Dean and Me

by Jerry Lewis

  Then it’s two o’clock, and there’s no downbeat and no curtain. And suddenly, a man walks to center stage and makes an announcement.

  “Ladies and gentlemen—due to an ankle injury, the role played by Miss Carol Haney will be played this afternoon by her understudy, Miss Shirley MacLaine.”

  There was a loud sigh of disappointment from the audience. Now, please understand: At this point, Shirley MacLaine was still Shirley Who? Carol Haney was the fabulous protégée of Gene Kelly, around whom Bob Fosse had built The Pajama Game’s showstopping “Steam Heat” number. Oh well, I thought. I’m here. Let’s see.

  Then the show went on, and the rest is Broadway legend, the kind of story line that, if it happened in a movie, most people would simply find too far-fetched to believe. Shirley came on and absolutely electrified me and everybody else in that audience. By the final curtain, we were all on our feet, yelling for her to come out again and again.

  Then I ran out of the theater, hailed a cab, and went back to the Plaza. I wasn’t in my suite three minutes before Wallis called, saying he was back and had plans for us that evening. I said, “I’ll be right over!” I ran down the hall to his suite, banged on the door, and almost screamed in his face: “You have plans for tonight! I don’t think so! You must let me take you to the theater to see the girl we’re looking for!”

  “Really,” he said with a smirk—as if to say, “ You found the girl?”

  I picked up the phone and asked for the hotel’s concierge. I told him I needed two orchestra seats for that night’s performance of The Pajama Game, for Mr. Wallis and myself.

  Wallis shook his head. “I’m not going to the theater tonight!” he said. “I’ve got other plans!”

  I looked him in the eye. “If you trust my instinct,” I said, “you’ll change your plans.”

  He pursed his lips, thought a second, and said, “All right, I’ll humor you.”

  Humor? I thought. Where will he get it?

  As we were riding to the theater in the limo, I was suddenly struck by a thought: What if Carol Haney got better, and the girl I saw will never be heard from again? I was ready for the Intensive Care Unit until we got to the theater and picked up our tickets at the box office, where the sign said:

  In Tonight’s Performance, Miss Carol Haney’s Role Will Be Played by Miss Shirley MacLaine

  I breathed a sigh of relief, and in we went.

  At eleven P.M., Hal Wallis and I were on our feet along with the other 1,700 people in the St. James Theater. I thought Shirley had been terrific at the matinee—but that night she simply exploded on that stage. Not long afterward, Wallis gave her a screen test, then signed her to a contract, and my partner and I had a leading lady for Artists and Models, a lady who would go on to make a great career for herself, and whose path would cross again with Dean’s.

  Often, others see us with the sharpest eyes. Then again, even the sharpest eyes can miss the whole truth. There’s a series of wonderfully vivid verbal snapshots in Shirley MacLaine’s Hollywood memoir, My Lucky Stars, of my partner and me during the shooting of Artists and Models. Shirley remembers what look like good times: The two of us going wild in the Paramount commissary, throwing food as Marlene Dietrich and Anna Magnani watch in horror, smearing butter all over the suit of production chief Y. Frank Freeman as Y. Frank, the courtliest of Southern gentlemen, sits in discreet shock (his real shock was yet to come). She recalls us racing golf carts around the studio lot, honking horns; jumping into strangers’ cars and screaming that we’re being kidnapped. She remembers the way Dean used to light a Camel with one of his gold cigarette lighters, blow out the flame, and throw the lighter out the window. These were all hijinks we’d been pulling for years, but Shirley was young and admiring, and witnessing them for the first time. It wouldn’t take her long to see the strain beneath the jolly surface.

  So we had a leading lady; we also had a new director. The last half-dozen of our films, with the exception of Three Ring Circus, had all been under the watch of Norman Taurog or George Marshall. I had the utmost respect for Norman and George, but Wallis’s new discovery, Frank Tashlin, was a man I would come to revere.

