Anxiety, loneliness, doubt, ambition, resentment, fear.
All of these nagged at Jerry Lewis throughout the twenty-three or so hours in each day that he wasn’t performing.
Dean Martin, on the other hand, couldn’t give a rat’s ass.
There was likely no entertainer wandering around New York in 1944 with a psyche more distinct from Jerry’s. If the young pantomimist’s bodily twitches and frantic yuk-it-ups were a twisted cri de coeur, Martin’s sleepy-eyed singing and drawling stage patter were the yawn of a Roman prince who’d just eaten a huge dinner and gotten laid. Jerry stepped through life as though it were a gauntlet of burrs and thorns; Dean sauntered along as if everything were a big joke. Jerry had to be onstage, had to win the approval of the crowd; Dean couldn’t believe that all those saps were paying him money to do practically nothing.
Inside Jerry Lewis, there was a little boy running desperately through the night to find his mother playing piano in a saloon. There was a boy inside Dean Martin as well, and he also headed toward a saloon: He’d heard there was a cushy job there, and he was whistling as he walked.
Nobody had chased Gaetano Crocetti and his brothers out of Italy, as the Levitches and Brodskys had been forced from Russia. The Crocettis were folk of the Italian soil—of Abruzzi, specifically, a land dotted with caves and rocky fields, a place that would kill a young man as soon as provide him a living. Young men from central Italy weren’t needed as laborers in the industrial regions in the north of their own country, but U.S. factories were starved for workers of any stripe. Two of Gaetano’s older brothers had passed through Ellis Island and found work in the smelters and furnaces of Steubenville, Ohio, an iron city teeming with Italian immigrants near the West Virginia and Pennsylvania borders. In 1913 nineteen-year-old Gaetano followed.
Unlike his kinsmen, who sacrificed body and soul each day in the infernal ironworks, Gaetano sought work less than he did freedom. He saw men emerge from the foundry looking like survivors of a natural disaster. That wasn’t for him. He would learn a trade that had provided so many of his fellow Italian immigrants with a livelihood. He apprenticed himself to Ambrogio DiBacco, a barber on the very block where he lived.
Gaetano had moved in with his brother Giuseppe and his family. Giuseppe was now called Joe, and Vincenzo, the other Crocetti brother, was known around town as Jimmy. Gaetano also anglicized his name: Ever after, he would be Guy Crocetti, pronouncing his last name “Crow-setti” in the English fashion. Under the tutelage of DiBacco, Guy learned the tonsorial trade—and met a suitable young girl, Angela Barra, an orphan who lived with DiBacco and his family. Angela’s father had disappeared one day when she was little, and her mother had been committed to a psychiatric asylum. Angela had been raised by nuns in an orphanage in Columbus, Ohio, and returned to Steubenville, where she’d been born, to work as a seamstress.
Angela was seventeen and Guy twenty when they married in October 1914. By June 1917 Guy had his own barbershop, and the couple had a one-year-old boy, Guglielmo. On the seventh day of that month, Angela produced another son. Born prematurely, the child wasn’t christened until the fall: His name was Dino.
The young Crocetti boys were raised among a large, healthy tribe of blood relatives and friendly neighbors. Guy was a good provider, and Angela added to the household coffers by taking in sewing jobs. The Crocettis had cars, bikes, toys, plenty of food and wine, and lived a loud, warm family life.
Guy was easygoing, as a successful barber must be, ever lending a sympathetic ear to the miseries of his customers. But Angela had grown up under brutal circumstances, and she tried to prepare her sons for the world by instilling some of her toughness in them. They would be men’s men: cool, self-aware, resilient. Of the two boys, Bill, as the elder was called, had the brains, Dino the moxie. Bill did well at school; Dino played hooky and snuck off to the alleyway crap games that the young men of Steubenville ran in imitation of their fathers.
In fact, if anything would toughen up a boy more than the teachings of Angela Crocetti, it was the streets of Steubenville. Like many riverfront towns during Prohibition, the city was a hotbed of bootlegging. The immigrant population—Steubenville had huge Irish and Italian enclaves—had even less respect for legally enforced temperance than Anglo-Americans. The city was filled with speakeasies, illegal casinos, and brothels that served local steelworkers and their peers from northern West Virginia and western Pennsylvania. Throughout the region, the City of Churches, as Steubenville called itself, was known as Boys Town, or Little Chicago.
Dino knew he wasn’t headed for a life in the foundries, but he wasn’t following Guy into the barbershop, either. Steubenville was wide open: cigar shops fronting for gambling parlors, pool halls, strip joints. Nothing in school or Guy’s shop was as attractive as those temples of learning. By the time he was in his early teens, Dino was running with a wild gang from around the neighborhood, other sons of immigrants from Italy and Greece, the future Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder—then Demetrios Synodinos—among them.
At sixteen Dino slipped out of school altogether and for good. He was tall and athletic, with dark, wavy hair and a bold Roman nose. He turned his good looks, lithe body, and quick hands into something that looked like it could realize a profit. He became a welterweight boxer: Kid Crochet.
He must have looked great on his way into the ring, with his chest bare and his handsome face held high. Inside the ring, well, that was a different story. “He was the laziest guy in the United States,” recalled Emilio Julian, a bantamweight from Steubenville who saw him fight. “He didn’t have too many fights. Most of them was him getting the hell out of the way from getting hit. After he got hit in the face a few times, why, he quit.”
Dino never saw much money from the fight racket—ten dollars was the most he ever made for a single bout, and even that he had to split with his manager. He turned to odd jobs and finally found work in the very sort of place he’d always intended to avoid: a steel mill.
