Among the members of the Lewis organization, there were a few pet catch-phrases. There was “I want my nana,” a kind of whining cry that could indicate infantile weariness or self-pity or anxiety. There was “Hey, Eddie!,” a variation on the “Hey, lady!” screech mimics took as Jerry’s signature. And there was “pussycat,” perhaps the most frequently invoked of them all.
“He’s a pussycat,” Jerry or one of his chums might say of some favored person. “Isn’t that a pussycat?” might express appreciation of, say, a new car or a fortuitous turn of events. It was a term of unqualified praise, and it had no bounds of gender, shape, or aspect: Patti Lewis was a pussycat, according to Jerry, but so too was Jack Keller.
The biggest pussycat of all, though, was the Pussycat itself, a forty-one-foot cabin cruiser loaded with the electronic gizmos its captain loved—things like closed-circuit cameras that photographed the fore and aft views from atop a mast, for instance. It was Jerry’s first big boat—Joe Stabile had introduced him to speedboating a year or so earlier—and he kept it moored in San Diego. He and Patti and the boys would board it on weekends for short cruises to Mexico or Catalina. (He sailed as often with a crew as without, which may not have been a good idea; according to Judith Campbell, “There were stories about his yacht and how the operators of various marinas would shudder when they saw Jerry at the wheel because Jerry thought he was an expert skipper and the result was an endless string of disasters.”) It was a private world beyond the private worlds over which he already held domain, a recreational outlet, a means of escape, a platform from which to entertain guests, a den.
It was to the Pussycat that Jerry repaired after the draining Nutty Professor tour. He needed the recuperative sunlight and fresh air, he wanted some time away from the Paramount offices and the corps of colleagues with whom he’d just passed two hellish months on the road, and he had some projects to work on that required concentrated thought. He had the ABC show to plan, of course, and there was a new script in the works, the story of a bellboy who finds himself transformed into a comedy star by some cynical Hollywood operators. He was calling it “The Schnook,” and he had a January start-up date in mind. It was a lot of work for a man allegedly resting up from an arduous routine, but as he’d told Richard Gehman, “I get nervous when I got nothin’ to do. The happiest I am is when I press myself.”
If that’s true, then he must have been delighted that summer. Not only was he embarking on a two-hours-a-week, live, prime-time series, but he had purchased, with his own money, a huge Hollywood theater in which to mount the show. The El Capitan on Vine Street, one-half block north of Hollywood Boulevard, had opened in 1926 as Hollywood’s first major legitimate theater. In 1942 Cecil B. DeMille briefly converted the theater to a motion picture palace, but it reverted to live shows that same year. In 1950 NBC bought the theater and converted it into a TV studio. Over the years, the El Capitan had hosted broadcasts by Eddie Cantor, Frank Sinatra, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Martin and Lewis, who performed several “Colgate Comedy Hour” shows there.
Now it was to be known as the Jerry Lewis Theater, and it had been completely gutted and rebuilt as a state-of-the-art TV studio. The very wiring and plumbing had been replaced. Eight hundred new gold-upholstered seats were installed. There was a new gold curtain on the stage, new plush red carpeting on the aisles, 350 speakers in the auditorium, and a gigantic closed-circuit monitor suspended above the stage so the audience could see the show exactly as it was broadcast. A walnut-paneled control room had been built, complete with a wireless communications link to the stage and a paging system connecting it to all twenty dressing rooms. The desk at which Jerry would sit when talking to guests was equipped with a control panel that allowed him to override the director and choose shots while the show was in progress; at a cost of thirty thousand dollars, it was designed to be broken down and taken anywhere in the world on location. The theater was air-conditioned, there was an outdoor rehearsal stage on the second floor, the marquee held three thousand lightbulbs. A logo of Jerry’s face was set in the cement on the sidewalk out front, his initials were set in tile in the floor of his dressing room john, and the star on his dressing room door was a six-pointed Mogen David. A box had been built just above the stage from which Jerry’s personal guests could watch the show. It was a $1 million reconstruction job, and Jerry oversaw every detail down to choosing the material for the ushers’ shirts.
He had grandiose plans for the show itself, but he seemed unable to articulate them fully or even to explain how all of his divergent notions would gel. For instance, he boasted of attracting such potential guests as Cardinal Spellman, Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth, Jimmy Hoffa, and Helen Keller, but he also insisted that the show would always be live and spontaneous: Even the most prestigious guests would have to agree to appear live with the host; he didn’t even want to meet them in advance. In part this was Jerry’s version of confidence in the medium, in part it was a concession to his sense that the show would work best if it were improvised within loose parameters. “If we find Jerry clicking in a certain groove on a specific show, he’ll have full latitude to stay with it as long as he wants,” Ernie Glucksman told reporters at a September 11 press conference. “You can’t fail when you’re a tall, good-looking Jewish movie star,” Jerry chirped when asked if he felt at all daunted by the undertaking.
But the whole thing was incredibly audacious, from the economic daring of ABC executives to the cheeky confidence of the star. It was billed as a breakthrough experiment in television, and it was. But it was something else as well, however, something more personal. With the elaborate, customized theater, the live audience, the shifting guest roster, and the box seats just off the stage, it had all the trappings, once again, of Casino Night in a Catskills Hotel. Just as he had with the Gar-Ron Playhouse and the productions of The Bellboy and The Ladies’ Man, Jerry took a major new step in his career by harkening back to the favorite show-biz model of his youth. Even though he was the highest-paid film and TV star in the world, his idea of security was to surround himself with employees who were like family and perform a spontaneous show for a pampered crowd, and now he was going to get to do it on a scale no one else had ever attempted.
ABC was growing suspicious about Jerry’s plans for the show, however. “Lewis was very full of himself,” recalled ABC president Leonard Goldenson, “and he wouldn’t tell us what the show’s format was. He kept giving us double-talk and double-talk and double-talk, insisting he would take the country by storm.” Whenever programming director Tom Moore tried to pin Jerry down, Jerry would appeal to Goldenson; “Lewis regarded me as a gofer,” Moore recalled. Still and all, the network—in for a penny, in for a pound—threw a good-luck banquet for him at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The place was choked with stars, network and studio executives, and sponsors; Peter Bogdanovich found himself seated at a table with Joan Crawford and George Gillette, the shaving products magnate. The Los Angeles contingent of the Brodsky family were all present, as were Danny and Rae. As was his habit of late, Danny wasted no time in letting Jerry know what was bugging him about the evening. This time it was the seating plan. “Do you know that we’re sitting alone with strangers?” he asked his son. “The least you could’ve done was put us in with some of your crowd.” Rae stepped in to forestall an argument, but Jerry was deflated.
It was typical of their dealings of late. Danny would show up at the office or on a set, so duded-up that one new employee took him for “a slimy mafioso guy,” and Jerry would immediately shrivel into a depression.
Bogdanovich witnessed this exchange between the two of them in 1962 on the set of It’s Only Money, when Danny came by to tell Jerry he’d been booked for “The Ed Sullivan Show”:
“So how you been, Jerry?”
“All right.”
“Everything all right?”
“Yeah, everything’s swell.”
“That’s good. Watch me on the show.”
“Yeah, Dad.”
“So everything’s okay, huh?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I’ll see you.”
“Yeah, Dad.”
Danny never sat down, while Jerry slumped in his chair the whole time and concentrated on sipping a malted; Danny left as quickly as he’d arrived.
Dick Cavett, whom Jerry had hired away from “The Tonight Show” as a writer for the ABC show, recalled that “every time his father came into the studio, he went into a funk that ruined that night’s show. They imprisoned him or something on opening night. I remember [producer] Perry Cross practically had sentries out: ‘If you see Danny Lewis coming, slap him in irons.’”
Danny had realized long ago that he would never get the sort of acclaim he felt was coming to him, just as he’d realized he could never hope to compete with his son’s success. He’d faced up to these realities by withdrawing, shrinking back from his ambitions. He was in his sixties, but he seemed much older to his son, who’d once idolized him as a giant in show business. Jerry no longer felt like boosting his father’s career; he was embarrassed by his very presence. As he remembered later, “I got angry at this hero of mine. He settled. He lost his drive. He had no desire to be anything other than what he was, a big fish in a small pond.” If he saw in his father’s diminishment a presage of his own fate, he couldn’t say. But he knew his father made him uncomfortable, and the people around him respected his moods enough to keep Danny at bay.
The uncertainty that reigned during the genesis of “The Jerry Lewis Show” was palpable, and to make matters worse, the media had drummed up an anticipatory murmur about the program throughout the land. The Nutty Professor was still packing theaters in which Jerry had just recently appeared. People were hungry for news about his new project. But even the press was baffled about what the show would be like. “‘What are you going to do for two hours?’ was the national cliché,” Cavett recalled.
The writing staff, which consisted of Jerry, Cavett, Bill Richmond, and Bob Howard, felt they had to confront questions like these head-on in the debut show. As Cavett remembered, “We wanted to play off the pretensions that were around the whole thing: everyone in tuxedos and ‘Tonight this man embarks upon the greatest adventure in the history of television,’ and so on and so forth. I had this idea that I thought deflated all that, and Jerry loved it too. It was that he’d be discovered on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, half a block from the studio, live, and he’d put out his cigarette—he smoked on camera in those days—and a voice-over says, ‘This man is about to embark on, etc.’ And we follow him walking toward his studio as the voice-over says, ‘You are part tonight of one of the most daring experiments in the history of television … a legendary comedian and so on … and this theater has been rebuilt …’ And you’d see Jerry Lewis’s face in the pavement out front and the marquee of the Jerry Lewis Theater. ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen,’ and a drumroll, and Jerry straightens his tux and goes to open the door and can’t get in. And I thought he would play it just right, he would underplay it; he’d try the first door and it would be locked and it would be embarrassing, and he’d move to the next one and finally realize that he really cannot get in, that the locks have gone or something. And he thought this was a brilliant idea, he could see himself doing it, and he got up in the office and showed just how he’d play it, and everybody said, ‘Cavett, you’ll get a raise, this is great,’ and all the other writers were jealous. But then he came out and sang ‘When You’re Smiling’ instead. That’s sort of a paradigm for what happened to ideas on that show.”
