In the spring of 1981, almost two years after Hardly Working was shot, Jerry had the last laugh. Twentieth Century—Fox had picked up the domestic distribution rights to the picture—and found itself, to its utter astonishment, with a hit on its hands. For one dizzying week in April, Hardly Working was the Number One film on Variety’s weekly box-office chart; the returns were so high the first weekend that Fox actually had some regional exhibitors count their receipts again, unable to comprehend how a Jerry Lewis movie could gross $4.16 million in only three days in only seven hundred theaters.
The critics hadn’t done anything to help it. Typical was Alan Stern’s notice in The Boston Phoenix, which went after Jerry personally (“the only emotion he arouses is pity”) and only then began to eviscerate the film. Time wondered aloud “why Jerry Lewis would choose to run around, fall down, go cross-eyed or winsome in one more movie comedy,” while Newsweek declared, “If ‘Hardly Working’ fails to break you up, it may well leave you in a state of terminal depression.”
But other reviews indicated that a younger generation of American critics, raised on French New Wave cinema and the auteur theory, had learned how to appreciate what Jerry was doing. In the Soho Weekly News, the estimable critic Jonathan Rosenbaum called Hardly Working “the most politically honest film I’ve seen this year … a key document of the Reagan era … unbearable, terrible, wonderful, stupid, brilliant, awful, shocking, inept, and even very funny.” He compared it to late films by Preston Sturges and Charlie Chaplin (Mad Wednesday and A King in New York, respectively) and concluded by saying that “Jerry Lewis is America, and both are hardly working. So it’s hardly surprising that this is a movie that tells more truth than any of us is entirely ready to bear.” Jerry had never had a review like that in English in his life.
To be fair to its admirers, the very shape and idea of Hardly Working indeed promised a kind of fascinating satire, a meditation on both the economy of the era and the status of its star—a clown without a job or, for that matter, a home. But the actual execution is an awful botch: choppily edited, poorly photographed, shot with none of the visual verve of Jerry’s first few films. Jerry blamed the script—“the worst thing I’ve ever put pen to paper,” he called it—but the final result betrays even the creaky story.
Despite the episodic plot—which followed an out-of-work clown through a series of job and costume changes, the film really doesn’t contain a single memorable sequence. It had been more than a decade since Jerry had made a film of this sort, but it was as if he had stored up absolutely no material in all that time. He looks pudgy, slow, out of it: His hair is long and greasy, he wears geeky sweater vests, he is red-eyed, gray-faced, and sluggish; you can see his health isn’t what it once was.
Among the lifeless scenes in the film, one stands out for obvious reasons—the parody of Saturday Night Fever. Putting aside the fact that the original was four years old when the long-delayed Hardly Working finally appeared, the scene is shocking in its lifelessness. A quarter-century earlier, Jerry ripped apart Living It Up when he danced like an amphetamine-riddled chimp with Sheree North; a decade after that, he drew comedy and pathos by dancing alone in The Nutty Professor. But in Hardly Working his reflexes and agility are gone; there’s not a funny moment in the bit. Worse, he looks not like a parody of a suave dancer but like a depraved old man trying to parody a suave dancer. And SanDee Pitnick, dancing along with him, is photographed flatly and unflatteringly and nearly out of focus. Her face, pretty in real life, doesn’t photograph well; her features flatten out, and her eyes seem dim. Jerry never had bothered to learn how to film an actress glamorously. They dance very closely together—alas, Jerry doesn’t even try to make a joke of the scene—and you realize that with its curious production history and its unusual Fort Lauderdale setting, Hardly Working is a vanity film, a project made by its creator simply for the sake of making it. Fox couldn’t help scratching its corporate head at the box-office returns; why would anyone pay money to see this?
The domestic success of Hardly Working reinvigorated Jerry spiritually, if not financially—no portion of its profits came directly to him. He began looking for another opportunity to write and direct; along with longtime co-writer Bill Richmond, he was working on a new script, but there was no production deal in sight. He’d also begun, along with a writer named Herb Gluck, who’d previously co-written an autobiography by football-great-turned-sitcom-actor Alex Karras, to work on his memoirs for Atheneum, a New York publishing house. Maybe he was right; maybe the circle had turned back to comedy. Maybe he could re-create himself for a whole new audience—the kids of the kids he and Dean had enthralled all those years ago.
His newest film project didn’t seem a likely vehicle for a beloved clown’s comeback, though. Not that it wasn’t a worthwhile project: He had been signed to costar in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, in which he would play a Johnny Carson—inspired late-night talk show host named Jerry Langford. In the course of the script by former Newsweek film critic Paul Zimmerman, Langford is harassed, stalked, and eventually kidnapped by two autograph hounds: Rupert Pupkin, a vaguely psychotic misfit who wants to perform a comedy act on Langford’s show, and Masha, a loony young Park Avenue girl who has developed a sexual obsession with Langford.
Scorsese, whose previous film was the masterful boxing picture Raging Bull, wouldn’t seem a natural for this sort of black comic material. But his 1976 film Taxi Driver had recently been used as evidence in the trial of would-be Presidential assassin John Hinckley, who had developed a psychotic fixation on Jodie Foster (one of its costars) and meant to win her affection by killing Ronald Reagan. Zimmerman’s story about an obsessed fan who can’t recognize the difference between his own life and life on the TV screen therefore had a personal resonance for Scorsese, a onetime Roman Catholic seminarian whose films often dealt with themes of guilt and purgation.
Jerry wasn’t Scorsese’s first choice for the role of Jerry Langford. Carson himself, an obvious candidate, refused the job, telling the director—famous for encouraging his actors to create their own roles through extensive improvisations and retakes—“You know one take’s enough for me.” Frank Sinatra was the next actor who came to Scorsese’s mind, and when he proved unavailable, Scorsese thought about casting someone from among the whole roster of Rat Pack entertainers, Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. included. He considered Orson Welles, but dismissed the thought because “he wasn’t ‘show business’ enough.” He thought of Dean Martin. And inevitably, after he thought of Dean, he thought of Jerry.
Scorsese contacted Jerry, whom he found working in Lake Tahoe. “Jerry has done nearly everything in show business,” Scorsese recalled. “He has a lot to draw on and he was eager to play the part. I had two meetings with Jerry over the course of a year and a half. I could see the man was ripe for it.” But the matter of deciding whether Jerry was suited to the role was in the hands of Scorsese’s longtime collaborator, actor Robert De Niro, who had first brought the project to the director’s attention and who felt the need to develop a deep rapport with the actor who’d be playing Langford. “What we went through before we decided that we were gonna do it!” Jerry remembered years later. “Bobby and I had five meetings, five separate meetings in six months.” It was all at the younger actor’s behest. “Bobby has to know the people that he’s gonna work with,” Jerry explained. “What he needs from them, I can’t tell you—whether he has to know that they’re genuine, whether he has to know that they’re just goddamn good actors, that they’ll commit-I’m not too sure, but he needs to know some stuff.”
