In 1921 Samson Raphaelson, a first-generation American Jew born on the Lower East Side and educated at the University of Illinois, published a short story in Everybody’s Magazine about a cantor’s son who spurns a religious vocation in order to become a singer of popular songs. Entitled “Day of Atonement,” the story was immediately recognized by members of the Jewish show-business community as a fitting emblem of their experience of assimilation into gentile society through the medium of mass entertainment. One cantor’s son in particular—Al Jolson—felt an intense attraction to the material, bringing it to the attention of a variety of movie people as a possible vehicle for himself (D. W Griffith, the director of The Birth of a Nation, dismissed the story as “racial”). When Jolson finally met Raphaelson at a nightclub and told him of his enthusiasm, the author developed a proprietary attitude toward “Day of Atonement” and short-circuited Jolson’s plans by adapting it himself into a stage play.
Raphaelson’s dramatic version of his story premiered on Broadway in 1925, with George Jessel—not, pointedly, Jolson—in the lead role; in this new incarnation, it was called The Jazz Singer. Although reviewers didn’t care much for the production—The New York Times wrote that it was “so written that even the slowest of wits can understand it”—the play ran for a full season of thirty-eight weeks, after which both Jessel and the story were bought up by Warner Brothers.
Warner was literally the only studio in Hollywood willing to touch such explicitly Semitic material. Whereas the Jews who ran the other film studios erased any trace of their ethnicity from their movies, Harry Warner was a champion of various social issues and made films that addressed matters of race, tolerance, and bigotry. He felt that a story about Jewish assimilation would help others understand his people, and he was eager to make a major film of Raphaelson’s play. To that end, he and his brothers, Jack and Sam, decided to use The Jazz Singer as the occasion to introduce synchronized sound on screen. Furthermore, they instructed screenwriter Alfred A. Cohn to turn the story—which, after all, was about a singer—into a musical. For this reason (and perhaps because Jessel’s Yiddish humor smelled too strongly of the ghetto for even their tastes), the Warners cast Jolson as Jacob Rabinowitz, the starstruck Jewish boy who changes his name to Jack Robin and makes a hit in the gentile show world, only to return to his late father’s synagogue to conduct a Kol Nidre service in his honor.
The screen version of The Jazz Singer debuted on October 6, 1927 (the day after the sudden death of Sam Warner, who oversaw the technical innovations in the film), and it became an instant classic, revolutionizing practically every entertainment medium. Competing studios scrambled to develop their own sound systems. Talent scouts scoured Broadway and the vaudeville and burlesque circuits for actors with resonant voices. Dialogue writers were suddenly in urgent demand. Radio became a new venue for advertising films and film stars. But above all, Jolson, already a legend in the ranks of show professionals, became a god. To aspire, as young Danny Lewis had, to sing and dance and thrill a crowd the way Jolson did was one kind of conceit; to see oneself as a star of groundbreaking movies that encapsulated the immigration experience of one’s family and race was an aspiration of quite another order. The Jazz Singer was a genuine milestone of show-business history, an Everest for entertainers who aspired to Jolson’s mantle.
By 1959—and in the wake of an ill-fated ’50s remake starring Danny Thomas—everyone in Hollywood considered The Jazz Singer moldy and sacrosanct at once. Astonishment and wicked anticipatory glee therefore greeted the news that Jerry Lewis would appear in a made-for-TV version of it. In Jerry’s hands, the story would be about a young man who forsakes his father’s traditional religious life to become not a crooner but a clown. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Cantor” was the disparaging nickname foisted onto the project by Hollywood snickerers, who saw in it irrefutable proof of the baldness of Jerry’s ambition to usurp every important spot in the traditional show-business hierarchy. “This is something that has been bugging Jerry for some time,” wrote Cecil Smith of The Los Angeles Times. “He is a man who runs with such ferocity that he makes Sammy Glick seem like a cigar store Indian—he continually sets up goals to prove himself; he must prove things over and over and over again. He is always saying that he has no interest in what critics write about him—‘the day you entertain the critic, you lose the audience.’ But he says it too often, so this must bug him too.”
Smith was right about Jerry’s hubris, but he didn’t quite glimpse little Joey Levitch standing behind the project and straining to show the world that he belonged in it. In fact, The Jazz Singer was one of Jerry’s most personal and heartfelt undertakings. He changed the name of the protagonist from Jack to Joey and further christened Joey’s sympathetic mother Sarah, after his beloved maternal grandmother. And while he atavistically retained the title of the project even though there was no jazz singing in it, he could have written from personal experience the story of the son eclipsing the father and then sentimentally capitulating to him.
Jerry admitted as much to Hal Humphrey of The Los Angeles Mirror News, harkening back to one of his deepest pains to explain the genesis of the project: “When I was thirteen, my parents couldn’t afford my bar mitzvah. Dad was on the road making twenty dollars a week in burlesque and I was living with my grandmother. I had to accept a charity bar mitzvah from the synagogue. You can’t imagine how badly my family felt about this. So The Jazz Singer, with its relationship between a Jewish father and his son, is kind of close to me.”
Nevertheless, it was ironic material to work with. Danny had virtually retired, after all, and had long resigned himself to Jerry’s career choices. He lived primarily off of his son’s largesse, though he still reserved for himself the right to criticize Jerry’s material and colleagues. His bitter grumblings about his failed career, however, were hardly analagous to Cantor Rabinowitz’s pious grief over his son’s departure from religious traditions. For Jerry’s part, while he felt a filial bond with his father and sentimentally bragged about Danny’s show-biz prowess, his hero worship for Danny had died, and he found himself increasingly uncomfortable in his presence.
Still, he hoped to craft The Jazz Singer into an autobiographical project—by his own description, the bar mitzvah he never had. NBC didn’t quite see it the same way, trying to rein Jerry in as much as possible from creating a statement of his artistic maturity. For one thing, the network limited the show to an hour—thirty minutes shorter than Jolson’s version—and insisted against Jerry’s objections that it be taped rather than broadcast live. This particularly irked the star. “I need the charge I get from a live audience,” he complained to Humphrey. “It’s the only real way to find out anymore if people really like you.”
The Jazz Singer was broadcast in color on October 13, 1959, as an installment of the “Ford Startime” series of specials and made-for-TV movies. Ralph Nelson directed the show under the supervision of producer Ernie Glucksman (the two had collaborated on the teleplay). Yiddish stage legend Molly Picon appeared as Jerry’s mother, Eduard Franz played Cantor Rabinowitz (reprising his role from the Danny Thomas film), and Anna Maria Alberghetti, the twenty-three-year-old Italian-born contralto who’d played opposite Dean Martin in Ten Thousand Bedrooms, was cast as Jerry’s sweetheart.
The critics were only slightly kinder after the broadcast than they had been beforehand. “Lewis,” wrote “Jose.” in Variety, “is hardly the figure to swing between the double masks of comedy and tragedy with any degree of ease, and there were times when the demands of the role were just too much for him. … The spectacle of Lewis singing ‘Kol Nidre’ [the final prayer of Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays] in blackface just about twenty-four hours after the Day of Atonement just didn’t sit right along ecclesiastical lines, and looked like a dramatic gimmick of a bygone era.”
It wasn’t a flop on the scale of Neil Diamond’s laughable 1980 version of The Jazz Singer, but it was hardly proof to the world of its star’s dramatic talents. Some weeks later, asked about his recurrent bad luck on television, Jerry sneered to the New York Post, “TV is a joke.”
He was lucky enough, anyhow, not to have to depend on a medium he couldn’t get the hang of to make his living. He was, as he liked to say, “a Jewish movie star,” and people were still happy to see him on stage and the big screen. He had been selected 1959’s Star of the Year by the people who knew from stars: the Theater Owners of America. He did Paramount producer Norman Panama a favor by making a cameo appearance in his film of the Broadway musical Li’l Abner as Itchy McCrabby, gangling noisily out of the crowd to take a gander at Stupefyin’ Jones (Julie Newmar), then adopting a grotesque, stock-still pose at the sight of her pulchritude. During the late summer and autumn he toured the southwest at a string of supermarket openings, gala one-shots that filled his wallet and kept him in front of live audiences. He spent even more time on the road doing personal appearances shilling Don’t Give Up the Ship, a heroic task considering that it was a Hal Wallis film.
On October 17 Patti gave birth yet again, to Anthony Joseph, named after her patron saint. “With all the babies we’ve been having,” Jerry told reporters at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, “maybe I ought to go downstairs and open a charge account.” He now had five sons to carry on his name.
Two days later he went before the cameras in the fourth Jerry Lewis production, Cinderfella, Frank Tashlin’s gender-reversed reworking of the fairy tale. It would be a full-scale musical, a glossy production with big sets, a budget approaching $2 million, a soundtrack recording, and a Christmas release. Such high-profile performers as Dame Judith Anderson and Ed Wynn (the only important comedian ever to play a major part in one of Jerry’s films) filled key roles. Jerry’s plans were grand enough to induce him to ask Grace Kelly, three years retired to regal family life, if she would appear in the film. Confiding that he had “something of utmost importance” to discuss that could benefit the princess, her husband, and all of Monaco, he wired her in July requesting an audience either by telephone or in person and declaring his readiness to “fly to Monaco immediately pending your answer.” (In mid-August Herman Citron told Jerry that he’d finally heard from Kelly’s former agent Jay Kanter, who said that the princess “tried to reach you, but was told you had gone away for two weeks.” So much for being at the princess’s beck and call.)
The production ran into little speed bumps like that all along. The folks at Disney, angry at the resemblance of the film’s title to their 1950 animated movie, threatened to take action against Paramount unless Jerry’s film was more clearly distinguished from theirs; a logo was designed in which the f in Cinderfella was printed in an elongated red typeface, and the protest was squelched. Early in the production, costar Erin O’Brien found herself on the wrong side of her producer and was fired (the first of several young actresses whom Jerry would dismiss early in his films); she was replaced by Anna Maria Alberghetti, but not until Jerry agreed to play the Palmer House in Chicago to compensate for pulling Alberghetti from an engagement there in order to make his film.
Then, on November 18, disaster: Jerry collapsed on the set after attempting several consecutive takes of a frantic run-up an enormous flight of stairs. “I was eating at the restaurant across the street from Paramount,” recalled Jerry’s cousin Marshall Katz, who’d been working in Jerry’s offices since The Delicate Delinquent, “and I got a call that Jerry had collapsed, so I ran across the street and I ran up those stairs myself. And that was a huge staircase.”
