The sense that he’d been dumped by his parents both wounded Jerry and hardened him, and he compensated with antics, attracting other kids with his audacity and recklessness. “He was a nudnik,” remembered his cousin Marshall. “A real pest.” He would wait on corners for buses, lift his foot to tie his shoe on their steps when they stopped for him, then walk away without getting aboard for a ride. He hung from pipes in people’s kitchens, hid himself in dresser drawers, and leapt out at unsuspecting victims. He made a spectacle of himself, sledding down snowless hills, creating a stream of sparks and sailing headlong when his vehicle ground to a stop.
It made him popular, but it also drew unwanted attention to him. And in Irvington, that wasn’t always a smart thing for a Jewish kid to do. Throughout his school years, in fact, Jerry became increasingly aware of a thick vein of anti-Semitism in his hometown.
It revealed itself to him whimsically enough. In the autumn of 1936 Jerry and his friends were keeping themselves busy in the playground at Union Avenue School. Suddenly, a black shadow cut across the sunny sky. A gigantic shape hovered over them, slowly drifting toward the south with a low, mechanical whirr. It was the Hindenburg, freshly arrived from across the Atlantic and headed toward its berth in the central New Jersey town of Lakehurst (where it would crash spectacularly the following year). The boys were predictably impressed.
They weren’t aware, naturally, of the growing German threat it represented. To them it was just an exciting distraction. Their parents, however, saw something more sinister in the Hindenburg, and in the headlines emerging from Europe. Like other Jews across America, they knew that anti-Semitism was thriving overseas. But Irvington Jews didn’t have to buy foreign newspapers, or read between the lines of relatives’ letters, to understand the brutality of life under German oppression. All they had to do was leave their own homes and walk around their small city, a longtime German-American bastion.
Irvington had been founded and populated by gentile Germans many years before up-and-coming Jews made their way there. Newark had always been a German town (beer brewing was one of its chief industries), and the Germans were naturally the first to branch out into the city’s environs. They ran the local businesses, they established the churches and the physical plan, and as they had in Newark proper, they built health clubs, kureins, with an emphasis on German gymnastic competition and Teutonic traditions of fitness and conditioning. In this relatively hermetic enclave a sense of German identity persisted, and the xenophobic impulses of the population were directed outward toward the immigrant population of Newark in general and the Jews who were infiltrating Irvington in particular.
In the previous decade, Irvington had become a popular destination for Jewish families from Newark who left the city as a sign of their upward mobility. Just southwest of Newark, across the city limits from predominantly Jewish Weequeeg, Irvington had a suburban spaciousness and prosperity that was new to the immigrant Jews of the Rothbergs’ generation. Newark’s Jews had traditionally lived in the city’s Central Ward, primarily around Prince Street. Throughout the 1920s, though, as their economic horizons expanded, they pushed south into the developing Weequeeg area, where they bought two- and three-family homes and established a thriving religious, financial, and even political presence: Their man in city hall, Meyer Ellenstein, would eventually serve as Newark’s mayor. By the 1930s the Jews represented some sixty or seventy thousand of Newark’s half-million residents. Eventually, their migration out of the inner city drove them beyond Weequeeg, west into Irvington, and Jerry’s family was swept along in the flow.
Although there are no accounts of anyone in Jerry’s family meeting with explicit anti-Semitism in Irvington, the atmosphere was ripe for it. It was the early 1930s, and while the Jewish encroachment into their enclave was under way, the Germans of Irvington were following events in their mother country. In fact, the German-American Bund, a nationwide group designed to show support for the fascist government back home, was founded in the Irvington area under the leadership of Fritz Kuhn.
“The kureins used to have meetings for gymnastic competitions with some subsidy from the Hitler government for developing a militaristic organization,” recalled Alan Lowenstein, a longtime leader of Newark’s Jewish community. “They became quite militaristic. I don’t know that they ever carried arms. I doubt it. I don’t think they ever shot anybody or injured anybody. But they were part of several fringe groups of different kinds in the 1930s. You had Father Coughlin stirring up anti-Semitism and antiliberalism, and Fritz Kuhn was attempting to build up pro-German support. It was primarily nationalistic.”
The Bund was very visible in Irvington. Jerry remembered one of the organization’s parades making its way down Chancellor Avenue, a hundred feet or so from his apartment: “I stood at curbside, gaping at a tangle of Stars and Stripes and the swastika, the gray-shirted bundists in Sam Browne belts trooping by with drums beating and trumpets blaring. At last I started to walk away, faster and faster, past the stores and faces along the parade route, and finally racing at breakneck speed to pull free of the sound.”
