In their quest to keep from spending their careers subject to the indifferent proctorship of Hal Wallis, Dean and Jerry began shooting At War with the Army on July 5, 1950, at the Motion Picture Center, a Hollywood backlot-for-hire. Although they’d made the mistake of choosing Hal Walker to direct the picture, they would be the stars of the film themselves, and, even more crucially, they would be their own bosses.
The idea that actors might produce and release their own films would have been thought lunacy just a few years earlier, but the studio system was wobbly, and the chinks in its foundation allowed all manner of strange mutations to emerge.
The studios had formerly been omnipotent: They owned the talent, they produced the films, they acted as their own distribution arms, and in almost every case, they owned showcase theaters throughout the country. It was a perfect vertical monopoly. In 1948, though, the U.S. Supreme Court had ordered the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains, thereby breaking their monopoly on the distribution of their own products and opening up bidding wars on the most desirable films. Paradoxically, while such auctions created the potential for large sums to pour into studio coffers, the situation actually cut the number of films the studios made: They curtailed production of the bottom-of-the-bill movies with which they had kept their own theaters filled, concentrating instead on potential blockbusters.
As production philosophies changed, so did the tradition of the contract player. It was less profitable than ever to hold large stables of actors under contract, while the handful of reliably bankable stars increased enormously in value. Name actors were now able to auction off their services on a per-film basis, commanding enormous salaries, getting deals to produce and even direct, and setting up their own companies to make movies and then sell them to the studios for distribution. No less an icon of the American status quo than James Stewart was the herald of this metamorphosis, jumping in 1950 from the hallowed MGM lot to Universal-International Studios in exchange for a rich package that included funds for his own production company and percentages of his films’ profits. Lew Wasserman of MCA, who engineered Stewart’s deal, surfed the industry’s volatile surface more adeptly than anyone, and the most ambitious and sought-after talent in the business began to swim in his wake—leaving behind the old-timers, the schmoozers, the men who had created the agenting business—of whom Abbey Greshler was an exemplar.
In a sense, Greshler had been paving the path for his own downfall. Though he was only in his late thirties, he still had a prewar mentality. He had been brought up with vaudeville and broke into the business booking big bands. He bore himself like an old man; he thought of Dean and Jerry as kids. Nevertheless, he was savvy enough to know that the business was transforming beneath his feet, and in response he had hired some younger guys to help him fathom the changes.
One of these was Freddie Fields, kid brother to Abbey’s old client Shep. Freddie had done a bit of agenting during the war booking the Coast Guard band, so Greshler was persuaded to take him on as a gofer. By days, Fields ran Greshler’s errands; by nights, he hit the clubs in Greenwich Village and the Upper East Side scouting talent. He had a touch—he found both Kaye Ballard and Imogene Coca for Greshler—and he grew itchy for more responsibility. But Greshler’s was basically a one-man operation; Fields was doing a good job, but there was nowhere to promote him. Greshler didn’t want to expand his office with new agents—“My father once had a partner who screwed him silly,” he would say—and Fields understandably began to seek other pastures.
No pasture seemed more fertile than MCA. Freddie’s brother Shep had a friend there—another young vet named David Begelman—and Freddie heard stories of the agency’s “team” philosophy, with the entire firm working in concert to further a client’s interests. It sounded swell, and he put himself in a position to be courted into the field.
When Dean and Jerry were playing at the Paramount in support of My Friend Irma, Fields came backstage and found Greshler. MCA’s Sonny Werblin had offered him a job. It was the same hundred dollars per week that Greshler was paying him, but it had real potential for an ambitious young man.
“What should I do?” he asked Greshler.
“You gotta take it. It’s a good opportunity. I want you to have what’s good for you.”
Fields, overwhelmed by his boss’s magnanimity, began to cry. Greshler embraced him. “You’re my son,” he said. “I want you to be happy and have …” Then Greshler started to cry, too.
Fields composed himself and returned home, intending to finish a few projects at Greshler’s office before moving to MCA. The next day, when he arrived at work, he found Greshler had changed the locks on the office doors.
Greshler had feelings for the kid, all right, but he wasn’t about to kill his business over them. He knew MCA couldn’t have hired Fields just because he was a promising young agent; he understood that MCA must have thought it would be a good move to have someone on staff who was close to Martin and Lewis. Still, he didn’t reckon on just how quickly MCA would act on its new access.
In June 1950, when Dean and Jerry were once again playing at the Copa, Fields came backstage to schmooze with the pair—and, no doubt, to sniff out how they were getting along with Greshler. He listened sympathetically when they started griping about their money problems, and then he began his pitch. He told them about Lew Wasserman’s organization at MCA, how safe he felt there, how powerful. “You guys have gotta meet Wasserman,” he told them.
They said it sounded great, but they were headed west the next day. To make the meeting happen, Fields would have to call Wasserman at home and wake him up—not necessarily the best way for a junior agent to get the boss to notice him. Fields steeled himself and made the call. Wasserman grumbled that he’d be willing to sit down with Dean and Jerry.
At the meeting the next morning at MCA’s New York office, Wasserman, Fields recalled, was brilliant. He sat behind his Queen Anne desk and never once bad-mouthed Greshler. He didn’t even mention him. He just talked about how much he esteemed Martin and Lewis as an act, about what he saw for their future, about how much MCA would like to be a part of it. When they parted, he told them, “I’ll have Herman Citron, our top man in California, pick you up at the train, and I’ll be out in a few days.” It was a classic Wasserman touch—having the biggest man in the office serve as a chauffeur—and it had its intended effect. Dean and Jerry undoubtedly rode west over the next few days scheming up ways to leave Greshler for MCA.
What followed was complex, expensive, and ugly, even though Jerry remembered it very simply: “He was stealing from us,” he said. “I don’t wanna talk about it. It’s not worth anything.”
But Martin and Lewis’s separation from Abbey Greshler was a byzantine affair, costing everyone involved years of annoying legal entanglement and dashing any chance that At War with the Army might have had of being a good movie. Through July and August, while they were filming the picture that was to mark their creative emancipation from Wallis, they were embroiled in a series of legal maneuvers that had to have hurt their work.
The entanglement began when they returned from New York and visited MCA’s California offices with copies of their NBC contract for Lew Wasserman’s perusal. One look at the document told Wasserman that Martin and Lewis were his. He read the papers gravely and then looked at them in wonder across his antique desk. “How could you have signed this?”
“With a pen,” said Dean.
“What’s wrong?” Jerry wanted to know.
“You’ve been hoodwinked, boys,” Wasserman bluntly responded. “NBC’s got you for peanuts.”