Frank Tashlin also ran up the stairs, and he later confessed his helplessness in a memo to Paramount publicity director Jack Karp, saying “It is unfortunate but I am completely ineffectual when exposed to another’s illness. … If Mr. Lewis had been in real serious trouble I would have been of absolutely no help.”
Tashlin credited a studio policeman, Fritz Hawkes, with cool-headed action. Hawkes called an ambulance, and Jerry was taken to his dressing room; when it was determined that he was merely out of breath and not suffering a heart attack, he was given oxygen. The workaholic producer-star was back on the set that afternoon, and three days later he hosted an MDA telethon from the Ziegfeld Theater in New York—“The Jerry Lewis 1959 Thanksgiving Party”—with his doctor, Marvin Levy, watching anxiously from the wings.
He simply couldn’t stay out of the limelight. “Money can’t really give you anywhere near the comfort of being embraced by a mob,” he told a reporter. “A mob wanting to touch you and hug you, that embrace is far more warm than a deposit at the bank.” Take television, for instance. Not since he was booed off the stage of the Palace Theater in Buffalo had he been so summarily rebuffed as a professional. And yet he was always lured back to the most popular of media, the tool by which he believed he could reach the largest conceivable audience. In January 1960 NBC found another sponsor for his occasional shows, Timex, and he was back on the air with a newly philosophical attitude about his enemies in the press. “The critic has a psychological problem right off when he realizes he must review,” he mused to a writer from The New York Herald Tribune. “Well, conditions are not always right for objective reviewing. If I’m a critic and I have a headache, the guy cutting up on TV is more irritating than entertaining to me. Maybe I had a fight with the wife. Or the kids are acting up. So many elements enter into a reviewer’s attitude toward a show. The thing I take offense at is when a critic will write, ‘Jerry Lewis is not my cup of tea.’ This is not criticism. This is an expression of the critic’s personal taste. It’s completely unfair to the performer. But what am I saying? I promised to quit fighting the critics.”
But he couldn’t stand any note of rejection. When the three Timex shows were, inevitably, slammed in the press (“a study in disorganization”; “Lewis, listening to inner voices, should settle down to hear the voices of others”; and “a disaster … a fiasco,” wrote three different Variety reviewers about them), he once again blamed the messenger for the bad news. Driving along Sunset Boulevard in a new convertible, wearing a black leather jacket, corduroy slacks, and cowboy boots, and racing off to the christening of dancer-choreographer Bobby Van’s child (to whom he had been named godfather), he once again sounded off spitefully to a reporter: “I can write the reviews for my show before we ever go on. … The critic who belts my show does me a favor. They create a bond between myself and the fans I know are watching. I don’t need a critic. I know when I’ve done a good show or a bad one. Don’t tell me when I’ve made a flop, just let me crawl into a corner and lick my wounds. You tell me how to entertain 240 critics instead of 40 million people. It’s impossible to entertain them both and I prefer to please the people.”
But he was finally feeling the burns under his skin, and later in the year he and NBC decided to scuttle the Timex show for the 1960–61 season. He had bigger fish to fry.
As Jerry always told the story, Barney Balaban, Y. Frank Freeman’s successor as head of production of Paramount, approached him in January 1960 with the request that Cinderfella, which had not yet been edited, be completed for distribution in July. Each year since 1954, the studio had released a Jerry Lewis (or Martin and Lewis) picture during the summer months and another one at Christmas. The schedule for this year, however, called for the Wallis production of Visit to a Small Planet to be released in April and Cinderfella to premiere in December. And since the first film didn’t quite seem like summer entertainment, with its droll political satire and Gore Vidal dialogue, Balaban was eager to get a lighter version of his star into theaters while the kids were out of school.
Jerry could have acceded to Balaban’s request easily; he did, after all, owe Paramount two films a year. But he didn’t want to tinker with his elaborate plans for Cinderfella. He had, after all, learned how to promote a film at Wallis’s feet (even working himself into a lather when early publicity referred to it as “Paramount’s Cinderfella” and not “A Jerry Lewis Production”). He told Balaban he’d give him another Jerry Lewis movie for the summer. In fact, he’d direct a Jerry Lewis movie for him.
Balaban was a money man with a taste for old-style showmanship. An immigrant grocer’s son from Chicago, he’d entered the picture business as a theater owner in 1908 after his mother pointed out to him that moviegoers paid their money before they got the product. He was a sober businessman who had parlayed a single theater into the national Balaban and Katz chain. Yet he had built fancifully exotic movie palaces in the glorious old style: the Valencia, the Oriental, the Tivoli, the Riviera. In 1936, when Paramount was in trouble, he was recruited to come in and reorganize it, and he’d climbed the corporate ladder steadily ever since. So while he could appreciate the commercial potential in Jerry’s idea, he was shrewd enough to refuse to finance it.
But Jerry was a step ahead of him. He was a man with a hundred-thousand-dollar-per-year personal clothing bill; he’d pay for the movie himself. He’d done it before in his own backyard, after all. Balaban would be allowed to share distribution rights to the film without taking any financial risk whatsoever. He gave Jerry the green light: So where was the script?
By Jerry’s account, there was no script. He flew to a nightclub engagement at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami that night and had an epiphany: He would make the movie there, a movie about a bellboy, done all in pantomime. If he could convince owner Ben Novak to let him use the hotel as a set, he’d save a fortune in production costs, he’d be out of eyeshot of Paramount executives, and he’d get to work in his favorite of all environments: a Jewish resort hotel.
This last element of the plan appealed to him most of all. Whereas the backyard parties that served as breeding ground for his Gar-Ron films merely simulated the conditions of a Catskills hotel, a big Miami hotel in the wintertime was a Catskills hotel, just one that had flown south for the winter. The same northeastern Jews who vacationed in the mountains in the summer were now able to travel by plane to Miami in the winter; the trip by air from New York took about as much time as a drive to Loch Sheldrake. And where the traditional audiences went, the traditional entertainers followed. The Miami Beach strip was lousy with old Catskill acts—acrobats, lounge singers, comics, and dancers—and Jerry knew they’d all be thrilled to have walk-on parts. He could pull the whole film off for about a million bucks. Novak was amenable, and Jerry set to work.
“I wrote the script,” he recalled in his autobiography, “stayed up eight days and eight nights. Not one wink of sleep. I turned out 165 pages like some kind of drugged madman, alternately writing and hallucinating scene after scene.” On January 30 his engagement at the Fontainebleau ended. On February 8 The Bellboy went before the cameras. Twenty-six days later it was wrapped, and it opened in July, just as Balaban had insisted.
The funny thing about this improbable story is that it’s true. Written drafts of some of the material were as much as four years old, but the “silly farce by Jerry Lewis,” as an early version called it, was essentially conceived, written, shot, and released in about six months; no papers in the copious Jerry Lewis Productions files on the film are dated before January 1960. Jack Keller confirmed almost every aspect of Jerry’s story in a conversation with Peter Bogdanovich: “I’m sitting here in Hollywood resting, when I get a call from Jerry. He says to me, ‘Jake, you better come down here right away, we’re starting a picture on Monday.’ I said, ‘Where are you?’ He says, ‘I’m in Florida.’ I say, ‘What picture? We ain’t got no picture!’ ‘We do now,’ he says. ‘The trucks are already on their way.’ I asked him, ‘Who’s gonna be in it?’ He says, ‘What’s the difference? We’ll cast it from Celebrity Service.’ Every scene was written the night before he shot it—for whomever was in town.”
As impressive as the pace of the production was, though, the novelty of it was even greater. It was unusual enough for a popular movie comedian to write and direct a film in 1960—no comic who’d debuted in talkies had ever done it. That Jerry did it, and did it under conditions like those of a (well-financed) independent film, is mind-boggling.
Part of the reason he succeeded was that he was willing to abuse his body to produce work. His history of collapses and ulcers and cardiac emergencies was directly related to his tendency to overwork himself. He fueled himself with tobacco, four packs a day at times, with a bowl of cigarettes on his desk that he insisted his secretaries keep filled. “Don’t tell anybody I told you,” he was quoted as saying, “but that’s the secret of all my pep. It’s my corpuscles fighting off the nicotine. Very combustible.”
During the shooting of the film, Dr. Marvin Levy was flown in (at the expense of the production) to consult with Jerry for a week. The discussions were more than just medical. As Patti recalled, “A friend confided that Jerry had our family doctor fly to Florida to discuss some of his problems and answer questions about the ramifications of his someday leaving me.” Miami—his first extended trip away from home with neither his wife nor his ex-partner to observe him—apparently agreed with him. Patti and the boys did come east for part of the production—four-year-old Scotty had a birthday party on the set—but for the most part Jerry was left to his own devices.
As an expression of his feelings of independence, he flaunted his freedom from Paramount. He’d learned from watching Tashlin’s dealings with producers and executives just how suffocating the studio could be to a director of outlandish tastes. If he had tried to make the film in Hollywood, he would be scrutinized every day. And since he was making what amounted to an experimental film—a series of comic vignettes—he would have been fought at every move.
He knew, for instance, that his very working method would be criticized, for he had begun employing a radical new technology, the sort of thing that only an autodidact and gadget-lover could bring to so institutionalized a medium. One thing that Jerry had always liked about television was the use of closed-circuit monitors to cut rehearsal time; a director watching a scene on a monitor could see the broadcast just as it would look on the air and give immediate feedback to the actors and technicians. Jerry’s idea for filming The Bellboy was to mount a small video camera beneath the regular film camera and connect it to a closed-circuit monitor. Whatever the big camera saw, more or less, the little camera would show him. He couldn’t tape anything, but he could see and do a lot more than ever before. He could use the monitor to help actors see what they were doing, to reduce the amount of conference time he spent with the director of photography, even to direct scenes that he himself was in, watching the monitor right up until the moment he made his entrance or the camera panned to his mark.
Today, every movie director in the world uses some version of this “video assist,” as Jerry dubbed it, but in 1960 Jerry was the first. And he was convinced that his experiment was a wild success, writing to Paramount technician Russ Brown: “It is an absolute blessing. … I feel like I have had the experience of 10 pictures under my belt rather than but one.”
