On his sixteenth birthday Jerry dressed himself up and made the round of agents, exploiting their familiarity with his dad to get a foot in their doors. He worked Times Square all day, and all day he got the classic “Call me when you’re working and I’ll come watch you” rebuff. “Regards to your folks,” he’d hear before the door closed on him. He had quit school, he had no money, he had no prospects. He went home and called his parents with the news.
Danny and Rae weren’t happy about what Jerry had done, but if it was anybody’s fault, it was theirs. They had consistently shown a preference for show business over home, family, and education, they had denied themselves to their son at almost every turn, and they provided little daily guidance beyond allowing Jerry to watch them work.
“At first we wouldn’t listen,” Danny recalled some years later. “Then Mrs. Lewis and I realized that unless he got the idea out of his system, the desire would always be there. If Jerry was bad, she argued, he’d know it and quit.”
Danny was jealous to protect his show-biz turf from his son, but he found a way to cloak his antagonism in something like paternal affection. “While I hated to have anyone in my family struggle with show business like I had, I finally gave in,” he said in an article published under his byline in TV Story in 1952. “But I was still very much against it. So much so that neither Mrs. Lewis nor I went to see him.”
Then he let an introspective note creep into his account: “The thing I regret most, I think, is that Jerry grew up too fast.” Of course, this was no Tevye singing a mournful “Sunrise, Sunset” as he married off a beloved child. Danny had been as absent as a parent could be, and though his son, whom he acknowledged had “the art of natural pantomime plus perfect timing,” chased after him in his desire to join him, his instinct was to shunt him away. But he told his wife he’d give it a chance, so he listened.
As Danny recalled, Jerry “had located a man who was willing to give him a chance to exhibit his ‘talents,’” The man was Irving Kaye. Kaye still had some connections from his own days as a struggling comic, and he thought he might be able to get the kid work during double-feature intermissions. Jerry got his folks to agree to his scheme if Kaye would serve as chaperon, manager, and aide-de-camp: Someone, after all, had to change the records while Jerry mugged.
“I took him around and got him auditions and got him on the Loew’s circuit, for fifteen and twenty dollars a night,” Kaye later remembered. “He could do fifteen minutes with these records he had. Loew’s had about thirty, forty theaters in the New York area, and RKO had some, and once a week these theaters, movie houses, put on a vaudeville show.”
The work wasn’t steady. Jerry returned to bus tables at the Ambassador in the spring of 1942, during Passover. A grocers’ convention came up from Jersey after the holiday, a loud, drunken group that wasn’t interested in watching a pimple-faced kid grimace to records. They brought their own entertainment: three hookers—“exotic dancers,” they called them. Such was the wartime hotel business that Charlie and Lillian Brown looked the other way.
But not Jerry. He’d been after girls his own age for a while, and all he’d wound up with, as he recalled in his autobiography, was a few cases of blue balls and a sad heart. Here, though, were women who reminded him of Marlene, his courtesan from the National Theater. After the girls performed, the grocers queued up to sample their other talents, and Jerry got right in line with them.
At the last minute, though, he lost his nerve. Alone with the girl, he couldn’t bring himself to perform, and he argued with her in an effort to get his money back. Businesswoman that she was, she grabbed his watch and bolted from the room, the skinny kid in pursuit. Eventually, the grocers sorted the thing out. Jerry got his watch back, but he had to fork over the dough and scram.
It must have been a relief when Irving Kaye got him some more stage work. Jerry toured Loew’s theaters throughout northern Jersey on a six-week contract, with his original entourage—Kaye and Lonnie Brown—appearing at almost every show. What they saw heartened them: Audiences liked the act. “In all my years working in show business in the Catskills and other places, I’ve seen acts stop shows,” Kaye said in flusher days, “I’ve seen standing ovations, but I’ve never seen anything like what he did.”
What he did was no different from what he had been doing: lip-synching to that same pile of records he’d bought the previous summer. He had learned how to control his body better—turning scratches in the records into comic riffs, for instance. He added costumes—when he aped Igor Gorin’s “Figaro” aria, he sported a fright wig and tattered overcoat in a parody of highbrow art that had all the savoir faire of a Warner Brothers cartoon. Still, skilled as it may have been, it was only a dummy act. No one would get very far with such a curious specialty.
He was getting by, though: It was wartime, and thousands of performers had been enlisted. Jerry was a kid—a kid who could do remarkable things with his body, true, but a kid nevertheless. He still wasn’t eligible for the draft. And therein lay his fortune.
Of course, even a fortunate act needed a helping hand to get off the ground. The hand that reached out to help Jerry was spidery and lean.
“Right away I saw Jerry had this genius for mugging,” recalled Abner J. Greshler, a Broadway agent just branching out from representing musicians to signing up comics. Jerry seemed a likely enough prospect when Greshler caught his act at the Ritz Theater in Staten Island, where the kid appeared for the princely sum of seven dollars. Greshler thought he could book Jerry on a wider circuit, burlesque houses, maybe. Jerry was delighted for the help. He had big dreams for himself, but Greshler’s might have been even bigger.
Abner Greshler was born in 1910 to immigrant parents on New York City’s Lower East Side. His father was a furrier who put in inhuman days in fetid, TB-infested sweatshops; Mrs. Greshler took in sewing, doing piecework in the family’s fourth-floor tenement apartment, a hovel in which they used bottles as latrines and wooden planks hung between chairs as beds.
