At around the time Gary Lewis was learning to speak his first words, his father was developing a verbal persona of his own. Gone were the records and the portable phonograph. From now on, Jerry Lewis would speak onstage in his own voice—or, at least, a voice of his own making. The character Lewis was to portray on and off for the next twenty years—the mewling schlemiel Lewis would come to call “The Kid” or “The Nine-Year-Old”—was born around the same time Jerry and Dean became a unified act.
It’s clear, in fact, that the character developed as a reaction to Dean’s extreme self-assuredness. Jerry’s conception of the act was based on the opposition of personalities—“Sex and Slapstick.” Dean oozed masculinity, worldliness, testosterone. Jerry aspired to all of those, but his stage persona took him in the exact opposite direction. Rather than mimic Dean, he would oppose and thus complement him, and what he hit on was a peer to Baby Snooks and Harpo Marx—not a moron, exactly, but a naïf.
Dean, too, refined his stage persona into a signature, allowing his ironic, disaffected worldview to seep out as comedy. Once a serious singer with a thinly veiled disregard—a contempt, even—for his craft and his audience, now he became a seriocomic lampoon of an Italian crooner with enough suavity and native talent to mix the roles of straight man, singer, and smart aleck without mussing his hair.
The familiar public faces of the duo were set in concrete that summer in Atlantic City: Dean the boozing, breezy, devil-may-care playboy with the soft heart; Jerry the frantic, frightened, hero-worshiping innocent with the soft heart. Though they would go on to do many things in their careers, neither ever completely escaped the guise he adopted at the 500 Club. Eventually, both men turned into self-caricatures, though not without being savvy to it: Dean parodied his public image wickedly in Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid and then gently on TV for years; Jerry virtuosically tackled both the schlemiel and the sharpie in his Jekyll-and-Hyde film, The Nutty Professor.
Given the way the act dissolved so utterly a decade later, it’s ironic how completely each performer owes the other for the character he wound up playing for the rest of his life; the team developed as a team. Neither man could have realized his familiar guise if it hadn’t been for the guy on the other side of the mike balancing his tendencies. Without the suave, soothing influence of Martin and his singing, Jerry’s hysteria would have been intolerable. Likewise, Dean’s singing, while always mellifluous, tended to be too cool to pull in audiences; the adrenaline that Jerry injected into the act turned Dean’s musical interludes into oases of calm. Jerry’s frivolity took the lascivious edge off Martin’s sexuality; Martin, with his leonine, Abruzzese, live-and-let-live air, taught the world how to love his imbecilic partner.
One crucial quality in this marriage of opposites was the terrific tension between the two; they were so different that you expected the act to explode of its contrasts at any moment. Far more than such earlier comedy duos as Laurel and Hardy, Hope and Crosby, Abbott and Costello—men cut from essentially the same cloth as one another, despite their physical differences—Martin and Lewis were presented as complete opposites, two guys you’d never figure to know each other at all if not for their being partners. There was an edge of cruelty to Dean—especially on screen, where he was always cast as a conniver who at the last minute turned good—while Jerry was more like a puppy dog that kept wagging its tail even when it was being kicked. It was a new concept in comedy, and it was widely imitated: A case can be made for their being the models for Gelsomina and Zampanò, the innocent clown and the egoistic brute of Federico Fellini’s La Strada, as well as for the bullying Ralph Kramden and whimsical Ed Norton of “The Honeymooners,” who came to television just as Martin and Lewis were at their peak.
The public, of course, assumed that each man was really like his stage character, and making the routine cohere required Martin and Lewis to play their parts with dead-on earnestness. In doing so, though, they became types. And whereas typification of this sort can make stars out of mere personalities—think of how much easier it is to imitate the distinctive Martin or Lewis than either Tony Bennett or Lenny Bruce, a better singer and a better comic respectively—it can also serve to make them tiresome. After a while, any act that goes undeveloped, unchanged, can come to seem like the work of a one-trick pony. Martin and Lewis generated an enormous amount of goodwill in their initial ten-year splash, enough to carry them at the top of the game for more than another decade, but their inability to erase their first impression (as entertainers such as Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby had done successfully) haunted the remainder of their careers. No matter how big they became, no matter what else they did, no matter how much distance they put between each other and their shared past, they would always remain the Playboy and the Putz.
Jerry’s Putz was an especially ambivalent character. A seeming mental deficient, he was acceptable, it often seemed, only by virtue of the company he kept: Chaplin, Keaton, and Danny Kaye never needed straight men, and Stan Laurel and Lou Costello certainly could’ve negotiated planet earth on their own. Not Jerry. He was a hopeless schmuck, but a schmuck who was nevertheless welcome in every boîte and country club in the world because his best friend was the Great Dino—a man’s man and a ladies’ man. People could accept Jerry because Jerry was acceptable to Dean.
Still, the public’s reaction to Jerry was often contradictory. Those who disliked him saw his gesticulations and twitches as a revolting mockery of disability, a sophomoric brand of insult humor that belonged in a middle-school cafeteria. To others, though, they constituted a brilliant form of mimicry, an externalization of the internal and the inexpressible, a way of showing with the body what the tongue can’t convey: the mood of the soul.
In each excruciating spasm and exaggerated grimace, Jerry seemed to give himself over to some inner urge civilization has taught the rest of us to suppress. Whether he was twisting his legs and biting a knuckle in a futile attempt to hide his lust from a pretty woman, curling up like a potato bug to withstand the bellowing of a tyrant whom he’s crossed, or grinning insanely and kicking his heels with glee after concocting a clever new scheme, Jerry embodied—and thus expressed—what the rest of us hid.
At the moment when Jerry Lewis first appeared as the Kid, Americans had never seen a grown man behave this way before. Though they were conquerors of the world, Americans of the late 1940s were nagged by an undercurrent of anxiety that slightly curdled their sense of triumph. Jerry turned this mood inside out: As if the stress of success, global leadership, and impending nuclear holocaust made the world too much for him to bear, he seemed constantly short-circuited, giving vent to every passing sensation as if every minute might be his last. The sight of someone admitting to his own worst fears and acting out his most childish fantasies was lapped up by the public.
Jerry knew exactly why people liked his stuff. “I appeal to children who know I get paid for doing what they get slapped for,” he said. “I flout dignity and authority, and there’s nobody alive who doesn’t want to do the same thing.” But only Jerry could get away with it. The genius of his character was that it was always within and without society, a child in adult’s clothing, an adult with a little boy’s mind and heart.
The spastic nerd that was Jerry’s stage persona was inept in every regard: as a lover, an athlete, a soldier, a worker, a son. He seemed capable of any sort of inadequacy, any embarrassment, any marginalizing behavior save one: Unlike his creator, who liked to indulge in touches of Yiddish onstage and often referred to himself as a “Jewish movie star,” Jerry’s comic character was utterly without ethnicity. True, few Jewish comics of the era flaunted their religious roots in mainstream entertainment; but beyond that, Jerry’s very position as half of a team required he sublimate his ethnic background. Jerry’s partner was highly regarded for his way with Italian songs, and the contrast between the virile and confident singer and his skinny-shouldered, nebbishy friend could easily have been loaded with ugly implications had the little guy’s ethnicity been allowed to surface. It was bad enough to play a hopeless spaz; why add the burden of a still only marginally mainstream Judaism to the poor guy’s frame? Even after the division of the act, Jerry would never play an explicitly Jewish character in movies. It was for a later generation of comics—Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, and Woody Allen, in particular—to make hay of the hallmarks of Jewish identity that incited anti-Semites during Jerry’s prime.
Of course, many aspects of Jerry’s new stage persona would come to the surface only in later years, when he and Dean were making films. In the fall of 1946 there was just a nascent nightclub act—two guys mixing song and comedy, sex and slapstick, in a ramshackle, hellbent-for-leather stage show. They knocked over music stands, spoiled people’s dinners, squirted seltzer bottles, spilled pitchers of water on the audience, fractured songs, harassed the help, used the entire room—customers’ tables and seats included—as their stage.
After Atlantic City, they played the Havana-Madrid, where Angel Lopez broke with his traditional practice of alternating Latin and Anglo acts by allowing Dean and Jerry to perform back to back at the end. Dean had top billing, and they were still doing their solo acts, but then they combined them in a finale that was the real meat of the show.
