Dean and Me

by Jerry Lewis

  Lolly Parsons may have sounded like Betty Boop, but she wielded a lot of power. She was the Big Mamoo, the Chief, the Ultimate Journalist. Give me a break. She was an old, fat has-been who couldn’t make it in Hollywood, so she made it with everyone she could, including William Randolph Hearst. She’d tried acting and flunked, and Mr. Hearst needed a spy to live in the underbrush of Hollywood and tell him all the stuff that eccentric old men need to hear, so poof! She was a columnist.

  At the press conference, Lolly tried to take us down a peg. Sure, we’d been a hit in New York, but Hollywood was a very different place, she told us. From the outset, though, I made it clear that I wasn’t about to kneel before her. “We’ll be an even bigger hit here,” I predicted flatly. Lolly made a face like she’d bitten a lemon. I was always outspoken and honest with her, and would eventually get in deep trouble because of it. Later Keller said, “If you think of the cosmos, we are but sand on a world of beaches . . . we almost mean nothing when you count it all. What are you trying to be? The conscience of the world of show business? Wise up, sonny. They won’t hear you, but I love that you try!”

  At the Brown Derby, Dean whispered to me, “Please, don’t flag-wave. We’re lucky we’re here!”

  I said, “We’re not lucky! We’re good at what we do, and don’t ever forget that.” Then I made the face of a little kid who has just spoken out of turn. . . .

  That night we opened at Slapsy Maxie’s, on the Miracle Mile—Wilshire Boulevard between Fairfax and La Brea. After all the publicity about these two crazy people, the Crooner and the Monkey, every big shot in town had come to watch.

  It was an era when all the stars went out at night—to dance and dine, to see and be seen. Los Angeles was a city of fabulous nightclubs: Ciro’s, Mocambo, Trocadero. But the biggest, poshest, most fashionable club in L.A. was Slapsy Maxie’s. The ringside was huge—it looked like 180 degrees when you were standing at the center of that great stage. And at the tables were (get a load of this): Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Jane Wyman, Ronald Reagan, James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, The Marx Brothers (the important ones: Harpo and Chico), Edward G. Robinson, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Carmen Miranda, Al Jolson, Mel Tormé, Count Basie, the whole “Metro” group, including Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, not to mention Greer Garson, Spencer Tracy, William Powell, Billy Wilder, June Allyson, and Gloria De Haven (more about these last two soon)....

  Keller was outside our dressing room, announcing every name as they entered the club—names that could not only excite but make you shake with fear. . . . And we were about to go out there in front of all those people and do our stuff.

  I looked at Dean a moment, and he saw the question in my eyes. I never said a word, though I wanted to ask, “Are we good enough?”

  And he smiled at me as only he could smile, and in his eyes I saw my answer: “We’re fine! We’ll be a smash!”

  And we were. Oh, were we a smash. We tore that goddamn place down.

  The day after our opening at Slapsy Maxie’s, the studios came calling.

  We had an initial meeting with Jack Warner, who delighted in doing his own stand-up and clearly would rather have gotten a laugh with a joke he’d heard from a grip or an electrician than sign a new twenty-year deal with Bette Davis.

  Then we got a call asking us to meet with the great Louis B. Mayer himself, at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in Culver City. After taking the famous Long Walk—everyone in Hollywood knew about that intimidating corridor that led to Mayer’s office—we were ushered in by two security guards, one on Dean and one on me. The office was known as Mayer’s Folly, and when I saw the layout, I understood why.

  We were asked to sit in two chairs carefully placed before Mr. Mayer’s desk—close enough for him to shake our hands. Although he wasn’t a tall man, he was looking down on us, as if we were two street urchins. I kept staring around the huge office, and it soon became evident to me that Mayer was sitting on a platform. It was subtle, but he was definitely sitting higher up than the two of us—an ingenious device that made him the prophet and all those sitting before him the disciples. A great device for him and his need to dominate.... But as young as I was, I could still smell a rat.

