From the time he broke up with Dean through the early 1960s, Jerry’s involvement in the Muscular Dystrophy Association had been limited, if highly visible. He did telethons and short broadcasts for the organization; he made public service films that were shown in theaters and on television; he lent his name to fund-raising activities, but not on a regular basis and not always on the most accommodating of terms. The organization found itself in a strange double bind with him: On one hand, he had for all intents and purposes built the organization by adopting it as his personal cause; on the other, he seemed to want to keep some distance between himself and an organization that, in the minds of many, had been synonymous with Martin and Lewis. Furthermore, key personnel at Jerry Lewis Productions, Ernie Glucksman and Jack Keller among them, had a hard enough job keeping him focused on his responsibilities to Paramount, nightclubs, and NBC; they participated in his MDA activities but somewhat grudgingly, seeing in the charity a kind of rival family of co-workers for their boss.
There were little conflicts between MDA and Jerry and his own production company. Art Zigouras, one of MDA’s key creative personnel, had to deal with Jerry and JLP often, and he found that being caught in the shoals between two sensitive groups didn’t allow him too much say in his own work. At the time he was asked to leave the set of The Ladies’ Man, he’d been sent to California to film a public service spot with Jerry that was also partially a promo for the film. “He got up on the crane,” Zigouras recalled, “and he had a microphone—this is Jerry, the great technical guy—and he showed the set and all this, but he was turned away from the microphone, and we couldn’t use it. But Jerry was very touchy about doing things for dystrophy. So we couldn’t go back and tell him it wasn’t any good. We just sort of put it aside and said, ‘Oh, yeah, we can use it, Jerry, it’s great, blah, blah.’ And then Paramount, since he did it on their time, sent us a bill for like ten thousand dollars, since it was their crew and such, and we paid the bill, which was way more than we would’ve paid for anyone else to do it.”
At other times, Jerry’s sheer ego kept him from being as helpful as he might have been to the organization. “Jerry’s involvement with dystrophy was a mixed bag as far as I could tell,” said Zigouras. “He was so bloody busy doing these other things. Once we did—on kinescope—a show from the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles with all these stars coming on and thanking people for supporting muscular dystrophy. I coproduced it with Ernie, and Jerry always had the final say-so. It was called ‘High Hopes,’ and it was done at the Coconut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel. We had Donald O’Connor, Richard Boone, and many others, and the audience was filled with minor celebrities. We wrote material for Jerry—I had written some stuff, Ernie had hired some writers—geared to dystrophy’s needs at the time, which was more public education than financing. Jerry came in and just threw it out. Egotistically: ‘No, no, tell me what you want me to say and I’ll do my own stuff.’ And we were leery of that—we being the dystrophy people—because Jerry had a tendency to fuck things up. He would start out to say something and get so convoluted that it never became clear. But he was top man: He was making films, he had all this money, he was hot, he was arrogant, he was egocentric, and he was a son of a bitch, and he just tore us apart. So we went up to do the show, and he ad-libbed, and we had to edit around him. And it was editing on kinescope, which wasn’t as easy as it is now. So we learned our lesson. The second show, we went to him and said, ‘Do what you want.’ So the script said something like, ‘Jerry does shtick with Donald O’Connor,’ or ‘Jerry does bit for MDA’—there was nothing written. And the director was going out of his mind, because he didn’t trust Jerry to come through with it. And Jerry came through. A lot of times he fucked up the lines, but that time he came through.”
At various times, the organization may even have considered going on without Jerry altogether. Zigouras was one of those most vehemently in favor of such a move, and not only for professional reasons. Having spent a fair amount of time around Jerry in his Paramount offices, he knew enough about the comedian’s private life to become afraid of what the chance of scandal might mean to MDA. “I got a lot of surprises when I was first out there,” he recalled. “I was really surprised to find that Jerry had been fooling around so much and having all these affairs. I’d come back to New York and I’d keep saying, ‘Let’s not put all our eggs on Jerry, because if any of this ever comes out, we’re killed, we’re dead.’”
Jerry did very little to hide his womanizing from the people around him, as Zigouras remembered: “Jerry was very friendly with me. We’d sit around and talk. He said to me once, ‘You know, Art, if you go out with a woman and you get laid, it’s because she likes you. If I go out and get laid, I don’t know if it’s because I’m Jerry Lewis or not.’”
But it was an era when the peccadilloes of movie stars, politicians, and athletes weren’t discussed in public except in the most outrageous and unforgivable cases. Jerry was thus at liberty to cheat not only on Patti but on women with whom he engaged in relationships outside his marriage. “He had a secretary [with whom] he was having an affair,” said Zigouras. “One time I was there, and there was a young girl who’d come over to audition for one of the films he was doing. We were in the Paramount offices, and on the lot he also had a dressing room, which was this huge beautiful place. Jerry was there with this young girl, and he had said to [his secretary], ‘I want you to wait till I finish.’ And [the secretary] was there, and it’s getting to be nine-thirty, ten, ten-thirty, eleven o’clock, and she starts crying, ‘That son of a bitch, he’s doing this deliberately to me.’ And finally Jack [Keller] says, ‘All right, that’s it, let’s get out of here.’”
Keller, in fact, was in part responsible for Jerry’s bold-faced behavior. More than anyone in the comedian’s life, he was able to argue with him effectively, but he was also a press agent, a man whose job it was to camouflage the private man with a public screen. He may not have approved personally of Jerry’s doings, and he may have been the only one with the audacity to tell Jerry when he was wrong, but he had learned his trade at the feet of George Evans, and he went along with whatever his employer did or asked him to do. Likewise, the MDA hierarchy ignored Jerry’s philandering because of his worth to the organization as a spokesman and fund-raiser. He was, indeed, top man, and the people at MDA were grateful for whatever he was willing to do for them.
In November 1961, with no films of his own in the production pipeline and his first Paramount project in more than two years scheduled to roll in just a few weeks, he hosted an MDA telethon in New York. It was a big deal to the charity, which was forever insisting to him, against his own judgment, that telethons were the best possible fund-raising technique, but for Jerry it was just an engagement between nightclub runs in Philadelphia and Las Vegas. (During the Vegas date, he appeared for free on columnist Ralph Pearl’s TV show and acted the crazy kid—ignoring questions, tearing up the script, destroying the set. When Pearl wrote angrily about his behavior, Jerry went on the show of rival columnist Jack Kogan and denounced him.)
At the time he was appearing in Las Vegas, he should have been on a sound stage at Paramount filming It’s Only Money, a Frank Tashlin–directed comedy about a TV repairman who inherits a fortune without knowing it. But when shooting on that film was scheduled to start on December 13, he refused to show up for work, declaring the studio had breached his contract; Variety speculated that his qualms were strictly financial. For the next week, Jerry’s office traded barbs in the Hollywood trade press with York Productions (the corporation persisted as a wholly owned subsidiary of Paramount even though Jerry and Dean had been bought out years before). On December 16, while teeing up at the Bel Air Country Club, Jerry was served with a subpoena to appear in Los Angeles County Superior Court, where York was seeking to enjoin him from working anywhere else until he fulfilled his obligations. In retaliation, Jerry sued York for breach of contract and subpoenaed every key member of the crew of It’s Only Money, effectively crippling preproduction work on the film.
