Like many stories, this one begins with a mystery—a secret identity.
As every article, book, encyclopedia entry, press release, or other account of his life would have it, Jerry Lewis was born Joseph Levitch on March 16, 1926, at Clinton Private Hospital in Newark, New Jersey.
The 1982 autobiography Jerry Lewis in Person states that Danny and Rae Levitch (who used the stage name Lewis) gave their only child the name Joseph in honor of the boy’s maternal grandfather, following the Ashkenazi tradition of naming a newborn child after a recently deceased relative. That boy chose the name Jerry Lewis, the book explains, when he quit school at the age of sixteen to enter show business—Lewis after his father’s stage name, Jerry because he didn’t want to be confused with the comic Joe E. Lewis or the heavyweight champion Joe Louis.
So for decades, the name Jerry Lewis has been presented to the public as a guise, masking the child Joseph Levitch beneath it. But the Newark, New Jersey, Bureau of Vital Statistics has no record of a Joseph Levitch, or Lewis, being born on March 16, 1926. What it does have, however, is record of one Jerome Levitch, born to Daniel Levitch and Rae Brodsky on that date. Although everyone knew him as Joseph or Joey when he was growing up, and although he would jokingly bill himself as Joe Levitch in cameo bits decades later, his name was properly Jerry from the day of his birth.
The matter of Jerry Lewis’s real name is no earth-shattering revelation, but it does raise the slippery question of personal identity in this life of shifting guises. And it further suggests the difficulty in establishing a sure chronicle of the comedian’s young life. Lewis has always depicted his childhood as a desperate, neurotic struggle with abandonment, friendlessness, deprivation, and Nazis, turning his early life into a kind of explanation of the strange course of his career. But the person upon whom the burden of that childhood fell—Joey Levitch—was, in more than one sense, a fictional character. In effect, Jerry’s recollections of his own childhood can’t always be trusted; not only is their protagonist someone who never exactly existed, but like many public figures, he has given so many contradictory accounts of it that there’s little that’s known for sure.
The most complete tellings of Jerry’s life up until now—Richard Gehman’s That Kid (1964), Arthur Marx’s Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime (Especially Himself) (1973), and Robert Benayoun’s Bonjour, Monsieur Lewis (1973)—rely on a single, highly inexact source for the comic’s early biography: a 1957 article in Look magazine that Jerry “wrote” with Bill Davidson entitled “I’ve Always Been Scared.” As with the name Joseph Levitch, a little probing casts doubts on many of the details in that article.
Take one incident as an example. In Look Jerry told Davidson that the death of Sarah Rothberg, his maternal grandmother and the woman who raised him, was the most horrible episode of his young life. Sarah had been immobilized by a diabetic condition that had caused an infection in her leg. She was taken to Irvington General Hospital, just up the hill from her home, and emergency surgery was performed. From the kitchen of her empty house, a preteen Jerry could see the blue light outside the operating room—a signal used by the hospital to let people know that surgery was in progress.
Davidson records Jerry’s dramatic memory of that evening: “Then, suddenly, the blue light went out. I rushed to the phone and called the hospital. I asked the operator at the hospital, ‘Could you please tell me the condition of my grandmother, Mrs. Rothberg?’ The operator said, ‘Your grandmother just expired, sir.’ I said, ‘But I don’t know what that means. Does it mean she’s all right?’ The operator asked, ‘How old are you, sir?’ I replied, ‘I’m eleven.’ She said, ‘I’m sorry, son, but your grandmother just passed away.’”
Powerful stuff. But compare it with Jerry’s next account of the event, the one he gave in his autobiography twenty-five years later. In that version, the blue surgery light on the third floor of the hospital has transformed into “a red light … above the emergency entrance.” When the frightened boy called the hospital, he used not the name of her then-husband, Sam Rothberg, but rather her first married name, Brodsky. And the tragedy transpired, so he said, in the weeks following his bar mitzvah, when he would’ve been thirteen, not eleven.
So when did Sarah Rothberg die? According to another of her grandsons, Marshall Katz, it was sometime after the autumn of 1940, when Jerry was at least fourteen. Katz was overseas in the army when his grandmother died; his family didn’t even tell him about her passing until he returned home after the war, so worried were they about how he might take the blow. And when did Katz enlist? “October 20, 1940,” he recalled immediately when asked more than fifty years later. “I’ll never forget that date.”
Of course, there are roots to Jerry’s story buried so deep that only their vague outlines are clear. Among them are his family’s in the steppes of the Ukraine.
Jerry’s family, like those of so many of his Jewish peers in the entertainment business, was part of the mass migration of Eastern European Jews to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Russia’s Czar Alexander III, long annoyed by the presence of unassimilated Jews in his country, loosed his troops on their villages in 1881. The Jews took to their heels, and many of those who made it found their heels led them to America. Along with Jews from Poland, Romania, and Austria-Hungary, they teemed across the ocean for decades until a beleaguered United States finally shut the door to prevent the onslaught of immigration caused by World War I.
It was no trickle. In the forty years preceding 1880, fewer than forty-two thousand Russians were admitted to the United States; in the four decades following the pogroms of 1881, more than 3.25 million Russian immigrants sought refuge on American soil, the vast majority of them Jews. As it had to the members of British sects in the seventeenth century, America promised religious freedom and a fresh economic start to persecuted Jews. Most were peasants with little formal education and a way of life that hadn’t changed appreciably in centuries. They came not in search of opportunity but out of desperation. And they flew toward the light with only the vaguest conception of the world to which they were headed.
The well-worn tales of immigrant passage—the larcenous shipping agents, the miserable, typhus-ridden boats, the anti-Semitism of Ellis Island inspectors, the shock of freedom in a nation more modern than anything they’d known—were told around tables on both sides of Jerry’s family. Hannah and Morris Levitch, Jerry’s paternal grandparents, arrived in the United States from Russia in 1897, a letter from a Jewish immigrant aid association in hand. Jerry’s maternal grandparents, Joseph and Sarah Brodsky, had been literally chased out of their Russian village during the anti-Semitic massacres of 1903, hieing to America with their young daughters, Jean and Rose, in tow.