The studio sent Bruce Denney, supervisor of its technical departments, to Miami to observe the shoot and file a detailed report on the experiment. He wrote nineteen detailed pages crowing about the myriad ways in which Jerry and his crew benefited from use of the system and itemizing the very few technological hitches in it that had to be corrected. But Paramount wasn’t convinced, and for the next few years, Jerry was the only director on the lot permitted to use a closed-circuit monitor or videotape system on his set. By the time the industry caught on, however, there were so many variations on the idea that Jerry couldn’t even get a patent on it.
On the day he sat in the director’s chair for the first time, Jerry got a well-wishing telegram from Paramount’s chairman of the board, Adolph Zukor, and another from his agent, Herman Citron. Addressing his client as “Boychick,” he congratulated him bar mitzvah-style: “Today you are a man.” The new director put himself and his crew through twenty-one different shots and setups, some requiring as many as seven takes. The film was still being written and cast as it was being shot. Some performers whom Jerry had hoped might appear in cameos bowed out; others invited themselves to be in the picture. Most of them were familiar names from the Catskills—stars like Milton Berle and Henny Youngman, troupers like Joey Adams, Jack Durant, Sonny Sands, and Sammy Shore, even old family friends like Jimmy and Tillie Gerard (Danny and Rae weren’t invited to appear; nor was Lenny Bruce, who was in Miami during the shoot and hung around with Jerry for a while). Along with Bill Richmond, a writer he’d met a few years earlier, Jerry wrote block comedy scenes for his inept, mute character, called Rutherford in early drafts of the script but known as Stanley in the completed film. The original script was far too long; it would have made a three-hour film, easily. Nevertheless, he shot as much of it as he could, to give himself that much more to choose from during editing.
The pace was grueling; Jerry had to wrap shooting by early March so he could fulfill an engagement at the Sands in Vegas. Most days were as busy as that first one, and the crew even put in two Sundays. When he finished, he went home for a week and then was off to Vegas with an overabundance of footage to cut into a film.
In Vegas, Jerry was literally too tired to take the stage. But a coincidence of booking at the hotel would make it impossible for him to cancel gracefully: Of all acts to have preceded him at the Sands, Dean Martin had just closed on Saturday night. Jerry had, in fact, caught his ex-partner’s closing set. “It was the first time I had seen him work alone since we split and I was surprised and delighted,” he said a few months later. At the end of the show, Dean introduced Jerry to the crowd and brought him on stage, where they mugged a bit and sang a comic duet of “Come Back to Me.”
“We strained trying to remember what we used to do, and for fifteen minutes there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, including ours,” Jerry recalled. “It was a beautifully emotional thing, with two people who cared for each other for very many years, and then, because of their own insecurities, led the world to believe that they didn’t care anymore. You just don’t turn off caring. Your subconscious lets you think you do. Of course, this doesn’t mean we’re going to team up again—Dean is doing just great, he doesn’t need anybody to help him, and I’m doing fairly well, too. I still maintain that our problems never really stemmed from the two of us but from the fringe. Because if I were ever in trouble, the first one in line, you could bet, would be Dean. And vice versa.”
He made the severed relationship sound more secure than either of their marriages, and he was probably right. On the following Wednesday, when he was too fatigued to fulfill his obligation to the hotel, Dean stepped in to play the date in his stead.
In April, while he was playing yet another live engagement, this time at the Moulin Rouge nightclub in Hollywood (his writing partner, Bill Richmond, sat in as a drummer), he finished cutting The Bellboy into a sixty-five-minute film. Two weeks later, it was previewed to military personnel and their families at March Air Force Base, near San Bernadino, and Camp Pendleton, near San Diego. The servicemen could be a harsh audience—“I predict that it will go over worse than ‘The Geisha Boy,’” wrote one marine who fancied himself a canny movie executive—but Jerry found fault with the film himself: “Re-Edit!!” read a note he scribbled during the second screening. “Stay on the Kid!” On May 23, several scenes were reshot at Paramount; thinking ahead, Jerry had had a crewmember swipe some Fontainebleau wallpaper so he could match the other shots from three thousand miles away. By June 1, the film was completed.
The Bellboy wound up costing $1.34 million of Jerry’s own money—less than Wallis had spent on Three Ring Circus six years before—and much of that was spent on material he didn’t use: Sequences involving Henny Youngman and Corrine Calvet (her career at such an ebb that she was willing to forget Jerry’s abusive antics of ten years earlier) didn’t make the final seventy-two-minute cut. Included in the budget was a bill for $16,325.02 from the Fontainebleau (which Jerry’s accountants whittled down to a payment of $5,495.28), a $768 bill for gifts of liquor to the crew on closing day, and an untallied bill for forty-eight bottles of Arpège perfume to female hotel staffers. Jerry paid himself $50,000 for the script and another $150,000 for his own services as producer, director, and star.
The money didn’t come out of his personal bank account, of course, but was routed through the companies he’d set up after signing his big contract with Paramount—a web of corporate entities that included the Jerry Lewis Pictures Corporation; Patti Enterprises, Inc.; Jerry Lewis Enterprises, Inc.; and the Gar-Ron Pictures Corporation, all under the banner of Jerry Lewis Productions, Inc. His business card listed them all. Under the terms of the contract, Paramount gave him $2 million up front for each of the seven pictures he would produce; given the quickness and tightness with which he’d shot The Bellboy, he was better than a half-million ahead before the film even opened. Successes like that convinced him he could do business for himself without the advice of his agents at MCA. He insisted that publicity materials for the picture not be run past the agency because “MCA has a habit of knocking these things out.” He was adamantly his own boss.
He was also a thinker. He had begun assembling a book of quotations, apothegms, maxims, moral tales, and wisdom, a kind of Victorian miscellany along the lines of Elbert Hubbard’s Scrap Book. He called it his “creed book,” and he filled it with familiar aphorisms like the one he shared that summer with columnist Sheila Graham: “There are only three things in life that are real. God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third.” He began a lifelong habit of dropping names like Hemingway, Saroyan, Tacitus, or “someone far brighter than I,” sounding like the archetypical dropout trying to pass as an intellectual, even though he claimed a year or so earlier that he’d read only one book in his life. Still, in show-business circles, the gleaning of even trite bits of popular philosophy into a volume was a form of intellectualism, and it was yet another way for him to prove he wasn’t the dope that his persona made him seem. He considered the creed book to be a legitimate work: He had copies bound and gave them to family members and close friends.
Among his newest friends was Stan Laurel. Jerry had been introduced to the great comedian by Dick Van Dyke, who had looked up the comedy legend after hearing that he was living in modest seclusion with the aftereffects of a stroke. On a Sunday morning Jerry drove to Santa Monica to pay Laurel a visit. He had always admired Laurel as a graceful comic who perfectly combined the physical with the verbal to achieve a blend of humor and pathos. But now that he met the man, he was even more impressed with what they had in common: sons of small-time showmen, halves of famous comedy teams that paired them with men who were their temperamental opposites.
Jerry showed Laurel his script for The Bellboy, which had already wrapped but was still being edited. He listened to the older man discourse on life and comedy. After a second visit, Jerry offered Laurel a job as a consultant with Jerry Lewis Productions at a salary of $150,000 a year. Laurel demurred, indicating to Jerry that he considered the generous offer to be mere charity. Jerry insisted that Laurel could be of great value to him, but the older man wouldn’t hear it. He was embarrassed by his mild debilities and, unlike his young devotee, he was constrained by modesty from thrusting himself before the public.
By June Paramount was so satisfied with the feeling they got from The Bellboy that they encouraged Jerry to put another film into production. He already had a story in mind—it was known as “The Girls’ Boy”—and all he needed was some help in getting it written.
Jerry hadn’t received a writing credit for anything before The Bellboy, although he’d been collaborating with his writers for years. He was, in fact, used to writing along with a team. Since he had two films to finish before the year was out—Cinderfella still hadn’t been previewed—he decided to hire another writer for the new project. He chose Mel Brooks.
They were a natural match. Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn three months after Jerry was born in Newark, had also begun performing in the Catskills as a teenager, playing drums and doing impressions. Unlike Jerry, he had served in World War II as a combat engineer. Though he’d had aspirations to become a star, choosing as his stage name an abbreviated form of his mother’s maiden name, Brookman, he had better luck breaking into show business as a television writer, finding work with Sid Caesar on 1949’s “Admiral Broadway Review” and remaining a part of the legendary writing team (along with Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen, among others) on “Your Show of Shows” (1950-54), “Caesar’s Hour” (1954-57), and “Sid Caesar Invites You” (1958). In 1960 he was still well regarded as a writer and a kind of comic’s comic—not quite as popular with audiences as with those in the business. Jerry’s offer of three thousand dollars a week for about four months of work was, for such a cult performer, a great opportunity. (Bill Richmond, by contrast, was paid five thousand dollars total for the same period.) The deal was consummated on June 15 with a telegram from Brooks’s new boss: “Here’s to a wonderful relationship.”
Before they could begin work together, however, Jerry rushed off to New York for a quick publicity tour in support of The Bellboy. There would be no several-city caravan for the film. Paramount wasn’t even showing it to the trade press until the night before it opened, a strategy designed to protect the curious experiment from the hostility that Jerry and the distribution office feared the critics would direct toward it. That he had written, directed, produced, and starred in the film was the target of enough hostile humor around Hollywood already; why let his enemies vent their scorn on a little comedy? He did at least ten newspaper interviews that week, and appeared on a half-dozen or more TV and radio programs. On June 23 he sat all day for illustrator Norman Rockwell, who painted the poster art for Cinderfella. Arrangements were made with the Loew’s theater chain for Jerry to return on July 20 and 21 and put in more than twenty personal appearances before showings of the film (when it was suggested to him in a memo that he show up in a bellboy’s uniform, he scribbled “Forget it!” across the page).
The press was intrigued by Jerry’s one-man approach to filmmaking, but when they began comparing him to Charlie Chaplin, Jerry wisely downplayed the resemblances without dismissing them outright. Indeed, he found some small advantage in the comparison: In recent years, Chaplin’s politics had made him anathema, and having been asked about his professed master, Jerry chose to distance himself from him. “To compare me to Chaplin is ludicrous in a sense. Chaplin was a real master. I’d have to work fifty years to begin to touch what he did. But we work differently. I don’t impose my thinking as a person on an audience. I don’t think comedy has room for a political approach.”
He hedged less when he described the joys of hard work and being his own boss. “When you do so many jobs on a picture, it sometimes means a twenty-one-hour day, but it’s a wonderful thing for you—physically, mentally, and spiritually. What’s the advantage? Well, look at it this way: You’re not as careful with your cigarette ashes in another guy’s office as you are in your own home. Nobody will work quite as hard for you as you will for yourself.”