The debut of “The Jerry Lewis Show” was one of the most highly anticipated TV events in the medium’s history. Jerry preceded it with an appearance on “The Danny Kaye Show,” but otherwise he focused on the task before him. It was yet another grueling schedule. Watching his boss put in twenty-hour days, Jack Keller remarked to Edward Linn, “He digs agony. He’d be the happiest S.O.B. in the world if somebody would only crucify him.”
As the September 21, 1963, premiere approached, work on the theater still hadn’t been completed and the very format of the show hadn’t yet been settled. Nevertheless, the guests had been booked; along with regulars Mort Sahl, Kay Stevens, Jack Jones, and announcer Del Moore, the opening-night roster consisted of the Harry James Orchestra and, curiously, editor and critic Clifton Fadiman. The sponsors had been lined up as well; the two hours would be paid for through the combined efforts of Nytol, Heinz, L&M cigarettes, Dial, Aquanet, Vista floor cleaner, Brylcreem, Dodge, United States Plywood, Gold Medal flour, and Polaroid. (Jerry, who had been given final control over whose money he’d take, had turned down an underarm deodorant ad, saying, “I cringe at some of the things that are projected into the home.”) Whether the theater, the script, or the star were ready, the show would definitely go on.
The big night found Jerry in an uncharacteristically jittery mood. The day before, stories about the series had run on the front pages of the The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, which also ran eighteen pages of paid congratulatory ads from such people as Charles and Lillian Brown, ABC executives, sponsors, and assorted employees and friends. Jerry had tried to make a joke of his butterflies, sending a memo to a secretary asking her to remind him that he had two things to do that day: get a haircut and go to the theater.
When he got there, he encountered a riot of activity: The press was outside en masse covering the premiere, workmen were putting finishing touches on the building, a full house of eight hundred were led to their seats by ushers sporting THINK PINK buttons (a reference to Patti’s pregnancy; the couple was hoping for a girl), and a crew of more than 170 technicians and cameramen in tuxedos buzzed about the stage, wings, and control room. (“It would take me two hours to tell you what a tuxedo will do for a cameraman,” Jerry responded when asked about his crew’s attire. “If nothing more, it’ll dress up his ability. He’ll be a little more’n a cameraman. All of a sudden he’ll be delivering a little more’n I might get ordinarily.”)
So many friends and celebrities had wanted to attend the premiere that Jerry spent forty-two-thousand dollars on a separate reception at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, a black-tie affair with cocktails, a closed-circuit broadcast of the East Coast feed of the show, and a sit-down dinner. As a gift to those lucky enough to get tickets to the theater, the on-air sponsors joined yet more sponsors in providing a pack of product samples: Pepto-Bismol, Brylcreem, Max Factor bath oil, Heinz catsup, Ballantine’s beer, Metrecal, a stuffed Green Giant doll, soap, toothpaste, hair spray, and more.
Jerry was up in his dressing room frantic with nerves. Although the room had been furnished just that afternoon, one of the lightbulbs around the mirror was out: It was an old superstition of Jerry’s to leave one bulb dim. Jerry allowed Richard Gehman in to see him, and they wouldn’t let the writer leave before the show began: “Don’t go, Beard,” he said, using his nickname for his biographer. “Stay and talk to me.” He disappeared into the bathroom to shave one more time. Then he shouted wildly—“Don’t leave me!”—and then he whined: “I want my nana.”
Lou Brown stopped in to try and settle him down. Ernie Glucksman came by, as did Marshall Katz and director John Dorsey. Jerry brushed them all off—though he did give Dorsey a shot list he’d thrown together, since his desk wasn’t yet ready to allow him to choose shots from the set. He was smoking; he was groaning; he gulped down a glass of brandy. Finally, six-thirty came (the show aired live at nine-thirty in the east), and he could submerge his anxiety in performance.
When it was all over, he wished he had never left his little sanctuary. The two hours passed like an eternity. The show drew a huge audience—it ran opposite reruns of “Gunsmoke” and “Have Gun, Will Travel”—and those viewers witnessed one of the greatest fiascos in television history. Decades later it would remain the stuff of legend, but that night it was sheer torture for the star, for his employees, and for the network.
After being introduced by Del Moore (who jokingly announced him as “Jerry Lucas, I mean Levin, Lewin …”), Jerry emerged to be engulfed by a swarm of tuxedo-clad crewmen with cameras, microphones, and lights. He shooed them off and broke into “When You’re Smiling,” with lyrics specially written for the occasion. As soon as he finished the number, he became aware of the first technical snafu of the evening. The giant monitor above the stage was out, preventing people in the far reaches of the theater from seeing the show. “That’s live,” he said mockingly. “P-tooey!”
An extremely self-conscious and even defensive monologue followed, with many references to the problems of filling two hours (he actually announced how long each of the evening’s segments would last, commercials included), many direct addresses to Leonard Goldenson, several jokes about his being a persecuted Jew (he called himself “Lawrence of Bel Air”), and repeated references to such inside matters as the union waivers that were secured for the show. It was as if there were no monologue, as if he were flailing around for something to talk about and the only thing appropriate was the show itself.
They made a big deal of the unveiling of the set and the pricey desk, though it wasn’t significantly different from the traditional talk show stage. He finally sat down with Del Moore and did an ad for L&M cigarettes, totally improvised and providing the first fresh laugh of the evening: Holding up the pack, he shrugged, “Here it is. You wanna smoke it? That’s your business.” (But then he tempered the joke by opening the pack, lighting a cigarette and making a great show of how much he enjoyed it.)
Ernie Glucksman had cooked up some surprises for him—though, as controlling boss par excellence, Jerry didn’t like such gimmicks. Robert Stack walked out in a tuxedo to wish him luck. Jimmy Durante popped out. A phone rang, and Johnny Carson was on the other end, watching from home in New York and saying how much he was enjoying it. He said he had a scout in the audience taking notes for “The Tonight Show” (which he’d been hosting for about a year), and the cameras panned to find Steve Allen scribbling in a pad. Allen came on stage to join the very strange group and make a plea for network ecumenism (though the next week he would savagely parody Jerry’s botched debut on his own syndicated show). Jerry seemed genuinely taken aback by these cameo bits—none of these men, after all, was a close friend or in any way associated with his career. He sat there unable to muster any snappy banter or do much of anything besides look swept away—a man drowning on live TV.
More technical screwups followed. The control booth lost contact with the cameras, so the director couldn’t order specific shots. Not that it mattered all that much: The cameras themselves had lost the red lights that let the performers know when they were on. Throughout the evening, people read dialogue into cameras that weren’t filming them, or action would be covered from cameras halfway across the theater. “It’s okay, it’s live,” Jerry kept saying, but even he knew it was a train wreck, finally blurting out, “Watch next week on tape!”
Nearly forty-five minutes into the show, the first talent was introduced—Jack Jones. Fair enough, but then Jerry followed his house singer by singing a song of his own. He introduced Patti, Rae, and his “Jewish Boys’ Town” in the stageside box, then he sang “Think Pink,” a hokey novelty number about the Lewises’ family situation. It was dreadful, but no more so than every other scripted bit on the program. There was a gag about a Jerry Lewis look-alike contest; Jerry introduced a huge blond surfer type as the winner. There was a sketch to which all the actors but Jerry were given a script, and he had to improvise and figure out the situation while they played it (when he discovered the sexy actress he’d been coming on to was playing his mother, he hugged her and muttered, “I want my nana.”) Mort Sahl performed a typically sardonic topical monologue, the Harry James Orchestra played, and Jerry conducted Lou Brown’s band briefly, injecting some much needed life into the proceedings.
Watching from the wings, Jack Keller muttered sadly, “He thought he had trouble in those Detroit drive-ins.” Finally, it wound to a welcome close. (Despite having two hours of airtime, they hadn’t made space for Fadiman and wound up bumping him. “I remember him fuming backstage in his tuxedo,” said Dick Cavett. “They couldn’t squeeze him in. I think he walked.”) Jerry sang “Make Somebody Happy” and stepped quickly off the stage.
The upstairs dressing room was funereal. Jerry was too embarrassed and depressed even to chew people out. “It almost all was ABC’s responsibility?” he asked Glucksman sheepishly. “We’ll move in our own engineering crew on Monday and get all the bugs worked out.” Glucksman, numb, just nodded.
Sycophants and hangers-on lied through their teeth to him: “Good show, Jer.” “A gas.”
An ABC censor stood meekly in the corner waiting to deliver the news that Sahl’s joke comparing Alabama to Nazi Germany was out of bounds. Jerry took pity on the poor messenger: “Don’t be unhappy, Ed. I’m the one who lies in the corner and dies.” (A few days later, ABC’s Tom Moore would tell Jerry that the network felt there were too many references to Jewishness in the show, and Jerry took it less well, sensing an anti-Semitic dimension to the criticism.) He gathered himself together and, resisting Patti’s suggestion that they just go home and go to bed, headed into the night toward his expensive party at the Beverly Hilton.