The two couples fit perfectly the typical immigrant mold: young, married, capable of skilled labor (the Brodskys were tailors), and seeking permanent settlement in America. Additionally, they possessed a certain level of cultural refinement. Morris Levitch, a gnomish man with a devotion to scripture, was remembered by his grandson Jerry as a vintner and by Jerry’s wife, Patti, as a rabbi; Joseph Brodsky had a lifelong dream of becoming a concert pianist and eventually installed an upright Steinway in his house so his children could share his passion.
Like countless new arrivals before them, the Levitches and the Brodskys settled into Jewish neighborhoods in large eastern cities. The Levitches found a home in New York City’s Lower East Side, the Brodskys in Newark’s Prince Street district. In these crowded environments, both couples flourished. The Levitches had two children: Daniel, born in 1902, and then a daughter, Gertrude. The Brodskys added two more girls: Rachel (“Rae”) in 1904 and then Elizabeth, whom the family always knew as “Buhddie” (which rhymes with “goody”). Eventually, both families were able to leave the hard streets of the inner cities for the relative comforts of outlying boroughs. The Levitches moved to the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1904, settling at 73 Grafton Street; the Brodskys moved to Weequeeg in Newark, a district of working-class Jewish families (it would one day produce the writer Philip Roth), and later to Irvington, another Jewish neighborhood even farther removed from the railroad flats of the city.
The Brownsville of Daniel Levitch’s childhood was much like the familiar Lower East Side of Manhattan: streets filled with pushcarts, trolleys, peddlers, and urchins, ethnic Jewish shops, and storefront synagogues with signs in Yiddish and English. Danny attended P.S. 156—a fact that casts some doubt on Patti Lewis’s memory that Danny’s father was a rabbi. Danny was certainly no scholar; by the time he was of high school age, he’d quit school entirely. He worked a string of jobs on Pitkin Avenue, Brownsville’s main artery, and with neither business contacts nor scholastic ambitions, he ambled into a wide-open future.
At the very least, he knew he didn’t want to follow his father’s path. Morris Levitch spent his days toiling in a basement, crushing grapes to make sweet kosher wine, which he sold by the glass and jug to other Old World Jews who’d made the disorienting passage to America. In the remote obscurity of the Ukraine, Morris’s was probably a noble profession; five miles from Times Square, it must have seemed to his Americanized son like oblivion.
Danny would have to look elsewhere for a horizon, and soon enough he found it. The story goes like this: One day he bought a ticket to a local vaudeville house and was thunderstruck. Danny Levitch saw his own future, and it was wearing blackface. What he’d seen was a performance by Al Jolson, and instantly he knew what he wanted to do with his life.
So many decades have passed, so many fashions in the entertainment business have bloomed and shriveled, that it might seem ludicrous to us that a hale and capable young man would find himself drawn to Jolson as a role model. But in the late 1910s Jolson was absolutely the most dynamic and successful act in the business. And he had enormous appeal for show-biz aspirants of backgrounds similar to his own.
Jolson was himself an immigrant, born Asa Yoelson in Lithuania in 1886. His father, Rabbi Moshe Reuben Yoelson, left the family for America in the late 1880s; when he’d secured a position with a congregation in Washington, D.C., he sent for them all to join him. Asa was seven when he made the grueling journey.
Like Jacob Rabinowitz, the character he played in The Jazz Singer, Jolson was brought up in a household that clung to Old World traditions and looked with skepticism on entertainment as a means of livelihood. But unlike Rabinowitz (who anglicized his name to Jack Robin), Jolson never attempted to tread a fine line between his father’s world of piety and his own of greasepaint, chorus girls, and footlights. He was a whole-hog performer, not just a trouper but show-biz incarnate.
Once he’d become a star, the traditional bounds of the entertainment media of the day couldn’t contain him. Stout and virile, with a warbling voice and a vibrant whistle, Jolson dominated every stage he took. His Broadway shows were loosely constructed, allowing him maximum leeway for comic improvisations, interpolated songs, encores of well-received numbers, even extemporaneous forays into and conversations with the audience. He would literally exhaust the crowd: taking requests, ad-libbing lyrics to popular songs to reflect the mood of the evening, teasing people who went to the bathroom. His bottomless store of energy and unmitigated desire to please his audience angered his fellow entertainers, none of whom could face a crowd after Jolson had wrung it dry for an hour.
The management of Broadway’s Winter Garden Theater, home to Jolson’s greatest successes, built a runway to extend the stage out into the orchestra seats to bring Jolson even closer to his audience. Penetrating the crowd on this ramp, Jolson generated an aura of excitement unlike any the business had known before. It’s easy to read into Jolson’s freneticism a desperation to assimilate, to join the gentile mass of the New World. Jolson’s success on stage, screen, radio, and phonograph was a triumph unimaginable for the son of an Orthodox clergyman. Asa Yoelson had won over the goyim, and so long as he could caper up and down that magical riser, he could be a celebrant at his own acceptance into American society. The applause of American audiences scoured the Old World from his skin, and he emerged as a new kind of performer, a fully assimilated Jewish American Prince of Show Biz.
Jolson dazzled audiences of all ethnic compositions, but his act was especially appealing to Jews. They knew that the immigrant story—a primal upheaval early in life followed by a long quest for acceptance by a large, suspicious public—was at the core of Jolson’s hunger for applause. Jolson’s career became a kind of hallmark of the American Jewish experience, especially in the eyes of those who followed him to the stage. A throng of important Jewish show people emerged soon after Jolson: Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker, George Jessel, George Burns, Fanny Brice, the Marx Brothers, the Ritz Brothers, Jack Benny, and Milton Berle most famous among them. (Even a Lebanese Christian like Detroit’s Danny Thomas, who grew up among Jews, was sucked up by Jolie’s example, breaking in as a Yiddish dialect comic.) Like Jolson—and decidedly unlike their immigrant and first-generation contemporaries who forged Jewish-American intellectual or social traditions—they only wanted to make people happy.
