At the Oceana Apartments, Jerry Lewis is among his more regular visitors.
Jerry Lewis is—or was—one of the Jews in hiding. The Jews may have helped to build the motion picture industry, but if they are to appear in its productions they must do so under another guise. Over at Columbia, Harry Cohn, a Jew, casts his own people as Indians, and at MGM Louis B. Mayer, a Jew, refuses to put Danny Kaye, another Jew, under contract until Danny Kaye has his nose straightened.
The Jews must pretend to be that to which they aspire. They can play anything but themselves, in life as on screen.
So David Kaminsky becomes Danny Kaye.
Julius Garfinkle becomes John Garfield.
Meshilem Weisenfreund becomes Paul Muni.
Emmanuel Goldenberg becomes Edward G. Robinson.
And Joseph Levitch becomes Jerry Lewis so that bigots and anti-Semites such as Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith may laugh at his jokes.
He likes Jerry Lewis as a man, and is touched by his obvious admiration and solicitude, but is ambivalent about his comedy. It is too crude, too reliant on a series of fallback expressions of idiocy. It is perpetual chaos.
Babe enjoyed the work of the Marx Brothers. He did not. He finds funny only the inadvertent creation of mayhem, the gradual, unavoidable descent into disorder. It is too easy to deliberately foment misrule. The humor and the humanity arise from the doomed struggle against it.
But Jerry Lewis does not care. Jerry Lewis is untroubled by the opinion of others. Jerry Lewis is entirely without fear.
Jerry Lewis always wears red cashmere sweaters with red socks when visiting the Oceana Apartments. He finds this odd, but is too polite to remark upon it. Either Jerry Lewis owns only one red cashmere sweater and one pair of red socks, and replaces these when they wear out, or Jerry Lewis owns entire closets filled only with red cashmere sweaters and red socks. Sometimes Jerry Lewis asks him if he needs a sweater, but he always declines. Also, all of Jerry Lewis’s clothing bears the initials J.L., and he does not wish to be mistaken for Jerry Lewis in the event of an accident that leaves him otherwise unidentifiable.
Jerry Lewis no longer communicates with his former partner, Dean Martin. Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin have not spoken in years. He thinks this is a shame. Jerry Lewis is like a younger brother estranged from an adored older sibling. But Jerry Lewis is also angry with Dean Martin. Perhaps this is another reason why he is perturbed by Jerry Lewis’s comedy.
Underlying it, there is rage.
Did you and Babe ever fight? Jerry Lewis asks.
—Only about his hair.
He cannot imagine a time when he and Babe would not have spoken.
There is, for a while, some awkwardness in the background when Jerry Lewis visits, although Jerry Lewis is unfamiliar with the concept of awkwardness and so he endures the strain of it alone.
The comedian Lou Costello’s daughter, Carole, is married to Dean Martin’s son, Craig. He is friendly with Lou Costello, so he does not mention Jerry Lewis’s visits to the Oceana Apartments when he and Lou Costello talk.
During the period of his marriage to Ruth—no, his second marriage to Ruth—Lou Costello sometimes comes to the house for dinner, where he and Lou Costello commiserate with each other over their treatment at Fox. Ruth always counts the plates and the silverware after Lou Costello visits because Lou Costello is notorious for stealing from studio lots, and Ruth is concerned in case Lou Costello becomes confused and starts stealing from her too.
Lou Costello steals lamps and tables and chairs.
Lou Costello steals rugs and cushions and a buckskin canoe.
Lou Costello does not even wait for the pictures to finish filming. Lou Costello loads a truck between set-ups and sends it on its way.
It is a game, but it is still stealing.
Lou Costello is an admirer of Chaplin, and is willing to stand up and defend Chaplin’s reputation when the government and the newspapers turn against him. J. Edgar Hoover himself is a fan of Lou Costello, and even writes a personal letter complimenting Lou Costello and his partner Bud Abbott on their radio show, although this is before the Chaplin business. In return, Lou Costello invites J. Edgar Hoover to lunch next time the director of the FBI happens to be in California. Everyone in Hollywood finds this amusing, as Lou Costello is known to possess one of the largest collections of pornographic material known to man, and is therefore not the kind of company that J. Edgar Hoover should be keeping.
They are unlikely friends, he and Lou Costello. Casual acquaintances sometimes wonder what they have in common beyond their profession and their shared troubles at Fox.
But people forget.
They forget that he cremated his child after just nine days of life, and they forget that Lou Costello’s one-year-old son drowned in one-and-a-half feet of water in the back garden of the Costello home in Sherman Oaks while Anne Costello’s back was turned.
Three men, three fathers, united by dead infant sons.
Maybe this is why, when the time comes, Lou Costello stands up for Chaplin.
But Lou Costello, like Babe, is gone. They buried Lou Costello at Calvary Cemetery in March 1959, in a crypt near his son, and nine months later they buried Lou Costello’s wife beside him.
And now there is no more awkwardness when Jerry Lewis comes to call.