Of the sixteen Martin and Lewis films, only one has a legend surrounding its making—Three Ring Circus, their 1954 job for Hal Wallis. Every account of the production has presented it as a classic “troubled shoot,” the sort of catastrophe that would today be fodder for syndicated tabloid TV shows, though not a drop of resentful ink about it was spilled in the late days of the studio era. Years after the film was made, stories circulated about Dean and Jerry feuding openly, about Jerry trying to control the direction, writing, casting, and even the music for the film, about breaches of contract, legal maneuverings, and personal rudenesses. The moneymaking show-biz beast Martin-and-Lewis was beginning its lengthy, ugly dissolution, and everyone in its vicinity was caught in the whirlpool.
What had happened?
For one thing, the two fame-starved up-and-comers who’d palled around Broadway and teamed up in Atlantic City had new ambitions that didn’t necessarily coincide. Jerry’s desire to make people laugh had become a desire to create. He had a yen to participate in filmmaking on a greater scale than his backyard movies afforded. And he was deliberately trying to institute a shift in his persona, to transform from a zany clown to a sentimental clown. He had, in effect, matured, and he sought to express that maturity in ways that weren’t necessarily compatible with the mode of expression he’d developed alongside Dean.
As for Dean, he’d had his first important solo success—“That’s Amore,” which sold more than two million copies and had even been nominated for an Academy Award. Having triumphed in one more medium than his sidekick, he imagined a more languid pace for himself than the frantic one Jerry sought to maintain. He wasn’t as eager to be forever in the spotlight or to be sharking after the next paycheck, especially when MCA was doing so well by them. He was wearying of Jerry’s shtick and his aesthetic pretensions, his “Chaplin shit.” And he was tired of the oversights and insults that came with being partner to a live-wire comic.
There had been an incident during the making of Living It Up, a brush-up that Jack Keller later recalled as their first falling-out. A Paramount publicist had arranged for Look to do a photo story about a wild dance sequence featuring Jerry and Sheree North, and the piece almost entirely omitted Dean: Even the photograph the magazine had taken of the two of them together had been published with Dean cropped out. Dean blamed Keller—who claimed to have been sick when the story was arranged—correctly suspecting that the press agent’s loyalties lay more with Jerry than with him. But he knew the real source of the problem. As Jerry recalled later, “He took a very heavy load for ten years. He was the straight man. There were times they never even mentioned his fucking name in a review. Everybody talked about the kid or the monkey or the funny guy. How long do you think I could’ve taken that? I wouldn’t have made ten years.”
Jerry had always been susceptible to the flattery of a coterie, but now the relatively self-contained Dean was beginning to listen to people in bars, casinos, and golf course clubhouses who were urging him to forge a career of his own. Jerry would attribute these whisperings to people wishing to revenge themselves on him: “He had outside factions telling him that he’s nothing. He had all these poison-droppers… these shit stirrers.” But Dean was more ambitious than he let on. He figured he could be a sympathetic actor, too, if he was only given half the chance. He knew, though, that he’d never get that chance if his partner, who was forever taking more control of the act, kept the sweet roles for himself.
Frustrated by his increasingly marginal role in the partnership and in the films he made, Dean was the first one to bridle at the script Wallis had commissioned for Three Ring Circus.
The legend goes something like this: Dean and Jerry wait until the day before shooting is to begin in Phoenix to announce their displeasure with the script. They have Wallis in a bind, with the entire Clyde Beatty Circus on his payroll and a clock ticking off the very expensive minutes they have to make the picture. They tell Wallis they don’t like the episodic nature of the story, in which each man has about ten minutes alone before they come together at the circus. Wallis, in an indignant fit, picks up a copy of the script, rips out the first twenty or so pages, announces, “Now you’ve met!” and orders them to report to Phoenix immediately.
Wallis, of all people, was responsible for the propagation of this myth—he told the story to Arthur Marx in 1973 and repeated it in his own autobiography seven years later. But he certainly knew just how wrong the account was. Wallis’s file of memos, telephone and conference transcripts, telegrams, and letters concerning the production of Three Ring Circus was as thick as a small city’s phone book. In some instances, dozens of pages of material were devoted to the intrigues and negotiations of a single day. He was put through such merry hell for so long on the film, it’s no wonder that he dreamed up and stood by a pat little story about its production. The actual events were too detailed, and probably too painful, to recall.
The picture was originally called Big Top; like the very first film Jerry said he saw, Chaplin’s The Circus, it was a tale of love, deceit, and redemption among circus performers. The script was written by Jerry’s old friend Don McGuire after Wallis had seen Meet Danny Wilson, the Frank Sinatra picture of McGuire’s first produced script. Wallis had called McGuire into his office and, aware of the writer’s friendship with Jerry, asked if he had any ideas for a Martin and Lewis picture. McGuire answered immediately: “GIs can study lion taming under the GI Bill of Rights!” The stolid Wallis, laughing out loud at the notion of Jerry learning to tame lions, sent McGuire off to write it up.