They had thought twenty-five thousand a show was a tidy sum, not realizing that they were in a position to get much more. Wasserman told them that if they left Greshler and signed with MCA, he would reopen the NBC deal and get them what they were really worth. As an added inducement, he offered them a forty-thousand-dollar signing bonus.
It sounded swell, but Dean and Jerry had signed a new three-year contract with Greshler only the previous August. If they were going to fire him, they would have to make a case out of it. On July 6, 1950, the day after production began on At War, Dean and Jerry sent Greshler a letter telling him that they had “sufficient cause” to “terminate and cancel all agreements … between us,” and concluding, “You are no longer to represent us or to act in our behalf in any capacity whatever.”
They also wrote “a quick note” to Wallis to inform him that “Abner Greshler is no longer acting as our agent or manager,” and that “MCA will handle all our business” (the copy in Wallis’s Martin and Lewis legal papers was the only paper in that vast collection sent by Dean).
On Sunday, July 9, Greshler tracked down Wallis’s partner, Joe Hazen, at a hotel and told him he’d heard that Dean and Jerry were promised that MCA would “straighten out that stupid contract they have with Wallis-Hazen.” Hazen had had some prickly dealings with MCA in the past—he’d been forced to renegotiate his deal with Barbara Stanwyck after she’d signed on with the agency—and he immediately made a call to Jules Stein, MCA’s semiretired founder.
After lunch on Monday, Hazen went to Stein’s office to get his assurances that Martin and Lewis’s film contract would stand. Stein told him he knew none of the details of the contract, and he summoned Wasserman and Taft Schreiber, the two sharks to whom he’d passed on day-to-day operation of the agency, to hear Hazen out.
Hazen told all three agents “that I wanted assurance that we would not be treated rough or worked over and that the boys would go ahead with the contract,” and the MCA men agreed.
“You have a contract,” Stein told him, “so you have nothing to worry about.” And for the time being, he and his hatchetmen were good to their word.
Meanwhile, Martin and Lewis brought action against Greshler and his wife for fraudulent business practices. Filing a complaint with the Screen Actors Guild, they identified a fictitious company through which they alleged the Greshlers had diverted 10 percent of Martin and Lewis’s income—beyond the usual agent’s 10 percent—as a charge for business management, which was presumably what Greshler was paid for. Greshler’s wife, Violet, they claimed, was the recipient of these additional funds, which totaled more than thirty-nine thousand dollars. Beyond restitution, the complaint sought to have Greshler disciplined by the Guild.
Now that Dean and Jerry were turning on him, Greshler wouldn’t be as readily tolerated around town. But he wasn’t through yet. He was still scrappy Abner Greshler from the Lower East Side, and it would take more than MCA to scare him off. While Dean and Jerry told anyone who asked what a crook Greshler was, Greshler was suing them and their new agents for $1 million, accusing Dean and Jerry of breach of contract and MCA of “luring away” the act. It was a “steal,” he told the press, and he would get MCA “for its pants.”
Greshler started launching his own public attacks on Dean and Jerry. He told reporters about their gambling habits—“The golf sharpies are just waiting for them”—and about how they couldn’t handle their money: “Several months ago they were in debt to me for $40,000 in cash—not commissions or fees—but in cash money put out in personal loans. Recently they needed money. I negotiated a deal with NBC wherein they get a loan of $75,000 cash in return for which they agreed that all their radio appearances over the next three years would be on NBC.”
In fact, they’d been borrowing money all over the place. Jerry had borrowed $3,000 from Wallis in April 1949, another $10,000 three months later, and $5,000 in February 1950. Dean had borrowed $12,500 over the same span. There were reports that they’d asked for advances and even cash loans from club owners. Martin and Lewis had been a moneymaking machine, it turned out, for everyone except Martin and Lewis. “Plenty of pockets were getting filled,” Jerry remembered, “but there was a big mysterious hole in our own.”
MCA, however, had the clout to plug that hole for good. Upon signing Dean and Jerry, Wasserman called Norman Blackburn at NBC and told him to forget all about the deal he’d made with Greshler. At Wasserman’s prompt, Blackburn flew out to Los Angeles with an NBC staff lawyer to find out how, with the Colgate series set to air in less than two months, he could keep the deal afloat. Wasserman assured him that the deal was quite viable—but at much, much more money. Say, $150,000 a show.
Blackburn was sickened, but he kept his cool. His lawyer, however, couldn’t contain himself: “We stand absolutely firm!” he exclaimed. Blackburn dragged him out of Wasserman’s office and into a handy conference room.
“We can make them stick to the contract,” he told him, “but you know what will happen? Right before we go on the air, Jerry’ll come down with a stomachache, and Dean’ll have laryngitis, and we’ll be stuck with sixty minutes of air-time with nothing to put on the tube.”
“But they’d be lying,” the lawyer said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Blackburn responded. “You can’t prove they’re not sick unless you send them to the Mayo Brothers. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been in show business a lot longer than you.”
And with that, he went back to Wasserman and cut a new deal: $100,000 for the first show, $150,000 for each of the next four, and another round of renegotiations after that. Wasserman phoned Dean and Jerry with the news—proof positive of how much they’d been missing with Greshler.
To their regret, however, they came to learn that Greshler was no small-timer when it came to taking care of himself. As the months wore on, they couldn’t get him to cooperate in their suit against him, not even to submit to subpoenas demanding that he sit for a deposition or turn over documents. They were satisfied, for instance, that the money had been siphoned away, but they had no way to prove it. And while he was evading them on one front, Greshler was, in the interim, filing grievances against them with the American Guild of Variety Artists for commissions on money they were collecting while their litigation against him was still pending. He was, after all, still contractually their agent.
It all proved too time consuming and, in the face of the money MCA was bringing in for them, too bothersome. They chose to settle with Greshler and kill his suit. Not only would they be forced to fulfill their three-year deal with him (signing over to him 10 percent of everything they made, including the newly renegotiated NBC deal), but they also paid him a sum (never confirmed in public) estimated at $2 million in cash, plus a Brentwood mansion with formal gardens and a swimming pool. Greshler might not have been in the driver’s seat anymore, but he made damned sure all memory of the railroad apartment where he was raised would be expunged as payback.
“I was not Lou Perry,” Greshler boasted years after the settlement. “They ended up fighting with Abbey Greshler, and that’s a whole different thing.” Maybe so, but just as sure as he’d bought out Perry, Greshler was now on the outside. He would represent other acts over the years—Tony Randall, Jack Klugman, David Janssen, Cloris Leachman, Vince Edwards. And he would gain a reputation as an old-school character around Hollywood: Both Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese would consider him for small roles in their films (The Godfather, Part II and The King of Comedy, respectively). But he would never again command the business the way he did when he had Martin and Lewis under contract. Like all the managers Dean had signed with and sloughed off over the years, he’d have to watch Martin and Lewis’s star ascend from the paying seats.