In this light, the Eastern European Jews practically invented mainstream American entertainment. It’s a remarkable accomplishment: As immigrants, as peasants, as Jews, they had a seemingly impossible triptych of hurdles to overcome in trying to win over American audiences. But they relied on resiliency, on brashness, and on traditions of music, humor, and folk culture to separate themselves from the other ethnic groups choking the grittier sections of American cities. Some of their gumption was no doubt born of the bitter difficulties of ghetto life; given the constant rebuffs show people confront early in their careers, only the thickest-skinned hopefuls are likely ever to tough it out. And as they did businessmen, boxers, and gangsters, mean tenement streets inevitably bred scrappy entertainers.
This chain of success stories has a specifically Jewish character. None of the other immigrant groups who arrived in the United States at the time—the Irish, the Italians, the Scandinavians, the Asians—produced so many entertainers. Show business was, in a way, in the blood of the Jews: The shtetl culture of Eastern European Jewry placed a high value on entertainment, and on jesters, clowns, and fools in particular. The shtetl produced a variety of archetypes that evolved into standbys of American entertainment: joking fiddlers, absent-minded wise men, stumbling schlemiels. There was even a type of fool with a ritual status—the badchen, a cultured clown who would turn up at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and brisses, pronounce a sober benediction on the proceedings, and then spend the rest of the day entertaining guests with zany antics (a prototype of the Borscht Belt night club emcee and, later, the Labor Day telethon host). A Jewish court jester, the badchen provided shtetl culture with a connection to the absurd and the irrational. And the immigrants retained this sense of irony even as they neglected to bring the badchen with them to the New World. They never forgot the healing properties of humor, which accounts, in part, for the relative legitimacy of entertainment as a career choice in the Jewish community. Indeed, aside from the black community, which birthed an equally dazzling stream of popular entertainers in the 1930s and ’40s, no other minority group has ever produced so many first-rung entertainers in so short a span of time. And Al Jolson was the master of their chosen profession.
Danny Levitch was consumed by the excitement of Jolson’s act. He learned Jolson songs, he practiced Jolson-style vocals, he imitated Jolson stage mannerisms, inapt though they may have been for his athletic, eighteen-year-old physique. Adopting the stage name Danny Lewis, he began to audition for agents in their offices. The agents liked what they saw—somewhat. He got bookings not at the Winter Garden but at kiddy shows, weddings, beer garden parties. He entertained schoolchildren as they waited in line for smallpox vaccinations. He was eager to please and to keep working. Pulling in five or ten dollars a shot, he kept his head above water.
They were rollicking times—Danny dove headfirst into the world of all-night cafeterias, flimsy dressing rooms, agents’ offices, bars, and of course, show women. He was a handsome young man, hearty and confident, with strong arms and a long-jawed, pleasantly equine face. He wore his hair slicked and short in the manner of the day, but there are photos where a wild forelock gives him a strikingly knavish air.
And he was something of a dude; family members vividly recall his fondness for clothes and jewelry. “I don’t remember ever seeing him without a tie on,” said a nephew, “even if he was just visiting my aunt’s house.” Danny’s eye for fashion became a family joke, even popping up in one of his son’s films. Watching Jerry teach an actor in The Errand Boy to admire another man’s suit using Danny’s exact mannerisms, Marshall Katz, then working for his cousin, warned him, “You’re gonna get it for this!”
But despite sporting the trappings of success, Danny couldn’t get enough gigs to sustain a full-time career as an entertainer. So he picked up a daytime sideline. In 1922 he began peddling sheet music for Fred Fischer, Inc., the Times Square music publisher. In the days before radio and the phonograph, the measure of a song’s popularity was the number of printed copies it sold to people who wanted to play it at home. Danny would hit his route with Fischer’s most recent stuff, putting it across with a combination of rakish good looks, confident salesmanship, and enthusiastic singing.
Among Danny’s regular stops was an S. S. Kresge store on Market Street in Newark. To help push the sheet music, the store had hired a pianist, a young girl who could play on sight anything a customer wanted to hear. She wasn’t beautiful by today’s standards—she was a bit on the zaftig side, in the way men of her generation preferred—but she had a dark, voluptuous air about her, with thick, long hair and deep eyes. You get the feeling that photos don’t quite convey her charm, although one, showing her on a boat deck, reveals an appealing sauciness that probably stood out in an era of imposed demureness and gentility.
As Jerry recalled it, they met cute. Danny, with his eye for the ladies, noticed the pianist immediately when he wandered into the store in the spring of 1923. He coolly selected from his sample case Fischer’s 1917 hit “They Go Wild, Simply Wild Over Me” and sang it to her as she played. During the bridge, he whistled an improvisation along the edge of his business card. It was a peach of a come-on, and the pianist was swept up in it. Her name was Rachel Brodsky. She was nineteen years old.
Danny and Rachel went out for almost two years. Given Danny’s line of work and his slick manner, this lengthy courtship serves as a demonstration of his honorable intentions; in fact, if family legends can be trusted, he was crazy about her. According to Jerry, Danny would call Rachel from Brooklyn, tell her that he was in Newark, and ask if she was free to see him. If the answer was yes, he’d say he needed some time to wrap up his business, then zip across two rivers to pick her up.
Eager as Danny was to get serious, Rachel wasn’t so sure. Her father had died in 1922, leaving his family of girls little money. There was one precious legacy, however: a piano. Of all the sisters, Rachel had the greatest ability with the instrument, and enough gumption to do something with her talent. When she got the job at Kresge’s, she was able to move out of her mother’s apartment above Joseph’s dress shop and rent a flat on nearby Bergen Street. She was unusually practical and worldly, an independent young woman not likely to be carried off by the first salesman who could produce a melody on a square of cardboard.