When he got wind of the project, Jerry counseled McGuire against having Wallis as a boss. “Why do you want to work for that schmuck?” he asked. “We’re not gonna work for the old bastard anymore. We’re not gonna show up.” McGuire told Wallis about this threat, and Wallis told him to relax. The whole thing had already been worked out with Herman Citron the previous November. Wallis had a firm start-up date set, and not even MCA could shake it loose. Not only wouldn’t Dean and Jerry get paid if they threw a wrench into the proceedings, but they couldn’t do their own film for York or fulfill their obligations to NBC until they’d done the work they owed him. He had them but good, and on the very first business day of 1954 he sent them legally binding start-up notices demanding that they report to work on the film on February 8.
By mid-January, however, Jerry and Herman Citron were making noise about Wallis’s choice of director for the film. Wallis had tried to hire any number of important directors for the film—Billy Wilder, Vincente Minnelli, Frank Capra, Nicholas Ray, Howard Hawks, and William Wyler among many names on an ambitious A-list, with Norman Taurog and George Marshall held over from the list of old reliables—but all of them had either refused to do the film or were rejected by the Martin and Lewis camp. He finally settled on Joseph Pevney, the director of Meet Danny Wilson. Though Pevney was yet another working-stiff director, he was, unlike the other hack directors Wallis had hired, of Dean and Jerry’s generation (born in 1920) and had a background similar to theirs: He’d sung and danced in vaudeville, in nightclubs, and on Broadway from his early teens through his mid-twenties. Recently, Jerry had sent Pevney a note expressing admiration for his comedies, even asking to work with him as an assistant. Nevertheless, when Citron got wind that Pevney was Wallis’s choice for the next Martin and Lewis film, he announced, “They still don’t think he is a good comedy director, and I am going on record to tell you that you are in trouble.”
The trouble, however, would be over the script and not the director. Visiting Dean and Jerry at the Plaza Hotel during an engagement at the Copacabana, Wallis pleaded with his stars individually to let him have the script revised according to everyone’s best interests. Jerry originally balked at sitting down with Wallis, saying that he’d recently had a meeting with agents Citron and Lew Wasserman and attorney Joe Ross, who had “beat his brains out” and told him “in the future he was not to discuss business.” But Wallis had two advantages that MCA’s brass couldn’t trump: He was present in New York while they sat scheming in Los Angeles, and he could call upon his off-and-on pseudopaternal bond with Jerry to gain leverage with him.
Dean and Jerry opened at the Copa on January 21, with Wallis, Joe Hazen, and their wives watching from a ringside table (Jerry introduced them to the crowd). Afterward, the two couples went to the stars’ suite at an adjoining hotel to congratulate them. Wallis used the opportunity to invite Jerry to lunch at 21. As he recalled in a memo, “Jerry got very nostalgic about our being there and recalled that we had discovered them there a few years ago, etc. We spoke about the luncheon date the next day, and I asked Dean if he wanted to join us, and Jerry kiddingly said to Dean, ‘You better let me go with him alone. I can get more out of him.’”
At that lunch, Jerry listened as Wallis walked him through the script, which was then undergoing revision. Jerry made various suggestions for improvements, writing them out on a waiter’s notepad, and Wallis held on to these. Jerry asked Wallis if he could sit in when the picture was cut, and Wallis agreed. After nearly three hours they parted, with Jerry telling Wallis “he was very enthusiastic and was even going to talk to his TV writers, some of whom were with him, to work up additional ideas and pieces of business.” Wallis spent the next few days looking into other properties he might acquire for Dean and Jerry—The Pajama Game and Guys and Dolls among them—and then returned to Los Angeles convinced he could get to work on the picture.
Back home, he ran into an MCA buzzsaw: Citron was complaining loudly about the script on Jerry’s behalf, just days after Wallis and Jerry had agreed to work together to repair it. Feeling betrayed and used, Wallis accused MCA of bad faith: “I made it very clear to Citron that whenever I was with Jerry, usually out of the city and away from the influence of members of the MCA organization, I had no problems with him and had a fine working arrangement, but that as soon as they involved themselves in it I then had difficulties.”
He was blaming the agents, but really he should have blamed the client. Jerry simply didn’t have the gumption to rebuff Wallis personally: He was willing to hold out on him, sabotage his schedules and budgets, and have his agents and lawyers attack the producer like pit bulls, but face-to-face he was chummy and compliant. Wallis rightly took this as hypocrisy and was frank with Citron about how annoyed he was: “This is a goddamn good script, and this boy who has been in the business for three years isn’t going to tell me that this is a lousy script! I’ve been in it twenty-five years, and I’ve made some goddamn good pictures, and I’m not going to be upset because he says it’s a lousy script!”
As the start-up date for the film approached, Dean began to make his objections known through Lew Wasserman. Whereas Jerry was mostly concerned with rewriting the comic elements in the script, Dean felt that his character was too much of a heel and that he and Jerry spent too much of the picture apart from one another. Wallis tried to quell this storm on a couple of accounts: that the script was being rewritten per Jerry’s suggestions and that Dean’s character wasn’t essentially different from the one he’d played in recent Martin and Lewis films (including The Caddy and Living It Up—both York films). Again he seemed to have won his point, and he awaited the start of production of his $2 million project with nervously bated breath.