Young Abbey was asthmatic, with a frail constitution and pasty complexion, but he was a scrapper. He had to be: When his parents finally were able to afford a less disagreeable home, they moved to a railroad apartment in a mixed neighborhood, a place where Jewish kids were regularly beaten up by their Italian and Irish neighbors. Abbey was smart enough to survive in this neighborhood, trading homework for protection so that he could hold on to the pennies he earned hawking Yiddish newspapers. Across the street lived the Fischetti family, cousins of Al Capone—the toughest kids on the block, and Abbey prudently befriended them.
Abbey was a studious kid, and he began to wonder about the papers he was selling. The comics, for instance: Why, if every Jewish kid he knew spoke English except at home, were they in Yiddish? Boldly, he created a mock-up of a comics page in English and one night after he was through selling papers marched down to see Abraham Cahan, the famous publisher of the Jewish Daily Forward.
“What’s so important to bring a boy out in the dark?” asked the imposing Cahan. The boy produced his creation, and after showing it to some co-workers, Cahan took out his wallet and handed the boy ten dollars.
“It was almost a month’s rent,” Greshler recalled. “And that’s when I decided to go into show business.”
Abbey became a kind of mascot around the paper, and Cahan took him under his wing, bringing him to concerts and plays and enrolling him in the Young People’s Socialist League, one of many Jewish progressive groups in the area.
Soon afterward, with Abbey’s horizons broadened, his father announced that he was moving the family to the Bronx and going into business for himself. The move liberated the family from squalor, though not from the need to hustle. To augment his paper-selling gig, Abbey added a bit of unlikely dash: He performed at vaudeville amateur nights at a nearby theater, drawn by the three-dollar first prizes.
He grew fond of the stage, but making a buck in vaudeville in the 1920s was a tough road—just ask Danny Lewis. Though only a teenager, Greshler had a keen business sense, and he began looking around for other cracks in the show-biz game that he might enter. He found one in a Chinese restaurant. On a school lunch break, he wandered into Yeong’s, a huge Broadway chop suey joint catering to midtown secretaries. The place was packed, but no one was eating: The girls were dancing stag to Paul Tremain and his Band from Lonely Acres, a jitterbug outfit hired to boost lunchtime business.
During the band’s break, Greshler approached Tremain—just a kid himself, whose father was arranging his bookings.
“What do you do when you’re done here?” Greshler asked.
“Nothing.”
“You mean you don’t play at any of the schools—the colleges, the private schools?”
“Why? Can you get us some of those gigs?”
“Sure.”
Greshler ran off to find an old friend—the former bandleader Willard Alexander, who’d just been hired as a booker with a Chicago outfit called the Music Corporation of America, MCA.
“What’s a ‘gig’?” Greshler asked him.
Greshler ran off beating the bushes for work for the band; two weeks later, he’d lined up three bookings.
Appeasing his parents, Abbey enrolled at Morris Evening High, but he spent his days booking the band, learning how to dress like a sharpie and how to schmooze adults into forking over sums he’d only dreamed of months before—up to five thousand dollars a night. Soon enough, his name got around, and he started signing other bands. MCA even offered him a job through Willard Alexander, but Abbey liked being in business for himself. He was becoming an impresario: He bought lights, a dimmer board, risers for the band. He booked corporate parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs.
One day his mother was cleaning his room and found his Lehman Brothers investment account passbook. It recorded a balance of eleven thousand dollars. She couldn’t believe the money was legitimate, and she chastised him so severely that he cried: He was, after all, still only in high school.
With his diploma in sight in the late 1920s, Abbey started looking around for ways to expand his business. One of his bandleaders, a kid named Shepard Feldman who went by the name Shep Fields, suggested Abbey try the Catskills. Shep had grown up there; his parents had run a hotel before his father was killed in a motorcycle accident and Shep drifted down to New York to try a career in music. Abbey had done well by him; he, in turn, steered Abbey toward the mountains, where Greshler’s own dad had gone long ago to recover from TB.
But the Catskills proved no Eden for Abbey: Hotel social directors were satisfied with their own rosters, and they didn’t want any New York sharpies butting in. They sent him back home with his tail between his legs.
Abbey wasn’t one to take rejection lightly, and he devised a scheme he thought would ingratiate him to the Catskill hotels without making them see him as a threat. He suggested that they host a string of “guest nights”—specially billed evenings when hotels would swap one another’s headliners for a night. It worked. Guest nights became popular, and a few more ears bent Abbey’s way. He began bringing carloads of talent up from Manhattan; the hotels footed the bill, and if they liked what they saw, they could work out a financial agreement later. Greshler was in the vanguard, bringing up Jewish comics, Broadway song artists, jazz bands, opera singers, even feature films. He became the premier booker in the area.
He was so well known, in fact, that it got a little dangerous. One day a mobster came knocking on his office door, a shtarker in a pinstripe suit looking for money.
“We wanna know when we’re gonna get our twenty-five grand.”
“What are you talking about?” Greshler asked.
“Well, we protected you.”
“Protected me? I don’t know what you’re talking about!” But the guy wouldn’t listen. Abbey would pay up or there would be ugly consequences.
It was Abbey’s first contact with the underworld he knew was swirling around beneath his business, and it scared him—even more than the neighborhood toughs had, back on the Lower East Side. And it was to his boyhood neighbors he turned, explaining the situation and appealing for their help.