Rachel dated other men, among them Jimmy Ritz, the middle Ritz brother. Though Rachel didn’t run in entertainment circles, it’s possible that Danny introduced the two of them; Danny had met the Ritz Brothers when they shared the bill at the Half Moon Café in Coney Island, and Rachel might have attended one of those shows. In later years, Jimmy would never let Jerry forget his brief fling with Rachel. Jerry recalled, “He’d say to me, ‘I never touched her,’ and he’d tease me and say, ‘You could be my kid,’ or ‘My illegitimate son, Jerry.’ He, Harry, and Al teased the shit out of me.”
Despite the competition, Danny continued to pursue Rachel with a combination of gentlemanliness and suavity. On one of their chaste afternoon outings, according to their son, he could contain himself no longer. He stole a kiss as they walked along the street—and got a smack for his trouble. In the fracas, Rachel broke her necklace, scattering the beads on the ground. Danny, abashed, apologized while helping her recover her things, then sheepishly walked her to her apartment. She must have spent the time considering her feelings for the man she’d so embarrassed, because when they arrived at her house, she abruptly announced, “I now accept the fact that we should be engaged.” In January 1925 they were married.
In the Old World, Rachel and her dowry, such as it was, would have been packed off to the Levitch house in Brooklyn. But this was America, and Rachel’s widowed mother commanded the young couple’s loyalty. They set up house in Newark, where Rachel’s older sister Rose had already married Harry Katz and begun her own family of three children: Marshall, Judy, and Natalie. Buhddie was there as well, going with Bernie Weisenthal, whom she eventually married. Jean, the eldest sister, was the only one not living in the neighborhood. She’d moved with her husband, Barney Epstein, to Brooklyn, where she remained, childless, until her nephew’s success brought the Brodsky sisters and their families to California.
In Newark, Danny continued his attempt to break through in show business, with mixed success. Fortunately for him, his new hometown supported a small entertainment world of its own that was easier to crack. Adding a bit of broad comedy to his song-and-dance act, he found work as an emcee at the burlesque houses that thrived in eastern cities during the 1920s. Newark was also near the Jewish resort communities of the Catskill Mountains and the Jersey shore, where even second-rung entertainers were in demand. And when Danny’s agent could get him better work, he headed across the Hudson to Manhattan, where he once shared the stage of the Irving Plaza Theater with song-and-dance man Robert Alda.
So even though Newark wasn’t the big time, it offered Danny work in a viable regional vaudeville and burlesque industry, allowing him at the same time to cash in on the tremendous demand for entertainment in nearby resorts. In the summer and during the winter holidays he’d hit the hotels, with Rae joining him as a rehearsal pianist and, it would seem, chaperon. Though a newlywed, Danny was still a dashing young man; in his bearing and wardrobe there would always be a hint of the roué, and Rae more than anyone knew he could lay on the charm. She would follow him on the road as long as he was on it, even though she grew to dislike the piano so much that relatives recalled she would play at family gatherings rarely and reluctantly.
Given Rae’s habit of traveling with Danny, it’s likely that one of Danny’s summer bookings brought Jerry into the world, that at some now-forgotten hotel engagement in the summer of 1925 Danny and Rae conceived their only child. Following this logic, the child born Jerome Levitch, the boy who became Jerry Lewis, is literally a Borscht Belt baby, who got his biological start in the mountains that years later would serve as a launching pad for his career.
When her son was still very young, Rae Lewis returned to work, taking whatever engagements her agent, Arthur Lyons, could secure for her. She played in cocktail lounges, on Newark’s WOR radio station (one of the largest in the nation at the time), and on the road with her husband. Jerry, as a result, was left in the charge of Rae’s sisters and mother for evenings, weekends, and even longer stretches of time.
“I was a CARE package child,” Jerry said, describing his nomadic existence as the child of scrambling entertainers. “I’m sure there were people who had rougher beginnings, but as I look back I can’t imagine that that’s true. I’m talking about violent death, poverty, hunger, and inability to equate where I live now to why I’m going to live with an aunt Tuesday, now with my grandmother, traveling back and forth. It was devastating.”
He recalled being trundled about on the road—the Catskills, small eastern cities, South Jersey shore resorts. He napped in cheap hotels and dressing rooms. He was baby-sat by hotel maids. He had no regular playmates. And most commonly, he was left with relatives while his parents raced off to engagements.
Only two or three facts about Jerry Lewis convey his character as completely as this one. The wheedling, whining, cringing, puppy-dog-on-speed-and-helium character that brought him fame; the struggling earnestness with which he dives into a song or executes a bit of soft-shoe patter on a live stage—these are hallmarks of a man conditioned to pleading for attention. As Jerry himself explained in the late 1960s: “An audience is nothing more than eight or nine hundred mamas and papas clapping their hands and saying, ‘Good boy, baby.’ That’s all. You’ll find that people who had enough ‘Good boy, baby,’ from their actual parents rarely turn to comedy.”
Jerry filled his autobiography with confessions of the pain he felt when left alone by his parents. Danny and Rae left their son with Hannah and Morris Levitch in the fall of 1931, with Rae’s mother in the fall of 1932 and the winters of 1936 and 1938, with Rae’s sister Jean in Brooklyn in the summer of 1940.
Summer and winter recesses were relatively happy times. Jerry and his folks were together at resort hotels or, in one memorable instance, on a burlesque tour. But the school year was murder. Jerry lived with a constant fear that his delicate sense of household stability would suddenly shatter. At any moment, he knew, the phone could ring and Danny could be called off to a faraway gig.
“What I felt then, as much as anything, was the difference between me and the other kids,” he reflected, “the need to know what a mother and a father surrounded by children were all about.” He would cheerfully insinuate himself into his classmate’s households, arriving early in the morning to walk with them to school in hopes that he would be invited in for breakfast: “not for the food, but only because I could be around a family.”