Come the big day, neither Dean nor Jerry showed. Citron and the Martin and Lewis brain trust put the case to the producer: Dean was upset with the script, even though it incorporated changes suggested by him and Jerry; Jerry wouldn’t do a film his partner wouldn’t do. Wallis had eighty-five people and a fifteen-car circus train waiting in Phoenix. He hit the roof: “I don’t like having a gun held to my head forcing me to meet Martin and Lewis’s requirements!”
It became a battle of nerves, and Wallis became more jittery as the meter ran. He agreed to a script revision meeting, provided Dean and Jerry would show up for wardrobe and color tests the next day. At 8 P.M. Wallis, McGuire, Pevney, Citron, Wallis’s assistant Paul Nathan, and Dean and Jerry’s TV writers, Arthur Phillips and Harry Crane, all met in Wallis’s office. Phillips was particularly eager, offering advice in nearly every instance in which Wallis wanted to cut or alter something McGuire had written. McGuire played along respectfully, occasionally defending his script. After several hours, Pevney and the three writers retired to work into the night and meet with Dean and Jerry the next day to find out what changes would fly.
McGuire was so humiliated by the process that he asked out loud if any part of the script was still safe, but he was assured that the problem was not so much his material as the deteriorating relationship of the stars. “Jerry’s problem is Dean,” Citron told him. “If he loses Dean for a while, it takes him a long time to get him back. … Hal knows it better than anybody.”
Once again, when they were due at the studio the next morning, Dean and Jerry failed to report. At noon they appeared in Wallis’s office with Citron, Crane and Phillips, Wallis’s lawyer Jack Saper, and Judge John B. Millikan, a friend of Wallis’s. At this conference—the site of Wallis’s apocryphal tearing-up of the script?—Jerry confessed that he had nurtured the script along with only his own interests in mind. He had accepted the script thus far because his character (who, unique among his roles thus far, was named Jerry) became a clown and was the center of a cloyingly sentimental finale. Now he admitted to seeing only his side of things: “I am enough of a ham that when you told me this business with the elephants and the other sequences that I could only see what wonderful things I could do, and when reading the script I overlooked the point concerning Dean and I being together.” Dean was less subtle: As Wallis recalled in a memo written immediately after the meeting, “He said that he doesn’t want to play a cheat, and doesn’t know what he is doing in the picture, that Huntz Hall could play the part.”
After scolding both of his stars for their “belligerent attitude,” Wallis brokered a compromise. They would do their wardrobe, color, and vocal tests, and Jerry would work with Crane and Phillips on the script. They all shook hands.
Dean refused to have anything to do with the revision of the script, telling Citron that he was “laying his confidence” in Jerry and their writers. After another long night, the rewrite was completed to Jerry’s satisfaction. Wallis then met with Dean, who announced that “this was exactly what he wanted, that he was enthusiastic and ready to start the picture.” When Wallis asked him why he hadn’t voiced his displeasure with the original script sooner and saved everybody all of the hassle, Dean answered, “You know I never have much to say. I let Jerry do the talking.” And he and his spokesman/partner went off to Phoenix and fought like longtime rivals.
As Jerry remembered it in his autobiography, “During the filming, Dean kept blowing his top at me and everyone else, saying he was fed up to the ears playing a stooge. It got pretty hairy. There were days when I thought Dean would ditch the whole package. It almost happened. One morning he arrived an hour late on the set and stared daggers at me. ‘Anytime you want to call it quits, just let me know.’”
The tension between the two stars was only part of the trouble on an absurdly off-kilter set. Dean and Jerry had announced to Pevney that they wouldn’t do an iota more than what was required of them; Jerry actually refused to say, “Thank you, sir,” at the end of a scene because it wasn’t in the script. Another time, Dean showed up at three in the afternoon, did one scene, and left, saying, “That’s all you’re gonna get from me.” Costar Zsa Zsa Gabor wouldn’t stay with the rest of the key members of the cast and crew at the plush Arizona Biltmore, putting herself up at a nearby dude ranch—not to keep out of the way of Dean and Jerry’s fighting, but to facilitate a private liaison with her boyfriend, international playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, who showed up with his own airplane and a small knot of reporters. Composer Walter Scharf, upon reviewing rushes, noticed that “Dean was always in the background. Jerry was always in the foreground.” When he told Wallis about it, he counseled the producer that “I had no doubt whatever that Dean wouldn’t take much more of it.” Wallis replied, “As long as they don’t kill each other, I’ll be happy.”
To Kathleen Freeman, a comedienne with a small role in the picture, the friction between the stars was ominously palpable. “It was difficult,” she recalled. “It’s always tough when you’re around people that aren’t getting along very well. That’s not a happy state of affairs. The crew were friends of mine, so it wasn’t so terrible on me. They would come over and say, ‘The boys are having trouble,’ so that I wouldn’t think I had done something incorrect. Which was very dear of them to do. And the minute I heard that, I just relaxed and let whatever was going to happen happen. I figured, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do to help ’em.’ Their troubles were so large, they weren’t paying attention to anyone else.”
