How big had the Martin and Lewis snowball become?
So big they could blow off the Copa. In December 1947 they’d been so desperate to play the club that they almost fired Greshler for holding out for more money. In May 1952 they just plain didn’t show up for a four-week engagement at the very spot that had launched them. They’d been slated to make six thousand dollars a week—Jerry had drawn a ten-thousand-dollar advance on his share—and they were willing to pay management a total of thirty-four thousand dollars out of their own pockets just to make peace. But the Copa wanted them, not their money: There was a lot more than thirty-four grand to be made with Dean and Jerry onstage for a month.
They were so big that Ralph Staub’s innocuous newsreel footage of the opening of Jerry’s camera shop—along with a few minutes of Dean and Jerry at the black-tie opening of Barney’s Beanery, the West Hollywood night spot later frequented by the likes of Jim Morrison—was touted by Columbia as a Martin and Lewis featurette (“Fame’s Funniest Pair,” read the ads), causing Hal Wallis and the attorneys at York Pictures to threaten legal action. Wallis clipped an ad for the newsreel from the trade papers and attached it to an angry memo he wrote to Joe Hazen: “This is a good example of how these parasites move in on our people [and] sell their shorts on the strength of their names.”
They were so big that they had logos, like a corporation. Many people would grow familiar with the stylized pen-and-ink drawing of Jerry with his eyes closed and mouth opened pelican-fashion. An artifact of the Martin and Lewis days, it was an icon Jerry used to identify himself as a commercial commodity, well into the 1990s; he used it on his stationery, on glassware in his home, and even on the welcome mat of his yacht. Dean’s cartoon likeness, which he abandoned when the act split up, showed him with his face cocked jauntily and his lips puckered in full croon. The caricatures were so much a part of the act that the team had gold cuff links designed out of them—one head per cuff link—and gave them away to crew members and other employees.
They were so big that a few of Jerry’s “Colgate Comedy Hour” stock phrases had caught on in the popular parlance. There was “Don’t lick it!,” which he would whine whenever Dean or a bit actor appropriated his lollipop or ice-cream cone. There was “Melvin?,” probably Dean’s most famous ad-lib; Jerry’s character would frequently bear this unfortunately nerdy name, and he would be greeted by Dean with a skeptical repetition of it whenever he introduced himself. It became a running gag, with everyone on the stage repeating it in a chain reaction. Once, after Jerry said his name, Dean blew a whistle and an entire military-style line of extras marched onstage, executed a brief drill routine, and turned to the camera to ask “Melvin?” And there was “I like it! I like it!,” Jerry’s excited reaction to anything insane or pleasurable he did (eating a thermometer, for instance).*
They were so big that they had a national fan club—the Jerredeannes, based in Brooklyn and composed primarily of bobby-soxers. Hal Wallis was sent a membership form, but he declined to enlist.
In fact, they were so big that they spawned imitators. In November 1950 a sixteen-year-old kid named Sammy Petrillo appeared on one of their Colgate shows in a cameo bit as Jerry’s baby son. Petrillo was perfect for the gag role. Not only was he a gangly, bone-faced, crew cut–sporting double for Jerry, but he’d grown up in a small-time show-business family: His mom had been a photographic double for Alice Faye, and his dad was a Borscht Belt comic and hoofer. He’d caught Milton Berle’s eye by sneaking into a “Texaco Star Theater” rehearsal and doing his amazing imitation of Jerry. Berle, no doubt hoping to needle Jerry, referred the kid to the Colgate people.
Like Jerry, Petrillo was a natural mimic, and he had expertly learned the older comic’s moves, voices, and postures. His voice was a bit wheezier than Jerry’s in one part of its range, a bit more nasal in another, and his physical imitation, while perfect in its various poses, lacked Jerry’s effortless, mercurial fluency. Watching Jerry was like watching a fire or a waterfall, something that changed aspect instantly and without any obvious conscious effort; Petrillo seemed more like he was scanning a crib sheet and adopting postures he’d memorized. It was the difference between a jazz musician creating an improvisation and a devotee of that musician memorizing and then replicating those same passages; the passion, the spontaneous wit, and the genius were drained from the structure, even if the shape was identical.
Still, Petrillo’s ability was notable. Reviewing his appearance with Dean and Jerry, Variety wrote that he was “an amazing double for Lewis, both visually and vocally.” The kid was a hit—too much, in fact, for his own good. A few days later, Sammy recalled, he got a call from one of Jerry’s secretaries and was told, “He’s angry because you got a good write-up with him.” As far as Sammy could see, however, Jerry didn’t seem upset; in fact, he helped Sammy sign with MCA and discussed various propositions with him, asking him to steer clear of TV in the meantime.
So Sammy stayed put, and even though he was signed to the most powerful talent agency in the business and sponsored, apparently, by the hottest comic, he got no work. Jack O’Brian, entertainment columnist for the New York Journal American, wondered out loud about Sammy’s inactivity, and he raised suspicions in the Petrillo house when he wrote that he hoped Jerry had nothing to do with it. “My dad and I realized,” Petrillo recalled, “he’s keeping me back on a shelf because he doesn’t want me to work.”