But Dino Crocetti wasn’t born to work in that soul-grinding environment. Soon after returning from an abortive flight to the West Coast, Dino found work in a Steubenville gambling club. The Rex Cigar Store was the biggest joint in town: It had the most tables, the biggest variety of games. It was even the first building in the city with air-conditioning. Dino was hired by the boss, Cosmo Quattrone, to deal poker and blackjack. He was barely nineteen years old.
“He was a beautiful dealer,” recalled a childhood friend. “What hands!”
The Rex was a legitimate joint: The dealers weren’t asked to bilk the customers. But Dino figured out an angle of his own. They didn’t use chips at the Rex, only silver dollars. Dino learned how to palm the coins and slip them into the oversized shoes he wore to work. It added five or ten dollars to his paycheck each day. One spring day Dino made the mistake of riding a carnival ride at a church fair on a break from work. His booty fell from his shoes like rain. A few days later, Cosmo walked up to his clever young dealer and said, “I hear you like to dance. I’d like to see you dance in them shoes you got on there.” Somehow, Dino kept his job, but he would have to find a new angle.
Guy and Angela weren’t pleased to have a gambler in the house. They were worried their baby boy was going to the bad. “My aunts said, ‘Your son’s gonna be a gangster,’” he remembered. “‘He’s gonna die in the electric chair.’” But Dino found a way to calm his mother. He reminded her of a film they’d seen together, The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo with Ronald Colman: “Remember the guy with the stick?” he asked her. “He wore the nice suit, the tie. He didn’t gamble, he just worked. Well, that’s me.”
And it was him. He took to fancy clothes and fancy women. Dino and his pals ran around nights drinking cheap hooch and savoring the city’s prostitutes. They had sweethearts—Dino was nominally attached to a girl named Irma DiBenedetto—but mainly they were tomcats on the prowl: out till dawn, carousing, gambling, drinking, chasing tail, golfing at sunrise, eating late suppers in Chinese restaurants while the rest of the world was waking up to bacon and eggs.
Dino was in the middle of it all, the tomcattiest of the pack, always sharply dressed, always with an eye on a skirt. “Shit,” remembered Mindy Costanzo, one of the gang, “Dino used to fuck every human he could. The dealers he worked with, when they went on shift, he’d go sneak down to their apartments and fuck their wives.”
It was 1938. Joey Levitch was dancing around to Danny Kaye records. Dino Crocetti was avoiding the law and his folks on the one hand, the clap, his boss, and jealous husbands on the other.
He loved it.
Even though he was always one of the boys, there was something in Dino besides his good looks and relative lack of scruples that set him apart from his chums. As they cruised the streets scamming for women and parties, Dino would sing out loud—popular songs, Italian canzoni, light jazz numbers. He liked to sing; he was serious about it. He had never had a moment’s patience with any sort of schooling, but he sat still for singing lessons from, of all people, the mayor’s wife. And he sang in clubs and taverns whenever there was an open mike and a band willing to back him.
Dino’s reputation as a singer got around, and he soon found work singing and dealing cards at various clubs in eastern Ohio. He was finally approached by Ernie McKay, a bandleader from Columbus who offered to take Dino on as a full-time crooner for forty dollars a week. Though it represented a cut from even his under-the-table pay as a dealer, he took it.
McKay had made one more stipulation when he offered Dino the deal. He wanted him to sing under a different name. He remembered one of the first big Italian crooners—Nino Martini. The name sounded authentically romantic to McKay, and so Dino Crocetti made his debut in Columbus late in 1939 under the short-lived name Dino Martini.
The McKay band made its home in the State Restaurant, a Chinese joint, and it was there that Lee Ann Lee caught Dino’s act. Lee was married to bandleader Sammy Watkins, who headlined in the Vogue Room, a night spot in Cleveland’s Hollenden Hotel. Watkins was a big cheese in Cleveland, but he was starting to get a bit overripe; business was falling off. He needed a new hook. In the spring of 1940 Dino sent Watkins a demo record he’d cut with McKay, and the two men met. Watkins saw in Dino the exciting presence his band was lacking, and he hired the kid to come to the big city and play to the Vogue Room’s clientele of mobsters, politicians, scam artists, and blue bloods.
But there was a stipulation to this deal, too. Dino Martini sounded a touch too just-off-the-boat to Watkins (who was born Samuel Watkovitz). He wanted the name anglicized another notch: Dean Martin was what he liked, and it was as Dean Martin that Dino Crocetti sang in Cleveland in the fall of 1940.
That winter, as he performed with Watkins’s band, Dean noticed a fresh-faced Irish beauty seated at a table with her father. She was Elizabeth McDonald, from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and she’d just been asked to leave the well-regarded girls’ college in her hometown after a single semester of poor grades. Her dad, Bill, a liquor distributor, had been sent to Cleveland by his company and would soon be transferred there permanently, buying a house and moving his wife and two other daughters in with him.
Betty and Dean traded flirtatious looks for a few nights, then he finally asked her out. It must have been love. Dean had had scores of women, none of whom moved him to consider commitment. “He was a bastard,” one conquest recalled, “all wine and candlelight, then a pat on the ass in the morning.” But in the summer of 1942 he brought Betty McDonald to Steubenville to meet his kith and kin, and he married her in Cleveland on October 2. Nine months later, Dean was officially 4-F (he had a double hernia), he was working as a touring musician, and he was adjusting to life as a father. Stephen Craig Martin was born on June 29, 1943.
With his new family responsibilities and his growing popularity around Cleveland, Dean began pestering Watkins for more money. He was the main draw, and he knew it. Watkins drew up a new contract for sixty-five dollars a week starting in July 1943.
