, in a time of people hating each other, was the look in Dean’s eyes as he watched me wreak havoc. It was the look in my eyes as I watched him sing and be so perfect. You can’t fake that, nor was there any need to disguise it.
And people got it. Instantly, on a gut level. Our audiences had grown up with great comedy teams: Laurel and Hardy. Abbott and Costello. Hope and Crosby. Bob and Bing were the most modern team of the bunch, and in a way, even when we were just starting out, Dean and I were going up against them. But from the word go—in my mind—there was no contest.
Bob Hope was a great monologist and Bing Crosby was a great singer. Their “Road” pictures for Paramount were a huge success. (And an accidental one: Paramount had thrown that first script at them, Road to Singapore, in 1940, because the studio had nothing else to give them.) But everything they did together was totally scripted, even the live performances, and I don’t think the two men particularly liked each other, and I believe that deep down, it showed. The audiences laughed because the material was funny and the performers were skilled. But Hope and Crosby never generated anything like the hysteria that Dean and I did, and that was because we had that X factor, the powerful feeling between us.
And it really was an X factor, a kind of mystery.
The world of show business was so much smaller then than it is today. Word of mouth didn’t just shoot up and down the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, but up and down the Eastern Seaboard. So as soon as Dean and I hit big at the 500 Club, word about the new hot guys traveled at lightning speed to New York City, and agents and managers and performers hustled down to catch our act.
They realized we were a hit, but they all left scratching their heads: What is it that these guys do?
The news, and the mystery, got around fast. So fast that when we actually arrived in Manhattan for the first time as Martin and Lewis, we were instant celebrities. There was a ton of curiosity about us—and a ton of confusion.
You remember I mentioned Sunday nights, Celebrity Nights, at Leon and Eddie’s, the Fifty-second Street club? Only a few months earlier, Dean and I had gone there to star-gaze; now we figured it was our time to step up. So one night after our second show at the Havana-Madrid, we strolled across town.
The celebrity show at Leon and Eddie’s usually began about 3:15 A.M.; Dean and I walked in around 3:20—and immediately found ourselves in the midst of Showbiz Central. Milton Berle was on stage, getting heckled by Red Buttons, Jack Carter, Henny Youngman, Morey Amsterdam, Buddy and Jerry Lester, Alan King, Sonny King, the Ritz Brothers, Danny Kaye, Harvey Stone, Pupi Campo, Shecky Greene, Buddy Hackett, Joey Bishop, Tony Martin . . . More names than I’ve got type for.
With Sophie Tucker. She wasn’t sure who she’d go home with.
It was an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experience. Somewhere around 4:55 A.M., Milton decided to introduce us. We hoped he would, but we kept making out like “Oh no, not us, please . . . we couldn’t, really. Call someone else, please.”
We spoke those last few words as we got on stage, and there in front of us was all of show business . . . still not clear about what, exactly, we did! Dean started a song that the piano player didn’t know all that well, and the pianist hit a few clams. Well, that was all we needed. While Dean took out his pocket handkerchief and busily cleaned the piano’s keys, I lifted the lid, then dropped it with a huge bang.
I then proceeded to half-undress the piano player.
The audience was beside itself.
As the pianist sat there beet-red and bare-chested, Dean asked, “Would you like to try it again?”
The pianist hit the same clam.
And we both yelled, “Perfect!”
When we got off, Berle looked at the crowd and said, “I still don’t know what they do!”
The reason Dean and I had such fun ad-libbing and going completely crazy on sta
ge is that we both knew we had a great act—something we didn’t ever stray too far from, no matter how wild I got. And believe me, I had to get pretty wild to top myself. One time I’d gone so far that Dean and I found ourselves literally standing nose to nose, with maybe an eighth of an inch of air between us. And he said, with genuine anger in his voice, “I have finally come to the point in our relationship where I am going to have to tell you, if you do that again, it’s over. Do you understand that? O-V-U-R!”
I planted my mouth on his, gave him a big kiss, and said, “I understand perfectly.”
Now, I have to tell you—the first time I ever did that, Dean had absolutely no idea it was coming! None! Ninety-nine out of a hundred guys in the business would have blanched, would have flinched and killed the gag. Not my partner. He didn’t budge. Meanwhile, people in the audience were crying with laughter.
The act might have looked like chaos, but we could always get back to where we needed to get on a moment’s notice. We had musicians (that we carried) always at the ready. Cues, lights, sound, all knowing, “They will steer this machine—just be aware and ready!” We had that down to a gnat’s ass.
Either Dean and I, together, would save us, or Dean would save me, or I would save him. It was a brilliant concept. One that we never sat down and discussed. And once you recognize that the magic is there, you sooner or later become fearless and do just about anything that comes to you . . . always making it look like it has been totally planned. As I write it, it scares me a little to think of the guts we had.
After the Havana-Madrid, we played the Latin Casino in Philly, Loew’s State Theater back in Manhattan, the Rio Cabana in Chicago, the Stanley Theater in Camden, New Jersey, the Earl Theater in Philadelphia, return gigs at Loew’s State and the 500 Club, and Ben Marden’s fabulous, glass-roofed Riviera, overlooking Manhattan on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. These were all prime venues of the day (although the venue of venues—which I’ll tell you about in a moment— still eluded us), and Dean and I were building momentum as we went, getting better and better known—and, in the process, getting to know each other, and the foundations of our act, ever more deeply.