Television was their last frontier. Even though it had movie men like Hal Wallis worrying holes through their stomachs, television was becoming the miraculous cash cow of show business. And along with the realization that Dean and Jerry were becoming the biggest thing in movies came the suspicion that they would also be a natural for TV.
Norman Blackburn and the MCA crew spent the summer of 1950 assembling a creative team for the Martin and Lewis leg of “The Colgate Comedy Hour,” and they brought the principals together for a skull session in August. Making the trip out west for the meeting would be the producer Blackburn had hired, Ernest Glucksman, a lumpy, well-dressed man born in Vienna in 1902—an unlikely regent, at first blush, to the Princes of Mirth. But Glucksman’s background was unique: He had roots in both the Borscht Belt, where he’d run summer stock theaters and done stints as a social director, and in early television, where he’d worked on “Your Show of Shows” with Sid Caesar and “The Phil Silvers Arrow Show.” The combination made him a serendipitous find.
The show would be broadcast from New York, where NBC had refurbished the Park Theater off Columbus Circle, and broadcast live to the eastern states only (the West Coast was fed by kinescope on a one-week delay). To flesh out the operation, Glucksman had hired verteran director Kingman Moore and a kid stage manager named Bud Yorkin. As writers, he hired Ed Simmons and Norman Lear, a pair of former baby-photo salesmen whose work Jerry had admired on a recent TV broadcast. As Lear recalled, “We were writing for Jack Haley’s ‘Ford Star Review,’ and we did a sketch called ‘Blind Date’ that Jerry saw and thought, ‘I’ve got to get those writers.’… It was the first or second show for Haley and the first television we’d ever done. We were replacement writers.” (They’d actually been extraordinarily lucky, having signed with MCA agent David Susskind just around the same time Dean and Jerry left Greshler for the agency: “We wrote something that somebody from MCA saw Danny Thomas do in California, and four days later we were in New York writing this show, and eight days later MCA says, ‘Jerry Lewis wants to talk to you,’” Lear recalled.)
Even though he’d assembled a crack creative team, Glucksman still hadn’t met his stars when he arrived at MCA’s Beverly Hills office for the big meeting. “I felt awful,” Glucksman recalled more than a decade later. “I had been up all night on the plane, my pants were baggy, I was unshaven, I felt like Willy Loman.” He slunk into the austere MCA conference room, where a bunch of Lew Wasserman’s immaculate minions sat stolidly, and waited for Dean and Jerry to arrive. He’d never forget their entrance.
“This was Hurricane Bertha within the confines of a small room,” he said. “I tell you—the goings on, with the inkwells, with the pencils, with the cutting off neckties, fooling around with the agents, kissing them.” In the commotion, Glucksman felt his attention drawn to one of the pair in particular. “I don’t know how it happened,” he recalled, “what with the two of them changing positions every minute or two, I just happened to gravitate toward Jerry.”
Glucksman managed to find enough quiet in the mêlée to ask Jerry if they could meet privately to discuss plans for the show, but Jerry told him he was taking Patti to Hawaii the next day for their first real vacation. So Glucksman asked if he could come by the house that evening, and Jerry agreed.
When Glucksman rang the bell that night, the door was opened by Irving Kaye. Glucksman had bumped around the mountains and Broadway for nearly as long as Kaye had, and he recognized the old bellhop immediately: “What the hell are you doing here?”
At that moment, Danny Lewis stepped into the foyer to see who had arrived, and it happened again: “Danny, what are you doing here?”
It was Old Home Week: Glucksman had auditioned Danny and Rae for a Catskills theater once, but the gig hadn’t materialized. If the producer had felt drawn to his young star at MCA, now he understood why—he and Jerry were cut from the same cloth, regardless of their age difference.
But where Glucksman saw a familiar face, Danny saw an opening: Of all the people now running his son’s hot career, here was one who would appreciate his talent. He took Glucksman aside and started promoting himself: “I’m a great comedian, too. Why don’t you have the writers write a spot for me on the show? You know, Ernie, if it wasn’t for me, Jerry wouldn’t have the talent he has today.” Glucksman diplomatically danced around all of this, afraid to alienate his new boss’s father. When Jerry finally rescued him and took him into his study to talk, he was relieved. Now it would just be him and the kid, whom he recognized as just another tummler. What he saw when they were alone, however, shocked him.
“He was to the point, he was businesslike, he showed me that he had every bit of information about every appearance he had ever made, every bill he had ever played on, carefully documented and bound,” Glucksman remembered. “He was big business. He was organized.”
Sobered by his host’s change in demeanor, Glucksman listened intently as Lewis explained how he wanted the show to be presented. “When you talk to the writers,” Jerry announced, “I want you to be sure to remind them that Dean and I are two comics, not a comic and a straight man.”
Glucksman left that night thoroughly impressed with the gravity of his young star. He knew, though, that he’d never have the same opportunity to parley with Dean. When he’d left MCA that afternoon, he’d approached Dean in the parking lot and suggested that they have lunch together so they could get familiar with one another. “Nobody gets to know me closely,” Dean cut him off. “Not even my wife.”
True enough, but there was another reason Dean didn’t need to see to his business affairs. Jerry, like a doting hen, attended to every detail of their careers and zealously protected his idol. It was a happy coincidence of temperaments. “My hero was my partner,” he recalled. “And his best friend in the world was this kid that was helping him make a fortune.”
Dean wanted freedom, comfortable working conditions, and the pleasures of golf, women, and money. And he had a full-fledged singing career to maintain, with recording sessions and even occasional solo TV appearances. For his part, Jerry was anxious not to let any aspect of their careers escape his scrutiny and approval. Even amid the splendors of his success, with new riches and opportunities being thrown at him each day, he still felt as though it could all evaporate at any moment, and he spent enormous amounts of energy on the details of his career.
As far as Dean was concerned, the kid could knock himself out. “He got in no one’s way,” Jerry remembered, “which was perfect, because the way he would have gotten into would’ve been mine.” Jerry frankly admitted in later years just how badly he wanted the career that he was so busily developing: “I had an all-consuming desire to be in the movies. I used Dean and us and what we had and geared for that.”