At their meetings, De Niro grilled Jerry extensively about his past—his years with Dean, his personal life, his thoughts on the filmmaking process, his relationship with his parents. In retrospect, it’s clear he’d already settled on Jerry as his costar and was trying to develop the fanatical relationship with Jerry Lewis that Rupert Pupkin had with Jerry Langford. When he felt that he’d delved into his subject sufficiently, De Niro returned to New York and approved the casting. Then, after the papers were signed, he gave Jerry a call. “‘Jer—I need you to know that I really want to kill you in this picture,’” Jerry recalled De Niro telling him. “‘We can’t socialize, we can’t have dinner, we can’t go out.’ I said, ‘Bobby, whatever turns you on, sweetheart. … Are there any ground rules about saying good morning?’”
It was counterintuitive casting, to say the least. Except for the ill-fated remake of The Jazz Singer and the 1965 episode of “Ben Casey,” Jerry had never played a wholly dramatic role (presumably, The Day the Clown Cried would have been another exception). Moreover, he hadn’t ever really succeeded on screen in an adult persona, despite all his efforts to reinvent himself since Boeing Boeing. Scorsese, though, knew just what he wanted from Jerry; he’d seen it on TV every Labor Day for years. In the telethon host the director saw the embodiment of High American Show Business of the Late Twentieth Century. He was especially struck by the telethon’s “combination of money pouring in for charity and its Vegas sensibility,” and the way it “seems at times to verge on nervous break-down.” Seeing the Labor Day broadcast as a kind of raw psychological performance, Scorsese said, “The thin line between reality and drama seems to be shattered constantly during this telethon. Anyone who could conjure up and sustain this atmosphere is quite extraordinary.”
Prior to production, the filmmakers asked Jerry to help create the role he would play. He dove into the chore. He met with De Niro, Scorsese, and Zimmerman to share with them some of his expertise on the matter of celebrity. After nearly four decades in the limelight, he was the only one among them who had lived through the unfathomable experience of being a globally known face; De Niro, even on the heels of his Best Actor Academy Award for Raging Bull, was the sort of chameleonic personality who could slip in and out of rooms without disturbing the air.
“They don’t know celebrity,” he bragged afterward. “They only know anonymity. You could walk by Bobby De Niro today, you wouldn’t know him. It’s just the way he is. And for many of the films—Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Bang the Drum Slowly, Raging Bull, The Deer Hunter—who the fuck knows who that is? They needed me to tell them about celebrity. And we wrote together. Paul Zimmerman and Marty and myself, we wrote the things that they had never heard about.” The most memorable such inclusion was based on a lady who bumped into Jerry one night in Las Vegas and switched from praising him to the heavens to cursing him when he refused to talk to her husband on the phone. ” ‘You should get cancer,’” she shouted after Jerry as he walked away. “It’s a true story,” he recalled.
With De Niro cast against his usual volatile, animalistic, ethnic type as Rupert Pupkin and avant-garde comedienne Sandra Bernhard cast as the ragged Masha, filming began in Manhattan and on Long Island in the spring of 1982. It was Jerry’s forty-sixth film, but the first he’d ever shot in New York.
Even though he’d been consulted on the creation of his character, Jerry had determined to adopt the appropriate respect for Scorsese’s dominion over the set. “I went in with a very simple philosophy,” he said. “If what they do got Raging Bull up on the screen, then I’m prepared to do whatever’s necessary. Bobby and Marty have eccentricities that I as a filmmaker had to adjust to because I wasn’t there as a filmmaker.”
When filming began, he approached Scorsese, who had just recovered from a bout of pneumonia and had been forced to stick to an early starting date by producer Arnon Milchan, to tell him that he would cooperate to the fullest. “‘I know I’m number two in this picture,’” Scorsese recalled Jerry saying. “‘I won’t give you any difficulty and I’ll do what you want. I’m a consummate professional. I know where I stand. If you want me to wait around, you’re paying for my time, I’ll do that.’”
Scorsese helped make Jerry comfortable on the set through the sort of naturalistic strategies he liked to use with his actors. Jerry was allowed to wear his own clothes, for instance, and in a scene in Langford’s apartment, Jerry’s shih tzu, Angel, was seen as Langford’s dog. Scorsese encouraged Jerry to relax in the role, to play Langford by being himself: “The less Jerry does, the better he is,” he told a visitor to the set. He recalled that Jerry helped to keep the pressurized atmosphere of the shoot light and lively. “He was very funny between takes,” said Scorsese. ‘And when he started cracking jokes I’d get asthma attacks from laughing. It got to the point of being maniacal, you had to shake him to stop it.”
But there was much in the making of the film that Jerry found unnerving. There was the matter of professional discipline. On his own sets, Jerry may have cavorted and clowned, but he never failed to put in at least a sixteen-hour day; he did so much homework and preparation that his antics were almost a necessary countermeasure to the exacting control he exerted. Above all, he was a crewman’s director, starting work early in the morning and striving to wrap production on schedule almost as if he himself were a union worker making an hourly wage. After all, he had produced many of the films he directed; it was his own money he’d be wasting if he wasn’t strict about time. But his sense of discipline was also part of his personal code of professionalism, the trouper’s credo he had learned from his father and during his own days in burlesque dives along the eastern seaboard.
In contrast to Jerry’s Studio Era notions of responsible filmmaking, however, the Stanislavskian improvisational techniques of Scorsese and De Niro seemed chaotic. Jerry would arrive at the set at 9 A.M., only to cool his heels for hours before his director and his costar arrived; he would prepare to do certain scenes only to discover that Scorsese had judged De Niro’s mood inappropriate for that material and had decided to shoot another sequence entirely; he would watch in astonishment as the director and his star shot take after take after take of scenes that he himself would have got in one or two tries.
“If they had hired me as a part of the filmmaking team,” he reflected, “I’d have killed them both, because it was against everything I was taught.” But he kept his mouth shut. “When I am a passenger on the other captain’s ship,” he said, “I’m just a passenger. And it means if I see this ship going down because this fucker’s pulling the cork out, he ain’t gonna hear anything from me.”
He was appalled at the amount of time Scorsese was willing to give De Niro to get into each scene. “When I saw Take 29 for a scene with no words—just walking from a theater mob to a limo—I said, ‘We’re in a mess,’” he recalled. “I never saw the number 29 before in my career! When I saw we had four pages of dialogue the next day, I said to one of the crew, ‘If this doesn’t go 138 takes, I’ll buy you a car.’”
Eventually, he was able to decipher the order beneath the apparent chaos and appreciate what Scorsese and De Niro were up to. “In order to work with Bobby you have to make a deal with the Devil,” he explained. “Bobby is no fool. He knows his craft. And that his craft needs his time, it needs his gut to go for it. Marty would tell him from now until next Tuesday that Take 5 was super. But De Niro knows fucking well that if he goes into Take 12 and 14 and 15 he’ll find an ‘if’ and an ‘and.’ If he does Take 20, he’ll pick up a quick turn, and on Take 28 he’s got lips tightening, which he never had through the first 27 takes. I watched him feign poor retention just to work a scene. I watched him literally look like he couldn’t remember the dialogue. He knew the fucking dialogue. It was masterful. There’s nothing he did that didn’t stagger me.”