Within eight weeks Dean was asking for his release. Frank Sinatra had canceled a date at the Riobamba in New York, and the Music Corporation of America, whose man in Cleveland knew Dean’s act well, was offering him the gig. Dean turned to Watkins for his freedom, and it was granted—in return for 10 percent of his income for the next seven years. For cutting the deal, and for all its future services, MCA horned in for another 10 percent.
On September 24, 1943, Dean Martin debuted with Charles Baum’s Society Orchestra in Manhattan. With his repertoire of borrowed songs and that smooth, insouciant manner that would forever mark his performances, he made a small splash. He was getting $150 a week. As a crooner, as a hustler, as a wayward husband, he had hit the big time.
By March 1944 Dean had moved Betty to New York and another baby was born, a girl. But the marriage was foundering. Dean and Betty fought, and she constantly moved back and forth between New York and Steubenville as relations between them improved and degenerated. And though he was working, New York was more expensive than Ohio, and he often had to borrow money to keep up his family obligations and his ever-busy life. He may have become a father and a husband, but Dean was still a tomcat. His taste for partying, gambling, and the ladies, nurtured in Steubenville, had followed him east.
There was another relic of Steubenville in New York. Dick Richards, who’d managed Kid Crochet’s boxing career back in Ohio, turned up looking to serve as Dean Martin’s exclusive manager in his new career. Richards offered Dean two hundred dollars in exchange for a 20 percent piece of his earnings. Dean was in debt to Watkins and MCA; he owed money to bookies, store owners, friends, and acquaintances all over town; he and Betty were being served with eviction papers from the London Terrace Apartments. He took the deal.
Dean cut a lot of deals in 1944. He was being courted by Lou Perry, a Times Square agent who made nice to him by letting him sleep on his couch at the Bryant Hotel (a privilege offered a steady stream of up-and-comers, has-beens, and never-to-bes). Perry offered Dean some cash for 35 percent of his earnings. He took it. Soon after, comedian Lou Costello took an interest in Dean’s career and offered to lend a hand for 20 percent. Dean took it. He was keeping busy with club dates and radio work, but he was running out of pieces of himself to sell: Between Watkins, MCA, Richards, Perry, and Costello, Dean Martin had sold away the rights to all but a nickel of every dollar he made.
That summer Dean got Richards, Perry, and Costello to broker a nose job, turning the schnozzola he’d inherited from Guy Crocetti into something a bit more presentable. He and his new nose were signed to do a fifteen-minute unsponsored radio show on WMCA in August, “Songs by Dean Martin.” The musical director of that program also took an interest in Dean’s future, and Dean milked it for a small payment. In exchange, he signed away 10 percent of himself: a grand total of 105 percent. He was making seventy-five dollars a week at WMCA. If he’d ever made good to his entire retinue of agents and managers, he would have been out $3.75 every time he worked.
Still, nothing bothered him. Dean Martin was one of the chosen: He slept with his friends’ girls, stole from his boss, and played both ends against the middle, and nobody ever seemed to call him on any of it. His wife and children were shuttled back and forth between Guy and Angela in Steubenville, the McDonalds outside of Philadelphia, and whatever New York hotel Dean was hanging his hat in. He was chummy with everyone he knew, but no one felt like they knew him well.
Sonny King, a fledgling comic, was another of Perry’s roommates-cum-clients. He and Dean would share a fold-out couch through the night and split a fifteen-cent breakfast at a Times Square automat in the morning. “Once in a while, he’d say to me, ‘You’re my best buddy,’” King recalled. “But in such a manner that you wouldn’t believe it.”
Dean wasn’t a pledger; he wasn’t a loyalist or a partisan or a joiner. He believed in wine, women, and song, especially insofar as his talents with the third allowed him to indulge in the first two. He wanted nothing more from the world than whatever he could take out of it without expending too much energy. He skimmed the surface of life, picking up a buck here, a broad there, singing in nightclubs and on the radio to keep the whole scam afloat. Critics who reviewed his act frequently sensed his disdain for the audience and even for his own talent. He never read them; he didn’t care.
In August 1944 he was booked into the Glass Hat, the night spot in the Belmont Plaza Hotel, and if he was aware that Jerry Lewis was on the same bill, he never registered the fact to anyone around him.
If Dean Martin strode the streets of New York City in the summer of 1944 guilty of knowing all too boldly who he was, then Jerry Lewis was guilty of a lack of focus about his future and a wavering confidence in his talent.
Dean was billed around town as “The Boy with the Tall, Dark, and Handsome Voice.” It was a swell slogan; Dick Richards had thought it up when Dean was still pretending to let him manage his career.
Jerry, on the other hand, had taken a more active role in promoting himself, printing up hundreds of postcards advertising his act with a subtle come-hither: “It’s perpetual motion set to music when th’ amusin’ Jerry Lewis flashes on th’ scene with his sparklin’ an’ laffsational antics an’ tops all ‘records’ in rollickin’ an’ original pantomimicry!”
The cards featured silhouette images of Lewis performing bits of his act—seven poses in all, from Danny Kaye to Carmen Miranda to Igor Gorin. The drawings, by cartoonist Dorothy Edwards, were full of funny-page effects. And Lewis subtitled each caricature with an appropriately catchy grabber: “Enter th’ mirth-maker!” “Screamlinin’ th’ classics!” “Platter pantopatter!” And most bizarrely, “Naive Frank Sinatra imaginational image!”