“I never heard another word,” he later boasted.
After his Catskill business took off, Abbey devoted himself to self-improvement: Fordham Law School at night, by day the college of Abe Lastfogle. Lastfogle was a William Morris agent and a legend on Broadway. He dressed modestly, spoke softly, and had more skill at packaging shows than any ten swaggering bookers combined. Greshler had sold him acts a few times and come away almost awestruck. He was like a chess champion: When everyone else, Abbey included, was worrying about protecting his pawns, Lastfogle was mounting elaborate offensives that no one else could fathom.
Lastfogle taught Abbey to build careers, not gigs—to invest more than an act was earning in the interest of long-term return. He saw himself not as in the booking business but in “the agency business.” He said it in inspiring tones. Greshler was known as a band booker and a Catskills packager, but he wanted to be in “the agency business,” too. All he needed was one steady-money act, one source of income to lift him above the bookers and into the sphere of agents. And in search of that act, he was willing to go anywhere. Even Staten Island.
The question of how Greshler came to be at the Ritz Theater has been a matter of some contention. The official Lewis family version was that Greshler had heard that the kid was killing audiences and went himself to check out the rumors. Greshler, to the contrary, told people that Dan and Rae begged every agent in New York to sign their son, hanging around outside Lindy’s on Broadway and coaxing Jerry into doing bits for the big shots who wandered by. Eventually, according to this version, Greshler agreed to listen to their pitch inside the deli—but only if they bought him cake and coffee.
Neither account rings true: An honest-to-God agent taking the ferry to Staten Island to watch a teenager do a dummy act? Dan and Rae spending time trying to get Jerry a leg up in the business? However it came about, though, Greshler did catch the act in Staten Island and offered to sign the kid, providing Jerry’s first real entrée into the business.
Greshler didn’t look like the impressive Abe Lastfogle. His skin was waxy and gray, his eyes sunken. But he was shrewd, a survivor who understood the business. Danny Lewis could see as much; he agreed to let his sixteen-year-old boy sign a standard contract.
Savvy Svengali that he was, Greshler set about reshaping Jerry’s image to exploit his queer gifts to the hilt. First he addressed the look: Photos of Jerry in his teens reveal a kid with a triangular face, a mouth full of teeth, and straight, longish hair, which he usually slicked down but could wear over his eyes so as to look like an ape. He was gangly—all elbows, shoulders, and knees—and he had a touch of Danny’s foppishness: In a photo taken in the Catskills in the early 1940s with his dad and some friends, Jerry sports two rings—one on his pinky—even though he’s wearing simple chinos and a sweatshirt.
By the time he was working with Greshler, though, Jerry’s image had been gussied up: double-breasted suits, a pompadour, even a fancy slogan: “Jerry Lewis—Satirical Impressions in Pantomimicry.”
Greshler booked the kid practically the day he signed him. A burlesque house in Buffalo, the Palace, offered him $125 a week. Just the sound of it had Jerry dreaming great dreams—the Palace. At Rae’s insistence, Irving Kaye would make the trip as well. The two boarded a train in Manhattan one September morning—Candide and Pangloss out to conquer the world, the Palace Theater beckoning like a siren.
But the siren was a trollop. Kaye knew the place but diplomatically had said nothing. The Palace was a toilet, the strippers worn-out hags, the audience just drunk and lethargic enough not to riot. Jerry was heartbroken.
He took the stage the first night and did some of his cutest bits. “Get the fuck off!” bellowed the small crowd of men with overcoats in their laps. “Bring on the babes!”
He raced back into the seedy dressing room in tears, stuffing his bags with clothes and swearing off show business, Kaye watching but saying nothing.
Another comic on that night’s bill, an old-time burlesque clown, walked in on the scene.
“Are you Danny Lewis’s son?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a fraud. Danny Lewis’s son would never walk away from a show.”
It was Max Coleman, a friend of Danny’s who’d played the National Theater during Jerry’s epochal family vacation in Detroit a few winters earlier. Jerry’s self-pity turned into shame. Reproved, he got a sufficient grip on himself to play the second show. It went better. He would survive.
Seeing that the Palace hadn’t knocked the spirit out of him, Greshler began to coax Jerry into doing more than pantomime. While the kid was in Buffalo, Greshler booked him in Montreal and Toronto at $150 a week—ten times his usual rate. But he’d have to do more than the dummy act to earn it. If he was going to go anywhere under Greshler’s hand, Jerry was going to have to open his mouth and speak onstage. He was going to have to emcee at burlesque houses, just like his old man.
This would seem a natural progression, but the prospect of appearing as himself daunted Jerry. There was a world of difference between the anonymity of lip-synching and the personal risk involved in emceeing a show. Jerry knew people liked him when he mugged, but nobody had ever clamored for him when he was just being Jerry. Greshler made it clear, though, that he had no choice: Either he started talking onstage, or he found another agent.
“He was a scared kid with a high squeaky voice,” Greshler remembered. “He was afraid to talk, to express himself, and that was why he had been crazy to do the record act. He didn’t have to speak. The record did it for him. I told him he had to talk if he wanted to make any money. I explained that if he did some emcee work as well as the record specialty I’d have a better chance of getting him jobs in clubs.”
Easier said than done: This was a sixteen-year-old boy, petrified to do anything on his own. But Greshler held sway. He packed Jerry and Kaye off to the Gaiety Theater in Montreal and sat in his Radio City office waiting to hear what happened.
