“I’ve got to feed my family,” Jerry told a reporter that summer, explaining why he always kept himself so busy. “I’ve had to keep going. I’ve got to make product.”
His latest product—finally dubbed The Big Mouth in classic Lewis fashion—took him to Mission Bay, near San Diego, where some years before Joe Stabile had introduced him to the pleasures of boating. Using the newly built Mission Bay Hilton as a location, he shot nearly the whole month of December 1966 in and around San Diego, including sequences at the Sea World theme park. The whole of January and a few days at the outset of February were spent shooting at Columbia and at some coastal locations around Los Angeles. The script was being revised until two weeks into the shoot—always a bad sign—but things went relatively smoothly. Yet another young actress managed to get herself fired before the cameras actually ran. Gail Hunnicutt, who was slated to play the lead opposite Jerry, was replaced by an ingenue named Susan Bay. But other neophyte performers fared better: Rob Reiner, Charlie Callas, Harlan Sanders (the fried-chicken king), and Scotty Lewis all made their film debuts in The Big Mouth. Callas, in fact, was Jerry’s protégé: Jerry had touted the rubber-faced comic all over Hollywood, doubtless hoping he might be the “young idiot” he’d been looking for.
Gary, it had become clear, would not be the one. He was still releasing records and still touring, but the steam seemed to be leaking ever so slowly from the hit-making engine. The Playboys’ five 1966 releases included two that didn’t enter the Billboard Top Ten and one that didn’t crack the Top Twenty—their first records that failed to make a significant impact on the charts. During the summer, after his road version of Bye Bye Birdie closed unceremoniously, Gary took the band on a tour of the Philippines (coinciding with a state visit to the island nation by President Lyndon Johnson). And the craziest thing happened to him there: He fell in love.
The object of Gary’s affection was Sara Jane Suzara, a Filipino girl he’d originally met in Hollywood and with whom he spent all his free time in Manila. Tall and dark-eyed, with long, black hair, she went by the nickname Jinky. She was a military brat—her father was chief pilot of Manila harbor—and a divorcée, with a six-year-old boy named John. Gary was twenty-one years old, a rock star supporting himself independently of his famous father’s considerable wealth. He was quite a catch. They talked about marriage.
And then an even crazier thing happened. In November 1966 he was drafted into the Army. Rich, white, and famous, with a father who knew the President, he might have been the least likely young man in the country to be asked to face action in Vietnam. But he was given an induction date and told to report to Fort Ord, a boot camp just north of the Monterey peninsula, where his father had almost drowned earlier that year.
Jerry wanted to stop it. “I was going to call Bobby Kennedy to spring Gary,” he revealed years later. But when he spoke to Gary and discovered that the young man wanted to serve his country, he backed off. Reflecting on his son’s maturity, he was proud. He even bragged about Gary’s patriotism: “I ran around Hollywood yelling, ‘Want to hear what my son said?’”
The Playboys had one last gig together on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in early December, Gary and Jinky spent a few precious weeks together, and on December 28 the whole family drove to the airport to see him off. He came back on weekend passes; basic training seemed not to have any ill effects on him. But the war was escalating, and the unspoken subtext to all of these brief family reunions was the reality that Gary was likely to be called up to active combat. He and Jinky became engaged on January 25, 1967, and decided to get married as quickly as possible. A wedding was planned for March 11 at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Westwood. Patti immersed herself in the plans, shopping with the bride for an eight-hundred-dollar gown, for which she and Jerry paid. Two days later, they celebrated with a huge catered affair. Jerry remembered it as festive, but an undertone of gloom must have resonated throughout the party. Afterward, Gary returned to Fort Ord and an almost certain deployment overseas.
Not that it was any consolation, but the household Gary left behind was becoming less and less hospitable to the Lewis boys. Jerry may have wanted to surround himself with children, he may have been subject to sudden urges to smother them with hugs or gifts, but he didn’t care to share his wife with them, and he even seemed to resent having them around, soundproofing their quarters in the house. They satisfied a need in his life to matter to somebody, but he would fly into rages whenever they escaped his control.
Indeed, with the pain in his neck so severe and his dependency on Percodan, Norodan, and Valium increasing, he himself was barely under control. “He did not act himself,” said Patti. “He was irritable and impatient—more than we had ever seen. At times, the kids, who used to be excited about making signs to welcome him home, fled when he pulled into the driveway.”
It was, in fact, the boys who were most stung by his temper. He was, in his own words, “a very heavy, heavy disciplinarian,” bragging to a reporter, “My right hand is heavy but my left hand is caressing.” He described his firmness as a reaction to the laxity of his own upbringing: “When I was young, I wasn’t disciplined at all. I’ve raised my boys the old-fashioned way, with spankings, sending them upstairs if they misbehave at parties, the works. I believe discipline is the proof of love. We’re very close.”
