This was only a twenty-six-year-old young man, recall, albeit one who had shot to the top of his profession without serving any significant apprenticeship. He left his parents’ house at sixteen, was married at eighteen, became a father at nineteen, found a partner at twenty, and woke up on his twenty-second birthday well on his way to becoming rich and famous. By twenty-six he’d made eight movies, he was costar of the most watched and anticipated program on television, he was on a popular radio show, he was doing endorsements for Chesterfield cigarettes and Van Heusen shirts, he’d cut records, he was writing a feature film. He was supporting his wife and sons, his parents, various relatives who’d traveled west in his wake, and an assorted collection of acquaintances and friends. For all intents and purposes, he was the Sun King at the center of his world.
And his partner, at thirty-five, had an equally impressive list of accomplishments to his name. No one had ever quite pulled off this sort of triumph before them, and it would be left to the next generation of entertainment gods—the rock stars—to replicate the sort of success and fame that Dean and Jerry enjoyed. They were multimedia events in and of themselves—movie stars, TV stars, stars of radio and nightclubs—and they controlled their own destinies.
Jerry had never felt like he belonged; he had always assumed, because of the treatment he’d received from Danny and Rae, that no one liked him. Now the world was throwing itself at his feet. Not coincidentally, he became a monster of temper around the house and, increasingly, at work. He developed a reputation for spouting off angrily whenever his will was opposed; witness his chronic settos with Hal Wallis. But nowhere did his volatility surface more than at the TV studio. Unfettered by the nagging Wallis, Jerry comported himself like a tyrant, with all of the hot-and-cold running capriciousness the word implies. Employees whose birthdays (and whose children’s and spouses’ birthdays) never passed without opulent attention from Jerry were subject to withering dressings-down when they failed to satisfy some unforeseen expectation.
Only one person was spared Jerry’s volatility, and that, of course, was Dean. All the success and money and toadyism he enjoyed still hadn’t diluted Jerry’s worship for his partner. Jerry liked to feel he was the only person permitted within Dean’s private force field. He even fought with Jeanne Martin over her husband. “She and I had a couple of little fracases,” he recalled, “only because I was so protective of him. If she said something like, ‘Well, he’s not all that attentive,’ I would get very protective and I would lean on her a little, and then she would tell him that I got fresh with her. Those little things happened. But I cared a great deal for her, more so than she knew, because she gave him so much pleasure.”
Dean’s marriage to Jeannie was considerably more stable than his first marriage, but it was still a bumpy relationship. They’d had their first child together in November 1951: Dean Paul Martin, Jr. (Dean had taken Paul as his middle name when he’d been confirmed in Steubenville). But they were prone to angry little separations, spats during which Jerry always took Dean’s side, in hopes, perhaps, of bolstering his position as his partner’s closest friend. Whenever he got wind of an estrangement at the Martin household, Jerry would offer Dean a bedroom at Amalfi Drive. Wisely, Dean usually chose to stay at a hotel instead. But once, according to Jack Keller, Dean accepted Jerry’s offer. “I happened to drop by Jerry’s house,” Keller recalled, “and found him tidying up everywhere, emptying ashtrays, behaving like a servant. I said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ He said, ‘Dean’s coming.’ He was as excited as a teenager.”
As much as Jerry yearned for Dean’s companionship, he didn’t like having to compete with him for public attention. Norman Lear recalled that Jerry used to go to great lengths to draw attention from Dean during the “Colgate Comedy Hour” rehearsals. “Jerry, who was supposed to be the funny one, couldn’t stand it if Dean got any laughs. Dean could be insanely funny with a line. Any morning that Dean would come in and start being funny with the lines or do funny things, Jerry would wind up in a corner on the floor someplace with a bellyache. And a doctor would have to come. This was always true. Whenever Dean was very funny, strange physical things happened to Jerry. Sometimes he would go to the extreme of calling Marvin Levy, who was his doctor at the time, to fly in from California to treat him.” (Shirley MacLaine recalled seeing this same behavior pattern when she worked with Dean and Jerry in 1955.) Others recall Jerry ripping off Dean’s jokes, taking lines Dean had ad-libbed at rehearsal and spouting them on the air as if they were his own.
Dean never specifically signaled that he didn’t appreciate his partner’s behavior; that wasn’t his style. But he had his own sly ways of letting people know he was aware of how controlling and excessive Jerry was. Simmons recalled how annoyed Dean became when Jerry had Danny appear on the Colgate show singing from his Jolson songbook: “Danny was on, and he was rehearsing, and I was standing in the back with Dean. Dean was smoking and looking at Danny with such disgust. This was still a major show, remember, although Dean put his uncle on it once, Leonard Barr. And Dean flicked his cigarette to the ground and said, ‘That’s it. Next show I’ll put my mother on. She’ll make a dress.’”
In a similar vein, Dean saw how grand Jerry’s comic ambitions had become, and he was perfectly willing to call him on them. According to Simmons, “When we were on the set of Scared Stiff, there was one scene where Jerry has been a stowaway on a boat and has been in a steamer trunk for a few days. And it’s a regular comedy situation: The trunk is opened and he gets out. Has to be funny. I’m standing watching them shoot, and again, I’m standing with Dean. Jerry gets out and it looked like he was bucking for an Academy Award: He was showing pain, he was showing ache, he was showing crippled, he was showing everything but funny. He got out of this thing and it just wasn’t funny. He was a good enough actor: You felt for this guy who was stuck in this thing. But the audience wasn’t gonna laugh at this. And I turned to Dean and said, ‘What is he doing?’ and he says, ‘Chaplin shit.’ And he rubs out his cigarette with his shoe and walks away.”
By all accounts, however, the two partners remained genuinely friendly throughout these, their glory days. If Jerry alternated between outright idol worship and petty jealousy of Dean, it wasn’t the only hot-and-cold relationship in his life; if Dean acted cool and cynical toward his younger partner, what else was new? They kept making movies together, they kept doing TV and live gigs. They were each grossing more than $1.5 million a year: They could forgive one another’s foibles.
When Scared Stiff wrapped, Dean went on vacation to Las Vegas and got a chance to perform solo, filling in for an ailing Kay Starr at the Flamingo. Soon after, they were off to Chicago and another engagement at the Chez Paree.