The holdout and the subsequent legal mêlée were resolved to everyone’s satisfaction by February 1962: Jerry would make It’s Only Money, after which he would be permitted to supervise all of his films, whether Jerry Lewis Productions or Paramount was the producing entity. For his loyalty and combativeness throughout the siege, Ernie Glucksman, who’d been associate-producing Jerry’s movies on a film-by-film basis, was awarded by his boss with a new five-year contract that assured his position as producer on all JLP films throughout the tenure of the deal.
Before production on the delayed film began, Jerry did a few weeks at the Sands and spent some time in Hollywood preparing for a new commercial venture. In conjunction with restaurateur Maury Samuels, he opened a Sunset Strip restaurant called, creatively enough, Jerry Lewis’s. Some years earlier, Samuels had gone into business with Dean Martin—just a few blocks down the Strip, in fact. That restaurant, Dino’s Lodge, was immensely popular, serving home-style Italian food and grilled entrées in a wood-paneled atmosphere meant to replicate the great roué’s den. It was such a temple of hipness that the producers of the hit TV series “77 Sunset Strip” chose it as the backdrop for their program, shooting the title sequence in front of the place and having teen heartthrob Edd “Kookie” Byrnes play one of its parking valets. Dean himself didn’t visit the place much, but the restaurant wasn’t about him so much as his image (indeed, after he’d sold out his percentage, he sued the owners to have his name and likeness removed from signage, menus, and advertising—and lost, so abstract had his connection to the place been all along).
Jerry Lewis’s was a different sort of operation altogether. Like everything else its owner had a piece of, it was an extremely hands-on enterprise. If Jerry was in town, he was a good bet to be at the restaurant, table-hopping and schmoozing like a Borscht Belt hotelier. In contrast to the understated masculinity of Dino’s Lodge, Jerry Lewis’s was a study in gaudy textures—dark walnut paneling, silver-and-purple highlights, heavy drapes, huge chandeliers, deep banquettes, and plush armchairs. The two massive sets of double doors that led into the place bore silver handles in the shapes of Js and Ls. The gigantic menus (ten-by-twenty inches closed) were covered in black velvet and embossed with a grandiose silver JL logo on the front. The china was black-and-white, the maître d’ (Luigi, hired away from Dino’s Lodge in a none-too-subtle tweak) wore tails, and the waiters and busboys wore double-breasted maroon uniforms. The menu featured French-inspired gourmet dishes such as caviar and roast pheasant. “The restaurant reflects Jerry’s thoughts on what he would like to be,” Jack Keller told a reporter whom he treated to a tour and a free meal.
Not everybody was taken in by the atmosphere of Jerry Lewis’s. Each elegant touch was undercut by a vulgar one: In the largest of the three dining rooms, a long curved window revealed Los Angeles beneath the Hollywood hills, but the same room sported a large framed stained-glass composition of Jerry as a hobo clown; the middle-sized dining room was dominated by a cockleshell-shaped chandelier towed by six cupids attached to the ceiling (the third dining room was private, with its own entrance). A reporter noted that the place “would make the Medici feel at home.” But it didn’t have the same impact on customers. Variety sent somebody to the February 16 opening and that reporter was most impressed with the lax service and long waits he endured, noting that “quite a few of the standees tired of waiting and left.” Eventually, Jerry’s own attention wandered away from the restaurant and it closed down, another whim that couldn’t outlast his initial enthusiasm.
The delays in shooting It’s Only Money, which wrapped at the end of April 1962, had ensured that it would be the first summer since 1949 that Paramount didn’t have a Jerry Lewis picture to distribute. The Errand Boy had opened to strong reviews the previous December. Variety flat-out declared it “one of the best and funniest Jerry Lewis pictures to come along,” while the far more resistant New York Times admitted that the film opened with “a screamingly funny half-hour.”
In crucial ways, The Errand Boy is simply the third version of his now-settled formula: a series of episodes in which Jerry runs amok in a staid environment—this time, a movie studio. After having been hired on as a spy for a tyrannical studio boss, Jerry (as Morty Tashman) goes from job to job, set to set, trying to remain anonymous but making a conspicuous mess of everything. The film includes many jokes tailored to the Hollywood setting—Morty accidentally redubs a musical, he stumbles onto sets and is trampled, he fails to distinguish acting from life and walks into scenes, ruining them. There’s plenty of typical Lewis stuff there (Morty, like many of Jerry’s other characters, is always interrupted in his lunch, and works of art come to life and nearly kill him), as well as some routines that are woefully old and, in their protracted versions, painful to watch.
The most typically Lewisian thing about the film is the meager plotline that develops in the closing minutes. Morty may be the world’s worst industrial spy, but he is naturally funny. As in The Stooge and Three Ring Circus, an idiot who can do nothing right is recognized for his genuineness and honesty and becomes a hit. In the finale, Morty Tashman is a big movie star (his breakthrough film is entitled It Could Happen to You) giving lessons in how to get ahead in Hollywood to an inept sign painter—played by Jerry as an even bigger dope than Morty. If it’s meant to be an allegory of Jerry’s own rise in the business, it’s dishonest and glib. But it’s a fully realized version of his philosophy, based on themes in Chaplin’s The Circus, that comedy has to come from the heart. Delivering such a message in a film with elaborate production sequences and a cast of hundreds (in many ways, it’s the most opulent film Jerry ever directed) doesn’t seem to rattle Jerry at all.
The audience certainly didn’t mind the incongruity. The sight of Jerry disrupting the operation of a movie studio delighted them and kept them buying tickets. The lack of an immediate follow-up was therefore all the more disappointing to Paramount.
Jerry, on the other hand, was hardly wanting for ways to fill his time. He had a new film of his own in development—an updated version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde he was writing with Bill Richmond—but it wasn’t scheduled to begin production until late fall. He began investigating new television venues for himself, and he told Vernon Scott of UPI that he’d been offered $35 million to do a Jack Paar–style late-night show for eighteen months. (Paar had recently left “The Tonight Show,” and there was much speculation in the trade press about how the late-night talk-show scene would shake out when young emcee Johnny Carson took the program over that fall.)
A movie studio might not have been afraid of the notion of tossing tens of millions at Jerry Lewis. (“What do I think of him?” responded an incredulous Barney Balaban to a reporter who asked about Paramount’s top comedy star. “Look at the money he’s made the studio during the last five years. If he wants to burn it down, I’ve got a match.”) But TV network officials hooted at the figures Jerry was mentioning. “All we’d have to do is sell the network to pay him that much,” one told Scott. Nevertheless, despite all of his flops on the small screen, rumors of a big TV deal continued to swirl around him.
He did an hour on ABC that spring and got paid $250,000 for his trouble. It was, in effect, a one-man show, with Jerry spoofing the twist, TV doctor shows, kabuki, folksingers, and crazes in teen culture. He sang “Mammy.” The critics were appalled: “Can a show advertised as a big time special be as bad as this one?” asked a critic with The New York Herald Tribune. “I don’t suppose a worse show has ever been put on television.”