On July 5, 1960, the Hollywood press was finally allowed to see what The Bellboy looked like. They hated it. “Minor league screen comedy,” wrote “Tube.” in Variety, “the victim of its energetic star’s limited creative equipment.” The Hollywood Reporter was even less kind: “It is the least entertaining motion picture in which Lewis has ever appeared, and, objectively considered, is a shameful waste of a major comic talent.” The next day, the film opened to somewhat more receptive reviews in daily newspapers. “He has kept his energetic demeanor in reasonable check,” observed Eugene Arthur in The New York Times, though John L. Scott of The Los Angeles Times noted, in a generally positive review, that “if director Lewis hadn’t allowed star Lewis to ‘mug’ quite so much, the results would have been much funnier.” There was a positive rave in The Rochester Daily Democrat-Chronicle (Jerry kept a copy of the review in his files on the film). Critic Stephen Hammer, calling the film a “masterpiece,” astutely remarked that “he doesn’t sing, dance, wisecrack or upstage anybody, as he has so many times before. Instead he concentrates on the areas in which he is superb: Ideas and pantomime.”
The Bellboy was shot in black-and-white, there was no story to speak of, and the lead character could not talk; for a Hollywood film released in 1960, it was virtually avant-garde. To answer Paramount’s baffled reaction to the film, Jerry added an introduction in which a phony film producer, “Jack Emulsion,” explained to the audience that they were about to see “a film based on fun. And it’s just a little bit different … a visual diary of a few weeks in the life of a real nut.”
What followed was a series of some forty-odd vignettes and set pieces, all but two or three of which centered on Stanley, a mute klutz of a bellboy, and all but two or three of which took place in the Fontainebleau. Some of the gags were right out of Frank Tashlin’s valise of cartoonishly impossible stunts: Stanley gives a dieting woman a box of chocolates and she balloons in an instant; Stanley fills an empty auditorium with perfectly orderly rows of chairs in sixty seconds; a man gets a polka-dot suntan after Stanley lays a mesh cloth over his face; Stanley takes a flash photo of the night sky and turns 3:00 A.M. into broad daylight. Many of them were old-style burlesque and Borscht Belt routines, but there are also a few gags that only Jerry could have conceived, bits that could have worked only in a film: Stanley’s brilliant ‘conducting’ of a nonexistent orchestra, his theft of a commercial airliner, his inability to find a place to sit and eat his lunch when an entire cafeteria suddenly fills with diners, his inadvertent destruction of a sculpture in an art show.
Yet there was an entirely personal, even autobiographical dimension to the whole film—notably in the long passage in which the Fontainebleau hosts the big movie star Jerry Lewis, who is holding a special preview of his new film at the hotel. The star (billed as played by “Joe Levitch”) arrives in a limousine escorted by a cadre of motorcycle cops. He is accompanied by an entourage of twenty-seven sycophants, all of whom emerge from the limo before him. His handlers brush off his clothing so much they rumple him; when he starts to smoke, so many lighters snap open in front of his face that his cigarette is crushed; when he tells the hotel manager he isn’t feeling well because of a death in the family, the entourage breaks out in phony laughter. It’s a tart portrait of the life of a celebrity, an acknowledgment of the empty spaces that exist between identities of public man, movie character, and private man. This theme is further doubled by the brief appearance of Milton Berle in the film as both himself and a bellboy, and by the appearance of an unnamed character played by Bill Richmond, a simulacrum of Stan Laurel who wanders through the film pulling off utterly surreal gags in an explicit homage to one of The Bellboy’s most direct influences.
At least two of the film’s gags were taken right out of Jerry’s life. In one, Stanley runs off and fetches a steamer trunk with great difficulty, only to find out that the bell captain wanted not the trunk but the hat box on top of it; the gag was a take-off on the solicitude of Jerry’s second son, Ronnie, who was so eager to please his father that he would rush from the room to fulfill a request of Jerry’s before it had been made explicit; according to Patti, “It upset Jerry very, very much.” And the beating Stanley suffers at the hands of an older couple, played by Danny and Rae’s old friends Jimmy and Tillie Gerard, was certainly an emblem of Jerry’s own relationship with his parents; though the husband and wife are screaming viciously at each other about which of them spends more money, they marshall their forces to squelch any hint of interference from the outside, however benignly it was intended.
Much of The Bellboy is hackneyed and must certainly have seemed that way when the film debuted. Yet Jerry’s characterization is vivid and fresh—Stanley is chipper and eager, whistling along while he works his destructive magic (Paramount wanted to hire professional whistler Muzzy Marcellino to dub the film, but Jerry did his own whistling). He’s not a believable fictional character—any bellboy this inept would surely be fired—but rather an emblem for a class of low-profile bunglers and hapless nothings; his only ambition seems to be the desire to eat his lunch in peace. There’s no sentimental veneer to the character—unlike the sad clown Jerry often played, Stanley rebounds instantly from every slight or incident of ill will that befalls him.
In the finale Stanley reveals the most certain sign yet of his universality. He finds himself sitting at the head of a table while the other bellboys voice dissent with the management of the hotel. Stanley keeps making gestures as if he wants to say something, and he’s in the middle of one such bit of pantomime when the manager walks in on the cabal and accuses him of leading it. Asked if he can’t speak in his own defense, Stanley shocks everyone in the room by doing just that: “I suspect I can talk as well as any other man,” he responds, adding that he’d never spoken before because “nobody ever asked.” With that, he walks insouciantly out of the film while a narrator delivers the moral: “You’ll never know the other guy’s story unless you ask.”
It’s not much of a philosophical insight, but it’s as apt a way as any to end an arbitrary assemblage of comic set pieces. The Bellboy may lack the heartrending pathos of City Lights or the sophisticated polish of Artists and Models, but it is a debut film shot under conditions much more harried and uncertain than just about any Hollywood feature; indeed, in the breakneck pace of its production, it mirrored more the low-budget efforts of the silent clowns or such Hal Roach Studio artists as Laurel and Hardy than any film Jerry had ever worked on before. It’s an experimental film—and a successful one. Jerry demonstrates mastery of camera placement, editing, and comic timing, and the thing swims along so fluently that you’re left wanting more; the notion that almost as much material was left out of the film as included makes one wish he would release a collection of the unused footage. Forget the Gar-Ron films or Jerry’s claims that he codirected his late-1950s movies with Tashlin. The Bellboy is his debut as a director, and it’s as accomplished a first film as any comic director ever made.
Jerry was such a surefire box office attraction that it almost didn’t matter that The Bellboy was such an original film; the public flocked to see him no matter what he appeared in (as Hal Wallis had learned, to his good fortune, time and again). In Los Angeles The Bellboy grossed $200,000 in its first week and $118,000 in its second; in New York it grossed $106,000 in its first two days on twenty-one screens (at an average ticket price of about seventy-five cents, that meant that 141,000 New Yorkers saw the film within forty-eight hours of its premiere). One week after the film opened, Jerry got his second telegram of the year from the aged Adolph Zukor: Addressing him as “Sonny,” he remarked of the Bellboy grosses, “They are phenomenal and so are you.”
The picture was enormously profitable. Jerry would sometimes claim it had earned $10 million; while it didn’t do all that business only at home or only in its first year of release, it was a big, big hit, earning about $5 million during its initial run. And, as he remembered with glee in his autobiography, “I had no partners!” Paramount got a flat distribution fee from Jerry Lewis Productions. The leftovers belonged to Jerry.
Whether Hollywood would let him enjoy them was another matter. Jerry hadn’t earned a reputation as a breezy, friendly guy over his dozen years in the business, and the sight of him attempting something as ambitious as The Bellboy rankled both the press and his peers. “There was a period where I was gonna quit, just quit,” he remembered years later. “I was getting depressed—right after The Bellboy—because the talk in town was ‘Jerry wrote, produced, acted, and directed and probably painted the sets.’ And I’m thinking to myself, ‘What’s my fucking crime? Who have I injured? What pain have I imposed on someone?’ And I’m walking down the Paramount street, and I walked right by Billy Wilder—he’s coming this way, and I walked right by him. And I looked at him, but I must’ve looked through him. And he said, ‘Jerry, what the hell is the matter, you walk right by me like you don’t even wanna bother. We’re not friends anymore?’ I said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry Billy, I’m just so goddamn depressed. The little squibs in Variety and The [Hollywood] Reporter and the newspaper people with that “Jerry Lewis has to direct himself and write and produce …’” He said, ‘Listen, if you quit, they beat you. The only reason that they’re talking is that they can’t do it. And the thing they hate more than anything is that you’re doing it and you’re showing them they can’t.’ He said, ‘I don’t give a fuck because they say that I write and direct. I don’t give a shit what they say. I do what I do good. Now get back in your fucking office and keep doing what you’re doing.’ I’ll never forget him for that. Because that town can do that to you.”
When The Bellboy opened, however, Jerry seemed less bent on quitting the business than on absorbing it entirely. The very day the public got to see the film for the first time, its creator was muddling through the first of several weekly script conferences for “The Girls’ Boy” with Mel Brooks and Bill Richmond. In order to ensure that no inspiration be lost, Jerry recorded the meetings and had the tapes transcribed. The transcripts reveal that although he had hired—at great expense—one of the top comic writers in the business, Jerry was an unwilling collaborator. From Jerry’s initial draft, Brooks and Richmond worked out many revisions and new ideas, but Jerry systematically shot them down or used them as springboards to ideas he was comfortable calling his own.
At that first meeting, for example, Jerry became rattled when he realized just how much of his original material the two writers had reshaped, and told them he was too busy for the meeting to continue. Richmond asked, “You haven’t got time to listen to a story concept we have?” Jerry, defensively, shot back, “Why, do you want to change everything?” Brooks tried to explain what he and Richmond had done: “No, we’re aiding and abetting,” to which Jerry retorted, “Don’t lie!”
The following week, the writers were better prepared to deal with their balky colleague, having spoken about their ideas with other people on the lot. “I brought up the nursery with Ernie [Glucksman],” said Brooks, “and he didn’t agree with me. I thought it was very funny. But George Abbott—” Jerry cut him off: “Everyone who’s heard it has thought it was funny and we’re never gonna know until I photograph it.”