Jerry showed up in Montreal a nervous wreck. He made his way to the theater, stepped in front of the curtain, and introduced the acts with a robotic sense of duty. He did his specialty—the only time all night he felt himself—and escaped from the evening without messing up … or making much of an impression.
And what sort of emcee was he? One club owner, after enduring Lewis’s petrified delivery, grabbed Greshler by the lapels and hollered, “What’s with this lousy kid? Don’t he tell gags or stories? You sold him to me as an emcee, not an undertaker.”
Another time, Greshler brought Ed Sullivan, then a rising Broadway columnist, to watch Jerry’s act. The presence of the great man in the audience couldn’t have helped, but Jerry topped himself in stiffness that night. He’d always relied on the words “ladies and gentlemen” to get him through a show. Greshler counted sixty-one repeats of the phrase that night. At evening’s end, according to Greshler, Sullivan turned to him and said, “He’s pretty funny, but for God’s sake, doesn’t he know any lines other than ‘ladies and gentlemen’?” Sullivan even wrote out a list of alternatives for Greshler to give to Jerry: “folks,” “dear friends,” and the like. Jerry diligently and mechanically added them to his arsenal. (A 1953 kinescope of a Muscular Dystrophy telethon he hosted with Dean Martin showed Jerry lapsing back into his old habit; in the course of two hours, he said “ladies and gentlemen” at least twenty times.)
Still, Greshler was slowly turning Jerry from a one-trick pony into a one-trick pony who could also introduce acts. Just as he’d promised, he got Jerry more and better work on the Loew’s circuit and in large eastern cities. The audience began to enjoy the contrast between the stiff, efficient emcee and the maniacally contorted pantomimist. Jerry made the rounds of burlesque houses, presentation houses (where he performed on brief vaudeville bills before feature films), and the occasional nightclub.
The notion of this high school boy working the burlesque circuit has a quaint, bygone savor to it, but it must have been a kind of assault on Jerry’s young sensibility. It was a lewd, coarse environment, and he was vulnerable to all sorts of suggestions in the air, even with Kaye as a chaperon.
Moreover, Jerry’s burlesque years were central in defining his conception of show business and comedy. In significant ways, Jerry’s career perpetuated many aspects of burlesque for decades beyond the medium’s demise. Indeed, in later moments when his shtick seemed dated, it was often because of its dependence on the traditions of burlesque. Just as his adoption of Al Jolson’s urgent, beseeching manner marked him as a Jewish American entertainer of a certain vintage, so his reliance on crude jokes, physical humor, sketch-based narratives, and broad sentimentality indicate his devotion to the entertainment world he and his father once inhabited.
Burlesque, like blackface, lingers in the collective memory under a suspicious haze, its patina of licentiousness almost as embarrassing as the racism of minstrelsy. But in its time it was a legitimate, adult-oriented alternative to the bourgeois family atmosphere of vaudeville. Where vaudeville served as the model for generations of TV variety shows, striving to offer something for everybody from cultural elitists to blue-haired old ladies to toddlers, burlesque was working-class entertainment with little in it designed to appeal to anyone but its presold masculine audience.
Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, when Danny Lewis was most active on the circuit, burlesque was under fire from municipal authorities all over the country, who blamed the occurrence of sex crimes on men who’d been overstimulated by the exposure of female flesh onstage. Whenever they were threatened with censorship, the burlesque circuits responded by tempering the striptease with heavy doses of comedy, acrobatic acts, and similar specialties. Most of these acts would have preferred to work more lucrative, respectable, and steady vaudeville stages; but, like the proverbial schlemiel who cleaned up after the elephants in the circus, they couldn’t bear the thought of quitting show biz.
Many acts, of course, played both. And when they were playing before wholly male, often drunken burlesque audiences, they had to deliver a more frenetic version of their repertoires. They added blue language and gestures, resorted to a more knockabout style of physical action, made their character sketches more grotesque, their ethnically or sexually oriented humor more explicitly demeaning. Where a vaudeville comedian would tell jokes and stories, maybe mix in a bit of song-and-dance patter or a few zingers at the expense of a straight man, burlesque comedians worked at a frenzied pitch of physical jousting, verbal hysteria, and outright hostility toward fellow entertainers and the audience. George Burns is an archetypical vaudevillian; Lou Costello is pure burlesque.
When Jerry got around to putting together stage shows, TV shows, and telethons (even as early as his Rex Theater benefit), he clearly had a burlesque model in mind: some singing, some dancing, plenty of bang-’em-up humor, a little cheesecake. And when he constructed his own comic persona alongside Dean Martin, he leaned toward what he’d seen on the burlesque stage: loud, almost inarticulate delivery, perilous and sometimes cruel physical humor, a taste for slapstick and sight gags over arch dialogue or situational humor, a strong central persona who played a predictable role but got laughs through the sheer force of idiosyncrasy.
In part, Jerry’s emulation of burlesque helps explain why people reacted to his act so immediately when he debuted in the late 1940s. Most of his audience then had grown up on the same stuff Jerry had, and the universal affection people had for him came in part from their own nostalgia. It was like discovering as an adult the kind of candy you loved as a kid. But as that audience dwindled with age, its children—who had no firsthand knowledge of burlesque or the silent-film clowns—came to think of Jerry merely as a roistering physical comic. When their childhoods were behind them, they put Jerry behind them—a shift in public opinion from which he has never recovered. Ironically, while it was the very disappearance of burlesque comedy that made Jerry seem such a breath of fresh air after World War II, its obscurity twenty years later made him seem less vital than fossilized.