Even the other kids in the neighborhood, young as they were, recognized that something was unusual about the Lewis household. “I remember my mother explaining that Jerry’s parents were traveling a lot,” recalled Leon Charash, a childhood playmate of Jerry’s and a future member of the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s scientific advisory board. “And I remember thinking how unusual it was that his mother worked and that when he came home from school she wasn’t there. Very few mothers worked in our neighborhood, even though it was the Depression.”
The sight of skinny young Jerry on their doorsteps while they were trying to get their own kids off to school must have made these other women extremely suspicious of Rae and Danny. The fact that Jerry was an only child does suggest a reluctance to be burdened with family on Danny and Rae’s part, but Jewish families of the era weren’t large compared with average American families. And there were obvious economic reasons. Given Danny’s commitment to show biz and his resulting low income, Rae had to work. She had neither time nor, likely, inclination to fill her home with children. Furthermore, several people who knew Danny suggested that Rae went on the road with her husband to stay his wandering eye; a larger family would certainly have curtailed her surveillance.
Whatever the reason for their small family, it’s certain that money was tight. Danny kept sufficiently busy that the family never went on relief or suffered an eviction, and no one recalled Danny’s being pressured to take up a more dependable line of work. “If that pressure came,” said Marshall Katz, “it came from his family, not Rae’s.” But he was never a great provider. In 1929 Danny’s shaky career prospects received a double blow: the Great Depression, which all but dissolved the American family’s entertainment budget, and the advent of the talkies, which began inevitably to suck the vitality from the live venues that were Danny’s bread and butter. Jerry always gave Danny credit for trying hard—“If he made sixty dollars, he sent forty-five to my mother.” But at the same time he couldn’t hide his pain when recalling his family’s modest financial condition: “They were poor and couldn’t help leaving me alone. But I’m supersensitive, and it killed me.”
Jerry was no street urchin, but he lacked many of the little luxuries most of the kids in his working-class neighborhood had—a rocking horse, a bike, new school clothes each fall. Danny and Rae never owned their own home; they rented apartments until Jerry bought them a house in the late 1940s. The apartment where the Lewises lived throughout the ’30s was the nearest thing their son ever knew to a fixed address, and when he went out on the road as a teenager, Dan and Rae relinquished even that. They moved into a hotel in Times Square, further proof that they saw themselves more as show people than parents.
Nevertheless, they did have a child, and it’s worth examining how they raised him. Their frequent absences resulted not only in their son’s legitimate anxieties but also in a sporadic attendance record that hampered him in his schoolwork; when he dropped out of school at sixteen, they didn’t stop him. Later on in life, Danny was often noted to bear himself with coolness and even jealousy toward his son’s success, and Rachel was known to be possessive of Jerry, harboring a thinly veiled antagonism toward his wife and even his children. As Patti Lewis recalled, “When Jerry’s folks came to our home, they showed little affection for the boys, who were given a quick, impersonal kiss before being relegated to the background.” This was a couple, it seems, that just did not care for children; more’s the pity, then, that Danny and Rae had a child, and that they had so little apparent concern for his comfort, happiness, or security.
In Jerry’s fondest recollections of his mom and dad, he is most often a spectator, watching them perform onstage or enjoy themselves among friends and family; rarely does he speak of interacting with them. There were occasions when the family did things together—Danny would take Jerry out to see vaudeville, burlesque, and legitimate performances (including the Yiddish theater) and critique the acts for his son—but Jerry’s own words make it clear that he wished he could have had more to do with them. If his ambivalence toward his parents as an adult doesn’t prove that—producer Perry Cross actually banned Danny from the set of Jerry’s TV series in 1963 because of the funk into which the comedian would lapse after his dad’s visits—then his headlong desire for a career like theirs certainly does. Not only did he crave the chance to act out his insecurity in a cathartic display, but he also felt he had to do so in the very field that drew his mom and dad away from him. When he was old enough to choose a path for himself, he turned to show business as a way of creating a family for himself.
There’s a photo of four-year-old Jerry lolling in the Catskill sun with Rae and Danny. They look beatific, full of youth and vigor. But the photo takes on a more melancholy aspect when you consider how infrequent such moments were. Though Jerry wasn’t an orphan, he was often made to feel like one, and in his on-again-off-again relationship with his parents can be found the origins of his thin skin, his eager manner, his quickness to tears or anger. Many people have survived worse childhoods with less obvious scars, but Jerry came out of his with these.
Among the caretakers with whom Danny and Rae left their son, none was relied on more often than Rae’s mother, Sarah, a woman who’d been driven from Russia by cossacks, crossed an ocean to an alien land, raised two families, and made a home while running a dressmaking business. If anyone could handle the extra work, it was she. It’s nearly certain that Dan and Rae set roots, however shallowly, in Irvington because they could rent an apartment around the corner from this always-available baby-sitter.
Sarah’s children were all grown by the late 1920s; by the time of Jerry’s birth, she’d been widowed and had married a second husband: Sam Rothberg, himself a widower and father of three. Rothberg was a tanner, a strong, loud man with a taste for spirits. His new wife’s grandchildren called him Uncle. Like Morris Levitch, Rothberg made wine in his basement, though his was strictly for his own consumption. He was hearty. He wore a mustache. And he scared the hell out of Jerry.
Jerry remembered Rothberg as a drunken bully who commanded obedience at the dinner table and once struck Sarah in front of her children and grandchildren. Some of Sarah’s other grandchildren recalled Rothberg without contempt, but Jerry spent more time under the man’s roof than his cousins and probably saw more of his temper than they did. Perhaps genuinely frightened by Rothberg’s ugly behavior, perhaps envious of Rothberg’s proximity to his grandmother, Jerry felt a profound hostility toward his stepgrandfather, to the point where he dreamed of murdering Rothberg with a kitchen knife. Even in his most secure childhood haven, he felt besieged.