Their commitments were starting to pile up unmanageably. The starting date for The Caddy kept getting pushed back by Paul Jones, whom York had hired to supervise production. That, in turn, was pushing back Wallis’s next Martin and Lewis project, Money from Home, which, in typically market-driven good taste, Wallis had decided would be shot in 3-D. There were still the monthly Colgate shows, though they had allowed the superfluous radio shows to fall by the wayside. There were live dates waiting at year’s end: the Texas State Fair, a string of club dates back east, including a ten-day commitment that it turned out they absolutely couldn’t refuse.
Somehow in the mountains of verbal promises to show up they had neglected an obligation to play some date somewhere. The particulars really didn’t matter; what mattered was that the club they’d somehow forgotten was owned by mobsters, and they simply had to make good on their marker. That, however, would mean further indulgences of time from Wallis, and the producer was loath to hand them anything more than they were already getting. In August Jerry called Wallis from Chicago and asked for more time between the end of The Caddy, projected to finish shooting in early January, and the start of Money from Home, which Wallis had hoped to take before the cameras in mid-February. Wallis protested and followed up with calls to Y. Frank Freeman, Paramount’s chief of production, and Herman Citron at MCA.
With Freeman, Wallis was deferential, accepting the gentlemanly former banker’s word that the new film would start when he wished it to. With Citron, however, he was less guarded, as his phone transcripts (he’d begun recording his phone calls during Dean and Jerry’s holdout) revealed. In particular, he was frustrated by Jerry’s insinuation that he and Dean would be in some physical peril if they didn’t show up: “I just had a call at noon from Jerry in Chicago—one of those again where he said, ‘We’re obligated to play a nightclub.’… It’s the same story we got last year … what these fellows were going to do if they didn’t perform.”
After complaining about how this might affect his own plans, Wallis spoke about the biggest irritant in the whole episode: If he didn’t get Martin and Lewis in front of his cameras early enough in the year, he’d have to forgo his annual art-buying trip to Europe in order to finish the picture: “I’m going to be duplicating my last couple of years where I’m sitting here all summer, and I just don’t want to do it.” Citron was all sympathy: “I don’t blame you.” But he had no reason to bend his clients to Wallis’s will. Dean and Jerry took their time on the road—that fall they earned three hundred thousand dollars in a month of personal appearances—and they didn’t start work on The Caddy until late November. Wallis and his 3-D masterpiece would simply have to wait.
For Sammy Petrillo and Duke Mitchell, however, time was of the essence. Jack Broder had to release Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla as quickly as possible, not only to capitalize on Martin and Lewis’s success, but also to avoid litigation. In September the picture premiered to universal indifference. Variety correctly predicted “a quick demise” for the film. Broder could secure only limited distribution for the picture, even after marketing it under such clever titles as The Boys from Brooklyn and The Brooklyn Gorilla.
Why Brooklyn should figure at all in the title is just one of many unexplained mysteries about the dreadful film. And for all Wallis’s fears, there was only a single reference to Dean and Jerry in the thing: Mitchell and Petrillo, having fallen out of an airplane, are rescued by an island tribe whose chief attempts to ascertain their identities by examining their clothing. He finds an issue of Variety and puts it aside, and then he notices a label sewn into a jacket: “Mervyn Fine Tailoring.”
“I think one of them is named Mervyn,” he announces, beginning a chain reaction of puzzled rejoinders: “Mervyn?” “Mervyn?” “Mervyn?” Hearing this chorus, Mitchell and Petrillo sit bolt upright in their sickbeds.
“Which one of you is Mervyn?” asks a native girl.
“Aw, lady, you got us mixed up with two other guys,” answers Sammy.
Sammy is cruder and less winsome than Jerry, with a knobbier face and a more grating voice. He has aspects of Jerry’s shtick down cold—physical stuff like the way he skips or crouches in fear or puts a hand on his belly and leans forward in mock dignity—but he’s just an imitator. There is no comic invention in his persona, which is stolen whole cloth from Jerry, or in his block comedy routines, which would come off poorly no matter who tried them. He even—Italian boy from the Bronx!—indulges in Yiddishisms.
Still, he deserves his role at the center of the picture, if only because his partner is so phenomenally untalented. Duke Mitchell lacks Dean’s looks, charm, voice, manner, acting ability, comic instincts, even his height: Though he’s supposed to be the tall, dark, and handsome one, his partner has a few obvious inches on him. When Bela Lugosi finally turns him into a gorilla out of romantic jealousy, it’s a welcome change.
And when Sammy takes a bullet to the heart trying to protect his gorillafied partner from being hurt (at a preview screening, Jerry allegedly shouted, “Thank God!”), it’s impossible to imagine that the film could get more surreally awful. Yet it does, turning out to be a Wizard of Oz–style nightmare: Sammy wakes up backstage at the Jungle Hut in Passaic, New Jersey, where he and Duke are about to go onstage. He’s been having a dream. Petrillo gets one last chance to mug before he and his partner arrive onstage (“Those two fireballs of fun,” shouts an unseen emcee) and launch into a wan knockoff of Dean and Jerry’s act: Duke sings careeningly, Sammy pretends to conduct the band.
Fade out. End of picture. End of career. Whether Jerry conspired to squelch the team is unclear. Sammy Petrillo bitterly recalled being thrown off a Colgate hour at the last minute; the episode was hosted by Abbott and Costello, and Lou Costello allegedly told Sammy that Jerry had pulled the plug on them. Neither Sammy nor his partner blamed Dean for their downslide. “He don’t want no trouble,” Mitchell told reporters. “He used to tell Jerry, ‘Leave the kids alone, let ’em make a buck.’ I’m sure Dean never, never, bum-rapped us once.” But they didn’t blame themselves, either, despite the silence that greeted their awful film. They pursued their chimerical career as though something other than their resemblance to a famous act had called it into being, finally breaking up after Dean and Jerry split.