The boys, especially the four youngest, whose memories of home life didn’t stretch back to Jerry’s best years in show business, remembered growing up in an atmosphere half-nurturing, half-punitive—the punishment meted out by Jerry, the nurturing by Patti. Years later, raising another baby, Jerry admitted as much. “I was a taskmaster of discipline,” he confessed. “The only thing that I didn’t know about is that when I wasn’t around, my ex-wife wasn’t a disciplinarian.” He would always boast that his sons had turned out well because he had molded them with his firmness. But the boys didn’t necessarily see it that way.
Chris, who was nine when Gary went into the Army, remembered that Jerry’s very arrival in the home was an emotional coin toss for his sons: Which father had returned to them? “He could be one of two people,” he recalled, “the loving father who hugged and kissed us, or an angry stranger to stay away from. If he walked in the front door and whistled to us, we ran and embraced him. If he came in with no whistle, we could hear his huge key ring hit the marble entry table and know it was time to head for the hills.”
Dinner was another ritual during which the boys gauged their father’s mood. Though Jerry allowed himself to make a mockery of decorum, throwing food at the ceiling or pouring and rubbing it on himself like a baby, the boys were strictly forbidden to horse around in like fashion. “We were to sit quietly, speak only if spoken to, and eat quickly and silently,” remembered Joseph. “We had to ask permission to rise. If we happened to ask when Dad was watching television, we were scolded. Many offenses could be committed at the dinner table. By far the worst was walking in front of the television. We were required to go the long way around the large marble table.” Jerry would wither his sons when they crossed his line of vision: “‘Damn it, get out of the way!’”
Getting the kids out of the way was a preoccupation with him. “I didn’t even say hello when I came home,” he reflected later. “I just flopped on the couch, wanting to be left alone. It was always Patti telling the boys to scoot.” He was showing the same sort of indifference toward his children that Danny and Rae had demonstrated toward him, and he recognized what he was doing—especially to Patti. “When it came right down to truth,” he confessed, “about giving, about spending an extra moment or two with her to discuss the children or some other concerns she may have had over the day-to-day routines of family life—if she got eight minutes from me it was a lot.”
Jerry’s detachment from the family was clear to everyone, even the youngest boys. They knew that whenever Patti approached their father with a problem, she would be hurried away with the response, “I’ll fix it.” But, as she recalled, this was most often a simple stalling routine: “He meant to, I hoped he would, and sometimes he did. But often the relationship stayed broken or the dilemma went unresolved.”
When he did take action, it could be either wildly inappropriate—when Patti got upset about Gary’s having bought a motorcycle, for instance, Jerry resolved the crisis by buying the bike from him—or violent. Almost to a one, the boys have come public with stories about the verbal abuse and physical punishment they received from their father. The boys’ responses to and memories of Jerry’s punishments were varied in specifics, but the general tenor was uniform. Scotty proudly boasted in later years that he was “the only one of the children [Jerry] never hit.” Chris hated Jerry’s shouting at him so much he “often wished he would hit us instead of yelling,” and Anthony, who always spoke about his father with intelligence and compassion, simply declared that Jerry was “the consummate disciplinarian.”
Of course, there was another Jerry—the man who made his children laugh, who kissed them on the lips with every arrival (even into their twenties), who took them deep-sea fishing and to baseball games and to movie sets, who could lavish expensive presents and elaborate attention on them. And sometimes his obsession with orderliness proved comic even to himself: He would try to film Christmas mornings for posterity, but drove himself to absurd distraction trying to get six boys to follow his stage directions while their presents sat waiting for them under the tree. But as his career slipped away from him in the 1960s and ’70s, and as his dependence on Percodan and other drugs increased, he became more and more the screaming, profane, withering man whose sons dared not cross in front of the TV set.
He would always speak pointedly in interviews about his fathering skills, about the happiness and intimacy he shared with his boys. When the boys were young, even these orchestrated hugs and pats satisfied them: “I remember telling Anthony once that our father really loved us a lot,” said Chris. “I knew this because I always heard him say it on television.” But as Jerry’s ability to relate humanely with his family deteriorated, and as his sons grew old enough to comprehend the gap between his public pronouncements and his private behavior, they grew more and more alienated from him. As Patti reflected, “Every time I heard Jerry expound upon his treatment of the boys, I knew that, to a certain degree, he was there for the older kids, and I always knew he meant what he was saying. However, doing what he was saying was another matter.”
With The Big Mouth shot, he took his ritual trip to Las Vegas to perform at the Sands and begin cutting the film, which would be previewed in April. And he began to plot a course for his next projects. He’d been offered a role in Walter Shenson’s production of Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River, a comedy about an American con man who can’t manage either his marriage to an English-woman or his outlandish get-rich-quick schemes. As in Boeing Boeing, he would be strictly hired talent (“I just went to England to do the picture because it was my financial pleasure to do so,” he admitted). Jerry Paris, who had played the next-door neighbor on (and, later, directed) “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” would be making his directorial debut with the film; the script would be written by Max Wilk, author of the popular novel on which the film was based. Shooting was scheduled for May through July 1967 in London.
