Homer Simpson, troglodyte daddy to an animated TV family, sits watching the Super Bowl on television as the announcer boasts that the game is being broadcast all over the world. In sequence, a pagoda, an African straw hut, the Kremlin, and a tent in the Sahara flash before us, all with the same sounds of NFL hype emerging from them. Finally, we see two men in striped pullovers and berets sitting on a couch, an open window behind them revealing the Eiffel Tower. Though we can’t see the TV they’re watching, we hear emanating from it the same game sounds we’ve heard all along. One of the men mutters a complaint under his breath and aims a remote control at the set. Now the men are smiling broadly. From the unseen TV we hear a holler—“Hey Laaay-deeee!!”—and one of the men announces, contentedly, “Formidable!”
The host of the “Weekend Update” news segment on “Saturday Night Live” reports on the opening of the Euro Disney theme park in a suburb of Paris. “Later that day,” he announces, “Goofy was declared a genius.”
A New Yorker cartoon: Middle-aged white-collar husband and wife at breakfast. Wife looks glum. Husband says, “I love you the way the French love Jerry Lewis.”
Paramount no longer wanted him, TV networks no longer wanted him, even the loyal audience that had supported him on stage and in movie theaters for nearly twenty years was shrinking. But an audience to which he’d only had a passing connection had blossomed into something neither he nor anybody else quite understood.
In March 1965, when Jerry arrived at Paris’s Orly airport to begin work on Boeing Boeing, he received a rock star’s greeting. Although it was the middle of the night, his airplane was met by what The New York Times later called “a swarm of wild-eyed fans, a phalanx of reporters, a rout of photographers and a small but select group of France’s leading film critics.” The crush was so overwhelming that Jerry was forced to hold an impromptu press conference in an airport lounge. The next day, every major French newspaper covered the event.
The entire French capital seemed swept up in Jerrymania throughout the comedian’s week-long visit. Le Passy, a Parisian art cinema, held a three-week-long Jerry Lewis festival to commemorate his arrival, and the world-renowned Cinémathèque Française held a systematic retrospective of his work, complete with seminars about the films. As he did at home whenever he was touring in support of a film, he held a reception for journalists in his hotel suite—a private cocktail party for twenty or so members of the French film press. At the soirée, Jerry was presented with an award from his guests, who’d recently voted The Nutty Professor the best film released in France in 1964 (against such competition as My Fair Lady and Zorba the Greek).
Jerry felt a sense of triumph and personal vindication. “After sixteen years in motion pictures,” he recalled later, “having put my heart and soul into it, only to find myself denied the recognition I so desperately wanted from the critics of my own country, here the critics honored me.” He considered his receipt of the award “a coronation of [a] sort, and my crown was sweet revenge.”
During the next few months, word of Jerry’s French reputation spread at home. It’s not clear what startled Americans most: that his films were more popularly successful in France than those of other American stars, or that his French admirers included intellectuals and serious film critics, groups that reviled or ignored him at home. Nevertheless, it was true: He was both genuinely popular and critically respected in France. As early as 1954, when Martin and Lewis were still on good terms, Living It Up was released in France as Ce n’est pas une vie! C’est pas une vie Jerry! (or, “This isn’t a life. It’s a Jerry-life”), suggesting that as far as the French public was concerned, the team was a one-man show. But at the same time, respected cinéastes in such journals as Cahiers du cinéma and Positif began writing about Jerry’s work in some critical depth as early as 1956.*
The French writings propounding Jerry’s art weren’t film reviews, but serious theoretical treatises about Lewis’s comic technique, the social and psychological dimensions of his humor, and his relationship to such forebears as Chaplin, Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy. To be true, Jerry was not a universal taste even in France. The most famous of the Cahiers critics, François Truffaut (who later in life was himself, ironically, more admired as a director abroad—in his case, in America—than at home), kept Jerry at a leery distance throughout the Martin and Lewis years. Reviewing Sailor Beware, he wrote, “Jerry Lewis, a new comedian, puts on the face of an American ‘avant-gardiste,’ very effeminate, with a short hairdo and bangs. It goes without saying that he is also overpowered by all the known signs of degeneracy: a fat chin, thick lips, and the hint of a goiter. He crunches everything put in his mouth—even a thermometer (which he mistakes for a candy cane). His blood is colorless and his extremely acute sense of smell allows him to detect women from a distance of three hundred feet.”
What Truffaut saw in Jerry—hipsterism, Borscht Belt mincing, infantilism, and even Jewishness (in Truffaut’s couched parlance, “degeneracy” and “thick lips”)—struck him not as a parody of American excess but as an instance of it. Yet he was one of the few French critics—and, for that matter, French citizens—to fail to see the humor in Jerry’s grotesquerie. In Paris alone, for instance, Artists and Models sold forty-six thousand tickets in its first week: a good take in an American city, an astounding one in a foreign country with a thriving film industry of its own.
Even more astounding was the intense critical analysis of Jerry in the film journals. To the American public of the 1950s and ’60s, the very notion of a film journal would have been alien. Unlike their French counterparts, American moviegoers still thought of the cinema as a medium composed primarily of actors playing in stories. They went to see “the new John Wayne movie” or “the new Western” rather than “the new John Ford film,” which would have been a more typical European designation. Part of the difference is due to the prominent role of intellectuals in European popular culture, as opposed to the relative absence of so-called public intellectuals in America in those decades. But it also has to do with the ways in which French audiences—and the French critics whose relatively dense writings they read—understood the cinema: namely, as a medium of directors, not stars, stories, or studios.