They’d worked it so that Dean could have his leisure and Jerry would do all of their business work. “He was not a great businessman,” Jerry said later. “That’s why he loved that I took it and handled it. And we had a great relationship. He played golf, I stayed in the office. I used to say to him, ‘We’ll never get anything done if we’re both playing golf. And we certainly won’t get anything done if we’re both in the office.’ He said, ‘I love what you’re doing, pal. Love what you’re doing.’ I took his fucking money to the bank in the beginning. You wanna talk about trust? But that was a long time ago.” (Best friends or not, Dean or MCA or someone else thought better of the arrangement: Hal Wallis began issuing the team separate checks in December 1950.)
Jerry’s workaholism eventually became a standing joke among his employees and those who observed him in the industry. He gained a reputation as a nit-picker who’d worry more about the colors of his crew members’ shirts and on the gifts he distributed to employees than, it often seemed, about such niceties as scripts. Ed Simmons saw Jerry’s vaunted multifaceted approach to filmmaking and show business in general as a destructive symptom of his anxieties: “I think he’s frightened. I think he was frightened all these years, which is why he would not let himself grow. I think a lot of the things he did as a director—or, as George Jessel says, ‘director, set designer, choreographer, grave digger, door-to-door salesman’—was evading Jerry the Comic.”
Jerry’s need for order and completeness may not have alienated his peers, but it certainly belied a desperately shaky self-image and lack of confidence. Dean, after all, the most self-assured man alive, could sign away 110 percent of himself and not bat an eye. Jerry, on the other hand, had to shore up his surroundings with objects, secure his working life with projects, and control his career and his personal life with a devotion to minutiae that wound up, to some degree, costing him the thing he held most dear—his relationship with Dean.
But that would be another, darker day. In August 1950, on the beach in Hawaii, with his third film in the can, his fourth and fifth films in preproduction, a new TV series in the works, and a new son in the family (Ronald Stephen was formally adopted on July 20), Jerry was a twenty-four-year-old prince. He liked to call himself “Child Star”—he even had custom shirts hand-embroidered with the moniker—and at that shining moment in his young life he was absolutely right.
Dean and Jerry were getting too big for traditional comedy venues. In September 1950 they played the Connecticut State Fair in Hartford and appeared as part of the Harvest Moon Ball Finals at Madison Square Garden. The following Sunday night, the seventeenth, they hosted their first installment of “The Colgate Comedy Hour.” There were guests—starlet Marilyn Maxwell and Leonard Barr, Dean’s uncle, who did a wacky dance routine in nightclubs—but the show was really nothing more than a nonstop hour of Dean and Jerry doing skits. Lear and Simmons provided their new bosses with three sketches: a slice-of-backstage-life bit, a satire of the film industry’s anxieties about television, and a send-up of the ballad “Frankie and Johnny,” with Dean singing the tune while Jerry and Maxwell lampooned the lyrics with a full-scale enactment.
The reviews were uniformly positive, none more so than Jack Gould’s piece in The New York Times. He called Dean and Jerry “a pair of mad zanies of the first rank” and their appearance “sixty minutes of slapstick and horseplay that for the most part were swell nonsense.”
That was the first paragraph. What followed, however, was unsettling: “It is the Lewis half of the partnership who is the works. … He was a one-man Hellzapoppin’ who clowned his way through everything and everybody.” After assessing Jerry’s talent for two more paragraphs, Gould shrugged Dean off as “a competent straight man” with “a baritone voice that should not offend either the Crosby or Como fans.” He finished his review by declaring that Jerry “should have more support on future programs.”
Just like the reviews of My Friend Irma, Gould’s review went out of its way to note that it was Jerry who made the pair a hit. Jerry always bent over backward—during his partnership with Dean and afterward—to correct this impression, declaring that “Dean was born funny,” or reassuring his partner after performances, telling him, “You did it again,” or, “Thank God we got what we got.” The detached Dean was no doubt as flattered by Jerry’s reassurances as he was flustered by the critics’ judgments—which is to say, not at all. He sauntered along, taking the good as coolly as the bad. Jerry admitted that he wouldn’t have been nearly so easygoing: “If the tables were turned, I don’t know that I could’ve handled it.” But to Dean, it was still a sweet racket. There was simply too much money to worry about which one the schmucks in the audience thought was the Golden Boy.
Gould’s assessment of Dean wasn’t the only unusual bit of fallout from that first Colgate show. The nation’s movie theater owners and film producers were outraged by the skit that mocked the picture people’s grudge against TV. The exhibitors and the Hollywood studios were fighting the onslaught of television with a “Movies Are Better Than Ever” publicity campaign, and Dean and Jerry’s writers put together a savage parody of their efforts. In the skit, Dean and Marilyn Maxwell played the proprietor and ticket seller at a deserted movie theater: She performed a striptease to attract customers; he led away an usher who’d gone stir crazy from isolation. When Jerry wandered by, he was shanghaied into buying a seat. Once inside, Jerry was overcome by the echoes in the empty auditorium, and Dean bopped him over the head for mentioning the word television.
Harmless enough stuff, but to an industry at war, it was like an act of sabotage. The very day the skit aired, the Motion Picture Herald had declared Dean and Jerry the “Stars of Tomorrow” in its annual exhibitor’s poll, the first team and the first comics ever so honored. Unable to reach Dean and Jerry, who’d left New York for a string of club dates, enraged exhibitors began assailing Hal Wallis’s office with telegrams and letters of protest. Wallis already hated their being on television: Not only did it overexpose them, he felt, but they would be subject to what he considered inferior writing and direction, thus jeopardizing their pull at the box office. Now that one of their TV appearances had caused a small fire to ignite in his lap, he demanded they correct the situation. Dean and Jerry took out ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter to apologize for the flap, and even gave a free performance in Pittsburgh for a convention of Allied Theater owners by way of apology. Jerry typed out a personal note to Wallis from Pittsburgh (“Dean joins me in sending fondest regards,” he assured his boss) and signed it “MOVIES ARE BETTER THAN EVER.”
After Pittsburgh came Steubenville and Dean Martin Day, a weekend-long celebration of the local scalawag made good. Jeanne Martin came east for the festivities, her first visit to Dean’s birthplace. She and Jerry met all of the characters Dean had told them he’d grown up with. There was a parade; there were reunions, keys to the city, formal banquets. Sentimental Jerry loved the idea of the prodigal’s return. Dean? “He loathed the whole thing,” his wife recalled, only enjoying the chance he seized to escape to the golf course with some old friends.