Because he was only sixteen, Petrillo was able to break his contract with MCA, and he soon found himself on television with some frequency. He did another Colgate show—this one with Eddie Cantor—and an assortment of variety, comedy, and quiz shows. For a brief while he teamed as a live act with George De Witt, a singing star from the “Name That Tune” series, and they played such familiar Martin and Lewis venues as the Paramount, the Copa, and Las Vegas, where they finally split. By 1952 Petrillo was living in California and doing one-shot appearances in nightclubs. He found a new mentor—comedian Joe E. Ross, the excitable “Oooh! Oooh!” guy, who would later become well known on “Car 54, Where Are You?” And he met up with a new partner, a sometime singing actor named Duke Mitchell.
Like Dean, Mitchell was the son of Italian immigrants (he’d been born Dominick Mitchell, an anglicized version of Micelli) and had grown up fond of westerns. Like Dean, he’d married young and moved away from home—from Brooklyn to Florida—in pursuit of a singing career. Also like Dean, he was nearly a decade older than the rubbery young comic with whom he found himself teamed. Mitchell had even worked with Dean, playing a tiny role alongside him as Jerry’s corner man during the comic boxing sequence in Sailor Beware (Mitchell’s counterpart in the opposing corner was played by an unknown young actor named James Dean, in his film debut).
It’s not exactly an uncanny set of coincidences, but Mitchell and Petrillo exploited it fully in developing their act. Mitchell sang pop standards and trendy new songs in a vigorous tenor; Petrillo yukked it up like a child alternately frightened and emboldened, making a shambles of the clubs where they appeared and forever seeking approval from his cool older partner. Mitchell and Petrillo even had caricatures of themselves drawn up in imitation of Dean and Jerry’s logo.
Developing a reputation as a poor fan’s Martin and Lewis, Mitchell and Petrillo played around Los Angeles in small clubs that couldn’t possibly afford the real thing. Naturally, there was a ready market in the business for just such an act, and Maurice Duke, who was managing the team, began looking for somebody to build a film around them. He found his angel in poverty-row producer Jack Broder, who had gone from rereleasing Universal horror classics to making low-budget features like Bride of the Gorilla. Broder must have been fond of primates: The script he finally approved for Mitchell and Petrillo’s film debut centered around experiments to evolve a chimp into a gorilla and then into a man. To boost the box office, Broder signed a marketable name for the picture and then used it in the title: In the spring of 1952, plans were set to film the mellifluously dubbed opus, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. (At the time Broder signed him, of course, Lugosi was also considering offers from Edward Wood Jr.)
The success of Mitchell and Petrillo hadn’t gone unremarked in Dean and Jerry’s camp. As early as the previous December, the easily perturbed Hal Wallis was wondering aloud to Joe Hazen whether he could simply put Mitchell and Petrillo out of business: “Jerry told me today that they are also beginning to appear on television; that some people have spoken to him about their shows and were under the impression that they are watching a not very good Martin and Lewis show. … I think something should be done about it if possible.”
Three weeks later, Wallis sounded out legal advice from Dean and Jerry’s lawyer about whether or not Mitchell and Petrillo could be stomped out. He began by quoting an item he’d read that morning in The Hollywood Reporter: “Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, the two kids being sued by Martin and Lewis because they look and act so much like Martin and Lewis, inked with Maurice Duke for four indie pix. Says Maurice, ‘Look, I could hit Sammy with a truck and he’d STILL look like Jerry Lewis!’” An incensed Wallis declared, “This is obviously an attempt to capitalize on Martin and Lewis, and I think you should put Mitchell, Petrillo and Maurice Duke on notice at this time before they get too far into their plans to make a picture.”
The report Wallis clipped was correct about Martin and Lewis’s annoyance with Mitchell and Petrillo’s act, but the older team hadn’t gone so far as to sue. Nevertheless, the buzz around town cast Dean and Jerry as the heavies. There they were, an apparently lighthearted duo who’d enjoyed all the success they could possibly imagine, yet they seemed intent on sabotaging the careers of a couple of less able, less in-demand young guys whose big crime was putting on a mimic act that any kid could see through. Life did a story on the flap; Quick magazine put both teams on its cover; entertainment columnists all over the country kept bringing the skirmish up, thanks largely to Jack Broder’s own publicity machine. The ruckus was backfiring on Dean and Jerry: Joe Ross told Wallis about a columnist who told him “that if Martin and Lewis want to stop these two impersonators, the columnist would say that Berle and others should stop Martin and Lewis.”