In a flush entertainment world, Abbey Greshler would have been hard pressed to sell such a bag of goods, but he had World War II on his side. People might not have been going out as often, but a huge chunk of the nation’s stock of entertainers was off to war. Jerry and Dean, like other 4-Fs, were left home to man the stages, just as guys like one-armed Pete Gray and fifteen-year-old Joe Nuxhall were able to play major-league baseball. Greshler wasn’t quite making Jerry a star, but there were stages clamoring for entertainers of any stripe, and the kid was kept busy enough not to holler.
After he returned to New York from meeting Patti Palmer in Detroit, Jerry was put straight to work at the Glass Hat. When he went over to the club to check it out, he discovered that his act had a new name. The billboard in the Belmont Plaza lobby bore the same old promo shot Lewis had been using—leaning toward the camera with an oily pompadour and a bucktoothed grin—but gone was the traditional billing, “Satirical Impressions in Pantomimicry,” that strange, pompous locution. Now Jerry Lewis was billed as “Sotto Voce.”
He had no idea what it meant. When he heard Greshler explain to him that it was a joke—“The connotation here is that you use somebody else’s voice, you understand?”—he was even more confused. But what could he do? Greshler was his agent; even if he had bad taste, it wasn’t as if a crowd of others was waiting to take him on.
So it was in a state of bewilderment—a professional identity crisis, in fact—that Lewis stood outside the Glass Hat when a tall, swarthy fellow in a camel-hair coat breezed past. From the curly hair to the piercing eyes to the “telltale sign of recent surgery coming down at the bridge of his nose,” Lewis was awestruck by the man, who seemed descended from some allegorical painting of Cool. Even his shoes—“Pimp shoes!” Jerry recalled later, “red patent leather tops!”—didn’t diminish the effect.
Jerry stood gaping as this Adonis stopped to chat with Ernie, the Belmont Plaza doorman, and then drifted into the street. Magnetically drawn after the mysterious stranger, Lewis approached Ernie himself.
“Who was that?”
“You don’t know each other?”
“Nope.”
“That’s Dean Martin.”
“He looks important.”
He might also have looked familiar. When Dean had stepped out of the elevator, Jerry had been staring at the billboard in the hotel lobby, eyeing that annoying “Sotto Voce” stuff. But Dean’s face was above his on the very same ad.
Jerry opened at the club soon after, emceeing and doing the record act, and the Boy with the Tall, Dark, and Handsome Voice was the headliner. There were other acts on the bill—dancers Vivian Newell and the team Cappella and Patricia, and an orchestra led by Payton Re—and no doubt they all went on to lead lives filled with pain, joy, regret, and laughter. But there was no element of fate or kismet in their sharing that stage that August. For Dean and Jerry, though, it was the conception that preceded the triumphant birth.
Both performers got nice notices in the trades for the engagement. Bill Smith of Billboard announced that Jerry “fills comedy job to perfection” and commented on the “poise and assuredness” of his emceeing. Smith called Dean “one of the better stylists around town.” Each got a slap on the wrist, however, for transgressions of demeanor. Jerry, Smith noted, performed a hilarious Rudy Vallee bit that “was marred by some blue gestures.” Dean had insulted a patron who was talking too loudly while he sang: “Hey, pallie, get your own microphone.”
Though the engagement went well, Jerry and Dean never became more than nodding acquaintances. Jerry courted the singer, but Dean wasn’t interested in a record-spinning pest. Dean would later admit he found Jerry’s act amusing, but Irving Kaye recalled that Jerry was positively smitten by Dean, standing in the wings, shaking his head, and repeating, “Isn’t he too much?”
It would be months before they met again. Dean took off for Baltimore, where he played the Hippodrome. Jerry, coincidentally, played the same club a week later (billed, in Greshler’s most surreal conceit yet, as “The Gay Imposter”). This leapfrogging pattern was repeated a few times in the next year, each man following the other in turn at some out-of-town venue. They would tell reporters in later years that they took to leaving one another notes describing their experience with the locals, and while it sounded like something Jerry would do, it was completely out of character for Dean. The copious files on Martin and Lewis kept by their Hollywood producer Hal Wallis contained dozens of handwritten letters from Jerry—apologies, thank-yous, simple hellos, congratulations, and the like—and one single mark in Dean’s hand: his signature on a loan agreement.
Dean was keeping busy (as any man with four managers ought) with his radio work and live engagements, and there were inquiries around town about his availability for recording dates. Jerry, however, had become a sporadically employed, stay-at-home husband. He was beset by loneliness, by the pressures of family and career, by fears of failure and abandonment. It’s a wonder that he could cope at all with life as a fragile teenage husband, soon-to-be father, and fledgling entertainer. If Patti hadn’t kept the couple’s head above water while Greshler was still struggling to launch Jerry into a real career, Jerry, like his own dad, might have had to pick up a day job. Sheet music peddling had gone the way of blacksmithing, but there were other options. Fortunately, Patti’s paychecks kept the icebox full, Greshler kept the work trickling in, and Jerry kept determinedly on his career track.
By March 1945, though, Patti had told Dorsey that she would have to quit the band because of her pregnancy. That change was shaping up as a turning point for Jerry. Ambitious as he was to succeed in show biz, he was confronting a cold choice: Nineteen, estranged from his family, with an expectant wife and no steady income, he could either stick it out like his folks did—struggle as a showman all his life and raise another lonely little Lewis—or give up the business altogether.
He was playing the Glass Hat again that month, and one night after the show he was bumming down Broadway with Sonny King. Neither had any particular destination in mind nor any special prospects to look forward to. Patti was on the road, and as he did when she was away, Jerry was planning to sleep in Manhattan. But he had sunk so low that he was considering joining the rotating corps of low-rung entertainers who made camp in Lou Perry’s rooms at the Bryant Hotel.