Jerry found contentment in his own ways, big spending among them. In October he and Patti paid sixty-five thousand dollars for their first real home, a twelve-room, five-and-a-half-bath ranch-style house on Amalfi Drive in tony Pacific Palisades. Size aside, it didn’t look much like a movie star’s house—compared with the Spanish stucco gaudiness of the Montez home, its brick façade was modest—but it was handsomely appointed within, with pine-paneled dens and plenty of storage rooms for Jerry’s troves of goodies. The backyard was expansive, a large garden where Jerry and Patti would build an outbuilding for entertaining. There was a vacant lot next door, which Jerry later bought and converted into a baseball field for his sons and their friends. For two rootless children grown up, it was like living in a dream.
At work, though, Jerry and Hal Walker had something less than a dream on their hands. At War with the Army was cheaply made, and it looked it. Piecing it together, they were reluctant to show it around—even to Hal Wallis, who angrily demanded a screening. They wouldn’t, in fact, be ready to preview the picture until December 7, when they would already be in production on their next Wallis film.
That’s My Boy, as Wallis’s new picture was called, would be a departure from the Irma films, a seriocomic story with Dean and Jerry playing real roles, not just thinly veiled incarnations of their stage selves. The script Wallis had commissioned from Cy Howard concerned a legendary all-American running back, Jarring Jack Jackson, and his Milquetoast of a son, Junior.
That’s My Boy was filmed on a tight schedule—seven weeks total, including time off for the Christmas holidays. It would have to be. Wallis had yet another film for Martin and Lewis set to begin filming in mid-February, and there were still club and TV appearances to satisfy. When Dean and Jerry asked for time off from the shoot for these other obligations, Wallis would hear none of it. He had a firm commitment to two films a year from this gold mine of a team, including exclusive use of their time during film production, and he didn’t give a damn what anyone had promised NBC or the Chez Paree. In November NBC had offered Wallis-Hazen several hundred thousand dollars of advertising in exchange for access to Dean and Jerry once every four weeks, even when they were making a film; Joe Hazen had flat-out rebuffed them, citing the time the team would need for rehearsal and travel (as well as “the risk of their flying”).
In fact, their movie bosses never ceased griping to Dean and Jerry about their TV work. On November 14, after their second Colgate show, Hazen wrote Jerry an absurdly long memo complaining about their material. Coming from a partner to the producer of My Friend Irma Goes West, it’s remarkable reading. Hazen declared of the overall production, “This sort of thing is all right for a couple of broken-down has-been vaudevillians; it is certainly not worthy of Martin and Lewis.”
He had specifics in mind: “I think the frightful slapstick ending of the show, where you pour water over Dean while he is singing ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ and Dean throws water over you, is a far cry from any kind of creative performance which requires your unique kind of talent and ability.” In conclusion, he advised Jerry that “anyone could do that sort of thing but there are few, if any, performers who can do the things which single out Martin and Lewis as a unique comedy team.”
Aside from the intriguing detail that the memo was addressed to Jerry alone—Dean’s indifference was apparently well established—Hazen’s comments demonstrate how difficult it was for Wallis-Hazen, or Hollywood as a whole, to absorb the frantic comedy that Martin and Lewis represented. Live audiences positively shrieked at the material on the Colgate shows. And the “Singin’ in the Rain” bit Hazen found so off-putting is still funny forty years later. Martin and Lewis on TV were brilliantly anarchic, teetering on the edge of improvisation while never straying too far from written structures.
In contrast, Willis and Hazen wanted to make predictable types out of Dean and Jerry, to cut and paste them into various pat situations. They’d be a cool sailor and a nebbishy sailor, a cool paratrooper and a nebbishy paratrooper, a cool guy and a nebbish investigating a haunting, a cool guy and a nebbish in a circus—whatever. Dean and Jerry were gifted enough to submit to a variety of yokes, but in their purest form—on a nighclub stage or, in a slightly sanitized version, on the Colgate show—they approached the Marx Brothers in their rebellion against sense, propriety, and authority.
Indeed, so offhand and spontaneous was their live comedy that Martin and Lewis were never able to reproduce it on screen. Hollywood signed them for what was unique about them and then declawed them, turning them into a version of everyone else. This was par for the course during the studio era: When vaudevillians like W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers broke into movies in the 1930s, producers didn’t know how to corral their talents and let them run wild, but by the 1940s, those comedy pioneers had been tamed and screen comedy was pretty much domesticated. The verbal comedy of situation all but eclipsed the physical comedy of personality. Rather than let stage and radio comics break up film narratives to do their usual stuff on screen, Hollywood developed a handful of comic formulas into which any comedians could be stuffed. There was little important difference between, say, a Danny Kaye film, a Bob Hope film, and a Red Skelton film. Each clown had his own métier, of course—Kaye was a highbrow klutz, Hope a roué, Skelton a doofus—but the basic stories were interchangeable.
Ditto for the comedy teams: As exemplified by the Road films of Hope and Crosby—which settled into a pattern immediatley upon proving successful—the comic-fish-out-of-water formula was merely expanded to include a duo in the place of the solo clown. When Martin and Lewis hit Hollywood, the traditional comedy pattern wasn’t altered to exploit their talents for onstage mayhem. Dean and Jerry were simply squeezed into the mold. As a result, all but a handful of their films are disappointingly tame, even in the comic moments, while their TV material, which was much looser and more broadly written, reveals something of the excitement that entranced their first audiences.
On December 7, 1950, At War with the Army was screened for the trade press. Lewis and Walker had patched together what they had—cloudy sound, murky photography, and all—and come up with a picture almost devoid of life. But no one seemed to notice. “Lewis is so funny,” wrote Variety, “the customer is likely to lose track not only of the plot but of the strong contributions of costar Dean Martin.” While congratulating Jerry for “the guffaws that greet his every appearance,” the reviewer noticed Dean only as the guy who “teams handsomely with Miss [Polly] Bergen.” The Hollywood Reporter, while recognizing the quickie picture for what it was—“the show appears to be put together with string and cardboard”—found Dean and Jerry more an integrated act: “They are on screen constantly—mugging, singing, making jokes and disporting themselves exactly as one should expect.”
The film opened in late January 1951 in New York at the Paramount, to withering reviews in the mainstream press. “The farces are growing more depressing, just as are the wars,” noted The New York Times. Time derided Dean and Jerry’s “ragtag of nightclub bits and pieces.” And Phillip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times savaged the production—“a kind of timeless vacuum through which men in uniform drift rather than advance”—and had harsh words for both Jerry (“It is a little embarrassing to have to laugh at him”) and Dean (“We do not care one way or the other what happens to him, but nothing much does”).