Although Mitchell and Petrillo welcomed their newfound fame, they were serious enough about their careers to want recognition for their work, and not just for their resemblance to a more famous duo. Sammy, no doubt recalling the way Jerry had undercut him in New York, wanted to eliminate any dependence on Martin and Lewis altogether. “We were gonna dye my hair blond,” he recalled. “We even talked about wearing glasses and all kinds of things not to look like the guy, ’cause they figured I was physically funny anyway.” They took pains to tell the world they didn’t mean to rip off Martin and Lewis. “Sammy looks like Jerry—it’s an act of God,” Duke Mitchell told reporters. “But I should be on the other end of a lawsuit. I should be suing Dean Martin because he went out and got a nose job to look like me!” When they got wind of Wallis’s and Jerry’s efforts to put an end to their film career, however, they didn’t feel they needed to play nice anymore. “He’s not gonna threaten me,” Petrillo recalled thinking when he heard rumors that Jerry was mulling legal action. “Nobody’s gonna threaten me! We went ahead and did it.”
Boasting a fifty-thousand-dollar budget, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla was shot that May in nine days. It was directed by William Beaudine, by most accounts the single most prolific director of feature subjects ever to work in Hollywood. Beaudine kept busy by refraining from being picky: His résumé is padded with Bowery Boys films, sex education documentaries, and religious propaganda. In 1952, when he was conceiving of a cinematic idiom in which to express the comic personalities of Mitchell and Petrillo, he directed at least six other films.
As Broder made plans to release his picture, Jerry tried to keep Mitchell and Petrillo’s feet to the fire. He spoke with Louella Parsons about his resentment at being imitated: “I met Sammy when he was just a punk kid of sixteen and we had him on one of our television shows as a gag. He looked like me and so he went and hired a partner and had him cut his hair just like Dean’s. You can’t create something and have people swipe it right out from under your nose without doing something about it.”
Although Jerry was making all the noise, Wallis was taking decisive action. He forced Jack Broder and Maurice Duke to screen their film for him, and the sight of this bastard offspring of his own quickie productions made him angrier than ever. His lawyers wrote to Dean and Jerry’s counsel to spell out the urgency of the problem. Fearing a situation wherein theaters would advertise Mitchell and Petrillo as a “Poor Man’s Martin and Lewis,” and correctly surmising that Broder would be happy with profits that Wallis-Hazen would consider modest, they actually suggested that a court be asked to view all of Martin and Lewis’s films and the Mitchell and Petrillo film in order to see how obviously the latter pair had infringed upon the former’s material.
Wallis, however, was shouting in a wilderness. He prevailed on MCA, York, and Dean and Jerry’s lawyers to join him in his struggle to suffocate Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, only to be met with indifference. The negative backlash in the entertainment press would be too risky, thought the Martin and Lewis camp. They proposed that Wallis file suit first; they’d follow, they said, by joining the suit a few weeks later. After an hour of arguing on deaf ears, Wallis resigned himself to letting the matter drop: “We did not want to be made the ‘fall guys’ in this matter. … If Martin and Lewis’s advisors were not concerned or did not want to take direct action … we would let the matter rest, since they had the greater stake in the situation.”
The Mitchell and Petrillo affair found Jerry and Wallis pooling their interests at an ironic time. During the months in which Jerry was fuming at Sammy Petrillo’s effrontery and Wallis was worrying about some small-time producer bleeding his hottest property for profits, the two were barely on speaking terms.
Wallis, naturally, had never stopped acting the gentleman with Jerry in all the expected ways. For his twenty-fifth birthday the previous spring, Jerry received a shirt and substantial gift certificate from his producer, and he expressed his gratitude appropriately in a brief, sweet-sounding letter.
But there was an astonishing gap between the dozens of polite and boyish notes Jerry wrote to Wallis over the years and the feelings he later admitted to harboring toward the producer. It was a characteristic ambivalence: Alongside the anger he allowed himself to generate toward authority figures, Jerry always seemed cowed and impressed by them, and he would go out of his way to flatter important people in just the way he wished himself to be flattered by others. Jerry was still prone, though, to lose his temper with anyone around him, even his boss. In November, between the productions of Sailor Beware and Jumping Jacks, he once again had to write an apologetic note to Wallis about his behavior, promising never to act inappropriately again. Again Wallis accepted the apology, and again he was magnanimous, prevailing upon Paramount to provide Dean and Jerry with brand-new dressing rooms of their own on the lot.
A few months later, Wallis suffered another slight. Seven times in one day he phoned Jerry (who was performing in San Francisco), and seven times he was told that Jerry couldn’t take his call. When late that afternoon he heard from Herman Citron that he had talked to Jerry earlier in the day, Wallis angrily wrote and filed an account of the entire episode, though he made no explicit mention of his annoyance to either Jerry or Citron.
But the worst was yet to come. Martin and Lewis, supported by the mighty MCA machine, were preparing to push Wallis’s patience to the limit. Their wounds from the Greshler and Screen Associates suits fully healed, they began to think about making another York picture, and they approached Wallis-Hazen in search of funding. Wallis played grand pooh-bah with them, saying he’d put up the money for the film only if he could produce it and control the distribution—if, in effect, it was his film. They demurred.