This auteur theory of film criticism is almost wholly a French invention, though, like Method acting, it was in wide practice before it was ever codified, labeled, or systematically applied. What the auteur theory attempts, baldly, is to identify the stylistic, thematic, and personal habits of film directors under the presumption that they (and not screenwriters, stars, producers, studios, or even genres) have ultimate authorial power over a film’s creation. A director is seen, in this light, in much the way a novelist or painter or composer is seen, as an artist expressing a particular sensibility through a medium. What especially characterized the cinema, however, according to the French critics first associated with auteurisme, is that directors aren’t normally able to control their own destinies as artists, so commercial and industrialized are the means of production in the medium. The most powerful auteurs, therefore, are the directors who manage to express their vision despite the pressures of employers, famous actors, and even scripts. Howard Hawks, who made films in every popular genre (Westerns, crime films, musicals, screwball comedies, biblical epics, etc.), was a God-like figure to the first auteuristes because of his versatility, on the one hand, and his consistent concern with themes of bravery, loyalty, and honest work, on the other; films of his such as The Big Sleep, Red River, Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, and even Gentlemen Prefer Blondes were covered with encomia in the pages of the most influential French film journals.
Auteurisme didn’t appear in America until 1963, when the francophile film critic Andrew Sarris published an essay describing the theory in Film Culture. In the United States it remained a marginal, even academic concern for the few people even aware of it; it enjoyed some scandalous repute, in fact, when screenwriters and their critical allies used it as a cudgel in their perennial war on the Hollywood system, claiming that writers, and not directors, were the medium’s true auteurs.
But in France the theory was widely known and little contested. Just as they were willing to accept writers of what Americans considered “trashy” literary genres (horror or detective fiction) as true artists, just as they accepted jazz musicians and performers of African-American popular music as geniuses, the French public found it completely plausible that the person responsible for approving the lighting and camera movement, signing off on decor and wardrobe, coaching the actors through their scenes, and assembling at least a rough version of the film in the editing room—in other words, the director—was responsible for whatever was artistic in the cinema.
French critics and audiences of the 1950s didn’t admire only such virtuosi as Hawks, who seemed able to do anything well. They were also great fans of screen comedy, domestic and foreign, silent and with sound. The French discovered Buster Keaton before anyone in America thought of him as a master; French adults appreciated Laurel and Hardy and Harry Langdon; Chaplin, of course, was considered a master all around the world, but the French made a home for the great comic writer-director Preston Sturges after Hollywood dismissed him as an eccentric egoist with no good work left in him—his last film, Les carnets du Major Thompson, released in the U.S. as The French They Are a Funny Race, was filmed entirely on French soil (it flopped here, but hit big there). Jean Renoir, widely considered France’s most important director, made comedies all the time, and native comic actors such as Fernandel and Louis de Funès were exceedingly popular, if almost unknown abroad.
In the 1950s France did produce one comic filmmaker whose excellence was recognized the world over: Jacques Tati, a quixotic genius who wrote, directed, edited, and starred in his own films, often taking years to create them. Tati was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1953 for Les vacances de M. Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday), and he won a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1958 for Mon oncle (on a night on which Jerry emceed the broadcast). A gangly six-foot-five-inch Russian (born Tatischeff) with pinched features, Tati specialized in a unique brand of character comedy derived in part from Chaplin’s experiments in sound in Modern Times but truly original nonetheless. His principal character, Monsieur Hulot, was a well meaning, almost entirely nonverbal Parisian bourgeois, a Gallic everyman whose manners and interests mirrored those of his countrymen with just a slightly detectable ironic dimension. He was, like Jerry’s Kid persona, a complete klutz and schlemiel, capable of reducing a quaint sitting room to a shambles while simply trying to straighten a picture on a wall, but he almost always tried to blend in—unlike the Kid, who was always bent on commanding the scene.
Tati’s films were shaggier than Jerry’s—less indebted, obviously, to Hollywood notions of story line, but also freer of sentimental trappings while nevertheless boasting a sympathetic core. Though Tati directed a mere handful of pictures in comparison with Jerry’s copious output, the two men made similar sorts of films—Hulot’s disaster-laden visit to a seaside resort hotel is similar in many respects to The Bellboy, and Mon oncle, a story about a lonely boy who prefers the company of his odd-duck uncle to the stifling atmosphere of his own house, is—like The Geisha Boy—a reworking of some of the themes explored by Chaplin in The Kid (The Geisha Boy was, in fact, known in France as Le Kid en kimono). Tati was, like Jerry, a formal innovator, though he experimented more with sound effects, set design, and camera angles than, as Jerry did, with techniques of production such as lighting, miking, and videotape.
A country capable of producing and appreciating a Tati was obviously a place where the comic film was respected as a style of moviemaking with a heritage and a grammar all its own. It’s easy to see, therefore, why the French responded so readily to Jerry even when he was still with Dean. French critics and audiences were, in fact, always on the alert for interesting new developments in Hollywood comedy, and they were quick to notice the work of Frank Tashlin when it appeared on their shores. Of course, Tashlin had the advantage of such splashy, popular performers as Dean, Jerry, and Jayne Mansfield appearing in his first imports, thus assuring that they’d be seen. But his eye for the hyperbolic, the grotesque, and the musically comic was immediately appreciated by French cinéastes. He was considered a Swiftian satirist of the American Dream as Bloated Nightmare. At home, even around the studios, Tashlin was considered a competent hack, but to French eyes he was a witty magician, capable even, according to a newly converted Truffaut writing about Hollywood or Bust, of turning Jerry into someone “more and more delightful with each picture.”
When Martin and Lewis split and Tashlin and Jerry began working together as frequent collaborators, enthusiasm for their films among French audiences was extremely high: Box-office receipts for Tashlin-Lewis films were consistently higher than those for Jerry’s films with other directors. Moreover, the Tashlin-Lewis films revealed to discerning audiences just how much Jerry had contributed to the movies he made (either with Dean or solo) with less expressive filmmakers. The French audience became aware that Jerry’s films with Norman Taurog, Hal Walker, and George Marshall, for instance, contained elements that were more similar to the Tashlin-Lewis films than to any other movies that those pieceworkers ever made. And although they appropriately credited Tashlin with many innovations in his films with Jerry, they also began to perceive a Lewisienne touch, a set of stylistic and thematic tics that recurred throughout the comic’s career: the excruciatingly drawn-out scenes of comic embarrassment; an attraction-revulsion relationship with women; a fascination with doubles, role-playing, and disguises; and a love of grotesque distortions of the human body, among many other obsessively repeated motifs. (A brilliant Cahiers article in 1967 offered a systematic dictionary of Lewisienne terms and themes, ranging from his use of child protagonists to his habit of wearing white socks with black shoes.) Nevertheless, even though they realized that Jerry’s habitual ideas were in sync with Tashlin’s, the French were biased toward directors and thus heaped most of their praise on Tashlin, whose non-Lewis films they saw as further evidence that the director was bringing at least as much to his films with Jerry as was the star.