Through it all, however, Grandma Sarah remained Jerry’s great love. In his autobiography he wrote in glowing terms of his maternal grandmother, “the love of my life.” “I trusted her with my life, under any circumstances,” he wrote of his “tenderhearted grandma, the most understanding soul you’ll ever find in this vast and foolish world.” The book holds no such words for the comic’s parents, wives, or children. To little Jerry, Grandma Sarah was the heart of the world.
Sarah Rothberg was the perfect Eastern European Jewish grandma. Stoutly built, with a long, wide nose, she wore her hair in a heart-shaped bun. Jerry remembered her in flower print dresses; likely she made them herself. She cooked traditional Ashkenazi meals: briskets, chickens, kugels, and latkes, a thick veneer of schmaltz—chicken fat—glazing it all. She spoke accented English with liberal splashes of Yiddish, kept a kosher home, and worked hard both at her housekeeping and at her dressmaking.
Sarah’s house at 63 Rutgers Street in Irvington was the nearest thing to a genuine home that Jerry ever knew. Sarah and Sam Rothberg had bought the large wood frame house across the street from Union Avenue School in the mid-1920s. Before long, the Lewises, Katzes, and Weisenthals also moved into the neighborhood, the latter two couples moving into their own houses while Rae and Danny took an apartment at 396 Union Avenue, just a block or so away.
Jerry remembered the Rutgers Street house so warmly that it was the only one of his childhood homes that he described in his autobiography. He recalled Joseph Brodsky’s piano, the metal kitchen table with the chipped edge, the big Majestic radio. Jerry would spend hours listening to the radio with his grandmother, sometimes napping beneath her sewing table while she pedaled away into the night. And he hid behind the couch, weeping over the absence of his parents. Even around Grandma Sarah, he couldn’t shake the feeling that his parents didn’t want him.
Difficult as it must have been for him to be shunted about, he might have fared better had he been raised wholly by relatives. He enjoyed being around Danny’s parents in Brooklyn, for instance. Morris and Hannah Levitch seem, like Sarah Rothberg, to have been more loving toward the boy than his own parents. Visiting their home as a five-year-old, Jerry overheard Hannah tell Rachel, “Your son will not only be just an actor—but a great actor.” Indeed, the Levitches had no hesitation about packing their grandson off to the movies, where he might catch the same bug that drove his father into such a wayward life. In the autumn of 1931, with Dan and Rae off on the road, the Levitches sent Jerry to the Loew’s Pitkin with a dime and a paper bag lunch to see Charlie Chaplin in The Circus.
Jerry wrote that this was his first filmgoing experience, and if it was, it’s almost impossibly apt. The 1928 silent feature is, like Chaplin’s later Limelight, a seminal essay on the nature of comic performance. Chaplin plays a bumbling handyman who’s about to get fired from a circus when audiences begin paying more attention to his cloddish shenanigans on the fringes of the big top than to the main acts. The circus owner keeps him on—without telling him he’s a hit. Chaplin wants to be a clown in the main ring, but he can’t perform when he’s prompted to act funny. Nevertheless, events conspire to make a star of him, even though he can get laughs only by overextending himself in unpredictable, spontaneous ways. It was just the sort of story Jerry himself would make again and again in his solo career decades later. As a mere five-year-old, he sat in that Brownsville theater—perhaps the very building in which his father had fallen under Jolson’s sway—watching entranced and thinking to himself, “I can do it! I can be a clown.”
Back home in Irvington, in the intermittent care of his mom and dad, he had few such pleasant epiphanies. More typically, Jerry remembered events like the night he flew through the streets of Irvington in a frightened frenzy at his parents’ absence. He was about six or seven. Dan was on tour; Rae was playing piano in a cocktail lounge in Irvington. Sitting alone in the kitchen waiting for his mother to come home, Jerry grew more and more scared. “They don’t love me,” he thought. “They don’t care. They never will.” He bolted out into the autumn night in hopes of finding his mother.
Running up Chancellor Avenue, Irvington’s main street, Jerry peered into restaurants and saloons looking for Rachel, finally coming across the crowded tavern where she was playing. He rushed in. Years later, he recalled “a garish brightness. The sound of music and raucous laughter in the near distance … a foul smelling rush of whiskey and beer, the tobacco smoke cutting into my lungs.” (In the Look article, Jerry contended that the experience gave him an aversion to alcohol, but there’s no evidence that he ever systematically abstained from drinking; he certainly smoked cigarettes well into his fifties and drank for at least a decade after that.)
Picture the scene from a patron’s point of view: The cocktail pianist’s little boy comes crying into the bar looking for his mommy. It’s an appalling image. Rachel was shocked to see her son; she picked him up, said a few words to the proprietor, and hustled into the street, crying as she walked home. For his part, Jerry was still scared out of his mind. He tried to explain himself, tried to sound contrite even in his relief. His mother softened: “Her arms came around me. There was a momentary embrace and a kiss.” Relief flooded over the little boy: “She loved me. They both loved me. What a wonderful feeling.”
Throughout his youth, incidents like this made Jerry feel tied to an emotional pendulum. His parents didn’t love him; his parents adored him. They fled him; they brought him along on exciting trips. He would always recall lying awake in bed far into the night waiting for the sounds of Rachel’s heels on the linoleum, listening to the comforting sounds of jingling coins as she emptied her tip money into a jar in the kitchen. But he would also recall episodes of abandonment, loneliness, and yearning, the feeling that made him do whatever he could to receive that elusive maternal kiss.
Jerry’s youth wasn’t all a horror show, of course. Brightest among his memories were the times he traveled with Dan and Rae as they worked the resorts or toured the burlesque and vaudeville circuits. There was the summer of 1932, for instance, when Dan and Rae landed a plum job. At the height of the Great Depression, they got a ten-week engagement at the President Hotel in Swan Lake, New York. Doubling up at other resorts nearby, they reckoned they could take in about two thousand dollars for the season, half of which would go to room and board at the President.