Variety all but ignored the three Latin opening acts to write for the first time about the wild new team that was making its New York debut: “Lewis tees off the fun with his synchronized mugging and motions to recordings of Danny Kaye’s ‘Dinah’ and Cyril Smith’s ‘Sow Song.’ Guy’s got stint down to perfection. Martin then warms up his pleasantly-smooth baritone on a group of pops. Young crooner is greatly improved since appearance at this club last winter. He still bounces around, jounces the mike and kids the audience but his completely relaxed manner builds up a nice intimacy with the crowd and he draws plenty of applause.”
The review was as positive as any either performer had ever received in the trades, and it’s notable that their solo work was appreciated by the writer. After all, both were familiar faces in New York, and because little had changed in their individual routines, the reviewer (who signed himself “Stal.”) might have found their acts disappointingly stale. Then again, his appreciation of their solo work might have been enhanced by what followed: “Rowdy action that pulls belly-laughs starts, though, when Martin and Lewis team up to carry the last twenty minutes together. Duo goes through a bunch of zany routines, apparently following a set format but improvising most of the way along the line. The hoked-up gags, impressions, terping, etc., probably wouldn’t go in the more sedate niteries, but it’s sock stuff here.”
The review sets the pattern for notices that Martin and Lewis received throughout their early years, celebrating while at the same time recognizing its older elements and suggesting that its appeal would be limited.
And really, there wasn’t much to it: Jerry called it “Three hours of ‘Did you take a bath this morning?’ ‘Why, is one missing?’” The secret wasn’t in the substance but in the style. They had the gift of timing, each had an undeniably entertaining spark, and they were enjoying the hell out of themselves. Jerry would always credit the success of the act to the fact that “you were watching a love affair,” and in retrospect, it’s easy to see the truth in that. Martin and Lewis were physically relaxed with one another in a way that no other comedy team had ever been: In later years, one of their bits involved Dean’s actually applying his tongue to his partner’s face. Their combined talents made them into a kind of überstar: a two-headed, eight-limbed, singing, miming, Don Juaning, clowning, dancing, joke-spritzing variety act, spinning three shows a night off a few simple premises: the sergeant and the recruit, the maître d’ and the busboy, the handsome man and the monkey.
Even within these simple confines, their energy and magnetism were indescribable. Everyone who saw them in person agreed that they were hilarious, but almost no one could rationally explain what was so funny. Reviewers constantly resorted to a kind of critical head scratching—something along the lines of Variety’s “probably wouldn’t go in the more sedate niteries.” It was the ultimate “you had to be there.”
“People couldn’t tell you when they left the Copa what the fuck Martin and Lewis did,” Jerry recalled. “They knew one was a singer and one was a monkey. That’s it. People used to sit in Lindy’s and say, ‘They tore the fuckin’ joint apart.’ ‘What did they do?’ ‘Uh … uh … you gotta see it.’ No one ever said what we did. No one could ever write what we did. They could try it, and good writers on The New York Times attempted it, and Dean and I used to sit and get hysterical. Laughing hysterically because they’re trying to be uppity and up-scale: ‘Of course, the straight man, who would come on after the comic, would do a gag or two, and he would sing some songs. …’ Well, Dean and I would say, ‘They don’t fucking get it. They just don’t get it.’ And we would laugh hysterically. We were putting on the whole fucking world.”
The sophomoric Martin and Lewis high jinks, at once hip and inane, captured the moment of the postwar years exactly: As America rose to global dominance, Martin and Lewis provided a kind of nervous escape hatch, a temporary flight from the American sense of responsibility. They acted out the urge to piss on the boardroom table that returning GIs turned businessmen repressed for the good of their families and their nation. There was nothing dangerously subversive in their act—it was still, after all, an age of relative consensus, before Elvis, before Jack Kerouac, even before Brando. But Dean and Jerry were instantly gobbled up by audiences that felt increasingly, if unconsciously, at sea amid the trappings of progress, wealth, and success.
Abbey Greshler, for his part, felt no existential burden at all. In the winter of 1946–47 he was overseeing bookings for a wildly hot act—he even had Jerry and Dean’s lives insured, lest some calamity rob him of his new sinecure. By the end of the Havana-Madrid engagement, Lou Perry took Jerry aside to tell him he was no longer representing Dean. In October the gig Greshler had presumptuously booked at the Latin Casino found Jerry and Dean billed in unison for the first time: Martin and Lewis. (The billing order, which custom has made sound so natural, was arrived at, according to Jerry, when Dean announced they should be billed alphabetically: “D comes before J.“)
In Philadelphia that fall, Jerry ordered matching two-hundred-dollar tuxes for the duo, despite Dean’s protests that the material was far too expensive for their knockabout style. Jerry, seeing that the very luxury of the suits would set off the slapstick nicely, not only ordered the tuxes over Dean’s objections but had a second set made as well.
He also contributed another sartorial touch to the act, which he felt was crucial to its success. Since both men stood just over six feet tall, and since both were slender and freshfaced, Lewis hit upon height as the dimension to exploit in distinguishing and enhancing their images. To exaggerate the physical differences between himself and Dean—to make the Putz look less prepossessing than the Playboy—Jerry had fractions of an inch shaved off the soles of his shoes and fractions added to the soles of Dean’s.
“When we used to read ‘the little guy,’” Jerry said, “Dean used to pound the table and say, ‘They don’t even know we’re the same fuckin’ size, those idiots!’ I said, ‘Leave them alone, Dean. We’re making a fortune. Let them write “the little guy.’” He said, ‘But don’t they watch?’”
The effect was subtle—Jerry would intensify it by performing in a crouch and peering up at Dean like a little kid—but it made a slight physical variance seem like a deep psychological rift. A half-inch here, a quarter-inch there, a hunch of the shoulders, and Jerry’s worship for Dean was writ physically into their posture. Dean would always refer to Jerry as “the boy,” both in and out of character, and while Martin was indeed almost a decade older than his partner, the term referred as much to a maturity gap in their characters as anything else.
Jerry was still a boy, though, and even though he had a little family of his own and a swiftly rising career, he had a boy’s problems. In addition to nightclub owners and booking agents throughout the northeast, all of whom were mad to showcase his act, Jerry was being courted by Danny and Rae—who, though still working, were now finding plenty of time in their schedules to see their son perform. They may have balked at his getting into the business, but now that he was becoming a success they were determined to keep close tabs on him.
Danny called Jerry one morning during the Latin Casino run to announce that he and Rae would be making the trip down to Philly to catch that night’s dinner show. Waking Jerry up, Danny tried to mask his embarrassed resentment over having to request tickets to his son’s hot new act. Jerry sensed his dad’s discomfort, but, as any twenty-year-old would, he blamed himself for the awkward situation: “In some incomprehensible way I felt guilty,” he later recalled, “as if everything I had become only made his life more painful, much harder to bear.”
If coming with hat in hand to request a ringside table at the Latin Casino stuck in Danny Lewis’s craw, he must have choked outright the following January, when Dean and Jerry were booked at the Loew’s State Theater in Manhattan at fifteen hundred dollars per week in support of The Jolson Story, the film of his hero’s life. With their five or six shows a day, Martin and Lewis were as big a hit as the film, which finished third in the year’s box-office derby. Jerry even began working Jolson material into the act. This wasn’t irony: This was fate spitting in Danny Lewis’s eye. The engagement was a smash. Variety wrote appreciatively of the “fresh, clean, youthful appearance of the pair” and once again seemed at a loss to describe just what it was that was so funny: “All they do cannot be detailed, but virtually every bit of it is good for solid laughs.” Whatever it was they had, it was infectious. The Loew’s chain picked up both of its options to book Dean and Jerry again later that year at an additional $250 a week.
Part of the furor at the State was created by the scores of servicemen with whom Greshler had seeded the audience. He gave them each two bits and some quick lessons in applauding and laughing on cue. The idea of spiking the crowd had come from George Evans, the publicist Greshler had hired to promote the act. Evans was a stone legend in public-relations circles at the relatively tender age of forty-five—the Irving Thalberg of flack. Thin and quiet, with wire-rimmed glasses perched on his slender nose and with dark, thinning hair, he looked more like a college administrator or small businessman than a behind-the-scenes show-business genius. But he was universally regarded as just that. Over the years, he’d pitched such acts as the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Lena Horne, and Duke Ellington, and he was the publicist for the Copacabana, the ne plus ultra of sophisticated nightclubs.