Wallis was well aware of Dean’s rising animosity toward his partner. One morning he ran into Jerry outside the Biltmore as the comedian was unloading film and cameras from the trunk of his car. After some opening pleasantries, Wallis recalled, Jerry “went into a long discourse on how serious things had become between him and Dean, that he had just had a quarrel on the set, that the situation between them was becoming impossible, that he had been fighting it as long as he could, that he was going up to phone his attorney, Joe Ross, to see what could be done about it, etc.” Wallis asked if he could be of any help, but Jerry told him that “the quarrel was not about me, that it went deeper than that and that he was at the end of his rope, hadn’t been sleeping, had been worrying, etc.”
Finally, Jerry’s spirit was broken. He called Joe Pevney later that day to say that “they were coming in the following morning and that they were going to pitch in and do a good job.” Then he called Wallis to say “that he had had a long talk with Dean that they were now straightened out and that everything was going to be fine.”
When the Phoenix location work was done and the crew returned to Los Angeles to finish the picture, Dean and Jerry were called in to MCA’s offices for a reconciliation. Lew Wasserman and Joe Ross laid out their commitments to Wallis, to NBC, to various club owners, and to companies whose products they endorsed. In effect, they were told, there was too much money riding on them for anyone to allow their spat to harm the act. They would have to find a way to work amicably together. They agreed to behave better.
The filming continued without incident in L.A., but Wallis was out forty thousand dollars in reshooting costs for the scenes Dean and Jerry had ruined. Just as he had when they held out on Scared Stiff, he suspected that the problems he’d had with Martin and Lewis had actually been an attempt by the comics to wrest even more control over their films from him, and he gathered evidence to make his case to Joe Hazen. He cited all of Dean and Jerry’s instances of truculence and refusals to cooperate; he recalled bumping into Dean at the hotel bar and hearing him complain: “Jerry and I agree that we are going to do certain things, and then he crosses me up.” And he recalled another heartfelt talk with Jerry at the orphanage where the film’s finale was shot: “Jerry went into great detail about his personal relationship with Dean, his feelings about him, his thinking that it would be best for him to go on alone in his career, the fact that NBC had flown someone out from New York to discuss television shows with him if the team broke up, etc. He then told me that Dean was burned up at him in Phoenix because he had spoken to me and because he had decided to pitch in and go to work. When Dean confronted him with this, according to Jerry, Jerry said, ‘Sure, I switched. I found out that I was doing the wrong thing and that we had been badly advised, and when you learn a thing like this, you don’t keep doing wrong—you try to correct it.’”
Once again, Wallis sensed the black hand of MCA behind the sabotage, but he finally had his film in the can, and he figured the hell with it. The picture was guaranteed box office, and he was able to wrap it in time to take his summer art-collecting trip to Europe. He could drown his sorrows in acquisition.
During this period of friction with his adored partner, Jerry had nowhere to turn with his sorrow and aggravation but to his family. Rather than seeking advice or a shoulder to cry on, though, he used them as an outlet for his anger. He expressed his frustration with Dean in hostility toward Patti. “It really got me,” he recalled. “I had a double whammy because I was taking it all out on her.” Patti couldn’t stand it, and she actually packed and left. “We had, I think, a one-week separation,” Jerry said.
Patti recalled the problem differently, saying that she left home not because of Jerry’s difficulties with Dean but because of the way he had turned their home into a clubhouse for fawning hangers-on. “I’ve been sitting around for ten years waiting for you to grow up,” she snapped, “and I’ve waited long enough!” Complaining about his retinue of “yes-men and hungry actors,” she remembered, “I was fed up. I picked up the kids and went to Lake Arrowhead to get away. He came running after me. I never intended leaving, I just wanted to scare him. That’s the closest I ever came. I walked off the job for two days.”
Patti’s action came near the holidays, and Jerry couldn’t, of course, stand the thought of being left alone: It was too much like his parents’ constant departures in his boyhood. His bond with Dean eroding, he panicked at the thought that his marriage, one of the very few relationships in his life that had nothing to do with business, might crumble. He even began drinking a little. Some of his retinue tried to convince him he’d be better off single, but that advice only drove him back toward his family. “It shook Jerry when I left,” Patti said, “and finally he learned who his true friends were and he understood why I left. He learned he couldn’t buy friendship.” “I made an ass out of myself,” Jerry admitted after it was all over.
Patti was still trying to find a way to deal with the stress on her marriage when she received another jolt. In April 1954 she and her brother, Joseph, who was living in Southern California with his family, lost their mother. Mary Calonico had been a source of stability in the Lewis household—she had actually taught Jerry to crochet!—and Jerry took her passing hard. Solace came from an unlikely source: Jeannie and Dean made themselves available to Patti and Jerry throughout the wake and funeral and the period of grieving just after. After the graveside ceremony, family members and friends met up at the house on Amalfi Drive, and Dean and Jerry went off into a room together for a talk. When they emerged, it seemed that their relationship had been patched up. Dean eventually recanted his criticisms of Three Ring Circus—he had recently told a magazine that “there was no sense in me being in that picture at all”—and the pair were able to see through the slate of commitments ahead of them. Patti, deprived of her own partner by Jerry’s tendency to favor his relationship with Dean over his marriage, briefly saw a therapist to work through her grief.