  Frank—or Tish, as I renamed him—started out as a newspaper cartoonist, then did some animation directing at Warner Brothers and other studios. A side job writing gags for Hal Roach’s low-budget comedies led to more gag-writing for live-action pictures (including a couple of the Marx Brothers’ and Bob Hope’s), then screenwriting, then directing. By the mid-1950s, Tish was a full-fledged movie director—the only important director ever to make the transition from animation to live action. But his background in cartoons always gave him a priceless instinct for outrageous comedy. (They said about him that he directed his cartoons like live-action comedies and his live-action comedies like cartoons.) He had an incomparable mind for the kind of humor that was right up our alley.

  Unfortunately, Hal Wallis was standing halfway down the alley with a blackjack in his hand.

  Wallis initially hired Tashlin not because Tish was a great comedic director but because Artists and Models was a story about comic books and cartoons. Hal Wallis was always a cut-and-dried fellow, and it was as cut-and-dried as that. Remember, Wallis knew as much about comedy as he did about atomic energy. But then, Hollywood deals always start with a smile and a handshake and a good deal of blindness about what’s going to happen next. I think that Tish never knew precisely what he was getting into.

  With Ben Hogan. They won’t let me mark my ball.

  Frank and I liked each other right away. He was a big bruiser—six-three and 250-plus pounds; brush crew cut, mustache, and horn-rimmed glasses—and, for a guy who made his living out of nonsense, was surprisingly direct. His personality was what you might call extra-dry. He watched you, made his judgments, and spoke his mind only when he was good and goddamn sure what he wanted to say. He had a patient, long-suffering air about him. I amused Tish—I tried very hard to amuse him—but I think that what he saw in me was a perfect instrument for his ideas. I will always think of him as my great teacher.

  Which didn’t mean he favored me over my partner. Not by a long shot. In fact, Artists and Models was a kind of liberation for Dean, especially after Three Ring Circus: In the new film (which Frank cowrote), Dean played my roommate and fellow wannabe comic-book writer, and he not only got as many lines as I did (a first) but (another first) had substantial comic material, as well as several terrific musical numbers.

  Not surprisingly, for the first time in a while, there was zero tension on the set between the two of us. But at the time, I’m afraid, my ego was still ballooning. Frank Tashlin’s strategic decision to let me in on the technical aspects of the movie was creating not just a future filmmaker but a kind of monster. I spent much of the shoot engaged in range wars—or pissing matches, call them what you will—with Wallis over everything from his attitude toward the crew to how much of my off-camera time I could spend attending to Martin and Lewis business. I was locking horns with the Big Guy, ego versus ego. It was quite a tussle.

  Meanwhile, Dean stood by smiling and practicing his golf swing. He was delighted with Artists and Models—and delighted to watch Wallis vs. Lewis from the sidelines.

  The funny thing, though, is that on nearly every single issue, Wallis ultimately backed down. It wasn’t the power of my personality (though at the time I thought it was) so much as it was the power of the Martin and Lewis franchise. We were just too big a moneymaker for the producer to risk rocking the boat.

  Instead, Wallis took out his ire on others.

  One day toward the end of the shoot, Tashlin came onto the set looking like someone had rammed a twelve-inch pin in one of his ears and out the other. I went into his dressing room on Stage 5 and asked, “Anything I can do, Frank?”

  “You’ve worked for Wallis long enough,” he said. “You know him, and if you want to help, find out how I can get out of my contract with him. I just will not allow him to diminish me the way he does. How can a m
an with so little knowledge about comedy...” And he proceeded to go into a tirade about what I understood all too well: the great Wallis’s utter tone-deafness when it came to humor on film.

  I heard Tish out, then said, “Frank, if you’re really serious about getting out of your contract with Hal Wallis, there’s a very simple thing you can do.”

  He blinked. “Simple? What’s simple about it?” he said.

  “Listen, Frank,” I said. “Wallis loves cutting film better than seeing his own kid grow up. He believes himself to be the ultimate filmmaker—and in certain cases he is, but not with what we do. Now, if you write him a note saying you think he cuts like a butcher, I bet you’re out of your contract before he finishes reading it.”

  Frank wrote what I suggested and sent it to Wallis’s office at about three P.M. Later, he phoned me at home to tell me that Wallis had called him at 5:15 to say he was out of his contract. Wallis didn’t want to work with him anymore!