Evans had made himself immortal in his trade a half-dozen years earlier, when he turned Frank Sinatra into a star: He planted bobby-soxers in the audience whenever the singer performed, arranged to have ambulances parked out front to rush swooning girls to the hospital, and supplied ushers with smelling salts and ammonia to help revive the victims of the Voice’s charms. The press reported all of the resultant commotion—real and imagined—as news, never questioning Evans’s role in creating the hubbub. Even more valuably, perhaps, Evans was an expert at extricating his clients from messy situations of their own personal manufacture. Sinatra’s marital misadventures were widely joked to have cost Evans his hairline, and while Dean and Jerry weren’t quite big enough yet to give their publicist ulcers, they were working on it.
With the act in increasing demand, Greshler was approached by the Copacabana with an offer of $750 a week. Though the club was universally regarded as the premier night spot in the country, Greshler was frankly insulted that its bookers would offer his boys less than half of what they were making elsewhere. He turned the deal down. Dean and Jerry were aghast, as was Evans, and the duo discussed dismissing Greshler, but the tough-minded agent succeeded in persuading them that the club would be after them again—and for more money. Besides, he was booking them into such lucrative dates that they couldn’t say no.
Martin and Lewis premiered in Chicago in May 1947, playing the Rio Cabana for a month at $1,750 a week. The date was just another in a series of their successes that spring and summer—the Stanley Theater in Camden, New Jersey, the Earl Theater in Philadelphia, return engagements at Loew’s State and the 500 Club. But it marked one minor sea change: During their stay in Chicago, Dino Crocetti, the barber’s son from Steubenville, applied scissors to his partner’s greasy pompadour, cutting it into a juvenile buzz. (By some accounts, Jerry fell asleep in a barber’s chair and Dean slipped the haircutter a few bucks to do the deed.) Jerry didn’t exactly love the effect at first, but he realized how crucially it affected the act. Gone forever was Jerry’s unlikely attempt to resemble a gigolo. He would be a crewcut-and-brilliantine guy evermore.
The hair: It developed as yet another means of differentiating him from Dean, making one look more the Casanova and the other more a chimp. But along with the notorious screech of “Hey, Laaaa-dy!,” it has become Jerry’s permanent trademark. Jerry’s haircut is as much a physical signature as Bob Hope’s nose, Groucho’s mustache, or Buster Keaton’s deadpan. And it is an almost irresistible butt of humor: Johnny Carson (“If you’d ever take that shoe polish out of your hair, you’d be a nice-looking boy”), David Letterman (“The big Labor Day weekend is coming up, which means that sometime soon Jerry Lewis will apply the first ritual coating of shellac to his head”), and scores of lesser comics can no more ignore Lewis’s haircut than they can political sex scandals or airline food.
It was a near-crewcut in the early years, adding an additional patina of boyishness to Jerry’s already youthful looks. After Martin and Lewis, it became a bit more elaborate: razor-fine along the temples, longer (and greased down) on top and over the edges of the crown, tapered in back—a modified D.A. Jerry was said to cut it himself, but he also went to elaborate lengths to get just the look he wanted when the occasion demanded it. Thirty-five years before Bill Clinton’s notorious Los Angeles airport haircut, Lewis flew his California barber to New York at the cost of five hundred dollars so his hair would look perfect during his epochal run at the Palace Theater. It was always jet black, suspiciously so as Lewis hit middle age. Lit up with spotlights onstage or in movies, it could look like an ebony skullcap—a grotesque approximation of the black widow’s peak of greasepaint sported by the Pierrot figure in the commedia dell’arte.
Lewis explained his coiffure simply: “I kept my hair long and it’s very, very fine. I can’t stand stuff in my eyes, so I used that shit to keep my hair out of the way.” And he could see, in retrospect, how awful the original, tall pompadour looked on him: “I got some pictures where I look like Anthony Quinn’s cunt,” he admitted, bizarrely. But the practicality of the hairdo is less telling than its persistence. Where Jerry’s hair once bespoke childlikeness and then represented a kind of cleancut hipness à la Harold Teen or Elvis-just-out-of-the-army, it has evolved into a mark of age, a symbol of a man at once out of touch and defiant about it.
As Lewis approached seventy, he knew as much—“You know what a joy it is for me never to use that shit?” he said—and with his hair relaxed for a day of lolling about the house or yacht, he would let his temples appear frankly gray, with tinges of auburn about his head. Onstage, however, he still went to some lengths to style his hair in the old manner, as determined to maintain that element of his character as he was to keep telling Polish jokes and singing Jolson songs.
In the fall of 1947 Greshler booked Martin and Lewis into the Riviera, one of the most fabulous steps on the nightclub circuit, a gigantic north Jersey dinner theater with a glass roof that revealed the night sky and the Manhattan cityscape across the Hudson. Dean and Jerry were making $2,250 a week—the Riviera, the gem of the Bergen mob’s string of gambling parlors and nightclubs, could afford it—but they’d begun to chafe a bit at Greshler’s management and even at each other. Each accused the other of trying to upstage him, and each was probably right. The act was so loosely put together, such a helter-skelter toyboxful of bits, that upstaging was a matter of course.
At first they took it in stride. “I remember once Jerry was onstage doing something by himself,” Dean recalled later. “I went back to the dressing room and got my suitcase, walked through the club and across the stage, and at the edge turned and said to him, ‘When you’re through, kid, lock up.’” But now they were sniping about each other to Greshler. The agent got so annoyed with the bickering that he approached the powerful William Morris Agency and offered to sell the act to them outright for $17,500 (more than quadruple what he’d paid Perry for Dean alone a year before). Morris said no.
So Greshler saddled up his frisky ponies and rode to Chicago, where an even bigger gig awaited them at the Chez Paree, the swank nitery that was to the land of Capone what the Riviera was to Fort Lee, New Jersey. It was a long, extremely lucrative gig—nearly thirty thousand dollars for Martin and Lewis as a team for some twelve weeks of work. And like that Christmas vacation Jerry had taken with Danny and Rae in Detroit a decade earlier, this winter-long hiatus in Chicago would mark a passage into a newer, more mature phase in his life.
Living in a Chicago hotel with Dean, surrounded each night by mobsters in tuxedos offering him drinks and showgirls in sequined costumes offering other favors, Jerry would begin to turn from the nervous kid who had palled around with Irving Kaye and Lonnie Brown into a slick, jaded young man. In imitation of his partner and idol, Jerry began to hang out with tough guys and cheat on his wife. If he was going to act like a baby while he was onstage, he would be the most macho of men when he got off it.
Jerry almost didn’t survive his initial look at this new life. He was onstage at the Chez Paree, bleeding the crowd for laughs, and some guy at a front table was not only not laughing but sitting with his back to the show altogether, talking to a friend.
Jerry wouldn’t have it. He reached down from the stage and grabbed the man by the shoulder.
“Hey, pal, the show is up here!”
The man stared him down cold. “If you don’t move away, right now, I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off!”
Jerry looked at the guy’s white-on-white tie and shirt, remembered that he was in Chicago, and felt a cold chill on his neck. He finished the show and summoned up the courage to go over and apologize.
“Sir, there’s no excuse for stupidity, but I’m young, I’m trying to do what I think is good on the stage, and I got carried away, and what I did was rude and disrespectful, and I’m really very sorry.”
“After I tell you I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ head off,” the man responded, “you got the guts to come over here. You’re all right.”
He extended a hand. “My name is Charlie Fischetti.”
Jerry had never heard of him, but he was Al Capone’s cousin, Trigger-Happy Fischetti, who ran Chicago from his ringside Chez Paree table.
Fischetti was Jerry’s first mobster, but he wouldn’t be his last. Over the years, Jerry would be voluntarily candid with journalists about the gang lords he’d known. He was more apt, in fact, to drop the names Fischetti, Genovese, and Siegel than those of presidents or monarchs he’d met. Told the FBI wouldn’t release its file on him without his permission, he responded, “There’s a lot of blacked-out stuff. Especially stuff pertaining to John Kennedy—all of that is struck—Marilyn Monroe, my friendship with [Sam] Giancana …” He bragged about the value of his marker, how on trips to Italy strangers would greet him as “an American man who my family said is okay,” how at various times in his troubled economic history connected men would appear with suitcases of money (which he refused), how he’d been able to get—and sometimes get out of having to play—gigs (“you just have to know what calls to make”), how the Fischettis supported his charity work: “There’s never been a telethon where I don’t get very, very heavy-duty checks from that family, every year.”