To their pleasure, however, they found their critical stance in need of adjustment when The Bellboy (Le dingue du palace, or “The Nut of the Palace”) and The Ladies’ Man (Le tombeur de ces dames, or “Casanova and the Girls”) debuted in France. An entirely new face of Jerry’s became clear: He had, as they’d suspected, been contributing crucially to his films throughout his Hollywood career, as demonstrated by his assured writing and direction of comic sequences, many of which bore the stamp of his earlier work under different directors. Something they’d sensed all along—that the commonalities they felt in Jerry’s films were not necessarily created by his producers, writers, or even directors but by Jerry himself, who had been “directing” key passages in his films for years—had been proven. They felt that he had joined Chaplin, Keaton, and Tati in the ranks of full-blown comic auteurs, and they were eager to see him reveal even more of his creativity, inventiveness, and personality.
Jerry had many champions among the fraternity of French film critics, ranging from converts like Truffaut to wild-eyed enthusiasts like Jean-Luc Godard, who wrote, “Jerry Lewis is the only American director who has made progressive films,” adding that Jerry “was much better than Chaplin and Keaton.” He had imitators in French show business and cinema—the Laurelesque comic Pierre Etaix, who wrote a book-length homage to Jerry in the form of a long poem accompanied by dozens of caricatures, and Louis Malle, whose dizzying early film Zazie dans le métro, about a rambunctious young girl’s tour of Paris, has many of the hallmarks of Tashlin and Lewis’s comic experiments.
But no one worshiped Lewis more zealously than Robert Benayoun, a slim, bespectacled writer with Positif whose mousy aspect, swollen nose, and dark, carefully combed hair made him look, unfortunately, rather like one of Jerry’s comic creations. Benayoun wrote some of the first serious critiques of Jerry’s work in the French film press, and he wrote about Jerry more consistently—and more discerningly—than any other critic the comedian has ever had.
Benayoun related to Jerry strictly as a critic throughout the 1950s, offering startling insights into Jerry’s art. In the essay “Simple Simon, ou l’anti-James Dean,” for instance, he showed that Jerry’s ability to convey adolescent and even childish emotions despite his obvious chronological maturity predated James Dean’s widely lauded sensitivity and vulnerability. But whereas other of Jerry’s French admirers such as Bernard Davidson, André Labarthe, Serge Daney, and Bertrand Tavernier (later a much-lauded director in his own right) kept themselves at critical removes, Beanyoun sought a more intimate relationship with his subject, contacting Jerry’s offices in the early 1960s and making the hajj to Hollywood to visit his idol soon after. Benayoun conducted nearly a dozen interviews with Jerry, starting in 1963 and continuing for nearly a decade. He visited Jerry’s film sets, he ate dinner at Jerry’s house and met the family, he attended the disastrous premiere of the ABC series at the Jerry Lewis Theater itself (he reported to Positif’s readers that the show was filled with “riches and hilarities”), while at the same time remaining an important critic of Jerry’s films in the French film press and French newspapers. He was, in short, far more of a fan and an intimate of his subject than Americans consider healthy for a critic or journalist, but he was starstruck by Jerry, who cultivated Benayoun as a chronicler of his life, art, and times just as he had Peter Bogdanovich and Richard Gehman. (In a sense, then, while Jerry didn’t invent his French reputation, he encouraged it as both good business and an ego boost.)
Benayoun’s solicitude may have seemed slightly odd to the French, who were bona fide Lewis enthusiasts without quite sharing the critic’s fanaticism. But to Americans, it was downright perverse. Bad enough that an entire nation was praising this comedian, whom his own countrymen had all but dismissed; that one man should seemingly spearhead the canonization singlehandedly was seen as a near-obscenity. In 1968, for instance, when Andrew Sarris sought to distance his own brand of auteurisme from the French brand in part by criticizing Jerry, he described Benayoun—without naming him—as “a Positif critic who so resembles Jerry Lewis that hero-worship verges on narcissism.” Benayoun responded four years later by dedicating Bonjour, Monsieur Lewis, his book-length collection of articles, reviews, photos, and facts, to “Andrew Sarris, le Spiro Agnew de la critique américaine.”*
The Sarris-Benayoun imbroglio illustrated the failure of the two nations and their film critics to understand each other’s perspective on Jerry and his work. To Americans, the French affection for Jerry was a joke, a license to dismiss both the comic and the country with one snide comment; “The French? What do they know? They like Jerry Lewis.” To the French, who discovered Edgar Allan Poe, Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker, and other indisputable giants who found no appreciative audiences on their native American soil, Jerry was yet another genius neglected in his myopic homeland.
In part, the divergence in opinion stemmed from the American audience’s long (contempt-breeding) familiarity with Jerry by the time he had achieved something worthy of critical attention. By the early ’60s, when Jerry really had become an important director, he had long since passed from the American public’s consciousness as a hot item. “Jerry was never chic in America,” reflected Peter Bogdanovich, one of the few American writers who took the comedian seriously at this stage in his career. “I think before he and Dean made pictures, there was a moment when they were at the Copa in the late ’40s when they were kind of chic. Orson Welles told me that it was to die. He said you’d piss your pants it was so funny. But when they got into pictures, I don’t think they were ever chic.”