Wallis didn’t really care who produced their annually allotted outside picture, since he had them for two films a year. They’d been before his cameras three times in 1951, making The Stooge (which had been finished for almost a year but hadn’t yet been released), Sailor Beware, and Jumping Jacks. And he had them in preproduction on another film, this one a remake of Bob Hope’s 1940 comedy The Ghost Breakers. Nightclub owners and NBC executives had to tread carefully around Martin and Lewis and MCA, but Wallis could afford to play hardball with them. He tried to be evenhanded—he gave York a percentage of Jumping Jacks when it became clear that legal entanglements would prevent Dean and Jerry from making a film of their own in 1951—but he made sure they knew who was in the driver’s seat. This was not the sort of balance of power to which Lew Wasserman and his legions were accustomed. While Dean and Jerry were on a four-city club tour in February and March 1952, MCA hatched a strategy that would remind Hal Wallis just who was boss.
According to their contract for the new film, signed January 4, 1952 (when they were still in production on Jumping Jacks), Martin and Lewis were to report to Paramount on March 24 to begin rehearsals. They never showed. The next day, Wallis got a thirty-inch telegram from them that called the script “degrading, offensive, insulting and an indication of the indifference with which you have viewed our futures, both as artists and persons.” They stated in no uncertain terms their unwillingness to continue working with Wallis in the manner that had become standard: “We do not propose to burn out the candle so to speak to make inferior pictures so that you can capitalize on our current popularity without regard to the future.” And they ended by accusing the producer of “subjugating our artistic and personal integrity to your greed.”
This was the act of mutiny Wallis had been anticipating ever since Dean and Jerry signed with MCA. He knew they were trying to get more money from him, maybe even to back out of one of their two-a-year pictures. They had taken great care to complain only about being asked to act in a remake, but they had a remake in release at the very moment they were complaining: Sailor Beware, the fourth version of material that had originally appeared in 1930. In his reply telegram, Wallis made it clear that he understood what was really happening: “We are shocked by both the substance of your telegram and the intemperate language in which it is expressed. Such a telegram so expressed raises questions in our minds as to your own good faith and the real purpose of such a communication.” Wallis couldn’t really prove that Dean and Jerry were looking for money or freedom and not just artistically higher material, but he served them legal notice to appear on March 26, and then he began to look into what was really happening.
He discovered, in part, that there actually was an orchestrated cabal against him. MCA, while claiming to represent Martin and Lewis, refused to make any deals, explaining that their contract with the team required that Dean and Jerry explicitly approve all negotiated agreements. Dean had disappeared to Palm Springs; he and Jeannie had rented a vacation house, a sure sign to Wallis that the holdout had been conceived well in advance of Martin and Lewis’s receipt of the script.
In the face of such premeditated stonewalling, Wallis fought pettiness with pettiness. He withdrew an application he’d made in Jerry’s name to the prestigious, all-Jewish Hillsdale Country Club, stopping the six-hundred-dollar company check he’d used to pay the application fee. He canceled an order he’d put through to the Paramount construction department for seven hundred dollars’ worth of furniture for Dean and Jeannie. He instructed W. F. Combs, the chief of the Paramount police force, to monitor Martin and Lewis’s arrivals and departures from the lot and to notify the Wallis-Hazen office in secret whenever the two stars came or went.
In early April, when Jerry was in Phoenix to play golf, Cy Howard bumped into Dean on the Paramount lot and mentioned that Wallis was going to be in Phoenix as well. Dean responded, “Gee, he’ll see Jerry there and Jerry isn’t supposed to talk to him.” Wallis did, in fact, run into Jerry, and the two spent an uneasy afternoon together. As Wallis later recalled in his files, Jerry was deluged with messages from Lew Wasserman, who tried to reach him at the drugstore, the golf shop, and other places at the hotel. “I would put two and two together,” Wallis wrote, “and assume that Wasserman learned of my trip and was phoning Jerry to coach him.”
Soon enough, Wallis-Hazen began the hard negotiating with MCA—learning, as they’d supposed all along, that it wasn’t the principle of the thing that was at stake but the money. They would have to cut a new deal or run into a similar buzzsaw on every future picture.
The holdout was followed avidly by the entertainment press. Louella Parsons assured her readers that the rift would be healed but that Dean and Jerry would never make Scared Stiff, as the project-in-limbo had come to be called. Variety reported that “the delay in settling the contract hassle is costing Martin and Lewis an easy half-million, they figure, because one-nighters and the [London] Palladium have to wait.”
The estrangement was hard on Jerry. He was capable of despising Wallis, but he was just as easily flattered into adoring him. At times, such as when they’d made That’s My Boy, he’d felt like a surrogate son to the producer, and parent-starved as he was, he was genuinely unhappy with MCA’s strict orders to keep away from Wallis. On May 12 Jerry violated the counsel of his lawyers and agents and called the producer at home. Wallis wasn’t there, but that didn’t stop Jerry from baring his soul to the producer’s wife, former Keystone comedienne Louise Fazenda, whose account of the conversation Wallis shared in a memo to Joe Hazen. Confessing to his boss’s wife that he felt that he himself “was a businessman and that Mr. Wallis was a businessman,” Jerry hoped that “they could sit down and discuss their problems.” He acknowledged that only agents and lawyers were profiting from the holdout. He went on to claim that Martin and Lewis “wanted to do all of their pictures with Mr. Wallis, including their outside pictures,” even if that meant only doing a single picture each year. He knew that Wallis wasn’t talking to him for legal reasons, and he admitted that he was calling “without the knowledge of his agents or attorneys.” Then he went on to claim that “he was very fond of Mr. Wallis, that he ‘loved the guy’ and hoped the situation could be straightened out.” Fazenda listened patiently, then told Jerry that she knew little of what he was talking about but shared his desire to see the matter resolved amicably.