It’s no great secret that there were intimate ties between show biz and the mob throughout the century, from New Orleans honky-tonks through the founding of Las Vegas to the celebrities who showed up at John Gotti’s trials to offer their support. In the late 1940s hoods ran the most prestigious night spots in nearly every American city, and every entertainer who regularly performed before live audiences came to know a veritable Who’s Who of underworld figures. But even those show people who actively sought the companionship, sponsorship, and confidence of gangsters have been more discreet about their connections to the mob than Lewis. Frank Sinatra, for a pointed instance, always threatened to sue writers who focused on the darker side of his social life, and continually denied any connection to mafiosi even when everyone from the Justice Department to Garry Trudeau could prove otherwise. Lewis, on the contrary, spent the 1980s and ’90s bragging about his familiarity with gangsters to Penthouse, Vanity Fair, Esquire, a journalist writing a book about Dean Martin, and his own biographer.
Why all the ruckus? Obviously, Jerry Lewis knew mobsters. But just as clearly, he was never an intimate of theirs in anything other than a social sense. He never, like Sinatra, entered into business ventures that bore the spoor of mob money. He was never forced to testify about organized crime before an investigatory body.
He was, however, able to call upon a gangster when he found himself in threatening straits. In January 1961, he stood to be named (along with such others as Dean, Sinatra, John Kennedy, and Sammy Davis, Jr.) in a divorce suit being filed by a Southern California restaurateur against his starlet wife, who wanted to collect on her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s estate. Jerry, according to Judith Campbell, who was working for him at the time, “ranted and raved. He would be ruined, his wife Patti would divorce him, his audience would desert him, his friends would hold him in contempt.” He asked for advice—“How can I stop it? Do you have any idea at all? Do you know anyone who could help?”—and Campbell put him in touch with her boyfriend, Giancana, who convinced the private eye who’d gathered a file against Jerry to quash the evidence.
But the only time Lewis’s name ever came up publicly vis-à-vis a gangster was during Mickey Cohen’s 1961 trial on tax evasion, when Cohen called Lewis as a witness to verify his destitute financial condition. “I loaned Mr. Cohen five thousand dollars in 1957,” Lewis told the court. “It was a personal loan. There was no interest. He was having financial difficulties.” Magnanimously, Lewis declared that he never asked for the money back. Another time, according to Lewis, Cohen had approached him with a moneymaking scheme: a film bio of himself that Jerry would produce. “I thought it would make a good picture,” Jerry said, “and Mr. Cohen thought Robert Mitchum should play the role.” Although the Hollywood trade papers linked Lewis to the project, it never went beyond the discussion stage, Lewis claimed, because “it was not in keeping with the levity of Jerry Lewis productions.”*
The extent of Lewis’s mob connections would have been a matter of little certainty or concern if he hadn’t talked about it so much. And its reality was less intriguing than his insistent reference to it. Like many show-biz and sports figures, he wore his familiarity with gangsters as a pinky ring, and he insisted on wagging it under people’s noses. As he shed the juvenile persona of his early career in the 1970s and ’80s, as his body thickened, his reflexes slowed, and his voice achieved a naturally rich baritone, he found himself playing roles that called upon his familiarity with mob types: a garment district tycoon under pressure from actual mafiosi on TV; a crime boss trying to revenge himself on a former colleague (named Dino!) in the film Cookie.
There were grace notes in these performances that indicated a familiarity with the culture—a way of chewing the insides of his cheeks and cocking his head as he listens to news he doesn’t want to hear, an aura of imminent explosiveness suggested by his barrel chest. But then again, as he aged he projected these same qualities in person. It was as if he had cast himself as a don in his own life, and an exiled one at that: Prospero with a suntan and a three-stroke handicap. His habit of dropping mobsters’ names seemed a way of insinuating that the decline of his career was based on some dark, noble mystery, some manly secret that very few others could appreciate. As if to exculpate his many years of acting like an infantile chimp, of wheedling sympathy out of reluctant audiences, he spun a cocoon of seeming menace about himself, and his references to the shady characters who dotted his life were part of that self-mythology.
Jerry’s fetish for gangsters might simply have meant that his new situation was turning him to the bad. Gangsters had always been drawn to Dean, who diplomatically but definitively rebuffed them. Jerry, however, was more easily flattered by such attentions, and quicker to accept and boast about them.
And it wasn’t the only symptom of change in his character. The desperately lovesick lad who practically proposed to Patti Palmer the night they met was just three years later straying from his marital vows with impudent regularity. Dean had never taken the slightest pains to conceal his infidelities, but Jerry was still college age, still writhing under his parents’ thumbs. He surely required some encouragement—if only by example—to carry on. While there are implications that Danny’s example offered that encouragement, Dean, like Danny’s evil twin, practically led Jerry by the hand into a variety of practices: gambling, drinking, women. In Chicago, with his wife and baby hundreds of miles away in their little Newark apartment, Jerry felt the license to rove. George Evans counseled him and Dean to be more discreet, but he wasn’t heard. They were merely exercising the same sexual rights that every big-time entertainer before them had enjoyed.
Unbeknownst to them, however, their shenanigans had gotten out of hand. According to Greshler, Dean and Jerry “went out with the wrong girls”—gangsters’ molls. “That was a no-no,” he said. Though he had sent the team to Chicago in the care of his assistant, Freddie Fields, Greshler made a trip west himself to clean up the mess.
“I got them out of Chicago about two steps ahead of Dean getting killed,” he recalled. “I did it with the help of Sidney Korshak. He’s a very dear man, but some people say he’s the mob’s attorney. I never asked him that. You learn not to ask.”
Indeed, so many years around the business had inured Greshler to a certain kind of rough customer. “I know every underworld character in the world,” he said late in his life, “but I never had any problems with them. They kidnapped my kid once, but outside of that, it was quiet.”
Just as he could gloss over a story like that, Greshler didn’t tell Jerry and Dean how close they’d come in Chicago to not being able to apologize for what they’d done. He didn’t want to worry them: As he’d predicted, the Copa had called back with more money, and Dean and Jerry would open there after they returned from Chicago. There was enough on their shoulders already.
When they got back to New York, Dean and Jerry made a movie—a home movie, actually, in eight-millimeter color. They walked around Times Square in wind-breakers, smoking cigarettes, looking like typical Manhattan sharpies of the era. The movie was shot beneath the marquee of the Loew’s Capitol, where Greshler had booked them at twenty-five hundred dollars a week. Universal Pictures’ trendy new film The Naked City, a strange mix of murder mystery and pseudo-documentary American neorealism, was the feature, and Tex Beneke’s orchestra had top billing. The combination of their high jinks and Mark Hellinger’s hard-boiled crime story wasn’t quite as natural as the pairing with The Jolson Story had been—business was good and the reviews generally positive, but it was no sensation. In the home movie they walk unrecognized down Broadway: They had yet to make a significant splash in the big city.
Indeed, at that moment, just prior to their debut at the Copa, their private lives were more dynamic than their stage ones. Dean made a grand gesture in the role of family man, leasing a ten-room apartment on Riverside Drive so that he, Betty, and the kids (now three in number) could finally live together. Jerry, on the other hand, moved into a hotel by himself, leaving Patti and Gary in Newark. It wasn’t their first separation—during these skyrocketing days, according to Patti, Jerry had “on many occasions … decided not to come home at all”—but it was a serious one, a genuine marital crisis.
Patti was a thousand miles from her family and living with her baby amid Jerry’s less-than-supportive relatives. She was devastated, but she’d grown up with worse. She determined to persevere. Hard as the estrangement was on Patti, it couldn’t have been easy on Jerry, even if he was the one who instigated it. “Jerry used to tell me that every person is really two people,” she recalled. “He certainly was—the husband and father who was solicitous one day and vindictive the next.” He must have fought with himself over what he’d done, his romantic and selfish sides battling within.
If the solicitous Jerry was ever going to reemerge, it would be against the protests of his parents. Danny and Rae were thrilled by the fame and fortune their son had come into. Now, to top it off, he was free of the meddling shiksa who’d stolen him away. “His parents were elated,” said Patti, “for now they would have their son all to themselves. They lingered backstage and milked the parent role for all it was worth.” It was a bitter experience of rejection, even for a woman who’d spent her whole life prior to meeting Jerry in a series of sour familial relationships. “I was hurt, not ‘playing’ hurt,” Patti remembered. “His folks worked hard to undermine my place. Their attitude—our son is finally back!—should not have surprised me. I had never been the little Jewish mama with real Jewish roots. To them I was Patti the interloper, the Italian outsider.”