Across the street, headed in the opposite direction, King recognized Perry walking along with Dean Martin. He tugged Jerry along with him to go over and say hi. Sonny and Dean talked about women. Jerry nervously stood his ground, too awestruck in Martin’s presence to say a word. He recalled himself thinking: “Look at me, weighing 115 pounds—still fighting acne. Standing there in my bumpkin mackinaw jacket, T-shirt underneath and suspenders that held the pants two inches above my Flagg Brothers shoes.” Jerry and Dean were the same height—a sliver over six feet each—but audiences around the world have always carried the same impression that made Jerry so silent that night: Compared with Dean, Jerry was lilliputian.
His stock in himself must have skyrocketed a few nights later, then, when he found himself in King’s room at the Bryant spinning records and shooting the shit with Dean himself. They sat up till four in the morning, Dean doing most of the talking. He told tales of broads, booze, boxing, and betting, of his life on the streets of Steubenville, revealing to Lewis the gorgeous indifference that lay beneath his gorgeous exterior.
If Jerry had been in a nervous swoon around Dean before, he now fell in love. Danny Lewis had always striven to convey an air of nonchalance and suave romance to a room of ten people; Dean had so much cool that he pissed it away. Following Danny around burlie houses and Borscht Belt rec rooms was all Jerry ever wanted out of his childhood; now, following Dean as he catted and sang around New York looked like a marvelous career. Just as he’d wanted to marry every girl singer who’d paid him attention, Jerry was smitten with Dean for deigning to spend time with him. That Dean possessed so many of Danny’s attributes—dark good looks, sexual confidence, a great voice—only made the attraction that much stronger.
Dean talked until he’d told Jerry his whole life story. He even became self-reflective, showing pictures of Betty and the children. Only then did he start asking Jerry about himself. He was startled to hear that Jerry was a married man with a baby on the way. They parted at dawn, Dean no doubt forgetting the encounter by the time his head hit the pillow, Jerry unable to sleep for his excitement. As the light filtered in from behind the shades, he was overjoyed at his new friendship: “I’m thinking that Dean has come along at the right time,” he recalled. “I’m thinking he’s going to be someone special: the big brother I never had.”
Spring came and went, and with it Jerry and Patti’s second wedding ceremony—the Jewish one—and the subsequent reconciliation of Danny and Rae with their boy. Greshler continued booking Jerry around the northeast as a combination emcee/specialty act—Baltimore, Montreal, D.C. And the Glass Hat evolved, luckily, into a running gig: Jerry found himself working there every few months.
Patti had quit the Dorsey band and had stopped making her five hundred dollars a month. She would never work again, even when she wasn’t pregnant and her children were old enough for her to leave the house: “Jerry had to support me,” she explained, “because I believe in a one-career marriage.”
But Jerry could barely do the job. The couple was so broke they could afford only one maternity dress, which Patti wore until she had to throw it away. Even though his wife was well along on her pregnancy and had no family of her own nearby to look out for her, Jerry had to race off as far as Canada to make a buck.
In mid-July 1945, when the baby was due any day, Greshler landed Jerry two weeks in Baltimore at the Chanticleer (again, with no connection but kismet, Dean would follow him there on August 9). It was a mixed blessing: Jerry would produce some income—one hundred dollars a week—but he’d be hours away from home at a time when his wife would need him at a moment’s notice. There really wasn’t much of a choice. There’d be no money to pay the hospital and doctor bills if he didn’t work. Leaving Patti in his parents’ hands, he took the gig. But first he tried to show Patti that she would be in his thoughts while he was gone: He spent most of their meager savings on a spaniel puppy, which they named Mr. Chips.
When the Baltimore engagement was almost over, Patti went into labor. Rae called Jerry and he grabbed the first train he could. He arrived in Newark on July 31 and got his first look at Gary Harold Lee Lewis, who’d been born very early that morning. And with the money he’d made in Baltimore and some extra borrowed from friends, he paid the $120 hospital bill in full. Then he returned south. A few days later, Patti and Gary took a cab home alone from the hospital to an empty apartment.
After Jerry’s return to Newark, the couple went out to celebrate their son’s birth. Jerry was working at the Havana-Madrid, one of the Spanish-themed nightclubs then in vogue in Manhattan. (Dean Martin had always fit well into these clubs, and his upcoming performance was being advertised in the Havana-Madrid lobby that night.) Ignoring the stares of better-heeled patrons, Patti wore Jerry’s latest extravagance, a squirrel jacket. She watched his act and then they went to Lindy’s for a late snack of cheesecake. Seated at a rowdy table nearby was Dean. He recognized Jerry and invited the couple to join him and his friends.
“There were lots of jokes and much kibitzing going on,” Patti recalled. “Dean was in charge, but Jerry played it well. I understood afterward what Jerry meant when he said, ‘Dean is a worldly man … just too much.’”
Indeed, having grown up around Italian American workingmen herself, Patti no doubt saw a lot that was familiar in Dino Crocetti—his looks, his mien, his ability to make other men desire his company. She understood the spell under which her husband had fallen. Years later, in fact, Jerry would presume that Patti shared his attraction toward Dean. As Patti recalled: “He accused me of having an affair with Dean. I did not. We were like family. But the verbal abuse Jerry heaped on me … had me on my knees, crying for mercy. Now I am convinced that his accusations and tirades were a cover for his own activities. … Dean tried, in his own way, to offer me support, and just knowing someone else was aware of what was going on eased my pain. It also created a bond between us and helped me understand Dean’s feelings.”