The reviews were unfortunately apt. More than four decades later, At War with the Army remains a depressingly lifeless, unfunny, muddled piece of busy-work. Somewhere deep inside of it is an attempt at a farce—characters wander in and out of an orderly room and keep missing one another in a moron’s approximation of Feydeau—but the surface is so ugly and spotty that it defies deeper analysis. It is the only Martin and Lewis film to have fallen into the public domain, and as a result all circulating prints are of horrid quality—grainy, overly contrasted, and even torn, with sound as from under a layer of topsoil. Once again, although the miniature plot revolves around Dean’s love life, it’s Jerry’s film: He gets a production number as an intro (“The Navy Gets the Gravy but the Army Gets the Beans”), he’s allowed to dress in drag and pantomime a kind of Marlene Dietrich imitation, he struggles on an obstacle course, he hits the jackpot with a balky-for-everyone-else soda machine (a Harpo Marx-ist joke that may have been Jerry’s own creation, as it predates the many technology gags of his later films). There’s a brief re-creation of some Martin and Lewis stage business, none of it funny: a fancy-feet dance number, an imitation (without satire) of the finale of Going My Way, with Dean in the Bing Crosby role and Jerry as Barry Fitzgerald. For the most part, though, it’s third-rank military japery on the level of a “Gomer Pyle” episode. That the film was successful enough to spawn a pair of subsequent Martin and Lewis service comedies is geniunely astonishing.
At this remove, though, a few lines in the film bear so obviously on the lives of its stars that it seems impossible that they’d merely been carried over from the original play without a wink—or a grimace. There’s the moment when Jerry, playing a character whose wife has just had a baby, is denied a pass by Dean and shouts, “If my wife forgets what I look like, you’ll be responsible!” Surely, wayward husband Jerry understood that the line applied to him and Dean as much as it did Private Corwin and Sergeant Pucinelli. Likewise the line he speaks when Corwin tries to remind Pucinelli of their pre-army friendship: “We were just like brother and sister.” Nothing out-weirds an earlier line, though, for revealing Jerry’s habits of mind or as an inside joke about how difficult the production was: “The first thing I’m gonna do if I get overseas is surrender. A concentration camp’s gotta be better than this!” A Holocaust joke coming from a Jewish comedian in 1950: It’s not just embarrassing to have to laugh at this stuff—it’s downright degrading.
Despite its flaws, At War with the Army grossed more than ten times the four hundred thousand dollars that York had invested in it, a return more stunning than that of either Irma film and proof positive of the public’s attraction to Dean and Jerry. The stars of the film, though, would never see a dime of the fortune they’d gleaned from their adoring public. In August 1951 Screen Associates, the corporation that Ray Ryan and his fellow investors had set up to fund At War with the Army and a projected skein of additional Martin and Lewis films, filed suit against the comedians, York Pictures, and Hal Wallis. Screen Associates claimed that Dean and Jerry had signed a seven-picture deal in April 1950, and that Paramount and MCA had succeeded in coercing the pair to ignore the obligation. The fact that the contract had been brokered by Greshler didn’t lessen the eagerness of Ryan and his partners to get another moneymaker like At War with the Army in the can. They pressed and pressed until Dean and Jerry forked over their majority interest in the film, just to wash their hands of the matter.
“Legally, the Screen Associates contract was no good and probably wouldn’t hold up in court,” recalled MCA agent Herman Citron, the former policeman who’d taken over Dean and Jerry’s business affairs when they signed with the agency. “But I figured the only clean way I could get them out of it was for them to give up their interests in At War with the Army and walk away”—which is what they did, writing off their first independent film as an exorbitantly expensive lesson and waiting until November 1952 before they even considered doing another.
Not that they needed the work. In fact, Dean and Jerry were running themselves ragged. They finished filming That’s My Boy on January 10, 1951, then went to New York to do a Colgate hour. They returned to Hollywood to begin work on The Stooge, which went before the cameras from mid-February through late March. In April they were in Chicago at the Chez Paree, where they did yet another Colgate show live before heading to New York and the Copa.
Patti caught up with them in Chicago and went on with them to New York so she and Jerry could stand as matron of honor and best man at the wedding of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh that June in Connecticut. As he had when Dean married Jeanne, Jerry tried to talk Curtis out of it, telling him right in front of his fiancée what damage he was liable to do to his career. (Curtis was astonished and told Jerry off on the spot; Jerry later called Leigh to apologize, explaining that Curtis’s agent had put him up to it.) Although they were an hour late and almost wound up missing the service, Jerry showed up in Life magazine bussing the bride in a full Valentino clinch.
Curtis and Leigh were part of the coterie that had begun hanging around the house on Amalfi Drive. The gang also included Jerry Gershwin (son of George); John Barrymore, Jr.; actor-writer Danny Arnold; comic Larry Storch; actors Jeff Chandler and Mona Freeman; Jerry’s personal physician, Dr. Marvin Levy; and various hangers-on, sycophants, and freeloaders. Patti hated having the crowd in her house at all hours—she was often called on to serve dinner to as many as a score of guests on short notice—and even with a butler and maid (Sam and Carrie, a middle-aged, married black couple), she found it difficult to cope. She was genuinely fond of Curtis and Leigh, though (Bernard Schwartz and Jeanette Helen Morrison, as they’d been born), who were an apt match for the Lewises: young, handsome show people from divergent ethnic backgrounds getting their first taste of Hollywood fame.
“We played games,” Leigh recalled of those halcyon nights on Amalfi Drive. “Or we’d go to a movie. But we all loved to play games.” They played parlor games like charades (imagine a young Jerry Lewis in a game of charades!) and Categories, a game in which players choose a five-letter word and five categories and try to fill in a grid by listing words or phrases appropriate to the categories and beginning with the letters in the word. Leigh recalled one such game. “The category was ‘ways of death’ and the five-letter word was tulip, and for u Jerry wrote, ‘Up the ass a bullet.’”
They were young and happy and rich and famous and they knew they were at the beginning of the lives of immortals. Still, no one could have anticipated what happened next. In July 1951 Dean and Jerry were booked into the Paramount Theater in support of Dear Brat, a pale third entry in a dying string of Paramount comedies about a family cursed with a mischievous teenage girl (played by Jerry’s pal Mona Freeman, already twenty when the series began six years earlier). The Paramount was the nation’s premier presentation house, a picture palace that had survived the demise of vaudeville with its prestige intact. It was a big moneymaker, able to seat 3,650 for a combined live show and film presentation. Like other large Broadway houses, the Paramount was usually programmed so that weaker movies would be accompanied by the most magnetic stage acts—hence the combination of Dear Brat and Dean and Jerry. They would play six shows a day (seven on Saturday) for a guaranteed paycheck of $50,000 a week, plus 50 percent of all weekly receipts above $100,000. The top ticket price was $1.50, the average less than a dollar. Nobody had ever come close to the box-office record that Benny Goodman had set at the Paramount five years earlier playing in support of the Hope and Crosby hit Road to Utopia: $135,000 in a week. Martin and Lewis shattered it. After two weeks, nearly 300,000 people had come to see their eighty-six shows, bringing the gross to $289,500, half of which was theirs. More than 22,000 people a day came to see them; the lines formed outside the theater as early as 6:00 A.M.