But De Niro didn’t deploy his arsenal of Method acting tricks only on his own performance. He coaxed Jerry into improvisations in some of their scenes together, never more vividly than in an emotional encounter between Pupkin and Langford at Langford’s country estate. During the scene, Pupkin insists that his fantasy relationship with Langford is real, until the talk show host turns violently on him, bellowing and chasing him from the house.
According to Scorsese, the scene took two weeks to shoot: “It was just so painful because the scene itself is so excruciating.” But some of that pain was imposed on Jerry by his colleagues. De Niro knew he would achieve the verisimilitude he hoped for, but he wanted to make certain that Jerry’s rage was genuine. As the crew prepared to film the climactic moments of the scene, De Niro began baiting Jerry with anti-Semitic epithets, announcing that Jews had “‘turned this world into garbage for five thousand years.’”
“I said, ‘You cocksucker, you’re lucky you’re alive. I’ll rip your fucking head off,’” Jerry remembered. “I didn’t know he and Marty had met already, to go for it. ‘Do you realize you are close to my ripping your fucking head off?’ And the cameras are rolling. I know Marty is getting what he wants. I know Bobby is feeding me. But for me not to be aware of two cameras and an entire crew, and Bobby De Niro, throwing dialogue at me, ‘Maybe the Jews were motherfuckers in the first place.’ That didn’t. … But ‘If Hitler had lived, he’d have gotten all of you cocksuckers’ was the fucking trigger. He knew—the son of a bitch knew. And he’s doing this to me because he’s just off camera. I pulled him into the scene by three feet, and I was on my way. Whew! He came into the dressing room. ‘Are you okay?’ ‘Yes, I’m fine. I never want to work with you again.’
He had a similarly unsettling experience filming a long scene in which Sandra Bernhard’s character, Masha, delivered an improvised monologue about her psychotic passion for Langford while he sat tied to a chair with medical tape like a mummy. For all of the embarrassments he had put himself through at Dean’s side or in his self-directed sagas about the lives of the world’s most abject misfits, he had never gone through anything like this—complete physical incapacitation at the hands of an odd-looking, pistol-packing young woman in a bra and panties. As with De Niro, Scorsese allowed Bernhard to improvise in the scene—through which Jerry, gagged, has no lines whatever. She employed various bits from her bizarre stage act, equal parts performance art, psychological confessional, and parody of the High Show Biz that Jerry embodied.
Scorsese recalled that Jerry tried to be magnanimous about the sequence at first. “The sexual threat to Jerry was very important,” he said, “but he used to crack up laughing. Then it became difficult to deal with, and his comments and jokes became edgier.”
Bernhard, making her first film, had been nervous about working with Jerry from the start. She remembered him as “the most intimidating factor in the whole situation.” Jerry was already signed to the film when Scorsese was still auditioning, and she, of course, knew who he was and had heard what he was like: “Jerry Lewis was a large, looming figure. So I was scared to meet him, and he lived up to his reputation. He’s one of the only show-biz people I met who really has an aura. We kind of worked together a little bit when I auditioned. But there wasn’t any big meeting of the minds. He came in right when they were making their final decision about me.”
While she found working with Scorsese rewarding, she didn’t feel any warmth coming from Jerry, even before their big scene together. “He didn’t have anything to do with making things easier,” she recalled. “I was just who I was, and that’s who he was stuck with. I think he would’ve felt the same way about any actress who he had to play that role with.” And the several days over which the scene was shot were nightmarish. “It wasn’t a smooth thing at all,” she recalled. “It was a very uncomfortable thing. And I don’t think he felt comfortable at all in the situation. Being intimidated by a young woman isn’t really Jerry’s forte. I don’t think it would’ve worked if it had been this nice, sweet off-screen relationship. All the dynamic off camera served the parts.”
After the scene was over, Bernhard was actually invited on to the telethon—and slotted at a 4 A.M. spot. It was emblematic of her experience with her costar. “The movie was it,” she said. “We didn’t bond. He wasn’t particularly nice to me. At the time I took it personally, but shortly after I realized that there was no reason to take it personally. He was from a different generation—why should he relate to me? And that’s where we left it. He’s too crazy. He’s too out there. He’s not a pleasant person. He just isn’t. He would just say mean things and snap at me.
Whether or not he felt he had been manipulated into his performance by Scorsese and his costars, Jerry was extremely proud of his work on the film, and in his memories the discomforts of the shoot dissolved. “It was the easiest job I ever had in my life,” he remembered more than a decade later. “I didn’t have to do a fucking thing but show up. All I had to do was play the character, read the dialogue.”
But Scorsese understood just how difficult it was for Jerry to play in a straight role and to work under such alien conditions. “Jerry is totally surreal,” he told a reporter. “But he was very easy to direct. The role was difficult. He had to look as if nothing were going on—as if he were just walking along the street. He wasn’t used to acting that way, and he had to keep his face less than elastic. That’s very hard to do.”
Moreover, Scorsese had gotten Jerry involved in the improvising, and one of the results of the experiment—Langford’s heartfelt confession to his kidnappers that his life was unenviable—stood as one of the highlights of Jerry’s performance. “He really got into the dramatic stuff,” Scorsese said. “I think he’s a wonderful actor.”
There were limits to the contributions the director was willing to accept from Jerry, however. When he got wind that Zimmerman and Scorsese differed on how the film should end, Jerry called the writer and the director together to offer an ending of his own devising—Rupert shouldn’t, he felt, be able to pull off his dream and become a star; rather, Langford should escape from Masha and arrive at the studio in time to see Rupert gunned down. Zimmerman didn’t even want to hear Jerry out; he shook his head “no” even as Jerry was speaking. But Scorsese kept his actor happy by listening carefully to his suggestions and chastising Zimmerman for failing to respect Jerry’s opinion. By such diplomatic, respectful gestures, he won Jerry over for the duration of the filming and beyond: When The King of Comedy opened in February 1983, Jerry did everything he could to promote the film.
Now, while his career blossomed in midlife springtime, and while he entertained offers from other filmmakers who were interested in casting him now that he had proven his box-office mettle, Jerry found himself confronted with a strange new sort of antagonism toward his charity work. The telethon was still coaxing at least a dollar more out of America each year—more than $31 million in 1981. But now the old whispers that Jerry was somehow profiting from his work had transmuted into attacks on the way he conducted it. In particular, there was criticism of the telethon as a kind of freak show that preyed on the handicapped by projecting images of them as helpless, pitiful children.
In a September 3, 1981, New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Aiding the Disabled: No Pity, Please,” Evan J. Kemp Jr., executive director of the Disability Rights Center, declared that the Labor Day telethon had bred “vast frustration and anger” among the nation’s disabled population. Zeroing in on the equation of all handicapped people with “poster children” and “Jerry’s kids,” Kemp called the telethon “a television show that reinforces a stigma against disabled people.”
