There’d been Dean Martin Day in Steubenville, and there’d been Martin-Lewis Day in Atlantic City, but there’d never been a Jerry Lewis Day—in part because there was really no hometown for Jerry to return to, in part because wherever they went, wherever they performed, Jerry turned the world into his playpen, the calendar into a series of Jerry Lewis Days. Nevertheless, when Uncle Charlie Brown called from the Catskills and offered to host a gala premiere of You’re Never Too Young at his hotel, Jerry’s first reaction was to leap at it. He would be offered a chance to play the local-boy-made-good in the one place he truly felt nostalgic for, the Borscht Belt. Brown’s Hotel would pick up the whole bill—transportation, rooms, meals, booze, entertainment, a newly constructed Martin and Lewis Playhouse in which to hold the premiere. But aside from what York and Paramount would save on promotional expenses, the offer conjured an irresistible image in Jerry’s mind: “the sight of me returning home as a sort of hometown hero, the big international celebrity and King Shit of the Catskills.”
Jerry was still reeling from this vision of himself a few days later when he broached the idea at a meeting with Wallis, Paul Jones, Norman Taurog, and Jack Keller. The assembled mavens were delighted at the prospect of so much free publicity. It was a go.
Only one person hadn’t signed on to Jerry’s big homecoming: his partner.
The day after the meeting, Jerry approached Dean and described the plan. Dean seethed. “You should have consulted me first,” he said.
“I’m consulting you now.”
Dean let out a resigned breath. “Actually, Jerry, I really don’t care where we hold it.”
Given Dean’s characteristic indifference to matters of business and protocol, Jerry had no reason to believe this was anything but a yes, so plans for the elaborate event went into motion. They would do “The Colgate Comedy Hour” show on June 5, 1955, then leave by rail for New York two days later. After a night in Manhattan, they would drive up to the Catskills for the Friday night premiere, reprising their old Atlantic City act—two solos followed by the team.
The night before their scheduled departure, Dean’s bodyguard-procurer Mack “Killer” Gray, a former boxing manager who had worked as George Raft’s factotum for twenty years, approached Jerry with astonishing news: “Your partner isn’t making the trip.”
Jerry, still vulnerable to anything resembling a slight from Dean, assumed it was a joke. “Are you putting me on?”
The coffin-faced Gray was hardly joking. “I’m relaying this straight from Dean’s mouth. He said he’s tired. He’s going to take Jeanne on a vacation to Hawaii. What else can I tell you?”
It was the most vivid indication yet of Dean’s animosity, and Dean handled it like a Machiavellian CEO, waiting until the last minute, when no appeal could be heard, and then sending a henchman to do the job. The very notion of people fawning over Jerry, or even himself, rubbed Dean the wrong way. He was lacking in sentiment almost to the same degree that Jerry was overloaded with it. “The main difference between them,” recalled a friend, “was that Dean couldn’t show the love and respect for other people that Jerry could, and that worried Jerry. And it must have worried Dean, too. In Jerry’s case the worry came out warm; in Dean’s it came out cold.”
Furthermore, Dean was beginning to show his resentment at Jerry’s increasingly authoritarian approach to material for the team. Dean had always ceded business decisions to his partner out of a genuine lack of interest, but time commitments were another thing entirely. For Dean to be dragged up to the Catskills as if by order would be the ultimate sign of the monkey leading the organ grinder around by the leash. And since he truly didn’t care where or how the premiere of You’re Never Too Young was held, he flouted his indifference by heading west while Jerry and the others went east. It was a hell of an insult: A man allegedly too tired to go to the Catskills was instead going three thousand miles in the opposite direction.
Dean had some business to take care of in Los Angeles before he went to Hawaii, though. He met with Herman Citron to discuss solo work on TV. Then he spoke about it with columnist Earl Wilson: “I want a little TV show of my own, where I can sing more than two songs in an hour. I’m about ten years older than the boy. He wants to direct. He loves work. So maybe he can direct and I can sing.” On the matter of the junket, he cut deeper: “Outside of back east, who knows about the Catskills?”
Jerry was devastated. He now had three miserable days of train travel ahead of him, three days to simmer in tight quarters with a family to whom he couldn’t express his hurt or anger, three days to prepare to face a battery of reporters and photographers who would lick their chops at the whiff of bad blood between the boys. He and his family were photographed in Los Angeles boarding the train; when they arrived at Penn Station on June 9, a hoard of ravenous writers met them. All Jerry could manage was “no comment.” The next day, he drove north to Brown’s past scores of embarrassing billboards promoting the gala weekend with Martin and Lewis. As the car turned into the driveway and he caught sight of Charlie and Lillian Brown standing in wait for their bubbelah, Jerry grasped Patti’s hand in childlike panic: “Momma, what am I going to tell them?”
He did what he had always done when he felt hurt, confused, or betrayed: He retreated into his shtick, making it through the disaster by playing the nutty kid to the hilt—dressing as a bellhop, a busboy, a waiter, yukking it up with guests and press alike, acting as if no real-life worries could dent his naïve armor. He dedicated the playhouse, introduced the film, did his best to seem carefree. Backstage, though, he agonized to bandleader Herb Sherry: “Herb, I’m going downstairs to announce that this film is the last time Martin and Lewis will ever appear together.”