This was just a little boy running away from a frightening experience, but Irvington steeled Jerry to personal threats before long: According to one classmate, he was respected around the neighborhood for refusing to rat on a gang that beat him up, and he acted out his growing boyhood frustrations in violent retaliation against anyone who confronted him. Indeed, the Jerry Lewis who so ferociously rebutted critics of his film or TV work, who disparaged disabled-rights activists who didn’t like the tone of his charity work, who excoriated family members who violated house rules, who belittled employees and lashed out at people who might betray him, was the same little boy who ran frightened from that Bund parade on Chancellor Street. There was a lot of anger inside Jerry, and nothing evoked it so much as a challenge. The anti-Semites and bundists of Irvington were merely the first to bring it out.
Jerry recorded one of these reactions in his autobiography, and eyewitnesses confirm the recollection. In December 1937 Mrs. Harcourt, the Union Avenue School music teacher, was drilling the fifth-graders in Christmas carols. Partly out of a sense of personal pride, partly out of an increasingly wise-assed inability to hold his tongue, Jerry blurted out, “If you sing Hanukkah songs, I’ll sing Christmas carols.” Leon Charash was in the classroom, and he remembered thinking, “Who knew anything about Hanukkah songs?” Mrs. Harcourt certainly didn’t. She threatened to send Jerry to the office if he didn’t comply, but the boy held his ground. Sarah Betz, the school’s German principal, also failed to see the humor or the ecumenism in Jerry’s refusal, and after a firm tongue-lashing she sent the insolent kid back to his classroom, where he sat silently while his classmates rehearsed their noels.
Jerry probably would have liked the singing, too. And the school officials knew it. So patent was his love for performing and entertaining that, academic failings notwithstanding, he was allowed to play a pivotal role in a benefit show. Let history note that the future producer and emcee of the Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon organized his first philanthropic performance for the benefit of the Red Cross at the Rex Theater in Irvington, New Jersey, in 1938.
The show was held between halves of a matinee double feature. A few dozen kids participated. Leon Charash had a feature part—he was a straight man to Jerry in a knockoff of a burlesque comedy skit. A trio of girls sang “Three Little Fishes,” while Lillian Messinger did a takeoff on Fanny Brice’s Baby Snooks.
It’s intriguing that Jerry’s first attempt at putting on a show included Snooks, one of the clearest antecedents in American entertainment for his own childish persona. There are direct parallels between Brice and Jerry: their ethnicity, of course, their common background in vaudeville and burlesque, their traditional show-biz career choices, even the long, intense relationships with dark, rakish gamblers—Nicky Arnstein in Brice’s case, Dean Martin in Jerry’s. Snooks wasn’t a psychological ball of twitches like Jerry’s character but rather a flat-out smartass, and she lacked the autobiographical dimension with which Jerry infused his act. But Brice was the first Jewish-American comedian to do a bit with childishness at its core. The character was enormously popular on stage, radio, and records, and the notion of an adult getting laughs with baby talk certainly made an impression on Jerry.
For that matter, so did Lillian Messinger, one of the prettiest and most physically developed girls in the school. Casting her must have reminded Jerry of the backstage world that had been his playground in Detroit. He acted just like Danny Lewis’s boy, threatening to cut her number from the bill unless she allowed him a quick feel. The girl ran off and told Leon Charash about the incident. Charash approached Jerry after the rehearsal in an angry mood, and Jerry bloodied his nose for him.
The show Jerry had put together at the Rex Theater was a miniature version of the burlesque shows he’d seen his dad emcee the previous winter. That week around the burlesque performers of the National Theater had been the perfect family vacation: Danny worked, Rachel kept an eye on both her husband and her son, and Jerry got the kind of education that he really wanted, not formal schooling but a seminar in show-biz technique. “Nothing escaped my attention,” Jerry recalled. “The smallest detail snapped into sharp focus, and the whole burlesque scene became a private vision. … I could tell why the comedy bits and production numbers had worked perfectly, and why they were screwed up. I knew it immediately. But I never said anything to the performers. Only to Dad, who would turn to my mother and say something like ‘Out of the mouths of babes …’”
It wasn’t until Jerry’s early adolescence, though, that all these influences coalesced into the recognizable roots of his act. And it was in the resorts where Danny Lewis found such steady work that Jerry grew into an entertainer. Jerry is often cited as a product of the Borscht Belt hotels, but Danny was the first Lewis to exploit Newark’s proximity to the Catskill Mountains of southeastern New York State. It was there, in a hotbed of hotels, campgrounds, and small pioneer towns remade into shtetls, that a thriving Jewish culture was giving birth to a thriving show-business culture. If the Jews invented American popular entertainment (and thus popular entertainment for the whole world), then the Borscht Belt was surely their laboratory.