It was a thorough, point-by-point attack. By focusing only on handicapped children, Kemp wrote, the MDA “seems to proclaim that the only socially acceptable status for disabled people is their early childhood.” A further result of the stereotype of disabled people as helpless children, Kemp said, was that “it intensifies the awkward embarrassment that the able-bodied feel around disabled people.” Finally, he declared that “the telethon’s critical stress on the need to find cures supports the damaging and common prejudice that handicapped people are ‘sick.’”
Kemp, who’d lived his whole life with neuromuscular disease, spoke about the MDA and its methods from a knowledgeable point of view. His parents were themselves handicapped by neuromuscular disease, and they helped found the Cleveland chapter of the MDA years earlier. Furthermore, he was a nephew of Drew Pearson, the influential newspaper columnist who had been an early advocate of the MDA and whose persecution at the hands of McCarthyites in the early 1950s had caused the organization to seek new spokespeople in the entertainment world, Jerry Lewis among them.
Kemp’s article wasn’t the only unkind murmur about the telethon in the media. Just two weeks before the piece ran, Jerry had appeared on a taping of “The Phil Donahue Show” during which Donahue called into question the MDA’s use of poster children and the organization’s intimate ties with corporations. In particular, he objected to the way many of the MDA’s corporate sponsors tied their donations to consumer purchases—for every box of cereal the public bought, for instance, Kellogg’s would donate a fixed sum to the MDA. The popular talk show host decried “all this pompous, self-righteous ‘my kids’ and put-your-dimes-and-pennies-in-here” and summarized the new charges against the MDA’s fund-raising strategies: “The charity enterprise and structure in this country is a competitive, rancor-filled, inefficient system that does not speak equitably to the various difficulties that afflict not only young people but older people as well. To make it worse, we have a bunch of greedy, bottom-line companies coming in here, and their motive has more to do with selling merchandise than with helping the kids.”
Jerry, visibly shaken by these arguments, which he seemed to take as personal attacks, adamantly defended both his fund-raising techniques and his corporate sponsors. “The corporate structure is not all that heartless,” he argued. “We never, ever exploit my kids in any way. We let the people know that a child has been given a dirty deal—not pity. We do not pity them. Many of them will say to you, ‘I’m not crippled, ‘I’m inconvenienced.’ That’s courageous. That’s stunning. That’s exquisite as far as I’m concerned.” And, in case anyone was wondering, he added, “They want me to sing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’ That’s meaningful to them.”
Donahue’s audience, however, felt the MDA should reform its attitudes toward the disabled and enter into less obviously commercial relationships with its sponsors. A woman stood up to announce that she found the MDA’s approach, specifically in the telethon, unbearable. “I find telethons kind of repulsive,” she said. “I hate them! I will not turn them on. I turn them on and it looks like a zoo.” Jerry shot back an ugly retort: “I’ve got to get you an autographed photograph of Eva Braun.”
As the show wore on, Jerry more and more responded to criticisms of MDA and its fund-raising techniques as if they were attacks on himself. He seemed to be seeking pity not for the kids but for Jerry, the put-upon angel struggling to perform noble acts in a hostile world. “There’s nothing wrong with a do-gooder,” he stated. “And there’s nothing wrong with the charity gain. There’s nothing wrong with corny. I’ve lived an entire life on corn—crying, spreading my emotions through comedy and through seriousness. We need more people in this world to say what they feel from the heart rather than the head.”
But after fifteen years of telethons, the novelty had worn off for a great many people, and the MDA had its leanest fund-raising season in the early 1980s. In 1982, for the first time in the history of “The Jerry Lewis Telethon,” the tote board tally at the close of the show was lower than it had been the previous year. Jerry evinced his desperation in an angry monologue delivered toward the end of the broadcast. “Why am I a criminal?” he asked the audience. “What we are doing here is great work. … We’ve only been at peace 557 days in the last seventeen thousand years. Had they had telethons, we’d have had peace, I’m sure. Is that idealistic? Is that old-fashioned, mid-Victorian? Is that stupid? Is that rhetoric? No! That’s what I believe.”
In the aftermath of the disappointing returns, an MDA spokesperson blamed “the economic situation and the high rate of unemployment” for the declining donations. But it would take another three years before the 1981 total was topped. The frightening thing from the organization’s standpoint was the possibility that Jerry himself may have been turning people away. But, as they well knew, Jerry would never give up his position as front man for the MDA without a fight that would be uglier than anything he might blurt out on TV out of sheer exhaustion.
Ironically, the telethon troubles were surfacing at a time when Jerry seemed actually to have revived his movie career. Even before The King of Comedy would be released to critical acclaim, his stock was already rising. Not only had he found producers to finance the new film he wanted to make, but he’d been signed to yet another plum role in a film by a young director. This time, he agreed to play two parts in a film version of Kurt Vonnegut’s science-fiction satire Slapstick, to be written, directed, and produced by a twenty-two-year-old auteur named Steven Paul. Young as he was, Paul had significant experience behind him. Two years earlier, in 1980, he had performed the same Lewisian hat trick of creativity in making Falling in Love Again (aka In Love), a Jew-from-the-Bronx-falls-for-WASP-princess story starring Elliot Gould, a debuting Michelle Pfeiffer, and Paul himself in a small role.
Slapstick (of Another Kind), as the Vonnegut adaptation was known, must have seemed terribly exciting. The project had attracted an enormous variety of performers, from costars Madeline Kahn and Marty Feldman to an oddball variety of personalities who performed roles ranging from a few lines of narration (Orson Welles) to cameo appearances (Virginia Graham, Merv Griffin) to feature parts (Jim Backus, Pat Morita).
Jerry was dazzled by Paul’s youthful enthusiasm and versatility; “He reminds me of me,” he remarked soon after shooting began. He was so happy to have the job that he deferred his salary in exchange for participation in the profits of the film, which even without paying Jerry cost $4.5 million. But at least one aspect of the film disturbed him. On the day the shoot began, Jerry learned it was a nonunion production. Jerry had always valued the contributions of his crew members down to the lowliest gofer, and he understood and respected their need to unionize. He was mollified when Paul sat down with representatives of the Teamsters and other unions to reach an understanding, namely, that because of the film’s relatively low budget, the unions would not boycott the production.
Otherwise, Jerry watched patiently as his young director worked out Vonnegut’s cartoonish story. He played both Caleb Swain, a wealthy “beautiful person,” and Wilbur, one of his deformed teenaged twins who was actually a brilliant space alien (Kahn played both Jerry’s wife and the other twin). He took no part in the actual directing, however much he joked about Paul’s youth with reporters. “I helped him a couple of times and gave him the wrong angles,” he told Army Archerd of Variety. “But I never let him film them.”