The solitude of the road weighed heavily on Jerry. He was born to loneliness, but now, with Irving Kaye sitting in as a kind of grotesque version of Grandma Sarah, with the daily reality of making his way in the world upon him, his prospects didn’t seem very bright. And Kaye didn’t help much. One night when Jerry was playing in Boston, Kaye sat morosely in their room at the Bradford Hotel taking stock of his life. Here he was, ward to a struggling child, changing records in the wings of burlesque houses, schlepping bags without even the prospect of a tip. As he recalled later, he looked cold and hard at Jerry’s future and told him point-blank: “You’ll have to change your act. Forget the lip-synch stuff, forget the records. Find yourself soon. Not twenty-two years from now—or maybe never, like me.”
Jerry knew he was right. He drew up an impromptu contract giving Kaye 10 percent of all his future earnings. Kaye was heartened by the gesture, but all the same he tore the paper into shreds, certain, no doubt, that Jerry’s dreams would prove to be as chimerical as his own.
A young man on the road with a desperate need for companionship surely sought more out of his nights than commiserating with the likes of Irving Kaye. Jerry was sixteen and playing near home—emceeing and doing his record act down the bill from the Louis Prima Orchestra at the Central Theater in Passaic—when a likelier distraction caught his fancy. Her name was Lily Ann Carol: brunette, twenty years old, nice to him. He would stand in the wings pantomiming as she sang; she’d let a smile sneak over her face.
Her real surname was Greco, and she was from Brooklyn. Her father and brothers would make the trip to Passaic from Williamsburg, where they worked in the shipyards, to greet her backstage after the shows. They were probably worried about her exposure to lecherous showmen, and with good reason: Jerry may have been making a big show of courting Lily Ann, getting to know dad and the brothers and making a big impression, but Prima was already exercising the bandleader’s droit du seigneur with her, out of sight of her burly relatives.
Naïve Jerry wooed Lily Ann the only way he could—by making her laugh. She found him amusing; she encouraged him. And when she went on the road after Passaic, Jerry got that same sick feeling he used to get as a boy when Dan and Rae left. When she called him one night from Philadelphia, he was overwhelmed. He hopped a train at Penn Station and was pounding on her hotel room door at two in the morning. Seating himself on her bed—had Prima been in it that night?—he all but proposed marriage.
Naturally, Lily Ann was appalled. She managed gracefully both to rebuff his insane notion and to coax him out of her room and back to New York.
“We’ll always be friends,” she told him: a death sentence.
“I’m gonna run all the way to the train,” he responded. “So I can get older much faster.”
He was still sixteen. The train ride must have taken forever.
The summer of 1943 came, and the work came in spurts. Burlesque was dying gracelessly, shifting more and more blatantly into lasciviousness in a frantic effort to attract customers. Jerry and Kaye took a room at the Holland Hotel on Times Square, where Danny and Rae were living: an underemployed little family, with Kaye as the comic uncle.
In the fall Greshler booked Jerry into Dave Wolper’s Hurricane, a Times Square nightclub decorated with a jungle motif inspired, in all likelihood, by the 1937 film of the same title: Dorothy Lamour and Jon Hall clinging to the doorways of their huts while a special-effects storm attacked their island paradise. Jerry was doing a Carmen Miranda bit by then, fruited hat and all. He must have fit right in with the fake vines. The Duke Ellington orchestra headlined for part of Jerry’s run, and jazz critics Leonard Lyons and Lee Mortimer both mentioned Jerry’s act in their columns when they came to see the band. But nothing came of it. The Manhattan nightclub boom was to be a postwar phenomenon. Greshler was still going to have to book Jerry as an emcee/pantomimist in out-of-town theaters. He started to string together a spring and summer tour.
But the Selective Service would have its say first. Two days after his eighteenth birthday, in March 1944, Jerry made his way to Grand Central Place in a blue suit and orange tie. He wanted to sign up, as did most young men of the day, but they wouldn’t take him. Perforated eardrum, the doctor told him, and a heart murmur: 4-F, the badge of shame for a red-blooded American boy.
Jerry did the honorable thing. He signed on with the USO to do a six-week tour of hospitals and boot camps, mostly in the northeast. He added Spike Jones’s “Der Führer’s Face” to his repertoire and entertained kids his own age, boys who were shot up, many maimed for life. He tried to understand what sort of star he’d been born under, that not even the military wanted him. It was a strange blessing, being 4-F; he’d make a movie about it one day, Which Way to the Front?, but not until after he’d made five or so others playing a serviceman. In 1944, though, it felt like just another form of rejection. The USO tour ended, and he returned to the grind of emceeing and pantomime, doing the work he wanted to be doing, but still lonely, still struggling, still aimless.
That August Jerry made a triumphant return to Detroit, the scene of his youthful burlesque reveries and his sexual awakening. He wasn’t playing the National or staying at the Barlum, but he was flooded with memories of his burlesque trip with his parents.