The rise of the Catskills as a breeding ground for entertainers was directly linked to the arrival and advancement of Eastern European Jews in the New World. As the Jewish immigrants came to prosperity in America, and particularly in the New York area, opportunity arose for resort areas catering especially to them. And no vacation spot was more closely associated with Eastern European Jews and their descendants than the region of the Catskill Mountains that became known as the Borscht Belt. With its fresh air, enormous meals, and ritualistic Old World traditions, the Borscht Belt became one of the centers of Jewish American life and the most productive cradle of Jewish entertainment in history.
Jews began arriving in the upper reaches of New York State as early as 1825, but the first transplants of Jews into rural New York State that actually took root came during the migration of the late nineteenth century, when the Eastern European Jewish population of New York had achieved a greater density than the slums of Calcutta or London. Choked on the asphalt and capitalism of the city, many shtetl-born Jews looked to the farming counties of New York State for their salvation. In the Old World they’d been people of the soil, and finding the modern city overwhelming, many chose to return to the earth—even if that meant soil that had repelled earlier Jewish settlers. Throughout the late nineteenth century and well into the early twentieth, Jews became a more and more significant presence in Catskill farming communities.
But even the Jews who stayed in the city established a presence in the mountains. The first to make the trip northward were the sufferers of “worker’s disease,” as the tuberculosis that swept through overcrowded tenements and sweatshops was known. As early as 1890 ghetto reformers had promoted vacations in the Catskills as a means to a cure. A regimen of food, fresh air, and undemanding exercise was widely believed to combat the ill effects of tuberculosis, and a steady stream of sick city Jews left for the recuperative mountains.
Indeed, so many Jews sought cure in the Catskills that the latent anti-Semitism of longtime residents surfaced in response. Throughout the 1890s and 1900s the subtle exclusionary practices against Jews that were long the custom of hotels and boardinghouses throughout upstate New York became blatantly and even boastfully explicit. The Jews responded by buying up their own properties, building their own hotels and resorts, and claiming a stake of the healthy mountain environment as their own.
Throughout the 1910s and ’20s these Jewish enclaves sprouted up wildly. Synagogues and political groups sponsored religiously and socially oriented camps. Boarders trundled their own bedding and kitchenware to rustic, barebones operations called kuchaleyns (“cook-alones”), tiny groups of bungalows clustered around communal kitchens and activity centers. And increasingly, as the Jews of the New York metropolitan area grew wealthy and status conscious, full-scale hotels sprang up.
The hotels began as little more than extensions of the kuchaleyns, with gigantic restorative meals, light regimens of exercise, and stridently encouraged socializing as their chief attractions. Eventually they expanded their seasons from the summer months, adding the Jewish holidays of early autumn, then Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. And they grew physically, adding ballrooms, swimming pools, gymnasia, rec rooms, tennis courts, riding facilities, and golf courses to the nature trails and small lakes they’d always offered. The Catskills holiday gradually evolved from an escape from the soul-stifling contagion of the city and the workplace to an orgiastic barrage of activity, gluttony, courtship, and of course, entertainment.
For crucial to every Catskills establishment worth the name “resort” had become two forms of entertainer: the headliner, who would appear after meals in the ballroom, and the tummler. Like his Old World ancestor, the badchen, the tummler was a kind of folk jester, though he had no ritual connection to any of the religious aspects of Jewish life. He was a pure prankster, a fool, a class clown for the vacationing bourgeoisie. For the Catskills hoteliers, the tummler was a kind of insurance policy against any guest’s ever voicing a note of boredom. From breakfast through a slate of organized activities, through dinner, through the evening gamut of plays, shows, and pageants, the tummler was a nonstop source of fun, a comic volcano egging guests out of any sense of routine, complacency, or self-importance and insisting that they enjoy themselves regardless of what they felt like doing. On rainy days the tummler was an especially crucial part of the hotel scene, enlivening lobbies and rec rooms and otherwise distracting guests from the thought of how much they were spending to breathe the fresh mountain air that the weather had conspired to deny them.
The typical tummler was no professional entertainer, just a busboy or lifeguard with a hambone and a thick skin for embarrassment; even the smallest hotels, which couldn’t afford professional entertainment, had a tummler of some sort. Indeed, tummling became the first accessible step into the entertainment business for young jokers with big dreams. Almost every Jewish entertainer who broke into music, comedy, or acting between 1925 and 1960 got a start tummling in the Catskills. Some, like Danny Kaye and Milton Berle, created the mold. Some, like Alan King, Jack Carter, and Red Buttons, exemplified it. Some, like Lenny Bruce and Mel Brooks, shattered it. And some, like Moss Hart, transcended it. But none of them ever completely shed his tummler roots.