The weekend was capped with a gala Saturday-night performance featuring Alan King, various dance orchestras, Patti (singing “He’s Funny That Way” to her husband), and Dean and Jerry’s old pal Sonny King doing a brief twosome with Jerry that harkened back to their salad days (and suggested to some in the audience that Jerry was auditioning a new partner).
Finally, Jerry cracked. As the show ended very late that night, he spoke frankly to the press, literally crying tears of confusion and frustration. “Maybe I’m using the wrong words,” he said to the hushed room, “but I don’t know the right ones. Maybe the lawyers wouldn’t want me to say anything at all. But you’ve been wonderful. You know we have a cross to bear up here, and I want to thank you all for saving me embarrassment by not asking questions I couldn’t answer. I want you to know I appreciate your wonderful cooperation during this weekend.”
The well-oiled audience of reporters and Catskills loyalists were deeply moved by the star’s open emotionalism: Jerry’s words “brought down the house with one of the most sustained mittings ever heard on a nitery floor,” observed Variety’s Hy Hollinger. Another reporter noted in Screen Life that Jerry’s “deeply sympathetic and grateful audience rose and honored him with a standing ovation for ten ear-splitting minutes, with most of us surreptitiously wiping away our own tears.”
But after the emotion had passed, the reporters were left pondering Jerry’s words. Lawyers? The bad blood had spilled into the open. The press, even Newsweek and The New York Times, made hay of it: The most popular act in the nation was having a public spat. And there was more to their sensational reports than even the scandalmongers could have known: After the Brown’s Hotel disaster, Martin and Lewis didn’t speak to one another for two months.
When Jerry returned to California from the Catskills, he went immediately to Lew Wasserman’s office at MCA and asked him to begin to unravel the act. Wasserman wasn’t eager to put an end to a cash cow that was bringing MCA millions a year. He tried to broker a truce between the boys.
“What about Dean?” he asked, stalling for time.
“We don’t talk to each other,” Jerry told him. “Just get me out of my commitments, and I’ll be happy.” Demanding that Wasserman inform both Dean and Paramount of his decision to sever the act, Jerry went home to await the fallout.
For his part, Dean once again turned to the press to air his grievances. “To me, this isn’t a love affair,” he told a reporter. “This is big business. I think it’s ridiculous for the boy to brush aside such beautiful contracts.” Once again, “the boy.” If Jerry could invoke lawyers and agents, Dean could pull the rank of maturity: Who in the country wouldn’t believe that Jerry wasn’t acting like a petulant child if his keeper and best pal said so?
A peace summit was finally held in the office of Paramount vice president Y. Frank Freeman, the first Dean and Jerry had seen of each other since before the Catskills junket. In the presence of Freeman, Wasserman, Wallis, and their attorney, Joe Ross, the pair had their future laid out before them: Wallis still had them under contract and wanted more films out of them, NBC was expecting more episodes of “The Colgate Comedy Hour,” etc., etc. It was a reprise of the previous year’s sit-down: No one gave a damn how they got along. Their signatures were on the contracts, and the people who held those contracts wanted satisfaction. They’d have to find some way to carry on, period.
An unhappy ceasefire was reached. Jack Keller put a shine on the alleged reconciliation for the press. The boys were no longer feuding. The Colgate show and the next York film—entitled, ironically, Pardners—would proceed as planned. The news actually made headlines.
Jerry, though, was a wreck. The public may have been happy that the feud was only temporary, but Jerry, who’d been Dean’s partner for his entire adult life, was left to confront the fact that his partnership, the act that was based on the friendship of two unlikely buddies, was a sham, a lie to both the public and himself. “In order to maintain the Martin-Lewis relationship,” he reflected years later, “I went through a ten-year period of lies. The whole situation was against my nature, but I didn’t know that. When you’re between the ages of twenty and thirty, you think that whatever you’re doing is right. But between the ages of twenty and thirty is a period that men in medicine have finally found a title for. It’s called stupid.”
Dean, who had just turned thirty-eight, was thick-skinned enough to fake anything: Insufferable as Jerry may have become, he was good for business. A split career—some solo stuff and an occasional Martin and Lewis gig—wouldn’t have been onerous to him. Jerry, however, comported himself as the soul of sincerity. The idea of clowning with somebody he couldn’t get along with made him feel like a bad person. Financially, he was still tied to Dean; emotionally, though, he began to cut himself off from his hero-partner and cauterize the wound that had been opened by Dean’s coolness.
For the first time in their years together, Jerry didn’t rebound from one of Dean’s slights like a happy puppy willing to let all bygones slide. He brooded: “I didn’t help fix it. I could’ve fixed it. But I knew it was over. What was I gonna fix? You gonna give aspirin to a cancer patient? That was it. Period. I knew it was over.”
Years later, he compared it to a divorce: “If you go home tonight and find your wife in bed with a man, are you gonna say, ‘Well, I think I understand’? Are you gonna be rational? What do you think will happen to you? What do you think? Have you ever thought about that? You think you’re gonna be able to turn the other cheek and be a wonderful human being? ‘Well, it’s for the children’? Bullshit. God willing, it doesn’t happen to you, but what do you think you’re gonna do? Everything you think you’re gonna do, you’re not gonna go near what you think. ’Cause until the time happens, you haven’t the faintest idea where your head’s gonna be.