That summer Dean and Jerry took what was for them a long break from filming—seven months—and they worked on smaller projects: Colgate shows, their first recordings as a team since “The Money Song,” live appearances in Los Angeles, New York, and Atlantic City, where they premiered Living It Up as the capstone to Martin-Lewis Day (a bench along the boardwalk was fitted with a plaque commemorating the genesis of the act on the site).
As usual, the trade reviews were somewhat kinder than those in the mainstream press. Variety, which almost never balked at anything they did, recognized Martin and Lewis vehicles as the purely commercial projects that they were, and called the picture “94 minutes of film fun that has been expertly packaged for customer enjoyment.” The New York Times, inexplicably calling the film Dean and Jerry’s sixth (it was their eleventh), seemed to wish that the source material had been left untouched and said cryptically that the comics “behave like the blandest of cliff-dwellers.”
By August they were back at home, planning the next York project—a remake of The Major and the Minor, the picture with which Billy Wilder debuted as a director in 1942. In that film, Ginger Rogers played a down-on-her-luck showgirl who disguised herself as a kid to get a discount train fare back home; she wound up spending time at a girls’ school and falling for a naïve serviceman (Ray Milland). In writer Sidney Sheldon’s remake, titled You’re Never Too Young, Jerry, forced to pass himself off as a kid after witnessing a crime, would hide in a boarding school to save his skin. Once again, Jerry was cast in a role originally played by a woman; the tendency obviously didn’t bother him, since York was making the film.
That month they were due to play two weeks at Ciro’s. Jerry had initiated the deal, assuring Herman Hover, the club’s proprietor, that he could book Martin and Lewis at a dirt-cheap price; he told MCA that Hover, his close personal friend, was to be given special consideration, and the engagement was booked for August 19. At the very last minute, though, Jerry called in sick, leaving Hover with no act to present to an audience that had paid fifty dollars a pop as a cover. Dean went gallantly onstage, and a variety of other performers helped fill the hole beside the singer: Alan King, Ethel Merman, Tony Martin (Martin and Martin, they billed themselves). On August 30 Jerry took an ad in The Hollywood Reporter claiming that a high fever had prevented him from attending his own opening and thanking his partner, “who showed everyone what a true showman looks like.” (Years later, Hover remembered spitefully, “Between the two, everybody liked Dean, and practically nobody liked Jerry.”)
In October they went to Lake Arrowhead to film You’re Never Too Young. Diana Lynn, who as a teenager had appeared in the original, was in the cast; she had metamorphosed into a stage actress since the My Friend Irma pictures, though she did appear as Ronald Reagan’s love interest in Bedtime for Bonzo. Norman Taurog was once again directing, and such pros as Nina Foch and Raymond Burr had been cast in key roles. It was a quiet shoot, especially compared with the nightmare they’d just been through. Jerry had a bout with the flu, and he was hit on the head with a water ski while filming the climactic chase scene (Dean, according to press accounts, rescued him from the water). The animosities between the pair still bubbled under the surface, though: When Taurog took Dean aside one day to chastise him for reporting late to the set, the actor bristled, “Why the hell should I come in on time? There’s not a damn thing for me to do.” But Dean would never show his emotions to a whole crew, and he had no intimates to speak of; only those close to Jerry knew how angry Dean had grown. To them, he expressed his hostility with iciness: “You’d pass him and you’d get a freeze,” recalled Irving Kaye.
Despite the crumbling relations between its stars, despite the turmoil on the set, Three Ring Circus opened on Christmas Day to some of the best reviews of their film career, most of them heaping praise on Jerry. John L. Scott in the Los Angeles Times wrote that Jerry’s “subdued” performance was his best since That’s My Boy. The Hollywood Reporter’s Jack Moffitt went further, invoking the name of Chaplin and saying that Jerry “has learned to blend pathos with his slapstick, until he has begun to show the potentialities that can make a great actor and a great star.”
The reviewers were right to focus on Jerry: He’d stolen the picture, not only performing brilliantly (in his clown sequences, at the very least) but almost smothering Dean out of it. It’s nearly an hour before Dean gets to sing his first song, which the writers had contrived to have him croon to a menagerie of spooning animals. He never, in fact, gets to sing to a woman, though he’s intimate with two in the film. And he’s a heel, just as he’d complained—installing gambling tables on the circus midway to help business and shunning a benefit the rest of the performers agree to appear in.