The trip to Europe would allow him a pleasant diversion. At the behest of Robert Benayoun, he would attend the Cannes Film Festival and allow himself to be fêted by the press and the crowds. He was ready for his French fans this time: Walking along the Riviera city’s famed Croisette, he greeted starstruck passersby with wild flourishes (“Hello, you bunch of frogs! Here’s Zherry Loueee!”) and under-his-breath dismissals (Benayoun was charmed to discover that Jerry’s universal pet name for new acquaintances, “Pussycat,” had evolved into “Cocksucker”). He rented a large yacht so he could cruise to Antibes, Monte Carlo, and Villefranche, and he was delighted to learn that it was captained by an old German seaman who’d served in the war; he quizzed him repeatedly about his exploits. When he attended the festival debut of Francis Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now, he created a gridlock of paparazzi in the theater lobby. Festival officials tried to escort him to a VIP area where Shirley MacLaine and Vincente Minnelli were seated, but he refused to be separated from his entourage and sat with the regular festival audience. He held a press conference in the Palais des Festivals, greeting his interlocutors. “This makes me think of the Nuremburg trials.” He stayed, however, taking dozens of questions and patiently waiting for Benayoun to translate for him. He was the smash hit of the festival—and he didn’t even have a film with him.
He took at least one other trip during the shooting of Don’t Raise the Bridge, flying to New York to appear on the debut of “The Merv Griffin Show” in prime-time syndication. He did a lot of shtick: playing the trumpet while smoking a cigarette, “rescuing” a lady from the balcony with a wobbly ladder, standing in as straight man for the avant-garde topless cellist Charlotte Moorman (who wore clothes for the show), and performing in a comedy skit.
It wasn’t his only TV appearance that year. NBC had done the unthinkable: Within four years of the ABC catastrophe, they had signed Jerry to do an hour-long variety series starting that fall. Bob Finkel, onetime “Colgate Comedy Hour” director and the producer who watched Jerry take his hideous fall on “The Andy Williams Show,” would produce the series through his Teram Company, which would work in partnership with Jerry Lewis Productions.
“You may think we have courage bordering on a desire for self-destruction to present Jerry Lewis,” remarked NBC president Don Durgin at the time the series was announced. “But we believe he can be the biggest single hit on television.” Durgin, the network reasoned, was in a good position to know. Under his aegis, Dean Martin had become one of the medium’s hottest stars, hosting a spectacularly successful Thursday night variety show that consistently ranked in the Nielsen Top Ten. The combination of Jerry’s desire to keep up with Dean and Durgin’s hunch that Martin and Lewis could be hits independently on his network had prevailed over the overwhelming evidence of Jerry’s previous failures in the medium.
The hype was exciting, the money was big. According to Finkel, it was “the most expensive comedy show NBC has ever done. We’re spending in the neighborhood of thirty-five to forty thousand dollars for guests and extras alone, and we’ll have big sets and comedy props.” The whole thing was so intoxicating that even former co-workers of Jerry’s—grown men who should have known better—were lured into the fold.
“One day, Pancho Villa came riding down from the hills asking all the peasants to join him,” remembered Ed Simmons. “I got a call from Jerry asking if I wanted to be head writer for his show.” Simmons had done well since he and Norman Lear had left “The Colgate Comedy Hour” in such a huff, writing for series starring George Gobel, Red Skelton, and other comedy stars. “The money was very attractive,” he said of Jerry’s offer. “And I went. Like a schmuck.”
The series had a much tighter format than the one on which ABC had gambled. By Finkel’s edict, there would be five days of rehearsal each week. The show would be taped—without an audience—and then edited into an airable format. In addition to Simmons, a writing staff of five was aboard (along with Jerry and Bill Richmond). Jerry wouldn’t be allowed to sit behind a desk and “be himself.” There would be an emphasis on guests—Lynn Redgrave, Sonny and Cher, Harold (“Odd Job”) Sakata, and the Baja Marimba Band would appear on the debut program—and on skits in which Jerry would reprise beloved characters from his movies and stage act: the Nutty Professor, the Poor Soul, the Mexican Bandit, Captain Eddie. NBC was even affording the program a popular lead-in: “I Dream of Jeannie.”
When the series finally debuted on Tuesday, September 12, 1967 (at 8:00 P.M., satisfying Jerry’s urge to “play to my kids”), the critics were underwhelmed. True, there had been none of the drumbeating that had boosted expectations for the ABC series, but viewers might have expected a little more than the tepid program they found. “This was a Jerry who didn’t provoke strong feelings. Either way,” wrote Barbara Delatiner in Newsday. Variety followed suit. Acknowledging that the star was being grounded in skits and would therefore “rise and sink on his material,” reviewer “Pit.” announced that the stuff Jerry had to work with was “a very uneven mix.” Praising Jerry’s pantomime abilities and granting that “Lewis contrived to inject some engaging moments despite the handicaps,” the review ended by pronouncing that “more moments of inspired lunacy will be needed if Lewis’ Tuesday night lease is to remain in force.”