  We sat and listened politely as he told us his life story: how he’d started from nothing, come west, and built this studio . . . and now he was L. B. Mayer! When he took his first breath from the dissertation and made us an offer for forty thousand dollars a picture—with MGM’s ironclad control over all our outside work—I wanted so much to say, “And you’re still nothing.” But because I was afraid Dean might slash my throat, instead I said, “Mr. Mayer, we would like to sleep on your offer and get back to you.”

  Mayer didn’t look happy. “No one out there will better my deal!” he shouted.

  Both Dean and I half-smiled. We got up, made that interminable walk to the door, and, as if we had rehearsed it, both turned and waved heartily....

  (We later found out that after we’d left, Mayer had delivered the immortal pronouncement: “The guinea’s not bad, but what do I do with the monkey?”)

  When we arrived back at our hotel, there was a message to call our agent. Dean made the call. I made a malted—the only true sustenance I gave my body in those days. I was just too excited about everything that was happening to us to eat anything else. My partner, on the other hand, had a six-course dinner every night, without fail. I’d say to him, “Eat, my boy, build yourself up so you can continue to carry the Jew.”

  Dean, on the phone with Greshler, was doing all the listening. I heard nothing after the first hello. He finally said, “Okay, Abby, I’ll tell Jerry. He’ll like that a lot.” Then he hung up and, to drive me crazy, stuck a cigarette in his mouth and proceeded to look all over the suite for a match.

  I knew what he was up to, but I bit anyway. “Tell me already, you lousy fink,” I said. “And use the goddamn lighter in your pants pocket.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, grinning. “Abby says he’s not really interested in the Mayer meeting,” he told me. “He says we can do better.”

  When we sat down with Greshler, he told us that Universal had offered us thirty thousand dollars a picture. Twentieth Century Fox offered a little less, but for a six-picture deal. Sam Goldwyn wanted us as a team, but with the option to split us up when a project called for either a handsome leading man or a crazy Jewish monkey. Republic wanted to make a film with us, but basically wanted to shoot our act in a nightclub. (An interesting idea—in hindsight!) United Artists thought we’d be good in a remake of Of Mice and Men. Columbia, in the person of the notorious Harry Cohn, told Abby Greshler we were nothing more than The Three Stooges, minus one. Warner Brothers offered us the most money—but only if we signed for a seven-year deal.

  Finally, our agent mentioned the one studio I’d silently prayed we would hear from—Paramount.

  First tux: Chicago was never handsomer.

  Hal Wallis, the producer who’d come on so strong in our dressing room at the Copa, was back with a serious offer: fifty thousand a picture to start with, working up to a ceiling of $1.25 million a film over the next five years. The money sounded good. But I told Dean and Greshler that for me there was a lot more to it than money.

  For about a year, when I was seventeen and eighteen, I’d worked as an usher at the Paramount Theater in New York, the site of Frank Sinatra’s first great triumph in the early forties. And so I had a sentimental feeling about Paramount, but it was more than sentiment. While I was ushering, I had the chance to see the studio’s in-house promotional films, which showed the stars on the lot, the sound stages, the art department, the camera department, the wardrobe and makeup departments, the stars’ dressing rooms, the commissary, and—most fascinating to me—the editing room. Wow! I thought Paramount was just the greatest studio of them all, the best of the best. That name! Those stars ... W. C. Fields, Gary Cooper, The Marx Br
others, Mae West, Claudette Colbert, William Powell...

  “A lot of people have serious money on the table,” Greshler reminded us. “I can go back to Mayer. . . .”

  “Let’s go with Paramount,” Dean said.

  Greshler said, “You’re sure?”

  “My partner’s sure,” Dean told him.

  When Dean and I signed to make movies with Hal Wallis and Paramount, I thought all our troubles were over. Little did I know they were only beginning.

  After all, becoming a movie star is the American dream, right? Sign on the dotted line; fame and riches follow! Well, the movies would bring us a ton more money; they would spread our fame around the world. But they would never take us to the artistic heights we achieved in live performance: in clubs, theaters, and on television (much of early TV was broadcast live).

  Why was that?