A week later, they were. The Hollywood trade papers carried reports of Dean and Jerry’s new contract with Wallis-Hazen, a seven-year pact at $1 million annually (up from about $125,000), with an obligation for a single picture each year and the freedom to do anything they wished to on their own. Soon afterward, they went to work on Scared Stiff, under the direction of George Marshall (who had directed the original Bob Hope picture on which the film was based); they marked the occasion by sending Wallis a telegram welcoming him to their new picture. And they began plans for a film of their own, the first since At War with the Army. The new picture was going to have a golf theme—Dean had long loved the game, and Jerry had picked it up in imitation of him and of Jack Keller—and Jerry would take an active hand in writing it.
Jerry’s contribution to the script of the new York film (officially written by Danny Arnold and Edmund Hartman) wasn’t his first foray into behind-the-camera filmmaking. For a year or so he’d been writing, directing, and editing short feature films at his house. Since arriving in Hollywood, he’d gleaned a lot of practical knowledge during the long pauses between shots on the Paramount lot, and he’d purchased all the cameras, lights, and sound and editing equipment necessary to make his own sixteen-millimeter films.
He had only fooled around with his equipment: Jan Murray remembered having to stand for a screen test when he visited the house. “He’d put you up there with the lights and camera,” he remembered. “And he’d talk to you: ‘All right, Mr. Murray, you’re up for this part, and we’d like to ask you a few questions. …’ And then he would tease you and heckle you and force you to do comedy. He had screen tests of everybody. Often when we came to his house for dinner we’d sit and watch these screen tests, and we’d scream.”
But Jerry got more serious with his filmmaking knowledge and toys when Tony Curtis started beefing to him about the sort of roles he was getting at Universal. “Tell you what,” Jerry told him. “I’ll write a funny part for you and we’ll make a movie right here.”
Jerry put together a parody of Paramount’s sophisticated 1950 hit Sunset Boulevard. Ladling a good deal of his idiosyncratic humor into the film, he called it Fairfax Avenue, transforming the elegance implicit in the title of the Billy Wilder classic into a reference to the middle-class Jewish neighborhood around the Los Angeles Farmer’s Market. Calling on the famous faces who frequented his house on the weekends—Curtis (in the lead as screenwriter-gigolo Yakov Popowitz), Janet Leigh (in a takeoff of the Gloria Swanson role), Jeff Chandler, John Barrymore, Jr., Shelley Winters, and others—Jerry (playing the Erich von Stroheim role himself) set about creating the first of what would become a string of Gar-Ron Productions. (In the grand tradition of Jewish garment center firms, the fictitious company was named after the Lewises’ sons, Gary and Ronnie.)
Among the less-famous contributors to these productions was Don McGuire, an aspiring actor and screenwriter who hung around the Lewis household hoping to be discovered. As McGuire later recalled, the first Gar-Ron production was How to Smuggle a Hernia Across the Border, a bawdy farce in which Jerry, with whom he co-wrote the script, played at least two showy roles: an effeminate army recruiting officer and a near-naked American Indian. (Jerry never bothered to list this film when he reminisced about his Gar-Ron pictures, but a 1951 puff piece on his home moviemaking mentioned it, as well as hinting unbelievably that such stars as Gregory Peck, Bing Crosby, and Lana Turner had appeared in it.)
Whichever picture came first, Jerry was delighted with the results. The people who were making them with him enjoyed themselves as well, Janet Leigh recalled: “A lot of us would gather there and make these funny movies. And we would then all go and have dinner, and we would go back and continue our shoot the next day. They were funny and quite wonderful. We just had great fun doing it.”
Jerry started taking the whole thing seriously, investing significant amounts of time and money in his avowedly offhand productions. Watch on the Lime, a spoof of Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, came next. He wrote several more treatments—A Streetcar Named Repulsive, Come Back, Little Shiksa, The Re-Enforcer (a send-up of the Humphrey Bogart drama The Enforcer)—and collaborated with McGuire and Danny Arnold in developing scripts from them. He upgraded his equipment and outfitted the summer house in his backyard into a full-scale theater—the Gar-Ron Playhouse. He paid prime rates to have a laboratory process his film overnight. He even coerced Dean into joining in, casting him as tough guy Joe Lasagna in The Re-Enforcer (key lines: “Send up-a da broads” and “Make-a look-a like-a an accident”) and as Doc Delaney in Come Back, Little Shiksa.