Like The Bellboy, the new film was shaping up as a series of gags. And as he had in his first film, Jerry was hoping to build this one more in the editing room than in the script, so he was willing to spend the time and money to shoot sequences that might not make the final cut. In a way, it almost didn’t matter to him that the writers had improved or altered or remade scenes. He would shoot all of the material he had. He wasn’t using Brooks and Richmond as collaborators or even, really, as screenwriters; he was using them as gag men. And he could be brusquely dismissive: “We have a pretty good idea here,” Richmond told him one day. “Would you like to hear it?” “No,” Jerry told him. “Put it on paper.”
It got to the point where Jerry was appropriating his writers’ ideas as soon as they voiced them: “It’s a funny joke, but let me take it”; “I’ve done the poor room joke a hundred times. But you’ve given me an idea.” He finally began using them as an audience, launching into long free-association screeds about what character names were funny or what sorts of wacky poems the main character (who, he’d decided, should be a serious writer) would compose. Before long, it became obvious to Brooks and Richmond that this wasn’t an active writing collaboration. They continued, nominally, to work on the script, but they also started looking for other ways to spend their time.
Another new employee was on Jerry’s payroll at around this time. Judith Campbell, mistress to both Sam Giancana and John Kennedy, had met Jerry in New York the previous fall, and he’d tried to woo her immediately, calling her several times for dates and finally inducing her to go out with him by dangling an invitation to meet Sophie Tucker. (When Jerry introduced Campbell to the grand old lady as his secretary, Tucker saw right through the ruse and gave him a withering look.)
Campbell wasn’t at all impressed with Jerry’s come-on. He liked to use big words, she noticed, and he liked to touch, “experimenting, always trying to see how far he could go.” But she found him perfectly resistible. “He quickly goes overboard,” she said. “You expect him to start speaking French. Although he is very serious about his flirting, from a woman’s viewpoint it is funnier than his pratfalls.”
Whether or not it was part of his courtship ritual, Jerry expressed an interest in Campbell’s artwork (she was a painter), and told her that his new film might offer him a chance to avail himself of her “proclivities.” He never, however, could explain to her just what he wanted her to do. He spoke of an illustrated book commemorating the making of the film, but it never materialized. All Campbell wound up doing was reporting to an office with her name over the door and pestering her boss to pay her the one hundred dollars a week she’d been promised.
Campbell found Jerry’s inability to focus infuriating. While speaking with her about her project, he’d dictate unrelated memos (“In the course of a day,” she recalled, “he dictated more interoffice memos than any corporation president”), talked about musical arrangements for the film, and generally comported himself like a hyperactive child. “His attention span where others were concerned was severely limited,” she remembered. “He concentrates best when he is listening to himself. He may have been listening to himself talking to someone, listening to a record of himself, reading something he had written, or listening to someone reading it to him, listening to someone compliment him or discuss him or his movies. He would listen to you on other subjects, but better make it quick if you don’t want to get caught talking to yourself.”
She wasn’t the only employee who was uneasy working around him. As Brooks and Richmond knew, the offices of Jerry Lewis Productions were a place where nobody but Jerry could really relax and get to work. The large, oak-paneled rooms were covered floor to ceiling, in Victorian fashion, with photos of Jerry and his family and friends, stills from his films, plaques and certificates he’d received from various charities and film groups, an autographed photo of John Kennedy, the gold record from “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby.” There were framed cartoons of Jerry, printed slogans and mottoes (“The funny bone has no time for statistics”), fake record jackets (Adolph Sings Songs for Passover, Jerry Lewis Sings the Songs from “Ben Hur”), and pictures of his yacht and his dog, Mr. Chips (the spaniel he’d bought Patti when she was pregnant with Gary and for which he’d recently bought a fifteen-thousand-dollar hearing aid). Tables beside Jerry’s large, wide desk were choked with electronic gizmos, camera equipment, typewriters, and telephones (employees suspected that a nearby dictaphone was surreptitiously used to record conversations). On his desk he kept a large bowl of Kool cigarettes and another large bowl of sharpened pencils; if either was appreciably less than full, he could blow his stack. He had cartons of trinkets personalized with his caricature logo: pens, rulers, cigarette lighters, stationery (including pads he kept in the bathroom bearing the slogan “JL Doodling on the Throne”). He had a solid gold Nikon camera with a diamond viewfinder, a gold-plated golf club. Outside the building he kept parked a personalized golf cart on which he whooshed around the Paramount lot (one time, seeing Dean walking along toward him, he ducked between two sound stages to avoid saying hello).
Jerry would arrive at the office sometimes as early as 4 A.M. to prepare for the work on the set, and he would be so busy throughout the day that he would eat and get his hair cut at his desk. Often he didn’t leave for home until after midnight, or simply crashed on one of his modernistic office couches. Most of his employees took their cue from his grueling pace—but not Keller, who was never impressed with Jerry’s displays of workaholism. “Jack wasn’t affected by that,” recalled one employee. “I had just got out there and I was worried about my job, and we’d be talking and Jack would stand up and say, ‘One o’clock! I’m gonna go for lunch. Come with me!’ Jerry would be sitting there, and Ernie, and they’d say, ‘We’re working in this meeting!’ And Jack’d say, ‘I don’t give a fuck about this meeting. Let’s go have a drink and get some lunch.’ So I’d go with him. We’d have an hour-and-a-half lunch, lots of booze, and then go back. Ernie and all the rest of them were very proud that they ate lunch in. In all the time I was there, Jack never ate lunch in. And he talked to Jerry like he didn’t give a shit. And Jerry respected him. I don’t think Jerry respected Ernie because Ernie was such a yes-man. Jerry really was in awe of Jack.”
But Jerry was, of course, also really in awe of Jerry. Among the duties he had thrust upon his cousin Marshall Katz, who served as an assistant to the producer on Jerry Lewis films, was the responsibility for staff photography. Dick Cavett, who was to enter Jerry’s orbit in a few years, recalled that “he had a photographer whose job was to be there when he awoke, I think, and stay until he began snoring. And he photographed him all day, with a bag the size of a mailman’s pouch of film. All day, every day: Jerry drinks water from fountain, Jerry attends meeting. The archive must be voluminous.” Another employee, Art Zigouras, himself a shutterbug, recalled with envy that “he’d go out and shoot twenty-eight rolls of thirty-five millimeter and have them blown up and everything.” Katz had a photographic lab built in a warehouse that Jerry had rented to store all his personal and business memorabilia, and Jerry would impose upon the Paramount photo lab for special rush jobs or color prints when he wanted them.
In August 1960 Patti finally got her husband to take a vacation, though even then he found a way to connect it to business. They took all five boys and went to Hawaii, where they stayed at Sheraton’s Royal Hawaiian at Waikiki. Jack Keller, whose duties now included negotiating corporate tie-ins with Jerry Lewis Productions projects, had managed to get the hotel to print and send one hundred thousand postcards advertising The Bellboy (and, of course, the Royal Hawaiian) to former customers of the chain’s hotels. Charlie and Lillian Brown, who, like other Catskill hoteliers, were watching their old vacation customers fly off to Florida, Las Vegas, California, and even Hawaii, had tried to get Jerry to host a premiere of Cinderfella at their hotel. More desperately, they wanted a mention in the script of The Bellboy, just so the audience wouldn’t forget which hotel really meant something to him. Both efforts had failed; even if its sons were conquering the world, the traditional Catskill hotel was dying.
Cinderfella was previewed later that month, but Jerry let Frank Tashlin worry about that one. The Ladies’ Man, which his next film had come to be called (after such names as “The Girls’ Club,” “The Bashful Boyfriend,” and “Wonder Boy” had been rejected), was taking up all of his time. It dealt with the misadventures of a character known only as “The Kid,” who, although loathing women after being rejected by his high school sweetheart, accidentally winds up working as a handyman in a boardinghouse full of beautiful single girls. It was a variation of the root idea of The Bellboy—a yutz on the loose in an orderly environment—but there was a distinctly psychological touch to it. The character had an emotional history; the orderly environment was a kind of dreamscape; there was even a story, albeit skeletal and fantastic.
With the large grosses earned by The Bellboy, Paramount was convinced that he knew what he was doing, so they footed some of the bill for the new movie. He was thus able to indulge his unusual ideas about filmmaking just a bit more. What he envisioned this time was truly revolutionary—a gigantic indoor set in the shape of a life-size, four-story cutaway dollhouse, complete with working elevator, fully constructed on three of its four sides so he could film anywhere around it. Using a huge crane, he could put a camera, a microphone, and lights into whichever room of the house he chose, or he could move back and capture the action in various places in the house as it occurred simultaneously. For the dozens of actresses who’d populate this gargantuan construction, he would build dressing rooms right on the set. To pull it off at Paramount, he’d need to use the combined space of two adjacent sound stages with the wall between them knocked out.
It was an outrageous request: a Christmas list, really. No one believed he could do it, much less get Paramount to pay for it. Estimates ranged over five hundred thousand dollars to build and furnish the set. Jerry admitted it would be expensive, but he argued that the cost of construction would be offset by the amount of time and money he would save working in its unique prefab contours. Furthermore, he would pay for the set over time because it could be dismantled and reassembled or rearranged. Besides, not only was he a ruthlessly efficient producer—he signed off on every conceivable expense and oversaw every aspect of production down to the most minute and technical detail—but he also had the confidence of Zukor and Balaban. Each and every one of his twenty-three pictures for the studio had grossed at least $3 million. So if he could bring this one in at the right price, he had their blessing to go ahead and do it.
Whether it could be done at all was the next problem. The same studio technical staff that had refused to adopt his closed-circuit system was now telling him that what he wanted to do couldn’t be done; you couldn’t move lights and boom mikes willy-nilly around so huge a set. Again, Jerry brought to the situation a perspective that could have belonged to no one else. He wouldn’t try to light the set from the outside; he would light each room from its own ceiling. He wouldn’t try to mike the whole set at once; each room would have its own sound system, an innovation that would serve to reduce the time the camera crew spent making sure they didn’t inadvertently photograph the boom mike or its shadow. One by one, the objections fell before his vision and persistence.
The autumn was a festival of electronic tinkering for him. The set, which he designed with Artie Schmidt, his editor and assistant, was under construction; the steelworkers who built it to its 25,000-square-foot, 36-foot high magnificence (working weekend shifts at his insistence), erected a flag over the finished frame, as per their custom. He shopped around for the largest movie camera crane in existence, for the most precise and compact microphones and recorders, for upgrades to the closed-circuit system. He was inventing something entirely new, part resort hotel, part TV studio, part burlesque stage, part film set.