Sarris, similarly, acknowledged that early on “there was a time when people sort of liked him in an odd way, or he could orchestrate an interesting receptivity.” But, he continued, by the time Jerry began to direct films, “the bulk of the intelligentsia had abandoned him and had no interest in that sort of thing. He still had a kind of box-office thing with people who knew what they were getting, his films were still making money, but there was no real dialogue over whether he was good or not. I mean, no one debated whether The Nutty Professor or The Bellboy or these different stylized things he did were any good. There was no one to talk to about them.”
As word of Jerry’s French reputation spread in the United States (The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a feature article on the subject in February 1966), the situation became a way to demean both France and Jerry Lewis in one fell swoop. The French—eaters of snails and frogs’ legs, unpredictable political allies, a nation of rude waiters and pretentious fops—became more ludicrous than ever in American eyes; and Jerry, his audience at home shrinking in both size and age, became more and more a laughingstock who had to appeal to an obscure foreign cult audience for validation as an entertainer.
At no time, perhaps, was the schism between French and American critics more pronounced than in the release of The Family Jewels in the summer of 1965. “Film shapes up as comparatively mild entry,” wrote Variety in its characteristically terse style, while Bosley Crowther flatly declared, “There isn’t a gem in the lot.” France-Soir, on the contrary, declared the film’s sentimental ending proof that Jerry was “a true human being and not merely a marvelous laugh-making machine,” and Benayoun, writing several thousand words about the film for Positif, described how it “deliberately severs space-time and leaves us a series of nearly interchangeable moments, a technique even more audacious when applied here than in a story with a more dramatic appearance.”
As it turns out, both camps were right. There is something incredibly doltish about The Family Jewels. The plotting is utterly arbitrary, the basic story ludicrous, and the filmmaking characteristically sloppy; in an apogee of Jerry’s studied carelessness, each of seven characters he plays wears the wedding band–pinky ring–fancy watch combo that he refused to doff for the cameras. But it’s also a sampler of comic invention, with Jerry creating two hilarious new characters—Captain Eddie, the confidently inept airline pilot, and Bugsy, the ruthless, moronic gangster. Additionally, characters from other films are given fresh life—Buddy Love and Professor Kelp are reworked as a caustic circus clown and a bumbling fashion photographer, respectively.
There are dull stretches, but also pleasant surprises: Gary Lewis and the Playboys make a cameo appearance, and Jerry—whom quick-draw pistol artist Bob Munden claimed had the fastest hands he had ever seen on an amateur—performs several amazing pool tricks. But it’s rather an impersonal, sporadically lively film, a let-down from the highly personal work in The Nutty Professor and The Patsy, and far less fun than such Jerry-amok films as The Bellboy, The Ladies’ Man, and The Errand Boy. It combines episodic comedy with a farcical narrative, but fails to see either through fully. While the American critics may have been overly hostile, the French notion that Jerry was somehow evading his own personality with the multiple roles, however intriguing, is equally wrongheaded.
Still, finding an insightful and appreciative audience for his work must have brought some comfort to Jerry in the summer of 1965, when he was a man without a studio or a TV network and only the second most popular entertainer in his own house. Gary, with Patti serving as his manager, continued to sell millions of records; he had released three LPs and five singles (all of which hit Billboard’s Top Five) during the first year of his career, with well over three million total units sold.
In September Gary was invited to host “Hullabaloo,” the NBC prime-time pop music and dance show modeled on the already venerable “American Bandstand.” Gary’s “guests” were Paul Revere and the Raiders, Barry “Eve of Destruction” McGuire, and a young singer named Joanie Summers. As a lark, Jerry was brought on to cohost the program, which aired on September 20.
To open the show, Jerry and Gary ran out to sing a duet of the Beatles’ “Help!” Jerry, sporting a navy sports coat with a red pocket square, uneasily read the lyrics to the song off cue cards and mugged and screeched to compensate for his patent uneasiness. The two pretended to step on each other’s lines and joked about Gary’s overweening ambition in a kind of sit-com Freudianism (at one point, Jerry “excused himself” for his poor timing: “It’s so long since I worked with somebody”).
Later on, after introducing Barry McGuire as someone with “something important to say,” Jerry himself took a singing turn. Gary announced that “my mother asked me to introduce a new record,” and Jerry came out in utter sincerity to sing a song whose title was never given. It was a kind of bad Dylan pastiche, with vaguely poetic lyrics and a brooding undertone. Though he was playing it straight, the very sight of him in this milieu singing this material was so incongruous that it seemed like a joke.
Jerry did some more singing during the show’s “Top of the Pops” segment, during which he was saddled with Roger Miller’s “Kansas City Star.” In a red V-necked sweater, he embarrassedly walked through a chorus of the song, shrugging dismissively as he concluded, a man completely unconnected to the very scene he was making. The show ended with Gary and Jerry bidding the audience adieu (“My son thanks you” and “My father thanks you”) and a performance by Paul Revere and the Raiders during which Jerry grabbed lead singer Mark Lindsay’s tricorner hat and a spare (unplugged) guitar and began mugging with the dancers on the “Hullabaloo” malt shop set. If it was a travesty, at least he would inject it with some energy.
The week before “Hullabaloo” aired, Jerry began to work on the film Paramount had refused to let him make with their money, Three on a Couch. Most of the crew members whose loyalty he’d cultivated in sixteen years at Paramount were no longer with him, as they were full-time employees of the studio. Cinematographer Wally Kelly was along merely as a consultant, and editorial assistant Rusty Wiles was on board as a full-fledged editor, but it wasn’t the typical homemade Jerry Lewis film. The script, for instance, had been written by a committee of four, none of whom were Jerry or Bill Richmond; for the first time, Jerry would be directing someone else’s material.