The critics were as flabbergasted by the disaster as the star. The broadcast was so far beneath their expectations that they were kinder than they might have been out of sheer confusion. The notice in Variety on Monday morning, while certainly negative, actually understated the show’s failures:
It’s conceivable, now that the premiere nervousness with the attendant bugs and kinks are in the past, the Jerry Lewis Saturday night two-hour marathon on ABC-TV might settle down to some form of respectable entertainment. It better had. … It’s truly amazing that so much could have gone awry. What was billed as “an informal two hours of fun, entertainment, discussion and interviews in a spontaneous atmosphere” came off as disjointed, disorganized, tasteless. … The responsibility was Lewis’ to fill the void and the lapses. On his getaway show, whether from nervousness or distraction, he just didn’t fill the bill.
Cleveland Amory, writing in TV Guide, announced that “the show runs two mortal hours, and the very idea of five years of them, as presently constituted, is an appalling thought.”
The second week’s guests were to be Ruby Keeler and Bobby Rydell. Long hours were spent in seeing to technical problems and giving the show a more coherent feel. But it didn’t matter. The entire nation had watched him take the steepest nosedive of his career. The ratings plummeted.
On week three, Mort Sahl made a crack about John Kennedy, Sam Giancana, and Frank Sinatra that aired to the East Coast but was squelched on the West by ABC censors; Jerry ripped off an indignant telegram to Leonard Goldenson.
Week four featured Sammy Davis, Jr., in the show’s first genuinely lively interlude. “There was great spontaneous by-play,” recalled Dick Cavett. “Everything the show might’ve been was apparent.” Sammy did nearly forty-five minutes solo and with Jerry (they did a bit to “Me and My Shadow” with Jerry tailing Sammy move-for-move). The critics finally had nice things to say: “The show seemed to have a cohesiveness previously lacking,” wrote Variety.
But by then even Jerry had lost interest. The show was a bomb, and the whole world knew it. He began disappearing altogether during the week. “Perry Cross, the producer, would pull clumps of his hair out,” recalled Cavett, “because Lewis would do the show and then go on to his boat and be incommunicado up to the day before the next show, if you can imagine.” To Jack Keller, Jerry was explicit. Sitting in his dressing room before the sixth episode, he told his old friend, “Get me off this show.”
He had forgotten about the obligation even as he was fulfilling it, spending his time working on his new film script and suddenly announcing a November nightclub engagement in Las Vegas without telling Cross. Speculation that the show had failed because he had arrogantly assumed he could pull it off just by showing up was now universally taken as truth.
The staff adopted a gallows humor about their plight. As Cavett remembered, “Once I made Mort Sahl actually laugh hilariously. We were walking across the street from the theater, where there was a foot-long hot dog place. And I said to Mort, ‘Take a look at the marquee.’ And it said, ‘THE JERRY LEWIS “LIVE” SHOW’—with ‘live’ in quotes. And I said to him, ‘If you went up there and rearranged the letters, it would be ‘THE JERRY LEWIS “VILE” SHOW.’ I also pointed out that in the thousands of dollars’ worth of stationery and on the marquee and everywhere, they had the illiterate use of quotation marks, with ‘live’ in quotes, which meant that it was not live. Jerry grasped this immediately and had it all reprinted.”
It wasn’t his only extravagance, even in the face of the utter failure of the series. “One of my great losses is that I used to have transcripts of all those shows,” said Cavett. “Each of us was provided with one. Jerry had them made to make it easier for historians. I gave one to Woody Allen one time. We have a running joke about a Comedy Black Museum—like Scotland Yard’s Black Museum—and what things should be put in there. … And some of these transcripts belonged. Of course, parts of them were utterly unintelligible: ‘Well, Del-sy, what about ya, ya, ya …’ And then it would say, ‘Jerry makes funny sound with mouth.’ And, ‘But here’s another thing,’ then, ‘dot dot dot Jerry makes funny gestures.’ And then conversation that would’ve kept S. J. Perelman rolling on the floor.”
Leonard Goldenson certainly wasn’t laughing. His expensive bid for a big-time variety show had turned into a public humiliation. ABC’s contract with Jerry had called for a minimum of thirteen shows, and by mid-November, the network announced that the thirteenth installment of the program would be the final one. Tom Moore delivered the news to Jerry, who held a grudge against him for years after.*
The final broadcast of the show, delayed a week by the Kennedy assassination, would come on December 21. ABC bought out Jerry’s contract and even took the theater off his hands. He walked away with a $2 million handshake, but he was stung. Critics dissected the failure even before the show was off the air. “He boasted to the press that he would by his sheer personal magnetism produce guest stars never before seen in entertainment programs,” remembered Tom Mackin of The Newark Evening News. “He mentioned Winston Churchill and Cardinal Spellman. He settled for Jimmy Durante and Peggy Lee. It is sad to see a TV series depart. So many hopes, dreams and fortunes go with it. But in Lewis’ case, it is easy to hold back the tears.”
On the penultimate show, he asked a priest in the audience to administer the last rites to the program. He joked with guests Frank Gorshin and Jack E. Leonard about being unemployed. His self-pity disgusted the critics. “For his final show,” wrote Hal Humphrey in The Los Angeles Mirror News, “Jerry should keep his mouth shut about what happened and who did what to whom, and show his audience he is a trouper.”
But the finale was as morose and awful as could be imagined. Jerry acted punch-drunk and made lewd gestures through a rendition of “I’m in the Mood for Love.” Sammy Davis, Jr., returned for the purpose of squaring off with his host in a duel of seltzer bottles. Jerry told the audience that ABC and the sponsors had forced him to compromise his vision for the program, that television was still an infantile medium: “I don’t like to do like I’m supposed to do,” he said in a self-revealing monologue. “There are rules and regulations. Some I did not adhere to, and for this I am sorry. … The important thing is to play the game the ways it’s to be played. … There’s no debating the power of a TV rating. I wish I knew that in advance.”
Toward the end of the show, he produced a smiling hand puppet of himself and sang to it. For the first time on television, he performed a song he had just a few years earlier incorporated into his live act, a song that had premiered without words in a film score of 1936. The lyrics, which Jerry sang straight, were written by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons:
Smile, though your heart is aching.
Smile, even though it’s breaking.
But it was the composer who most interested Jerry when he chose the song. The film in which the melody premiered was Modern Times, written, directed, starring, and scored by Charlie Chaplin. In the midst of his most miserable beating, Jerry once again emulated his boyhood hero.
Dick Cavett reached even further back for a point of reference for the failure of the show. He had, after all, read “Ozymandias”—and Thomas à Kempis, for that matter—and he was put in mind of both when he left Hollywood for New York: “On the last day, I went to the bank to withdraw my savings, rounded the corner of Hollywood and Vine to take a last look at the theater Jerry had done over in his image, and was just in time to see a giant pulley lowering the ‘Jerry Lewis Theater’ sign to the street. On the sidewalk in front of the theater a workman was chiseling away the caricature of Jerry’s face that had been embedded in the pseudomarble pavement. He was up to the eye when I walked up. For the benefit of the unseen camera I muttered, ‘Sic transit gloria mundi.’”
ABC, far less philosophical, immediately converted Jerry’s theater and time slot to more profitable uses. The marquee soon read “The Hollywood Palace,” the name of the series that the network ran successfully on Saturday nights for the next six years with a new guest host every week—Dean Martin prominent among them.
The ABC debacle was crushing enough, but then Jerry got kicked when he was down: A Los Angeles County Superior Court ruled that he had to defend himself against a civil suit brought against him by a novice screenwriter named Lor-Ann Land, who contended that The Nutty Professor was derived in part from her unproduced screenplay “Treat Me Beat.” Land had met Jerry in Blum’s Soda Fountain in 1962. He’d been sitting at the counter, and she sat beside him and announced that she’d written a script with him in mind. He asked to see it, she claimed, and she sent it to his office. A year later, she learned that The Nutty Professor was in production and, feeling it resembled her work, sued him for $1.5 million for plagiarism.
Jerry had been talking about a film like The Nutty Professor since at least November 1959, so Land’s claim that he’d stolen her ideas wasn’t likely. And after a year of litigation, the superior court ruled that he hadn’t, in fact, plagiarized her material. But he had, according to the court, potentially entered into a contractual obligation with her by asking to see her script, and the court ordered further hearings to determine the nature and value of that agreement. According to Judge Macklin Fleming, “Producers who discuss plots with would-be script writers, even at cocktail parties or soda fountains, do so at their own peril. The contractual relationship between the parties can only be untangled by a resolution of the conversations, promises, events and disclosures which took place at Blum’s.”
In addition to having to prove he hadn’t established a contract with Land, Jerry also found himself—along with his various companies and Paramount Pictures—the target of a $1 million slander and libel suit filed by the screenwriter. The whole thing was tawdry and insulting; he wasn’t even allowed to enjoy his best work. He had his lawyers settle the suits out of court.
Sixteen days after the final installment of “The Jerry Lewis Show,” Jerry began production on his fifth film as director and star. Known now as The Patsy, it was a kind of show-business Pygmalion, with Jerry as a clumsy bellboy who wanders into a hotel suite where the vipers who once ran the career of a popular comedian are wondering what they’ll do now that their gravy train has died. They decide to make a star out of the bellboy—they know all the tricks of the Hollywood trade—and the film chronicles their efforts to reshape and launch him as a comedian. As written by Jerry and Bill Richmond, it was a cynical, caustic story of Hollywood careerism, made all the more credible by the casting of veteran actors as Stanley’s new “friends”: John Carradine, Everett Sloane, Keenan Wynn, Phil Harris, and in his final screen role, Peter Lorre. Buddy Love revealed a dark side to Jerry’s character, but the film in which he appeared wasn’t itself dark humored. The Patsy, on the other hand, from the title to the situation to a lengthy stream of tearing-the-mask-off-Hollywood jokes, was the acidulous vision of a man who was weary of his work, his public, and maybe even his station in life. It’s easy to see in its basic shape a parable about how the lighthearted goof of The Bellboy was poisoned by the toadies who convinced him to do two hours a week of live television. In retrospect, The Patsy seems a calculated good-bye to the life of sycophants and the star-making apparatus on which he had thrived.