“Well, we’re talking about the same thing. This relationship was very strong. When you scar a relationship, you’re never gonna have it right again. Let’s assume that you forgive your wife. Whatta you think you’ve got? You’ve got staying up at night waiting for the other fucking shoe to fall. So that’s the scar on a relationship. Once a relationship is scarred, everything you do is a façade. All the cheer and the happiness and the giggling is bullshit. You can only do that without scars. Then it’s real. So I knew in my gut this could not be retrieved.”
As he dazedly confronted his ruptured career, Jerry had some sources of consolation at home. He and Patti had conceived another child after nine exploratory operations. “The doctor agreed to always cut across the same incision,” Jerry revealed. “And because of a small video camera, the problem was detected, and the doctor said we’d have another child within a year.” The baby was due in late winter. And Danny Lewis was giving his son career advice that, for the first time, wasn’t self-promoting or resentful. As Jerry recalled, Danny was among the first to counsel him to split up the act while it was still a success. “‘You hit the galaxy,’” Jerry recalled Danny’s telling him, “‘and you gotta know that a shooting star doesn’t stay in place.’ He says, ‘You’ve been the greatest shooting star in the history of show business. Recognize that it tails off. But don’t wait until it’s gone out of the sky and then you decide, “Well, let’s do something.” Uh-uh. You gotta do it while the crest is there.’
“My dad said, ‘What’s the worst thing for you in boxing?’ And the worst thing for me has always been to watch a guy get knocked through the ropes. It’s such a fucking indignity. How did Joe Louis wind up? He went that one fight too many, and he got knocked through the fucking ropes. This great icon, this great champion of champions, went one fight too many.”
But what was one fight too many for Martin and Lewis? Dean seemed satisfied with a primitive form of partnership—civil interactions during rehearsals and performances. Jerry needed the combined thrill of mass adulation and mutual affection. It was over as far as he was concerned; there were still commitments, and there was all that money to make, but he had ideas he wanted to realize, and he was increasingly willing to see them through on his own.
Hal Wallis didn’t care if Dean and Jerry spat blood at each other off the set, as long as they showed up on time and knew their lines. Artists and Models looked like yet another hit, and he was keeping the pipeline filled with potential projects for the team, whose services he still had under contract through 1959. His immediate needs were being met by “Route 66,” a script being reworked by Tashlin from an original story by Erna Lazarus. (Wallis had originally purchased it years earlier as a vehicle for Shirley Booth and Humphrey Bogart.)
Wallis had other projects in mind as well. He had tried to get the rights to The Pajama Game, the hit Broadway musical about a labor dispute at a garment factory, but he had been told by the producers of the play that “they did not regard Martin and Lewis as any plus factor in the situation and that, as a matter of fact, there seemed to be considerable reservation as to whether or not they would be willing to sell the property if Martin and Lewis were to appear in it.” He tried to get the rights to Teahouse of the August Moon, but producer Dore Schary (like Jerry, a son of Jewish Newark) was “not interested in having Martin and Lewis in it—period.” He even considered a summer stock production that Bette Davis had discovered on vacation in Maine—Fore and Aft, a musical farce set among pirates—but passed on it after Paul Nathan told him “It reminds me of Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, which, unfortunately, I just happened to see.”
As he made his plans, Wallis bore in mind the friction between his two stars, and with a premonition of the team’s possible demise, he decided the 1957 Martin and Lewis vehicle should be The Martin and Lewis Story. Paul Nathan registered the title and began compiling notes on the lives of the boys. It was a cynically astute move: Since Jerry’s public breakdown at Brown’s Hotel, news about the team had been more and more frequent in the press. Their Colgate scripts even made joking reference to their troubles—when Dean repeatedly dunked Jerry in a tank of water during a parody of a quiz show, the half-drowned comic shouted, “Haven’t you read the papers? The feud’s over!” Wallis recognized they had become a subject for scandalmongering in the way Hollywood figures with far more outrageous personal lives had long been, and he figured he could lure people into theaters with a biographical film that promised personal revelations with a veneer of happy collegiality.
But in fact, the pair was far from collegial. Though they were staying together to make money, they still had massive financial problems stemming, years after the fact, from their split with Abbey Greshler. During rehearsals for Artists and Models they had taken advances against their salaries from Wallis: $5,000 for Dean, $15,000 for Jerry. And in the summer of 1955, they found themselves in a jam with the IRS. The government had come looking for $650,000, and there was no way they could get that sort of money out of Wallis. Jerry turned to Paramount production chief Y. Frank Freeman. Freeman didn’t ask for details; he wrote out a check against his personal bank account and handed it over to Jerry, who promised to pay it back in sixty days. In September, a few hours early, Jerry returned the money to Freeman. The transaction had taken place without Dean’s knowledge or, for that matter, his interest. It was literally business as usual.
Later that autumn, though, Freeman asked a favor. He would be chairing a benefit for underprivileged children on November 10 at the Shrine Auditorium, and he wanted to know if Dean and Jerry would be willing to perform. Jerry said yes, once again neglecting to get his partner’s approval in advance. As the day of the show approached, Jerry reminded Dean several times of their obligation and of how Freeman had bailed them out so generously just two months earlier. Dean seemed to agree at all times: “For Chrissakes, Jerry, I know how important this is. You got it.” On the afternoon of the tenth, however, Jerry couldn’t find him. He sent Dean a note reminding him of the appointment, and he sent copies to Jeanne Martin, Mack Gray, and the Lakeside Country Club. Jerry showed up at the Shrine on time and, when it became clear that Dean wasn’t going to turn up, did twenty solo minutes, apologized for his partner’s absence, and left the stage as quickly as he could. It was like the finale of Three Ring Circus, only in real life and without “Hey, Punchinello.”