Nevertheless, NBC—memories of those wildly successful “Colgate Comedy Hour” days still warm in its corporate heart—wanted him back, and in a unique spot: During the interregnum between Paar and Carson, various guest hosts were being used to keep “The Tonight Show” in the public eye. Jerry would be given two weeks in June. The network would have one of the biggest film stars in the world for an exclusive fortnight, while Jerry would have entrée to American living rooms for the same span of time, which would surely settle once and for all the question of whether or not he was talk-show host material.
The results were spectacular. NBC had hired a prestigious roster of talent to fill in on the show during its six-month revamping, Groucho Marx, Art Linkletter, Donald O’Connor, Joey Bishop, Hugh Downs, and Mort Sahl among them, but Jerry’s ratings were absolutely the highest. For two weeks he ruled the airwaves as he had at no time since he and Dean were together. Part of the appeal was that he had no respect for the familiar “Tonight Show” formats, making a shambles of guests, advertisers, the band, and the audience. But it was also that he was in a role he never filled previously: He was ringmaster rather than main attraction, and his interjections, asides, and idiosyncrasies were the spice of the program and not the meat. For the first time since “The Colgate Comedy Hour,” the TV audience unequivocally loved him.
Even the critics appreciated what he did to the already tired contours of the late-night talk show formula. Longtime Lewis watcher Harriet Van Horne wrote yet another canny critique of him in The New York World Telegram: “Mr. Lewis, as we who read Photoplay under the hairdrier well know, is a Pagliacci … a grave and thoughtful man who must periodically cut short his musings on the decline of Western culture to cross his eyes, wail like a banshee and regale the groundlings with his version of the shaking palsy. … Once you’ve accepted this strange dichotomy in Mr. Lewis you find yourself sympathizing with it. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp and—well, his does. As some critic remarked of the poet Southey, ‘His pretensions jostle one another.’ In Mr. Lewis’ case, the jostling is frequently abrasive. And this, too, is a compelling, quirky business to watch. Mr. Lewis is a man who loves big words, who makes offhand allusions to his riches and grandeurs and who sometimes seems embarrassed by his distinct gifts for low comedy. He will give us a turn that is wildly, outrageously funny—then look acutely annoyed. It’s as if the Student Prince were to be caught cheating at cards. … Mr. Lewis may not think so from the above but I find him fascinating.”
Jerry knew that his “Tonight Show” run had helped alter his public face, telling a journalist that his two weeks on the show proved “that I can communicate with people and that I can step out of character and not be some kind of wild chihuahua all the time.” He reflected further on his newly mature image: “Once I was a terrible liar. Maybe I’m growing up. Mayby I’ve stopped hating myself.”
Despite this self-analytic breakthrough, his success on “The Tonight Show” wasn’t the most exciting thing that happened to him and Patti during their two weeks in New York. They had decided to take what they called a “second honeymoon” in the city, and following Jerry’s usual custom, they had booked a suite at the Essex House on Central Park West. It was to be a major vacation, apparently; they brought along a valet, a dresser, a secretary, and their best clothes and jewelry.
On Tuesday night, June 26, 1962, while they were at RCA studios in Rockefeller Center taping a show, burglars used a celluloid strip to enter the suite, emptied Jerry’s jewel box of everything but his upper plate, slashed open Patti’s suitcase (which was in another bedroom—not her husband’s), and made off with everything they found.
It was a real-live jewel heist—quick and precise. The perpetrators had left behind two valuable watches, a chinchilla coat, Jerry’s traveling camera kit, and the tip he’d left on the dresser for the maid. They took all of Jerry’s treasures, even an onyx pinky ring Patti had given him back when she was still touring and he was courting her. Patti lost twenty-five pieces, including a ruby bracelet, three diamond-and-sapphire bracelets, and a lavish necklace-bracelet set. The total haul was estimated at $195,000. “But you can’t measure what it was worth in heart value,” Jerry said, adding, “maybe three and a half million.”
It was the Essex House’s third such burglary in recent weeks, and one of three with celebrity victims in New York during that same span of time— Rosalind Russell had been taken for $70,000 at the Plaza, Errol Flynn’s widow for $15,000 at the Pierre. But Jerry lost a literal fortune right from under the eyes of a huge television audience.
He was devastated: “They did a beautiful job, an unbelievable job,” he told the press. “They hit everything.” He tried to stress the emotional impact of the experience, explaining that he most missed that old pinky ring and a watch Patti had given him when he opened in London with Dean in 1952. “It’s been my good luck charm,” he said, though, of course, London had been a disaster. But he couldn’t lose sight of the money he’d lost, big by even his standards: “I’d pay two hundred grand for three shots at his face, whoever did this,” he said. “Just to punch him against the wall.”
“You can punch me for a hundred grand,” cracked a reporter.
He didn’t like the joke. “I can’t be whimsical or irresponsible about a tragedy like this. Patti’s heart is broken. She’s a very emotional Italian woman who takes these things seriously. She’s acting calm to protect me, but her heart is broken. And I don’t know how I’m going to fix it.”
The FBI was called in, dozens of cops showed up (he did shtick for them: “I can never get more than ten or twelve people around me and not consider it an audience”), and the story broke big in the papers. But it had been a real professional job; the FBI had nothing. The stuff was gone. It was, of course, insured back in California, but it was all a memory. And truly, it was the sentimental loss that bothered him.
Years later, Jerry recalled how he had reacted to that sense of loss in the extremely public forum that his visit to New York had afforded him: “I went on the air the next night and I said, ‘I know about heists because I know about the people that do that, and I’m not proudly proclaiming that I know them as friends, but I do know their modus operandi. So therefore, I’m not really concerned with the three hundred fifty or four hundred thousand dollars’ [sic] worth of jewelry, but there was a ring that my wife gave me.’ And I described it. I said, ‘I doubt that that ring could possibly cost more than sixty dollars, because she bought it for me in 1943 [sic]. So if any of you guys before you fence all this stuff run across that ring’—and I’m looking right in the camera on ‘The Tonight Show’—I said, ‘you have my marker for the rest of your life if I could get that one ring back.’”
He offered a five-thousand-dollar, no-questions-asked reward right there on TV. A few nights later, somebody showed up at the “Tonight Show” taping to give Jerry a ring like the one he’d described. Jack Keller got wind of it and called the cops. Three squad cars and four detectives showed up, but it was a false alarm—it was just a fan who wanted to make sure that Jerry had some kind of ring like the one he’d lost. But then, as Jerry recalled, “Two weeks passed, I finished ‘The Tonight Show’ in New York, I went home, and I had an appointment at Paramount at seven-thirty in the morning. I get in my car and it’s sitting on the seat of my car in an envelope.” TV audiences really had learned to love him after all.
Back at Paramount that summer, he worked his usual day-and-night schedule on his new film. It was unlike anything he’d tried until now. Not only was it fully scripted as a linear narrative (as opposed to a series of jokes hung off a slight frame), but it called for him to play two complete roles, the Jekyll and Hyde of the story. It had been almost a year since The Errand Boy had wrapped, and the pace of preparation on the new film was infinitely more deliberate than usual. There had been intimations of his doing a version of Jekyll and Hyde for at least two years, and even earlier than that he’d investigated the matter of remaking a property that was in the public domain. So this was hardly a headlong rush like The Bellboy or even the partially spontaneous Ladies’ Man.