When it was all over, though, he was distressed with what he saw. The film was disjointed, truly unreleaseable. Jerry wanted to help Paul cut the film into something more presentable, in particular into something that his fans would recognize. “You cannot just slap Jerry Lewis’s name on the marquee without explaining what’s going on here,” he recalled telling Paul. “Or else we’re misrepresenting the movie.” But he was rebuffed. The film would remain in limbo a year, only to emerge in 1984 to anemic box office. By then, Jerry was doing everything he could to distance himself from the debacle. “This is either going to be a cult movie or you’ll never hear of it,” he said. “I hated the script. It didn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t.” It didn’t matter—nobody came to see the film, and Paul’s career went into a swoon. He didn’t receive another credit of any sort until his name appeared on the script of Never Too Young to Die, a 1986 spy movie spoof cast with offbeat rock ‘n’ roll stars.
In early September 1982, in time to catch the annual wave of telethon publicity, Atheneum released Jerry Lewis in Person, an autobiographical account of his fifty-six years. As a historical document, the book perpetuated and even initiated as many inaccuracies about his life as it dispelled; chronologies were inexact, accounts of unpleasant episodes in his life were manipulated to his advantage, tragedies and failures such as the Jerry Lewis Cinema story were ignored altogether.
All this, of course, made it a standard celebrity autobiography. But there were moments of genuine frankness in the book as well—confessions, for instance, about his drug addiction and the dissolution of his marriage. Particularly unusual was the number of instances the book recorded of his breaking down and sobbing, painting a portrait of a man frequently overcome by his emotions. And astounding by its relative absence was an account of the family he had with Patti—most of the boys weren’t even named in the text. If his sons had been estranged from by him by the divorce, this snub did nothing to help forge a reconciliation.
The book wasn’t the first time Jerry had bared himself to the public. He’d been forthright about his Percodan use and his divorce in magazine interviews. But the level of detail with which he treated these matters in his autobiography opened a new question: What would the book have been like if he’d decided to be entirely truthful throughout?
Indeed, he was to hint years later that he had originally intended to produce a much less saccharine account of his life. He had started out with some thirteen hundred pages of manuscript, he claimed: “Brutally honest stuff.” His publisher had taken a look at this volatile material and dubbed it “a monster book,” a potential blockbuster. But, claiming to be overcome with concern for the dignity of others, Jerry excised almost everything inflammatory he had written.
It wasn’t that he thought too highly of himself to reveal his own transgressions and failings. “I can be pretty objective and look at Jerry Lewis from a distance,” he claimed. “You’d be amazed at what I’d write about him. Because it wouldn’t be flowers and fucking gifts and candy. It would be an interesting exercise. Because I got some news for you: The negative would outweigh the positive. If you’re gonna be really honest. Now, whether I could write where the negatives have come from or justify them, I don’t know.”
But he claimed to be unable to publish such things under his name. The final version of the “monster” manuscript was a three-hundred-page tour of his life’s highlights as he saw them from a breezy, ellipsis-laden remove. The world greeted it for what it was—marzipan. It received only fleeting attention in the book-reviewing press: Such traditional review venues as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the weekly newsmagazines didn’t bother with it at all. Like The Total Film-Maker, it never saw a second edition. Jerry kept cartons of the book on hand at his office; whenever charities contacted him for donations for auctions, he would autograph a copy and send it out. “It served its purpose,” he reflected.
The last time Jerry had made as many as two films in a single year was 1967, but in June 1982 he was on his third movie set in twelve months. He had finally found financing for a new film of his own. Peter Nelson, who’d produced two made-for-TV films, and Arnold Orgolini, a novice producer, had recently formed a production company and hit upon Jerry’s script as their first project. The story, know as Smorgasbord, centered on Warren Nefron, a misfit so inept he can’t even kill himself when he’s overwhelmed by his screwed-up life. Under the guidance of a psychiatrist, he essays a number of therapeutic cures for his depression, each one leading to disaster. Like Hardly Working, it was an episodic film, but it was, in an elliptical way, even more personal. If the earlier film was an embodiment of Jerry’s career crises throughout the 1970s, this one was as frank about his inner turmoil as his autobiography had tried to be. Even through its prism of gags and shtick it emerged an unmistakable revelation of his long-term feelings of loneliness and inadequacy.
Smorgasbord was shot in Los Angeles throughout the fall of 1982. Jerry kept an office in Scarlett O’Hara’s old Tara mansion, now an office building on the former Selznick International lot in Culver City. Though Jerry later announced with pride that he’d “like to get as many of [his] old crew together as possible,” most of the principal creative collaborators—editor Gene Fowler, cinematographer Gerald-Perry Finnerman, and composer Morton Stevens among them—were joining him for the first time. The cast, on the other hand, was filled with old Lewis friends. Milton Berle and Sammy Davis, Jr., had small roles; Herb Edelman, costar of the ill-fated Hellzapoppin’, played the psychiatrist; and longtime Lewis bit player Buddy Lester was on hand, as was John Abbott, an English comic actor Jerry had met on Who’s Minding the Store? and with whom he was reunited on Slapstick (of Another Kind).
Scott Lewis, the only one of the boys then pursuing a professional relationship with his father, served as associate producer, and he made a gushing show of his reverence for his dad’s comic gifts to reporters who visited the set. After laughing deeply for nearly two hours as Jerry shot a scene of physical business in a bar, Scott told Lynn Hirschberg of Rolling Stone, “My God, I just hope I’ve inherited some of his amazing ability. We’re both Pisceans, so maybe …”
The success Fox had enjoyed with Hardly Working, coupled with strong advance word about Jerry’s work on The King of Comedy, had drawn interest in Smorgasbord from domestic distributors. Warner Brothers had bought domestic rights from Nelson and Orgolini, but they wanted to test the film before they made any formal plans to exhibit it. Late in 1982 Jerry and Gene Fowler set to work editing a rough version of the film in Las Vegas, where Jerry was living openly with SanDee Pitnick in a condominium at the Las Vegas Country Club. In mid-December he took a quick publicity trip to Europe to do some bush-beating for the film, which would open there in a cut not subject to Warner Brothers approval, and then returned to his condo to finish work on the domestic version.
On Sunday, December 20, he felt a pain in his chest while working in his editing room. Assuming it was indigestion, he knocked off work, took an antacid, had a light supper, and went to bed. The next morning, when he woke with the same pain, he became alarmed. “This is no indigestion,” he told SanDee. “I’m having a heart attack.”
They drove to Desert Springs Hospital, where Jerry, walking in under his own power, told doctors he felt he was on the verge of a traumatic cardiac episode. The doctors administered a series of tests and began consultations with Dr. Michael DeBakey, Jerry’s adored personal physician (he carried his picture in his wallet) in Houston. They kept Jerry in the hospital overnight, with SanDee sitting by his side.
At around midnight, he had the heart attack he had felt brewing. “Suddenly my eyes rolled,” he remembered soon afterward. “The pain was a son of a bitch.” The hospital staff went into immediate action, administering nitroglycerine and pounding on Jerry’s chest. For something like seventeen seconds his heart stopped beating completely. He was, for a brief moment, clinically dead. “My kind of attack is the worst,” he remembered. “It’s like a TV going off at night when they say, ‘That concludes our programming for today.’ I felt my body freeze.”