The couple were sufficiently reconciled, however, that Patti was there for the Copacabana opening on April 8, 1948. The pressures of the gig may have sent Jerry back into his wife’s arms, or it may have been a genuine urge to be a good husband and father. Jerry always smarted from his lonely childhood, and he wanted a large family to help him keep his fears of abandonment at bay. Moreover, his hero, Dean, was able to combine a life of constant womanizing with a growing brood of kids at home. It looked to Jerry like a fair approximation of the perfect life; he’d certainly grown up himself in an atmosphere of intermittent family unity. He and Patti would simply have to reach an accommodation.
Besides, part of the reason they’d separated was surely the anxiety Jerry felt prior to the engagement at the Copa. Failure there would erase the previous two years of good fortune. Greshler had ensured that it would be a lucrative gig. He’d originally sought three thousand dollars a week, though when club owners Monte Proser and Jules Podell balked, he settled for twenty-five hundred for two weeks—with a ringside table and an open bar tab thrown in for himself. Jerry was impressed at the way Greshler had overcome the reluctance of Proser and Podell (who fronted for the real owner, mob kingpin Frank Costello) to book such a wild act in their high-toned nightclub. But Greshler knew New York crowds well enough to guess that they would go for his boys. “Brazenness, cunning, mental toughness, willpower—those were his weapons,” Jerry said admiringly of his agent, and he and Dean were set to reap the benefits of Greshler’s persistence. They weren’t at the top of the bill—Broadway and Hollywood song star Vivian Blaine (later to gain fame as Adelaide in the original production of Guys and Dolls) had that slot—but they had most definitely arrived.
They rehearsed for the premiere more than they had ever bothered in their lives. Jerry, in particular, was on edge. “I keep thinking we ought to be better prepared,” he told Dean. “This is the Copa.”
Dean, unperturbed as ever, tried to relax his partner, but a few days later, Jerry had some news. “I hired a writer. I paid him one thousand dollars. Don’t worry—it’ll come out of my half.” The writer, Danny Shapiro, the first gag man they’d ever used in a career made up of bits borrowed and stolen, delivered a sheaf of routines to Jerry, one-liners and all. Just as nervous as he’d been a few years earlier when he was breaking in as an emcee, Jerry pored over the material.
“He was studyin’ those lines just before our opening,” Dean recalled later. “I looked at him. I knew he didn’t wanna do ’em. I said, ‘Jer, you don’t want to read those lines, do you?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Tear ’em up.’” Jerry did, filled with the nerve that Dean exuded.
The day of the premiere, Jerry raced into Manhattan to Saks Fifth Avenue to buy a new mink for Patti, presenting it to her at Lehigh Avenue, where she was giving Gary a bath. They made their way into town and met Danny and Rae, Mary Farina, Betty Martin, Abbey Greshler, and the other friends and relatives who were assembling for the show.
Jerry was nearly sick with stage fright, but he found his dressing room, got into his tux (in the old show-biz tradition he followed throughout his career, he dressed completely in his stage clothes save his pants, which he donned only at the last minute to avoid creasing them). He paced backstage in his dress shirt and underwear, trying to work out what he would do and coming up blank. Just outside the door, the World-Famous Copa Girls, the club’s dancers, made their way to the stage to perform their own act. He could hear the sounds of the Nat Brandwynne orchestra, the applause, the shuffling of the chorus line back to their dressing room.
The big moment came. He and Dean hit the stage on a wave of sheer guts, flying by the seats of their pants. Jerry walked up to the mike. Scanning the room he saw Walter Winchell, Milton Berle, and Billy Rose, none of whom, he knew, were there to see him. He saw his wife, his parents, and a few other familiar faces.
When he spoke, it came out straight: “My father always said, ‘When you play the Copa, son, you’ll be playing to the cream of show business.’”
He peered quizzically over the mike, then shifted into Yiddish inflection: “Dis is krim?”
It was just the opening salvo they needed. Dean sang “San Fernando Valley,” “Oh, Marie,” “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby” and a few others. Jerry stuck prop buck teeth in his mouth, knocked over busboys’ trays, and ran through the club like a ricocheting bullet. It was the same act they’d been doing for nearly two years, but it had been propelled into glorious hyperdrive by the sheer thrill of the setting. The Copa, as Greshler had suspected, was the perfect presentation room for the act—sophisticated, yes, but not stuffy.
They’d been told they could do twenty-five minutes—and Podell had been known to yank acts who overstayed their time limit. After fifty minutes, and with the crowd hollering for more, they left the stage exhausted: They had to conserve energy for the second show, after all, and they had nearly run out of stuff.
The room was on fire. In her dressing room, Vivian Blaine must have felt like she was awaiting execution. She was the headliner, the local girl who’d gone west to sign with Twentieth Century-Fox and returned in triumph. But listening to Martin and Lewis absolutely slay her audience, she knew the night would be a disaster for her. She gamely made her way to the stage, sang a few songs to a crowd that barely acknowledged that she was in the room, and cut her act short.
Jerry and Dean were entertaining their guests backstage, still high on the buzz of the reception they’d gotten, when they noticed a look of concern on Greshler’s face.
“We have to be in Proser’s office as soon as the crowd clears out,” he told them.
They were sure they had done well, but now they got a sick feeling: Had they stayed on too long? Had they been too wild?
They made their way sheepishly to the office.
“I’d be a damned fool if I did nothing about this show,” Proser told them. “It’s coming off all wrong.”
Greshler leapt to his clients’ defense: “Where the hell did they go wrong?”
“It’s not them I’m talking about,” Proser said.
It was Vivian Blaine. Once word of the show hit the streets, he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep her in the headline spot. She’d have to switch billing with Martin and Lewis.
Jerry couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I tore my gaze from Proser and glanced at Dean,” he later recalled. “He had a pipe stuck in his mouth, sucking it noisily and doing Eddie Cantor bits with his eyes.”
Proser broke the news to Blaine, who quit outright rather than suffer the humiliation of having the bill upended on her. And just as he’d imagined, the papers went crazy for Martin and Lewis.
“Here’s a case of two being better than one,” wrote Variety. “They work in yeoman fashion and permit one another enough latitude for individual scintillation. It’s only after each makes impact on his own that whatever stepping on one another’s laughs and lines occur. And then it doesn’t matter.”
Nothing mattered. The two weeks got extended through the summer—more than a dozen weeks in all, at five thousand dollars per. Greshler negotiated for a suite of rooms in the hotel above the club, a place for Dean and Jerry to crash between shows, to hide out with girls and do whatever they might want to do in private. Privacy was at a premium now: The two guys who’d been signed as a second act were absolutely the hottest thing in town.
Take as proof the deal Greshler got for them during that first run at the Copa. The gigantic Roxy Theater, the Broadway motion picture palace, reopened that spring with renovations that included an ice rink on which its chorus girls performed before films. To herald the changes, the Roxy hired Dean and Jerry to do one show a night along with the skaters and a suitably overblown piece of cinematic hokum, Give My Regards to Broadway, which starred Dan Dailey in a story about an attempt to revive vaudeville. Racing from the Copa after the supper show to the rink at the Roxy and then back to the Copa for the midnight performance, Martin and Lewis pulled in an additional ten thousand dollars a week. Over twenty-one exhausting days in that incredible summer of 1948, each man earned $22,500.
Success had a funny way of spilling off Dean and Jerry like water. Everyone around them benefited. Spendthrift Jerry walked into the Dunhill store on Fifth Avenue and bought a few dozen engraved gold lighters for friends. He rented a humidor full of Cuban cigars for Irving Kaye, whose taste for rancid stogies had always been a joking point between them. (As proof of his ambivalence about his marriage, though, he and Patti continued to live in their rent-controlled apartment, the monthly cost of which represented less than one percent of Jerry’s weekly salary.)
Danny Lewis might have gone apoplectic over his son’s rise but for Greshler’s ability to get him some premium bookings as well. Folks were eager to get any piece of Dean and Jerry, even if it meant going to see Jerry’s father sing. In June Danny played a fifteen-minute stand at the Latin Casino in Philadelphia and was reviewed by Variety: “Success can be retroactive. Skyrocketing of young Jerry Lewis (Martin and) is carrying special premiums for his not-so-old-man, Danny Lewis. After years on the borscht circuit and moderate stage success, Lewis, Sr., is getting his chance for a bid at top niteries. … Lewis has a voice so much like Al Jolson’s that it might easily be palmed off as same, if you weren’t looking. However, he does it straight, wisely eschewing those worn-thin imitations of Jolie’s mannerisms.”
It was no rave, but Danny didn’t mind. He still honestly believed he was going places, and by Greshler’s graces, he returned to New York to play the Glass Hat and Loew’s State (conscious, no doubt, that his son had beat him to the punch in each). He no doubt would have resented the hand-me-down quality of his success more if he weren’t so confident that he deserved it.