Greshler had booked him at the Downtown Theater for sixty dollars a week. He was a between-acts specialty: The show began with a road version of the ‘Arlene Francis Blind Date” radio game; then Jerry would step before the curtain and do his shtick; then the Ted Fio Rito orchestra came on. The orchestra featured a twenty-three-year-old singer named Patti Palmer. She had a dark-featured, heart-shaped face, a wide smile, chestnut eyes. Her nose was a bit flat, her hair slightly unruly, but she could be gorgeous.
Jerry noticed her right away. Standing with his oily pompadour, in his baggy zoot suit and rubber-soled creepers, he gave her the eye: “Hey, girlie, you should have dinner with me tonight.”
She thought he was a neighborhood wise guy and shot him down. “Are you for real?” she snapped, breezing right by him.
Detroit was a homecoming for Patti, too. Her real name was Esther Calonico, the daughter of Italian immigrants (actually, she had been born Pasqualina—“little Easter”—but she begged for an anglicized name when she began to attend school). Her mother, Mary, had lived a brutally hard life in Italy as a maid for a wealthy family, suffering beatings when her work didn’t meet their standards. When she was fourteen, Giuseppe Calonico proposed marriage and flight to America. Mary agreed, passed through Ellis Island, and found herself in a house with linoleum floors in Cambria, Wyoming, a remote coal-mining town.
Mary Calonico had never known tenderness in her life, and the fates had conspired to make her violent and bitter. Her husband abused her, spending his money on booze and lashing out at her with his fists. Dragged across an ocean and a continent to a life worse than the one she fled, Mary made her daughter the scapegoat for her own miseries. Where most parents make their children feel loved with the stories of their births, Mary terrorized Esther: “She said I had weighed ten pounds and my body was covered with black hair. To top it all off, my head was badly shaped. She was so embarrassed by the way I looked that she felt she had delivered a monster.”
When her daughter was six or seven, Mary threw a butcher knife at her husband during an argument. It wobbled menacingly in the wood of the doorjamb. That night, Mary and her children, Esther and Joseph, left the house for good.
Patti wouldn’t miss Wyoming much. She remembered weeping over that linoleum floor on her hands and knees while her mother supervised her work. She remembered being slapped if she held a crochet needle improperly. She remembered being chained up if she misbehaved. She remembered when her playmate, a tiny lamb, was slaughtered for the table. If Jerry Lewis thought his childhood was something out of Dickens, Patti Palmer’s was a chapter from the Marquis de Sade. “My mother held me only once that I can remember,” she said. “When she came toward me I usually flinched because I thought she was going to hit me. Usually I was right.”
When Mary and her children finally stopped running, they were in Michigan. Mary found work in a Chrysler factory. Soon enough, her husband found them. There was a brief reconciliation, then more fighting. Mary threw him out again, but this time he took the children.
Esther and Joseph found themselves in a string of foster homes, where life could be even more nightmarish than Wyoming. One, in St. Charles, Michigan, was a haven—a farmhouse with a garden that Esther was allowed to tend. In others, though, she was beaten and underfed. She was staying in one of the better ones when her mother, now remarried, snatched her away and sued her ex-husband for custody of the children. The judge made a Solomonic decision: The boy, Joseph, would live with his father; Esther went to Mary and her new husband, Mike Farina, in Detroit.
Mike and Mary had met at the Chrysler plant, and she had hopes for him, but he turned out to be no better a husband than the one she’d left, arguing with and hitting his wife. But at least he was kind to his stepdaughter. On their first Christmas together he bought presents and a tree. She’d never had either before. “I hugged and kissed Mike for all he had done,” she remembered, “because I knew the effort had all been his. I never remember Mama putting herself out for anyone.”
Throughout the ordeals of her youth, Esther had only two staffs of comfort: Catholicism, which she practiced faithfully, and music, her one worldly escape from her brutal life. Esther had always had a pleasant voice—Mike Farina used to bring her into saloons to sing atop the bar for silver dollars, and he and Mary used to force her to show her talents off at Chrysler company picnics. As she grew into adolescence, she figured she could make a little money with her singing, intending to help her mother with household expenses.
She formed a small group, Esther and Her Sailing Swing Band, and got a job playing at a Polish wedding in nearby Hamtramck. She and her musicians played for thirteen hours and each took home fifteen dollars. When she crept into her house at three in the morning, Mary was waiting for her in a rage. She didn’t remember hearing anything about a job. “She started hitting me,” Patti remembered; “she screamed that I had gotten the money from having sex with boys. I ran from her and huddled in a corner of our tiny kitchen. She kept coming. When I curled up enough to make it hard for her to reach me with her fists, she began kicking me furiously.” Again, Mary was taking out on her daughter pain that had its origins elsewhere: Mike Farina had moved out.
More and more, music seemed to Esther the only way out of this horror show. She joined the school choir, raising the money for a dress with another gig with her band. And she took up an instrument—the accordion. Besides being a traditional Italian instrument, the accordion had the psychologically useful function of allowing her to perform an entire act on her own. Esther Calonico had never had an ally in the world. Now she’d found a way to become a singer without having to depend on a band.
After she graduated from Cass Technical High School (no one from her family came to see her get her diploma), Esther got a job at a music store and studied other instruments. She learned all the popular tunes of the day and joined an all-girl band in which she sang and played accordion and trombone. Her high school music teacher found a conservatory in Florida that agreed to take her on as a scholarship student. Mary refused. “She said all I would do was play around and get married,” Patti sighed.