  Wallis cut Casablanca, Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Life of Emile Zola, and Jezebel. He cut those films very dramatically and very well—and that’s the last nice thing I’ll say about Hal Wallis. He was a strange man. He had to win. He acted as if his very life depended on making his point. He justified all his actions with this pontification: “Great film can be put together by many men, but it is made by one man.” Without that one man, he felt, nothing could go forward. Maybe he was right, but he handled everything with such life-or-death conviction that he beat many around him into the ground. Yet away from his office he was a joy to be with. When he wasn’t behind that desk, he not only had a human side but a wonderful sense of humor. He could be generous almost to a fault. But behind that desk, he would cut your heart out if it saved him 50 cents.

  Poor Frank. Free from his contract, he sat out our next (and also next-to-last) picture, Pardners. But then Wallis somehow sweet-talked him into returning to direct our last film, a total debacle all too aptly titled Hollywood or Bust. (The “or” in the title should have been replaced by an “and.”) After Dean and I broke up, Tish and I made a half-dozen pictures together (The Geisha Boy, Rock-a-Bye-Baby , Cinderfella, It’s Only Money, Who’s Minding the Store, and The Disorderly Orderly). I continued to learn priceless lessons about film, and comedy, from him. But I think that the give-and-take of the movie business, and especially the stress of having to go up against people like Wallis, probably led to Frank’s much-too-early death, at age fifty-nine, in 1972.

  Despite Wallis, and at the expense of Frank Tashlin’s nervous system, Artists and Models became what many regard as one of the best Martin and Lewis pictures. After the film wrapped, Dean and I took Dick Stabile, our twenty-six-man orchestra, and the rest of our staff and went on a two-week theatrical tour throughout the Midwest, then jumped east to the Boston Garden. We put all the pressure and contention and bitterness of the movie business behind us, and for seventeen charmed days in May of 1955, it felt just like old times....

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THAT LOVELY TRIP REMINDS ME OF ANOTHER ONE: AT THE precise midpoint of our ten years together, in July of 1951, we played Grossinger’s in the Catskill Mountains.

  Now, that might not sound so strange to you, but in 1951, the likelihood of such an engagement was not even a long-shot bet—no bookie would have taken your action.

  Martin and Lewis in the Borscht Belt, even in the heyday of the Borscht Belt? Lewis, yes. Martin, no way!

  By that summer, we had turned down Grossinger’s for three years straight, and we planned to keep turning them down. We always had something else going on, and the fit didn’t feel right.

  But Paul Grossinger was a young man who didn’t know how to take “No” for an answer. He felt—no, he knew—that everything has a price. That was Paul’s way of thinking, and he was a nice, warm, and friendly man, and personally, I hoped we could do it just on account of his being a terrific guy.

  So Paul’s agent called ours: “We want Martin and Lewis for an exclusive one-night show at Grossinger’s.” (Exclusive meaning that we could not play any other hotel up that way—as if we’d finish that show and dash off to Kutsher’s!) The agent went on to say, “We know how many times they’ve turned us down since 1948. They said no to $25,000 and no to $50,000, and they said no to $75,000! We now feel we have to go the last mile and make them an offer of $100,000 for the night.”

  Our representative said, “Let me call you back.”

  At this point, I, in my house in Las Vegas, whip out my handy inflation calculator and note that $100,000 in 1951 translates to approximately $733,462.38 in today’s dollars. Approximately.

  These were not the kind of numbers offered by agents over the phone. Our representative hung up and got me at my office at Paramount. I said, “But we turned them down each time because we were either doing a film or were otherwise unavailable.”

  “You know that, I know that, Dean knows that. But they don’t know that.”

  I said, “Let me talk to Dean.”

  I ran out of my office to Dean’s dressing room, just across the way. He was smoking a Camel, watching a rerun of some old movie, and waiting for Artie, the barber, to come and give him a haircut. I walked over and turned the set off.

  “Hey, they were just about to show the murderer!” Dean yelled, getting out of his chair to turn the TV back on.