In 1982, a year after Mitchell’s death, Sammy Petrillo made a final, inadvertent TV appearance. Amid a montage of clips introducing a “Today Show” segment about Jerry and his autobiography, audiences caught a brief glimpse of what looked like a young Jerry mugging with Eddie Cantor. “That wasn’t me,” Jerry told Bryant Gumbel. “It was Sammy Petrillo, a kid that I found walking on Fifty-third Street here in New York, and I brought him out to Hollywood to work on a sketch with Dean and I, and then he worked with Eddie Cantor two weeks later.” Jerry explained that he’d never worked with Cantor, then joked, “Not only that, but I was never that good-looking.” When, a few days later, David Letterman’s office contacted Sammy and asked him if he’d come and surprise Jerry, who’d be making an appearance on “Late Night,” he refused.
Mitchell and Petrillo weren’t the only team whose stars rose along with Dean and Jerry’s. Norman Lear and Ed Simmons were increasingly recognized around the industry as writers of talent and wit. Reviews of “Colgate Comedy Hour” episodes routinely cited their contributions: “Their wild imaginings have raised M&L to the peerage of their particular type of comedy,” wrote Variety in a typical notice. Dean and Jerry had themselves acknowledged as much in the spring of 1951, when they bought a full-page ad in Variety announcing to the world how grateful they were to their writers, showering them in superlatives and brilliant absolutes.
But as Jerry came increasingly to cast himself as the font of all of Martin and Lewis’s inspiration, he grew prickly toward anyone who might vie with him for credit, and no one more so than Simmons and Lear. Not only were they not cut from the typical sycophant mold, after all, but they were creative people, people who supplied Jerry with the stuff that made him so popular and wealthy, people who had the ability to sit down with nothing and stand up later with a finished product.
Jerry had long been vocal about not needing writers—he was said to have snapped at Billy Rose during his first Copa appearance when the impresario suggested he and Dean should commission a written act—and he wasn’t very comfortable with having to buy scripts for his TV and radio work. Late in life, Jerry spoke of himself as a writer first and foremost—“I began as a writer and that’s been the secret of much of my success: what I’ve been able to get down on the paper.”
But during the 1950s, though he took (and undoubtedly deserved) credit in interviews for much of the material he and Dean performed, he had never received a writing credit for a film or a TV show. He ascribed it to modesty, telling interviewers that he wanted his work accepted on its own merits and not just on the strength of his signature. He also said that he refused to take credit for his behind-the-camera contributions to the team’s work so as not to overwhelm Dean in the act (a qualm that didn’t, however, stop him from adding a credit to Money from Home—“Special Material in Song Numbers Staged by Jerry Lewis”—even though the material was just his old record act pulled out of the hope chest for the occasion).
Ed Simmons had a simpler explanation for Jerry’s lack of writing credits: “Jerry couldn’t sit down and write like a writing-type person.” To be fair, with all of his other creative and family commitments, he was probably too busy to write his once-a-month television show, but as Simmons recalled, he was also an unwilling collaborator: “Jerry never met with us. We’d have to go chase after him and pin him down. We pretty much had free rein.”
Simmons and Lear, along with “Colgate Comedy Hour” director Bud Yorkin, exploited the fact that Dean and Jerry were too busy to supervise the TV scripts. They devised a routine whereby Dean and Jerry would have scripts presented to them at rehearsals, when it was too late to make major changes: Sets and costumes had already been designed, supporting cast members hired, timings worked out. They had, in effect, taken pains to Jerry-proof the show.
This sort of precaution was more and more necessary, given Jerry’s stature in the business. Not since Shirley Temple had someone so young had so many entertainment executives jumping through hoops. Jerry was revealing a spoiled-rock-star temperament at a time when Elvis Presley was still in school. You can see it in the way he boiled over at Wallis, in his imperious attitude toward Simmons’s and Lear’s work, in his ambition: He wanted to play the London Palladium, to direct films—in short, to be another Chaplin. He incorporated a Chaplin routine into Jumping Jacks (cavorting along with Dean, who also sported a derby, bamboo cane, and square mustache for the bit), and he wrote about his screen hero in publicity materials released with That’s My Boy.
He referred to Junior Jackson as “a pathetic figure very reminiscent of the character made famous by Charlie Chaplin and others of his era.” The reason for this approach, Jerry claimed, was that “at heart I really belong to the old school which believed that screen comedy is essentially a combination of situation, sadness and gracious humility.” He was careful to point out that he had “no intention of imitating Chaplin or any of the other great humorists of his day,” knowing full well that “imitators never get anywhere.” Indeed, he was convinced that too many modern comedians aped previous artists. He declared that he hoped only “to capture the same warm, sympathetic quality which Chaplin and a few others had.”
Regardless of whether Jerry wrote this manifesto himself or Jack Keller threw it together at his request, several elements in it reveal Jerry’s self-image clearly. Chaplin (and his thrice-unspecified peers) was still alive as Jerry was writing this—working, in fact, on Limelight, his late masterpiece about the nature of humor, sentiment, and comic performance (the film also featured Buster Keaton, whom Jerry never named). Jerry, however, writes as if he alone among living comics was capable of bringing a long-lost Chaplinesque mixture of slapstick and pathos to the screen.
Furthermore, Jerry’s identification of his comic persona (even as it is muted in That’s My Boy and The Stooge) with Chaplin’s is brazen at best. Taking into account the films Jerry had made or was planning to make, his relatively limited contributions to his own films (Chaplin, under the aegis of Mack Sennett, as hands-on a producer as Wallis, was allowed to direct almost from the start), and the fact that he worked in talkies and with a partner, it’s difficult to fathom how, in his mid-twenties, he felt comfortable linking himself to Chaplin—while in the same breath decrying comics who imitated other acts!
“Chaplin shit” aside, the most telling aspect of the brief manifesto is Jerry’s confession that he “really belong[ed] to the old school.” It’s a gesture that runs contrary to the typical vein of self-promoting press materials, especially materials concerning hot young comedy acts. Rather than posit himself as a groundbreaking modern performer or one of the first multimedia stars—both of which he was—Jerry chose to legitimate himself with a backward glance toward a universally recognized master. In reality, the strength of his comic persona was its aptness for the postwar era. By acting like a little boy in 1952, he was exactly in tune with the Baby Boom, and his audience identified with him as a peer. But Jerry could only accept legitimacy in the terms of an earlier culture, one in which such values as “sadness and gracious humility” still held currency. That in his private life he tried as much as possible to comport himself like an up-to-date adult only further revealed the split he felt between himself and the world around him. Even though he was adored, highly compensated, and kowtowed before, he felt as if the only time in which he wanted to be loved—his childhood—had passed him by.