If Patti understood Dean’s feelings, it may have been, in part, because of their shared experience as show people born to Italian immigrants. Dean and Patti recognized each other across that noisy table at Lindy’s. They were cut from the same cloth, however differently they wore it. Patti was demure and proper, but she had dark features and a tough, proud spine. She might have reminded Dean of his mother. There was nothing sexual between them—Dean usually went for blondes—but that Jerry was married to such a woman surely raised him a notch in Dean’s eyes.
That winter Dean opened at the Havana-Madrid to the delight of its owner, Angel Lopez. Lopez expressed interest in overseeing Dean’s career, and he offered Dean a thousand dollars for a piece of the action. Dean signed over 5 percent. That made 110 percent of himself that he had brokered out, and it was the straw that broke the crooner’s back. In February 1946 Dean was forced to declare bankruptcy in U.S. District Court. His assets consisted of one hundred dollars in clothes, fifteen dollars in cash, and thirty-five dollars in the bank.
Jerry, on the other hand, was seeing light. During the same February in which Dean sought the protection of a court against his own financial inabilities, Greshler had Jerry playing the Glass Hat again for $110 a week, giving him enough to rent a room in town and have Patti and Gary join him. Even more exciting was his next booking: In March he would share the bill with Dean at the Havana-Madrid. Work, wife and kid, big brother: a dreamy major chord.
Lopez always booked the Havana-Madrid with a half-and-half mixture of Anglo and Hispanic acts, alternating them throughout the show. The bill for that run in March included flamenco dancers Dorita and Valero and Afro-Cuban singer Betty Reilly. Pupi Campo led the orchestra. Jerry emceed and did the record act (he’d “improved tremendously,” according to Billboard), and Dean headlined.
Yet this was a different Dean, friskier, less aloof. Bankruptcy might have chastened him somewhat, familiarity with Jerry might have softened him somewhat, or he might have sunk into a lower slough of indifference than he’d ever inhabited before. He and Jerry joshed each other when one was offstage and the other was performing. Jerry, raised on Borscht Belt kibitzing, knew just how to swing along with this sort of banter, and before too long the two of them were regularly launching satiric salvos at each other’s acts.
At the end of each night’s closing show, these sorties grew into a wild, riffing jam session. Campo would stick around and try to play for Dean while Jerry ad-libbed interruptions. They did some physical stuff; Jerry even played straight for Dean, whose nonchalant way with a joke perfectly foiled Jerry’s supersonic delivery. Some nights Sonny King joined in, turning the act into a hip Three Stooges.
Bill Smith of Billboard caught this after-hours frivolity: “Martin and Lewis do an after-piece that has all the makings of a sock act. Boys play straight for each other, deliberately step on each other’s lines, mug and raise general bedlam. It’s a toss-up who walks off with the biggest mitt. Lewis’s double-takes, throw-aways, mugging and deliberate over-acting are sensational. Martin’s slow takes, ad libs and under-acting make him an ideal fall guy. Both got stand-out results from a mob that took dynamite to wake up.”
“Martin and Lewis”: The phrase that would launch tens of millions of dollars had seen print for the first time.
Years later, Lewis shrugged off those wee-hours romps: “That was just bullshitting around.” But back then he must have gloried in his proximity to Dean and in their ease with one another. It was as if Danny had chosen his own son instead of Lou Black as a partner. Dean had usurped Danny’s place in Jerry’s eyes as an ideal, a man who with a mere gesture could possess women, audiences, and the riches of the world. But rather than eclipse Dean in some oedipal psychodrama, Jerry became his partner, a frantically engaged complement to Dean’s disdainfully distant soul. Even Dean had to have been aware that they had clicked. The difference was, of course, that while he left the Havana-Madrid looking through indifferent eyes toward his next job, the episode had merely left Jerry hungry for more.
The chance for a reunion was remote, however. Right after the Havana-Madrid gig, Dean was booked into Chicago’s Rio Cabana. Before he left New York, though, he made a screen test for Columbia Pictures. When the studio’s autocratic boss, Harry Cohn, saw the results, his verdict was terse: “Martin may have some ability in a nightclub, but he cannot talk at all.”
Jerry had more success staying on more familiar turf. He was booked back in Baltimore, opening at the Hippodrome on March 24 as part of a vaudeville show accompanying the movie Deadline at Dawn. Variety caught the debut: “Lewis is a frequent repeater here, but youthful comic has an original turn and pleasing manner of salesmanship. Mouths vocals played by off-stage recordings and makes the most of comedy panto.”
He returned as well to the Gaiety Theater in Montreal that spring, to a less heartening Variety notice: “He’s obviously a seasoned guy with plenty of know-how on selling a punchline, but this just isn’t his spot.”
Then it was off to D.C. and the Capitol Theater. There, as emcee, Jerry did an audience-participation piece tied into the feature film he was supporting, United Artists’ Breakfast in Hollywood. The odd picture starred Tom Breneman, a radio journalist who did a live breakfast chat show of the same name. According to Variety, “Lewis does a Tom Breneman hat auction, with volunteers from the sidelines as models. Audience cooperation is along acceptable lines, with no offence to participants. … Bit is clever stage business and clicks.”
This is obviously a different Jerry from the kid who was too nervous to open his mouth onstage just a couple of years earlier. Perhaps it was the accumulation of nearly four years of experience as an emcee in theaters and nightclubs; perhaps it was a bounce of confidence following his after-hours shtick with Dean at the Havana-Madrid. Whatever the reason, Lewis had begun, at twenty, to mature as an entertainer, able to involve an audience in a bit of spontaneous fun just as easily as he and Smitty had once drawn a crowd aping movies in the lobby of the Arthur Hotel.