Headline acts were something else altogether—professional entertainers, not eager clowns. They toured hotels during seasons when big-city nightclub and vaudeville business slackened. Only the largest of the region’s hundreds of hotels could afford headliners, however; smaller hotels, forced by competition to hire performers of their own, booked lower-rung vaudeville and burlesque performers. And the hoteliers who couldn’t afford even that would pool resources with their competitors to hire talent for a season and share it on alternating nights.
There was no mistaking that Danny Lewis was a headliner and not a tummler. Sure, he could pitch some gags, but his specialty was putting over songs with a broad, sentimental manner. He was a pro, if a small-time one, and he took only show work—no waiting tables or schlepping bags for him. He may not have played the big hotels on Saturday nights, but he could nevertheless put together a good season of steady work each summer. For a trouper like him, the mountains were a sweet gig: steady, close to home, well paying (it usually included room and meals), offering all the health benefits that drew people to the mountains, even presenting a chance to make business connections.
Jerry’s childhood was dotted with trips to the mountains to be with Danny when he found steady work. The most crucial of these came during his Christmas vacation of 1938–39. Ironically, the trip wasn’t to the Catskills at all: Danny had been asked to perform at the Arthur Hotel in Lakewood, New Jersey, a resort forty miles south of Newark where he’d spent some time working the previous winter. At that time, Charles and Lillian Brown, the Arthur’s managers, had discovered Danny at a talent showcase after having been told by the resort’s owners to hire an emcee and entertainer. “We were in this place where they had all the talent,” Charlie recalled years later, “and we saw Danny perform. We liked his personality. He was suave but he was also very warm.”
A few years after that first successful term with the Browns, Danny was booked for three months at the Arthur, and he called Rae telling her to round up a sax player and a drummer and prepare to move to Lakewood for the winter. He also persuaded the Browns to make a place for Jerry at the hotel, pitching the boy as a budding showman. As Lillian Brown recalled, “Danny and Rae told us that he was producing a little show at the school where he was, how he took over, produced it, acted in it, and did everything pertaining to the entire show. And they told us that the people in that school were just overwhelmed by all that talent.” The Lewises and the Browns arranged for Jerry to spend his winter recess at the hotel and to attend school in Lakewood through February.
Like the Catskills, Lakewood was a Jewish resort area, drawing on the Newark and Philadelphia populations just as the Catskills hotels catered to New Yorkers. The Arthur was a modest establishment, a white stucco building with thirty-five rooms and a little ballroom, but the Browns were clever managers: In busy seasons they put guests up in spare bedrooms at local homes and fed and entertained them on their own premises. It was Jerry’s first mature experience of the resort atmosphere, with the truckloads of food, the schmaltzy entertainment, and the incessant nudging of the guests into activity.
The winter Jerry spent in Lakewood, like the previous winter’s trip to Detroit, was a formative experience in his life. Not only did it give him another chance to luxuriate in the aura of his parents while they were happily working—“I spent a marvelous winter there, if only to peek through those casino doors each time Dad came on stage,” he recalled—but he was taken into the arms of the Brown family. The Browns had their own kids—a daughter, Lonnie, two years older than Jerry, and a son, Arthur—but they were in the hospitality business: It was their job to make people feel at home, and Jerry, it was obvious, was a child in need of attention. Charlie was especially kind to the moody boy, sensing the loneliness beneath his antic exterior. He would, Jerry remembered, “get very sentimental if he saw me brooding. In a second he would somehow know; his arm would go around my shoulder, and that was all I needed to feel good again.” In later life Jerry remained exceedingly loyal to the Browns, always referring to them as Aunt and Uncle, playing engagements at their large Catskills hotel when he could have commanded much more lucrative work, and recalling his time spent among them as the most domestic experience of his life. One of the definitive ruptures between him and Dean Martin, in fact, would be instigated by his loyalty to the Brown family.
A large part of Jerry’s affection for the Browns was devoted to their daughter, Lonnie. Like her parents, she sensed the despair that plagued Jerry. A shy, bookish girl, she took Jerry under her wing, becoming the closest thing he ever had to a sibling. He had a crush on her, and he followed her around the hotel and the town of Lakewood like a puppy dog. Lonnie saw how Jerry behaved around his parents, and she was sensitive to the pain her younger friend was suffering. She began to let him into her private world, an entrée that would soon have a monumental impact on his life.