There was enough child still in Jerry, however, for Dean to buy him a motor scooter as a gift (making Jerry a kind of Sal Mineo to his partner’s James Dean). Jerry kept the little bike on the Paramount lot and scooted around raising a rumpus throughout the time The Caddy was in production. In January 1953 he cracked the thing up and was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon for knee surgery (Louella Parsons incorrectly reported that a previous injury to the same knee had kept Jerry out of the army). The injury set back shooting on the film for several weeks, and it pushed Wallis’s new picture back as well.
Wallis had The Stooge out at the time, though, after sitting on it for well over a year. Though the film had ceased production in March 1951 and had been intended as a follow-up to That’s My Boy, it sat on the shelf for nineteen months before Wallis finally previewed it for the trade press. The delay, highly out of character for an efficient businessman like Wallis, had nothing to do with the work of Dean and Jerry or their director, Norman Taurog. It was due, strangely enough, to the script by Fred Finklehoff (who’d written At War with the Army) and Martin Rackin. The Stooge was an uncomfortably bald look at the relationship between an egoistic singing comic and his moronic, underappreciated sidekick, based on the reminiscences of former professional stooge Sid Silvers, who’d worked from the audience as part of accordionist Phil Baker’s act in the 1920s. Though in some ways the relationship between the central characters was exactly the reverse of Dean and Jerry’s, the disparities in their stage personae and even their physical appearances were the jumping-off point for the film, and the cruelty implicit in the portraits made even the imperious Wallis ill at ease.
Taurog was yet another in the string of journeyman directors with whom Wallis entrusted Martin and Lewis, but he developed a rapport with the team that none of his predecessors had; after The Stooge, and until they split up, he directed every York film Martin and Lewis produced. Taurog, like George Marshall and Hal Walker, was another Hollywood lifer, having acted for Thomas Ince at fourteen and directed Larry Semon comedies at Vitagraph at twenty. As a director, he’d worked with W. C. Fields, Mickey Rooney, Bing Crosby, and other comedy and light romance stars. By the time he signed on with Wallis and Martin and Lewis, Taurog was seen as a sort of B+/A– director, capable of turning out a minor classic like Boys Town but generally commissioned with light, often quasi-musical fare.
The Stooge, as it appeared under his signature, had many of the familiar contours of a Taurog picture—gentle comedy, the occasional song—but little of what audiences had come to expect from Martin and Lewis. This, and not some dark intimation that the film presaged real conflict within the team, was probably what caused Wallis to hold it from release for nearly two years. But on its release, Variety read into the film a possible expansion of the Martin and Lewis audience, which, like the audiences of randy teen comedies in the 1980s, was presumed to be largely young and male: “The change of pace, mixing as it does schmaltzy sentiment into the fun, will make a favorable impression on those, particularly the femmes, who heretofore have not wholeheartedly accepted the team’s uninhibited antics.”
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who followed Martin and Lewis’s rise with less concern for the box office than for the human condition as the team seemed to represent it, was also surprised by the film. “Students of the exotic and the brazenly bizarre are likely to find the display more intriguing than will the addicts of straight belly-laughs,” he reasoned in a generally positive review, while adding that “the going gets rather sticky and unfunny toward the end. This is not only oddly depressing; it is perilous to one’s simple faith in man.”
A heavy moral to draw from a movie starring a couple of jesters, but in fact, the film, set in the 1930s, is barely a comedy. Dean’s Bill Miller is a thorough heel, an egoist driven to further his career at the expense of friendship, marriage, and simple decency. When he breaks with his old partner and flounders as a single, his agent (a pleasantly subdued Eddie Mayehoff) suggests he get a stooge—a shill planted in the audience, off whom he can bounce jokes and song introductions. Enter Teddy Rogers (Jerry), nearly twenty minutes into the film. Teddy immediately becomes Miller’s slavish devotee—performing with him, mending his clothes, feeding him, sending loving telegrams back home, covering for him when he gets drunk. But he’s more than just a stooge—he’s such a natural comic that he becomes the real center of the act, even though Miller won’t even grant him billing. When everyone around Miller criticizes him for his selfishness, he fires Teddy, then flops again, then confesses his dependency to an audience at the Palace Theater, and then they reunite: sob, sniff, curtain.
The Stooge offers an interesting contrast to That’s My Boy, in which Jerry’s meekness was sympathetic and Dean’s boorishness rooted in more humane motives. The presence of the overbearing father in that film was a problem for Dean and Jerry to overcome together; here, the villainy comes from one of the characters we ought to be rooting for most, and all of the secondary players—Mayehoff, Polly Bergen as Dean’s wife, Marion Marshall as Jerry’s unfortunately named sweetheart, Frecklehead—spend the whole film castigating Dean for his behavior. Wallis was right to be nervous about the picture; Dean has a meaty role and sings a lot of swell old songs, but he’s an outright creep.
The most interesting motif in the film, and one that became a theme throughout Jerry’s work, is the notion that an untrained, unrehearsed neophyte can somehow perform before a live audience and score a hit merely on the basis of having a funny personality and a sincere heart. (This alone may account for the fact that decades later Jerry would declare The Stooge his favorite Martin and Lewis film.) Teddy Rogers doesn’t even know he’s supposed to be part of the act, but he steals it with his purity of spirit—just like the character Chaplin played in The Circus, who had no idea the audience was enjoying his unintentionally funny antics. It’s a philosophy of comedy that helped Jerry reconcile life and art throughout his career—his comedy, the argument ran, came from some genuine store of humanity within him that superseded anything untoward he might do off stage. But it’s a dubious theory, and it’s shakily presented in the film: When in the finale Teddy is reunited with Bill Miller, he performs a completely polished act—in drag and without his usual high-pitched whine. It’s a funny bit, actually. Dean sings straight and Jerry responds to each line of the song with ironic undercuts, innuendoes, and bad puns; it’s probably cribbed from their nightclub work. But it just doesn’t fit in with the rest of the picture: How did this schnook get so smooth all of a sudden?