On January 7, 1964, Patti gave Jerry another baby, and this, too, proved a disappointment. Despite all the thinking pink, it was a boy—Joseph Christopher. Two days later, Jerry made contact with an adoption agency in hopes of getting a daughter that summer. “She and our new son will grow up together,” he told the Associated Press. “By next Christmas I’ll have a kid for every day of the week.” (Despite his optimism, the adoption never went through.)
On the day of Joseph’s baptism, Jerry typed up a kind of meditation on the child’s birth and placed it beside a photo of himself holding the baby. It’s a completely strange document, a poem, really—the original is enjambed and indented like an ode. Assuming his infant son’s voice, Jerry consoled himself for his own lost childhood and seemed to declare that his own parents’ neglect of him was a qualification for fatherhood. In effect, he turned the baptism of his child into a celebration of his own neuroses. The document ended with its infant voice declaring, “I can’t help but feel a little sorry for you, Dad, ’cause I think you would have loved it too.”
Patti was touched by the note and saved it, though she had little reason to sympathize with Jerry’s hurt feelings about life. He had been awful to her through the course of the past year. “Although I was thrilled with the prospect of having another baby,” she recalled years later, “I also had the feeling of being an inconvenience to my husband. During this pregnancy, more than any other, Jerry developed a black belt in sarcasm.”
But she, too, saw the root of their marital problems in the dysfunctions they’d suffered as children: “Our marriage contained precious few role models of genuine love. We had received no training in the give and take a marriage requires. We possessed no understanding of what stardom does to Hollywood families, and we had only had glimpses of the value of abiding faith.”
Patti was being charitable to her husband to lump herself in with him. Despite having been raised in a brutal environment, she was the nurturer in her household, always trying to improve herself and mend rifts between herself and Jerry. She had chosen to be docile with her husband, and he had taken that as a license to take advantage of her. Although he spent the bulk of his time at the studio, on the road, or with other women, Jerry dominated Patti thoroughly, discouraging her from doing anything about the gray hairs she began to acquire in her twenties or leaving the house during the day and thereby being out of reach of his neurotic barrages of phone calls, telegrams, and flowers.
In part, Patti saw her husband’s mix of volatility and neediness as a manifestation of his poor self-esteem. In part, though, she recognized in it his distaste for competing with their brood of boys for her attention and affection: “I felt his jealousy of the time and love I lavished on the boys. He was not predisposed to share me that much, and I had trouble knowing when to draw the line. At times, Jerry seemed unreasonable, but now I understand it a little better. As one of my ‘boys,’ he needed a portion of child love along with adult love.” The difference, of course, was that her sons never used her as an outlet for their frustrations as Jerry did, nor did they flagrantly abuse their relationship with her as he did with his affairs. She had been ill used as a child, and she had married a man who treated her in like manner.
If Patti had to suffer through her pregnancy and marriage, at least she was doing so in genuine splendor. There would never be more money in the Lewis family coffers than there was in that winter of 1964, and everyone who stepped into the palatial Bel Air manse was overwhelmed with the opulence they saw there.
Pulling into the driveway, visitors came across as many as two dozen cars, all belonging to Jerry (Jack Keller once accompanied his boss on a trip to an automobile dealership where he purchased—and paid cash for—four Lincoln Continentals). Peter Bogdanovich visited once and was sent home with one of Jerry’s cars: “He didn’t even want to see me driving this rotten ’51 Ford I had. He was sick of seeing it come into his driveway. He said it made his driveway look like shit. So he said, ‘Take one of my cars, I got a lot of them. Take one of them, I don’t care. I don’t want to see you driving in here with this garbage, this piece of shit.’ So he gave us a Mustang for about a year.”
With Jerry as its owner, the doorway of Louis B. Mayer’s one-time mansion was marked with a mezuzah and a golden plaque that read: OUR HOUSE IS OPEN TO SUNSHINE, FRIENDS, GUESTS AND GOD. Friends and guests were led into a paneled living room furnished with low couches and crammed with memorabilia of the Lewises’ family life and Jerry’s career. Like many movie people, Jerry had the script of each of the films in which he appeared bound in leather, and those volumes occupied several shelves. But he also had books made out of clippings that represented various live engagements or TV projects or interviews or other ancillary activities connected to his career. And as for family matters, the dozens of titles on display included “Our Son Chris Is Four Years Young, Oct. 9, 1961,” “Honolulu, Second Honeymoon, 1950,” “Jerry Plays with Sam Snead, Bel Air Country Club,” “Jerry’s 36th at Jerry Lewis Restaurant, March 16, 1962,” and “Paramount Executive Party at Our House, July 3, 1959.”
On the wall opposite this library of personal volumes was a glass-enclosed case choked with plaques, certificates, engraved trophies, and the like—the booty from Jerry’s tireless years of charitable efforts. It also contained a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth and three photos autographed by personal heroes of Jerry’s: Adolph Zukor, Y. Frank Freeman, and Cardinal Spellman.
On a display table in front of the trophy case sat the silver-bound Jewish Bible (in Hebrew) that he’d been given in Ebbets Field, a Christian Bible, and a leather-bound script of The Ten Commandments autographed by Cecil B. DeMille (as near as Hollywood could offer to the Shroud of Turin). Three pieces of art dominated the walls: a painting of Jerry as an Emmett Kelly–style tramp clown (complete with forlorn bandanna full of possessions at the end of a knobby stick), a stained-glass version of the same portrait, and a huge portrait of Jerry, Patti, all the boys, and the family menagerie of dogs and cats painted in the style of one of Picasso’s harlequin families. Converted into a theater by lowering a screen from the ceiling, the room could seat twenty comfortably.
Just beyond the glass doors of the living room lay the outdoor recreation area—a collection of pinball machines, Ping-Pong tables, lounge furniture, and telephones beneath a retractable canvas roof. In the garden just past the games stood full-size marble statues in floral niches: Moses and St. Anthony (the latter shipped from Italy). Then came the pool and the remainder of the three-acre grounds.
Throughout the house was strewn an enormous collection of Venetian glass clowns, some as large as three feet tall. There were works of modern American art and a portrait of Jerry by Norman Rockwell. There were also microphones and cameras hidden in the very walls and ceilings, giving Jerry—and the private security force he had hired—a chance to monitor conversations and activity anywhere in the house. This surveillance system was a secret addition to the intercoms that connected the entire house. The boys, who were made to keep their intercoms on at night, thought they could attain some privacy during the day by switching them off; they didn’t, however, know about the microphones in the walls. In 1975 Jerry boasted to Tom Synder that he once spanked Gary—who was well into his teens—and repaired to his monitors to hear what Gary had to say about the incident to Patti, who went up to her son’s room to console him: “I expected the worst, you know, nasty stuff. You know what he says? He says, ‘Daddy’s the only one in the world who really loves me.’”
The centerpiece of the first story of the house, for Jerry’s purposes, at least, was a soundproofed den he called his stereo room. A large L-shaped wing of the house, it contained the equipment that fed into his radio station, a full-service film-editing room, a recording studio, at least half a dozen professional tape recorders, a sixteen-millimeter movie rig, two thirty-five-millimeter projectors (and a CinemaScope screen that lowered from the ceiling), the control panels for the microphones and cameras hidden throughout the house, and an enormous color-coded library of audiotapes, kinescopes, and films of his life’s work (along with a copy of Modern Times given to him by Chaplin himself).
There were dozens of cameras, lenses, flash attachments, and tripods. An encyclopedia sat near a TV set so Jerry could look up anything he saw on television that piqued his interest. A desk was lined with telephones and an electric typewriter. There were drawings and writings by the Lewis boys. There were collections of memorabilia and photos of Jerry with his sports heroes. Scattered all over the room, taped to consoles and windowsills and the walls, were apothegms of the sort that filled his “creed book”: “The only gift is a portion of thyself”; “The things you keep you lose. The things you give away you keep forever”; “When I’m right, no one remembers. When I’m wrong, no one forgets.” The room was positively choked, a dizzying environment for anyone who entered it save its owner and his home secretary, Helene Stebbins, who had served in the same capacity for Louis Mayer.
Journalistic visitors weren’t granted access to the upstairs of the house, so they never got a glimpse of his massive wardrobe, which included eighty-eight tuxedoes. At least one room on the upper floor was extraordinary. Jerry had a private bathroom built for himself off the master suite, complete with sofa, full bar, another control system for the surveillance equipment, a television, two telephones, and a stocked refrigerator. It was a self-enclosed apartment within the house, and he spent hours secluded in it, often talking on the phone with girl-friends while his wife and sons listened to him through the door (Chris occupied a bedroom that shared a door with Jerry’s retreat and overheard such conversations throughout his childhood).
Patti indulged Jerry’s need for a sanctuary, though she was well aware all the while of what he did while he was ensconced in it. “He perceived his bathroom as a haven,” she recalled. “I asked for and was granted—for a short time—an extension of the bathroom phone line by our bed. But he soon cut the line and had another, different number installed in the bathroom, and I had to endure overhearing his conversations with other women, and then conceal my frustration and hurt. I still haven’t determined if I mentally and emotionally repressed those times to protect myself or the children.”
Even with such painful events transpiring within its walls, it was, by any standards, a regal home, staffed with maids, a cook, a butler, nannies, and groundskeepers. But Patti had grown up in poverty and was a frugal mistress. She rose early to shop at sales, she saved trading stamps, she cooked dinners herself. Jerry preferred simple cuisine—Italian and Jewish dishes cooked according to traditional recipes, and grilled steaks and chops—but the Lewises frequently ordered take-out dinners from Chasen’s, the posh Hollywood hangout that served caviar appetizers that the boys especially liked.