  When my partner and I got up in front of an audience, any audience, we and they knew that at any minute absolutely anything could happen. Our wildness, our unpredictability, were a big part of the package. It was thrilling to an audience that we could do all the mischievous things they might imagine but would never really do.

  This was only half of it, though.

  The other half was that indefinable something I’ve talked about: our obvious pleasure in performing together. Audiences have a great desire to feel along with their favorite performers. Dean and I had an uncanny ability to get an audience to not just be viewers but to participate in our fun.

  In films it wasn’t as easy to generate those feelings. In fact, it was damn near impossible. After all, the pleasure of movies is not in spontaneity but in story. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl get back together. Three acts—that structure is as old as the hills. But there are parts of the human spirit that three acts can leave out.

  For his first project with Martin and Lewis, Hal Wallis had decided to try a low-risk proposition: plugging us into a low-budget movie project he’d already started. The picture, called My Friend Irma, was to be based on a popular radio series of the same name, about a ditzy Manhattan career girl, Irma (played by Marie Wilson), her best friend Jane (played by Diana Lynn), and their adventures. The series had been created by Cy Howard, who had also written the screenplay. With a little revision, Wallis thought, Dean and I could be plugged into the script as Irma and Jane’s boyfriends.

  So he thought.

  It felt like Fantasyland when the two of us were ushered onto the Paramount lot for our initial meetings with studio brass and our director-to-be, George Marshall. Mr. Marshall, who had directed W. C. Fields in You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man and Bob Hope in Monsieur Beaucaire, was not only a terrific filmmaker but a wonderful person (and, ultimately, a dear friend and confidant). He was to direct us in our screen test first thing the next morning.

  The 5:30 A.M. wake-up call came as something of a shock: Normally, that hour was one my partner and I only saw when we were turning in! For the first time, we began to realize what moviemaking held in store for us. Shooting generally begins around nine in the morning, but with travel, breakfast, makeup, and wardrobe, you’d better get rolling at half past five or you’ll have a couple of dozen people understandably pissed. So we learned right away that being on time was a top priority.

  We sat down in canvas director’s chairs, and a crafts-service gentleman gave us coffee. At about five after nine, George Marshall and his assistant director walked onto Stage 9, along with Marie Wilson and Diana Lynn. Introductions all around—matter-of-fact for Marie and Diana, not so for Dean and me. My God, we had seen them on the huge screen at the Paramount in New York, and here we were standing next to them, getting ready to act. To be directed. Two little things we’d never done before.

  Neither Dean nor I knew anything about Mr. Marshall’s career. And “Mr. Marshall” was what everyone called him—until you knew him much, much better, and then it was “Bones.” That was the nickname for anyone who had funny bones: a deep-down, world-class sense of humor, the kind you’re born with, the kind that can never be learned. George Marshall had the funny bones of Laurel and Hardy—in fact, he had directed some of their earliest work, which I didn’t learn until much later. Had I known that morning, I’d have died from fear.

  The set was Irma’s apartment. Dean was up first, to play a scene with Diana Lynn as Jane’s boyfriend Steve, an aspiring singer. Paramount had signed Diana to replace the woman who’d played Irma’s sidekick on the radio, feeling that as a known box-office quantity, she might sell a few more tickets. The studio was certainly still unsure that Martin and Lewis would mean anything on the big screen. This test was supposed to give them a clue.

  In Dean’s scene, he was to ask Diana’s character to please understand that he couldn’t just get a job—that he loved singing, that was his life. She was to ask him why he couldn’t do both: “Sing and work like a regular person.”

  The scene went very well: Dean was terrific for his first time. In fact, most of the crew and people around the set that morning were a bit surprised, as was I, at how comfortable he looked doing the scene, how relaxed. The camera doesn’t lie. It takes what you give it—no more, and very often a little less. Dean was my hero that morning: He was giving me a leg up (I thought) on being a movie star. Everybody was ecstatic, and before we knew it, it was time for lunch.

  I was to do my test after we ate. I’ve never been less hungry in my life.