  “Don’t bother!” I said. “I saw it! It was Henry Fonda.”

  (Note: Henry Fonda never played a murderer in his entire career.)

  “What’s so goddamn important, and why are you puffing like a tired racehorse?” he asked.

  “Because,” I whispered, “Grossinger’s wants to give us one hundred thousand dollars for one show. One night. The most money ever paid to anyone in the history of show business.... Including Frank, Bing, Caruso, and Mario Lanza.”

  For one of the few times I can remember, Dean was hooked. “Tell me you’re joking,” he said. “Tell me I can’t really pick up fifty grand for doing one performance!”

  “I’m telling you you can pick up a hundred grand for that one show, but I get half. So work it any way you want—just tell me to okay it!”

  He jumped onto his couch and bounced up a couple of feet in the air. “What the hell are you still doing here?” he yelled. “Go and say yes!”

  A Saturday night in the Catskill Mountains in the early 1950s was a lot like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. There was no other hotel like Grossinger’s. The dining room fed 1,600 people at a time (with two sittings, like a cruise ship), at big round tables seating twelve. Before that there were cocktails. There was milling, there was shmoozing, there was kvelling and yelling. There was tummling, by busboys who would grow up to be comedy headliners. In short, Jewish pandemonium! And tonight the pandemonium was compounded by our presence at Paul Grossinger’s table.

  Watching Dean on this turf was priceless. All the little old ladies would come to the table and just flat-out kiss him on the face, rub his hair, pinch his cheeks.

  And Dean was loving it. He was loving it, but I also recall that he was hungry, and anxious to get into the half-grapefruit already sitting in front of him, with a little American flag stuck in the center. There were also pickles and horseradish and rye bread—but no butter. Kosher is kosher. Dean picked up a slice of bread and scanned the entire table for butter. No one would say anything, so I told him: “Butter you get here for breakfast and maybe lunch, but not for a meat meal!”

  Dean shouted, “Then I’ll eat what I need to eat to get some butter!” I glanced over at Paul Grossinger, who gave me a look as if to say, “No way!”

  I crept around the table, knelt by Dean, and whispered the ground rules to him. “We just traveled three thousand miles,” he said. “You couldn’t tell me to buy butter?”

  “And no milk,” I tell him. “And no cream.”

  “So why do the Jews hate cows?”

  Now we move forward four years to the spring of 1955. You may remember a friend of mine named Charlie Brown—the man, not
the cartoon. Charlie and his wife Lillian were hotelkeepers who let me busboy and bunk at the Arthur, their Lakewood, New Jersey, resort, when I was just starting out. I had sweated through the earliest performances of my record act on their stage. In the interim, Charlie and Lily had moved their establishment to the Catskills, and now Brown’s, in Loch Sheldrake, New York, was one of the important hotels of the Jewish Alps.

  So when Uncle Charlie called me and asked if Brown’s could host a gala premiere, in early June, for the thirteenth and latest Martin and Lewis movie, You’re Never Too Young, I was absolutely thrilled. Charlie was offering to pay for everything—transportation, accommodations, food, cocktail parties, and press receptions. He was even offering to permanently dedicate Brown’s newly constructed theater, the site of the proposed premiere, to Martin and Lewis, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis Playhouse! It was irresistible.... I thought back to my early days at the Arthur Hotel in Lakewood, perspiring as I lip-synched to Frank Sinatra and Danny Kaye, then imagined myself returning to the Browns, a celebrity.

  When I brought up the idea at a meeting of our production company, everyone there—Hal Wallis; director Norman Taurog; Paul Jones, line producer for York Productions, the company Dean and I had started; the Paramount head of publicity; and Jack Keller—found it equally irresistible. Wallis, in particular, was ecstatic at the idea of Charlie’s footing the entire bill. “Terrific deal!” he said. “Can’t go wrong! This oughta save us fifteen, twenty thousand bucks!”

  Then I told Dean.

  It was the following morning, and my partner did not look pleased. In fact, he gave me such a glare that the little hairs rose on the back of my neck. Suddenly, all the ill will that we’d sidestepped for months came flooding back. “You should have consulted me first,” Dean said.