Wallis, of course, didn’t worry about whether his Martin and Lewis films achieved overall harmony; he just wanted them to make money. To that end, he spent the early part of 1953 helping arrange for Dean and Jerry’s first overseas trip. A lifelong Anglophile, Wallis had encouraged Jerry’s enthusiasm to play the London Palladium, and he had been writing for several years to Val Parnell, the Palladium’s manager, suggesting he book the act. Not only did Wallis feel Dean and Jerry would do very well before English audiences, but he also believed that their appearing there—where “The Colgate Comedy Hour” had never aired—would boost their United Kingdom box-office performance, which he monitored very closely. (The previous June he’d acknowledged to Paramount’s U.K. office, which had just reported to him that Sailor Beware was a hit, that he knew “it was going to be a matter of education and an uphill fight.”) Wallis and Jerry had wanted to undertake the Palladium trip at least a year before, but the Scared Stiff holdout had interfered. Finally, however, plans were made for Dean and Jerry to play outside the United States for the first time that June, just after Money from Home wrapped.
They traveled first class on the brand-new Queen Elizabeth (Elizabeth II had been crowned just the previous year), along with a full entourage including musicians, writers, a road manager, an accountant, and a few more hangers-on (the tickets cost thirty-two thousand dollars all told). Patti, Gary, and Ronnie made the trip with Jerry; Dean, though reconciled with Jeanne, went stag. They arrived in London on about June 10 and spent a few days sight-seeing and playing the classic Scottish golf courses. Jerry bought English suits and shirts for himself; Dean, who had won twelve thousand dollars in the ship casino on the way over, carried on a brief affair with actress Pier Angeli, whisking her away from his fellow Wallis wage slave Kirk Douglas, who was shooting Vincente Minnelli’s The Story of Three Loves (another loan-out project) with the actress.
On June 15 they hit Glasgow along with Patti; Gary and Ronnie stayed in London with a nanny. In Scotland a small knot of adoring fans waited for Martin and Lewis’s arrival—bobby-soxers chanted their names outside their hotel—and they gave a few interviews. Jerry assumed a remarkable gravity in these talks, taking time not only to bare his soul to the Scottish press but to take several pointed swipes at Wallis, the very man behind the overseas trip. In interviews in London and Glasgow, Wallis was repeatedly castigated by both comics as a poisonous influence on their careers. While Dean nodded vigorously in agreement, Jerry lambasted their producer before a string of reporters: “We keep telling him that it’s far better to make $20 million over ten years than $8 over two. You can even keep more of it in the end. But that man can’t see it. I suppose he’s afraid one of us will break a leg or something. We were the Number One box-office attraction last year—but we won’t stay that way if we do the same thing all the time. We’ve got three more films to make for that man. Then we’ll be our own bosses.”
All of these tirades were reported to Wallis in Hollywood, prompting him to send an angry telegram to Jerry at the Savoy Hotel stating, among other things, that “I have devoted twenty-five years of my life building up and achieving an enviable reputation and standing in the motion picture world and I cannot stand by silently and see you distort facts and unwittingly harm it.”
But Wallis wasn’t the only focal point of Jerry’s strange introspection. Maybe it was being overseas that caused him to speak as if at a distance from himself. Maybe he was a little drunk—he was never much for booze, but the British interviews were generally held during cocktail parties he and Dean threw for the press, and at least one quoted him as asking for “another one of those stale drinks.” Whatever the reason, he reflected on his fame (“Success is still so new I enjoy every minute of it. Every night I pray everything will stay all right and every morning I wake up thinking I’m a lucky fella”) and on his unusual partnership, hinting, even, that Dean didn’t provide everything he wanted from a friend: “I’m Jewish with a theatrical background and I have to show my emotions. Dean is Italian from a tough steel town in Ohio where it’s supposed to be sissy to show what you feel. So he covers it up and pretends never to be serious or nervous.”
Dean, watching the spectacle, kidded to a reporter, “The boy’s sick. He’s having an off day.” But something about the trip had struck a deep chord in Jerry. After a warm reception for their June 15 performance at the Glasgow Empire, he returned to London to prepare for the June 22 debut of Martin and Lewis at the Palladium (at seven thousand pounds for the week) in the same kind of reverently subdued mood that caught hold of him before they debuted at the Copa. “Over in Hollywood they seem to think of the Palladium as a turning point,” he told a reporter. “Sort of a steppingstone to the big time.”
Such a perspective may seem odd coming from a performer as popular as Jerry, but it speaks to his conception of show business as he inherited it from his father: Television was no big deal; movies weren’t the real thing; the great live stages—the Palace in New York, the Palladium in London—were where the true legends made their marks. He was the most popular comedian in the United States, but he approached the stage of the hallowed London variety house that night with trepidation.
For once, his anxiety was well founded. Following a standard roster of opening acts—a chorus line, an impressionist, a knife thrower, a juggler, a couple of dancers, a British stand-up comic—Dean and Jerry did their act as they had always done to killing success back home: mugging, singing, spritzing, yukking it up with the band. They were received, according to about half of the newspaper critics on the scene, with the fits of laughter they were used to hearing at home. But as their act wound down, Jerry approached the microphone out of character, much as he did at the end of each “Colgate Comedy Hour,” to offer a word of thanks.
“When we return …” he began.
“Never come again!” came a shout from the balcony.
Jerry stopped dead and looked up into the audience in disbelief.
“Go home, Martin and Lewis!” rang out another cry. And shouts of “Rubbish” and “A disgrace to variety” were also recorded. A torrent of boos began to rain out of the stalls, though observers couldn’t agree later whether they were meant for Dean and Jerry or for the people who’d heckled them. Whichever it was, the two comics ran for the safety of their dressing room without attempting another word of gratitude.
Backstage, after agreeing that they should forgo an encore, Val Parnell assured them that they had done fine. The political atmosphere in London, he told them, was ripe with anti-Americanism. There was a great deal of sympathy among the British public for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who had recently been executed, and there was a lingering bitterness in the air following the visit to London of another pair of American clowns—Roy Cohn and G. David Schine, staff lawyers to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Parnell tried to calm his stars by assuring them that the reception that had so shocked them was in fact part of an orchestrated cabal. (Several weeks would pass before Variety would run a story proving that Parnell was right: The ringleaders of the heckling mob were “two young men who read The Daily Worker” and who had similarly disrupted an April Palladium performance by, of all people, Vivian Blaine.)