There were other friends at the Arthur. The Browns had given Jerry a job as a tea boy; in the afternoons and evenings, he’d offer hotel guests cookies and tea as they lounged in the lobby. Through this experience he became friendly with Joe Unger and Norman Smithline, two waiters who sometimes participated in makeshift comedy skits with Danny. Smithline, known around the hotel as Smitty, was the headwaiter in the dining room. “He was a kind of ladies’ man—a little guy with a mustache who always dressed up spiffily,” recalled a busboy who worked under him. “He played the drums. And he taught Jerry how to play the drums.” Jerry was surely reminded of Danny by Smitty, and the mustachioed waiter’s paternalistic attention was a gift. Jerry would keep in touch with Smitty long after he’d moved on to bigger things. “Through the years, Jerry helped him out,” the busboy said. “He was in an automobile accident, and Jerry paid a lot of his bills.”
Smitty and Unger would take Jerry with them when they went to movies in downtown Lakewood on their nights off. One night the trio came out of a Ken Maynard western in particularly high spirits, reenacting the movie’s stunts all the way back to the hotel. On the hotel porch they got an inspiration: They would liven up Jerry’s tea service with a takeoff on the movie. The guests liked it. In fact, the little act became such a hit that it soon became an expected coda to the evening’s more standard entertainment. The three cutups began to parody movies right after seeing them, arriving back at the hotel to an expectant audience. As Lillian Brown recalled, “They would come in and roll down the steps into the lobby. … And then they’d go through the whole performance they’d just seen. We used to howl.” Rae accompanied the act on piano. Everyone thought it was a gas.
Except Danny. The grand spotlight Danny had always envisioned for himself had begun to dim. He had no house, he wasn’t a big name, his wife had to work, his kid was moody and had problems at school. If he had ever believed he could be the toast of Broadway like Jolie, his sights were slipping lower. Now he was grateful for gigs at places like the Arthur.
But at least in his own little sphere, Danny had been able to act the Complete Entertainer—that is, until the day he turned around to find his kid killing them in the lobby in an improvised meshuggener act. People were actually leaving his own shows early so they wouldn’t miss the kid. Danny grew icy. Almost everyone who met him once Jerry had become a star reported that Danny seemed jealous of his son—critical of Jerry’s work and arrogant around his boy’s employees, friends, and collaborators. The chip on Danny’s shoulder got its start that winter in Lakewood: He was the headliner, but his kid was stealing the show with a tummler bit he was doing for free!
The boy had the knack, and he was eager to prove it to people. Jan Murray was an up-and-coming comic maybe twenty-one years old when he first met Jerry around this time. He had been playing at the President Hotel, and he ran into Danny and Rae in a drugstore there one morning. “We started to schmooze,” Murray recalled, “and he says to me, ‘I want you to meet my son. This kid loves you. You crack him up.’
“So he yells, ‘Jerry!’ and this little boy came out—he’d been in the back of the store reading the comic books or something. He came over and Danny says, ‘This is Mr. Murray,’ and the kid says, ‘Oh, Jan Murray! Oh, boy!’ Danny says, ‘You know, he saw you perform last night.’ And I said, ‘Oh? Did you like it?’ And Danny said, ‘Did he like it? Show Mr. Murray how much you liked it.’ And the kid did the whole act for me that I had done the night before. He remembered almost every joke I told. It was the first time I ever met him and I wanted to kill him! I said, ‘I’m gonna hurt this boy—keep him away from me!’
“He had only seen the thing once, and he remembered most of it. He stood in the middle of the drugstore and did the whole damn act back in my face. He was just a natural with a great sense of humor. Even when he was doing it back to me, he added timing and inflections. He wasn’t just a parrot. He really understood the nuances of comedy.”
Even though he knew Jerry could pull off such a performance, Danny didn’t know just how serious his son was about a career in show business. Jerry’s ambitions were pricked further one February morning in 1939, when he was wandering through the Ambassador Hotel and heard music emerging from Lonnie’s bedroom. He recognized a Tommy Dorsey tune, “You’re a Sweetheart,” with vocals by Edythe Wright. But there was another sound. He knocked on the door.
Lonnie had been singing along with Wright—she called it “practicing” her records. With the record playing behind her, she struggled earnestly to measure up to the big-band vocalist. Jerry got an inspiration: Why compete with the singer, he asked her, when you could be the singer?
Lonnie didn’t get it, so he demonstrated. Starting the record over, he lip-synched Wright’s vocal, singing the song directly to her teddy bear for comic effect. Jerry threw himself into the performance; he recalled “feeling totally alone in the pleasure of my own making.” He was thrilled; he’d found a way to be the center of attention and yet lose himself in a character, to catch an audience’s eye with none of the risk of self-revelation. He and Lonnie spent the rest of the afternoon trying out other records, rehearsing specific bits of business for each.