Freeman, ever the gentleman, let Jerry off the hook, but Jerry had once again been stabbed in the heart by his partner. He confronted Dean, who absolutely brushed him off: “Nobody told me there was going to be a benefit.” If Jerry was going to make commitments without consulting him, then Dean was going to treat those commitments the same way he had his marriage vows or the friendships of men whose wives he’d screwed on the sly in Steubenville. He was through acting as if he cared. And it certainly meant nothing to him if Jerry got hurt by his actions. If Jerry had declared the partnership dead in his own mind, Dean acted like it had never even existed. Jerry liked to brag about how he could shut his heart against people, but he was underprepared to win a battle of cold shoulders against Dean.
Dean and Jerry shot Pardners that winter in Phoenix and Hollywood. It was an honest-to-God Western, with songs by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn. There was a big show-stopping finale—the two stars linked arms and sang together, “You and me, we’ll be the greatest pardners, buddies, and pals!” The film, with Norman Taurog directing again, became the most expensive York production yet: Bad weather in Phoenix washed out many costly days, and Jerry demanded shooting time for elaborate scenes of his antics—including a square dance sequence and a scene in which he tore up a trail camp, neither of which made the final cut. When it was all over, it was a $2.6 million picture, which meant whatever profit it might see wouldn’t be very impressive. The fact was, though they had freedom when working for York, Martin and Lewis did better financially working for Wallis.
That December, after Colgate-Palmolive decided it no longer wanted to sponsor “The Colgate Comedy Hour,” NBC offered Dean and Jerry $7.5 million a year for the next five years for a minimum of four shows annually—a sign of the series’ continuing popularity. When Artists and Models opened that Christmas season, however, it got hammered in both the trades and the mainstream press. With at least two films a year since 1949, Martin and Lewis had worn their critics past the point of acceptance, to weariness and even anger. “Almost anybody might have written at least as good a script,” wrote Bosley Crowther in The New York Times; even kid-gloved Variety carped that the film “overdoes specialty situation material almost to the point of no laugh return.”
The pity of these notices is that Tashlin’s is easily the best direction Dean and Jerry ever had, and the film is, in the main, one of the best they ever made—certainly one of the most vivid and memorable. The very opening credits are startling—curvy, live models (Tashlin can’t resist randy focus on the female figure, even if he jokes about it) pose beside easels while Dean sings the title song—and the initial sequence is drenched in wild colors: Dean and Jerry, two billboard painters, spill buckets of yellow and red on their bosses below. The whole film is charged with visual energy that no other Martin and Lewis film remotely approaches. Tashlin surrounds his stars with an amazing number of American cultural signifiers—advertising, television, astrology, the military, comic books, bohemians, wholesome youth groups, the Cold War, cosmetics, espionage, “The Honeymooners,” Rear Window, An American in Paris—turning the whole of civilized modernity into a kind of dream world with Martin and Lewis at its center.
This time out, Dean and Jerry are Rick and Eugene, childhood buddies from “Steubendale” (the Paramount censors wouldn’t let them use Steubenville, since the script refers to Dean’s having to leave home to avoid a couple of shotgun weddings) who have come to Greenwich Village to become, respectively, a painter and a children’s book writer. They can’t hold on to jobs or girls, and to make matters worse, Eugene is addicted to violent, blood-and-guts comic books—then all the rage in real life—and is given to shouting out the lurid contents of his nightmares. All of this comes together when Rick gets a job drawing comic books and uses Eugene’s outbursts to provide his narratives.
The picture is brimming with outrageous gags to match Jerry’s excesses. Tashlin’s roots in animation—and his ear for the American vernacular—are evident in a scene involving a neighbor lady Jerry inadvertently awakens with his middle-of-the-night yowling. Dean doesn’t even believe the woman exists outside of Jerry’s feverish dreams—“You’re flippin’ your butch,” he tells him—and he peeks out the door to calm his buddy’s nerves. We hear a smashing sound and a splash, and Dean reenters the apartment with a hot water bottle busted around his head like a cheap straw hat. In typical Tashlin fashion, it’s a joke that could only happen in just this impossible way.
Tashlin also has fun with his supporting players; as if to catch up with Jerry, everyone becomes a caricature—even Dean crosses his eyes in exaggerated comic frustration—and the effect is to make Jerry look normal and believable.
Of course, there are the usual limits to Jerry’s ability to inhabit a character. There’s the ever-present jewelry—a wedding band on the left hand, an onyx pinky ring on the right. And, perhaps as an outward sign of his anguish over the troubles with Dean, he’s puffy in the belly and face; the absurdly gaunt marionette of a few years earlier, pushing thirty, is carrying an extra twenty or thirty pounds. Still, Tashlin alone of his directors has the sensibility to put his mugging to the service of the story and not the actor’s ego. Jerry gets to overdo it, but always at an appropriate moment—imitating an already exaggerated Eddie Mayehoff, enduring a pummeling at the hands of Shirley MacLaine, succumbing to the effects of knockout drops—and Tashlin’s camera never lingers too long. He seems in tune with the world around him, although he does confess to a TV panel investigating the influence of comic books that “I’m a little retarded.” Most surprisingly, cast opposite the similarly limber, frantic MacLaine, he shows a touch of comic leading man. They made a promising pair (Wallis knew as much, but MacLaine was pregnant when he cast his next—and last—Martin and Lewis film, and the two never performed together again).