The enterprise evolved quickly from a lark into a full-scale project. On some weekends Patti had fifty or more people around the house (“She had to be greatly relieved when Jerry was working during the week,” observed Leigh). Such hangers-on as Irving Kaye, Jerry Gershwin, and Dr. Marvin Levy turned up in small roles, as did Jack Keller. Life ran four pages of pictures about the making of The Re-Enforcer, with Hal Wallis visiting the set and posing for gag pictures as Jerry’s assistant.
Gar-Ron films were premiered in catered, black-tie parties at the Lewis house, for which, oddly, Hollywood turned out: the Wallises, Darryl Zanuck, columnist Sidney Skolsky, Ronald Reagan and new wife, Nancy Davis. Jerry hired klieg lights, doormen, a red carpet. He commissioned a film crew to record the event newsreel-style. He designed an Oscar-inspired statuette, “The Jerry Lewis Award,” to present to his stars. He even printed up elaborate opening-night programs. The one for Come Back, Little Shiksa included lengthy mock biographies of the film’s stars (“DINO CROCETTI … a graduate of the well known BLACK HAND PLAYERS for the Mafia Theater Guild in Sicily, a well known summer resort approximately 7364 miles east of Ossining, New York”) and culminated in this description of its principal creators, Jerry and Danny Arnold:
OUR PRODUCER
JOSEPH LEVITCH—a Jew
OUR DIRECTOR
ARNOLD ROTHMAN—another Jew
(There are many known varieties.)
That the Gar-Ron films, which have circulated only in brief snippets, were larks can’t be denied: Not even Jerry has ever claimed they were anything more than elaborate party jokes. “They were like a sophomore play,” recalled Norman Lear. “You had to be in the group to laugh. They were not very good. They all laughed. Nobody else did.” The clips that have circulated are dark and grainy, like most old sixteen-millimeter footage, and the sound is tinny and remote. The shots are painfully tight: Within the confines of his house, Jerry was practically on top of the people he was filming. Specific moments of the source-material films are re-created Mad magazine-style, with key bits of dialogue and action twisted into punchlines and slapstick. Fairfax Avenue, for instance, replicates a scene from Sunset Boulevard in which retired actress Norma Desmond calls Joe Gillis’s screenwriting partner to reveal that Gillis is a gigolo; in Jerry’s version, Leigh makes an anonymous phone call to offer the bombshell “Yakov Popowitz eats ham.” But even with all of these limitations, it’s clear to both Jerry and the people who made the Gar-Ron films with him that this was his first real taste of directing. As Janet Leigh recalled, “I’m sure that Jerry started his apprenticeship with those movies.”
Jerry was also aware that he had another motive in making these little movies: “The things I did while in the company of my buddies were artfully planned so as to win over their loyalty and affection.” For what were the Gar-Ron weekends other than an effort to convert his house into a Catskills hotel, complete with a pool, a softball diamond, a garden playhouse, and a tummler prodding the guests into becoming part of the show?
Besides, he couldn’t stand being out of the spotlight, even at home on his days off. In the words of his friend and frequent fellow performer Steve Lawrence, “Jerry is a total show-business animal.” An old show-biz joke was revived in his honor: When Jerry Lewis opens the refrigerator and the light goes on, he does twenty minutes.
Take, for instance, his habit of showing up at other entertainers’ shows and taking the stage with them. By December 1952 the American Guild of Variety Artists had reprimanded and fined him at least four times for performing for free at AGVA-endorsed night spots. Variety, writing about one of these hand slappings, referred to Jerry’s “penchant for putting on cuffo, impromptu performances in niteries.” The AGVA went so far as to put Jerry on probation, threatening him with suspension from performing in nightclubs or theaters with Dean should he get caught performing for free again.
For all that, he was certainly encouraged in his hunger for affection: He and Dean made a cameo appearance in Road to Bali that winter, popping up in a dream sequence—necking, even!—in order to return a (contractually agreed) favor Hope and Crosby had done them earlier by appearing in a similar cameo in Scared Stiff.*
He even showed up on Broadway. In June 1952 producer Joshua Logan mounted Wish You Were Here, a romantic musical comedy set at a Catskills hotel and based on a 1937 play called Having Wonderful Time. That fall, Jerry attended a matinee performance and went backstage during the intermission to meet the cast and crew. He importuned Logan to let him say a few words to the audience. The producer proved agreeable and took the stage before the curtain rose, announcing, “There’s a member of the audience who is very enthusiastic about our show. He’d like to tell you that the second act is about to begin.” Jerry came out to a roaring ovation to declare, “This is the story of my life in the Catskills. I want the second act to begin in a hurry so I can see what’s gonna happen to me.”
Jerry’s desire to stay busily in the limelight had costs for him at home. The production of Gar-Ron pictures wound down soon after the premiere of Come Back, Little Shiksa, in part because Jerry was increasingly able to vent his creative impulses on the real films that York was now making. He could replace the friends and hangers-on at home with a staff of real employees at work.
But Patti had grown more distant from her husband through the commotion he orchestrated at home on weekends. As Janet Leigh had surmised, Patti was happy to be rid of the ruckus surrounding Jerry’s home movies. She had been forced to deal with the burden of Jerry’s psychological need for guests by working to entertain, clean (despite two full-time servants, she did a great deal of her own housework), and see to the children.