Back at the Copa, Jerry was coasting along on his own brilliant streak, though not without hitting the same sorts of bumps he’d stumbled over in the past. Screwing around at the bar one night between shows, he got on the nerves of a particularly brutish customer.
“Why don’t you knock off that shit and be quiet?” the bruiser growled.
Jerry was stunned for a moment. “I figured he was either kidding or too drunk to appreciate who I was,” he recalled. “So I threw him a stock line. ‘That’s what happens when cousins get married!’”
Dean, standing nearby, cringed. The bartender looked at his shoes.
The man stuck a finger in Jerry’s face. “That’s not funny, you stupid son of a bitch. If you open your mouth once more, it’ll be without teeth.”
Dean stepped in to make peace. “My partner is a little young,” he said. “He didn’t mean any harm.” He grabbed Jerry’s arm. “Now, Jer, just say to the man that you’re sorry and it won’t happen again.”
Frozen still, memories of Charlie Fischetti in his head, Jerry did as he was told.
The man addressed Dean this time. “You keep the little bastard away from me. Tell him he’s lucky I’ve got a sense of humor.”
They mumbled thank-yous and yes-sirs and walked away. Dean pushed Jerry into a corner. “For your information, schmuck, that was Albert Anastasia.”
Even Jerry recognized the name of the Lord High Executioner of Murder, Incorporated. Despite the sick feeling in his stomach, he played the second show that night: “I couldn’t see them in the darkness, but I swear I could feel Anastasia’s cold steel eyes hitting me like bullets through the performance.”
Mobsters weren’t the only big shots keeping company with Dean and Jerry at the Copa. Through their New York offices, the Hollywood movie studios had heard wondrous tales of the sensational new act. Dean had had some flirtatious encounters with the movies in the past—his failed screen test for Harry Cohn and a few passing inquiries from MGM musical producer Joe Pasternak—but Hollywood had always turned up its nose at him. Now, though, the studios smelled a moneymaker, and a few producers were making the trip east to catch Martin and Lewis in New York.
First among the crowd was Hal Wallis, the veteran Warner Brothers production chief who’d overseen such classic films as Casablanca, Jezebel, Little Caesar, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and Yankee Doodle Dandy. Wallis had left Warner Brothers in 1944 and formed an independent production company with Joseph Hazen, a former staff lawyer at the studio who, like Wallis, had bristled under the yoke of Harry and Jack Warner. The company they formed, Wallis-Hazen, had been courted by various studios when it was begun, finally striking a long-term distribution deal with Paramount Pictures. It was a small company, true, but it was still young enough to have its pocketbook open.
Wallis was quite a catch for Paramount. He was one of the more assured showmen of his time—he’d been the publicist on Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, back in 1927—and he had a knack for discovering and cultivating fresh young talent. Within a few years of his arrival at Paramount, he signed Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Anna Magnani, Lizabeth Scott, and Charlton Heston.
As his résumé indicates, comedy wasn’t Wallis’s métier. Still, hot was hot, and when he found himself in New York in the spring of 1948, he checked out the act at the Copa: “Nightclub comedy is not my favorite form of entertainment, and I expected very little as they came out onto the stage. They were strangely ill matched. Dean, tall and very handsome, didn’t look like a comedian, and Jerry, equipped with a mouthful of oversized false teeth and a chimpanzeelike hairpiece, seemed grotesque. But even before they began their act, the audience was screaming with laughter. Never before or since have I seen an audience react as this one did. The team (I am not given to superlatives) was an outright sensation.”
Wallis came backstage after the show to meet Dean and Jerry and to announce that he wanted to sign them to a film contract. Greshler played his hand as cool as he could, telling Wallis that he’d arranged for a date in Los Angeles later that summer and that they could talk again at that time. Dean and Jerry would have bent over backward at the first Hollywood offer that came along, but Greshler wanted to see what price he could fetch on the open market.
Jerry’s notion of a big future had always involved performing at a first-rank vaudeville house. His horizon had never surpassed the corner of Broadway and Forty-seventh Street, just beneath the marquee at the Palace. Now it reached all the way to Hollywood, and he could hardly believe it.
There was nothing firm waiting for him and Dean in L.A. besides a nightclub date, but that didn’t dampen the excitement a bit. Their smash at the Copa had created a buzz that carried them forward more quickly than they’d ever dreamed. The world held no limits that summer. Whatever they did, wherever they went, they were kings.
At around this time, Jan Murray met Jerry again. They had shared the bill on a club date a few years earlier—Murray was the headliner, there was a girl singer, and Jerry opened with the record act. Murray had thought Jerry was terrifically funny, and when Martin and Lewis started to hit it big, he recognized Jerry as the opening act from a few years earlier. One night, when Martin and Lewis had become so famous that they required a police escort to go out to dinner in Times Square, Murray was eating in Lindy’s when Jerry and Dean arrived with full entourage.
“He passed my table,” Murray remembered, “and he pointed at me and he started screaming in that high voice: ‘There he is! There’s my idol!’ I thought he was putting me down. I got so mad, I could’ve killed him, really. ’Cause I thought he was making fun of me, an older comic or something—even though I was only a few years older. I just felt he was ridiculing me because of his attitude, with the high voice and all that. So he went to his table, and there were people standing around it so that he wouldn’t be disturbed. I got up to go to the men’s room, and I stopped at his table, and I said, ‘You know, you’re a very successful young punk. I found that very embarrassing.’ And he looked at me, and he almost had tears in his eyes, and he says to me, ‘Jan, what are you talking about? I was so thrilled when I saw you sitting there. Don’t you remember me?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. Are you the guy who did a club date with me once?’ He says, ‘Yeah, but don’t you remember past that?’ I said no. He says, ‘I met you when I was nine or ten years old in the drugstore of the President Hotel and I did your act for you.’ And the whole thing came back to me, and I said, ‘Oh, my God …’ And he says, ‘You’re the first comedian I saw, and I imitated you.’ I apologized and I gave him a hug and he invited me to sit down with him and Dean. He told everyone the story: ‘The first time I met him he wanted to kill me!’”
Murray had already been in the business over a decade, but he had never seen anything like the way audiences took to Martin and Lewis. “Boy oh boy, they were the sensation of America!” he recalled. “I can’t begin to describe what a hit they were or how popular they were. It was tantamount to an Elvis or the Beatles. They were like the hottest thing in the country.”
It was only natural that they would bring their act to television, and even their quick six-minute debut on the infant medium had an epic dimension. It was Sunday, June 20, 1948, and they spent the morning rehearsing for an appearance on a sort of vaudeville show for television, a mix of singing, dancing, comedy, interviews, and walk-ons to be hosted by the gnomish Broadway gossip columnist Ed Sullivan. The show was called “Toast of the Town,” and it premiered that night.
Abbey Greshler had always had an eye for novelties, and he thought TV variety shows were a good idea, a way of shunting all the touring vaudeville and burlesque acts onto a new circuit without anything like the production costs of film. Sullivan and his coproducer, Marlo Lewis, approached Greshler with an offer of more than half of their talent budget for just a few minutes of Dean and Jerry. Greshler said yes—to two hundred dollars. The other guests—Rodgers and Hammerstein, dancer Kathryn Lee, concert pianist Eugene List, a New York City fireman who’d recently made headlines, and boxing referee Ruby Goldstein, who’d just worked the Joe Louis-Jersey Joe Walcott bout—split the remaining $175. Also on hand were the June Taylor Dancers (billed as the Toastettes) and the Ray Bloch orchestra.
The show aired on six CBS stations at 9 P.M., playing in New York opposite a political interview program on NBC and two obscure movies on local stations. Such was Sullivan’s relatively obscure stature at the time, and such was the freakishness of televised vaudeville, that none of the New York papers bothered to review the broadcast. Variety saw it and liked it, though. “Tops were Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis,” wrote their old friend “Stal.,” even though he slapped the hand of CBS for letting them “give out with some blue material, okay for their nitery work but certainly not for tele.”
Another hot young comedy duo had been slated to appear on that first “Toast of the Town,” the witty New York cabaret favorites Jim Kirkwood and Lee Goodman. Sullivan had apprehensions that the team’s allusive, topical humor might be a bit too sophisticated for the mix he was trying to achieve, but he liked them so much that he didn’t let them know about his concerns—or, for that matter, which other acts he’d booked.