Just as he makes Jerry seem possible, Tashlin pulls off a clever and jam-packed final act, including a Dean and Jerry duet and an inventive free-for-all fight (suits of armor are thrown at the villains and appear to walk down the stairs). In the final frames, Tashlin magically transforms the costumes of Dean, Jerry, MacLaine, and Dorothy Malone into wedding attire; though it’s a physically impossible transformation, it’s handled in fluent rhythm and has a kind of poetic truth. Artists and Models is a Martin and Lewis film all right, but it contains the seeds of more than just high jinks, and it remains the capstone of their work together.
Ignoring, as usual, the critics and their carping, Wallis liked Tashlin’s work (and the box office for the film) enough to let him develop the Erna Lazarus screenplay, but he hadn’t yet settled on it for certain. Jerry, however, was wildly keen on Tashlin and his script. Paul Nathan reported to Wallis that Jerry asked, “Please don’t break us up with Tashlin,” and then said “he would kiss my fanny” for a chance to do “Route 66,” which Tashlin had described to him.
The script still roughly followed Lazarus’s original story, but Shirley Booth and Humphrey Bogart would never have entered anyone’s mind had they read Tashlin’s version first. Rather than following a down-on-her-luck ex-chorus girl and a con man as they made their way west, Tashlin’s revised script was about a con man (guess who?) and a starstruck dope (guess who?) making their way to Hollywood in a car they each won half of (one honestly, one crookedly) in a raffle. Lazarus objected to the revisions on several grounds, even threatening a lawsuit. The final script, though largely rewritten, would bear her name alone as a result—such was the prestige of a Hal Wallis production that she was willing to fight for credit even though the work wasn’t, for the most part, hers.
On Washington’s Birthday, February 22, 1956, Patti gave birth to Scott Anthony Lewis—eight pounds, thirteen ounces—at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She was helped through the delivery, her first in twelve years, by Dr. Blake Watson. Jerry had been hoping for a girl—“We’ve got several thousand dollars worth of girl’s clothes and not a thing for a boy,” he told the press—but he was actually very proud. He was just shy of his thirtieth birthday. Years later, he would refer to Scotty as “his first son as a man.”
The new daddy was feeling his oats. He had been asked to host the Emmy Awards broadcast by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, but when the nominations were announced and he and Dean were ignored, he was livid. He called ATAS president Don De Vore and chewed him out while a startled New York Post reporter sat nearby and listened. What good, after all, was power if the whole world didn’t know you could wield it?
Hal Wallis finally decided to shoot Tashlin’s revision of “Route 66.” Retitling it Hollywood or Bust, he scheduled production for April 15, with preproduction duties for the stars to begin on March 7. Normally, there would only be a week between preproduction and the actual shoot, but Dean and Jerry had asked Wallis for two weeks’ leave to play Las Vegas (they were booked into the Sands, where their old pal Jack Entratter had come out west from the Copa to run things). Reluctantly, knowing how hard it was to hold them to commitments without letting other engagements intervene, Wallis agreed to the unusual arrangement. Predictably, he lived to regret it. Dean and Jerry never showed for wardrobe tests on March 7—as Wallis wrote to Joe Hazen, “this despite the agreement on which the ink is not yet dry.”
The next day, after calls from their lawyer, the stars appeared. Jerry called Wallis to apologize, but the producer had reached his absolute limit with them. He wrote to his partner: “This is the way it usually works out. We finally get what we are entitled to after calling agents, lawyers, finding the boys wherever they may be, and going through a torturous hell every time.”
He felt he had only three options left to him: (1) Cut a deal with Paramount to allow the studio to make the remaining Martin and Lewis films, leaving himself with some sort of stake in them, (2) sell the contract outright to another producer or studio, or (3) shut down the picture at the next sign of intransigence from Martin and Lewis and let his lawyers fight it out. He concluded the letter with a heartfelt gesture: “The fact remains that there isn’t enough money in the world that makes it attractive enough for me to go through the torture of making these pictures. There is no personal satisfaction and too much wear and tear on my constitution is involved in making these things. I don’t want to make any more Martin and Lewis pictures.”
The poor, exhausted man: How could he know that the worst was yet to come?
Erna Lazarus was the first to get wind of it. She was standing on the sound stage near the start of the shoot. Jerry, who made a point of becoming friendly with the crew on all of his films, was talking with a grip. “This is nothing against you or to do with you,” he confided, “but I intend to make it as difficult as possible for everyone connected with this picture.” Jerry was going to revenge himself on Dean and perhaps also on Wallis, and he didn’t care who got sucked into the mêlée (he might have done as much on Pardners, which went into production just after Dean’s no-show at the Shrine, but that was a York picture, and Jerry considered those projects his personal creations). Even Frank Tashlin, Jerry’s new mentor, wouldn’t be spared; Jerry became a spiteful, one-man guerrilla campaign against the picture, against Wallis, and against Martin and Lewis.