Jerry teased Patti about her skimpy ways with money—she was even embarrassed by the constant gifts of jewelry he lavished on her—but whenever he was gone, she would return to her habitual manner. On a few occasions, she and the boys took vacations without Jerry and stayed in cheap motels and ate fast food. The boys loved these illicit adventures—trips their father would never abide.
They had a small vacation villa in Palm Springs, and Jerry had the yacht in San Diego, of course. By late 1964 the radio station and the restaurant were sold off—they’d begun bleeding too much of their owner’s time and money—but there was no end in sight to the Lewises’ splendid lifestyle. Even with the embarrassing disaster of “The Jerry Lewis Show” so fresh in the public mind, he was still the premier comic entertainer in the world, and he lived as grandly as one might expect of someone who had achieved that title.
The Patsy finished shooting on the last day of February 1964, three days late and $131,000 over its original $2.1 million budget. Even then, sporadic reshooting went on until as late as May 12. Jerry and John Woodcock took their footage down to the Pussycat to edit a rough version of the film, which was shown to a preview audience on May 19. An August release was scheduled, but it would not be the occasion of another insane personal appearance tour by Jerry and his entourage. The country may or may not have seen a bit too much of him in the last twelve months, but he, in any case, had certainly seen too much of it. He devoted the summer to performing in yet another film, The Disorderly Orderly, the last movie he would make with Frank Tashlin.
It wasn’t that he and Tashlin were weary of one another or that Tashlin had grown too old for the sort of films he and Jerry made. The truth was that Paramount was learning the same lesson that ABC had learned, although not at a similar cost or to a similar degree of public ridicule: Jerry’s commercial potential had leveled out, if it hadn’t actually begun to drop. Even before The Patsy went into production, Barney Balaban told a reporter from the Saturday Evening Post that Cinderfella and The Ladies’ Man “did not necessarily show a profit.” The facts were simply economic, of course—they were the two most expensive films that Jerry had made. But the damning thing was that Balaban—he of the match with which Jerry could burn down the studio—was speaking in such a way to the press at all. Jerry had been signed just five years earlier as a kind of savior for an ailing Paramount; now he was being spoken of, however diplomatically, as something of a burden.
When The Patsy was released, it made for yet one more blemish on Jerry’s record. The critics weren’t enthusiastic about it: “It could have been built up through stronger plotting and editing,” wrote “Whit.” in Variety, while Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, after confessing he hadn’t seen any of Jerry’s previous films as a director, announced that he was “gratified to discover that he’s no better as a comedian than he used to be.” Wiping his hands of the film, he categorized it as “just another moronic mishmash in which Mr. Lewis falls all over himself.”
There was a lot of stumbling and flailing in the film, but aside from Jerry’s physical technique, The Patsy was genuinely unlike anything Jerry had done before. A combination of a sequel to The Bellboy (it had even been called, early on, “Son of the Bellboy”) and a cynical remake of Pygmalion, it’s rather like Jerry’s version of The Circus or Limelight, a black comic exploration of the nature of comedy as constructed by the Hollywood flesh machine.
After comedy star Wally Brandford dies in a plane crash, his publicist (Keenan Wynn), writer (Phil Harris), director (Peter Lorre), valet (John Carradine), producer (Everett Sloan), and secretary (ingenue Ina Balin) decide to create another star whose coattails they can ride to financial gain. As soon as they have formulated their plan, inept bellboy Stanley Belt (Jerry) barges into their suite dropping ice cubes and glasses. Despite his extremely unpromising mien, they are so convinced of their powers that they decide to cast their Svengalian spell over him.
There are several transformation scenes—Stanley is outfitted, given singing lessons (his deft destruction of vocal tutor Hans Conried’s home is among Jerry’s career highlights), taught comic timing, brought into the studio to cut a record, broken in at nightclubs, and introduced to the Hollywood press (Hedda Hopper, UPI’s Vernon Scott, and Jerry’s biographer Richard Gehman all play themselves in the scene). In each regard, he is an abject failure, yet the people behind him push him on, convinced their skills in packaging the star will make up for Stanley’s inabilities. (Only the secretary, inexplicably charmed by his stumbling, has a soft spot for him.)
Finally, Stanley is booked on Ed Sullivan’s show and abandoned by his handlers, who are convinced that there is no transforming this particular patsy into a star. But Stanley turns the tables on them; improvising an elaborate comedy scene, he is a tremendous hit. He calls them all back to the hotel suite under false pretenses and hires them to support him now that he has a real career.
It’s worth rehearsing so much of this plot because it is obviously meant to mirror Jerry’s own experience of Hollywood while touching on his favorite narrative themes—the cynical handlers, the clown who comes through with sincerity when his act fails, the women who want to burp him, the lying sycophants and journalists, the absurd means by which nobodies become stars. The film features several Hollywood stars playing themselves—Rhonda Fleming, George Raft, Mel Tormé, Ed Wynn—yet the script asks them all to play phonies. Hedda Hopper is exemplary in this regard; she appears at a cocktail party with an absurdly oversized hat, and only Stanley has the effrontery to laugh at it; when everyone else is appalled at his cheek, however, she praises him for his honesty and predicts big things for him.
The routine on the Sullivan show is truly bizarre. Stanley, trained as a stand-up comic, is so bad that crickets can be heard chirping in the background at one of his club dates, but suddenly he’s able to pull off a long silent comedy routine with no rehearsal. It’s a nice, well-timed bit, but it doesn’t fit logically into the narrative framework of the film—Jerry’s handlers have never seen the elaborate sketch before, so how on earth would the Sullivan show have been prepared to present it? Even in the logically unstable world of Jerry Lewis (which more than one critic has compared to that of Lewis Carroll), this is hard to rationalize.
But questions like these seem beside the point. The Patsy opens with an impossible stunt out of Tashlin: Stanley falls from a hotel balcony, hits a canopy below, and vaults right back up into the suite. And it ends with an even stranger reprise of the bit: When Stanley apparently tumbles over the balcony again, and a concerned Ina Balin rushes over to see if he’s okay, Jerry stands up, out of character, to point out that it’s just a movie with a fake set and a crew filming it all. He calls her “Miss Balin”; she calls him “Mr. Lewis”; they walk out of the studio along with the actual crew and go off for lunch.
Thus The Patsy, in its maker’s eyes, is just another duplicitious instance of Hollywood hype and performance. That the postmodern ending doesn’t quite come off—that Jerry’s “aspiration … exceeds his ability,” in the judgment of Andrew Sarris, is almost irrelevant. As a technical accomplishment, The Patsy may not equal Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., but as a personal testament—the confession of a cold-eyed Hollywood star who knows that his own career is at least partially assembled with the same inauthentic materials as Stanley Belt’s—it’s frankly self-lacerating. “Jerry Lewis as The Patsy,” read the opening titles, and the audience can make that identification on several levels. This was not just a simple reappearance of the Kid in a new setting; this was a mature man coming to grips with the fact that his career was built on ephemera and boosted by liars. It’s no wonder the film’s box office was among the softest yet for a Jerry Lewis picture; there was about The Patsy an air of nastiness and self-deprecation that none of his other projects had.
Jerry looked around for other venues, and there was television staring right at him. He couldn’t resist it, though he was still smarting from the ABC debacle. He was mentioned as a candidate for a one-shot performance as Billy the Kid on CBS’s “Rawhide” series. He spoke about starting a slate of series for children to air on an early pay-per-view system. Neither of these panned out, but he went ahead with another of his notions—directing, acting in, and coscripting an episode of NBC’s “Ben Casey” series, starring his old Gar-Ron actor (and Abbey Greshler’s client) Vince Edwards. The original title of the hour-long episode was “Of Impoverished Frolic and Earnest Tears,” but it finally aired as “A Little Bit of Fun to Match the Sorrow.”
He made as personal a project as he could of it, given that it was someone else’s show (Bing Crosby’s actually—it was one of several prime-time series his company produced). Jerry played a brilliant neurosurgeon driven by inner anxieties to act like a clown. The autobiographical dimension of the project was obvious, as were the resemblances to The Disorderly Orderly, which he had just finished filming and which was a kind of comic version of the same material. (As a director, he was all business; when Edwards insisted that a script girl read his lines to cue another actor, Jerry demanded that he do it himself; Edwards refused, then left the set, and Jerry ordered him banned from the stage, the set, and finally the lot until he apologized.) But the show also gave Jerry a chance to express his scientific interests; his years consulting with MDA researchers and physicians had given him a kind of crash course in medicine. As he had learned to direct films by osmosis—asking questions of crew members and hanging around editing rooms and such—so he had, chameleonlike, learned a fair bit about doctors and hospitals and health care. It was only the second dramatic role he had ever played (though, like the other one in “The Jazz Singer,” it included elements of comedy), and it went almost wholly unnoted by the critics.
Even if he still looked and acted like a big star, down deep he could feel it starting to fade. He was sliding from the acme.
Something else had begun to happen that made Jerry feel old and passé even at thirty-eight. His eighteen-year-old son Gary had enrolled at a theater arts college in Pasadena in the fall of 1963 and, under the spell of near neighbors such as the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, and imported acts such as the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, and the Rolling Stones, he’d started playing rock ‘n’ roll with some of his classmates.
He had, of course, been hovering around show business all of his life. He had been on many of Jerry’s TV shows, going back to his 1957 appearance with Jerry and Danny on NBC. He’d sung in Rock-a-Bye Baby—as the childhood incarnation of Jerry’s character, Clayton Poole—and he’d appeared in brief roles in other films of his father’s. He’d even been on television by himself, appearing on “The George Burns Show” as a solo in January 1959. He’d always liked comedy—he would write comic sketches and run them by his father for critiques. And he’d always had a musical bent, playing the clarinet in the marching band at Black Foxe Military Academy and learning drums from such friends of Jerry’s as Buddy Rich when he was as young as eight. He’d bought himself his own drum kit with money he’d earned performing on one of his dad’s NBC specials.