He dedicated himself to the picture, eventually dubbed The Nutty Professor, right up through the start of the shoot—no TV, no nightclubs. As was his wont, he oversaw every single aspect of the production, from the logistics of filming exterior sequences on the Arizona State University campus in Tempe to the casting of key players. And, as was his wont, if he didn’t get his way, he could get furious.
MDA’s Art Zigouras was talking with Ernie Glucksman in his Paramount office one day when Jerry got some bad news about the film: “Ernie’s office was connected to Jerry’s office by a door that was behind a bookcase. It was like a secret door, and it opened with a kind of pneumatic hiss; evidently, Jerry had some sort of secret control. And I didn’t know this. So we’re in there talking about some thing for dystrophy, and the door—shoooosh—opens up. Jerry storms in, furious at Ernie, and just chewed him out the way you would chew out some minor servant who’d left a watermelon peel on the table, even though Ernie was a producer in his own right. It seems Jerry had asked for John Williams, the British actor, to play the dean of the school in The Nutty Professor, and it got back to Jerry without getting through Ernie that John Williams would not be in this movie, that he didn’t think much of Jerry, that he didn’t think Jerry was a good director, that he wouldn’t bother with this piece of trash. Well, of course, if you told Jerry that the script was trash he’d start yelling. And he thought that somehow Ernie had fucked it up: ‘You’re supposed to be my producer and you didn’t get John Williams and you screwed it all up.’ Ernie turned white. He was about sixty-five, sixty-six. And I never felt more sympathy for him than at that moment. And Jerry stormed out and the door went shoooop and Ernie turned around and chuckled and said, ‘Well, now, let’s get on with our business.””
The part of the college dean went to Del Moore, the announcer for Jerry’s homemade radio station. Other parts went to other old friends—Kathleen Freeman, Buddy Lester, Milton Frome, and Larry Storch (a longtime Lewis hanger-on whose role wound up being cut). Some new faces were hired: a comic named Henry Gibson, a gigantic young actor named Richard Kiel.
As his leading lady, Jerry cast a twenty-six-year-old starlet named Estelle Egglestone. She was born in Hot Coffee, Mississippi, and was married, became a mother, and got divorced while still in her teens. She fought a court battle to keep her husband from taking her baby away, she attended Memphis State University (where she acted the Marilyn Monroe role in a production of Bus Stop), and she posed as one of Playboy’s most popular centerfolds. She had broken into movies in 1959 when Frank Tashlin cast her in Twentieth Century–Fox’s Say One for Me. Critic David Thomson likened her life to a Preston Sturges scenario, adding that it was “perhaps more than Sturges could’ve handled.” Maybe Al Capp would have been a more appropriate point of reference. After all, Egglestone and Jerry first met on the set of Li’l Abner, in which she stole several scenes in the role of Appassionata von Climax under her nom de scene: Stella Stevens.
Stevens was the era’s sexy blond bombshell par excellence, a voluptuous young woman with an adorable and naïve air that simultaneously undercut and heightened her allure. Jerry was absolutely bowled over by her. Three weeks into the production, he stayed late at the office to write what could only be described as a mash note to her. “I was completely inspired last night,” he told her. “You are the reason men can’t live without the pride and thrill of direction. … Perhaps one day you too will know the feeling.” He must have realized how far overboard he’d fallen, admitting, “This is not the kind of a letter I would want to dictate.”*
The film had begun shooting on October 9, 1962, and the set wasn’t run in the familiar everybody’s-welcome fashion. Although he hosted diplomatic contingents from Morocco and the Ivory Coast and a group of children from the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court, Jerry closed the set to all outsiders when he was in makeup for the “Hyde” personality. (He did, however, take a Saturday away from the set to go over to MGM, where Stanley Kramer was shooting the mammoth slapstick film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and contribute a cameo as a speed-crazy driver who crosses several lanes of traffic to run down Spencer Tracy’s hat.)
Another time, he virtually shut down the set for two hours so he could spout off to a Variety reporter about the ills he thought were plaguing the film industry. He especially decried the tendency toward adults-only films, which he said were stifling the industry by alienating patrons early in their lives and turning them into inveterate TV-watchers. “I have to hire a projectionist for fifty dollars to show Babes in Toyland at home to my kids on Saturday afternoons,” he said. “I’m certainly not going to let them go to a theater and see a Lesbian [sic] concept.”
He saw himself as the last sane man in an increasingly insane business: “We let The Twist come out and then made movies from it. The Twist should have come from the movies. We created degradation by latching on to a motion picture subject that comes from a degraded form just because it is lucrative. It is degrading to take our talent and apply it to this just because of the greed of some people. To put a dame in a film because of her measurements is not substantial enough to make product—there just mustn’t be that kind of greed.”
Never once passing to think that anything of what he had said might have had any reflection on his own work, he went on to detail all of the tie-ins Jack Keller had arranged for The Nutty Professor—Planter’s Nuts, Willys Jeeps, Vic Tanny Fitness Centers, North American Van Lines—and then put his false teeth in his mouth and went off to film his curvy Playmate of the Month leading lady.
In November the shoot moved to Tempe for three days of exteriors and establishing shots. Jerry kept regally above the throng of students who milled about the set—he literally rode a crane over their heads—but occasionally alit to entertain himself. Scott Townsend, then a student at ASU, recalled that Jerry dismounted the crane, “got in his Lincoln Continental, and drove all of fifty feet across the street to one of the athletic fields. He took his golf clubs out of the car, and he proceeded to hit about fifty brand-new golf balls out into the field. Of course, there was a huge crowd watching, and there was a smaller crowd that were trying to get the golf balls that he hit for souvenirs. After fifteen minutes or so of hitting golf balls, he got back in his Lincoln and drove the fifty feet back across the street.”*
On the last night in Tempe, Jerry put on a full-scale performance in Goodwin Stadium on the ASU campus. It was the same material he’d done in Vegas the previous winter, with jokes about Phil Harris, Richard Nixon, the Edsel, Arabs, folksingers, and the movie Exodus. He did cane tricks and golf and hat routines. He lit an audience member’s handkerchief on fire and then replaced the immolated object with a monogrammed hanky of his own (a perennial Lewis bit). He sang “I’m in the Mood for Love,” “What Kind of Fool Am I?,” and an Al Jolson medley, and he talked about his family. He was memorialized with a bronze caricature in the student union, and he enjoyed his trip to college so much that when it came time to preview the film he lobbied to do so in Phoenix (Ernie Glucksman, however, convinced him that the audience there would already be predisposed to like the picture, and Jerry wound up not only forgoing a Phoenix preview but skipping the town altogether on his promotional tour for the movie).
The Nutty Professor wrapped on December 18, 1962, five days behind schedule and $380,000 over budget. Of the $1.892 million final cost, $80,000 went to Jerry as director, producer, writer, and star, a relatively modest sum but altogether superfluous in another light.