“I had tried to be a composite of Patti Palmer the entertainer; Esther the mother and caretaker; and Jerry’s grandmother, Sarah, who had nurtured him when his parents could not,” she recalled. “I assumed the responsibility for the boys and our home. I was lover, nurse, and friend, fulfiller of Jerry’s wishes and, often, the bridge over troubled waters.”
But Jerry didn’t always reciprocate her solicitous manner. He could be syrupy and sentimental, composing elaborate paeans to her for her eyes only (“Just ’Cause I Love Her,” he entitled one that ran nearly fifteen hundred words; in another, he described her as “the first human being that has ever cared about me or for me”) and smothering her in gifts of jewelry, perfume, and clothes. By the same token, he could cut her off cold. “When we had a crisis, or if I were ill, Jerry coped by distancing himself from the problem,” Patti said. “He simply ignored any unpleasantness.”
Jerry’s remoteness from Patti might have arisen out of guilt over his hot-and-cold, loyal-and-indifferent behavior. Even when he was steely toward her, he couldn’t stop seeking her approval and affection. As Ernie Glucksman recalled, “No matter where he was, or how many girls he was fooling around with on the road, he’d always be phoning Patti—sometimes fifty times a day.” Patti was aware of what was going on, but she’d been raised to suffer in silence. Her usual reaction to his behavior was to act so much the ideal wife that even wanton Jerry would be made to feel guilty. (As for the kids, the man who made his living acting like a wild child, who was famous for playing outrageously with his food at formal dinner parties, sent Gary and Ronnie to Black Foxe Military School and provided ample, stern discipline at home: “I give them what they need,” he told a reporter, “a spanking with love.” Only one Lewis would be allowed to misbehave.)
To help insulate herself against her mercurial husband, Patti returned to one of the sources of comfort that had sustained her through her brutal childhood. She had never fully converted to Judaism, but she had observed Jewish holidays for Jerry’s sake and had agreed to let Gary have a ritual circumcision. By 1952, however, she had begun practicing Catholicism again, attending Mass and getting Jerry’s permission to break the strict rules he’d forced on her concerning their home: “No crucifixes in the house, no New Testament.” She also brought her mother, Mary Calonico, to live with her, giving her an ally in her increasingly isolated situation.
Jerry was glad that his mother-in-law moved in with them. She was “a big comfort to Patti,” he recalled. “Just her being there helped to smooth over some very sticky problems of my own.” Besides, he’d taken on a burden that would make it harder than ever for him to work on his marriage: He’d finally convinced Danny and Rae to move out to California. Danny, having turned fifty, had swallowed his pride sufficiently to let Jerry buy airplane tickets and arrange to move his and Rae’s furniture to an apartment in Beverly Hills. Until their things arrived, Jerry’s parents stayed at his house, in an atmosphere weighted with all of their mutual resentments.
Finally, Danny broke. “We’re gonna go back to the mountains.”
Jerry lost it. “Well, if that’s what you want, let’s say good-bye,” he barked. “However, before you leave, you should know I just spent nine thousand dollars to give your goddamn furniture a vacation!”
Somehow this incident was swept under the rug, and Jerry set about looking for a car for his dad as a birthday gift, a custom-built Cadillac. He drove it over to his parents’s apartment, wrapped it in a giant red ribbon and bow, and called up for them to look out the window. Danny took in the sight of his new car for a moment and then asked, in earnest, “How come it’s not a convertible?”
Danny and Rae had grown spoiled by their son’s munificence. Ed Simmons recalled Rae’s reaction to one of Jerry’s gifts: “They’d had a picture taken, he and Dean, a wonderful color picture. One of the best pictures they ever had taken, a keynote picture. His mother was in Chicago with us. And he had the picture framed and autographed it to her, and he had it behind his back. He says, ‘Mom, I’ve got something here for you.’ She says, ‘What is it? What did you get for me?’ He gives her the picture, and she says, ‘Oh.’ He says, ‘What’s the matter?’ She says, ‘I thought it was a mink coat or something.’ They were small-time people, two-bit people. They weren’t anything remotely resembling a Jewish mother and father. It was one of the saddest moments I’ve ever seen for Jerry.”
Jerry was defenseless in the face of such behavior. Every time he tried to please them, it seemed, he was rebuffed. And when he had to deliver bad news—he took a trip by himself to their apartment to tell them that Patti had begun practicing Catholicism again—he felt, in his own words, “like a soldier coming home after losing the war.”
It’s no wonder that, with his parents sniping at his every overture and his wife shrinking from his every excess, Jerry surrounded himself with yes-men. The people who spent time with Jerry because they genuinely liked being with him and Patti were gradually outnumbered by socially ambitious acquaintances and career-minded friends. “You know what it started to get a little bit like?” said Janet Leigh. “It started to get—and we kind of felt this—almost like the ones who were around got to thinking about ‘Who’s closest?’ and ‘Who can get the biggest present?’ And it got almost to be like ‘Who could outdo the other?’ And that took away from what the essence of our association and feelings were. So Tony and I kind of pulled back a little bit. This was Jerry’s group. It got so that it was not this fun nucleus but it was ‘Who could buy their way to being the closest?,’ which was not our cup of tea.”