Almost all kids who grew up with recorded music have done something like this crude pantomime, and Jerry apparently wasn’t aware that the act he thought he’d dreamed up was already a familiar specialty on the vaudeville circuit. The English comic Reginald Gardiner, who had made a hit on Broadway a few years earlier by imitating wallpaper, had begun doing lip-synch material in the mid-1930s, and the bit had become a comic staple. There were dozens of “record acts” or “dummy acts,” as they were known in the trade, by the time Jerry and Lonnie were rehearsing Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy’s “Indian Love Call” in a room off the lobby at the Arthur. But those were professional acts. These were just kids having fun.
Until the fateful night that Red Buttons turned up missing, that is. Buttons was an up-and-coming comic at the time, twenty years old or so, with a reputation at amateur nights and in resort areas. His real name was Aaron Chwatt; his stage name derived from the jackets he wore when he doubled as a bellhop. He was doing just that in Lakewood that winter, working days at the Brunswick Hotel and picking up gigs at night at other hotels.
On one particular Saturday night, when he was scheduled to appear at the Arthur, he hadn’t shown up by the time the dancers he was supposed to follow were wrapping up their act. As Danny worked the phones, scrambling to find a quick replacement, Jerry and Lonnie took advantage of the moment: Gathering up their phonograph and records, they were onstage announcing their act before Danny knew what hit him. Lonnie did the Edythe Wright number, Jerry did a Jimmy Durante song, and they finished up with “Indian Love Call.” To their elation, the crowd met the end of the number with a roar of applause. They were overwhelmed … until they saw what had happened. While they were doing their act, Buttons had arrived and was taking the stage. The ovation was his.
But Jerry wasn’t deterred. He knew he’d connected with the crowd, and he and Lonnie did another half-dozen or so shows that winter. Jerry even went so far as to approach Danny’s sad-eyed agent, Harry Cutler, and ask him to take him on. This is something like a clinical definition of moxie: the twelve-year-old son of a small-time performer pushing himself on his old man’s two-bit agent in hopes of making a career of lip-synching to records. Cutler demurred—whether out of show-biz savvy or out of fear of irking Danny it’s impossible to say.
At any rate, the die was cast: Jerry was going to be a performer, with Danny’s help or not.
Danny and Rae began to think of Jerry’s desire for a life on the stage with trepidation. They dreamed up ways to separate him from the environment that was turning his head in the professional direction they themselves had followed. In the summer of 1940, for instance, after his eighth-grade graduation, Jerry was packed off to his aunt Jean’s house in Brooklyn, far from the mountains and the record players and the small, appreciative audiences.
But Dan and Rae didn’t reckon on just how determined he was. Separated from the Catskills, Jerry landed a plum job: Lying about his age and calling on a family friend, he got work as an usher at the Paramount Theater on Broadway. Jerry’s connection at the Paramount was Broadway Sam Roth, a ticket broker who kept a small office beside the famous theater. Roth had met Jerry at the Arthur, where he was a frequent guest; according to Lillian Brown, the older man “was crazy about him. He said he was sure Jerry was going to be famous.”
For a stagestruck kid, a job at the Paramount would have been a dream come true, but Jerry managed to blow it within two weeks. Unhappy with the oversized uniform the theater manager, Bob Shapiro, had given him, Jerry griped out loud to his fellow employees one day in the locker room. Shapiro, though, was standing right behind him: “Levitch, turn in your dickey!” It was the first of a string of disappointments; Roth got Jerry jobs up and down Broadway, and the kid blew them all.
His luck was no better back in Newark, where he tried to join the top-flight theatrical program at the YMHA. The Newark Y had been modeled after Manhattan’s Ninety-second Street Y, the legendary cultural bastion. And one of the key elements in its formation was the establishment of theater workshops for young people. “One of the people who was on the staff was George Kahn, who for fifty years headed the drama program,” recalled Alan Lowenstein. “Moss Hart was on the staff as well. Jerry Lewis as a kid came in to be an actor in the drama department at the YMHA. But he was a hellraiser, and the legend is that he’s the only one that George Kahn ever threw out of the Y.”
In the fall, as a freshman at Irvington High, Jerry was in way over his head academically. The only thing he could do to distinguish himself was tummel. So famous were his antics, his distorted whoops, and his rubbery grimaces, that he became known around campus as “Id” (for “Idiot”—not a Freudian reference, however appropriate one may have been) or “Ug” (for “Ugly”). With his gratuitous clowning, he managed to ingratiate himself with the other kids even if he was struggling helplessly in his classes.