Wallis had put Paul Nathan in charge of the day-to-day operations of the picture, and Nathan’s memos from the set provide a vivid account of Jerry’s insubordination. There was the Battle of the Dog, for instance. Jerry’s traveling companion in the film was a Great Dane named Mr. Bascom, around whom several comic set pieces (and even a romantic plot line) had been written. Jerry, however, decided to make an issue over the dog’s presence in the film; even if it required an extensive rewrite, he wanted the dog out. Tashlin, who’d written the dog into the script to begin with, naturally objected. As Nathan told Wallis just three days into the picture, “Jerry is violent about the dog and about Tashlin, and Frank thinks we must do something to keep the peace. … I can’t believe the dog can be this much of a threat to Jerry’s throne.” Tashlin had chosen his own strategy for dealing with the stars: “Frank told me he is going to stay out of the middle of this project—come what may. He is going to shoot the script exactly as it is, without any temperament from anybody.”
Jerry finally lost the fight—Mr. Bascom was, in fact, one of the more memorable things in the completed picture—but there were other occasions to needle his colleagues. Just a few days after the scrap over the dog, Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom had a bit part in the picture, and Jerry prolonged the former prizefighter’s work on the film by ad-libbing obscenities during every take and persistently engaging in a mocking imitation of a punch-drunk pug. Rosenbloom had the maturity to ignore Jerry’s cry for attention, but Nathan realized Jerry wouldn’t stop unless something was done.
“We have a major problem and I promised myself to keep calm on this picture, but I think this has to be ironed out immediately,” he wrote to Wallis. “When you see the new dailies on Hollywood or Bust you will realize that Jerry Lewis is not playing the part and is really terrible.” He reported that assistant director Buddy Coleman and Tashlin himself claimed that Jerry didn’t know the lines and kept the crew working on the scene endlessly. Tashlin, in fact, had reported that at least one actor—Rosenbloom—would’ve been off the payroll already if Jerry had cooperated. Instead, however, Jerry had made life hell for everyone, stalking the set and muttering, according to Tashlin, “‘That scene is shit.’” Nathan concluded by laying the worst case out for his boss: “Tashlin apparently has no control over this fellow. I hate to take such a gloomy attitude, but unless we straighten it out right now, the whole picture is going to end up as nothing.”
Despite warnings from all around him, however, Jerry continued to sabotage the production. One scene took place in front of a movie theater; Jerry’s character was to list all of the theaters he regularly attended, but Jerry insisted on changing all the theater names—a minor matter, except that Paramount’s legal department had already cleared all the names in advance with any theater owners whose businesses happened to share the names in the script. Jerry’s ad-lib, which he changed from take to take, forced the legal department to repeat the laborious process all over again. As Nathan told Wallis, “It is a pain in the ass for everyone concerned.” He added that Bob Richman, the man in charge of obtaining clearances for the studio, “who never has anything to say, said this scene sounded like an insane man reading, and he can’t believe anybody could ever lose a character the way Jerry did.” (Eventually, the material was simply cut from the picture.)
The whole series of obnoxious disruptions had been aimed at Dean, but Dean had already stopped caring about what Jerry did, and it was the innocent bystanders—the cast, the crew, Tashlin, Wallis, and Nathan—who suffered most from Jerry’s behavior. Finally, Tashlin had seen enough. One day midway through the shoot, he got the impression that Jerry was about to launch into another disruptive fit. He stamped it out immediately.
“I want you off the set,” he announced.
Jerry thought it was a joke: “Ho ho.”
“I mean it, Jerry—off! You’re a discourteous, obnoxious prick.”
The entire sound stage watched as Jerry flushed with shame. He tried to apologize. “Hey, Tish, whoa—calm down. Where did you get the right … ?”
“Jerry, as director of this picture, I order you to leave. Go. Get your ass out of here and don’t come back.”
No one had spoken to him so roughly in years. He slunk out of the studio and went home. Later that night he called Tashlin and apologized in earnest, promising not to disrupt the production any further. Tashlin patiently agreed to let him return to the set the next morning.
As they said good night, Jerry added a final note of gratitude: “Tish … thanks.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know, maybe for saving my life.”
There was a dose of melodrama in that statement, but there was some truth in it as well. Tashlin had managed to get Jerry to turn his behavior around—though he confessed to Nathan that “it has not been easy or fun for him, and at the end of the day he is so beat he can’t stand it.”
Jerry’s anger toward his partner and his circumstances still festered within him. Not that he said as much to Dean; in fact, according to Jerry, the two didn’t speak a civil word to each other apart from their dialogue throughout the production of the film. It was an intolerable working environment, but Jerry was determined not to crack: “We’re good actors, we’re good performers, he’s a good director, we’re professional people. It’s that simple. You’re paid a lot of fucking money to show up every day. It’s very simple. You just do it.” But the pain of the production was so great it never left him. “I’ll never see it,” he said of the film decades later, the hurtful memories still quick to leap to his mind.
On Wednesday, May 18, 1956, he emceed a Screen Actors Guild testimonial dinner for Jean Hersholt, the quintessential Hollywood philanthropist. According to Louella Parsons, who was in attendance, “Jerry covered himself with glory” that night. Even though he was out of character, she said, “he was never funnier or better.” But when he got home that night, he felt terrible: nauseated, dizzy, with a gripping sensation in his chest. Patti took one look at him and was shocked: “I’m calling Dr. Levy.”
She rushed him over to the doctor’s office, where it became increasingly clear that he had had a heart attack or something very close to one. Levy immediately sent for an ambulance to take Jerry to Cedar-Sinai Hospital, where he ran a series of cardiac tests. It hadn’t been as bad as it looked—a murmur or a flutter rather than something more severe—but it was clearly a signal that Jerry was endangering himself with his anger. Levy ordered Jerry to stay in the hospital for a few days of tests and relaxation. And he had some advice for him: As Jerry recalled, Levy said, “‘I’m gonna write you a prescription: Do a single.’ He says, ‘You’re gonna die.’ He says, ‘This is just your warning, but you’re gonna die.’ He saw the emotional stress. I mean, it showed up on the instruments, in my blood workup.”