Abbey Greshler had done what he’d set out to do: Jerry was now a viable emcee/specialty act on the nightclub and presentation house circuit, and he was getting work steadily. No one was going to get rich doing Tom Breneman imitations, though. Jerry and Greshler both knew that Jerry would have to develop something else, but neither of them knew just what it ought to be.
It was July, and as it did every year, a pall fell over the Manhattan nightclub scene. Everybody left the city for the Catskills or the ocean, and the entertainment followed.
Jerry hadn’t played the mountains in years, but Greshler had booked him into a sweet summertime gig in Atlantic City: the 500 Club, the gem of the boardwalk. Skinny D’Amato, a legendary sharpie in the hallowed resort town, ran the joint; his partner, Irvin Wolf, booked it; and Marco Reginelli, boss of the Camden mob, owned it—though not so as you could prove it in court. The 500 Club could seat one thousand in its showroom; the illegal casino in the back had a capacity the fire marshal hadn’t set a limit on.
Greshler had gotten Jerry $150 a week from Wolf to be part of a bill headlined by Jayne Manners, a former Ziegfeld girl turned singing comedienne whose affairs of the heart had made her a darling of gossip columns. There was also a singer named Jack Randall. Jerry was billed second, the old standby “Satirical Impressions in Pantomimicry” once again his billing. He did three shows a night—the last began at 4 A.M.—and he was making enough to have Patti and Gary join him by the sea, taking a room at the Princess Hotel, a block or so from the water.
By the middle of the month, though, a sour note had crept in. By one account, either Wolf or D’Amato couldn’t stand Jack Randall and fired him. By another, Randall took sick and had to be replaced. Still other versions say that the act that Wolf or D’Amato or both couldn’t stand was Jerry’s.
Whatever the reason, all parties agree that Jerry contacted Lou Perry after recommending that Dean fill the empty singing spot. Perry recalled later on: “Lewis called me, crying that Irvin Wolf was going to cancel him, and I could do something about it.” By Perry’s account, Lewis begged him to sign Dean to Randall’s singing spot, reminding him of the rapport he and Dean had shared at the Havana-Madrid that spring. Perry remembered that the 500 Club had long been interested in Dean, and as Dean was idle for the time being and seemed to get along with Lewis, he offered him to Wolf at a discount price—five hundred dollars a week—encouraging Wolf with the news that Dean and Jerry did some funny stuff together. A contract was drawn up and signed. Dean would debut at the 500 Club on July 25, knocking Jerry from second to third billing.
The revamped show premiered that night and, to Wolf’s consternation, there was nothing much special about it. Jerry emceed, Dean and Jerry each did their bits, Jayne Manners did her act, and the show ended. Wolf, according to Jerry, got sinister: “Where’s that funny shit you two were gonna do? If it ain’t in the second show, you’re both outta here tomorrow.” (Or maybe it was D’Amato who was angry; over the years, Lewis has fingered both men for the threat.) It’s clear, at least, that someone said something to someone. And no wonder: The 500 Club management must have felt they’d been sold a bill of goods; they didn’t like Jerry and had only kept him on for the comedy he supposedly did with Dean. Now they wanted some comedy. It’s not as likely that they would want to fire Martin, whom they’d courted for a long time, but they might have wanted both guys out on the street merely because they felt duped.
Jerry panicked—he needed the work—and he took Dean into the dressing room determined to work out an act. They had their silly stuff from the Havana-Madrid after-hours pieces to build on, and Jerry figured they could expand that into an act. As a boy he’d developed the habit of scanning the show-biz sky for examples of the best sort of comedy, and he was certainly aware of the huge success then being enjoyed by comedy twosomes: Abbott and Costello, of course, and more to the point, Hope and Crosby: a joker and a crooner.
Of course, Jerry was no Hope—it wasn’t given to him to dash off one-liners or droll stories with the cool panache of a stand-up comic. So he envisioned a slight variation: the Playboy and the Putz. Dean would stand in front of the mike and ooze sex and lassitude as only he could; Jerry would dress as a busboy and do his best to ruin the mood with accidents, outbursts, and interruptions. And since Jerry really needed the gig and he himself didn’t care one way or another, Dean agreed.
Here’s where the story becomes ineffable: By all accounts, the first show Martin and Lewis planned and performed before a paying crowd was an earth-shattering success. Jerry, in a typical exaggeration, would repeat for decades the claim that before “literally, an audience of four,” the two men did an act that “lasted over three hours.” Probably it was one hundred people and an hour-long show. It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t so much who was there, or for how long, as what it was that they saw.
There was something inimitable and sublime about the comedy that Jerry Lewis became famous performing—the shrieks, the wild release of the id, the lack of physical and emotional control. But Martin and Lewis were just as unique, their energy sparked by the obvious conflict between them. One was a pure schlemiel in ill-fitting clothes, trying to play the drums, assaulting the microphone, dropping trays of water glasses, throwing patrons’ steaks around like Frisbees. And the other was a genuine Casanova, turning even silly songs into lascivious come-ons, bouncing off of the schmuck’s buffets with imperious bonhomie, utterly unflustered, never breaking into laughter, acting like it was the most natural thing in the world. It was like watching the two halves of a personality you wished you could have: insane and unrepressed on the one hand, smoothly poised and confident on the other. And serendipitously enough, they actually enhanced one another, sanding away each other’s brittle edges.
The howling reaction of the 500 Club’s patrons to Martin and Lewis’s slapstick-and-psychology cocktail appeased Wolf (and/or D’Amato). Jerry and Dean—one relieved, the other nonplussed—walked out into the night. They stood next to each other on a pier along the boardwalk, staring out into the ocean and smoking, not saying anything, just absorbing, each in his own way, what had happened. Neither had ever heard a crowd roar like that, neither had ever felt the organic mass of the audience rise toward him and cling to him in such perfect harmony. Neither had ever gotten such a rush out of performing before. It was brilliant—magical—and they knew it.