Inadvertently, Dan and Rae let Jerry get another foothold into show business in the spring of 1941, just after that first year in high school. Dan and Rae had bolted Irvington before the school year was over. This time they were off to Loch Sheldrake, a Catskill resort where the Browns had bought their own hotel, the Ambassador. Coming home from school one day, Jerry found his folks packed and ready to leave. With them was burlesque comic Lou Black, who had worked a twosome with Danny on and off over the years. Rae gave Jerry five bucks and the key to his aunt Rose’s house, then left him to finish out the school year on his own.
By the time summer break rolled around, though, they’d found a way to take care of the kid. Once again, they’d pitched Jerry’s skills to the Browns—it was his athleticism, this time, not his showmanship—and they’d wrangled a job for him. Rae wrote to Jerry that the Browns would pay him ten dollars a week, plus room and board, to be their athletic director. Jerry bought himself a metal whistle and caught a bus north.
The Ambassador was a much more elaborate setup than the Arthur. It had many more guest rooms, a built-in swimming pool, a rec room with a pool table and jukebox, and a huge ballroom that dwarfed the Arthur’s tiny casino (there had even been an on-site barbershop before the Browns turned it into sleeping quarters for the kitchen help). The hotel was nestled in the heart of the Borscht Belt at a time when the region’s influence was still ascending. The Browns had cut a great deal to get hold of the place, which would become the basis of their later fame in the resort business.
With some of their employees, though, they weren’t so lucky. As an athletic director, Jerry made a great tea boy. After a few days he injured himself and politely resigned his commission. Charles Brown then offered him a chance to work as a busboy. Clearing tables would seem a step down from the relative distinction of putting old women through their calisthenics, but at least busboys got tips and a chance to schmooze the girls.
Not that Jerry had much time to cultivate his love life. He was spending time with the old gang from the Arthur—Lonnie Brown, Joe Unger, and Smitty. He was working on his record act. And he had found a new ally in his desire to make a career of himself—a schlub of a bellhop named Irving Kaye.
On the surface, Jerry’s friendship with Kaye was positively cryptic. Physically, they were opposites: Where Jerry was tall, bony, boyishly handsome, and slick, Kaye was short, froggy, and rumpled. He smoked foul cigars and wore thick glasses—the guys at the Ambassador called him “Googs” for his Barney Google eyes. In a picture taken with Jerry in 1948, he could pass for the kid’s aging dad; Jerry would introduce him as “my dead cousin.” Due to his strange upbringing, Jerry felt comfortable with older folks perhaps even more than with people his own age. And Kaye, who had kids and a wife somewhere but seemed unconnected to anyone, must have relished the role of tutor to the bright youngster. He’d once wanted to be an actor himself—“a Jewish Barrymore,” he told Jerry—but he’d drifted into comedy and would up schlepping bags. “He was slow moving,” recalled one of his co-workers. “Not a Stepin Fetchit type, but he didn’t seem that ambitious.”
Also on the scene that summer was Lawrence Shapiro, a New York kid about a year older than Jerry whose dad knew Charlie Brown and who’d gotten a job busing tables through his connection. He got to watch Dan and Rae perform: “Rae only could play the piano in one key,” he recalled, “and it was Danny’s key. I didn’t think Danny had a great voice. He had a strong voice but not a great one.” And he got to see Jerry around his mom and dad. “He loved his parents,” Shapiro observed. “That always came across. And he always seemed happy.”
What made Jerry so happy, no doubt, was being close to both his parents and the parade of performers that passed through the Ambassador’s ballroom. He watched Danny and Lou Black practice routines tirelessly. He watched Tillie and Jimmy Gerard—a Burns-and-Allen-style act—and a stream of solo comics: Gene Baylos, Larry Alpert, Mickey Freeman. And he saw a record act. A comedian named Sammy Birch came through the hotel doing just the kind of stuff Jerry and Lonnie had worked on the previous winter. The sight of someone presenting a polished version of his own little specialty might have crushed a kid with less gumption or less exposure to small-time show business. But Jerry took Birch’s act as an encouragement. He pestered Rae to buy him a phonograph and some records, and she obliged.
As he worked on his act that summer, Jerry saw his father suffer a tremendous disappointment. Danny had gotten a chance to emcee and perform at the nearby Majestic Hotel in a showcase for an agent of the William Morris office. He and Lou Black poured hours into rehearsals for their big break, and Jerry recalled that they performed brilliantly. Of course, Jerry always recalled Danny performing brilliantly, despite his continual inability to get big dates. In later years Jerry used his clout to get his father all sorts of showcases—the Paramount Theater, television appearances, even a film role—but no one ever stepped up to make a star of Danny Lewis. That night at the Majestic was typical: The Morris agent never showed up.