He lay in the hospital contemplating the inevitable: The only thing he had left of his partnership with Dean was bile. He would have to sever the relationship and start a new career.
Danny Lewis came to visit his son in the hospital. He found him inside a plastic tent, attached to wires and machines and intravenous tubes.
“What happened to you?”
Jerry was so happy to see his father that his eyes clouded with tears. “Nothing,” he said. “I’m taking a vacation.”
Danny came closer as if to share an intimacy. Instead, he delivered an accusation: “Do you know what you’re doing to your mother?”
Appropriately, Jerry turned away from the stinging question. He feigned sleep—he was weak enough for the ruse to work. Danny left, and neither he nor Rae visited the hospital again before Jerry was released on May 21.
Soon afterward, still at work on Hollywood or Bust, Jerry summoned up the courage to talk to his partner and see if he could heal the breach between them. He tiptoed over to where Dean was biding his time between setups and said, “You know, it’s a hell of a thing. All I can think of is that what we do is not very important. Any two guys could’ve done it. But even the best of them wouldn’t have had what made us as big as we are.”
Dean stared at him. “Yeah? What is it?”
“Well, I think it’s the love we still have for one another.”
Dean didn’t buy it for a minute. He thought for a moment, studying his shoes, then looked up and delivered the baccia di morte: “You can talk about love all you want. To me, you’re nothing but a dollar sign.”
It was each man at his worst: Jerry mawkish and pompous and begging for affection; Dean callous and dismissive and curt. It pushed Jerry over the limit. He went home and told Patti he was quitting the act, that no one would talk him out of it. She more than anyone knew the psychological and physical burden the strain had put on him: He’d been visiting a psychiatrist sporadically for the past year. She said nothing. She was probably relieved.
There were loose ends still: Don McGuire had written a new screenplay for them, a buddy story based on Jerry’s fascination with the myth of Damon and Pythias, the classic best buddies. Jerry would forever compare his and Dean’s relationship to the bond shared by the two warriors who exchanged places in prison so that one might go free. Various people in his circle—Jack Keller, Ernie Glucksman, McGuire—claimed over the years to have told Jerry the story first. Now he had come up with a parody of a juvenile delinquent picture, in which he would play a nebbishy street kid named Sidney Pythias who is accidentally mistaken for a hood, and Dean would be Mike Damon, a cop who befriends Sidney in hopes of reforming him. Dean was disgusted at the thought of appearing on screen in a police uniform, and told Jerry as much. That ended that collaboration.
There was a press conference promoting Pardners on June 15 at a ranch near Newhall. Jerry, Keller, and all the Paramount people were there, along with more than two hundred members of the press. Dean called in sick, two hours late. Just a week earlier, he had celebrated his birthday with his wife and some friends at a swank restaurant and hadn’t thought to invite Jerry and Patti. He didn’t care enough to put an end to the partnership, but he wouldn’t lift a finger to hide his disgust with it, either.
Jerry took his case to Wasserman, Wallis, Freeman, the people at NBC, and all the lawyers. He wanted out: Renegotiate the contracts; to hell with the money; out. It hit the press on June 18: Martin and Lewis were through. “This break sounds so final,” wrote Louella Parsons, “that I have to believe what both Dean and Jerry tell me.”
The divorce of Martin and Lewis was more than a financial matter, although it was in fact a monumental financial matter. There were several substantial contracts to reckon with: Wallis, York, NBC, endorsements. The public showed no signs of tiring of the act, despite all of Wallis’s fears that they would overexpose themselves: They hadn’t had a Top Ten box-office hit since 1952 (when both Sailor Beware and Jumping Jacks had achieved that distinction), but their films and TV broadcasts were reliably popular and profitable. Nevertheless, the money the pair could anticipate earning wasn’t that important to Jerry: Everyone around him assured him he would do well without Dean. It was honestly for him a matter of principle and comfort. Whatever it cost—at various times he estimated the unrealized earning potential of Martin and Lewis to be between $20 million and $41 million—he was dissolving the act.
“I was heartbroken,” Jerry recalled. “I knew it was over. There was no question about that. I knew we were teetering on it being over. And that was killing me. This was my baby I was watching die. You mustn’t forget that. It wasn’t just two men. It was my baby. I breathed life into it. I put thirty-two hours a day into it.”
Part of the heartbreak was rooted in uncertainty: Once they had split, what would happen? The kid who’d met Dean Martin on a Broadway corner, and clowned with him at the Havana-Madrid, and teamed up with him in Atlantic City, hadn’t before that moment had an ounce of appreciable commercial success. With his partner, he had quite literally conquered the entertainment world. But would anyone want him alone? They hadn’t, after all, before Dean. “It’s pretty tough riding the crest of the wave and figure you’re gonna drown in four days,” Jerry recalled. “It’s terrible. Who knows if the audience was gonna accept me by myself?”