The producers, however, stuck by their guns—it was to be a show driven by sketches and guests—and the series wound on. Jerry made funny with famous guests (Ben Gazarra, Lawrence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Bobby Darin, Martha Raye), he sang (“Beyond the Blue Horizon,” “Witchcraft,” “Embraceable You,” a seventeen-song medley with Mel Tormé), he did painfully forced skits (a “square” trying to fit in with “swingers,” a kleptomaniac married to a policewoman, a surfer overloaded with equipment, a thirty-year-old on his first-ever date). There were bits that could have been pulled right out of his films (a doorman who wreaks havoc on a luxury hotel, a bungling bag boy promoted to store manager, a man disrupting a movie set) and one that actually was—the crashing-of-the-Hollywood-premiere pantomime bit from The Patsy.
But the show was a wan affair, more embarrassing in its way than the ABC series, which at least crashed with a bang. “Those looking for insightful comedy,” opined a Variety follow-up review, “will have to look elsewhere.” They did. Jerry’s show quickly fell victim to CBS’s “Red Skelton. Hour” in the ratings; even a plug from Dino, who told his vast audience, “Don’t forget to watch ‘The Jerry Lewis Show’ “at the end of his season premiere, didn’t help. It wasn’t quite a disaster—it regularly beat ABC’s Dirty Dozen knockoff, “Garrison’s Gorillas”—but nobody connected with it was fooled into thinking it was a hit. Before long, Jerry went on automatic pilot, thinking of other projects with which he might busy himself.
Having enjoyed himself so much at Cannes in May, he traveled to Mexico in November, where he was the invited guest of the Acapulco Film Festival. Unlike Cannes, an internationally respected competitive festival and studio trade market, Acapulco was purely a vacation festival, an excuse for hotels to draw film buffs and celebrity-gawkers and a chance for the Mexican film industry to sell itself to its northern neighbors. Jerry was to be put up at the government-owned luxury hotel, El Presidente, but when he got there, his suite wasn’t ready. He launched into a temper tantrum, running through the halls of the hotel banging on sleeping guests’ doors. Finally, he returned to the airport in a huff, snubbing both Mexican officials and Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti, who was to host a reception to introduce Jerry to Mexican VIPs. When reports of the outburst hit Hollywood, Jim Flood issued a denial, stating that Jerry left Acapulco because he’d been suffering “a twenty-four-hour sickness which occasionally strikes visitors to Mexico.” But the Mexico City newspaper El Heraldo wasn’t convinced, stating that “the famous comic seems to have little sense of humor in real life,” and predicting that Jerry’s behavior “makes it probable that his movies will never be exhibited in Mexico again.”
Of course, it was becoming less and less probable that many venues would be wanting to exhibit a Jerry Lewis movie again. The Big Mouth had opened that summer to the usual hostile press—calling the film “tired and overdone,” Howard Thompson of The New York Times begrudgingly acknowledged that “the kids love him, mouth and all”—and a box office that was disappointing for a Jerry Lewis–directed film. It did manage to earn more, however, than Boeing Boeing, Way … Way Out, and even Three on a Couch, indicating that, directing himself in a certain type of role, he still could draw a public to watch him.
What they saw was a strange mixture of expertise and amateurishness indeed. The Big Mouth was the only film that Jerry both wrote and directed while at Columbia, yet in ways it seems less like a Jerry Lewis film than anything else he ever did. For one thing, it parodies a specific movie genre, the spy film, and has a linear (if shoddily assembled) plot. For another, Jerry’s chief character, Gerald Clamson, is almost not comic at all—not, like Christopher Pride in Three on a Couch or Willard the chauffeur in The Family Jewels, because he’s the starting-off point for a series of comic characters, but because he’s only mildly debilitated in contrast to almost every other protagonist in a Jerry Lewis production.
For all the strained plot, The Big Mouth is a pretty tepid film. Jerry is so low-key as to be transparent (though, always, he’s funny in a subordinate, Kelpish role), and the supporting cast just doesn’t make up for the star’s lack of comic invention. Jerry allows himself only one truly outrageous comic scene—he dons whiteface and a white fright wig and masquerades as a kabuki player to escape from the gangsters. It’s a funny bit, but it doesn’t make the movie.
Most appalling of all, though, is Susan Bay, who reads her lines as if they were random strings of words. Indeed, given the lifelessness of her performance, and Jerry’s own torpor in the vaguely comic role of Gerald Clamson, the film takes on an almost documentary air: Watching the two costars working together at a hotel in San Diego and calling each other “Gerry” and “Suzie,” you get the macabre sense that you’re watching filmed rehearsals, a voyeuristic touch that enlivens the otherwise moribund movie. Though Jerry himself seems lively, the film doesn’t share any of his intermittent energy.