At least one other old friend was on the premises—Janet Leigh, playing the female lead as Jerry’s romantic interest, a psychiatrist who specialized in the romantic traumas of young women. Much had changed since the days when Janet was making silly movies in Jerry’s Pacific Palisades backyard: She and Tony Curtis had divorced in 1962, she’d married stockbroker Bob Brandt later that very year, she’d been nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her famous brief role in Psycho, and, in general, she’d mixed a career as a successful actress with a real-life role as wife and mother. Socially, she hadn’t seen much of Jerry since she and Curtis had felt themselves choked out of his circle by the crush of sycophants. In fact, she’d become close with Dean and Jeanne Martin, who had introduced her to her second husband and even stood for them at their wedding (giving Leigh the distinction of having had Dean and Jerry as best men at two different marriages). Still, she was glad to be working with her old friend, and she was particularly impressed at how he had evolved as a filmmaker.
“He had matured and grown so,” she recalled. “He was one of the best directors I’ve ever worked with. I’m not saying the best director, but he’s definitely at the top. Really, he was wonderful. It was the first time I’d ever seen an instant replay used on the set. And it was wonderful—you didn’t get the full scope, but you could see if the scene worked or not, so you would know whether to do it again.”
Leigh was taken aback by the relative sobriety of the set, so unlike the atmosphere of high jinks that prevailed when she’d worked with Dean and Jerry on Living It Up. Perhaps it was a sign that his childlike exultation in the very process of directing had waned, perhaps he was trying to impress his new bosses at Columbia with his professionalism, but the wild atmosphere that marked the shoot of The Ladies’ Man, for instance, wasn’t in evidence. “There was a sense of gaiety,” remembered Leigh. “They’d be throwing the baseball at lunchtime and things like that.” But there were no practical jokes of wild outfits or touring groups of foreign dignitaries. It was strictly professional, she said, though not stifling. “You can tell the tone of a set the minute you walk on a stage,” she explained, praising the bonhomie on Jerry’s set, “and you can tell whether there’s harmony or whether everyone’s at everyone else’s throat. It’s tough enough to make movies, you know, and to have that kind of atmosphere is almost intolerable. The people who set the tone are the director and the stars. If somebody’s going to be uptight, you can tell right away.”
Jerry, she was grateful to remember, wasn’t like that. Leigh enjoyed the atmosphere so much, in fact, that she led the crew and extras in a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” when Jerry arrived for lunch.
Not that the shoot was entirely without its troubles. There was the matter of a theme song. Jerry had wanted “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” but was told in a telegram from a Columbia music supervisor that the publisher refused him rights to the song “under any circumstances whatever.” (He went instead with a song composed of his own lyrics and Lou Brown’s music, “A Now and Later Love.”) And, as on Cinderfella, a young actress found herself on Jerry’s wrong side and was fired from the picture early in production. In this case, it was Jill Donohue, a twenty-six-year-old movie brat (her father, Jack, was a longtime TV director who’d made some light comedy and musical features) making only her second film. On October 4, Louella Parsons reported that Donohue had shown Jerry brash disrespect: “Where are their think-machines when a novice like Jill Donohue, impatient over waiting for her scenes to be shot in ‘Three on a Couch,’ walks off the set at Columbia? This, after Jerry Lewis, the producer as well as the star, had asked Jill to remain. When he learned she had bolted, Jerry said, ‘Fire her. Get someone who will appreciate the break.’ Within 24 hours, Kathleen Freeman had taken over.”
The contours of the story were essentially true—Donohue had left the picture, Freeman had replaced her. Jerry’s office, however, hadn’t been caught unawares by Parsons’s report. In fact, Jerry’s new publicist, Jim Flood,* had planted it. He told his boss that Donohue’s press agent had told Parsons that his client had “walked off the picture because she didn’t feel the part was good enough for her and the same with the picture, etc.” After checking the story with Joe Stabile, Flood fed Parsons the Jerry Lewis Productions version of events, which was the one run in the column. “I don’t believe in planting this stuff,” Flood told Jerry, “but when they start up it’s the only way we can go.”
It was only a minor contretemps, and the film—which was shot on Columbia’s Burbank lot as well as on locations throughout Los Angeles, in nearby Arcadia, and in San Francisco—concluded principal photography on November 16, just $298,000 over its original $1.8 million budget. One week later, Jerry opened an engagement at the Sands, where, as in the past, he spent his nights on stage and his days sorting through his footage and assembling a rough cut.
There was a final, odd note to 1965, an anonymous, unbilled performance that had a profound effect on Jerry. He had always swiveled ambivalently between the need to be accepted for himself and his work, and the need to be accepted for his fame and fortune. As a kind of experiment with himself, he donned clown makeup and joined the troupe of the Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey circus for a show at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium. “I played in front of twenty-five thousand people,” he recalled, “and not one of them knew who I was.”
Some stars like that sort of anonymity, that reminder of life before fame. Not Jerry: “When I left the auditorium,” he said, “I pulled off the wig and took off the makeup and I burst into tears. Oh, did I cry! I experienced a shocking revelation—that when a clown is through with a performance, he’s nothing, nobody. The people had laughed and wept and applauded. But if I wasn’t Jerry Lewis, I could have walked thorugh them afterwards and they wouldn’t have known who the hell I was. I trembled so much when I thought about it that I couldn’t sleep that night. Next day, I went to a typewriter and wrote a twelve-page screen treatment. ‘Two-Faced Clown.’ One day I’ll make it. When I’m ready.”
That day never came.
In December 1965 Paramount released Boeing Boeing to disheartening notices in the press; though almost every reviewer praised Jerry for his relative restraint as Tony Curtis’s straight man, it didn’t matter—nobody was watching. In February 1966, when Cahiers du cinéma published a special issue devoted at length to Jerry’s work, he was already in production on his thirty-fifth and possibly least worthwhile production, Way … Way Out, his first-ever film for Twentieth Century–Fox. It was written by William Bowers, who’d been producing screenplays since the 1940s, sometimes with distinction (he’d been nominated for two writing Oscars, including one for The Gunfighter) but more often not. Gordon Douglas, an old-school hack of the sort Jerry hadn’t worked with in years, was the director. He was a favorite of Frank Sinatra’s, not because he was especially good but because Sinatra could boss him around, ordering the director to shoot without him until noon so that his days on the set could be crammed into about four hours.