While that was going on at work, he spent a hundred thousand dollars on a radio station and connected his house to it by means of a cable link. Another hundred thousand went for a satellite studio in his home, which allowed him to join the broadcast of KJPL (as he renamed the station after himself and his wife) whenever he wanted, just as if he were there live. He did it often, interrupting announcer Del Moore to introduce houseguests such as Pat Boone (doing Elvis impressions) or simply butting in with shtick. He had the airwaves of Los Angeles at his fingertips around the clock; he’d taken the art of attention-getting to staggering heights.
In October he finally marshalled all the clout and money he’d accrued to launch yet another attack on his běte noire, television: He produced and directed a pilot episode of a situation comedy about a group of female naval reservists called “Permanent Waves.” (Imagine a distaff “McHale’s Navy,” though that successful series didn’t appear until 1962.) None of the three major networks bit at the pilot; NBC executives might have lost interest when they learned that Jerry would be making a guest appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in November, the first time since “The Colgate Comedy Hour” premiered that he would perform on a rival network. The ten thousand dollars he would be paid for his eight-minute segment was forty times what he and Dean had split on Sullivan’s first show a dozen years earlier.
That same month, he fired Mel Brooks, who had never quite adopted the obsequious tone Jerry preferred from his employees. Take the simple matter of the working day, for instance. Like a philistine studio boss of the old school—the sort who felt his writers were loafing if he walked past their offices and didn’t hear their typewriters humming—Jerry insisted that Brooks and Bill Richmond put in a full nine-to-five day, reprimanding them in a tart memo. Richmond apparently kowtowed appropriately, but Brooks, a legendary straggler, bridled. On September 27 he submitted notes on the latest draft of the script and got written instructions from Jerry about how to revise his revisions. Three days later, when his work was due, Brooks was hurrying off to catch a plane to New York. He called Jerry to let him know he could only see him early in the day, but the two never met. He stayed out of the office for several days, and when he returned, he was caught talking on the phone for an hour and a half with Carl Reiner, planning what would become the famous Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man album. That was the last straw. Jerry fired him the next day and told his accountant to dock Brooks’s pay for the days he had spent in New York.
Brooks got under Jerry’s skin one last time, however, when his agent protested to the Writers Guild that the final script credit for the film neglected to name him (The Ladies’ Man was credited to Jerry and Richmond). When Ernie Glucksman broke the news to Jerry, he hit the roof: “He never wrote word one of this screenplay … he was hired to do so and had to be paid off because of not delivering any material whatever.” (Brooks, in fact, didn’t get credit on the final film.)
Judith Campbell also didn’t make it to the end of the film. She had spurned all of Jerry’s advances, and he had never really figured out why he’d hired her. He was cutting down his staff overhead anyway, so he decided to fire her.
But how do you fire the girlfriend of the Chicago don, the man who just a month or so earlier saved your good name from being dragged into divorce court?
It was another thing that Jerry never figured out.
At first, he tried a back-door maneuver. While he was off in Phoenix, he had a bookkeeper tell Campbell that she was being let go because the staff of Jerry Lewis Productions was being trimmed. She called Jerry and he told her that the bookkeeper was mistaken, that the staff reductions didn’t include her.
A month or so later, however, when Campbell accompanied Jerry and the rest of his entourage to Vegas, he tried to cut her off again. Campbell was drinking at the bar of the Sands with Jerry’s secretary when Jerry and Patti walked past, utterly ignoring the two women. A moment later, the secretary was paged and excused herself. When she returned, she was visibly upset.
“I was just given instructions not to talk to you,” she told Campbell. “You tell me what’s going on.”
Hurt by this news, Campbell returned to her room and called Giancana. “Get out of there,” he told her. “You don’t need that crap. Come on up to Chicago.”
When she arrived at O’Hare, she found her boyfriend in an unusually agitated state. “Do you want your job [with Jerry] back?” he asked.
She was so frightened by his demeanor that she chose to deflate his anger rather than give it a focus. “I don’t think so,” she answered. “I’d rather forget the whole thing.”
Giancana wasn’t satisfied. “All you have to do if you want your job back is say the word. If you want more money, you’ll get more money.”
She assured him that money wasn’t the issue, but he still simmered. As soon as they got to their hotel, Giancana put in a call to Vegas and within minutes had Jerry on the phone.
When Giancana asked why Campbell had been cut off, Jerry blamed Patti, explaining that she was jealous of Campbell. Giancana wouldn’t have it: “Listen here, you son of a bitch, I don’t give a damn about your stupid wife. All Judy has to do is give me the okay and she’s got her job back. Do you understand me?”
Jerry was reduced to groveling, pleading his case to Giancana. The mob boss held the phone out for Campbell to hear. “He sounded like he had gone into his spastic routine,” she recalled. “I could just picture him, jumping around and perspiring, scared out of his wits.”
Giancana ended the phone call with a final reminder. “You better thank God she doesn’t want your stinking job back,” he sneered, “because she’d have it back and with a big raise in pay. Stop sniveling and thank your lucky stars that this lady wants nothing more from you.”
While Jerry sweated in Vegas, Campbell glowed with satisfaction in Chicago. “I felt Jerry had it coming,” she said. She considered him a manic nightmare of emotional highs and lows: “He could make a problem out of just absolutely nothing, and carry on like he was demented, cry like a baby, then snap right out of it, laugh and joke.”
Campbell had begun to see a therapist at around the time she began working for Jerry, and her new boss’s fits had made her feel positively healthy. She felt especially good when she compared herself with other employees. “Most of the people working closely with Jerry were caught in a love-hate situation,” she reflected. “They were kept in a state of chronic anxiety. I think many ended up either with a psychiatrist or an ulcer, or perhaps both.”
She had always hated the way he flagellated people around him, recalling how Jerry couldn’t stand to lose pickup basketball games on the Paramount lot or have his performance in them criticized. “He abused people every day—and got away with it,” she said. “Now he was getting it back from someone he feared, someone he had no control over.”*
Given the potential technical difficulties, the actual production of The Ladies’ Man turned out to be a wonder of cooperative professionalism. Following on the heels of the premiere of Cinderfella (which opened in Chicago, with Jerry arriving at the city’s Harvest Moon Ball in a horse-drawn coach), the $3.4 million undertaking was news in and of itself. Jerry held a PR event at which he revealed the mammoth set and its high-tech accoutrements to a startled trade press. He showed them a time-lapse film of the thirty-nine-day construction of the boardinghouse and then lifted a curtain to reveal the thing itself, with thirty-six actresses from his seventy-seven-member cast wandering through it like bees in a human-scale hive. He told them about his miking and lighting and closed-circuit systems. They’d never seen anything like it. William Perlberg, a fellow producer on the Paramount lot, stopped in for a gander and walked off amazed: “If this works as well as I think it will, it is the most revolutionary development in films since sound.” Reports of the set ran in papers around the country; Life published a two-page color photo of Jerry sitting atop his huge crane (labeled “Jerry’s Toy”) in front of his audacious dream house.
When filming actually began, Jerry did his best to instill a familial, partylike atmosphere, once again replicating the vacation mood that had characterized the Gar-Ron films, the set of The Bellboy, and his Catskills adolescence. “This is NOT a closed set!” announced a sign on the front door of Stage 15; another, dwarfing all the rest, pronounced the set the “Jerry Lewis Comedy Stage” (with the e in his first name reversed as if in a child’s hand). A Jerry Lewis Productions logo—with a Janus face that bore Jerry’s countenance in both its sad and mischievous guises—made up another component of the gaudily decorated set door, along with the new JLP motto, “Films for Fun,” which was also printed on stationery and the covers of scripts. (Work shirts were printed for crew members with the logo emblazoned on the breast.) A set of bleachers had been erected on the sound stage so that anyone who so wished could watch the proceedings (in later years, Jerry claimed that a frequent visitor was young Francis Ford Coppola, who lived nearby and who would one day make a film, One from the Heart, with technological elements strikingly similar to those in The Ladies’ Man).
Jerry had made it a long-standing matter of principle that he knew the names of all the members of his crew—more important than ever, now that he was directing. Everyone was greeted by name; crew members’ birthdays were lavishly celebrated; crew members’ spouses’ and children’s brithdays were celebrated. No touch was too small to command his attention. “He couldn’t stand the sight of paper cups or foam cups for coffee,” reported his cousin and assistant Marshall Katz. “So he made everybody a mug with their name painted on it and the name of the movie. And every morning you would get to work and there were all the cups hanging on hooks all cleaned for you.” His fastidiousness became a running joke: “What do I do?” replied a bemused production assistant when asked by a reporter what his job was. “All that’s really left for me to do is make peanut butter sandwiches and sweep up.”
Jerry’s omnipresence touched large matters, as well. Kathleen Freeman, the veteran character actress who’d played bit parts in Three Ring Circus and Artists and Models and who’d been cast in the ill-fated “Permanent Waves,” had third billing in The Ladies’ Man and found herself dazzled by her boss and costar. “He is the only man I ever worked with, around, or for in Hollywood that if he were to call me to do something, I’d do it,” she said. “There was never any discussion about billing, salary, or anything. I’d say, ‘If you want me, I’ll come.’ I don’t think he got that from a hell of a lot of people. I told my agent, ‘Whatever he says is fine with me.’ He did a very dear thing on Ladies’ Man. It’s common if there’s [a guarantee of] x number of weeks of employment to take less [per week]. … So I did. And he dragged me into his trailer one day and said, ‘How dare you do that?’ and he gave me a raise retroactively. It was only a couple of hundred dollars, no big deal, but it was the symbol of the thing that was extraordinary.”
He couldn’t offer such generous salary deals for the more than three dozen young actresses he’d hired to populate his vision, but they were lavished with gifts. Eventually, according to Freeman, they came like spoiled children to expect them: “He loved to give gifts. In fact, the front hall closet of his home was filled with wrapped gifts, ready to give. I used to go to dinner, and you never left without a watch or a lighter or some damn thing. And not ten-cent things. On Ladies’ Man he used to come in every morning, and he’d have something for everyone. A ruler advertising the picture, or whatever. And he’d fling things—he loves to throw and catch stuff. Anyway, first two weeks of the shoot he was doing that. One day he threw little pearl bracelets to every girl. And two and a half weeks went on; every day he walked in the door with presents. Some were rulers and some were pencils, but there were also pearl bracelets. It was insane. And he marches onto the set, feeling real chipper, and this girl, who shall remain nameless, is standing there. And he had built all the dressing rooms on the sound stage so he didn’t have to go running around to find people. And this girl stands there and she puts her hand out, and she goes, ‘So what’s for today, Jerry?’ And I just happened to be right there. And this guy’s face went like somebody smacked him. He turned around and went back to his dressing room. Crushed. I knocked at the door: ‘Lemme in, it’s Katie!’ We talked a lot about it, and he told me some very personal feelings. But it was just like somebody went whap! That’s the way his face was. And I thought to myself, ‘You dumb broad.’”