Jerry, on the other hand, is everywhere. Five times he gets to don clown makeup—thick white lips, a five-o’clock shadow, bulbous red nose, and heavy eyebrows—and cavort, sometimes in set pieces and once, with genuine inspiration, alone in a circus tent while dreaming of glory. He does block comedy bits with elephants, lions, a bearded lady (Elsa Lanchester, vivid and vital amid Pevney’s uninspired cast of real circus players), a dunk tank, a tightrope, a human cannonball routine. It’s like a one-man show, save that every now and again Jerry turns to Dean and declares eternal palhood. The only times the partners seem to be together come when they bump into one another on the midway and ask each other questions. If this is the way the script read after Jerry and the writers regrouped to do a better job of integrating Dean, one can only imagine with suspicion the earlier drafts.
Jerry’s performance is uneven—he slips out of character during several speeches—but at least in clown makeup, he achieves a consistent personage. “Jerricho the Wonder Clown”—as Jerry’s character is known in his clown guise (and as the film was renamed when it was briefly rereleased in the late 1960s)—is a nice, concise emblem for his creator. He joins up with the other clowns when one of their ranks falls ill and, to the resentment of the drunken star of the troop, Puffo (Gene Sheldon), steals the crowd’s affection and applause. Where Jerry Hotchkiss botches everything he attempts, to the dismay of all those around him, Jerricho’s inadvertent mishaps amuse everyone—another instance of Jerry’s theory that the performance of a sincere amateur can be more affecting than the work of a seasoned but heartless pro.
The Dean-and-Jerry conflict comes to an uncomfortable head in the finale, in which the circus plays a benefit at an orphanage. Dean doesn’t want to spare any time from the circus’s busy travel schedule to do the date, and Jerry is heartbroken that his pal could be so cold. When Dean insists that Jerry simply doesn’t understand business, Jerry retorts, “That’s the story of your life. Nobody ever understood you. But I understand you now. … You ain’t nice anymore.” (It’s impossible to ignore the sensation that you’re watching documentary footage of the feuding partners and not a fictional scene.) He goes off with the other performers to play the benefit, greedy Dean be damned.
At the orphanage, Jerry’s capers have the kids in the palm of his hand—all, that is, except for one crippled girl in the front row whose face never registers anything but deep sorrow. Jerry sits beside the girl and violates the clown’s canon by speaking aloud and all but begging her to laugh or smile, to no avail. It’s all too much for good-hearted Jerricho; he sheds a crocodile tear. This simply slays the despondent child: “Look, he’s crying! The clown’s crying,” she guffaws, suddenly, sharply, unrealistically. All those assembled applaud this metamorphosis, and Jerry returns to the ring to the congratulations of his peers. Still, he’s wan: His best pal isn’t here to share the moment. Suddenly, to the strains of “Hey, Punchinello,” Dean drives onto the scene in a car filled with clowns (had these people also shunned the benefit until now?). The partners link arms and sing together to the enthralled audience of children.
Peace, goodwill, and fortune were theirs once again.
At around this time, with his relationship with his hero-partner at an ebb, Jerry discovered a new father figure for himself, a new colleague who truly appreciated his art. Frank Tashlin was a bearish man—six-foot-three, about 220 pounds—with a blue-collar aspect: cropped hair, bristly mustache, black, no-nonsense eyeglass frames. “He has the air,” wrote Peter Bogdanovich after meeting him in 1961, “of a person with an infinite amount of patience who is duped by nothing.”
Throughout his life, Tashlin cheekily sabotaged attempts to establish his biography, but his career was unique enough for journalists to refer to it whenever they wrote about him. He was, by his own unverified claim, born in 1913 in Weehawken, New Jersey (site today of the western mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, five miles or so from Irvington). An only child, he claimed to have had a troubled relationship with his father, who moved the family to Astoria, Queens, during Tashlin’s school years. Sometime in his midteens he dropped out of school to work, and held a variety of low-wage jobs—among them a tenure as office boy at Max and Dave Fleisher’s Out of the Inkwell Studios. Tashlin was a gifted draftsman—his cartoons and drawings had appeared in school publications—and in 1930 he landed a job as an artist with Van Buren Studios, which produced the “Aesop’s Film Fables” animated series.
He became something of a local celebrity; newspapers ran articles about the gifted boy cartoonist. In 1933 he caught the eye of Leon Schlesinger, a Warner Brothers animation producer. At Schlesinger’s prompting, Tashlin moved out to Los Angeles and spent several months working on “Looney Tunes” and “Merry Melodies” shorts. At the same time, he began publishing a comic strip in the Los Angeles Times; he eventually left Warner Brothers when he and Schlesinger quarreled over the amount of time he was putting in on this outside project.
Tashlin had always had an eye for dynamic, quirky humor, and he moved from Warner Brothers to a job at the venerable house of slapstick, Hal Roach Studios, where he wrote gags for low-budget comedies for a few months. Throughout the remainder of the 1930s and early ’40s, he put in stints at a string of Hollywood animation studios, working for Ub Iwerks, Screen Gems, Columbia, and Disney; he even passed two more brief tenures with Schlesinger. By the mid-1940s, though, Tashlin was burnt out on cartoons. He was no longer a kid phenom who dazzled the press with his precocity, but a thirty-year-old vagabond animator who had trouble keeping a job. Harkening back to his Hal Roach days, he began seeking work in live-action films. He made contributions to dozens of films at a number of studios in the next few years, and did a lot of script doctoring and gag writing for such comedians as Bob Hope, Red Skelton, and the Marx Brothers; he is said to have written gags for Harpo Marx in A Night in Casablanca, including a famous bit involving a collapsing wall.