This failure-on-all-counts wasn’t lost on Columbia executives, who were beginning to look at Jerry the way their counterparts at Paramount had: With his hands in producing, writing, directing, and acting, they felt he was becoming not only less and less able but less and less marketable. They saw no indication that he had found his form as an actor; his “grown-up” roles (Boeing Boeing, Three on a Couch, and Way … Way Out) hadn’t clicked with the adult audience to which they were pitched, and they’d left his usual following of children utterly cold. Comedy styles had changed. Peter Sellers was now a big star doing some of what Jerry used to do, but with an even more amazing vocal talent and a frankly degenerate undertone; he played the sorts of roles that Jerry righteously insisted he’d never take: lechers, perverts, and Nazis. Jerry was struggling to keep up with the metamorphosis without any luck, and his bosses at Columbia and NBC didn’t want him to experiment.
They didn’t even want him to direct. When Jerry set to work on his next Columbia film, a marital comedy entitled Hook, Line, and Sinker, he was forced to hire a director, even though he was producing the film. He so resented the stipulation that he went and hired George Marshall—George Marshall!—the seventy-eight-year-old director of My Friend Irma and other Martin and Lewis films that Jerry had hated making. It was absurd: Jerry had written off Marshall as an old hack back in 1949; he had refused to allow him to direct Three Ring Circus; he’d had Marshall forced on him in The Sad Sack. Now, by hiring him, he was virtually flaunting his intention to supersede his director.
Marshall was still averaging a picture a year well into his sixth decade in the business. Nevertheless, the only explanation for his presence on Hook, Line, and Sinker was that Columbia insisted that a real comedy director be behind the camera, and Jerry knew he could have his way with the old man. Knowing Marshall wouldn’t interfere while he directed the film himself, Jerry filled the picture with his perennial collaborators: cinematographer Wallace Kelly, editor Rusty Wiles, assistant director Hal Bell, associate producer Joe Stabile, and Stabile’s bandleader brother, Dick. Hook, Line, and Sinker would be the final film of Marshall’s career, and Jerry’s last film for Columbia. He waited until he’d shot his last TV show of the season, made the movie quickly—about eight weeks, including location work in San Diego and some foreign exteriors—and left in a huff.
He was, in fact, beginning to talk about the movie business in the sort of contemptuous terms he usually reserved for television or critics who had bad things to say about him. He continued to decry the increase of profanity, nudity, and violence that had characterized the American cinema since the film industry had eased its production code a few years earlier. When he spoke about his distaste for new trends in the film industry with Earl Wilson that summer, he explained it in economic terms, as if to disguise his personal antagonism. Sneering about the presence of sex and violence in films, he argued “it’s not really in the hands of the producers. It’s in the hands of the public, which is to blame. As long as the public wants to buy it, they’re going to make it. I’ve had a couple of dozen scripts submitted to me that I just wouldn’t go near. I got one the other day with a title you wouldn’t believe. The funny part is, eventually, they get done! … Some freaks are making an awful lot of money and an awful lot of noise in our business. I can’t understand some of it; it’s like going to a zoo.”
On January 22, 1968, ten months after she and Gary were married, Jinky Lewis gave birth to a daughter, the first Lewis girl. She was named Sarah Jane, just like her mother—and, coincidentally, after Jerry’s maternal grandmother. Gary and Jerry were shown in a wire service photo, hugging and grinning with big cigars stuck in their mouths.
Gary still hadn’t been sent overseas, so he hadn’t yet been required to give up his musical career, which he kept alive with weekend recording sessions. The Playboys were continuing, however, to slide down the charts. Just as Jerry had lost touch with the comedy audience, so Gary had been left behind when the English pop bands he’d emulated turned to more sophisticated musical ideas. On both sides of the Atlantic, bands scrambled to follow the Beatles’ lead—few as cluelessly as Gary Lewis and the Playboys, whose peppy, streamlined party sound bore no relation to the Sgt. Pepper–era baroque psychedelia coming out of London.
Liberty had turned Gary over to producer Leon Russell, but the change didn’t generate a hit; “The Loser (with a Broken Heart),” the first Playboys record on which Gary’s nasal, constricted voice wasn’t double-tracked, didn’t even crack the Top Forty. The new production team crafted two Gary Lewis albums in 1967 alone—Listen! and New Directions—and a handful of singles, released to moderate success. Gary was actually relieved that the records didn’t make it. “Jill” and “Girls in Love” were such elaborate psychedelic productions that all he could think was “If they become big, big hits, how am I going to duplicate these things on stage?”
As the date of Gary’s overseas service neared, he and Snuff Garrett reunited to complete as much recording as they possibly could. He was due to be shipped out on March 11—his first wedding anniversary—and two nights earlier he recorded “Sealed with a Kiss,” the old Bobby Vinton hit. He was never reckoned an expressive or personal singer, but that particular performance was laden with emotion for him. Within forty-eight hours, he would travel to a war zone, leaving behind a wife and newborn daughter. When he described the recording years later, the wound still seemed fresh: “If I could have been given another chance to sing that,” he said, “I would have taken it in a second. That’s the only song I will never listen to as long as I live. I cringe every time I hear it.”