On November 27, along with various ABC executives, Jerry had announced that he had signed a deal for a new series. Both the money and the show were unusual. Jerry would be the host and star of a two-hour live variety/talk show set to air on Saturday nights opposite “Gunsmoke” and “The NBC Saturday Night Movie.” For a schedule of forty shows each season, he would receive $8 million—$50,000 a show. It was a five-year deal, with a $40 million ceiling. As he had just three years earlier with Paramount, Jerry Lewis had signed the biggest contract in the history of the medium; he was now the highest-paid star in movies and TV.
Word had been circulating for some time that NBC and CBS had been trying to sign him to a similar deal, based on the strength of his two weeks on “The Tonight Show” that spring. But he had pushed for concessions that those networks simply wouldn’t allow him: 100 percent creative control, a premium time slot, an absolutely live broadcast. ABC didn’t give him the whole house—they didn’t include any series pilots from Jerry’s production company in the deal—but they had given him his own set of keys.
ABC president Leonard Goldenson agreed to Jerry’s terms in large part because his network’s generally weak standing made such risks necessary. Moreover, he had flown out to Paramount to meet with Jerry and Ernie Glucksman and been impressed with the comedian’s energy and vision.
As for Jerry, he finally felt as though he had the medium that had so long frustrated him by the throat: “I’ll be in complete control,” he announced. “It’ll be something I’ve never done before. It’ll be what people want—strictly entertainment. No song-and-dance stuff. No working under pressure with people who are frightened.”
He elaborated on this last comment, an obvious jibe at the NBC executives who had heretofore overseen his TV career: “I was tired of being governed by a lot of frightened people who don’t have the courage of their convictions. I walked away from frightened people in a frightened medium years ago. Now they’re getting some guts.”
But as to what he was going to do during eighty hours of live TV each season, he sounded a little unsure: “I’m going to play it loose. I’ll be what I’m with. I suppose I’ll have guests. If they’re hostile, I’ll be hostile. If they’re warm, I’ll be warm. If they’re zany, I’ll be zany.”
After Christmas, he took the reels of The Nutty Professor with him to Lake Tahoe, where he played three weeks at Harrah’s. Along with him he brought his editing team—Artie Schmidt, John Woodcock, and Rusty Wiles—and Glucksman. Not only did they have the release of one film to handle, but they were set to begin production on another in the spring—a Paramount production called Who’s Minding the Store? to be directed by Frank Tashlin—and now a major TV series scheduled to premiere in nine months.
For some reason, the TV series seemed to matter least of all to Jerry. The deal itself seemed to satisfy him somehow. And of all the people in his coterie, only Jack Keller had the nerve and the standing to tell him that the TV series was too big, that his priorities were backward, that the movies ought to have been someone else’s concern, and that he should have been concentrating on the show. Art Zigouras recalled that “the only person who said to him, ‘Don’t do it’ was Jack Keller. ‘It’s not your thing,’ and all. And Jerry was fuming at him. Jack and I used to go out and drink and he’d say, ‘It’s no good, he’s gonna fuck up, it’s not his thing.’ And I remember him saying, ‘Jerry just thinks he can make a funny face and do a funny bit and he’ll get by, but you can’t do that on ABC television any longer.’ He would tell Jerry that, and he and Jerry would have these real arguments.”
But Keller was getting a bit long in the tooth. He had begun to groom a protégé, a young publicist named Jim Flood, and he had been balking at another of Jerry’s schemes. For the launch of The Nutty Professor, Jerry wanted to go on a national tour with a band and a full retinue. He would open the picture in each town with live performances at a number of theaters, do TV and radio and press conferences, and greet his audience one by one, as it were. He would visit twenty-five cities in forty-four days, doing about two dozen twenty-minute shows in each town. Jerry reckoned it would boost the gross for the picture by about $1 million and drum up an audience for the TV series. Keller reckoned it might kill him. He tried to talk him out of it: “What’s to be gained?” he’d asked. “The picture’s going to make money whether you do it or not.” But Jerry wouldn’t change his mind. So Keller set about planning the tour, coordinating it, and eventually going along on it. In typical sardonic fashion, he dubbed it “The Jewish Bataan Death March.”
The spring of 1963 saw three previews of The Nutty Professor—one in Jamaica, Queens, was filled with old friends of Jerry’s from Times Square and the MDA—and the start of filming on Who’s Minding the Store? When that film wrapped at the end of May, Jerry had a week to rev up for the Nutty Professor promo tour.
It was an enormous undertaking, with several buses and limousines, a five-piece combo under the hand of longtime Lewis bandleader Lou Brown, and a retinue that included Keller, Glucksman, Bill Richmond, a secretary, dresser Dick Jarrod, stage manager Hal Bell, ABC producer Perry Cross, some Paramount distribution people, personal photographer William Woodfield, and a rotating crop of hangers-on. Even more grandly, Jerry allowed Richard Gehman, a freelance journalist who’d written a story about him in The American Spectator the previous year, to accompany him for twenty-four-hour stretches as part of a book-length chronicle of the tour and its star’s life. He was Johnson traveling the provinces with his own Boswell.
Jerry had a massive loose-leaf binder prepared for him, with each day’s itinerary mapped out in painstaking detail down to the name of every reporter he would meet. Shopping trips to camera stores were noted; dinners with friends were scheduled. The outside of the sixty-six-page binder read:
Jerry Lewis
Personal Appearance Tour
for
“the NUTTY professor”
Under that he wrote in pen:
and
Jerry Lewis Show
ABC TV
AND
for the future!
Just packing for the thing was a logistical nightmare. Jerry was used to traveling with so much stuff that he took two cars along when he went down to his yacht for a weekend. For the Nutty Professor promo tour, Jarrod was in charge of the following: ten tuxedos with matching shirts; six sports coats designed by Jerry along with matching trousers; six store-bought sports coat-and-trouser ensembles; ten pairs each of white yachting sneakers and black leather loafers; a gross of pairs of white socks; four dozen pairs of black socks; thirty-six sweatshirts; twelve pairs of twill yachting slacks; ninety pairs of broadcloth shorts monogrammed with Jerry’s caricature; a half-dozen baseball mitts and a dozen hardballs; a set of golf clubs; a suitcase of Indian nuts; a suitcase of Pep-O-Mint Lifesavers; a suitcase filled with cigarettes, mouthwash, caffeine pills, aspirin, soap, and assorted toiletries; a suitcase of recording equipment; four suitcases of cameras, lenses, film, and photographic equipment; an oxygen tank; three electric typewriters; a carton filled with Jerry’s self-published book Instruction Book for Being a Person; a box of specially printed “Think Pink” stickers; a scrapbook entitled “The Mad World of Jerry Lewis”; a portable phonograph; and a box of Count Basie LPs. (In part, the opulence fed his sense of having been deprived as a child, but the multiple changes of clothes were necessary because Jerry fetishistically refused to wear any pair of socks twice and gave away all of his suits as soon as they needed to be cleaned; similarly, he would insist on beginning each day with a newly opened, full pack of cigarettes.)
The tour began in Houston on June 4. He held court with reporters at the Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel and set about charming them immediately: “I say this respectfully, and I love you, but I couldn’t care less what you say.” But they were saying nice things about him: He was another Chaplin, right? Nope. Unlike Jerry, Chaplin had gone to the bad: “He was wonderful when he wore the baggy pants, but somewhere he went wrong. He forgot his roots.”