And there was another worry, one that gave the lie to the affection he still harbored in a hidden corner of his heart: “Who knows if the audience is gonna accept him by himself? The most important thing that happened was that he did well. Because my doctor said to me, ‘Your biggest problem has got nothing to do with you. You’ve got all the talent in the world. They’re not gonna take your talent away. Your problem is if he fails. If he fails, you’ll go under.’ And he was right. If he failed, I would go under. Because of my love for him and my feelings for what we had. I knew in my heart I was gonna be okay. I was more concerned with his doing well—because I broke it up, I was responsible for it ending. And you carry a heavy load with that kind of guilt.”
Financial arrangements were worked out. Paramount released Dean and Jerry from their agreement to produce films as a team through York. Wallis, with greed and spite and no small modicum of revenge, only gave them leave for a single film each; if they wanted to continue to make films separately, they would have to pay him $1.5 million for the three films they owed him plus a percentage of their profits from the last two films they’d made for him. NBC also played hardball: The $7.5 million they were to get annually as a pair was cut down to $5 million; for that sum, York would produce thirty-four one-hour specials, seventeen with each man as a solo, over the span of the next five years. And The Delicate Delinquent, as McGuire’s Damon-and-Pythias screenplay had come to be called, would be produced for York, with another actor in the cop role, by Jerry himself.
There were some dates left to fulfill—ten days in Atlantic City to premiere Pardners, a Muscular Dystrophy telethon at Carnegie Hall, two weeks at the Copa. Coincidentally, the Copa engagement would span the last week of July—exactly ten years after their first show together at the 500 Club. It would make a perfect swan song. Jerry proposed the plan to Dean: “I said, ‘Let’s finish it. Let’s make the Copa our last thing together, and let’s go out with fucking dignity while we’re still on top, while we’re still making all the money in the world.’ And he agreed. It was his chance to finally get his feet wet and do what he wanted to do career-wise, stand on his own without the fucking monkey. And I had a chance to stretch.”
Though they’d agreed on a graceful conclusion to their partnership, they sniped at each other in the press. Dean announced that Jerry wanted to direct, telling Louella Parsons, “I do not feel he is capable of directing me.” And he expressed frustrations with the limits of the act: “As long as I do Martin and Lewis pictures, the formula is always the same—for eight reels, I’m the heel, then at the last minute I’m a right guy. I want to do something more than that.”
Jerry was much franker and more openly bitter, saying that Dean was the one holding him back, both in his career and in his personal maturation: “I’m tired of being restricted. I don’t want to work twelve weeks and sit around for forty. He wants to work for twelve weeks and play golf for forty. … I’m not a happy man unless I can perform and entertain and make people happy. I feel like a completely frustrated cripple when I’m not allowed to do it. The time comes when you look in the mirror and say to yourself, ‘All right, be a man.’ So it’s time I became a man. … They [NBC and Paramount] know that [Dean] doesn’t want to work. All he wants to do is sit around a pool and play golf. I don’t want to sit around a pool that I may not continue to own if I don’t work. … I can’t be a part of his wrongdoing.” The golf was a particularly sore point. When columnist Louis Sobol came to Paramount and asked Jerry where Dean was, he got a pointed response: “Oh, he’s a pretty busy man. He’s out trying to cut down his golf score.”
At the end of June they flew east—separately—to wrap it all up. They appeared live on “Today” from the 500 Club and could barely stand to look at one another. Then they went north to play their final string of shows wearing happy faces.
Jerry was being eaten up inside, and he suspected that Dean was too: “Dean had his own personal pain,” he reflected. “He had to work through that. He had the same thing I did. He just was able to work through it differently.” His pain didn’t diminish the vigor of his performance; during their first week at the Copa, he fractured two toes on Jerry’s left foot during a rowdy gag. “It was purely an accident,” Jerry told the press when they asked how it happened.
The last show of the last night had been sold out weeks in advance. The crowd was as stellar as any they’d ever played to: Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Jackie Gleason, Sammy Davis Jr., Milton Berle.
“It was one of the most electrifying evenings in the history of show business,” recalled Steve Lawrence. “They were always magnificent performers together, but this night, because of what was involved, was a highly charged, emotional evening for them and the audience. I don’t think there was a civilian in the room. Everyone was either in show business or around it: performers, writers, producers, columnists. There was a reason for their being there.”
They hit the stage from their respective dressing rooms, and Jerry shot a look at his soon-to-be-ex-partner: “His face was a mask,” he remembered. “He would play it cool even if it killed him.” They did a long set, well over an hour, and climaxed with the title song of Pardners, which would open the next day: “You and me, we’ll be the greatest partners, buddies, and pals!” They hugged. Then they ran off the stage, each to his own dressing room, forswearing any encores.
Jerry lay on his bed practically hallucinating. He called Patti in tears. He worked up the nerve to call Dean.
“Hey, pallie,” he heard. “How’re ya holdin’ up?”
“I don’t know yet,” he lied. “I just want to say … we’ve had some good times, Paul.” (He often used his partner’s middle name as a sign of closeness.)
“There’ll be more.”
“Yeah … well … take care of yourself, that’s all. …”
“You too, pardner.”
They said good-bye.
A quarter-century later, Jerry sat down to write his autobiography. For the opening pages he chose to write not about his birth or his stage debut or his wedding day or the births of his sons or his first day as a movie actor or his first day as a director. He wrote about the moment in the dark in a hotel room above the Copa, the moment he lost his brother, his hero, his partner. The person he loved more than anyone else in the world—more even than his parents, his wife, or his children—was gone from his life, and he never fully recovered.