“We got to the theater about nine-thirty on that Sunday morning,” recalled Kirkwood (who went on to write P.S. Your Cat Is Dead and A Chorus Line), “and we walked in and there were Dean and Jerry rehearsing. They weren’t just good, they were socko. I said, ‘Jesus, Lee, are they on the show, too?’ I knew we were dead.”
Nevertheless, Kirkwood and Goodman rehearsed their act—to a silent auditorium. Sullivan and his team huddled in the corner. Someone suggested that Kirkwood and Goodman go with their most physical bit—they wore kitchen strainers for fencing masks and did a comic sabre dance to “Night and Day”—and so they rehearsed that one a few more times.
Finally, they were presented with a Hobson’s choice. They were welcome to stay and appear on the show, but only if they could cut their bit to three minutes. “Ed feels that Dean and Jerry are pretty strong,” they were told. “No shit,” Kirkwood replied, and he and Goodman, like Vivian Blaine before them, walked.
From the Sullivan show, Dean and Jerry returned to Atlantic City for their third engagement at the 500 Club. They played two weeks to jammed houses and returned to New York on August 2 for another TV appearance. The next week, they headed west toward their destiny.
Greshler had known New York would go for Dean and Jerry’s high-voltage act; Hollywood, though, was another thing—a company town with a decidedly less urbane sensibility. Sure, there had been interest from the studios, but they took a look at anything that had a patina of heat about it. Word of Martin and Lewis had already drifted west—Hal Wallis’s appearance at the Copa was proof of that—and George Evans’s West Coast man, Jack Keller, was fanning the incipient flame. But the team’s momentum was a fragile thing to maintain, and Greshler had a lot riding on it. In the right setting, he knew, he could generate a bidding war for Martin and Lewis’s services. He was hoping he could put together a West Coast showcase as natural for the act as the Copa had proven, a venue with the combination of prestige and ease that Frank Costello’s New York nightclub had afforded Dean and Jerry.
Slapsie Maxie’s Café, in a then-fashionable section of Wilshire Boulevard’s Miracle Mile, was the nearest thing Los Angeles had to the Copa in 1948. Maxie Rosenbloom, a former pro boxer who’d been dubbed “Slapsie Maxie” by Damon Runyon himself and had become a familiar cameo actor in roles calling for tough yeggs or punch-drunk types, took over the former Wilshire Bowl in 1947, fronting for clothiers Sy and Charlie DeVore and gangster Mickey Cohen, who kept an office in back.
Greshler had negotiated a plump contract with the club: four thousand dollars a week (high by L.A. standards) and three first-class train fares for him and the boys. (Like Betty Martin, who was expecting a baby, Patti stayed back east.) Mickey Cohen would later take credit for fronting Rosenbloom and the DeVores the cash to close the deal. Along with Irving Kaye, who was now on Jerry’s payroll as a road manager, Dean, Jerry, and Greshler arrived in California on August 9, the very night they were to open at the club.
They rode as far as Pasadena, getting off there, as did all the famous stars, to avoid the crush of the press at L.A.’s Union Station. Not that L.A. was panting for their arrival; they were just two nightclub comics from back east, not film royalty. Unless George Evans had done some big preselling of the act, nobody would come to greet their train no matter where it stopped.
Charlie DeVore was planning to be there on behalf of Slapsie Maxie’s. But Evans, who operated almost exclusively out of New York, told Dean and Jerry that his West Coast man, Keller, would be handling the big arrival. They didn’t know who to look for, but Greshler assured them, “Just look for a dynamo.” They prepared for their big arrival. Dean sported a thick-striped suit, and both of them wore gaudy painted shoes.
Sure enough, when they disembarked, a small knot of pressmen and photographers came toward them, led by a potbellied, unshaven, bleary-eyed bear of a man in a rumpled suit.
“I had a hangover,” Keller later admitted.
He approached Dean and Jerry and bowed. “Jack Keller. At your service.”
Jerry nudged Dean.
“Some dynamo,” he whispered.
Keller turned to the newspeople, who seemed to be under his express direction. “Okay, boys, here they are—Lewis and Clark!”
Silence.
He shot a puzzled glance at Dean and Jerry, then snapped back to the reporters. “No, it has to be Stanley and Livingstone … Leopold and Loeb …”
The reporters broke up. The suspiciously haggard press agent turned out to be just the master Evans promised. Keller’s “cynical masculinity,” as Jerry called it, perfectly suited Martin and Lewis. Where Evans was all shrewd calculation and quiet brilliance, Keller was chumming-with-the-press, three-shot lunches, and afternoons on the golf course. “He handles the press,” wrote Richard Gehman, who dedicated his book on Jerry to Keller, “without the press having the slightest notion that it is being manipulated.” A former door-to-door salesman, pool hustler, small-time con artist, and golf pro, Keller was nobody’s yes man, but he capitalized on his self-effacing charm and friendly relationships with reporters to smooth over any contretemps into which his clients stumbled. Eventually, he would work solely for Martin and Lewis, then for Jerry after the split, orchestrating promotional campaigns and product tie-ins for Lewis’s film and TV projects as a full-time member of Lewis’s production staff.
Whether it was Keller’s doing or the workings of the Hollywood grapevine, the opening night at Slapsie Maxie’s was a riot of eager activity. Greshler must have been dizzy with anticipation as he watched a veritable round table of Hollywood royalty—Crawford, Bogart, Gable, and their ilk—squeezed into tables or shut out altogether. Hal Wallis was in attendance, as well as the heads of several other studios, Louis B. Mayer among them. Everyone had come to see the hit act. And Dean and Jerry lived up to their renown.
They opened the show straight—an increasingly rare occurrence—with Dean singing. But then Jerry made his entrance, and along with the house orchestra, led by New Jersey transplant Dick Stabile, they tore the joint apart. It was exactly what Hollywood clubgoers had heard about from friends back east, and it was a smash. “They topped every word of their advance build-up,” wrote Alan Fischler in Billboard. In Variety, “Kap.” agreed, saying that “high-priced screen talent was draped all over the place laughing incessantly.”
“I’ve seen nightclub engagements by the best in the business,” recalled Jack Keller years later, “and I never saw anything like that. That room must’ve seated nine hundred. There was a bar at one end, and there were terraces around the floor. I saw hundreds standing up on the bar so they could see the stage. You couldn’t move in that joint. ‘You wanna make a reservation? We can take you seven weeks from today.’”
Within a week, Martin and Lewis had been seen by every studio head in town, and the famous faces who couldn’t get a seat at their shows would have made an impressive portrait collection. It was a publicist’s dream. An agent’s dream, too. Greshler’s feeding frenzy was about to begin.
Wallis believed he had dibs on the act. Backstage at the Copa, he had told Jerry, “I assure you, we’re going to make a movie together.” But he would have to outbid at least two other studios for Martin and Lewis’s services. Universal was offering a deal of thirty thousand dollars per picture, but they demanded control over the team’s outside work, a concession Greshler would not make. Dean and Jerry were shocked that their agent would turn down such a sum, but he assured them they’d get more.
MGM, represented by producer Joe Pasternak, who’d once passed on Dean as a solo, offered forty thousand dollars per picture, but he too demanded approval over other appearances. Again Greshler balked, again Dean and Jerry registered their frustration, and when Pasternak countered with an offer for Dean alone, it seemed possible that the act might split up altogether.
But Greshler had left his trump card—Wallis—for last. He held several meetings with Joe Hazen, Wallis’s partner, and they arranged for a screen test for Dean and Jerry. It almost backfired.
“I felt a shockwave of disappointment,” recalled Wallis of his reaction to the footage. “The charisma that live audiences responded to so enthusiastically disappeared in the transition to film. On the screen, nothing happened.”
Wallis asked for another test. It too was a flop. And then he understood what had been going wrong: “They were doing things written for them,” he realized, “playing characters.”
He had them submit to yet another test, but this time in their stage personae. “I thought those burlesque routines would be too extreme for movie audiences,” he remembered, “but I was wrong. The moment Dean and Jerry did their act exactly as they had done it on the stage, they were fantastic. They burned up the screen. Everybody in the projection room was in stitches.”
Having hooked Wallis, Greshler was still stringing along MGM. At the same time, he was playing a couple of networks against each other for a TV deal. After a lifetime of knocking on doors, Greshler now had everybody lined up at his—and it could get exciting, even scary. Joe Pasternak actually threatened him, approaching his table one night at Slapsie Maxie’s and announcing, in front of Dean and Jerry, “If you take the Wallis deal, you’ll never make a picture.”