Still, it wasn’t as if the material in Way … Way Out deserved a better helmsman. Jerry and Connie Stevens were cast as an American couple shot into space to conceive a child before their Russian counterparts, Dick Shawn and Anita Ekberg, could do the same. It was ludicrous—purely a money job (he claimed to have been paid eight hundred thousand dollars)—and Jerry knew it. He was listless on the set—“I’m on the tired side of pratfalls,” he told an Associated Press reporter—and he was dreaming of drifting out of the limelight altogether, of directing exclusively and making only occasional film and television appearances.
He told Earl Wilson he was almost ready to quit performing: “I’m waiting to find some young idiot to do what I did, and I’ll retire behind the camera, which is where I believe my real field lies.” He was hoping that Gary, whose band had recorded the title song to Way … Way Out and who, Jerry told Wilson, had “all that’s needed to be our next great comic,” might fill the bill; he was eagerly anticipating his son’s debut in a Kansas City production of Bye Bye Birdie that summer.
But he was also having talks with Woody Allen, still a rising young talent with a single screen credit to his name (as actor and writer of What’s New, Pussycat?, 1965’s chic sex farce). Allen had a new script to shoot, a parodic crime drama called Take the Money and Run—and he wanted Jerry to direct him in it. He had seen The Nutty Professor (in Paris, yet!) and recognized in it a perfect version of the sort of film he wanted to make. He became a big fan of Jerry’s work. “He knows how to cinematically film a joke,” Allen told Newsday. “Even with a long-term joke, he knows how to hold the shot just long enough. The opening scene in The Patsy—he comes in as a bellboy juggling the ice cubes—you remember, he held that one just right, just long enough. In my opinion, he’s the best comedian’s director around.”
Allen wasn’t just being diplomatic. The fact was, since 1960 (indeed, since the silent era) Jerry was practically the only comedian’s director around, a man who’d worked on both sides of the comic lens and thus understood comprehensively not only how to come up with a funny performance but how to film one. Knowing that Jerry often made himself available to young comics seeking guidance (he had many conversations with Lenny Bruce over the years, encouraging him even though he was extremely frustrated with Bruce’s stubborn insistence on political material and blue language), Allen approached Jerry with the idea of directing the script. As Jerry later remembered, “He came to me to direct Take the Money and Run, and I wasn’t available. He thought that they’d like to do the picture in eight weeks and it would be so great if I would direct it. I said, ‘Woody, I spend twenty-eight weeks in prep. Shooting in eight weeks? We’re talking thirty-six weeks.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’ Get a good cameraman, get some good people who will teach you what to do with the lenses, give yourself a good two-three week prelim of learning what it should take you twenty years to learn.’”
Jerry didn’t bother to tell Allen about how he’d turned around The Bellboy in less than three months, but Allen took the older comic’s advice, finally releasing the film in 1969. When he was ready to make his next film, Bananas, he once again asked Jerry to direct it and was once again gently rebuffed, but he remained grateful to Jerry for inspiration and encouragement throughout his career.
At around the same time Allen was trying to get Jerry to save him from having to direct himself, another young Jewish comic was finding himself behind a camera for the first time. Mel Brooks, Jerry’s reluctant collaborator on The Ladies’ Man, was shooting The Producers, a satire about venal Broadway money men, from his own script. Although neither Brooks’s film nor Allen’s was the sort of plotless, abstract gag fest that Jerry began his directing career with, and although neither film featured a protagonist as wildly ill suited to life on Earth as Jerry’s familiar character, the very fact of these films was a kind of triumphant result of Jerry’s insistence on making films of his own.
Whatever Barney Balaban’s thoughts in allowing Jerry to direct The Bellboy, the establishment of a precedent for other Jewish comics to follow in becoming filmmakers couldn’t have been among them. But Jerry had, in fact, formed a bridge connecting early generations of Jewish performing comedians (Danny Kaye, the Marx Brothers, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar) with a new generation of comics who seized control of the presentation of their material on screen. Moreover, where the Jewish dimension of the older generation’s material was almost wholly repressed, Jerry’s nebbishy persona, though never explicitly Semitic, paved the way for a comic persona like Allen’s to be presented to a larger audience as a frankly Jewish character. Jerry would never play an acknowledgedly Jewish character in a feature film (though several of the characters he played on TV in the 1980s would be explicitly Jewish), but he clearly prepared America for the uncloseting of a wholly Jewish sensibility in Hollywood film comedy in the late 1960s. Surely it was this—not a desire to become another Stanley Belt himself—that drew Allen to Jerry as a mentor. Nevertheless, few other comics or filmmakers were canny enough to realize Jerry’s role in their liberation, and Jerry was left to direct himself in films that had no impact on people who weren’t already eager to see them.
Television. He couldn’t help himself. Like a scab on his knee, it was an irresistible temptation, though every time he played with it he was left bloodied. He did a cameo on an NBC special celebrating the glories of burlesque. He did a cameo on “Batman,” sticking his head out a window and having a chat with the Caped Crusader as he climbed a wall. And when Sammy Davis, Jr., fell ill in February 1966, he volunteered to guest-host his NBC variety program for a night.
Sammy had been getting murdered in the ratings by “Hogan’s Heroes,” the popular concentration-camp sitcom, and he had jokingly “declared war” on his competition. But Hogan himself, actor Bob Crane, didn’t care for the tenor of Sammy’s remarks. In an interview with Los Angeles Times TV critic Hal Humphrey, Crane spoke up about Sammy and about relishing Jerry’s appearance opposite his show: “Listen, I know Sammy’s a big talent, but people don’t like to hear a guy talk about himself that way. Look at what happened to Jerry Lewis after he told everybody how great he’d be with that two-hour show every week. Jerry’s a fan of mine, too, and says he watches my show every week. Wonder if he’ll be watching this Friday?”