But Jerry couldn’t be persuaded out of feeling betrayed by the audience. “We are human beings,” he told a reporter, “and therefore we are hurt.” It was the most stinging reception he’d been accorded since the days when he was a nervous, stammering emcee. And what hurt at least as much as the incident was the way it was covered by the press. All but ignoring the appreciative welcome the act had received from the vast majority of the house throughout the performance, the London papers concentrated on the booing, assuming it was the crowd’s reaction to the show: “For twenty years, Jerry Lewis, the monkey-faced American comedian, has dreamed of playing at the Palladium,” wrote the News Chronicle. “And last night, when he topped the bill there with his partner Dean Martin, he was booed.” “A Tragedy for Two Comics,” was the headline in the Daily Mirror. Several reviewers who made hay of the evening’s strange denouement assumed that the commotion was a reaction to the content of Martin and Lewis’s act, and they took it upon themselves to impute their own opinions of the act to the audience. “Theirs is the humor of village idiocy,” wrote the Mirror, “with straws in its hair—witless and very embarrassing.”
That the whole incident was politically motivated (Jerry, by his own confession, knew absolutely nothing of politics), and that much of the booing was probably meant for the hecklers themselves, didn’t matter. Whatever pain the incident had inflicted on him was only worsened by the press coverage. For the remainder of the engagement, Jerry performed politely and within strict limits, never once taking an encore regardless of the reception.
When he and Dean arrived in Paris after a tour of U.S. military bases in France, they went tooth-and-nail after the British press. Speaking at lunch with Art Buchwald of the International Herald Tribune at the Hôtel George V, they took no care to hide their resentment. “I’m never going back to England,” said Dean (in a passage presumably sanitized for print), “on account of the British press stinks. And you can tell them I said so. The British press are a bunch of two-faced people. They tell you how much they like you to your face and what great admirers they are of yours, and then the next day you read in the paper that you stink.”
Jerry ordered a lunch of “a nice roasted English reporter garnished with lots of French fried potatoes” and then complained that “they called me a gargoyle. One of the reviewers said he wasn’t sure but someday he’d succumb to my apelike qualities. Warped minds, that’s all they have.”
Dean, who was to return home directly after the Paris stopover, was aware of the gravity of his remarks, asking Buchwald when the story would run: “I just wanted to know when the war would start.” Russell Holman of Paramount’s European offices wrote directly to Jerry to caution him about any more such comments, but nobody got in touch with Dean. He sailed back to New York on the Liberté along with David Niven, who committed the faux pas of announcing to reporters that Dean and Jerry were courageous and accurate in their attack on the British press. Back in New York, Dean carried on with his criticism, citing the murmurs of approval he’d heard from others in Hollywood for his frank assessment of the British writers. Hal Wallis was aghast that one of his biggest stars was persistently and willfully alienating the press in one of his biggest markets. When he tried to silence Dean, the singer complained that Wallis’s quickie productions were turning him and Jerry into a second-rank comedy team: “Wallis would like to put us in anything, like the way Abbott and Costello make pictures.”
The American papers reacted to the episode by calling Dean and Jerry crybabies; the San Francisco Chronicle even ran an editorial chastising them for their petulant refusal to accept negative press. Walter Winchell chided them for “a Major Bubu: You never publicize the raps.” Hedda Hopper offered advice: “The boys should have taken the reviews and made an amusing sketch about them for their TV show.”
Jerry missed the whole ruckus. He and Patti toured France and Italy until mid-August. They were spotted by paparazzi on the Via Veneto and touring the Roman Forum, looking for all the world like a happy, handsome young couple. After Jerry and Patti returned to the States, Jerry and Dean played several engagements in New York, including another profitable turn at the Paramount, and then returned west to make the next York film. Eighteen months after boycotting Scared Stiff because it was based on an earlier film, he and Dean were producing a new version of the classic Ben Hecht screwball comedy Nothing Sacred (which just the year before had been transformed into an unsuccessful Broadway musical). Called Living It Up, it was the first of York’s final trilogy of films; they would all be remakes.
The only absolutely new material being prepared for Martin and Lewis was the stuff that Simmons and Lear were writing for “The Colgate Comedy Hour,” whether Dean and Jerry appreciated their contribution or not. They would, of course, tell journalists that they were funny on their own, and even Simmons agreed. “Dean and Jerry were funny,” he said, “and they had a good relationship, but the stuff was written. That’s not to say they didn’t add. But we felt shitty when they’d say they didn’t need writers.”
Jerry was certainly not the first comedian to declare himself to be born whole cloth a comic genius, but with his phenomenal success, he began to believe it himself, and he grew testy with collaborators. As Lear recalled, “Something happens to some comedians—not just this comedian, but something happens to some funny people. They develop a kind of popish aura. Comedy is a religion, and they are the pope of that religion. And as a consequence they begin to know everything. So they become producers and directors and mavens on every subject. And that was developing in Jerry along with the rift with Dean. He knew everything that was best for Dean as well as himself.”
Jerry’s proprietary attitude was probably strongest toward his television work because TV was the medium in which he had the most power: When making films, he was answerable to Hal Wallis or the Paramount executives who oversaw York films; when performing live, he took pains to tread carefully around Dean and the mob-backed nightclub owners they worked for. But Dean didn’t give a damn about how their TV shows were put together, and no one at NBC felt powerful enough to rein in Jerry, a legitimate movie star who deigned to appear on their network.
So Jerry didn’t take advice from his writers and chums, Simmons and Lear. And both men felt it hurt his career as a comic. “He never understood the essences of Jerry Lewis,” mused Lear. “He never understood what was best about him. So he accented some of the things that were most irritating. He hasn’t welcomed collaboration in his life. He stopped doing that early in our career together. He would pay no attention. He just didn’t require it.”