And earning more than seventy thousand dollars a week was their least impressive feat. They created virtual gridlock around Broadway and Forty-fourth Street. In order to empty the auditorium and sell more tickets—after considering cutting off food and drink to its patrons (who got wise and started smuggling in provisions)—management promised the audience that Dean and Jerry would perform impromptu shows for them from the window of their dressing room. There were some eighty-odd free performances in all. Thousands of fans filled the streets to catch a glimpse of their heroes, who mugged and waved and smiled and threw glossy photos of themselves to the masses below. Dean played the trumpet, they sang, they tossed bow ties and shirts and hats and handkerchiefs down to the street, Jerry waved a shotgun (he had three on hand) and dared the screaming teenage girls below to come and get him. There had been nothing like it since Sinatra, and there’d be nothing like it again until Elvis or the Beatles. “Little girls were practically having orgasms every time Dean and Jerry opened their mouths,” recalled Norman Taurog, their latest film director, who’d come east to catch the show. (In the middle of this mayhem, little Ronnie fell and broke his leg back in California. Patti, who had traveled east with Jerry, flew home to see to him; Jerry couldn’t leave, but he had a phone put next to Ronnie’s hospital bed and monitored the boy’s condition constantly.)
Not even the guardians of official culture could ignore the hubbub. The New Yorker deigned to make the trip across town to see what all the noise was about, and its “Talk of the Town” writer was predictably droll and condescending, taking careful note of Jerry’s ways with money (grabbing four fives for a twenty from Paramount Theater publicist Jack McInerney, he commented on the thickness of the man’s bankroll; later, he asked aloud for no apparent reason, “How do you make a check out for eight people?”). Dean and Jerry, the piece noted, “seem to have a frenzied following not only among the Copacabana set but among the Howard Johnson set.”
It wasn’t just a New York thing, either. After the Paramount, they hit Chicago and Detroit, to similarly incendiary receptions. Life put them on its cover that August—a brilliantly blurred jumping-and-mugging shot by photographer Phillippe Halsman. Inside, there was less text than image. The message was clear: Whatever the cost, you had to see them.
Just a few years earlier, Jerry and Dean had been part of a Parade magazine publicity stunt in nearby Columbus Circle: Jerry dressed down, Dean put on the dog, and each went up to strangers and tried to bum some change. The results were unspectacular (Dean, for the record, did better), but the stunt worked because nobody on the street knew who they were. As in that home movie taken in Times Square in 1948, they were invisible to the public.
Now that public was wild for them. The films, of course, had all been smash hits, but television gave them the real bounce. There was a difference between being showcased in My Friend Irma and going berserk in people’s living rooms. The box office had been solid, though only At War with the Army had thus far been Top Ten caliber (That’s My Boy, which hadn’t opened yet, would outearn it). But on TV they were indomitable: Slotted opposite Ed Sullivan’s ratings powerhouse “Toast of the Town,” the show they’d helped launch back in 1948, they were cleaning up, pulling in almost half of the national audience some nights. NBC had renegotiated its deal with MCA to guarantee Martin and Lewis a $1 million annual minimum for a slate of six to eight shows. Only Milton Berle, who worked every week and whose show was higher in the ratings, was paid more. But Martin and Lewis were worth every penny: The public couldn’t get enough of them, be it live, or TV, or in the movies.
Who else, after all, was there? Berle, Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball were all exclusively TV people by 1951. Abbott and Costello were waning at the box office. The Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy were virtually finished. And on stage? Forget it. Nobody commanded the same money. For the next few years, they were absolutely tops in every single thing they did. Even radio, where they’d laid their only egg, wanted them back, this time with sponsors: Chesterfield and Anacin. “The Martin and Lewis Show” on radio was just another moneymaking perquisite of their thrilling rise. It was so awesome, in fact, that Jerry collapsed from sheer exhaustion. They were in Chicago on August 2 when it happened, and they had to cancel a Minneapolis appearance that would have earned them another fifty thousand dollars.
That’s My Boy opened that week. Archer Winston of the New York Post, for one, went nuts for it, calling it “fine gold” and “mature moviemaking.” Though he found the conclusion sentimental, he thought the remainder “brilliantly expressed in hilarious comedy” and concluded by sighing, “We can never count on many pictures like ‘That’s My Boy.’”
It’s no classic, but it’s certainly a welcome rebound from Dean and Jerry’s previous two films—in part because Wallis for the first time truly built the script around them. That’s My Boy gave Jerry a chance to act like a human being, for a change; there’s barely a trace of the Kid anywhere in his performance, and in his scenes with Eddie Mayehoff and with a psychiatrist (John McIntire, pleasantly seedy) he’s positively touching.
It must have been easy for him to relate to his part; when Jerry says, “I can’t follow in Dad’s footsteps. His shoes are too big, and I’m uncomfortable in them,” he’s expressing an emotion he knows firsthand. Of course, the real Jerry Lewis chose not only to put on his father’s shoes but to stomp over his father with them. Nevertheless, Junior Jackson embodied a kind of fear that nagged at the actor who played him.
That’s My Boy also has in its favor the rich black-and-white photography of Lee Garmes, the inventive cinematographer; even under the direction of Hal Walker, Garmes achieves such nice effects as flashes of light off Junior’s thick eyeglasses and the rustling shadows of leaves covering his face as he endures his father’s browbeatings. But, like My Friend Irma Goes West, this is another film laden with sloppy bits: Jerry, playing a high school senior and college freshman, wears a wedding ring in some scenes, and he appears in some sequences with braces on his teeth and in others braceless. Still, the generally thoughtful subject matter, the concentration on story at the expense of block comedy sequences, and the inspired casting of Eddie Mayehoff (he would go on to reprise his role in a spin-off TV series) lift the film above the ranks of mediocre productions Wallis had generally assigned Dean and Jerry to make.