Besides all of this exposure to the world of entertainment, Gary may have had even deeper reasons for pointing himself toward performing. Like his own father, Gary was brought up by an entertainer whose attention he could rarely keep for very long. He wasn’t abandoned as Jerry had been—Patti stayed at home, largely in capitulation to Jerry’s will—but he felt similar longings and pressures to grab attention. The main difference between their two upbringings was in the way their parents treated their ambitions: Jerry was raised by parents who didn’t notice him and then shrugged off his desire to perform when he announced it. Gary’s father, in contrast, had coddled him and even encouraged his steps toward show business—then often slapped him away when he was close to achieving his goal.
For instance, as a boy, Gary was frequently photographed mugging alongside his dad. He was dragged into photo shoots and TV shows and movies—but then told he wouldn’t be allowed to become an entertainer. “It’s not only that I don’t like most professional child performers,” Jerry told Joe Hyams during the filming of Rock-a-Bye Baby, “it’s that Gary’s going to have the advantages of the education I didn’t have. I had to quit in the second grade of high school, not because I needed the money but because I couldn’t be happy unless I was in show business. I’ve lived to regret it. I’ve had to adjust to situations I could have coped with more easily if I had gone on in school.”
Still, when it came to including Gary in one of his film or TV projects, Jerry never hesitated at yanking him out of classes. Gary’s was a childhood riven with mixed messages. He was encouraged to clown, but he was chastised for cutting up at the dinner table. He was told to keep his mind on school and not on performing, but he was excused from school to act in movies or appear on TV.
Jerry knew he was exerting a potentially harmful influence on his oldest son. “At age eleven,” he recalled years later, “Gary developed a nervous tic. He said to me, ‘Everybody … all my friends … are always laughing at you. You’re always jumping around like a nut … like an idiot.’ I told him, ‘Getting attention is my business. My whole life is predicated on, “Hey, look at me!” ’ “Patti found it harder to dismiss Gary’s anxieties. “He always walked in his father’s shadow,” she observed. “He felt he had to measure up to him. I felt this was sad.”
Jerry saw talent in his son, but he was protective of his own career, and he frequently stifled his child. He was a producer; like so many of his Hollywood predecessors, he could have taught Gary the business during summers or school holidays. Instead, he got him a job as a car valet at a Sunset Strip restaurant—not even his own, but a place called the Picadilly. Although his father earned between $5 million and $12 million most years, Gary had to save up toward his own college tuition. “He had saved six hundred dollars,” Jerry explained to a reporter, “when he fell in love with a nice seventeen-year-old girl from Chicago. Last year he bit into his savings to visit her and wound up with less than he would need for his tuition. … I’ve worked out a deal with him—from earnings he’ll pay me four dollars a week—to complete his tuition savings.”
Over the years, Jerry had alternated such puritanical lessons in self-sufficiency with grandiose moments of largesse, such as having the boys invite their entire school classes to private birthday parties at Disneyland. Gary, living in a luxurious mansion and working for tips, had lost all perspective on the value of a dollar, according to his own father: “One night at dinner he asked me, ‘Dad, do you manage to clear five hundred dollars a week?’ Five hundred dollars, to him, you see, is a lot of money because it took him two years to put that aside. I think he’s got a very level head about it all and a lot of that comes from his mother. Patti kept me from blowing my steam when he asked about that five hundred dollars. She was right, you know, because he had gotten the point that there were a lot of people to be paid before Dad got his.”
It’s no wonder that some journalists who met Gary in Jerry’s presence got the impression that the son was older than the father; the indulgence Jerry demanded from those around him had kept him, in many ways, from growing up, while Gary’s confusions had caused him to mature quicker than he might have liked.
Of course, there were undeniable advantages to being the son of a movie star. When Gary and bandmates Dave Walker, Dave Costell, Al Ramsey, and John West decided they were serious about becoming musicians, they got to perform at Disneyland. And when they approached Jerry’s longtime bandleader Lou Brown for advice, Brown introduced them to Liberty Records producer Thomas “Snuff” Garrett. Garrett, born in 1939, had made a specialty of light pop, transforming rockabilly singer Johnny Burnette into a million-seller with “You’re Sixteen,” and scoring such hits as “Take Good Care of My Baby” and “Run to Him” with lightweight singer Bobby Vee. Along with songwriter and super-session man Leon Russell, Garrett came out to a Paramount rehearsal hall Jerry had hired for the band to practice in, listened with interest to the group, and asked them to come to his office to hear a few songs he thought might suit them.
At the Liberty studios, Garrett tested the band out, cutting a pair of instrumentals with them. Then he turned them on to a song keyboard player Al Kooper had written, which had recently been released as a rhythm-and-blues record by Sammy Ambrose: “This Diamond Ring.” The Playboys liked what they heard, an arrangement was worked out, and on November 19, 1964, they recorded it. In the next few weeks, Garrett wound up overdubbing most of the instrumentation with studio players’ work: “They let the Playboys feel like they were really a part of it,” Gary recalled later, “but in the final mixdown, they kind of buried them.” A version of “This Diamond Ring” based on the Playboys’ tenth take was released on December 3, 1964.
Three days later, Jerry and Gary appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” together. Making the appearance even more epochal for Jerry was the booking of Sophie Tucker, his old supporter from Atlantic City, on the bill; Tucker was introduced as Gary’s godmother (a stretch; he was a year old when the singer caught his father’s act for the first time). Then Jerry and Sullivan introduced Gary and his band, who lip-synched “This Diamond Ring.” Afterward, Jerry and Gary did a bit of shtick together and the band reprised their lip-synching, this time with Jerry pretending to play the violin with them and yowling along.
The appearance on the Sullivan show with an icon of old-time trouperdom and his own son wasn’t the only big event for Jerry that night. Soon after the broadcast, he walked a few blocks to the Winter Garden Theater, where the American Guild of Variety Artists fêted him in a benefit for its Youth Fund, raising $148,000 in ticket sales and donations. It was Jerry’s first Broadway appearance since playing the Palace almost eight years earlier, and he was determined to make an experience of it. He spent $17,000 of his own money to fly a twenty-three-piece band to the engagement, to jet the Hollywood press out and put them up at the Regency Hotel, to have Al Jolson’s old runway reinstalled in the orchestra. “I don’t know how to play Charlie Humble,” he told his audience that night, “but I’m humble in my own way. I make noise.” He did Jolson songs, of course, and in honor of Funny Girl, which was the attraction at the theater at the time, sang Barbra Streisand’s signature tune, “People.” He was warmly received. It was a sweet night.
But it was Gary who was making headlines. In a rise even more astonishing than Jerry’s record of “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby,” “This Diamond Ring” reached Number One on the Billboard charts on January 23, 1965, holding the spot for two weeks and staying in the Top Forty for eleven. With the third track he ever recorded—and his first-ever release—nineteen-year-old Gary Lewis had the greatest success of his life.
It’s a hell of a catchy record, with a polish that makes it seem like a dozen singers were singing Gary’s part in perfect harmony and a simple melody that’s doubled on organ and guitar and backed up by timpani and tambourines. There was no worldliness in Gary’s vocal—indeed, it was an awfully upbeat song given the subject matter (rejection, of course). But the thing was pure sugar, an instant pop classic, the type of guilty pleasure that audiences turned their radios up for three decades later.
Garrett knew he had better jump on the Playboys quickly, and he had them back in the studio the week after “This Diamond Ring” topped the charts. He gave them another hot new song, this one written by Glen D. Hardin of the Shindogs, the house band on the TV series “Shindig.” “Count Me In” was recorded on February 13 and hit Number Two in Billboard in April. The Playboys themselves were even further suppressed on this track, however, with the addition of a trio of backup singers, the Eligibles. In fact, Gary sang not with the band, but to a tape of backing material assembled by Garrett and Russell in the studio with the help of session musicians and singers.
The Playboys probably didn’t mind, however. They were like Motown bands, Phil Spector’s elaborately produced singing acts, and so many other pop groups that were put together factory-style: fresh-faced kids fronting for arrangers and more skilled, but less photogenic, musicians. Besides, the money was great. Each Playboy was making five hundred dollars a week, whether they played or not, and Gary decided to split all royalties exactly evenly, against his father’s advice: “I think you’re the worst businessman I ever met,” Jerry told him, “but you’ll do what your heart tells you.” They were in the studio constantly throughout 1965, recording three albums’ worth of material and putting a total of five songs in the Billboard Top Ten.
None of these hits ever had the lasting power of “This Diamond Ring,” though “Sure Gonna Miss Her” had a powerful groove and “She’s Just My Style” was an authentically catchy middle-period Beach Boys knockoff. Because they were merely a front for a studio band (Gary, the last instrumentalist among the original players, had turned the drumming duties over to ace session man Jim Keltner), the Playboys were subject to some truly bizarre experiments. On “Time Stands Still,” a creepy, almost psychedelically overproduced ballad, Gary sang a chorus in his father’s famous mongoloid voice; “Everybody Loves a Clown,” another broken-heart song, had a carnival feel to it. There’s a freshness and occasional vigor to many of the Playboys’ early records, but the sound is so preciously contrived that there’s no feel of rock or roll to it; you know it’s a studio production, and you can’t imagine any of the principals sweating or getting excited about anything they were doing. Still, Garrett was one of the craftsmen of the hour—not an innovator like Phil Spector or an empire builder like Berry Gordy, but a man with his finger briefly on the nation’s pulse nonetheless. During the Playboys’ heydey, he made a thoroughly respectable collection of records with them, and if their songs lacked the musicality of songs by Lennon and McCartney or Brian Wilson, they were still palatable pop fun.