Simmons, too, spoke of a great fondness for the comic gifts he’d seen in Jerry when they first knew each other, and he also felt that Jerry’s increasingly imperious attitude wound up hurting his art as well as his business. “He had stopped taking advice very, very early,” he reflected. “He had stopped taking advice a year into their success as a team.” But Simmons saw a different reason for Jerry’s eventual fortunes: “Jerry once was very funny. It isn’t that Jerry changed. It’s that he should’ve changed but didn’t. Because he at sixty-six or sixty-seven years old is still the Kid. And he was the Kid through all these movies even when he wasn’t the Kid. And he did not grow. When he was twenty-two years old, there was no funnier person in this world. But with each year that went on you got less from the same things. Now, you watch the progression in the ‘Colgate Comedy Hours,’ both in the time I was there and then after that, you see him getting older but still playing the baby. So suddenly it becomes like Harry Langdon. And Jerry did not grow, in my estimation. His nightclub act is the same. He does talk shows and they kid him about the sounds he made. Everybody who does an impersonation of Jerry Lewis does Jerry from the Fifties.”
Simmons and Lear were on the scene to witness Jerry’s transition from Brilliant Kid Comic to Serious Businessman Comic. When they first joined Martin and Lewis as writers, it was like joining a rock band. The four of them were all about the same age, all live wires, all full of themselves and their amazing success. “When we started to work together, it was like a fraternity house,” Lear remembered. “We played pranks, they played pranks; and it was just great fun. And Jerry was absolutely a genius.” Jerry would have Simmons and Lear stay at his house when they were in California, and he would come into their bedroom and start pillow fights or serve them breakfast.
Even Dean was playful with them, though not without a certain edge. “Because of the street fighting he’d done growing up, Dean knew every nerve center in everybody’s body,” said Simmons. “And they were both reasonably sadistic. Well, once I’m standing watching a rehearsal, and I had this fucking excruciating pain, and I had no idea who did it. I turned around and I swung—it could’ve been a secretary—and I hit Dean in the arm. I could’ve hit fifty blows, but whatever it was, I hit the right place, and his arm went absolutely dead. Dean looked at me and said, ‘Boy, you’re pretty strong for a writer.’ I said, ‘Let that be a lesson to you. Remember one thing: Don’t ever fuck with Big Ed.’”
For their part, the writers were taken with their bosses and imitated them in starstruck fashion: “We never knew what loafers were until we saw them wearing loafers, so we got loafers,” Simmons remembered. “Brylcreem was the other thing, all the Brylcreem in their hair. Things like that. And the cologne. Jerry used to use Aphrodisia and Dean would use Woodhue. I think they used to get the stuff by the case, or it was given to them, or whatever. And they would use it. Two showers, two bottles. So we decided we were gonna get cologne. Well, I was closer to Dean, so I got Woodhue, and Norman got Aphrodisia. They were appearing at the Chez Paree, and we were gonna go to the Chez Paree. We’re putting on cologne, and we figure we’ll do it the way they do it: It isn’t just a touch of cologne, so we pour it on our necks and our faces and down in the crotch. In the cab, I say, ‘Jesus Christ, something’s going on!’ And Norman says, ‘Me too.’ We burned our balls off! We go back to the hotel, we call the doctor, and for days, wherever we walked, we’d leave a little trail of dandruff. It was dead skin falling off us.”
The charmed relationship that Simmons and Lear shared with Dean and Jerry soured, eventually, over money and over the question of who the truly creative parties to the Colgate show were. In November 1953 the hot young writers were awarded by the hot young comics with a new contract, a seven-year deal at $10,400 a show. It was the most money anyone had ever paid for writers in the brief history of the medium, and as such, it was news. Variety and Billboard wrote stories revealing details of the contract, and TV Guide published an editorial lauding the fact that television writers were now receiving their financial due. “We blew a lot of smoke up our respective asses at that time,” Simmons recalled.
But just as he stole Dean’s one-liners, Jerry couldn’t abide this sort of thing: Only one person in the operation would be renowned for generating brilliant ideas, and it would be him. In what Ernie Glucksman took to be a practical joke or a passing whim, Jerry picked up the telephone one day and fired Simmons and Lear. Even though they were producing brilliant material for him. Even though he had just signed a long-term contract with them for all that money.
Simmons and Lear promptly sicced lawyers on Martin and Lewis, and they won their point: They would be paid $10,400 for every full-length script they submitted; they were still the principal writers of the show. For the next few months, they diligently prepared their material and submitted scripts to Martin and Lewis at the appointed time. And Jerry took each one of those scripts and tossed it into the trash without a glance. Simmons and Lear got paid, but the scripts Dean and Jerry performed were written by a new team assembled from among Jerry’s friends: Danny Arnold, Harry Crane, and Arthur Phillips. The unusual (and, for Dean and Jerry, costly) flap made headlines in the trade papers, though Jerry insisted publicly that he and his writers got along fine.
The entire 1953–54 season went that way, until Simmons and Lear finally couldn’t bring themselves to submit another script that would never be aired. They moved on to less hostile pastures when the season ended, taking up writing for George Gobel, a comic as distinct from Jerry in both on- and offstage demeanor as there was. At the end of that same season, Dean and Jerry’s “Colgate” director, Bud Yorkin, also moved on to the Gobel show, just as weary of Jerry’s ways.
The Caddy debuted that fall. It’s one of their sloppier films, part quasi-autobiographical biopic, part Dean-and-Jerry domestic comedy (Dean the wayward partner, Jerry the wifely loyal pal), part silly sports film. It opens as Joe Anthony (Dean) and Harvey Miller (Jerry), a hot young act, are enjoying a monumental run at the Paramount Theater (actual footage of their own Times Square hysteria was included, fleshed out with tame re-creations). While they perform a lively stage number, “What Wouldcha Do Without Me?,” Dean’s just-offa-da-boat pop (Joseph Calleia) tells a reporter how Joe and Harvey teamed up.
Harvey is yet another browbeaten son, the offspring of a champion golfer. Yet unlike the man who plays him, Harvey is afraid of crowds—the film’s freshest gag shows a golf ball staring up at him like a giant eye—and he quits competing in tournaments. His fiancée’s wayward brother, Joe, is himself a good golfer without any phobias. Harvey eggs Joe into tournaments, serving him as caddy, tutor, manservant, surrogate mother, and Jiminy Cricket. Joe wins a club championship, then enters a pro tournament, but Harvey is too disruptive and they’re run off the course. Luckily, a corpulent man who’s been laughing hysterically at Harvey’s antics turns out to be a theatrical agent who signs them to a lucrative show-biz contract.