The previous day’s tests had revealed to Dr. Harold Freikes that an artery leading to Jerry’s heart was 90 percent occluded. At 5:45 A.M. on Tuesday, a three-doctor surgical team, attended by ten assistants, began to perform a double bypass surgery on him. Jerry, who’d awakened in the hospital’s intensive care ward after his heart attack, was terrified. He knew all about heart surgery from his experiences alongside DeBakey, who had allowed him to photograph operations in Houston. He knew they would use a retractor to pry apart his ribs, that they would remove his beating heart from his thorax. The surgery lasted more than two hours, with doctors removing a healthy vein from his calf to replace the blocked artery in his chest. He was returned to the intensive care unit afterward so that his recovery could be monitored.
He spent eight days recovering in the hospital before he was permitted to go home. It was a traumatic period. “I had devastating nightmares afterwards,” he recalled. “The tears poured like a faucet.” He wept over the fact that his dog, Angel, couldn’t visit him in the hospital; SanDee was so moved by Jerry’s grief that she smuggled the dog in for a visit. Four of his sons also came to visit him there, including the estranged Chris, who woke up on the day Jerry entered the hospital with a premonition that his father was ill.
The pain he suffered through the first stages of his recuperation was intense, Jerry remembered, but the single most traumatizing thing had been the glimpse he felt he’d been given of the afterlife. “I was gone and they brought me back,” he remembered a few years later. “I saw the other side. And there was nothing. You know how at the end of a day your TV tube goes psssh and goes black? That was it. I was looking for a billboard that said, ‘Jerry Lewis loves Brown’s Hotel.’ I should give people hope by telling them there’s a yellow brick road and all that, but I saw nothing.” Later still, he was even more decisively certain about the experience. “Judy Garland isn’t there,” he said. “It isn’t beautiful. It’s bleak.”
Returning home, he accepted the reality that he would have to change many of his lifelong habits if he was going to stay alive. He gave up smoking—a four-packs-a-day habit. He began eating more carefully, eliminating salt and sugar from his diet. And he began to respect his body more by making sure he got at least eight hours of sleep each night and avoiding stressful situations. “I allow myself only five minutes of stress at a time, maximum,” he explained. “I can’t stand incompetence, and I used to be wildly impatient. Now if a clerk in a store is goofing up, instead of blowing my stack, I say, ‘What the hell, so it’s another ten minutes.’ We were having a staff meeting the other day and we got into an argument. After a while, Joe Stabile, my manager, looked at his watch and said, ‘Hey, Jer, it’s five minutes.’ I said, ‘Right, let’s move on.’ If I’ve got an ugly situation, I face it right away and then dismiss it. I don’t hold it.”
A Hollywood publicist who knew Jerry for years confirmed that the near-death experience mellowed the comic. “Jerry was an absolute pussycat after his heart attack,” he told Esquire. “Before that, I dreaded working with him. Look in his mouth. He’s got three rows of teeth.”
Encouraging him toward recovery was the slate of work he had ahead. In January, just three weeks after surgery, he attended a sneak preview of Smorgasbord at a theater in Vegas. It went badly: Warner Brothers declared the film unreleasable and wouldn’t even consent to reconsider the decision after further editing. They determined after some time to premiere the film on one of their cable TV stations, where it made its appearance in 1984 as Cracking Up. Overseas, however, the film more than paid for itself, with 160,000 paid admissions in Paris alone upon its April 1983 release.
It didn’t really deserve much more attention than it got—although plenty of worse films found their way into distribution. An episodic comedy without as much connecting material as even the very loose Hardly Working, Smorgasbord (as it should be known, for the word is a key element in the film, as well the name of a Jerry Lewis film within the film) gives Jerry the opportunity to put together a few very funny gags, but it’s hardly the sort of coherent narrative that contemporary film audiences might have hoped to see. It’s just a sequence of comic set pieces; some of them are splendid, but they pop up and disappear without explanation or coherence.
Yet again, Jerry plays a complete and total failure (how he can afford his tailor-made suits and jewelry is, of course, never explained—though this is the only film in his entire career in which, divorced and not yet remarried, he doesn’t wear a wedding band). With the help of an indulgent psychiatrist (Edelman), he explores his family history, his own biography, and some of the nagging manifestations of his mental condition. Finally, his doctor cures him with posthypnotic suggestion, but winds up inheriting his defects and deficiencies.
Within this framework, Jerry includes some of his traditional trademarks—modernist decor (sleek patent leather sofas, monochromatic rooms, absurd kinetic art), an art gallery come to life, Jerry himself playing multiple roles, and a blurring of lines between the world of the film and the off-camera world. The first motif is hilariously explored in the psychiatrist’s office, whose floor is so heavily waxed that Jerry can’t cross the room without destroying it in bravura physical (and almost totally silent) fashion. Jerry is remarkably limber for a man in his mid-fifties, and when he ends the bit by spilling an entire bag of peanut M&M’s all over the roan-colored floor, the sequence achieves a tactility exceedingly rare in the cinema. But it’s a level of comedy the rest of the film never reaches.
In Variety (which reviewed it upon its Parisian debut), Leonard Klady astutely observed, “It would be a genuine surprise if Smorgasbord repeated the North American success of Hardly Working. There is a genuine Lewis audience still, but it is certain to tire of this rehash.” Still, as with Hardly Working, some respected critics used Smorgasbord as an attempt to revive esteem for Jerry as a filmmaking talent. When a two-day run of one of the test prints of the film was held in New York in 1985, Jim Hoberman of the Village Voice wrote “‘Smorgasbord’ has the ascetic, abstract quality that one associates with auteurs in the moody twilight of their obsessions.” Undeniably true, but the film is still a weak entry on even Jerry’s checkered résumé, and Warner Brothers’ decision not to distribute it—whether, as Jerry suspected, a sign of personal malice (“Warner Brothers did it to me a second time,” he reckoned) or a simple function of market analysis—probably spared Jerry another barrage of ugly reviews.
The King of Comedy, on the other hand, was almost certain to win a public and a following among critics. In advance of the film’s opening, Jerry gave interviews to People, Rolling Stone, and even McCall’s (where he spoke about “The Joys of Being a Grandfather”). He appeared on “Late Night with David Letterman” and hoped to pull off a stunt involving his autobiography—he wanted to provide all 550 audience members with a copy of Jerry Lewis in Person but not have one for the host (when he couldn’t drum up enough copies in time for the taping, he called the prank off). And he hosted NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” performing in a few sparkling skits with young comics (and obvious Lewis fans) Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo. In one routine, Jerry was wheeled in for open-heart surgery and given anesthesia, only to dream in his ether swoon that a drunken Dean Martin (Piscopo) was his surgeon, and a swinging Sammy Davis Jr. (Murphy) his anesthetist; in another, he was escorted into a Parisian film studio to watch Tim Kazurinsky dub The King of Comedy into French, only to hear all of Jerry Lang-ford’s dramatic lines delivered in the familiar wheedle of the Kid.