The children of Hollywood royalty had always tried to cash in on their famous names and on the novelty of a new generation of a renowned family entering show biz. Not long after the Playboys hit the charts, in fact, a truly terrible group was formed by Dean Paul Martin, Jr., and Desi Arnaz, Jr., with the name Dino, Desi, and Billy (third wheel Billy Hinsche had no famous parents). Nevertheless, only Ricky Nelson enjoyed more popular success than Gary did. For a few months, if you squinted just right, you might have thought that just as Jerry had eclipsed Danny, Gary actually had the potential to make a bigger career than his father.
Jerry was still working, though, even if the opportunities were becoming sparser. In January 1965 he began production on The Family Jewels, the tenth picture in his fourteen-film deal with Paramount. Once again he would produce and direct a script he’d written with Bill Richmond. This time, though, he would attempt a more ambitious acting chore than he’d ever tried before. Just as the Svengalis in The Patsy had tried to make an adult-style performer of Stanley Belt, Jerry would recast himself in The Family Jewels by playing seven different roles, some similar to characters he’d played in other films, but most new to his movie audience. It was a comic trick that had been performed by such precursors as Alec Guinness (Kind Hearts and Coronets), Peter Sellers (Dr. Strangelove), and even Tony Randall (The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao), the last two of which were in release when Jerry and Richmond were writing The Family Jewels. With its swiveling between the various characters and disguises of its star, the script they developed had a more episodic quality than either of Jerry’s last two directorial projects, The Nutty Professor and The Patsy, but it also had a coherent plotline that distinguished it from his very first films. Jerry had never directed a film without trying to do something he’d never done before, and he had allotted himself more time to make this one than he’d ever taken; he had no specific commitments until April 8, when he would begin shooting Boeing Boeing, a Hal Wallis comedy, in Paris.
It was a good thing he’d allowed himself such a cushion of time. On Friday, March 5, he took time off from The Family Jewels to drive up to Burbank for a taping of “The Andy Williams Show.” He was exhausted from the long hours he’d been putting in on his film, so he suggested to producer Bob Finkel that they tape the dress rehearsal, just in case he was too tired to do another run-through of the act. “I might blow it another time,” he said.
They set to taping the show, Jerry came on stage to do his bit, and he slipped in a puddle of water, landing with a bang on the base of his skull. In terrific pain, he wrapped up his number—people must have taken it for just another Jerry Lewis pratfall. “I finished the last three minutes of that show unconscious,” he told Hedda Hopper two weeks later. “I don’t remember anything for about forty minutes after the show, when I woke up in the hospital.”
He had suffered a serious injury; radiologists at Mount Sinai Hospital detected a “fine linear skull fracture,” according to wire reports of the incident. For the next few days, he was subject to nausea, double vision, and disequilibrium. After two days of bed rest, he tried to return to the set of The Family Jewels, but he had a severe dizzy spell and returned home for another week of recuperation. Still, even a week after he was finally able to get back to work, he was feeling ill effects of the fall: “I’m still having difficulty with one eye,” he told Hopper. “I’m told it’ll take about six months before it will clear up entirely. I have to turn somewhat to see clearly. This evidently happens no matter who has this type of accident, but it’s pretty scary when it happens. I’ve taken falls for thirty years, but this one I didn’t take.”
Hal Wallis was concerned that Jerry’s accident would threaten the start-up of Boeing Boeing. He had Joe Hazen contact Dr. Marvin Levy, Jerry’s longtime physician, and Marvin Meyer, one of Jerry’s attorneys. Hazen asked Meyer if it would be better for Jerry to skip the picture altogether, but he was told that “just the opposite was the case, that Dr. Levy felt that the best thing in the world for Jerry would be to go to Paris for a couple of weeks.” When Hazen asked Meyer if Wallis could call Jerry, he was told there would be no problem.
Two weeks later, on March 24, Dr. Levy filed a report with Wallis for insurance purposes stating that Jerry was in excellent physical health except for a tear of the medial lateral ligaments of his left knee (an old injury he’d suffered horsing around with Dean) and the skull fracture he’d sustained on March 5.
It’s worth tracing this episode so exactly for two important reasons. The first is that Jerry has long contended that he had his severe accident fifteen days later, on March 20, 1965, while taking a pratfall off a piano during his closing show at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. He gave this date in an interview in the National Enquirer in 1974, wrote about it in his autobiography in 1982, and discussed it in an interview in Penthouse in 1983. (Patti Lewis repeated the story along Jerry’s lines in her own autobiography.) In all these cases, he was specific about the place and time of his injury, and in all these cases he further claimed that he suffered a chip off his spinal column at the base of his skull.
The account in Jerry Lewis in Person is the most thorough: “When you take a fall, you have to commit yourself. No rearranging things in midair, no hesitation or you can get hurt. Well, I committed, saw the microphone cable, twisted out of control and landed on my back—165 pounds slamming against this little plug attached to the cable. I was numb, but got up and finished the act. … Next morning, I put in thirty minutes trying to get off the bed. The pain was horrendous, almost paralyzing, and it wouldn’t stop. I stood for two hours, then went to Dr. Bill Stein, an orthopedic man in Los Angeles.”
According to Jerry, Stein fitted him with a metal neck brace and prescribed codeine and Emprin to relieve his pain. He hated the brace and took it off whenever he could, but “the longer I remained free of that accursed contraption, the more my poor aching body cries out for it.”
It’s completely plausible that Jerry damaged his spinal column as well as his skull when he fell in Burbank. But that he fell onstage at the Sands just two weeks after hurting himself so severely on “The Andy Williams Show” is less likely. There was no second disruption of filming on The Family Jewels, and there was no mention of a second fall in Dr. Levy’s report to Hal Wallis. Although he might have been at the Sands on Saturday, March 20, it’s unlikely, given that he was still in production on The Family Jewels and had to be off to Paris in two weeks for Boeing Boeing. More impossibly, we are asked to believe that within two weeks of fracturing his skull on “The Andy Williams Show” he was imprudent enough to be performing flips and pratfalls off a piano in Las Vegas. If Jerry ever did take a severe fall at the Sands, it wasn’t that spring.
Why, then, his insistence on March 20? Is it that “The Andy Williams Show” is a less impressive-sounding venue than the Sands? Or is it that, as with many specific details, Jerry’s memory is simply flawed?
The last explanation is surely the best, especially given the second reason that it’s so important to get these dates settled. According to Jerry, the aftermath of the accident was a nightmare of pain and incapacitation. He sought help from neurologists and orthopedists for a year, but the prognosis was always pessimistic: A knot of fibrous tissue had developed along the nerves where his spinal column had cracked. Not even surgery could help him; he would have been luckier, in a sense, if he had broken his back. The pain was grueling and persistent, and to alleviate it, all the doctors could offer him was a regimen of heat, massage, rest, and medication.
The codeine and Emprin were, finally, not enough to numb him. One of his doctors prescribed Percodan for him. It was the first time he’d felt relief since he’d fallen. “Imagine taking your top lip and lifting it all the way over your head,” he said, trying to describe his pain. “My left eye goes almost totally out of focus. Both of my legs feel like I’m walking and yet I’m not getting anywhere, the pain is so severe. Yet when I was put on Percodan I would take one and in about twenty minutes I would be able to relax.”
A small dose of oxycodone (a synthetic drug similar in effect to morphine)—four or five milligrams—and a cringing cripple would find himself transformed into a functioning person once again.
One magic yellow pill, maybe two, in the course of a day.
And little by little, in due time, he was addicted.
With its star and director injured, The Family Jewels took until April 2 to wrap—nearly three months, all told, to produce a film that should have been shot in perhaps eight weeks. Part of it was due to Jerry’s injury, but part to his choices as director and producer: “I tried to shoot the picture in continuity,” he recalled. “I found, after it was over, that we would have been better off ‘blocking’ that production”—that is, shooting all scenes involving one of his guises at a time and editing the film into the proper chronology later on. A misjudgment of this sort was made possible by the departure of Ernie Glucksman from the Lewis organization; after the embarrassment of the ABC series, Glucksman, who had more authority over the show than anyone except Jerry, had been shown the door. To the Paramount brass, the failure to replace Glucksman with a similarly capable producer created concern that Jerry was wearing too many creative hats and hurting the studio both during production—by slowing things up and hence making them more expensive—and at the box office, where his self-directed films were doing less and less well. They were pleased that he would be working strictly as an actor on Boeing Boeing, and hopeful that the experience would help convince Jerry he was a performer first and foremost.
The stress of his injury, his rush to finish The Family Jewels, and the new pressures from Paramount all created an atmosphere of dread around him whenever he was at home. Patti was beginning to develop symptoms of her own. The affairs had been bad enough—“as each new evidence of Jerry’s unfaithfulness surfaced, I became more distanced from reality,” she realized—but now he was frankly brutal, hollering and slamming doors as if his pain gave him the right to inflict pain on his family. Finally, Patti succumbed: “The stresses caught up with me and I became very ill, with severe pain. Jerry agreed to take me to the hospital, where I immediately underwent intensive testing. That night, Jerry came by in a rush. He handed me a crucifix, and said he had to dash off to Paris since he had promised Hal Wallis he would do a film there. They had shaken hands on a deal, and Jerry would never break a handshake promise. So saying, he disappeared into the night, and I dissolved into tears.”
Patti had developed an adrenal malfunction, and she spent much of the time Jerry was making Boeing Boeing in the hospital and under nurses’ care at home, where she had plenty of time to meditate on the state of her marriage.