He dashed off to Dallas, Fort Worth, San Francisco, Des Moines, Omaha, Denver, Kansas City. In St. Louis he told reporters at the Chase-Park Plaza Hotel that he was too busy to get home for Father’s Day. He had taken two days to fly back to Los Angeles for Gary’s high school graduation, though, so it wasn’t as if he didn’t love his children. Patti was pregnant again. The other kids were great. He attributed the success of his marriage to them: “We’ve been married nineteen years. When you think about it, that’s what it’s all about. You know it; I know it. But we tend to overlook it. It’s like apologizing to a stranger for bumping into him. You’ll spend more time apologizing to a stranger than you will telling your kids how much you love them. You know, our house without a baby is nothing. We’re here to reproduce the best possible citizens. They are our children until they’re grown, then they hand in their resignation and you wish them well and send them on their way with your love. We call them ‘rental babies.’ The little ones take their places. We’re going to have children just as long as we can, and then we’re going to start adopting them. My wife and I are buying a seventeen-acre ranch. We’re going to call it ‘Love State’ and keep it fenced, and kids will get everything there, including love. Everyone should have their own little place like that.”
He rode off to Cincinnati, Philadelphia (he appeared on “American Bandstand”), and Washington, D.C., where he coincidentally ran into an MDA publicity event, much to the chagrin of its organizers, who included Art Zigouras. “I was working very closely with Patty Duke,” Zigouras recalled. “Her show was on the air at the time, and her manager was a guy named John Ross. We had twin poster children, and we were trying to get them in to see President Kennedy. We tried that with all the poster children, and we couldn’t ever do it. Well, John Ross and I went out for a drink once, and I told him we couldn’t get in to see the President, and we wanted to get some publicity with him. And he says, ‘Why didn’t you come to me sooner?’—Peter Lawford produced ‘The Patty Duke Show’—and he said, ‘I’ll talk to Peter,’ and a few days later we were invited to the White House.
“It was the same time that Jerry was doing the promo tour for The Nutty Professor, and he just happened to be scheduled to be in Washington, D.C., on the day we were going to the White House. And Jack Keller is calling me saying, ‘Why isn’t Jerry in on this deal? What the fuck is this?’ Well, we couldn’t do anything about it because it’s Peter Lawford and the Rat Pack. And there’s no love lost between Jerry and the Rat Pack. So Jerry is fuming and furious and screaming.”
On the day of the visit, Zigouras arrived at the White House aware of having alienated MDA’s highest-profile supporter but convinced that getting the President in on the campaign was worth the risk. “This is before the assassination,” he recalled, “and before we were so aware of security and so forth. I wasn’t supposed to go in there, but when it came for our turn to go in there, I grabbed a wheelchair because I wanted to see the President. And I go in from the waiting room, the family goes in, and I turn around, and there’s Jerry. There’s Jerry! Jack Kennedy looks over at him and says, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ He’s ribbing him. And Jerry says, ‘I’m on a tour and these are my kids, blah, blah, blah.’ The whole thing went very well and we filmed it. I never heard any repercussions back from the Peter Lawford camp, but Jerry was not supposed to be there. … We did put together a PSA to be released in November, with the kids looking through their album and saying, ‘And here’s when we went to see President Kennedy, and he was so nice.’ We used wire service footage, and we sent the thing out, and soon after that he was assassinated. And the stations said they couldn’t play it because it would look like we were cashing in.”
Having crashed a party at the White House, Jerry and his buses moved on to Atlanta, New Orleans, Jacksonville, and then north to Detroit, where Richard Gehman met up with them to begin his chronicle.
Detroit was, of course, something of a homecoming for Jerry: He visited the National Theater and the Barlum Hotel—scenes of that long-ago winter vacation with Danny and Rae—and some of the sites he visited with Patti when they first met. But there was little misty-eyed reminiscing. They’d all been on the road for three brutal weeks, and they were fed up. Keller was, as he’d known he would be, exhausted. “This is the last one of these for Your Old Father,” he proclaimed. “After this I wouldn’t go out on tour with the Pope.”
Jerry was showing signs of stress as well—chain-smoking Kools and skipping nights out on the town with the boys to spend quiet time in his hotel suite with his secretary. One night, a bug flew into his ear while he was on stage, and he had to be rushed to an emergency room afterward.
He finally lost his temper when the string of theater appearances was converted, without his approval, to a string of drive-in theater appearances. He disappeared out from under the noses of his retinue for almost an entire day, and he was still depressed when he made his way back to the hotel, offering no explanation for his absence and threatening to scuttle the rest of his commitments in Detroit and take off for Montreal, the next stop.
As Jerry sulked, the others in the suite tiptoed around him. Then he remembered that the Detroit Free Press had published a negative review of The Nutty Professor that morning. “Send him a Candygram,” Jerry barked. “‘DEAR JOE,’ or whatever his name is, ‘THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND I PROMISE TO DO BETTER NEXT TIME. MOST SINCERELY, JERRY LEWIS.’” He stormed into his bedroom and slammed the door.
Keller did as he was told: Jerry had him send telegrams all the time. Several a day went off to Patti and the boys (on top of multiple daily phone calls), others went out as gags. Indeed, pleasant thoughts of the Lewis family were among the few bright spots left in the ordeal for those around the star. The three drive-in appearances were canceled lest Jerry go mad, and they set off for the airport and Montreal, an escort of motorcycle cops with sirens paving their way.
“The Mood,” as the Lewis entourage had come to refer to their boss’s ever-fluctuating demeanor, was brighter when they woke up in Montreal. As he had when he first arrived in Detroit, he reminisced about gigs he had played there as a young pantomimist and emcee: The Normandie Roof nightclub at the Mount Royal Hotel, the Gaiety Theater. He could turn any sort of appearance into a dewy-eyed homecoming if he wanted to.
Even better was the reception he got from the journalists in the city, who not only liked The Nutty Professor better than their counterparts in the States but asked questions of Jerry as a fellow intellectual, seeking his opinions on matters of state and morality. “Boy!” he announced to his retinue at the end of a press conference. “Did I enjoy that! What an audience! Those are perceptive, articulate people out there. If this is the kind of reaction I’m gonna get up here, I’ll stay over for a couple more days and dump some cities off the States schedule. Wow!”
He really did respond well to journalists when he felt they were on his side. Indeed, with the passing of old-style Hollywood journalism—a glib combination of authorized studio publicity and tepid lifestyle reporting—he was finding it more and more interesting to deal with the press. There were new-style journalists out there, people like Richard Gehman and Peter Bogdanovich who wrote lengthy, psychologically focused profiles of their subjects. Jerry granted these writers total access to his life, his home, his office. He spoke frankly with them about his fears, his passions, his biases. It was as if he was psychoanalyzing himself in their work, using the printed page as a mirror on which he could test his moods and attitudes and see how he looked to other people. He had long been fascinated with psychotherapy, and in the absence of an analyst of his own, he turned the press into his confessor.