This was just the sort of thing to set Jerry off. He clipped the article and sent it off to Crane with an angry letter. He took pains to prove to Crane that he’d never claimed he’d be “great” on ABC. Jerry was determined to discount the possibility that Crane was misquoted: “Although Humphrey isn’t one of my favorite people, I must say, he’s one hell of a newspaperman.” And he concluded with a bit of advice from an older star to a younger one: “The BIG TIME is a marvelous place to be invited to. Play it BIG and you’ll never know the pain of the SMALL TIME again,” signing off with the following cryptic note: “cc: Martin Borman [sic], Rudy Hess, E. Braun.”
Crane was reduced to groveling by Jerry’s letter, hurriedly dashing off an elaborate apology to Jerry. “Never was I so glad to receive a letter as I was yours,” he began, claiming that he’d been trying to apologize by telegram ever since Humphrey’s article appeared and offering an elaborate explanation of how the columnist had turned Crane’s praise of Jerry into ridicule. “Hal extracted what he wanted to hear from me, a rap at Sammy, and God knows why, a rap at you,” Crane said, closing on a truly humble note: “Jerry, I hope to hell I haven’t bored you with this, but I felt even worse than you about the column.”
Feeling that Crane had bowed deeply enough, Jerry wrote a letter absolving the actor of his sins—accepting his explanation “without question”—and reflecting philosophically on the incident: “I wouldn’t even guess at the number of people around hating each other because they didn’t take the time to check it out.”
To Humphrey, however, a writer to whom he’d granted many interviews over the years, he was less forgiving. He sent the columnist copies of all of the correspondence between himself and Crane, along with a caustic cover letter: “I am genuinely sorry the respect I had for you when I wrote Mr. Crane has sadly diminished.”
Humphrey, who saved all of the materials Jerry sent him, responded that Jerry had been had by Crane: “I don’t recall that you ever accused me of misquoting you in any of the many interviews we have had together, a couple of which, as you recall, you taped.” Humphrey declared that he took careful notes of the Crane interview and “was amused to find that Mr. Crane’s memory, if you believe him, is more trustworthy.” But Jerry didn’t answer, content—having slapped a hot TV star and sneered at an important columnist—to let the matter die.
Jerry hadn’t stumped for a film since The Nutty Professor, so when Three on a Couch was released in the summer of 1966, he decided to embark on a fourteen-city tour to promote it. There were other things going on as well—he would spend a week in New York hosting “The Tonight Show” (and get into an ugly spat on his final show with his guest and old friend Jack E. Leonard, who would walk off, leaving Jerry looking dazed and hurt); he would stop in Kansas City to see Gary open in Bye Bye Birdie; he would do a lot of camera shopping and spend time at baseball stadiums and race tracks. But the main idea was, as in the past, to sell tickets to a Jerry Lewis production.
This was no Second Jewish Bataan Death March, however. There would be no running to a dozen theaters in each city to perform with a band. He was forty; he didn’t need the strain. Instead, he taped appearances for local TV and had sit-downs with local print and broadcast journalists. He even spent time with old friends—he had dinner with Lonnie Brown in Toronto, met with comic Alan Sherman in Boston, and performed a show at Brown’s Hotel on the July Fourth weekend.
Still, though he didn’t have the old retinue with him, he continued to travel in regal style. The hundred-thousand-dollar tour involved two private airplanes—one for Jerry and his people, one for their luggage. Variety got its hands on a copy of a directive the Lewis organization sent Columbia’s local press representatives at each of Jerry’s stops. The niggling five-page document was eye-opening proof of just how Jerry saw himself. It stipulated that Jerry and his entourage be met at the airport with two “brand new,” “meticulously clean” limousines and a bonded truck to carry Jerry’s forty pieces of luggage (the recipient was to come to the airport in a taxi). Jerry was to be put up in a two-bedroom suite (“the Presidential Suite whenever possible”) with the following amenities: two bottles of Courvoisier Brandy V.S.O.P., a case of beer (Coors where available, Budweiser otherwise), a bowl of fruit, a color TV, and the name of the hotel manager and his apartment phone extension or home telephone number. There were even instructions about autograph requests (they had to be channeled through an aide) and for personal messages: “In almost every city on the tour Mr. Lewis will have friends who will be calling him. You are to direct all such calls to Mr. Lewis’ secretary.”
Variety also reported that Jerry was to be interviewed in a private hotel room other than his suite, or in the suite itself, if no other room was available, so that he could (openly) record the interview in order “to provide the star with a history of his statements and a record of his changing attitudes in later years.” He would thus sit in his black lounging pajamas, complete with brilliant red JL monogram (which Newsday’s Mike McGrady speculated might glow in the dark, “serving even in the middle of the night as a reminder of identity”) speaking forth on such topics as the movie business, the Vietnam War, and civil rights. The tour was over by the second week of July, but it didn’t have the impact he had hoped for. Although Three on a Couch got positive reviews in some surprising places—Richard Schickel of Life declared that the film revealed Jerry “proceeding more intelligently, more funnily than he has in years,” and went on to say that “as both director and star he demonstrates admirable economy”—Columbia saw disappointingly modest profits on the film.
It really didn’t deserve much more. It’s a dreary piece of work, despite giving Jerry another opportunity to play multiple roles. As Christopher Pride, an artist who wins a plum commission from the French government (his own countrymen, tellingly, don’t appreciate him), he’s dullish, if a full-fledged adult, all Sy DeVore suits, martinis, and haughty demeanor. Pride seduces his psychiatrist girlfriend’s patients in three guises—a loud-mouthed Texan, an eager jock, and a nebbishy Southern zoology buff—and even dons drag to play the zoologist’s twin sister. Since Pride, out of costume, has almost nothing funny to do (Jerry does handle an early drunken scene well), the film goes painfully without laughs for quite a long time—and even then the caricatures are disappointingly tame (only Rutherford the zoologist allows him to do really broad, funny comedy).