Whatever he had told Patti at the hospital about the value of a handshake agreement, Jerry had tried to wriggle out of his commitment to Wallis, or at least delay it, almost until the day he left for France. It’s not at all clear that his desire to forestall his trip to Europe had anything to do with the state of his marriage; he hadn’t yet finished The Family Jewels, after all. But he would have to be in Paris for only a week of shooting, and so he went.
In truth, he had to be as pleased as Paramount was to be working on this particular Hal Wallis film. It was a totally new direction for him, one that, if successful, would reinvent his wobbly career. Boeing Boeing was based on a French play of the same name that had been a huge hit at the Comédie Caumartin theater in Paris and in an English-language version in London. It was a classic farce à la Feydeau about a writer living in Paris and enjoying the favors of three girl-friends who work as stewardesses on three different airlines; his delicately balanced schedule, according to which only one girl at a time is in town with him, begins to fall apart when a fast new Boeing aircraft becomes the international standard. Things are further complicated by the arrival in Paris of his old American chum who, ignorant of the rules of his friend’s ménage, develops romantic designs on the stewardesses himself.
Wallis first became acquainted with the material as early as January 1961, when his East Coast representative, Irene Lee, saw the play in Paris. He bought it right away and had it translated as a vehicle for Dean Martin. When Dean didn’t bite at the role, Wallis peddled the script to various comic actors—Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers, David Niven, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jack Lemmon, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra. No one wanted it. Wallis considered moving the setting to Rome and casting Vittorio Gassman; he even considered rewriting it as an Elvis Presley vehicle. Finally, in the spring of 1964, Tony Curtis expressed interest in the film. Once again, Wallis shopped the script in search of a big-name actor to play the visiting American alongside Curtis’s Paris-based writer. He finally ran out of options and, after consulting with Paramount, brought the script to Jerry.
Wallis and Jerry hadn’t worked together since Visit to a Small Planet wrapped in the summer of 1959. Since then, Jerry’s star had risen dramatically and then begun to wane, and Wallis’s career had slowly but surely ebbed. He was sixty-seven; he had lost his wife, Louise Fazenda, who passed away in 1962; he had seen his output drop to a single film a year. As always, Boeing Boeing was a commercial project for him, not an artistic statement. But it was the only iron he had in the fire in early 1965, so he couldn’t have been delighted to enlist his old nemesis in it, no matter what his box-office power. As for Jerry, the film was an opportunity to spread his wings and try a new style of comedy—grown-up, sophisticated farce. He would act like an adult, play off actreses, team up with a new sidekick (and old friend). And it would calm Paramount’s worries about his taking on too many roles while he planned his next film. He first heard about the script in December 1964, and he signed on within a month, at twenty-five-thousand dollars a week for twelve weeks (plus a hundred thousand dollars to Jerry Lewis Productions for loan of the star and two thousand dollars in living expenses, beyond his hotel bill, for a week in Paris).
Jerry was actually thrilled at the chance to work in Europe. He told Jack Keller that he hoped to do some sight-seeing with Patti while he was there (early plans for the film called for some location work in Rome), and he wanted to use the trip as a means of promoting his own films overseas. He even had a sentimental yen to find Patti’s Italian relatives, the families her mother and father had left behind almost fifty years earlier—a scheme scuttled by Patti’s illness. None of this fit into Wallis’s plans; the cast and crew were to spend a week in Paris, maybe a day or two in Rome, and then return immediately to Hollywood and shoot until mid-June. Wallis and his assistant Paul Nathan knew Jerry well enough, however, that they made no mention to him, Keller, or Keller’s assistant Jim Flood about their tight schedule; it would only have agitated him.
They also didn’t tell Jerry or anyone in the Lewis organization about Tony Curtis’s reluctance to work with Jerry. Although Jerry had been his best man and their mutual participation in the film was stipulated in their contracts, Curtis had been confiding to Paul Nathan that he had no desire to be the next Dean Martin. He used Jerry’s presence in the film to make all kinds of absurd demands of Wallis: He would be transported only in a Rolls Royce, he wouldn’t share a wardrobe assistant with anyone. Nathan was Wallis’s liaison with Marvin Meyer, who was attorney to both Curtis and Jerry, and two weeks before shooting started, Nathan finally told Meyer to rein in his client. As he wrote to Wallis, “I had a half-hour talk with Marvin Meyer today and it was strictly personal, off-the-record, friendly. I told him, now that it was all over, what a shit he has been and the workings of Mr. Tony Curtis. I also told him all the secrets I have been keeping for Tony, whereby Tony refused to work with Jerry and made us the heavies which we weren’t.”
When Wallis finally got his spoiled stars off to Paris, he found that things proceeded no more smoothly. Jerry arrived at the Hôtel Madeleine Palace with his full entourage (dresser, publicity man, barber, and stand-in/double) and a lobby-choking seventy-five pieces of luggage. He had just left his wife severely ill in a hospital in Los Angeles and had only one thing on his mind: deli sandwiches. When he discovered that the hotel couldn’t provide salami or corned beef, he threw a temper tantrum and, even though it was past midnight, took his entourage and luggage to the Ritz. He settled into another suite there, but his second attempt to order Jewish soul food was also rebuffed, though this time, as Wallis recollected, “he decided to stay put and sent one of his people to comb Paris for the salami.”
Back in Los Angeles the next month, Curtis began a pattern of disappearing from the set for hours, arguing with his director, and throwing himself into snits over anything he took as a breach of his star status. Wallis wound up closing the set to the press, to which Curtis responded by taking out ads in the trade papers indicating that the barring of reporters wasn’t his doing. Wallis wrote furiously to Joe Hazen, threatening to shut the set and hold Curtis responsible for the cost of the delay: “I am pretty tired of all this nonsense in dealing with these sick people and I do not intend to indulge him in any way.”
Soon enough, it was Jerry who was drawing the producer’s ire with a holdout of his own. On June 10, when Wallis had some four dozen extras sitting around a restaurant set waiting to shoot, Jerry left the studio three hours early with neither warning nor explanation. The next day he didn’t show up at all. No one in his office claimed to know where he was. Finally, he turned up in San Diego on his yacht.
He hadn’t left to annoy Wallis (though he surely felt no qualms about doing so); he was sitting out the most elaborate and expensive days of the production to protest Paramount’s increasing pressure on him to give up directing and producing his own films. He had a new story lined up to shoot in the fall—a romantic farce—and he was planning to shoot it just as he had his previous films. But the studio wanted him to concentrate on acting and leave the directing to someone else. Jerry wouldn’t budge, and neither would they. It was shaping up into something bad.
Boeing Boeing finally wrapped on June 22—five days late, quite a bit of it due to Jerry, at an additional cost to Wallis of one hundred thousand dollars. Jerry continued to fight the studio about his power to serve as his own director and about its habit of rereleasing his films in theaters or on TV when his new projects were in the early stages of their initial runs. Finally, Paramount elected not to fight him anymore. In July, after seventeen years, studio executives chose to shake hands with Jerry and let him seek a new home for his production company.
In his autobiography Jerry said he left Paramount voluntarily because he objected to costs charged to his films. He had hired Joe Stabile as his manager and asked him to investigate expenses the studio was levying against his productions. When Stabile reported back about various expenditures such as office furniture and personal entertainment costs that, as standard Hollywood procedure, had been tacked onto his budgets, Jerry said he felt the studio’s charges were inappropriate: “Joey’s discovery overrode my loyalties to Paramount.”
Later still, he declared that it was Paramount’s new corporate culture that drove him away. He’d always done business with a handshake, he said, but “When Gulf and Western took over the studio, they didn’t know from handshakes. So they sent me papers, and laywers, and meetings, and I said fuck you, and you, and you. Go make your belt buckles, and shove ’em up your ass, I’m outta here!”
But industry speculation was that Paramount (which wasn’t officially acquired by Gulf and Western until October 1966) had decided he wasn’t worth banking any longer. They had been giving him between $1.8 million and $2 million per picture, and as long as those films made over $3 million or so on their initial release, they didn’t mind indulging Jerry’s desire to be completely autonomous. But when the receipts for his films began to thin out and their cost increased, Paramount executives grew balky. And when Jerry refused to let someone else direct him and started creating brouhahas on other people’s sets, they chose to wash their hands of him altogether.
Back in 1948 Hal Wallis had signed a hot young comedy team. They were cutting-edge, hip, and sexy. Their nightclub shows in New York and Los Angeles drew a tony crowd of celebrities, gangsters, and swingers. But in the two decades that followed, Jerry Lewis had become a family act, and then finally a kiddie act.
He didn’t see this as a diminution of his stature. In fact, he bragged about it to Peter Bogdanovich: “The kids, they’re smilin’ ’cause The Idiot’s on his can. They built me a house in Bel Air, I ain’t gonna forget that. When they come up to the box office and their little hands reach up to the window with their little money and they say, ‘One child, please,’ they can’t go inside and be disappointed. I mean that. … I got a lot of loyal people. There’s three-year-olds that grew up and now they bring their three-year-olds to see my pictures. There’s this seven-year-old kid and his mother called me up this morning—he’s deaf, but he reads me and he laughs. How can I take that away from him?”
He had resigned himself to a narrow niche in the market. It’s possible, in fact, to read his many self-righteous pronouncements about the dangerous trend toward realism and adult subjects in films as his way of reminding the industry of the economic power of the juvenile audience, which was now his bread and butter.
Almost immediately after he left Paramount, Jerry was able to place his next film—Three on a Couch—at Columbia. But where he’d wind up after that, neither he nor the trade press could be certain; he entered into talks with United Artists, Fox, MGM, Warner Brothers, and Columbia.
For their part, Paramount was publicly sorry to see him go, but they had a replacement act lined up already: a hot new comedy team, in fact, right out of the nightclubs. Even their names had a golden ring to them—Martin and Rossi.