On June 8, 1966, in the midst of an eighteen-cities-in-thirty-three-days film tour, Jerry Lewis wrote in pen on his scrupulously detailed, mimeographed itinerary, “The man that doesn’t advertise may know his business, but nobody else does.”
It’s not the stuff of an MBA term project, nor was it something that Lewis had just realized. The clever businessman who printed all those weird postcards, and who would one day have a caricature of himself designed as a permanent logo, had an inspiration back in 1946 in Atlantic City that was intended to do for Dean and himself what the postcards had failed to do for the record act. Once they’d managed to secure their jobs at the 500 Club, Dean and Jerry began staging publicity stunts for themselves out among the crowds on the beach.
Jerry raced into the waves and pretended to drown; Dean acted the hero and swam out to rescue him. When Dean had landed Jerry and was about to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in front of a good-sized crowd, Jerry broke out of his phony torpor: “I’d rather have a malted, sir!”
Dean, in unflustered rhythm, responded, “Vanilla or chocolate?” Then he eyed Jerry suspiciously: “Don’t I know you?”
“I’m Jerry Lewis!”
“Well, I’m Dean Martin.”
“I know that: I’m playing at the 500 Club with you!” They both bolted from the perplexed crowd, shouting out show times.
It was an old gag—no less than W. C. Fields had pulled it when he worked Atlantic City back in the town’s glory days. And as luck would have it, Sophie Tucker—the Last of the Red Hot Mamas, an old-timer well familiar with such drumbeating—happened to catch one of these fake drownings. Curious about who would resurrect such material, she caught Dean and Jerry’s show. She loved it.
“These two crazy kids are a combination of the Keystone Kops, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello,” she told the local press. “They will leave their mark on the whole profession.” This was publicity that Skinny D’Amato and Irvin Wolf couldn’t have bought. Within three nights, Martin and Lewis were the hottest thing on the boardwalk. Patrons were being turned away from even the 4 A.M. show. Columnists came down from New York to get a peek at the Next Thing.
When he wasn’t cooking up publicity schemes for the new act, Jerry busied himself writing material for it. He entitled his conception “Sex and Slapstick,” and he outlined bits that he and Dean could do together, understanding that their appeal lay as much in their contrasting personalities as in their ability to burst into any sort of spontaneous mayhem. Gathering his thoughts at the Princess Hotel that summer, Jerry wrote the following: “Since time immemoriam, there has never been a two-act in show business that weren’t two milkmen, two food operators, two electricians, two plumbers, and for the first time here we have a handsome man and a monkey.”
Jerry was so delighted with his new prospects that he frankly and willingly adopted the role of the buffoon to Dean’s king. He was anything but ashamed to acknowledge that standing alongside his gorgeous new partner, he looked—and acted—subhuman.
There was only one hitch in this grand conception: The handsome man and the monkey were still working for different agents. There was no way they could work together permanently as an act until they were under one managerial hand.
If Jerry had overlooked this detail, Abbey Greshler certainly hadn’t. Persona non grata around Atlantic City just a week before—as the guy who’d sold Irvin Wolf the awful record act—now he arrived like a pasha to oversee his young genius in action. Smelling the fresh blood in the water, he came south to insinuate himself between Dean and Lou Perry.
Perry had been in Dean’s corner a long time—he “would have gone to hell and back for Dean,” Jerry said—but he had tired of the hassles involved in managing such an irresponsible and indifferent personality. Dean was pushing thirty, he was in bankruptcy, he’d pissed away his radio show, he’d cut records that went nowhere, he didn’t care to be around his own wife and kids. Before he’d sent Dean down to Atlantic City, Perry had been approached by Nick Constantino, an eastern Ohio gangster who knew Dean from his blackjack-dealing days and wanted to buy Dean’s contract. Perry thought about what a relief it would be to rid himself of Dean once and for all and agreed; they shook hands, but no price was set, no papers were drawn up. Dean didn’t know that his days with Perry were numbered; Perry, of course, didn’t know that Dean was about to become a star.
In Atlantic City, meanwhile, Greshler had begun to catch Dean’s ear. He knew he had to move fast: On the strength of their Atlantic City word-of-mouth, Angel Lopez had booked Dean and Jerry into the Havana-Madrid for a September run (Dean had top billing, at $750 a week). If Greshler didn’t wrest Dean away from Perry by the time the act exploded on New York, he was in danger of losing both Dean and Jerry outright. Manhattan was filled with big agents who might exploit the situation better than even Greshler could.
He went for broke. Before the Havana-Madrid engagement opened, he signed Martin and Lewis as a team at the Latin Casino in Philadelphia for six hundred dollars each. Then he had Dean sign a letter to Perry firing him as his manager. Perry immediately sought relief from the American Guild of Variety Artists, but the hearings that the AGVA held to sort out the situation were a tangled, inconclusive mess (Dean’s financial history couldn’t have made matters easy). Finally, Greshler offered Perry a four-thousand-dollar settlement, and Perry snatched it up. Greshler took Perry to his Radio City bank and cashed the check, to Perry’s amazement. “Perry and I were in different worlds,” Greshler observed.
And that was that. Dean and Jerry were united as Martin and Lewis. Perry took a belt in the nose from one of Nick Constantino’s goons and began paying regular reparations. And Greshler held on tight, suspecting that he had just caught hold of the ride he’d been waiting for his whole life.