  Oh, well—off to the Paramount commissary. Pauline Kessinger, head of the commissary and a power broker in her own right (imagine the world’s most exclusive restaurant—seating is everything), gave us a big greeting at the door and steered us toward a good table. Herb Steinberg, head of the P.R. department, had publicity stills taken of us as we entered. Then we sat down. If you craned your neck, you could see Cecil B. DeMille and his entourage at his huge table in the back. As Dean and I ordered our lunch, we stared around the place, trying to see everyone. (A couple of weeks in, after we got comfortable at the studio, we’d be treating the place the same way we treated any nightclub we played— breaking up the joint.) We spotted Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, Marlene Dietrich, Alan Ladd, William Bendix, Bill Holden, Rosemary Clooney, Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, and Kirk Douglas—all in the same place at once! Some of the biggest stars ate in the private dining room, a privilege we, too, would be allowed once we became box-office hits—and not a second before.

  Then lunch was over, and it was back to Stage 9, where I would shoot my screen test with Marie Wilson.

  Mr. Marshall explained the scene to me: I was to play Al, Irma’s loser boyfriend. Al was a schemer, a leech; Irma basically worked to support him. He was brash, he was pushy—Hal Wallis must have thought that role was created for the Jerry Lewises of the world. Since the movie was, after all, a comedy, Al was supposed to come off as funny, with a kind of Damon Runyon edge to him. Remember Jack Carson in all those B pictures of the forties? But I wasn’t Jack Carson. It was hard for me to think of a way to make this character sympathetic.

  Marie and I did the scene. She was cute, she was bubbly—but she was thirty-two years old to my twenty-two, ten years that really made a difference. And I, having never acted before, was trying hard to pretend to be someone I profoundly was not.

  Neither my partner nor I could figure out why Dean was essentially playing himself and I was supposed to play someone else altogether. What had Hal Wallis seen at the Copa that made him want to sign us? Where were the two guys he saw that night?

  Good questions!

  I had a sinking feeling the next afternoon when we sat down in the executive screening room. Dean’s screen test with Diana was wonderful, as we all knew it would be. Cy Howard was thrilled. George Marshall was ecstatic. Hal Wallis and the Paramount executives in the room were slapping him on the back.

  Then came the scene with Marie and me.

  It limped onto the screen, and finished even limper. When it was over, it was so quiet in that room, you could have heard a mouse piss on
a blotter.

  Wallis suggested we meet in his office. We all gathered there—Dean and I, our agent, press agent, and lawyer; Wallis and his minions— around twenty people in all, and the atmosphere was not lighthearted. “Gentlemen, I think we all agree we have a problem on our hands,” Wallis said. “I think we must move ahead with great care, given the very significant commitment we’ve made to Paramount on Martin and Lewis. We have to deliver on that commitment. Now, my suggestion is that we all sleep on this, and reconvene at the end of the workday tomorrow to begin to formulate a plan.”

  My heart sank even further. I was a sharp kid, and I knew what Wallis was up to: He wanted to spend the early part of the day on the phone conferring with Paramount executives in New York, seeing what his options were. Maybe cut the Monkey loose and make the Crooner a star? I had to think that was on somebody’s mind. Nobody but Dean would really look me in the eye.

  The driver took us back to our hotel. “Sleep on it,” I muttered. “Sleep on what? Sleep on the fact that they took what we were and changed us!”

  In our suite, Dean and I sat in silence. Finally, he said, “Hey, who the hell wants to live in Los Angeles, anyway?”

  Oops, I thought. Here we go. He’s gonna do it. He’s about to make the grand gesture.

  “Listen,” Dean said. “If they just put the camera on what we did at the Copa, it would’ve been great!”

  “But that’s not what movies are about,” I said. “Movies are about personalities playing characters. Movies are about story.”

  “Well, I say bullshit,” Dean said. “I say it’s Martin and Lewis or nothing.”

  I loved him for it, and I was torn. There was no way in hell I could watch my partner throw away what might be his chance of a lifetime; at the same time, I agreed totally with what he was saying. There was no way in hell I could watch Hal Wallis throw away Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.