It was an idyllic summer—swimming, softball, hiking, bike riding. But whatever else he did that summer, Jerry was always on hand in the hotel casino when his parents rehearsed. It was heaven. Not only could he be around Danny and Rae at their happiest, but he had a chance to see a whole variety of acts practice their routines. Jerry was exposed to a gamut of show-biz métiers, and he got the even more valuable chance to see the performers working on their bits before the show. He recalled being “enveloped in some kind of curious rapture … wishing all the while that one day soon I would be performing on stage just like them.”
It was during this summer that Jerry’s first foray on the stage took place. Danny had been performing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney’s Depression tearjerker, and Jerry had diligently learned the song by watching his dad day after day. He urged his folks to let him sing it onstage, and they took the occasion of a benefit for the local Fireman’s Association as a chance to appease him. (The notion of a Jewish resort hotel helping raise money for firefighters in a region where Jewish hotel owners were forever accused, often justly, of burning their properties for insurance money—a practice that gave birth to the phrase “Jewish lightning”—is almost too ironic as is the idea that Jerry made his performing debut during a charity event.)
For years, Jerry’s official press materials gave a detailed account of this performance—Jerry stepping onstage to the surprise of his parents, the orchestra unable to play in Jerry’s small-boy’s key, the singing itself, full of broken and bent notes that drew laughs from the crowd, even the date: September 17, 1931. Jerry Lewis in Person corrects much of this misinformation, even if publicity still propagated it more than a decade after the book was published. The date, for instance: Harburg and Gorney didn’t write “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” until 1932. And it was no spontaneous outburst of song: Rae had rehearsed Jerry and served as his accompanist. She put him to bed that night and kvelled over his efforts. “You didn’t forget a word. Not a syllable,” she said. “Good, good; keep going.”
There was another memorable family trip a few years later, a trip on which Jerry underwent an even more crucial initiation. In the winter of 1937–38, Danny had been booked on a burlesque tour around the Great Lakes, and Jerry and Rae were to accompany him to Detroit during winter recess. On Christmas Day, the trio piled into a Plymouth sedan and made the drive west. When they arrived in the bitter midwest winter, they headed straight to the site of Danny’s engagement, Detroit’s seedy National Theater—“It ain’t the Palace,” Danny shrugged—and then to the Barlum Hotel, where Danny signed them all in with a magisterial flourish.
For the next week, Jerry walked around in a cloud of bliss, overwhelmed with his proximity to his parents and with his exposure to the burlesque environment. He was so excited that he couldn’t rest on his cot. He’d rise early to explore the hotel, and then he’d be off to the theater to watch rehearsals, quizzing the technicians and stagehands about their jobs. At night he’d take in the show from the wings. After the evening’s final performance, Rae would wait for Dan and Jerry in the lobby—giving them a convenient excuse to leave the raucous backstage environment—and the family would find a restaurant for dinner.
Jerry was in awe of his father’s suave manner and stage skills, though his memories of Danny’s act suggest it wasn’t exactly top-flight entertainment. Jerry recalled his father introducing the chorus girls with a rendition of “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” he remembered a baggy-pants comedy bit in which Danny played a German dunce, and he recalled a production number in which Danny, dressed in a ringmaster’s outfit, snapped a whip at the girls, who all wore animal skins.
He also remembered feeling “gripped by a new excitement, a contagion of emotions.” What he felt, of course, was the bloom of sexuality. He was almost twelve, and he was spending his nights lurking in the wings of a theater watching showgirls undress. Burlesque wasn’t exactly the sort of milieu that authorities recommend for child rearing—strippers, rough-hewn stagehands, bawdy humor. And Jerry’s experience was proof that a burlie house wasn’t really a place for kids.
One night Danny introduced him to a stripper whose eye the kid had caught during a routine earlier in the week: “Say hello to Marlene, son.” The nervous boy could barely respond, but the woman encouraged him. “Don’t be shy, sweetie. I won’t bite you.” A night or two later, according to Jerry, she proved good to her word, taking him to her dressing room and initiating him sexually. “Whatever we did,” Jerry said, “I remember it took only a minute. After that she talked to me about her little boy … her lips were trembling and her eyes looked awfully red.” While Marlene waxed maudlin over her son, the boy whose innocence she stole slipped out of the door and went off to find his parents.
Danny was certainly wise in the ways of burlesque people. Whether or not he himself was guilty of womanizing, it’s shocking to realize how instrumental he might have been in his eleven-year-old son’s sexual initiation. Did he intend for Marlene to seduce Jerry? Was leading the boy to a sexual encounter his idea of being a good dad? Or did he think a sexually mature youngster would be off his hands all the sooner? If Jerry’s story is accurate, Danny was either incredibly naïve or incredibly cynical; and if the incident didn’t happen—if it amounts to another instance of Jerry’s self-mythologizing—the story nevertheless reveals Jerry’s impression of his father’s world. The maternal kiss Jerry always craved, that sweet note of recognition and affection he sat up at night awaiting, now came to him wrapped in greasepaint and lingerie. Ever after he would associate show business not only with proximity and parental attention but with his own desires and desirability as well. Only onstage could he be seen by the people whom he so desperately wanted to see him; only around show people could he find love.
Back in Irvington, the trip lingered in Jerry’s mind like a glimpse of heaven. Rae went back on the road with Danny, and her son, left again in the care of Grandma Sarah and his aunts Rose and Buhddie, dragged himself reluctantly to school, where he whiled away his education in daydreams of a life on the stage. He lived for the penny postcards his parents would send, his only connection to them that winter.
Eventually, the distractions proved costly. One spring, when his fellow students as Union Avenue School were marched ceremonially to visit the classroom where they’d spend their next school year, Jerry was left behind. He’d missed too much school—and done too poorly in the part he’d attended—to be promoted. Though he was bright, he just hadn’t been able to keep up. Jerry recalled this as one of the great disappointments of his life: “I thought I was a dummy, a misfit, the sorriest kid alive. I never felt more alone than just then.”