Structurally, the film moves more smoothly and more mindfully of its narrative obligations than anything Jerry had previously made. And the look is striking—modern, clean, and spare, with bold color choices. Price’s inner office is entirely white, with a microphone hanging from the ceiling and a theatrical lighting system that can render the room blue or red at the turn of a rheostat. But it’s not saying very much if the decor is a film’s most striking feature. Three on a Couch is certainly a more conventionally mature comedy than anything Jerry made at Paramount—no surprise, since it’s the first film he directed from somebody else’s script. But by the same token, it’s flatter, with none of the anarchic flavor of his earlier work. The film evinces the commercial bind in which Jerry found himself at forty-one—impelled to appeal to an adult audience, yet best equipped for family comedies and even children’s entertainment. Mature audiences weren’t necessarily going to see a new Jerry Lewis movie in the first place; for the kids, the film had to have been a bore. The conundrum would haunt Jerry’s movies for the rest of his career.
As he did after The Nutty Professor tour, he repaired to the sea to recover and catch up on work. He was writing yet another script with Bill Richmond, and this one even had a nautical theme. He was on his third boat—Pussycat and Pussycat II had given way to Princess, a sixty-five-foot cabin cruiser he’d bought the previous year for $200,000 and on which he’d spent an additional $150,000 to update to his specifications with electronic gizmos, wood paneling, matching armchairs with “Mr. Captain” and “Mrs. Captain” stenciled on them, and Baccarat crystal. On July 18 he boarded the boat in San Francisco with a secretary, his stage director Hal Bell, ship’s engineer Art Gannon, and skipper Joe Proux. The plan was to sail to San Diego, where the ship was usually docked, and prepare it for a trip that he, Patti, and the boys would take to Mexico a week later.
The boat never arrived. At 2:30 A.M. on July 19, just off the coast of Monterey, the hull cracked and the Princess began taking on more water than Proux and Gannon could bail, even with sophisticated pumps. Proux roused Jerry and advised him of the situation. “The water was rising fast in the engine room,” Jerry later recalled. “Ten seconds after I got on the radio, raising Maydays. I had no idea if anyone heard us.”
No one had. They began firing flares into the night, but they were far from any real population on the coast. As dawn approached, with the ship going down, Jerry had to make a captain’s most painful decision: “I watched my children’s belongings float across the saloon; toys and things disappearing under swirling water. The night was fading. Through the mist we saw the dim outline of land, perhaps a mile away. I gave orders to abandon ship.”
The five terrified passengers donned life jackets and climbed into an inflatable raft in a desperate effort to make it to shore. The odds were decidedly against them: The sea was rough, the coastline rocky. After making it most of the way to the shore, the raft was capsized by a wave. They swam the rest of the way.
As luck had it, a thirteen-year-old boy named Raymond Gould, who lived in the nearby hamlet of Gorda, had seen the flares during the night and alerted his father, who had called the Coast Guard and then made his way to the shoreline to search for survivors. He came upon Jerry and his harrowed party and brought them to town, where they were given coffee, blankets, and dry clothes. Arrangements were made for a rental car so they could drive back home. Before they left, Jerry returned to the beach to watch as his boat, which had been anchored within sight of the shore, slipped under the waves. Eventually, it broke loose and smashed against the rocks. But Jerry was gone by then, driving south in a state of shock.
Some months later, during insurance hearings, it was revealed that the shipyard that built the vessel had used half-inch rivets in some cases where one-inch rivets had been specified. Jerry collected his insurance money—and he boldly bought a new boat with it, the even bigger, more luxurious Princess II—but he had been granted an irrefutable glimpse of his own mortality, just the thing to turn a midlife crisis into a dramatic Hollywood potboiler.
Plans were being laid for the new film—known intermittently as Mind Your Own Business and Ready, Set, Die—to be shot from December 1966 through February 1967. First Jerry would go on a tour of live dates, playing outdoor arenas throughout the country as he had in late summers past. But there was another item on his schedule, something he’d been avoiding for years but that now struck him as an appropriate undertaking.
He hadn’t done a telethon for Muscular Dystrophy since 1961. But now he was immersed in the longest hiatus he’d ever taken from feature filmmaking since his arrival in Hollywood, and he’d been merely an occasional guest on TV for the past three years. The telethon wouldn’t be a huge media event, by any means, but it would be TV, the medium he could never resist.
The MDA had lured Jerry into a single-station broadcast in the New York area, where the organization’s earning power had been decreasing precipitously over the past few years. Bob Ross had been trying to get Jerry to do another telethon since 1964, to no avail. But a new member of the organization’s hierarchy—Mucio “Moose” Delgado—had more of an impact on Jerry than Ross and all of his alarming statistics. Delgado was a thickset Arizonan whose family had been touched by neuromuscular disease, and he won Jerry over with his tough-guy-with-a-heart mien (à la Jack Keller) and his refusal to accept any of Jerry’s excuses for backing out of charity work. He and Ross called Jerry to a New York meeting and laid out the organization’s needs in an effort to change his mind. Jerry, though, was still gun-shy about a real TV project: “I’m not going to stick my neck out and get rapped for doing good stuff,” he announced. But Delgado gave him a withering look and he felt cowed.
On Labor Day weekend—the acme of the Borscht Belt summer season, but a graveyard in the TV business (hence the willingness of WNEW-TV in New York to give it over to a show without a sponsor)—Jerry hosted the twenty-hour broadcast. It was a typical charity show lineup, with dozens of guests ranging from Chubby Checker to Joan Crawford to Jackie Vernon to Robert Merrill to Henny Youngman. And when it was over, to Jerry’s and the MDA’s shock and gratitude, they’d discovered that there was not only an audience for such a program on Labor Day, but it was one with open pockets. The show raised over $1 million in pledges, much more than had been anticipated. In a single day, he had solicited more money for MDA than in the last five years combined.
Maybe there was something to the telethon business after all. …