Tashlin was finally asked to write whole screenplays, and in 1951 he was allowed to direct Hope in a few sequences of Paramount’s The Lemon Drop Kid. It was a successful debut, and Tashlin was soon directing comedies at RKO and Paramount: Son of Paleface with Hope, Marry Me Again with Robert Cummings and Marie (“Irma”) Wilson, Susan Slept Here with Dick Powell and Debbie Reynolds. He became known for his way with musical numbers and for outrageous gags that were clearly reminiscent of his work as a cartoonist and animator: Hope sharing a bed with a horse in Son of Paleface, an Oscar statuette narrating the action in the Hollywood-themed Susan Slept Here.
It was this last film that drew Hal Wallis’s eye to Tashlin. He had been developing a script for Dean and Jerry that would cash in on the current national mania for violent comic books and the call for censorship that accompanied the craze. The film was based on a story called “Rock-a-Bye Baby” by Norman Lessing and Michael Davidson, and Wallis had Herbert Baker and Hal Kantor, two old Paramount comedy hands, working on revisions. Don McGuire spent a few weeks with the script as well, and then Tashlin got a crack at it, but Wallis wasn’t sure about making the project Dean and Jerry’s next film.
His opinion was swayed, however, by Tashlin’s enthusiasm for the material. Tashlin “is absolutely overboard” on the film, Paul Nathan told Wallis. “It is right down his alley, and he promises you he can get one hell of a picture for Martin and Lewis.” Nathan supervised Tashlin’s script, and a month later he wrote to Wallis to say, “The more I see of him and his work the more I think that it’s going to be our next picture.” Casting began in January 1955, and the film, retitled Artists and Models, began shooting toward the end of February.
In January, while playing at the Sands, Jerry got a horrible shock. His cousin Judy, the thirty-year-old daughter of Rose and Harry Katz, was murdered on the streets of Irvington. She was mugged on her way home from the grocery store on a Friday evening; her attacker beat her over the head with a pipe or tire iron, and she died almost immediately of head injuries. Jerry offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for anyone who could help authorities arrest and convict the killer, and he flew back to New Jersey for the funeral, arranging for family members in California to return home as well.
The mere possibility that the big hometown movie star was coming to Irvington brought crowds out to the synagogue where the funeral was held. “I almost couldn’t get in myself,” recalled Judy’s brother, Marshall Katz. Jerry had to return to work in Vegas immediately, but he did whatever he could to help assuage his relatives’ grief. “I brought her mother and her father and her sister and her brother and my mom and dad all out to the Sands to try to help them forget,” he remembered. “And they had a wonderful two-week vacation. I made sure they had a great time. But it was tough. It was tough.”
Jerry had remembered Judy affectionately from childhood as someone who’d always had a kind word for him when he’d been dumped on her family’s doorstep by Danny and Rae. “She was such a fan. She was so supportive. She believed that everything that I did as a kid was perfect,” he said. “The family thought I was a fucking lunatic and that I should have a keeper. But Judy was always saying, ‘Jerry, you’ve got something going within you.’ And I’d try things out for her, I’d audition for her. I was always in Judy’s room. She was really my best friend. She didn’t treat me like the rest of the family did. The family treated me like the fucking village idiot.”
Jerry kept raising the reward he offered to help catch the man who’d killed Judy, but nothing ever came of it. The horror of the crime would stay with him over the years: “I’ve had fantasies of this young Slavic-looking guy coming up to me and saying, ‘I never liked you, I never liked your work, I never liked anything about you, and I want you to know that I killed your cousin Judy.’ I have fantasies about that.” It was an exceedingly odd combination of empathy for his lost cousin and selfish focus on his career, but it was sincere. He would reflect on the loss in genuinely heartfelt terms: “When a human being has touched your soul or is part of something that’s important in your life, that’s tough, boy.”
Jerry returned to Hollywood with Dean in February to begin work on Artists and Models. At the outset, at least, Wallis was spared the nightmares that had beset him on Three Ring Circus. Much of the credit for this relative calm was due to Tashlin, who immediately hit it off with Jerry. It was a perfect combination of temperaments: the manic comic and the stolid cartoonist. Jerry became an instrument Tashlin could deploy to bring outrageous conceits to life. He used Jerry’s physicality—the gangly limbs, the elastic face, the sound-effects voice—to wring out the sort of gags he could have constructed previously only with animation cels. Tashlin furthermore showed good managerial judgment in allowing Jerry to consult with him about the mechanics of filmmaking, giving the aspiring director a sense that he was more a collaborator than a mere actor. Their budding rapport was a counterpoint to the undercurrent of animosity between Jerry and Dean, though the partners behaved civilly together throughout the shoot.