If he was supposed to have mellowed, he didn’t sound it in an interview he gave the New York Daily News during the week he spent in town. He could still get exercised on the subject of the press, for instance. “I will not allow injustice,” he announced. “I will not allow inaccuracy, and I am not a subject of ridicule. I was not put on this earth to please those who would be happiest if I went on my ass and/or their sadness if I score well. I’m not here for them. I’m here for me. And if I can contribute something for all of you when I’m doing what I need to do for me, I’ve lived a life. If you’ve got what I got—I was living with it for seven, eight, maybe nine years anticipating that finally I would read the press off.”
If that didn’t sound sufficiently like the tantrum-prone, presurgery Jerry, he continued: “I live in a selfish, selfless kind of a cocoon. You cannot get by in this world, apparently, if you are a courageous, honest crusader and/or stand-up, straight-ahead man who will not take shit. I’ll sit in the corner and let you pound me if I’ve got it coming. If I don’t have it coming, you’d better know what you’re doing, because you’re tangling with a goddamn son of a bitch.”
Anyone who was surprised by this sort of talk coming from a funnyman-philanthropist only needed to see The King of Comedy to know for certain that there was an ebon side to Jerry’s character. With the exception of Buddy Love, Jerry Langford was absolutely the closest thing he’d played to himself on screen. Cocky, aloof, a sometime dandy, yet lonely, sarcastic, and capable of venomous outbursts, Langford was the quintessential Great American Star.
For the first time in his life, Jerry was almost universally heaped with praise. Vincent Canby of The New York Times spoke of Jerry’s “brilliant solemnity,” while his colleague Janet Maslin called Jerry’s work “one of the best things” in the film. In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael was even more specific: “Jerry Lewis is the only real thing here,” she wrote, adding that “Lewis doesn’t try to make the off-camera Langford likeable; the performance says that what the off-camera star feels is his own damn business.” “A shrewdly disciplined performance,” wrote Richard Schickel in Time, while Jack Kroll of Newsweek called Jerry’s work “extraordinary.” Indeed, when The King of Comedy was named one of the decade’s ten best films by a group of critics polled in American Film magazine in 1989, Jerry’s contribution was clearly one of the elements people remembered most vividly.
Of course, Jerry felt the praise was his due—failing, it seemed, to recognize a difference between his work for Scorsese and his work for himself and other directors. “Those reviews—and I read every single one of them—were incredible,” he said a decade later. “And I just laughed. They all wrote about what a good actor I am. I’ve been doing it for fifty-five years! Where have these people been? Just because I don’t take a pratfall in a motion picture, I’m now a great actor? For those of you who study comedy, you have to remember this expression: ‘He acts like a fool.’” He insisted, despite his earlier testimony of the emotional toll that Scorsese and De Niro exacted from him, that he did nothing for the duration of the film but show up on the set.
But–for once—he was being modest about what he accomplished. Of all of the work he ever did, only The Nutty Professor comes as close as The King of Comedy to indicating just what the man was like beneath the skin. And where the former film only revealed the real Jerry as a pair of counterposed tropes, the latter has an almost documentary feel. Contributing to the effect was Scorsese’s methodology: Wearing his own clothes, sitting with his own dog, with a picture of his adolescent self on his mantle, Jerry Langford is very, very nearly Jerry Lewis. He has a caricature of himself as the logo of his show and his company; he plays golf; he lives in a pristine, modernistic environment; he has an explosive, caustic temper; he feels compelled to display himself to his public (despite his celebrity, he walks the streets of Manhattan to go to work) yet simultaneously loathes it (he tells Rupert that if he becomes famous, “then you’re gonna have idiots like you plaguing your life”). Buddy Love should have given America all the insight it would ever want into the black side of Jerry’s nature, but America took The Nutty Professor for a fairy tale, not a confession. Nobody who saw The King of Comedy, on the other hand, came away thinking that Jerry Lewis was a genial, breezy guy.
He’s all over Scorsese’s film, appearing in eighteen scenes. He plays the haughty celebrity, the lonely successful man, a joshing chum (in Rupert’s fantasies), the consummately professional talk show host, a pleading prisoner, an immobilized victim. He walks confidently in the sunlight (where he meets the lady who tells him in one breath that he’s “a joy to the world” and in the next that he “should only get cancer”) and races desperately through the night after escaping Masha’s clutches. Most memorably, he belittles Rupert in the venomous outpouring of rage that De Niro coaxed from him with his off-camera anti-Semitic remarks.
It’s a chilling scene. Rupert and his date (played by De Niro’s ex-wife, Diahnne Abbott) have come to Langford’s country house and have made themselves at home in Jerry’s absence. After a hilarious phone call from his Asian butler, Jerry arrives at home carrying a golf club and simmering with rage. At first he patiently sizes up the scene, saying as little as he can as Rupert attempts to reconcile his fantasy life (in which his good pal Jerry has invited him for the weekend) and the colder reality.
Finally, Langford sees that no amount of gentle coaxing will rid him of this pest. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re a moron?” he asks. “Do you understand English? Take your things and go!”
Rupert desperately attempts to bridge the gap between himself and his idol by appealing to their common humanity, but Langford doesn’t feel obliged to see the intruder as his equal. When Rupert begs for just ten minutes of attention, Langford refuses: “I have a life, okay?” “So do I,” says Rupert, to which Jerry responds, “That’s not my responsibility!”
Finally, Langford shatters all Rupert’s fantasies. “I told you to call to get rid of you!” he shouts, and it’s clear that the character’s anger is also the actor’s. “If I didn’t tell you that, we’d still be standing on the steps of my apartment!” Beaten, Rupert admits, “Well, all right, I made a mistake.” “So did Hitler!” shouts Jerry, red-faced, snarling, and leaning forward with menace.
It’s stunning, as if the bile of a lifetime has spewed out without Jerry’s knowing it. Astonishingly, Scorsese gets two other such moments out of him: the look of horror and revulsion on his face as he sits tied to a chair in a room full of candles while Bernhard cavorts in her brilliant monologue, and the improvised confession with which Langford hopes to achieve his release from his captors. Speaking reasonably, like an adult with another adult, with some of his natural haste but with a genuine sense of groping beneath his words, he describes his life to Rupert and Masha: “I’m sure you can understand, doing the kind of show that I’m doing, it’s mind-boggling. There’s so much stuff that comes down, you can’t keep your head clear. And if that’s the case, I’m wrong. You’re right, I’m wrong. If I’m wrong, I apologize. I’m just a human being, with all of the foibles, all of the traps, the show, the pressure, the groupies, the autograph hounds, the crew, the incompetence, those behind the scenes you think are your friends and you’re not too sure if you’re gonna be there tomorrow because of their incompetence. There are wonderful pressures that make every day a glowing, radiant day in your life. It’s terrific. Okay. If all of that means nothing, if I’m wrong, despite all of that, I apologize. I’m sorry. If you accept my apology, I think we should shake hands and we’ll forget the whole thing.” This patient explanation of the hell of celebrity life is just as convincing as his volcanic tirade, another remarkable glimpse into the mind of Jerry himself.