Almost two months after Gary left Fort Ord for Asia, the song was released at home along with another single, “Rhythm of the Rain,” also recorded in a hasty final session. “I remember having the songs out and not being able to go around the country and promote them,” he said years later. “I remember thinking, ‘Gee, these’ll never make it!’ “The public, though, recognized the heartfelt pathos in his singing; “Sealed with a Kiss” was his first Top Twenty hit in nearly two years.
Jerry was neither so busy nor so lucky. He had almost nothing to do in the summer of 1968 but prepare for another excruciating year of his NBC series. He had no movies in preparation, he had no studio to release his work, he did no live touring—nothing. Plans were in the works for his third consecutive Labor Day telethon (the success of the 1966 program had convinced him to turn the event into an annual project), but the man who just a few years earlier was putting in twenty-hour days in film, TV, live shows, charity work, and even a privately run radio station was at a near-standstill, terrified that his career had ground to a halt.
Years before, everyone had talked about how badly it seemed Dean would fare after the split, and how wonderfully Jerry would do. And until The Young Lions and the Rat Pack days, it seemed Dean was indeed headed toward oblivion. But now the worm had turned: Dean was still making records that sold well, he was still in demand as a film actor, and his TV show was a staple in millions of homes. It was Jerry who was struggling, as much at sea as the night the Princess sank out from underneath him.
Dean made repeated pitches for Jerry’s show on his own program; it became a running gag, and a painful one for Jerry. Kay Gardella of the New York Daily News asked him about it in his Burbank dressing room before his second season on NBC began, and he unburdened himself to her. “Dean was twelve years ago,” he told her when she asked if they would appear on one another’s shows. “I don’t see any reason for exchanging guest spots. This is a subject I could discuss all day with you, if I had time. It’s all right for Dean Martin to mention me in kidding on his TV show. He’s doing it in character. He can do jokes about his wife, booze, and even me and get away with it. I can’t do that. Detrimental jokes of any kind I can’t do. While Dean is in character, it’s okay. He gets away with it fine. However, if I kidded about Dean on my show, or referred to our old partnership, the hurt and pain would show. You don’t live and work with a guy as long as I did without the divorce being painful. How do you tell your audience you loved the guy? To kid what was and still is painful, because it might be saleable today, would be beneath my dignity. I’m still too sensitive about it. Dean can do it because the character he plays lets him do it. I can’t.”
He launched dispiritedly into the TV season. Producer Bob Finkel had added Nanette Fabray and the Osmond Brothers as regulars, Jerry had developed a new character named Ralph Rotten, and NBC moved him to 7:30, when prime time began in those days. Once again, the show, while not necessarily an artistic disaster, was murdered in the ratings, this time by “The Mod Squad,” the interracial, coed, hippie cop show. By the end of the year, Jerry’s show was ranked sixty-eighth out of eighty-six series rated by Nielsen.
He’d had enough: If he was going to bomb again, it would be on his own terms. He did away with the tape-and-edit format, choosing instead to do the show in front of a live audience and air a relatively whole version of the performance. “This way, there’s a little thing called spontaneity,” he told reporters. “It can make good material greater and weak material better.”
As with the ABC series, he placed the blame for the show’s poor performance on his network: “NBC wanted to do the show in a certain way. I had to do it that way until they got wise to the situation. Now there’s going to be more of Jerry Lewis on camera. NBC’s strong point was ‘Let’s forget Jerry Lewis, let’s do comedy characters.’ I sometimes wondered why they hired Jerry Lewis, but I hopefully went along. Now we’ll have fewer characters, more comedy, and no canned laughter.”
To Ed Simmons, however, the advent of the new, looser format halfway through the second season signaled the return of the obstinate old Jerry who wouldn’t listen to anyone back in the “Colgate Comedy Hour” days. “It got so that finally he was putting such obstacles in your path that you couldn’t write anything,” he recalled later. Simmons decided he’d rather do without his fifty thousand dollars per year. He walked into Bob Finkel’s office one day and announced to Finkel and Jerry, “This is it, fellows. Tear up my contract. I’m not working here anymore. You don’t have to pay me what you owe me. Just let me out.”
Simmons went on to more success in TV; he produced and served as head writer for “The Carol Burnett Show,” which debuted that same season and won him several Emmys, and developed such hits as “Welcome Back, Kotter.” But he never forgot how exciting a comedian Jerry had been when they’d met, and how badly, in his view, Jerry had served his own talent and potential. “I used to have fantasies,” he said years later, “of grabbing Jerry and really slapping him around, and then, when he’s on the floor, I’d say, ‘Okay, you had enough? Now, you son of a bitch, you’re gonna listen to me and I’m gonna make you the greatest fucking comic there’s ever been in this world.’ I realize if I ever did that, I couldn’t have changed him, because the greatness is not there. I think I was dazzled early on.”
In December 1968 all of the Lewises drove out to Los Angeles International Airport to meet Gary’s plane. Gary was returning from his nine months of overseas duty in one thankful piece. He was smiling, wearing a light-colored pullover, hugging his wife and daughter and parents and brothers, but he had changed. They couldn’t see it at first. He went through the motions of restarting his recording career, he spent time around the house (he and Jinky and their kids lived at the St. Cloud mansion), and he participated in the holidays.