Jerry, meanwhile, was preparing for his professional debut. He’d performed with Lonnie Brown at the Arthur during the winter, but now, with his own phonograph and stack of records, he had eyes for bigger things. He had worked out a variety of numbers, doing takeoffs on Danny Kaye, Frank Sinatra, Carmen Miranda, Betty Hutton, Deanna Durbin, English comic singer Cyril Smith, and opera star Igor Gorin. And he’d managed to get a paying gig for himself performing as a pantomime soloist: He would make his debut at the Cozy Corner, a shack where hotel employees went for beers and hamburgers. One August night Jerry marched into the place with his first entourage—Lonnie Brown and Irving Kaye—and played through his stack of records. His chums in the audience, most of whom had seen him do the act countless times in the Ambassador’s rec room, cheered him on, and he left the joint five dollars richer and glowing with the applause he’d received. Pointedly, Danny and Rae were not on hand.
Danny, in fact, was trying to find ways to keep Jerry out of the show racket altogether. He and Charlie Brown leaned on Kaye to get him to stop encouraging the kid. “Danny didn’t want his boy to be an actor,” Kaye recalled. “And Charlie said, ‘Look, busboys are hard to get. Stop making an actor out of the kid.’” But Jerry wasn’t really depending on Kaye’s mentorship. That summer he finagled several engagements for himself at the small hotels in the area—the Waldmere, the Nemerson, the Laurel Park, Flagler’s, Young’s Gap. Some of these hotels had no doubt hosted Danny Lewis when he was an up-and-comer. Now they had the pleasure to present “Joey Levitch and His Hollywood Friends,” as Jerry was billing his dummy act. From early morning and throughout the day, he endured the sweaty labors of a busboy. At night, with Kaye and his phonograph in tow, he was a star.
The summer ended, and Jerry returned to Irvington High without any of his Hollywood Friends. It didn’t feel like a homecoming. Jerry drifted through his classes listlessly, and even Dan and Rae, whose attentions to their son’s education had never been exacting, began hassling him over his poor marks, to little avail.
Jerry worked the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons at the Ambassador. Things may not have been working out well between him and his folks; for the first time, he bunked with the help. As usual, space was at a premium during the holidays, so the Browns had Jerry, Lawrence Shapiro, and an oddball waiter share a room in the basement. “That guy smoked pot,” Shapiro recalled, “and also sold it. Not to us, though. And Jerry never tried it. Neither did I.” The waiter’s strange behavior drew attention to him fast. “Thanksgiving he was there, and Christmas he was in jail,” Shapiro remembered.
The hepcat waiter wasn’t the only Ambassador employee who disappeared that winter of 1941. And Jerry’s cousin Marshall Katz, who’d joined the Navy a year earlier, was among the first to learn why: He was stationed in Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and survived the Japanese attack on the Pacific fleet (Katz would fight the entire war in the Pacific, being issued a sole three-week furlough to come home to Newark and get married). The war sucked the life out of the hotel staffs all through the Catskills. The pickup musicians who accompanied Rae—drummer Joe Kenneth Beltzer and a saxophonist—were both gone to war by spring. Increasingly, staffs were made up of kids like Jerry and Shapiro and overaged louts like Irving Kaye. Out of such historical anomalies, strange chemistries brew.
When school resumed after the New Year of 1942, with his parents performing at the Ambassador, Jerry provoked one of his teachers with a mishap involving some school equipment. By some accounts, he broke a band saw while trying to cut a board that still had a nail in it. By others, he caused a small explosion while ad-libbing a chemistry experiment (a nicer fit with the future Nutty Professor, and the version Jerry used in his autobiography). Whichever, Jerry was summoned to the principal, a Mr. Herder, of local German stock.
“Are you a wise guy?” the exasperated bureaucrat asked Jerry, and then: “Why is it that only the Jews … ?”
He never finished the sentence. Jerry hit him in the mouth; by day’s end he’d been expelled and sent to a technical school, Irvington Vocational High. He called his parents, who voiced support but couldn’t get away from their engagement at the Arthur, and he went off to learn a trade.
By March, electrical maintenance and repair had lost its allure for him. But he had a plan. He would soon be sixteen years old. He would drop out of school. He would have head shots taken. He would take his act to Broadway. On March 16, instead of dressing for school, he would put on a suit and take the train to Manhattan to find work as a professional lip-syncher.
And there was that last little change to see to. No longer would he be known as Joey Levitch, the sad, lonely boy from Irvington whose parents never had time for him. He was a professional, and he would have a professional’s name: Jerry Lewis. Joey Levitch would never be heard from again. Glimpsed only in the fuzzy recollections of a man who made his living by pretending to be someone else, he became yet another persona of the mature man. Jerry he had been born, and Jerry he would remain forever.