Though the script doesn’t bear Jerry’s name, his signature is all over it. He reprises from That’s My Boy the theme of the squelched son who finds a hero in a paternalistic peer just as Dean was a Danny whom Jerry could live with. He allows himself a full-blown production number, “The Gay Continental,” in which he cavorts around a pool in a simulation of Groucho Marx doing a Noel Coward song. Inaugurating a lifelong habit of casting his sports heroes in his films, he filled the picture with great golfers—Ben Hogan, Julius Boros, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead. And through Paul Jones, the nominal producer of the York films, he hired the Paramount crew with whom he and Dean had made almost every one of their pictures: cinematographer Daniel Fapp, costume designer Edith Head, art director Hal Pereira, editor Warren Low, optical effects man Farciot Edouart.
It’s one of the first films in which Jerry explicitly assumes a female role vis-à-vis Dean, cleaning and cooking for him when they play in tournaments away from home, sharing a bed with him (a joke used in almost all of their films together), fretting over him like a mother hen, dressing as a se$nTorita opposite Dean’s matador in a makeshift Spanish musical number. The final Jerryesque touch is its weirdly postmodern ending, in which the “real” Dean and Jerry follow Harvey and Joe at the Paramount and get mixed up backstage with Harvey and Joe’s girls. After Donna Reed and Barbara Bates are whisked away by Joe and Harvey, “Dean” wonders aloud, “How lucky can two guys get?” and “Jerry” unctuously pats both himself and his partner on the back, responding, “Yeah, we got it real bad, ain’t we Dean?” Frame-breaking devices of this sort would be trotted out at the end of some of their other York films, and they became a hallmark of Jerry’s work when he came to direct himself years later.
As The New York Times noted in its review of The Caddy—and in ignorance of the extent to which Jerry had a hand in creating the film—there were fewer and fewer chances for Dean to stand alone. “Mr. Martin, for his pretty singing and his romancing, rates the usual nod,” wrote a prophetic Bosley Crowther, “but Mr. Lewis is slowly taking over. Just give him a couple of more years.”
It’s ironic, given this, that the single most memorable thing about The Caddy was a song that Dean performed in it, a novelty tune written for the picture by Dean’s paisano, Harry Warren (born Salvatore Guaragna). Warren had been selected by Jerry to write songs for Dean, but he didn’t like working for Jerry. Late in life he told an interviewer, “I watch his telethon just to see if he’s as crass as he used to be. He was a pain in the ass.” He did, however, enjoy Dean’s company and was happy to write expressly for him. Dean didn’t care for the song’s ridiculous lyrics at first, and he allowed Jerry to take a chorus of it with him when it was presented in the film. But there was something undeniably catchy in the melody, and corny or not, the lyrics had a definite hook, starting with the opening couplet:
When the moon hits your eye
Like a big pizza pie …
“That’s Amore” became Dean’s breakthrough hit, rising to Number Two on the charts and remaining on the Hit Parade for nearly five months. It was a long-overdue success for Dean—a bit of limelight he didn’t have to share with his partner.
Dean and Jerry did a second Muscular Dystrophy telethon late that November, as different a program from the previous one as could be imagined. Rather than accept phoned-in pledges, the telethon called upon the services of U.S. postal carriers, who had agreed to sacrifice their Thanksgiving holidays by making their routes to collect MDA envelopes they’d delivered with the mail earlier that month. Rather than running on NBC’s New York affiliate, the show was broadcast nationwide by ABC, the puny third network that had nothing to lose by airing a charity show in prime time. Instead of sixteen hours, the show ran merely two. Those two little hours were made to seem like an entire day, however, by the show’s somnabulant structure, its lack of top-flight guests, and by Jerry’s endless, sober-toned repetitions of “ladies and gentlemen,” the deadly refrain he’d resurrected from his emceeing days. The desperate lifelessness of the enterprise was captured in its attempt to simulate a real telethon: After a mere half-hour, Dean and Jerry undid their ties and opened their shirt collars. Hard work, all that entertaining.
The telethon had come in the midst of the production of the current York picture, Living It Up, in which they had cast their old friend Janet Leigh. It was a bowdlerized version of Nothing Sacred, the classic 1937 screwball comedy about a cynical reporter who hears about a dying small-town girl whose last wish is to visit New York. He plans a series of sensational articles around the girl, even after he discovers that her diagnosis was mistaken and she’s not fatally sick at all. Jerry was cast in Carole Lombard’s role as the girl, Leigh in Fredric March’s role as the reporter, and Dean was given the beefed-up role of Jerry’s doctor and coconspirator. It marked the first time Jerry was cast in a role previously played by a woman, and it underscored some of the obvious disparities between him and Dean as personalities: Virile, handsome Dean monopolized the team’s masculinity; Jerry had long played the spoiled, frightened kid in response, but now he and his writers had found another way for him to pair off with Dean’s profound maleness. (Having Jerry play a woman was a rather clever switch, in a sense, for having him play a Jew, the inevitable sexist and even homoerotic tones being less disturbing to Jerry than hints of anti-Semitism.) There had been a touch of this in The Caddy, where Jerry followed Dean around like a wife or maid, but Living It Up took that hint to an extreme, rewriting a romantic comedy as a story for two men.
Leigh recalled that the atmosphere on the set was akin to the mood that prevailed when she was making the Gar-Ron pictures. “They clowned around and such,” she remembered, “but that was part of their charm, and they executed it very well. So it was great fun, but it was still very professional.” She was aware, however, that they didn’t seem to see much of each other away from the set. “There wasn’t a lot of socializing with the two families,” she said. “At that point, we knew Jerry better than we knew Dean. Dean and Jeannie came to the premieres and everything. We knew them and liked them. It wasn’t like there was a problem. It’s just that he sort of had his group and Jerry had his group and all of that. I don’t know why they didn’t socialize. Maybe they felt that when they were on the road together they saw enough of each other and when they were home they should sort of have their own lives.”
It had, in fact, been a conscious decision. Jerry had heard from no less an authoritative source than vaudeville comics Chick Johnson and Ole Olsen that the wives ought to be kept apart from each other, to prevent jealousy and other hazards. As for Dean and Jerry, they would be successful as long as they had each other.
Right?