Soon, though, Jerry knew there was some trouble. “I didn’t see my son,” he remembered later, “I saw an old man.” Gary dragged himself around in a daze, sitting and staring as if into his own skull, speaking slowly and quietly, letting his voice drift off and losing track of his own conversation. He told Jerry shocking stories about battles he’d been in, ambushes he’d witnessed, atrocities, inhumanity. He’d seen a friend ripped open by sniper fire while they sat eating lunch. He’d shot the enemy in close combat. And he was unable to repress or forget any of it.
Many, many Vietnam-era veterans bore similar psychological wounds, of course, but few of them had, as Gary did, an Asian wife and Eurasian daughter waiting back home for them even before they went to war. Jerry recalled that this fact gave his son special pain.
“Father,” Gary asked him, “Did you ever have your finger on the trigger and as you looked through the sight you see this man coming, who’s got a daughter like Sarah Jane, and you have to squeeze the trigger or he’s going to get you?”
“You squeezed it, or you wouldn’t be here,” Jerry responded.
“But she doesn’t have him.”
“Fuck him. I don’t know him. I don’t know if he has a daughter. You can help yourself by understanding that you might have got a single guy.”
But Gary would have faded out again.
Jerry was frank with reporters about the toll the war had taken on his son: “He came back totally devoid of any feelings or emotions. He just doesn’t give a damn about anything anymore. When I sit him down and say, ‘You’ve got to try to get your head back where it was,’ he says, ‘Why?’”
Gary spent months in his withdrawn state, and Jerry was sick whenever he saw him: “I’d come home from the studio and I’d see Gary sitting, staring out into space. Eight months, nine months, just sitting. I said, ‘Talk to me, just talk to me.’ “(In later years, he would describe his son’s detachment less solicitously, telling a reporter that Gary had been “an absolute fucking zucchini.”) Inevitably, thinking back to how he wanted to stop Gary from serving in the first place, Jerry felt it was his fault. “If I had known the facts, when my son said, ‘I want to fight for my country,’ I’d have ripped his fucking throat open.” But nobody suspected in November 1966 that things would have gone so badly.
Now that he knew the price of his own patriotism, however, Jerry began to turn his attention to his other sons. Ronnie was eighteen, and Scotty and Christopher were nearing their teens. He seriously considered moving the family of boys out of the country. “They’ll never get another one of mine,” he vowed later. “They’ll have to come and get me. … Now, if I saw the Russkies on the shore of Malibu, I’d stick a gun in my granddaughter’s hand. That’s different. But don’t you go talking draft to me if you’re going to go playing in El Salvador. … You ain’t getting any of my sons. If I have to make cunts out of them, I go chop. I’ll castrate them. Do you get the picture?”
But Gary couldn’t be fixed so handily. His grief and anomie were coupled with drug use. He smoked pot, took pills, “and this and that,” according to Jerry. “He hid them in his shoes, his jackets, in the lampshades—Christ knows where! We got him as much help as we could.” Joseph remembered that Jerry initially reacted to Gary’s drug use with rage. Patti recalled that Jerry saw Gary’s condition somehow as a kind of betrayal: “When Gary turned to drugs, Jerry refused to acknowledge the reasons behind this. He turned our son’s pictures against the walls, or jerked them down in anger. There was no outward empathy. As a wife, I had to believe that somewhere within he felt for Gary’s situation, but all we saw was the rage.”
Eventually, his anger turned into compassion: Where Jerry couldn’t relate to Gary’s postcombat stress, he could readily comprehend his son’s substance dependency. He himself was taking more Percodan than his prescription called for, and he knew how narcotics could genuinely help someone in genuine anguish. “I got him cleaned out,” he confessed, “but then I started supplying him with marijuana. He needed it for whatever his pains were.”
Gary eventually emerged from his cocoon and recorded a new album for Liberty, a self-produced project abjectly titled I’m on the Right Road Now. But he was so far out of the rock mainstream that the album died outright. Liberty released him. As an entertainer, he had fallen even more precipitiously than his father, and had even fewer options open to him.
In February 1969, Jerry finally broke off relations with Columbia Pictures. He was frustrated with the studio’s insistence that he not take on so many diverse responsibilities on his films; they wanted him as an actor or not at all. But he still felt he could do it all, and truth be told, he was beginning to prefer directing. Variety reported that Columbia didn’t mind seeing Jerry go, “in view of some recent softening of Lewis’ box office performance.” Three years earlier, when Paramount suggested he was “unprofitable,” he threatened to sue them for slander. Now he merely packed his things and moved to Warner Brothers, where executives had agreed to let him both direct and star in his own films.