One week before The King of Comedy’s nationwide opening, Jerry and SanDee flew to the Sonesta Beach Hotel in Key Biscayne to be married. It was supposed to be a small, private ceremony, with MDA executive director Bob Ross serving as best man and Claudia Stabile, wife of Joe, standing as the matron of honor. But unbeknownst to the bridal party, ABC-TV was using the hotel’s facilities that weekend to tape an athletic competition show, “The Superstars.” Nevertheless, the couple was wed by a rabbi on Sunday, February 13, 1983, exchanging rings and standing for a UPI photograph showing the groom attempting to swallow his bride’s face the way he’d so often wrapped his mouth around an entire water glass.
Afterward, Jerry confessed that he was nervous during the ceremony, a condition he ascribed to his recent brush with death. “There wasn’t another marriage in my life,” he said. “The first was so long ago. I felt like a young stud starting out all over again.” Indeed, the wedding in Key Biscayne rather echoed his secret elopement to Connecticut with Patti: Danny was gone, Rae was sick at home in Las Vegas, none of his six sons were present.
He had, in fact, failed to reconcile with most of the boys since the divorce. Scott was willing to work for him, but Jerry kept him at a distance. During the shoot of Smorgasbord, for instance, Jerry told him, “I love you, but I didn’t work my fingers to the bone for you or your mother. I did it all for me. All of you got in the way, and so I’m releasing myself from those obstacles to see if I can enjoy my life totally.”
Chris, who had remained almost entirely estranged from his father from the time he had seen the contents of Jerry’s bathroom drawer, made some overtures to Jerry after the heart surgery. He came to Las Vegas along with his fiancee to have dinner, but he was so uncomfortable in Jerry’s presence that he couldn’t look him in the eye. Jerry didn’t make it easy on him. “I’m almost resentful the boys weren’t quicker in coming around to me,” he said soon afterward.
Only one son remained by Jerry’s side without pause from the divorce onward. Anthony, Patti’s most exacting, together son, was considering a wedding of his own when his parents’ marriage dissolved. He was in his early twenties, he remembered, and he and his fiancee, Sharon, “found ourselves being dragged into a political undertow which was not only forcing us to choose sides, but was also overshadowing any and all notions of our getting married.” Patti, in fact, asked the couple to put their wedding plans on hold until her own marital situation was settled, but they wouldn’t; Sharon’s parents even called Patti to ask if she could help pay for the big wedding the young couple hoped to have. Patti, with nothing of her own to spend, told Anthony to ask his father for money.
Jerry leapt at the chance; he promised the couple a big Las Vegas wedding, as his treat. Told about these new arrangements—which she knew involved SanDee—Patti refused to attend the wedding, and the rest of the boys announced they would sit it out with her. “Sharon and I were unable to make a logical, collected decision as to how to handle the whole issue,” Anthony recalled. In their confusion, he and Sharon decided to keep themselves virtually incommunicado from Patti and the other boys.
When the wedding was celebrated, Jerry stood as his son’s best man, but Rae was the only other family member in attendance. At the precise hour that the service was being held in Las Vegas, Patti and the other boys went to dinner at Chasen’s in Beverly Hills and toasted the absent newlyweds with champagne. Afterward, the Hollywood rumor mill viciously reported that the estranged Lewis boys and their mother had spent Anthony’s wedding night celebrating their solidarity in rebuffing Jerry, but as Patti admitted later, “the truth is, I was crying.”
In the aftermath of this calamity, Anthony and Sharon became favorites of Jerry’s. “Sharon and I were always with Dad and had a very good time together,” Anthony remembered. They had their first child, Kimberly, in March 1982, and she appeared with her grandfather in magazine and newspaper photographs and articles. But Patti was denied access to the child altogether. For at least a year after the baby was born, Patti was so thoroughly spurned by Anthony and Sharon that she became active in lobbying Congress for federal legislation to mandate visitation rights for grandparents. Democratic Congressman Mario Biaggi of New York was trying to introduce federal legislation of a type that already existed in forty-two states, and Patti contacted him to support his efforts.
As it turned out, Biaggi was glad for Patti’s help because, among other things, she had become something of a nationally recognized figure since her divorce. As a visible member of a group known as LADIES (“Life After Divorce Is Eventually Sane”), she spent her days making public the plight of late-life divorcées such as herself. The group had been founded in the early 1980s by Michael Landon’s former wife, and it ranks had swelled over the years to include ex-wives of such performers as Ken Berry, George Segal, Buddy Ebsen, Erik Estrada, Leonard Nimoy, Flip Wilson, Don Knotts, and Glen Campbell. That these women had been party to high-profile marriages no doubt made their cause attractive to the media; Patti made several appearances on daytime talk shows, including one taped the very afternoon she and Jerry signed their final divorce papers. But it was also true that in a culture that was aging demographically and more prone than ever to divorce, her cause was of interest to millions. The group dedicated itself to easing the burden of older divorcées by recommending attorneys who were supportive of women’s needs, by directing people to counseling and therapy, and by forming a network among organizations that offered older divorcées assistance. They even provided for a novel kind of buddy system: When a member of the organization appeared in court as part of her divorce proceedings, someone else from the group would show up as well. They counseled one another through such pains as their ex-husbands’ highly publicized new marriages and helped each other deal with their greatly diminished financial resources.
Despite its obvious potential to be a conduit for feelings of antagonism or even revenge, LADIES was more like a spiritual organization dedicated to mutual support, the rebuilding of members’ self-esteem, and the setting of an example for women undergoing divorces from less famous men. Patti spoke on live and televised religious programs and in front of such national organizations as Displaced Homemakers. Although she had always been spiritually inclined, her work with LADIES brought her closer than ever to the sources of her faith.
She certainly needed it—she had very little in the way of material recompense to show for her thirty-six-year marriage. In 1983 she was forced to put the Bel Air house on the market. Asking $7.5 million for a house in something less than pristine condition, she had to wait nearly three years before she sold it, afterward buying a smaller home in nearby Westwood and filling it with the mementoes she and Jerry had accumulated on St. Cloud Drive.
She wasn’t the only Lewis displaced after Jerry’s heart attack and remarriage, however. When their father’s ill health pulled most of the boys back toward him, Anthony found himself shunted aside. “Since then,” he reflected, “things have been generally amenable but sporadic.” He and his wife reconciled with Patti, who was finally given the chance to meet her grandchildren. “All three of us have crossed that line between love and contempt,” Anthony explained, “and realized how distasteful it is on the other side.”
There was one last family postscript to Jerry’s second wedding. On the very weekend that Jerry and SanDee went to Key Biscayne, Rae Lewis entered a hospital in Las Vegas complaining of chest pains. Her heart was failing. She held on for two weeks, then finally lost her struggle on February 25. Danny had been gone for two years. Just as she’d spent her life sticking by him even when it meant leaving her only child behind, she was buried by his side in the desert.