Back in the States, however, he ran into more of the hostile, insensitive questioning that drove him crazy. In Buffalo, a reporter actually asked him, “Are you in town for a picture, Mr. Lewis?” Jerry angrily wrote the question down on his itinerary. His treatment at the hands of the press so agitated him that he canceled two stage shows and three interviews.
The tour ground on: Rochester, Toronto, Boston. He took a few days off and flew home. Then came Chicago, where he began to lose his cool altogether. He was fed up with exhibitors who wanted more and more from him when he appeared in their theaters but did nothing to accommodate him. He decried their “greed” and barked, “I’m through playing toilets!,” making headlines in local papers as well as Variety. Hotel employees who wandered into his presence were subjected to rude treatment, reporters who failed to attend a late-Friday-afternoon press conference (a time when many of them were under deadline for their Sunday editions) were castigated to those colleagues of theirs who did attend the function, and some absentees, including influential columnist Herb Lyon, received vitriolic telegrams.
Even the entourage took its cuffs—“I’m surrounded by such stupid people!” he shouted to one of his party within earshot of reporters. “Get out of here! I’m sick and tired of looking at your worthless face.” When he saw he had an audience of journalists for this outburst, he hugged the man and patted his head, proclaiming, “I love this guy. He’s been with me for years, just like most of my staff. We’re fantastically loyal to each other. They love me, and I love them.” In the pages of his itinerary, he wrote in a large, angry hand “Greed greed!! GREED!,” as disgusted with himself as with anyone around him.
When the tour finally rolled into New York for its final four days (including an unofficial homecoming in Newark), everyone was relieved. They’d been on the road for seven weeks and had been to eighteen states and two Canadian provinces, putting in something like 770 appearances in theaters, on radio and TV, and before the press. It was an inhuman routine, and it was no wonder Jerry had begun fighting outright with reporters, hotel desk clerks, and his own employees toward the end of it. Keller wasn’t literally right—the trip hadn’t killed Jerry—but he was in a state of near-collapse. He was visibly rattled, not like a man who’d been busting his back but like a man on drugs. “He’s like a machine,” said a member of his entourage. “He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t drink [alcohol]. If he drank, he’d be dead. He lives on pills and vitamin shots and the only way he unwinds is by sitting around talking to people. He never goes to bed.” And yet, despite his never-ceasing chatter and despite the presence of his soon-to-be TV producer on the trip with him, he had done very little preparation for his new ABC series, which was a mere nine weeks off.
But he had, just as he’d predicted, raised the grosses of The Nutty Professor. It set records everywhere for the opening of a Jerry Lewis film, even in places where he hadn’t taken the tour. Actually, grosses in those cities indicated that the tour might not have even been necessary. In Los Angeles, for instance, where he hadn’t done much publicity, the picture did $52,000 in its first two days—just slightly better than The Bellboy, but more than half as much again what The Ladies’ Man or The Errand Boy had earned, and quadruple the two-day figures for Cinderfella. The first week there constituted the best opening of any Jerry Lewis picture ever. Other cities reported similar successes. And Jerry monitored them assiduously: In his papers he had a three-inch-thick report from the Paramount distribution office reporting the proceeds earned by The Nutty Professor for each day of its first two weeks in every theater in the country where it was playing; the document was filled with notes, observations, and questions in his hand.
Such attention to the minutiae of his business was typical for Jerry, but in the case of The Nutty Professor the punctiliousness was justified. Simply put, the film was his one undeniable, ineradicable masterpiece, the one piece of work that even his critical antagonists would concede had true merit. Upon its initial release, the film got moderately positive views in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, but word of its quality or Jerry’s sheer universal impact that summer drew other, unlikelier reviewers to it. In The New Yorker, which didn’t bother to review most of his films, physician and theatrical director Jonathan Miller, slumming as a critic, wrote, “This is a very funny movie, with some brilliant visual gags and a stunning parody by Lewis of a Hollywood Rat Pack cad.” The New York Times agreed, calling it “his most painless romp in some time and probably the most curiously imaginative one of his screen career … less of a showcase for a clown than the revelation (and not for the first time) of a superb actor.”
At three decades’ remove, even these glowing notices seem modest. The Nutty Professor is so far superior to Jerry’s other films that it’s almost inexplicable. It’s clear how he built toward it in his first three efforts as a director, but it’s utterly unique from them. Most of the traditional Lewis themes and gags are absent, the plot is carefully constructed (there is only one free-floating gag in the whole picture, and it’s not a bad one at that), even Jerry’s performance is completely realized, not only in each of his two characters but in the delicate moments when each of his two personae begins to peek through the other. It’s astonishing that the man who had just made The Errand Boy had anything to do with the film. With one stroke, he went from faux silent gagster to masterful orchestrator of pathos and wit. Disappointingly, he would never come close to this apex again; his next film would attempt a full-scale narrative, but with far less success, and the remainder of his career as a director would be spent in clumsy hybrids of episodic comedy and structured storytelling. But for 107 minutes of film in that summer of 1963, he was an indisputable master of his art.
Although The Nutty Professor is clearly derived from Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there’s a sublime twist on the familiar escape-of-the-inner-monster theme. Whereas Jekyll accidentally unleashes his inner demon, Julius Kelp—a Milquetoast chemist who has fallen unrequitedly in love with one of his female students (Stella Stevens, as Stella Purdy)—deliberately hopes to find an artificial means of altering his body into something more assertive and desirable. He winds up unleashing Buddy Love, a depraved, alcoholic libertine who wears absurdly stylized clothes, retaliates to threats or sarcasm with violence, and has the confidence to sing to an audience. The transformation is one from insecure little man (Kelp is stuffed in a small closet by an angry student and sees himself in a flashback as a baby with bifocals) to exceedingly confident big man, from private worrywart to public peacock, from Joey Levitch to Jerry Lewis.
At the time of the film’s release, a handful of viewers theorized a connection between Buddy Love and Dean Martin. In France, where the film was known as Docteur Jerry et Monsieur Love, critic Robert Benayoun saw the film as the acme of Jerry’s long obsession with doppelgangers and doubling, themes that were the principals of cohesion of Martin and Lewis as an act. It’s easy to see the despicable Love as a rap at Dean, but it’s also facile and biographically unlikely. The film was written in 1962, more than a half-decade since the team’s acrimonious split and two years after Dean’s selfless performance in Jerry’s stead in Las Vegas. Relations between the two were nonexistent, but there was no cloud of animus, either. Decades later, even before he began publicly pronouncing that he’d always loved his former partner, Jerry swore that the character wasn’t based on Dean.
And in fact very little about Buddy Love is like Dean. The traditional Dean Martin character may have been a small-time conniver, a cad with the ladies, a singer, and an occasional tippler, but he didn’t do any of it with the headstrong, ugly purposefulness of Buddy Love. Dean romanced women; Buddy commands them to heel. Dean worked angles with a material purpose in mind; Buddy manipulates people for the sheer pleasure of seeing them do his bidding. They both sang, but in Dean’s case singing was usually a means by which his character hoped to make his way in the world or to express his feelings for a girl; Buddy sings because it’s a surefire way of getting attention, period. Dean worked with a partner; Buddy Love is a solo (albeit one with a partner/alter ego tucked away inside of him). Dean was courtly, if a roué; Buddy pulls up to a romantic spot, hands his girl a handkerchief, and sneers, “Take this, wipe the lipstick off, slide over here next to me, and let’s get started.” Dean was a boxer; Buddy punches like a sissy. And Dean was never a dandy; Love comes on like a degenerate Little Lord Fauntleroy in tight-fitting suits with loud patterns. In fact, looking at Buddy Love’s thick eyebrows, apparently mascaraed eyelashes, plump lips, and dripping-with-grease hair, one notes more of a resemblance to Tony Curtis than to Dean.