In fact, despite all the trappings of a big family enterprise, there were a few little spats. For instance, not everybody was welcome on the set. Art Zigouras had arrived in Hollywood from New York to shoot a public service announcement with Jerry for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. But when he chose to spend his days watching the impressive production, he found himself asked to leave: “I was watching the shooting of this film, and I was really intrigued by it. I’m watching and watching, and one of the guys comes over and says, ‘Ernie Glucksman wants to see you in his office.’ So I went in. Ernie was the biggest con man, the sweetest kind of shyster. And he calls me in and says, ‘Artie, you’re doing this for dystrophy and you’re doing this on Paramount’s time, and the guys from Paramount are a little annoyed with you standing around and watching, so they asked me to tell you that you aren’t allowed on the set any longer.’ And I’m thinking, ‘What did I do? Jesus, I was just standing there looking.’ And I was really nervous because my boss was there, and he was a real bastard, and I thought if he heard I was kicked off the set of a Jerry Lewis film—which nobody ever was—I’m gonna be in big trouble.
“So we shot the PSA and I returned to New York and it never became an issue. And soon Jerry came to town to meet key volunteers—we had a big meeting every year with them, and this was like a public relations meeting and Jerry would speak and do shtick. So Jerry comes in and here was [MDA founder] Dr. Paul Cohen and some other people, and instead of getting over to them, Jerry comes over to me, and he’s like, ‘Hey Artie, how’ve you been? Good to see you.’ I couldn’t believe it, because he ignored all these other people. And Jack Keller told me later that it was because it was Jerry who had me thrown off the set because he couldn’t stand my looking at him knowing he had to do this PSA later in the day and it was making him nervous, and rather than be up front with me, he told Ernie to get me off the set. And Ernie, being a devious guy, invented the whole story about Paramount.”
An even more serious problem developed between Jerry and cinematographer Haskell Boggs, who’d shot The Bellboy, The Delicate Delinquent, Rock-a-Bye Baby, and The Geisha Boy. Jerry’s ideas about what he wanted to do on the film were ironclad, and in mid-December Boggs, like Mel Brooks before him, found himself fired when he and his director suffered “differences of opinion on how The Ladies’ Man should be shot,” according to Variety.
Still, for the most part, Jerry ran the set like an antic despot. Beside him at all times he kept a big Harpo Marx-style horn, which he would honk if a scene didn’t work out to his satisfaction. If a crew member’s attention wandered, Jerry would chase after the offender with a long paddle labeled “The Not Listening Stick.” He played catch with his crew, he tossed lit cigarettes at them from atop his crane, he dressed up as an Indian and did shtick for them, he blew up inflatable clowns and performed bits for them. Peter Bogdanovich, then a twenty-one-year-old film critic, came by to report on the set for Esquire and dubbed it Jerry’s “make-believe kingdom.”
Indeed, so collegial and spontaneous was the atmosphere that one of the troupe of actresses, twenty-four-year-old Daria Massey, actually chose to hold her wedding on the set and have Jerry film it for possible use in the picture. It was a publicity stunt, of course, dreamed up in part by Jack Keller, but Jerry was all sobriety and munificence about it. He stood as best man to the groom, and he paid for a Las Vegas honeymoon for the newlyweds. (He wasn’t crazy enough, apparently, to use the footage in the finished film.)
Such antics wound up driving the budget for The Ladies’ Man way over the original estimates. The final bill, as calculated just before the film was released, was more than $3.4 million—almost triple what The Bellboy had cost. It might have been worse, but because he had the loyalty of the crew, he was actually able to save money. In The Total Film-Maker, the book-length treatise on moviemaking compiled in 1971 from recordings of his seminars at the University of Southern California, he told how his crew pitched in for Jerry the director to the benefit of Jerry the producer: “I had to wrap up a sequence or it would have cost an additional hundred thousand. The crew knocked off at eight o’clock, went to dinner, and then came back to work until three in the morning to finish it. Two days passed before the unit manager told me that the 116 technicians had all punched out at eight o’clock, and had dinner on their own time. They contributed the time between nine o’clock and three the next morning. Had they stayed on the overtime clock, it would have cost something around fifty thousand dollars.”
He was happy about such savings, of course, but note that it was days before he even wondered about what things cost. If the opulent set didn’t cripple the budget, if weddings and daily gifts and an inveterate gagster in the director’s chair didn’t bankrupt the production, then Jerry’s sheer fastidiousness behind the camera might. As Freeman recalled, he could rehearse a scene ceaselessly until he achieved on film what he saw in his head: “He was more than lavish about the whole thing. He was in seventh heaven. He had this idea with Walter Scharf of having all the women in this building come down to breakfast. I was Katie the housekeeper, and the end goal was the breakfast room, where it looked like we were serving everybody. So he had this design idea of people waking up to rhythm. It was really groovy, and the finished product is lovely. And I think he had visions of doing it in one, and with that kind of choreography, forget it. But he had these visions. And we started working with three girls from this room and six from that, boom, bing. And in the hall, bingity bong. He was getting monstrously frustrated, because you’d rehearse it again and one girl would be late in catching up to the rhythm and he’d be, ‘Enough, enough! That’s not gonna work!’ He got down off the crane at one point and shouted, ‘All right! All right! We’re gonna get spontaneity if it takes all night!’ And then he kind of laid back and said, ‘Oh,’ and he broke up.”
On February 21, 1961, the filming finally ended, fourteen days behind schedule. Jerry was exhausted. The previous fifteen months might well have killed him. He had produced, starred in, and supervised the release of three films, two of which he had also written, directed, and edited. He had gone on three publicity tours. He had done four one-hour TV shows and produced and directed a pilot. He had played live dates of at least a week each in Miami, Las Vegas, Chicago, and Hollywood. He had created a new way to film movies, overseen construction of the largest set in Hollywood, bought and operated a radio station, begun to compile a book, reunited briefly with his ex-partner, and taken his family of six on an extended vacation in Hawaii.
Now, in February, Ernie Glucksman persuaded Jerry to reorganize the hierarchy of Jerry Lewis Productions. Glucksman rose from associate producer to producer, while sometime film editor Artie Schmidt rose from assistant to the producer to associate producer. They told everyone that it was to take the strain of daily cares off Jerry’s shoulders, but it was really just a cosmetic change; Jerry hardly ever left the office, arriving as early as 5 A.M. and staying very often until two the next morning. Nothing was being done without his say-so.
Cinderfella had opened at Christmas time, just as Jerry had insisted, but it hadn’t generated either the receipts or the accolades he had anticipated. In retrospect, it seems as if he was bucking for Academy Awards by releasing a big-budget musical with a prestigious supporting cast at the end of the year. But for all its accoutrements and despite the contributions of the mischievous Frank Tashlin as both writer and director, Cinderfella was bloated and stodgy. “Either one goes with Lewis all the way or has reservations,” wrote Variety, “which in this case could be considerable. … The pace engineered by Tashlin is uncomfortably deliberate for a comedy.” Howard Thompson of The New York Times, having been handed the responsibility to cover Jerry’s films by Bosley Crowther, who couldn’t abide them, called the film “one of the dullest comedies of the season—make that the year,” and came to the conclusion that Jerry had “become fascinated with the very sound of his own breathing. … We’ll bet good money that even the kids will be bored stiff.” People came to the theaters, but not in droves; it didn’t lose money, but it was no hit.
The Ladies’ Man, with its enormous scale, stood a chance of running into similar problems, but the gag-after-gag structure kept it from becoming too monstrous. Jerry spent the early spring cutting it, and it previewed in Modesto in mid-April. At the same time, he and Bill Richmond began concocting material for another film (though Jerry would receive the sole writing credit). Rather than ask Paramount to build him another fantasy set, he would use the back lot itself as his set for a movie about an inept studio gofer. There would be more of a story than ever this time; a corporate intrigue would form a backdrop to the inevitable string of gags. Plans went ahead for a July shoot, and Paramount executives began to wonder when the Jerry-as-Chaplin experiment would end and they could get their profit-generating star into another comfortably familiar moneymaking film.
Other groups hoped to use him for moneymaking as well. The Democratic National Committee asked him to play a one-hundred-dollar-per-plate birthday dinner at the White House in May. Five thousand people saw him perform in fealty to his handsome young king. The contact between Jerry and JFK had been sporadic since their days in Chicago together a decade earlier. And the rift between Jerry and Dean didn’t help matters. The members of Sinatra’s Rat Pack—who had shot their own gilded resort-town homage, Ocean’s Eleven, at the very same time Jerry was shooting The Bellboy—despised Jerry for all of the friction between him and his former partner, whom Frank Sinatra had personally recruited into his clique. Peter Lawford, liaison between the JFK White House and the Rat Pack, worked hard to keep a wedge between Jerry and the President, and the DNC fund-raiser was one of the few times that Lewis and Kennedy met during the days of their mutual ascendancy. A photo taken of them mingling at the event shows the comedian smiling with profound warmth at the President.
When The Ladies’ Man opened in July, it got some of the best trade notices Jerry’s work had received in years. “Lewis is trying to broaden his now set characterization and let it mature,” wrote James Powers in the Hollywood Reporter, adding that “‘Ladies’ Man’ will probably be one of the most successful Lewis pictures.” Variety’s “Tube.” used the film as the occasion to crown Jerry as the film industry’s premier comic: “He is Hollywood’s clown prince, the only true clown now operating in the Coast film capital.” There was a sentence in the Variety notice that might have given Jerry some pause, however, if he’d thought about it. According to the convention whereby film reviewers in the trade papers tried to predict the box-office potential of a film, “Tube.” wrote, “He’s the king of the lucrative Little League legions, a funnyman whom parents are willing to entrust with the chore of keeping their charges entertained.” In other words, the comic who’d begun his career in a nightclub twosome that was often chastised for a slightly blue tone was becoming a children’s entertainer. And while children’s movies stood to make a lot of money—Jerry liked to point out that children came to movies with parents or in packs—children’s acts were treated as minor specialties by the studio in budgeting and distribution decisions; the kiddie movie was a kind of ghetto.