That’s My Boy would have been a terrific building block for further films for the team, films that allowed for drama and pathos along with the antics, but Wallis didn’t see the team as actors. To him they were clowns, and he wasn’t interested in making Pagliacci. He sunk them into the most formulaic pictures he could devise. In September they went to work on Sailor Beware (known around the studio until the Screen Associates suit had been filed as “At Sea with the Navy”), and four months later they began work on Jumping Jacks, a paratrooper comedy (“Aloft with the Air Force”?). Wallis had done so well making by-the-numbers fare with Martin and Lewis that he had begun collecting art: impressionist paintings, Remington bronzes. Dean and Jerry were still scrambling to pay the back taxes Greshler hadn’t bothered with, but Greshler was driving a Rolls Royce, and Wallis was amassing a notable hoard of works that would one day be doled out to museums on both coasts and in Europe.
Even Danny Lewis was getting fat. When That’s My Boy opened at the Paramount that August, Jerry was able to pull strings and get him booked as the headliner in support of the film. It was a corny bit of novelty programming that demonstrated just how unnecessary a live show was with a Martin and Lewis film on the bill. Dean and Jerry’s old friend “Stal.” at Variety reviewed Danny’s show: “Lewis père is trading too much on his son’s rep. Where once he made his own way with a voice resembling but not matching that of Al Jolson, he’s doing the Jolie bit now only as an opener. Then he lets the audience in on his true identity and rides it into the ground from there.” It wasn’t a great review, but no one cared: The film did monster business, outgrossing even At War with the Army, and Danny played to full houses, as he felt was his due.
And there was one last beneficiary of Dean and Jerry’s supernova, one last focus for Lewis’s energy and hunger for attention. Their “Colgate Comedy Hour” stage manager, Bud Yorkin, approached Jerry one afternoon at rehearsal and asked a favor. Yorkin’s sister had a young son who’d been stricken with a debilitating disease, muscular dystrophy, and was dying from it. Doctors could do nothing to save the boy, but Yorkin asked Jerry if he would be willing to take a minute or so at the end of an upcoming show and make an announcement about the newly founded Muscular Dystrophy Association, asking viewers to send whatever money they could to help the group sponsor the necessary research. Jerry made the appeal, and money rolled in, proof of both Martin and Lewis’s popularity and the American public’s receptivity to celebrity-endorsed charities. The end-of-the-show MDA spots became a staple on the Colgate shows: Even when guest acts had to be cut because the show was running over its time allotment, Jerry would briefly step out of character just before the closing credits and make his pitch, using his natural voice for the first time all evening.
Jerry became more and more involved with the MDA. He met Paul Cohen, a dystrophy sufferer who founded the organization, and various doctors who were pioneering neuromuscular research. In imitation of the March of Dimes and its fight against polio, the MDA was telling people that it was merely a matter of money before the disease would be vanquished. Jerry took to the task of fund-raising with characteristic zeal—the MDA, at Yorkin’s suggestion, had been buttering him up with honorific titles and plaques—and he and Dean made plans to host a telethon that would put the infant organization on the charity map.
The telethon wasn’t actually a muscular dystrophy event, but rather a fund-raiser for the construction of the New York Cardiac Hospital. As hosts and chief attractions, though, Martin and Lewis were permitted to earmark a percentage of the total pledges toward a charity of their choosing, namely, the MDA. Ernie Glucksman was tabbed as producer, and all of the personnel and facilities of WNBT, NBC’s New York flagship station, were at the telethon’s disposal for the March 15 show.
Production coordinator Bud Granoff assembled a stunning roster of show talent to fill out the sixteen-and-a-half-hour broadcast: Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, Henny Youngman, Yul Brynner, Nat “King” Cole, Mel Tormé, Perry Como, Cab Calloway, Gene Krupa, Sarah Vaughan, Harry Belafonte, Sid Caesar, Ella Fitzgerald, Milton Berle, and dozens of others. Frank Sinatra worked with them for the first time, and such ghosts from their pasts as Shep Fields, Sonny King, and Vivian Blaine were on hand. They did a nostalgic section with Dean’s uncle Leonard Barr and Danny Lewis dropping in; Danny brought Jerry, who would turn twenty-five the next day, a birthday cake. The big finale featured Eddie Fisher, just out of the army and still in uniform, and an astonishing burst of energy from the hosts, who Charlestoned, squirted the crew with seltzer bottles, and cavorted with the band.
When the take was tallied, they had raised nearly $1.15 million from 243,000 donors in the New York area alone. Jerry recalled that $68,000 went to the MDA (roughly 5 percent of the total donated). But almost as monumental as the money was the impression that Dean and he made on the public with their unprecedented performance.
The New York Times canonized them: “They gave an astonishing demonstration of patience, understanding and personal dignity,” wrote Jack Gould. “Aside from being capital performers, Martin and Lewis are very genuine human beings.” Variety went much further: “By any kind of reckoning,” wrote Leonard Traube, perhaps himself exhausted by the broadcast,
it was one of the greatest show biz shows in TV history. … It compared favorably with the outstanding public affairs telecasts of our time—the Kefauver Committee hearings, the United Nations Security Council visualers or the Jap Peace Treaty Ceremonies.
While smashing over for a great cause, it gave trade and public a new view of the comics. They not only worked themselves silly, staying on screen virtually all the way and taking time out only for a change of garb and maybe a fast cuppa coff, but emerged as guys with considerable personality quite divorced from their “in character” zaniness. The tally added up to a parade in which the word colossal seemed a little pale even as liberally applied in many of the industry’s facets.
There it was, in black and white: They were as big as the end of World War II.
And they knew it, as an eyewitness remembered. Richard Grudens was a studio page working at NBC’s studio 6B, home to Berle’s “Texaco Star Theater” (and later to Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”). He, like all his colleagues, had volunteered to work on the telethon, and he’d been assigned to check the performers in as they came and went. He also had the responsibility to keep everyone out of Berle’s private bathroom, which was located behind the studios. Nobody, not even Dean and Jerry, had permission to use the facilities, and Grudens, who’d witnessed Berle’s horrible temper on many occasions, was loath to cross his boss. He directed people to an elevator some hundred feet away and to the toilets on the floors above or below.
Informed that Berle wouldn’t let anyone use his bathroom, “Jerry was furious,” Grudens said, “and demanded I find someone who could authorize his use of the facilities. Jerry’s father and Jerry and I tried to release the keys to Jerry, but no one would dare permit it. He ranted and raved that Berle had no right and he would sue him.” Jerry and Danny berated the teenage page for what seemed to him like the length of the telethon, finally relenting and going up to the seventh floor to see to their needs. Once again Berle had bested Jerry, and someone, even if it was just a volunteer kid, was going to have to take the heat.