Stuck in Detroit, she got lucky. While working as a strolling accordionist/singer in a restaurant, she learned Dinah Shore’s repertoire and style well enough to be hired by the local NBC radio affiliate WJKB as a staff singer on “Uncle Nick’s Kiddies Hour.” Soon she got her own fifteen-minute weekly show: “Two Pianos and Patti.” She’d officially taken the stage name Patti Palmer, a name even less ethnic than Esther, aware that the change was “a drastic step in our Italian household.”
And then bandleader Ted Fio Rito came through town. Fio Rito had once been a big-time musician: He’d written “Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Good-bye” (which, being a Jolson standard, was well known in the Lewis house) and had some hits with his band. He’d acquired a reputation as a star maker as well: Betty Hutton, Betty Grable, and June Haver had all passed through his band on their way to Hollywood fame. By the 1940s, though, he’d hit hard times, touring small theaters and recording for an obscure label.
Driving through Detroit in his car, Fio Rito heard “Two Pianos and Patti” and discovered a new singer for his band. He called the radio station and asked Patti to meet him at the Cadillac Hotel. She signed a contract on the spot. In August 1944 she was featured on a Fio Rito record, “Mamalu.” She was going places.
She almost didn’t get there. One night that summer, the band headed for a date about an hour outside Detroit in a rickety cargo truck. Returning from the gig, the musicians lined the trailer like soldiers on wooden benches. They didn’t know that the taillights on their truck weren’t working, though, and when another truck came barreling up behind them, they shouted to get their driver’s attention. Alerted, he pulled the truck off the road, and the musicians and singers all threw themselves clear. As if God had intervened to make it so, the next day Patti met Jerry.
Jerry Lewis may have been hungry for affection, but Patti Palmer wasn’t given to letting her guard down. She never, for instance, succumbed to the pressures of show business by sleeping with co-workers. “I was always rather reserved and homespun,” she recalled, “in spite of my theatrical ambitions. The boys in the band knew that, and they kind of left me alone to carry my own suitcase. I guess it was the price I had to pay for not being more sexually accommodating.”
It was a natural reaction, then, for Patti to take Jerry for a wolf when he leered at her that August afternoon. After seeing him perform, though, and learning that he was just a kid like her, she let him take her to dinner. Jerry asked her to Papa Joe’s, a local pizza joint, and showed up late—with lipstick on his collar. While she ate, he nursed a cup of coffee (he had about five bucks in his pocket). Some naïf quality in him brought out her entire life story. If Jerry had been prone to self-pity, hearing this tale was like a bucket of water in the face. He stammered a good night and bolted, convinced she’d seen right through him.
The truth can be funny: Patti had seen right through him. She knew he was unreliable, that his frantic behavior covered up his pain, that he felt a bit too sorry for himself. But still she liked him. A day or two later, she found a note written on her dressing room mirror in lipstick: “Let’s fill these.” A pair of soap baby shoes hung beside it. Some men feel they have to marry every girl they sleep with: At eighteen, Jerry Lewis felt he had to marry each one who smiled at him.
Patti consented to see more of him. They went out with each other as often as they could. Jerry snuck around, not wanting Irving Kaye to know how serious he was. “I used to say to myself, ‘Where the hell is he? Is he going for coffee and sandwiches again?’” Kaye remembered. Jerry met Mary Farina and announced, “You know, I’m going to marry your daughter, ma’am.” (He wasn’t bold enough, though, to tell his own parents as much: They had no idea he was serious with anyone, let alone a shiksa five years his senior.)
They were young, they were in love, and they were running afoul of Fio Rito. Patti and Jerry may have been willfully innocent in the ways of show people, but Fio Rito was frankly jaded. He’d pinned his hopes on a new singer with a good voice; he wasn’t about to let some skinny kid with a dummy act derail his gravy train. He confronted Patti about her budding romance: “I suppose you were out with that Jew again?” (It’s not hard to see how Fio Rito’s career fizzled away in a business dominated by Jews.) His anger terrified her, and he reckoned she got the message. Besides, the band was headed for Syracuse. The pesky little Jew would be out of her life and out of his hair.
Fio Rito didn’t count on the power of true love. Patti and Jerry kept in constant contact when she went back on the road and he returned to New York. And he didn’t count on how life had toughened his girl singer. Threats didn’t bother Patti Palmer. She told other people in the band about her predicament and sent a glossy photo and a copy of her record to Jimmy Dorsey, who’d just lost Kitty Kallen from his own band. Dorsey liked the package and hired her over the phone. Patti gave Fio Rito notice and walked, telling all the Jewish musicians in the band why she was leaving. They left as well.
Stopping in New York for a brief solo engagement at the Roseland Ballroom, Patti met Jerry to discuss their plans. She confessed to him that she hadn’t known he was Jewish. “I had been brought up to fear anyone who was Jewish,” she remembered, recalling how she used to run past a Jewish-owned grocery store as a girl. For his part, Jerry revealed that he hadn’t told Dan and Rae about her. “I think it’ll be better if I don’t,” he said. “They wouldn’t be happy—let’s leave it at that.”
Patti joined the Dorsey band in Pittsburgh and suddenly saw her name on marquees. She recorded songs and played on national radio. She shared the stage with no less than Ella Fitzgerald. She was invited by Glenn Miller to sing with his band overseas. Suddenly, the girl Jerry spent his idle days mooning over was not only older than her suitor but a bigger name as well.