Jerry wasn’t bothered by such intimations, however. As he had with The Bellboy, he hit New York for a two-day publicity binge for The Ladies’ Man, putting on twenty-eight twenty-minute shows (complete with four-piece combo) at RKO theaters and appearing on three national television shows. (Although he made the rounds of the city in an air-conditioned bus, he had a telephone-equipped limousine following his caravan the whole time that kept him in constant touch with home, where Scotty was having his tonsils out.) He was like a monarch touring his domain, extending his appearance by organizing drill routines with Boy Scouts and other kids outside theaters, accepting gifts and even food from fans (not that he needed their sandwiches—his bus was stocked with box lunches from the Four Seasons, his and Patti’s favorite New York restaurant), joining in a sandlot baseball game, darting from the bus as it passed through Coney Island to scoop up some Nathan’s hot dogs. Of course, he loved it.
The Ladies’ Man was indeed a film to be proud of. As experimental in form as The Bellboy, it’s a riot of color, sound, and motion, as lush a meditation on the means of the cinema as any of Frank Tashlin’s films—or even, in the views of some of its later critics, Federico Fellini’s. It many ways, it resembles The Bellboy in shape: a series of gags about a clod set loose in a staid environment. It differs crucially, however, in its attempt to create a psychology for its main character: Stanley was just Everyputz, but here a prologue of several minutes and a series of confessional speeches illuminate the interior life of Herbert H. Heebert, Jerry’s character.
Herbert, a small-town college valedictorian (“I’m very glad that you choose me,” he blurts out at his graduation), swears off women forever after he finds his sweetheart kissing a football star. Despite the blubbering protests of his mother (a hideously over-made-up Jerry), he leaves home. Arriving in Hollywood, he quickly finds a job as a caretaker in a large house; unbeknownst to him, though, it’s filled with young women. The skittish misogynist is now surrounded by dozens of available girls (and two older, motherly women—housekeeper Katie and housemistress Miss Welenmellon). It’s not a film about the fear of women; on the contrary, given Jerry’s off-camera predilections, it’s more about life amid a surplus of them, the thinly veiled autobiography of a man half-schmuck, half-satyr.
As in The Bellboy, a series of comic riffs ensues, with the merest cobweb of a story line holding it together—Herbert encourages an ugly duckling in her career, while she encourages the other girls to express their appreciation for him. The girls represent a collection of types—vamp, beatnik, method actor, maneater—although none receives any more considered treatment than did the hotel guests in The Bellboy. There are the trademark sight gags—a butterfly collection comes to life, the lipstick on a portrait smears, a ferocious-sounding beast turns out to be a puppy dog. And there are longer gags that demonstrate real artistry: an encounter between Herbert and a surly gangster (Jerry’s great stock actor Buddy Lester) whose hat, hairdo, and suit the incompetent houseboy ruins; a fantasia in the forbidden bedroom of Miss Cartilage, a stark white set that mutates in size (so as to include Harry James and his orchestra) and takes Circean hold of Herbert’s limited senses.
Ironically, given the high-tech conditions of the production, one of the weakest sequences involves the airing of a live television show from the house (the den mother is a former opera star whose munificence with the girls is considered news). Otherwise, from the very opening shot—a pan down the main street of Herbert’s hometown—The Ladies’ Man fluently orchestrates motion and light, often in ways that have nothing to do with the story or even the jokes. It’s a virtuosic performance by Jerry the director in only his second film.
But Jerry the performer leaves a gaping hole in the center of the film that no amount of technical wizardry can fill. Jerry never for a moment looks the part of a juvenile; his body is thick (he has love handles and a potbelly), and he looks like he’s grown out of his clothes. People keep calling him “kid,” but it’s a thin masquerade; he keeps yelling “Maaaaaaa!” when he’s afraid, but it sounds more like a generic squeal than the voice of someone who’s recently left his mother’s home. His voice won’t find a consistent characterization; at times it’s deep or swishy or Jewish or plain. Herbert isn’t the Kid, but he isn’t anyone else, either. Jerry invents an idiosyncratic physical bit for him—his eyeglasses are forever misapplied on his face—but he doesn’t create a character. In the middle of a thrilling, exotic film, the central role is woefully underrealized.
Jerry’s inability to achieve a true characterization in The Ladies’ Man was the jumping-off point of a savage attack on the film—not a review, but an opinion column by “Li’l Abner” cartoonist Al Capp in the Los Angeles Mirror. Capp related his experience in accidentally wandering in to see The Ladies’ Man. After about twenty minutes of the film, he felt he could no longer endure the sight of “the most uninventive modern comic” and left the theater: “Not simply because I was bored. It was something more painful: I felt it had been somehow indecent of me to peek at a grown man making an embarrassing, unentertaining fool of himself. We all do now and then—privately. But what made this exhibition something to write about was that Jerry Lewis was doing it in public on a screen a mile long, in full color, and charging money.”
Capp analyzed Jerry’s career, and in particular, the way Dean’s presence had tempered Jerry’s shtick into something palatable: “Under the glare of Martin’s disapproval, Lewis restrained himself enough to become wildly, almost tastefully funny.” Without a partner, Capp argued, Jerry “got rid of that priceless ingredient in all creativity—constructive disapproval.” He concluded with a coup de grâce: “When creativity is permitted to erupt unchecked, and its excesses remain undisapproved of, it can become unintelligible and unbearable. It can become Ladies’ Man.”
Jerry couldn’t stand to be told that things he envisioned for his films couldn’t be achieved technically; he couldn’t stand to be watched by anyone he felt might be second-guessing him; but to be blindsided like this on the opinion page of a major newspaper left him sputteringly mad. He underlined various sentences in Capp’s column and composed, on his own typewriter, a furious reply of several pages to the cartoonist.
Confessing that he felt “compelled to write and, if nothing else, feel better that I did,” he savagely attacked Capp’s motives: “Can it be the inability to display your talent minus the cartoon strip? Or is there any talent at all, without your little friends from Catpatch?” He concluded by attacking Capp’s own creative work: “You see, Al, when creativity is permitted to erupt unchecked, and unedited, and it’s [sic] excesses remain undisapproved of, it can become unintelligible and unbearable. … It can become Li’l Abner … (and I at least saw more than one episode).”
Even this furious raspberry didn’t assuage Jerry’s sense of outrage. As soon as he finished venting his spleen on Capp, he wrote a little parable about a stallion that can’t be tamed and that, in its liberty, evokes the jealousy of the broken, corralled horses. It concluded, “All the horses in that distant corral hate that stallion causing all the trouble … but they sure would love getting all that attention, and had they the opportunity to start all over … you can bet, they couldn’t get a rope, a saddle, or anything on them either.”
There could be no doubt that the bold stallion was none other than Jerry himself, attention-craving nonconformist par excellence, subject of the jealousies of the rest of the world, a man utterly beyond the control of nay-sayers, managers, or moral authorities.
It was this self-image that led him to try to secure a popular novel that he wanted to direct and star in for the screen. The Catcher in the Rye had been published to universal critical acclaim and enthusiastic public reception by J. D. Salinger in 1951, but Jerry seemed to have first become aware of it in the early 1960s. “Time magazine did a profile of Salinger,” recalled Art Zigouras. “Jerry had read the profile and sent out people to get copies of Catcher in the Rye. I don’t know if he read it or not, but a few weeks later he wanted to play Holden Caulfield. I didn’t say a word, but Jack Keller said, ‘Jerry thinks that he’s the Jewish Holden Caulfield.’”
Even though he was in his mid-thirties and had never attempted anything besides “The Jazz Singer” that remotely resembled real drama, Jerry was telling people that he was the perfect choice to play Salinger’s alienated teenaged anti-hero. “You never saw a more Holden Caulfield guy than you’re sittin’ with right now,” he informed Peter Bogdanovich. “If a person ain’t genuine, I know it. I can spot a dirty, lying, phony rat. I can smell ’em.” He tried to approach Salinger through his agent, but the representative of the notoriously reclusive author didn’t even respond to his queries. Salinger wouldn’t even let not-for-profit groups like the Yale Drama School produce adaptations of his works; he certainly wasn’t letting Jerry Lewis get his mitts on them.
But Jerry had other ways of approaching the problem, according to Zigouras. “He found out later that Salinger’s sister was a buyer for one of the department stores in New York, and he wrote to her to influence Salinger to go ahead with it. He said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get him.’” He apparently did find the sister. “Salinger’s sister told me she used to call him ‘Sonny,’” he revealed to Bogdanovich. “That’s what my grandmother used to call me. It’s frightening.” He never did succeed in wheedling the rights to the novel from Salinger, but even in the late 1970s he was discussing the possibility with dreamy enthusiasm. “Salinger’s sister told me if anyone would get it from him it would be me,” he told an interviewer. “I’m still trying. He’s nuts also. And that’s the only reason that he’s entertaining talking to me—because he likes nuts.”
If he was worried that he might spread himself too thin, he didn’t show it. Starting in late July, he shot The Errand Boy, which wrapped on September 1, 1961, five days ahead of schedule, at a budget of $1.79 million. There were few problems or personality conflicts (though Jerry did chew out veteran comic Fritz Feld when the sixty-two-year-old man couldn’t reproduce his dance steps exactly), and there were no mountains of technology to scale. The company files on the film are dotted with carbon copies of telegrams of thanks and congratulations from Jerry to the cast and crew. The speedy completion of the film was due, in part, to the diligence of the director and his employees: They shot past 11 P.M. several times and wrapped up work at 1:20 A.M. on the last day of shooting.
Still, the thing went so smoothly that he could take a night off to team up with Bobby Darin on the pregame show of an Angels-Yankee broadcast. He was a big baseball fan—his Errand Boy cast notes include a handwritten account of a discussion he had with cameo player Leo Durocher about which games the Dodgers needed to win to secure the pennant—but when he showed up with Darin, reporters didn’t care so much about his ability as a sports prognosticator as about the whiff in the air of a possible new partnership. He’d always been asked the same questions whenever he showed up to perform with a singer, so he knew how to brush them off. And he shared a secret about himself and Dean with UPI’s Rick DuBrow: “You know what a team like that is? It’s two guys scared to death who need each other. That’s all it is. It’s pretty cozy to see someone up there. It’s murder up there alone. Try it.”