Leigh’s talk of gifts isn’t metaphoric. Jerry was, of course, an inveterate gift giver, if not always a considerate one. He was constantly expressing his gratitude toward employees and colleagues with elaborate presents engraved with his and Dean’s names or cartoon likenesses. “Jerry was still continuing to do things like that long after it was really seriously a joke,” recalled Norman Lear. “He gave Ernest Glucksman a floor model television set that had a brass plaque on the top that said ‘Love, Dean and Jerry.’ So the guy, in order to have it in his home, had to let the world know it was a gift.”
“Like a lot of comics,” Simmons remembered, “he indulged in a lot of the passing of the gold. A gold lighter, a gold pen, a gold one of these, a gold one of these. And it would say, ‘Thanks, Dean and Jerry.’ You’d say, ‘Thanks a lot, Jerry,’ and he’d say, ‘Don’t thank Dean yet, I haven’t told him.’”
However gaudy or surreptitious, the gifts were Jerry’s heartfelt way of showing affection and appreciation, on the one hand, and seeking those same things, on the other. As Jan Murray recalled, “You would leave his office like a quiz show winner. You had a clock and a fountain pen and a watch, all with his logo on it. I’d have my arms full like I just answered four questions correctly. I used to kid him and say, ‘What about spending money? What am I supposed to do the rest of the week?’ He’d heap things on you.”
The rub of the thing was that he came to expect gifts in return from his friends and associates, even encouraging them with loud expressions of gratitude that evolved into still more acts of ostentatious generosity on his part. People invited up to Amalfi Drive for dinner or a weekend of softball and moviemaking began to bring their host gifts as a matter of course. The gift giving even became part of the postdinner entertainment, with guests retiring to the playhouse to watch their host unwrap his goodies like a five-year-old at a birthday party.
For those who were currying favor with Jerry, the gifts were a way of demonstrating their fealty; for others, especially Jerry’s employees, the expectation was an expensive burden. Among the most resentful were Norman Lear and Ed Simmons, who were among the few staff members who could actually afford to regale Jerry with costly tokens. “We got sick and tired,” Simmons recalled. “It wasn’t that we didn’t want to buy gifts, it was that it just didn’t matter. He would get these gifts that somebody went out and spent three, four, six hundred dollars on, and he’d just throw them aside like they were trash. It was just ridiculous.” (Another employee of later years recalled Jerry receiving a bust of himself as a gift and then refusing to let it be put in his limo with him; a cab had to be summoned to carry the statuette to Jerry’s house.) One evening Simmons and Lear made fun of the entire enterprise by disappearing just before the gifts were opened and pretending to hang themselves by their neckties from a tree in Jerry’s backyard, apparently despondent over forgetting to bring a present. “We ruined the neckties but saved ourselves a grand,” Simmons boasted.
Another time, anticipating the need to bring a gift but angry that it was required of them, they came up with the perfect idea: The one thing that they could think of giving Jerry that no one else had was a live human being—gift wrapped, of course. The gag might have remained a dream had not a short, beefy repairman turned up in their office that afternoon to fix a window. He was an old Frenchman who spoke only broken English, but when they asked him if he wanted to make twenty-five dollars that night helping out with a joke, he understood enough to agree. They had a box built for him to crouch in, and they told him he’d have to wait in the car through dinner and then climb in the box and get wrapped and carried into the playhouse.
As the twenty or so dinner guests retired to the playhouse to open gifts, Lear and Simmons went out to wrap the old man. When they put him in the box, they had another brainstorm: They offered to give him another five dollars if he could keep from smiling through the gag. Telling him to “act deadpan,” they wrapped him and carried him into the party.
“Hey, look at Simmons and Lear—they got him a television set!” yelled someone from the back of the room. The two writers carried the large box over to the coffee table, where Jerry sat amid the debris of dozens of expensive gifts—watches, radios, cameras—for which he truly had no need. Eagerly, he stood to open the huge package. When he opened it, he saw an old man hunched over with his eyes shut and his mouth tightly pursed, trying desperately to keep from laughing and looking for all the world like …
“A cadaver!” Dr. Marvin Levy shouted.
“Everybody was shocked,” recalled Lear. “Patti screamed.” He and Simmons coaxed the man out of his pose. But there was no way of dispelling the pall that had fallen over the room.
“Everybody else, on behalf of Jerry, all the sycophants, were shocked that we could do such a thing,” Lear remembered. “The only people laughing were Hal Wallis and Louise Fazenda. And [Wallis] roared; he loved it. He understood it and could afford, in his relationship with Jerry, to laugh at it. But they were the only ones.”
As Simmons said, Wallis saw the joke beneath the joke: “The key line of the story is that it wasn’t just a joke-joke, it was ‘Jerry, we’re giving you something: your very own human being.’ But the room had a hundred people that were his own human beings, that he owned and that revolved in his orbit.”