There were some bumps in the production. Jerry protested about a dance number he was asked to perform with Shirley MacLaine, insisting that some ideas of his be incorporated into Charlie O’Curran’s choreography. As Nathan told Wallis, “He has some cute bits of business, but it really doesn’t change the number at all. He just wanted to have something to say.” Tashlin, for his part, was having trouble with Dorothy Malone, who had been cast opposite Dean. Wallis didn’t care for the way his director was shooting his female lead—he objected specifically to a scene in which she wore dark glasses—and he asked Nathan to investigate the matter. Tashlin had an explanation: He said he was trying to hide “the big bags she was showing under her eyes.” But the problem, according to Nathan, ran deeper: “He feels this girl hasn’t an ounce of sex, and he is trying to build some up for her in cuteness.”
More seriously, Jerry and Wallis butted heads toward the middle of the production. Early on, things were pleasant enough. Jerry wrote Wallis one of his sweetie-pie letters asking for a print of Money from Home for his private film collection, ending it, “Don’t you think this would make a wonderful gift to such a wonderful Jew as I? THE HAPPY MONSTER.”
Jerry got his film, and he and Dean had behaved so well that they got permission from Wallis to fly to New York during production to be fěted at the Friars Golden Jubilee Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. But within a few weeks, Jerry and Wallis were fighting openly on the set. It was hardly their first set-to, but Jerry was feeling increasingly powerful as a filmmaker in his own right, and he wasn’t as willing as he used to be to write apologies to the boss. “We got into a really heavy argument,” he recalled. “I can’t remember what the argument was, but I wouldn’t back down, and he wouldn’t back down. And everybody in his own office told him that I was 100 percent right. And we were dealing with something that had to do with a morality issue. … I wrote him a letter that night, ’cause the issue hung. I hadn’t won the point yet. I wrote him a letter, and whatever I said in the letter was a restatement of my position. But in the end of the letter, I wrote, ‘P.S., Please don’t confuse my gratitude with my principles.’ I told him, ‘You’re an immoral prick. You’re pushing human beings around.’”
There was another flare-up soon after; Jerry went AWOL halfway through a day’s work because of Wallis’s imperious attitude toward the crew: “I left the set because he yelled at a fucking hairdresser in such a manner. I never heard a human being treated like that. I left the fucking set. I knew I was gonna cost him money. They couldn’t find me for three hours. I went to a fucking café somewhere on Melrose and just sat there and had coffee just to fuck him for three hours’ worth of money. The joy in my heart!”
The disappearance was typical of a larger pattern of uncooperative behavior on Jerry’s part. He left the set for hours on end—even when Dean stayed nearby practicing his golf swing and joking with crew members—and did what he could to make Wallis’s life difficult in little ways. His rebellion had its intended effect. When Herman Citron called Wallis late in the shoot to try to get Dean and Jerry some rehearsal time for a Colgate broadcast, the producer couldn’t believe his ears. He spilled his heart to the agent, telling him just how taxing Jerry had become. “There was one day they waited on the set—they turned the lights off … they sat there for an hour and a half while he was having a meeting about his record business with Mannie Sachs in his dressing room,” he revealed, adding that no one could get the star to cooperate: “They sent down for him … they sent the assistant … Tashlin went down … everybody. And he says: ‘I’ll be there when I get through.’”
Wallis was more than weary with this sort of behavior. “This is not new,” he said. “I—what the hell—I gave it up. I told you. I wasn’t going to eat myself up on this picture and that’s maybe why—I thought I had told you about it. But this has been going on all through the picture. … I would say that he is responsible, at least, for four to five days being behind schedule.” But when Citron indicated that he’d bring Wallis’s concerns up with Jerry, the producer balked: “Don’t tell him we’re complaining … tell him that if he wants to do his TV show and wants to get time off he’s got to be on the job.”
The exchange revealed how subtly power had shifted away from Wallis and the film studios in general toward Citron and the talent agencies, of which MCA was the most potent. Wallis took great pains not to offend Citron—or even Jerry, for that matter—and the agent merely heard the producer’s complaints with cursory interest; he would do nothing to lessen his clients’ interests, nor did he have to. For his part, Wallis had been put through such hell on Three Ring Circus that he was loath to indicate anything more than mild displeasure to the Martin and Lewis camp, and he was even willing to suspend his production for a few days at a time to keep the peace. Patience paid off in the long run: The film wrapped at the start of May, only a few days behind schedule.
Dean and Jerry did a “Colgate Comedy Hour” the following week. Their next York film—Pardners, a remake of the Bing Crosby-Martha Raye western Rhythm on the Range—was scheduled for an autumn-winter shoot and was being rewritten by Sidney Sheldon. On May 9 Dean and Jerry boarded the Golden State Limited at Union Station for a seventeen-day, fourteen-city club date tour. For two weeks they traveled together as they had in the old days—no kids, no wives, no bitterness, no suspicions: Kansas City, Omaha, Des Moines, Toledo, Philly, the Boston Garden, Chicago Stadium.
It was another big moneymaking spree, and it was the last such trip they would take.