The Dorsey band came into New York for an extended run at the Capitol Theater, where they supported the film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Henny Youngman was on the bill, as was the one-legged tap dancer Peg Leg Bates, and Patti and Teddy Walters sang. Jerry was working at the Glass Hat, a nightclub in the Belmont Plaza Hotel, but he attended as many of the Capitol shows as he could, inventing alibis for himself and sneaking away from the hotel where he was living with his parents and Irving Kaye.
On the night of October 2 Jerry didn’t return home at all. “Jerry used to sleep a lot in those days,” Kaye remembered twenty years later. “He didn’t have so much on his mind then. Twelve hours at a crack, it was nothing to him. One night he went out and later I didn’t see him. Towards morning he comes in and wakes me up. He says, ‘Don’t say nothing to them. I eloped today with Patti.’”
It was a Monday and the Dorsey band had the night off. Jerry and Patti headed to Greenwich, Connecticut, were married by a justice of the peace, then went back to the railroad station for lunch. Jerry, frightened to return to New York and the inevitable wrath of Danny and Rae, had a brainstorm. They would take a quick honeymoon in Lakewood, where the Arthur was open for the autumn season. Dan and Rae wouldn’t welcome the newlyweds, but Charlie and Lillian Brown surely would.
Jerry and Patti spent their first night together in the hotel where he’d learned his specialty, each of them content to have found a companion in life. Neither had ever felt loved or protected in the world. Now, though they’d known each other for less than a dozen weeks, they had each other. Patti owed no one in the world anything: She had a husband, she had a future. She slept peacefully. Jerry stared at the ceiling overcome with guilt: He’d finally found someone who would stay at his side. But he also had to return to New York and face his parents.
Irving Kaye met Jerry in front of the Holland Hotel.
“You better hurry or you’ll be late for the first show.”
Jerry showed off his wedding band. “Is that a way to greet a friend? Where’s the congratulations?”
Kaye stared down at his shoes.
“Well, say something.”
“Oh, shit.”
The eighteen-year-old newlywed entered the hotel like a rabbit on his way to visit wolves.
Rae attacked first. “You didn’t! You didn’t! How dare you! You’re making me sick!”
She recalled her maternal efforts: “What did I raise you for? To run off with a Catholic?” Worse, she hit Jerry’s sorest spot: “If your grandmother was alive, she’d drop dead.”
Danny stood dramatically, waving his only child away: “Who needs you anyhow! Go! Get the hell out of here!”
A few days later, Patti was off on a midwest swing with the Dorsey band. Before she left, she and Jerry signed a lease on an apartment at 10 Lehigh Avenue in Newark: a walk-up flat, two and a half rooms and an eat-in kitchen, sixty-five dollars a month. (The apartment would stay in the family for years after Jerry and Patti moved to California; Dan and Rae lived there for a while, then a string of relatives enjoyed its rent-controlled comforts.)
They could afford the place on Patti’s $125-a-week salary, and they would have to. Jerry was floundering, scheming and conniving just to get ten-dollar jobs in the mountains. Patti would wire money for household expenses, for train tickets so he could visit when she was playing nearby, for an allowance so Jerry could buy coffee at the drugstore and schmooze with other out-of-work comics. Jerry was spending days alone in a small north Jersey apartment waiting for word from his touring wife and feeling sorry for himself. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was married, he could have been seven all over again.
Patti had an engagement in New Haven, Connecticut, that winter, and she wired Jerry money to come see her. They wandered the streets aimlessly, talking about work, Jerry’s family, nothing, really. They sat in the sun on the steps of a grand-looking building at Yale.
“We’re going to have a baby,” Patti said.
Jerry celebrated, somewhat shell-shocked, all the way back to the station, where he boarded a train for home. He stared out the window at the chilly New England landscape. He was eighteen, estranged from his parents, underemployed, a kept man scraping by in his career. Soon he’d be a father. He would have to find a way to pull the fraying strands of his life together. He could do little about his career save keep at it. But he could try to fix his family problems. He would ask Patti to convert.
That spring they journeyed to Brooklyn to ask Morris Levitch’s blessing. The bent old man scared the life out of Patti. “I lived in terror that he would find me out,” she remembered. “They had never dared tell him that his favorite grandson had married a Gentile, so I had been presented to him as a good Jewish girl, and coached before each visit as to what to do.”
But Morris Levitch was no rube. Jerry explained the situation to his grandfather and the old man stood and slapped a chair. “You’re not fooling me,” he bellowed at Patti. “I knew you were a shiksa from the first day we met!”
She sank. He wouldn’t have her.
Then the old man’s attitude shifted. He stared into Jerry’s eyes. “Now look at my grandson,” he proclaimed. “She loves him. She takes care of him. He’s happy.” He waved a hand around his home. “All this before God is small. Love like theirs is big.”
She’d been reprieved. Patti spoke to a rabbi and made arrangements for a traditional Jewish wedding. She didn’t convert, however. She clung to her Catholicism dutifully. It had served her well as a comfort in her childhood, and she would need a staff of succor in the future.
In April 1945, before the authority of a rabbi and the watchful eyes of Rae, Danny, and a small brood of aunts, uncles, and cousins, Jerry and his six-month pregnant shiksa stood under a chuppah to be married once again. Rae would forever remain cool toward her daughter-in-law. “Let’s just say,” recalled a relative, “that she never wanted to share her son”—especially, it was intimated, after he’d made it in the business. But her boy had found his way back home to her.