Jerry, meanwhile, insisted that Greshler visit Louis B. Mayer with him and hear him out. Mayer—who, according to Wallis, had initially dismissed the team, saying, “The guinea’s not bad, but what do I do with the monkey?”—told them he’d match Wallis’s offer dollar for dollar, but insisted on approval over all outside work. The legendary movie magnate, at that time the most highly paid man in America, took them on a personal tour of the studio. And Mayer had done his homework: As they walked through the lot, he asked Greshler how his sister Rose was and if his father was still in the fur business. Greshler, who prided himself on always being better prepared for negotiations than the other guy, was stunned.
Mayer’s sentimentality—he had a large painting of his mother in his office—held an enormous appeal for Jerry. Although later in life he would declare that “my first love was Paramount,” he was flattered by the great man’s attentions. He urged Greshler to sign with MGM. But Greshler liked the idea of working with an independent—Wallis’s little company would want the team only for a dozen or so weeks a year—and he held firm. So firm, in fact, that he snapped. After meeting with Mayer, Greshler had a nervous collapse and was admitted to a hospital.
Within a few days, however, he had recovered sufficiently to close some business. On August 20, 1948, he signed Dean and Jerry to a recording contract with Capitol Records with a guarantee of eight releases a year. And a few days later he signed the deal with Wallis and Hazen: five years, two pictures per, with fifty thousand dollars for the first, sixty thousand dollars for the next, and so on to a cumulative ceiling of $1.25 million. They could make one outside picture per year, and they had control over their own stage, TV, and radio work. Wallis allowed them approval over their first film, an enormous concession to make to new talent in the studio era. The only limit on them was that they couldn’t do outside work during the shooting of Wallis’s films.
The fine print didn’t matter too much, though. They were made. They’d been in Hollywood less than two weeks, and they had signed a contract for more money in a year than either of their fathers had made in a lifetime. They made plans to bring their families out west and buy huge Hollywood homes.
But first there were some wild oats to sow. Dean had been carrying on an affair with MGM star June Allyson practically since he got off the train, and it wasn’t long before Jerry took up with her friend Gloria DeHaven. The daughter of a show-biz family, DeHaven had, like Jerry, grown up following her parents around on the vaudeville circuit. Her father, Carter DeHaven, had directed several silent films and had even served as assistant director to Charlie Chaplin on Modern Times, in which Gloria made her screen debut at age eleven. At MGM Gloria was featured—often alongside Allyson—in light comedies and musicals, usually playing a daft, oversexed ingenue. But it wasn’t her résumé Jerry was interested in. The four of them were married—Allyson to Dick Powell, DeHaven to John Payne—but they carried on so shamelessly that George Evans had to get Hedda Hopper to sit them down and scold them.
There were other girls, too. “Shit, yeah, we started knockin’ ’em off,” Jerry would boast later on. “In truth, I fucked more than he did; but it was always like they wanted to burp me.” It was a refrain Jerry repeated frequently over the years, and it revealed unintentionally just what sort of impression he carried of himself. The women who passed through his life are cast by his words as mothers, not sex partners. Lewis offered the “burp me” line as a way of undercutting his boasts of sexual conquest—presumably, the women who slept with Dean didn’t have baby burping on their minds—but instead it reveals his shaky self-image, showing just how strongly his promiscuity was a compensation for his childhood feelings of inadequacy. It would be cheap Freudianism to suggest that he slept around because his mother hadn’t shown him sufficient love, but he was the one who repeatedly conflated extramarital sex with the care and feeding of an infant.
Patti had recognized early on that Jerry would be on the road without her and fall prey to temptation. “I know you’re human,” she’d said. “I know you’ll meet lots of girls who want to be friendly when you’re away. I just ask you not to do anything that would make people feel sorry for me.” The product of a brutally broken home, Patti was determined to keep her family together even if it meant some discomfort. She could handle domestic blows, she felt, but not public humiliation.
In discussing his marriage during the 1950s and ’60s, Lewis would contend that Patti’s dignified request had “fixed” him and kept him on the straight and narrow. But after his 1980 divorce, Lewis would admit to a lifetime of infidelity. “A couple of times I was as discreet as a fucking bull taking a piss in your living room,” he said in 1984. He would brag that he was “no different from anyone else in Hollywood, except I was a little busier.” A few years later, he declared that John Kennedy—whom he and Dean had met in Chicago in November 1950, when the future President was still a fresh-faced congressman—was “one of the great cunt men of all time. Except for me.”
This kind of stuff was shocking, especially coming from the mouth of someone who made his living making children laugh and who claimed to have quit the film business in the 1970s because of its turn away from family movies. Indeed, like his obsessive references to the mob, Jerry’s sexual boasting seems rooted in a desire to erase the impression of sexless prepubescence created by his onstage behavior. After years of acting like a childish clown, he seemed to want the world to know for certain that his sex life was not only normal but superior.
In 1948, though, the availability of willing women seemed like just another contractual perk of success. Sex and money: They even sang about it. Before they headed back east in September to an engagement at the Latin Casino in Philadelphia, Dean and Jerry stopped at Capitol’s Hollywood recording studios to cut their first single for the label, a pair of novelty tunes—“The Money Song” and “That Certain Party”—about the two things they suddenly found themselves swimming in: dough and broads.
As in their early film appearances, Martin and Lewis seem under wraps on these recordings. Dean begins each record singing straight, with Jerry joining—never interrupting—in various stages of accelerated frenzy. Some “comic” touches were added technologically; on “That Certain Party” Jerry’s voice gets speeded up into an insane babble (prompting Dean to ask, “What are you doing—singing in shorthand?”). Between the two sides, Jerry does half a dozen voices: British, baby talk, operatic, a Jimmy Durante growl, fake Japanese, fake German, a bit of Yiddish. Dean mainly sings straight, though he does a kind of Rudy Vallee on “That Certain Party” and some fake Spanish and real Italian on “The Money Song.”
They weren’t very funny records—in fact, they made a better showcase for Dean’s dry wit and deft timing than for Jerry’s incessant aping, the strength of which was at least as visual as aural. Capitol hawked the single with fake dollar bills called “Martin-Lewis Mazuma” (“200 Fins Worth of Laughs,” “50 Double Saw Giggles,” and “10 C Note Guffaws”), and they may have even chosen the wrong song as the A-side. “That Certain Party” had been written for a vaudeville act in the 1920s, and technological tinkering aside, it had an air of live performance to it. The melody isn’t very elaborate, and the lyric, a repetitive question-and-answer variation on “Billy Boy,” was extremely flexible. Then again, “The Money Song” hadn’t been recorded before—for a few months it became a Martin and Lewis signature tune—and its herky-jerky cha-cha beat led to a chorus that was an especially appropriate motto for the singers’ lives at the moment they recorded it: “Funny, funny, funny what money can do.”
Dean and Jerry went east to fulfill a club date in Philadelphia, where their wives and children were waiting for them. On weekends they slipped off to New York to tape a TV show and to spend their time with Allyson and DeHaven, who’d followed them.
Lewis recalled George Evans’s appalled reaction to this comportment: “He had fuckin’ migraines, the way we carried on. We went arm in arm down Fifth Avenue. Two married men with the biggest stars in Hollywood.”
Jerry seemed to have the sense—borne, perhaps, of insecurity—to see his affair with DeHaven as the crazy fling it was. “What we were doing was playing our little fucking fantasyland,” he confessed. “I never had fifty bucks in my pocket at one time; now I’m walking around with thirty-five hundred in hundred-dollar bills, and I got a starlet on my arm. It’s fantasyland.”
He was also smart—or scared—enough to be discreet, keeping well away from DeHaven when Patti joined him in New York. But Dean had no concern for such niceties, and he flaunted Allyson in Patti’s face. Word got back to Betty, who was stuck in Philly with her four children, her increasingly antisocial liquor habit, and a nagging case of pleurisy. The news didn’t help her mood.
Perhaps Patti had her own suspicions about Jerry, but she kept them to herself, just as she’d learned to bury her anxieties as a girl. In a way, Dean’s flagrancy was a blessing. Any apprehensions Jerry and Patti had about their new life—any self-doubts on Jerry’s part or rumors Patti might have heard—paled in comparison to the unraveling of Dean and Betty’s marriage. Even Jerry felt sorry for Dean’s overburdened, ailing wife. But he was riding a magic carpet, and he wasn’t going to upset it in midflight by getting preachy with his big brother. Besides, he was having far too much fun.
Funny what money can do.