So if Buddy Love isn’t Dean, who is he? Well, Jerry Lewis, obviously. The cigarettes, the tyrannical outbursts, the overdone wardrobe, the fondness for brassy big-band swing, the hipster’s lingo, and the unctuous manner with the ladies were all attributes of Jerry’s private personality. Indeed, insofar as the “real” man he conveyed to his audience on TV shows, on nightclub stages, and in the press was itself a role, Buddy Love was very nearly that character: loud, arrogant, abrasive, abusive, and conceited. Only once before, when playing the character Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy, and not for another two decades, when he played a caustic legend of show business in The King of Comedy, would Jerry offer such a dark—and unmistakable—portrait of his off-camera self.
Julius Kelp, the pathetic soul from within whom Love emerged, on the other hand, was nearer to the persona Jerry presented in movies—the well-meaning bungler, the Kid grown up and invested with a Ph.D.—and nearer, in certain regards, to Jerry’s own view of his deep-down inner self. Jerry saw himself as a bright man with strong empathetic feelings who suffered slights in childhood and desperately wanted to be loved. Like Kelp, he transformed himself into a performer to receive affection and attention; like Kelp, he suffered nagging doubts about whether the public loved the real man or the mask. The Nutty Professor is, in effect, a confessional about Jerry’s neurotic compulsion to perform and the perils of succeeding in the public arena. It’s not explicitly a show-business story—Buddy Love, for all his swagger, is not a professional performer, just some guy who shows up at a bar and sings—but it’s Jerry’s most meaningful statement about the heart of the entertainer: Kelp’s climactic confession takes place, after all, on a stage.
For all that, though, it’s still a hilarious and adeptly poised comedy. Kelp, the only completely realized character Jerry was able to create after the Kid, is a wonder: articulate and stammering, intelligent and utterly naïve, with a chipmunk’s voice and teeth and a tweed wardrobe from the set of an Agatha Christie mystery, bullied but unvanquished, a zealous explorer of scientific puzzles, a hopeless klutz trying desperately to walk a tightrope of decorum and respectability. He blows up classrooms, he wrecks gymnasia, he myopically hurls his bowling ball at people instead of pins. Yet he’s utterly charming, all the same. Unlike the Kid, Kelp never wheedles for our affection; his speech is affected but never attention-grabbing; he tells terrible jokes and then, still reaching for a connection to his unamused audience, tries to explain them; standing on the sidelines of a prom, he is transported by the sound of the Les Brown band and dances with delighted abandon by himself.
Until this film, Jerry had been a one-trick pony as an actor: The Kid was the sole undeniable manifestation of his comic genius, and none of his attempts to play sympathetic, mature characters felt like real performances. With Kelp, traces of whose personality had popped through in his comic riffs as early as his days with Dean, he created a second full-bodied characterization. Like James Joyce answering the charge that Stephen Dedalus was his only living, breathing character, Jerry created of Kelp a Leopold Bloom: a bucktoothed, greasy-banged chemistry professor who simply wants the world to treat him like a man.
The creation of Kelp (and the revelation of his own inner Buddy Love) was only half of Jerry’s achievement with The Nutty Professor. Among Jerry Lewis films, it has no peer in technique, professionalism, or sheer judicious choice-making. Shot in warm but vivid color, expertly paced and edited (there’s no support in the film for the traditional charge that he lingered too lovingly on his own antics), and filled with comic set pieces that explicitly furthered the plot and characterization, it’s rivaled only by Jerry’s best work with Frank Tashlin as an artistic achievement. There are moments of marvelous cinematic invention—the point-of-view shot of the newly emergent Buddy Love walking from a haberdashery into the Purple Pit nightclub (a shot ironically echoed by the famous Steadycam shot into the Copacabana in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas); a hilariously composed sequence showing Kelp’s reactions to sounds as he suffers a brutish hangover; the devolution of Love into Kelp in the final confessional scene. Kelp’s first transformation into Love is filmed as a horror movie sequence, with dark lighting, a discordant score, makeup far more monstrous than Buddy himself, crashing laboratory equipment. It’s the longest piece of drama Jerry ever shot, and it works splendidly.
There are also the inevitable clumsinesses in the film—notably the shots of Stella reacting to Kelp or Love by looking into the camera, the uncomfortable fantasy in which Kelp imagines Stella dressed in a variety of come-hither outfits. But the very fact that these less masterful moments revolve around the object of Kelp’s desire oddly justifies them: He can’t control himself in the best of cases; around a girl who arouses him, he’s completely lost.
Inevitably, as in most of Jerry’s films, there’s a drive toward a homilistic finale. At a prom both Kelp and Love are expected to attend, the professor makes an appearance and then hurriedly prepares his potion. The hastily blended solution proves inadequate however, and soon Love is turning slowly into Kelp—who reveals, after putting his glasses on in a genuinely heart-touching moment, what the experience of being two different people has taught him: “You might as well like yourself. Just think about all the time you’re going to have to spend with you.” It’s an ironic message, coming from such a fragmentary figure as Jerry Lewis, but to hear Julius Kelp espouse it is to take it as truth. Of all the sympathetic endings Jerry ever attempted, this is the most successful.
Part of the reason it’s so easy to take is that it’s undercut by an ironic coda. Kelp’s father has discovered his son’s formula, turned himself from a henpecked wimp into a dominating swinger, and begun marketing the elixir as Kelp’s Cool Tonic (with the slogan “Be Somebody, Be Anybody”); he interrupts one of his son’s lectures with a sales pitch. Stella, who has proposed marriage to Kelp, escorts her fiancé through a mob of students who want to buy the formula for themselves. The audience is meant to be charmed by her affection … and then sees that she has made off with two bottles of the elixir for herself—a kind of marital aid, the revelation of which causes her to turn and wink toward the camera. There’s no reason, she seems to be saying, for the sexually vibrant Buddy Love to disappear from Kelp’s (or her) life forever.
More has been written about The Nutty Professor than about any other film Jerry ever made, for these and any number of worthy reasons. And the man who made it, a thirty-seven-year-old Jewish American prince of show business, was the highest-paid actor in movies, the highest-paid performer on television, one of the highest-paid live acts in the world, an accomplished producer, an innovative cinematic technician, the author of two self-published books, a restaurateur, a radio station owner, a philanthropist, the father of five boys.
Julius Kelp looked in the mirror and saw a nonentity. Buddy Love looked in the mirror and fell in love. When Jerry looked in the mirror in the summer of 1963, he saw the King of Comedy. Jolson, Chaplin, Dino, Berle: Nobody had ever been where he was.
He had done everything he had ever dreamed he could do—and he was certain that there was more to come.