It’s not clear, however, what this moment actually meant to Jerry’s academic career. Although he claimed in both Look and Jerry Lewis in Person to have been left back, he graduated from the eighth grade at Union Avenue School in the spring of 1940. He was fourteen, right on schedule. Given that, the only way Jerry could have repeated a grade and graduated on time would be if he had entered school a year early—to have begun first grade before his sixth birthday—and this might certainly have occurred as a result of his parents’ constant search for places to leave him. Otherwise, unless the episode is a whole-cloth invention, the only other possibility is that the school left Jerry out of the class-changing ceremony as a punishment, but then let him work his way back into the proper spot in the system.
But the real impact of missing the ceremony was to change Jerry’s attitude toward academics forever. While the Look account is frequently unreliable in its facts, its account of Jerry’s reaction is vivid: “From then on, I lost all interest in school. I thought I was a dummy and I began to clown around to attract attention, so I wouldn’t ever have to be alone like that again. If I could make people laugh, I thought, they’d like me and let me be with them. I had to do it in self-defense because I felt I couldn’t compete for their attention with my brains.”
But even if he had no knack for books, Jerry was Sarah Rothberg’s grandson, and Sarah Rothberg’s grandsons would all be bar mitzvahed if she had any say in it. In the fall of 1936 Jerry was enrolled in Avrom Buchom Cheldem School on Chancellor Avenue, a storefront Hebrew school of a type common in Jewish communities throughout the area. Under the supervision of the school’s Rabbi Friedman, Jerry learned the rudiments of Hebrew grammar and Jewish religious culture alongside other neighborhood boys, including Leon Charash. Leon was an able student who’d skipped a grade in public school and was thus in Jerry’s class despite being a year younger. But Jerry struggled with this second language as much as with his studies at Union Avenue School. At least this learning experience would have a payoff: the bar mitzvah day itself, the day above all others on which every Jewish boy is a superstar in his own home.
Most Jewish men think back on their bar mitzvahs as golden moments. Jerry recalled his ritual initiation into manhood as “the saddest day of my life,” adding, “I’ll carry it with me till I die.” In a by now familiar pattern, Jerry had been sent back to Irvington to continue the school year after spending most of the winter of 1938–39 on the road. March came, and with it the boy’s thirteenth birthday, but Dan and Rae were still working the winter resorts around Lakewood, New Jersey. It was left to Grandma Sarah to see the boy through this key ritual in his life.
Jerry’s only older male cousin, Marshall, had had a large bar mitzvah party some half-dozen years earlier; photos show a huge group of kids clowning in the summer sun. Now it was Jerry’s turn to reap the attentions of his family, but instead of a brood of cousins and friends, he trundled off to synagogue with only his grandmother to support him. He made his way through the ceremony, reciting his haftarah portion and enduring the endless service in the nearly empty shul.
As Jerry recalled, Danny and Rae had called early in the day from Lakewood, saying they’d be there. Throughout the long morning, their son waited for them in vain. He dragged himself back to his grandmother’s house afterward, fighting back justifiable tears. There was a reception, which stung the alienated Jerry all the more for its liveliness. Dan and Rae finally showed up, having left Lakewood hours after they said they would, accepting the congratulations of neighbors and relatives for something for which they really could take no credit. If there is any emblem of Jerry’s relationship with his mother and father, this is it: the prodigal parents walking in on the party in honor of the son whom they’ve ignored; the sad, angry boy in the corner, at once the center of attention and a pathetically marginal character. Dan and Rae always loved parties; Jerry would grow up shy of them.
In the spring of 1940 Jerry graduated from Union Avenue School along with the other eighth graders. He always claimed this as another scarring experience, but unlike the undeniably painful memory of his bar mitzvah, it’s difficult to understand why this experience should hurt. In 1984 he told Parade magazine how awful the day was for him: “Lewis stood up, walked over to the wall above the fireplace and took down a photograph in a black frame. … ‘See that kid on the far left? … That’s me: Jerome Lewis. See, I’m the only one in the picture in mismatched clothes. I was in hand-me-downs, and I spoiled the picture. It was humiliating. I look at this picture often, and I remember that on that day I decided I’d never be humiliated again.’”
Of course, he’d never been known as Jerome Lewis, but this marks the single instance of Jerry’s referring to himself as Jerome in a half-century of interviews, suggesting how jarring the memory was for him. Just as interesting, though, is Jerry’s memory of the clothes. Put bluntly, judging from the original photo, he looked fine. It was no Armani suit he had on, but nor was it an Emmett Kelly castoff. Several schoolmates were decidedly less put-together than Jerry, and he hardly marred a picture in which he appears unobtrusively on the margin. (Indeed, he had inherited Danny’s reputation as a sharp dresser in his school days: “He came to school wearing spats!” remembered Leon Charash.) But this photograph captured what became a meaningful moment for Jerry. He would forever conjure up his meager wardrobe in describing his childhood misery, and he seemed to make a lifelong resolution never to be embarrassed by his wardrobe again. In 1960, for instance, the Associated Press reported that he spent a hundred thousand annually on clothes, most of which were made by tailor-to-the-stars Sy DeVore—who revealed that Jerry owned eighty-eight tuxedos (more even than the Duke of Windsor) with solid gold buttons that themselves cost sixty dollars per suit, and donated his old clothes to such charity cases as out-of-work actors and “an underprivileged boy with a genius IQ but only one suit to wear to college.”
The other blow that Jerry suffered around this time—the death of Sarah Rothberg, which he remembered as occurring in the spring—may in fact have colored his recollection of his graduation. If any experience marked the low point in young Jerry’s life, that would be it. The only person in his world whom he felt was standing behind him was gone. When her mother died, Rae was on the road with Danny. After the funeral, they took Jerry to his aunt Buhddie and uncle Bernie Weisenthal in Gloversville, New York, where Bernie had gone in search of work during the Depression, and they said good-bye at the train station. For the next few weeks, as Jerry recalled, he had trouble eating and sleeping. The phantom of abandonment that had always threatened his peace of mind seemed more real than ever.