He appeared on a TV special honoring Jack Benny’s seventy-fifth birthday. The next month, he created a flap while guest-hosting “The Tonight Show.” Speaking off-the-cuff about racial segregation, he said that he’d recently fulfilled a lifelong ambition by “using the bathroom while flying over Mississippi.” Gulf States Theaters, a large exhibition chain in the South, announced it would henceforth ban his films, yanking Hook, Line, and Sinker. Some NBC affiliates in the state followed suit, pulling his show off the air.
The latter certainly didn’t bother him. He had given up on television yet again. The revamped format of his show didn’t win any new viewers. The last installment, not nearly as heralded as the final episode of the ABC series, aired on April 15. Hook, Line, and Sinker costar Peter Lawford was his final guest. Lawford and Jerry played comics trying to impress a stolid show-biz executive, there was a spoof of the Academy Awards, and Jerry sang “Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder” and “Put on a Happy Face.”
But he certainly wasn’t trying to put a happy face on his experiences in the medium. After more than a decade of struggling to find a voice and an audience on television, he sounded serious about washing his hands of it forever. “Television destroys dreams,” he told The New York Times. “Television has been one of the most destructive forces in our society. Ask me about violence, and I’ll tell you television has caused it. … Sirhan Sirhan would never have carried a gun if he had not seen the way Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in a crowded corridor.”
As for his own experience in the medium, he was grateful it was over: “I knew I was going to be part of twenty hours of trash that would never be seen again. Psychologically I couldn’t put very much into it. The temporary nature of television destroyed me. Essentially, I always have in mind that my great-great-great-grandchildren will see me in my pictures, that I have to be impeccable for them. There is no way they can see me on television. Thank God! And I hated the endless hypocrisy, and lying, the crap, the stopwatch. My funny bone has no time for statistics. I couldn’t bear the clock dictating when I would start and finish a joke. And the censorship—network censors are stupid, anticreative men. What those stupid morons don’t understand is that when you’re given freedom, you don’t abuse it.”
Having given TV the kiss-off, he set out on a brand-new venture. He would direct Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. in a sequel to their 1968 swinging London comedy Salt and Pepper. It was a British film, produced by Milton Ebbins and written by Michael Pertwee. Jerry, a man without a movie studio, was now a man without a country. He grew a beard—in part to hide the weight he had put on his famously skinny frame, which he also camouflaged by wearing athletic warmup clothes in lieu of his natty Sy DeVore yacht wear and suits—and, packing fifty-one pieces of luggage for his three-month trip, he headed off to London, where he could count on a respectful reception from the European press.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t have any opportunities at home. They were simply ones he didn’t understand. Richard Zanuck, Darryl’s son, had, at age thirty-five, been producing films for ten years and serving as production chief and president at his father’s company, Twentieth Century–Fox, for more than five. In 1969 he tried to interest Jerry in appearing in a film adaptation of a hot novel by a Jewish writer from Newark—the naughty best-seller Portnoy’s Complaint. Jerry absolutely refused to do it.
“The picture business was not doing what I believed they should be doing,” he recalled. “I got a whole moral code about that. I turned down discussions with Zanuck at Fox about Portnoy’s Complaint. I told him he’s a fucking lecher. Ha! I said not only wouldn’t I participate in Portnoy’s Complaint, I wouldn’t know how to participate in it. I read it because it was the thing to do in Hollywood. I wouldn’t know how to fucking make that movie, nor would I know how to appear in it. And Zanuck says to my attorney, ‘He can’t turn down this kind of money.’ And my attorney said, ‘You’d be amazed at what he can do. The first thing he can do is tell you that you can’t buy him for that project. Not for any money.’ Zanuck said, ‘Everyone’s got a price.’ My attorney said to him, ‘You ain’t getting this kid. Try.’ Zanuck tried everything he knew. Everything. Came to me through L. B. Mayer. Came to me through other friends. Came to me through even Muscular Dystrophy. He was going to donate five hundred thousand dollars to Muscular Dystrophy. I said, ‘My kids don’t want your fucking money for what you want me to do for it.’ He said, ‘This is above and beyond the deal. This is a bonus.’ And my attorney said, ‘He doesn’t want your fucking money.’”
The story isn’t quite accurate in its details—Mayer died in 1957, as Jerry should well have known, having bought his house from his widow—but Richard Zanuck never did get Jerry into his film. (Nor, in fact, did he ever make it himself—the following year, his father fired him from Fox, and Portnoy’s Complaint was eventually adapted into a tepid film starring Richard Benjamin.)
In London no one dared broach such smut with Jerry. He was treated with the respect normally accorded a Chaplin or Welles. He was, after all, a visiting foreign director of high repute. Journalists from all over Europe turned up on the set. A Portuguese entrepreneur put together a charter package flying eighty-five of his cinephile countrymen to London to watch the shoot. Jerry had once again turned his working environment into a carnival: Just as in the Paramount days, the entrance to his sound stage bore a sign reading THIS IS NOT A CLOSED SET COME ON IN—YOU ARE MOST WELCOME. And he had upped the ante by announcing on British TV that everyone was invited to come watch him work. As a result, in addition to the usual swell of journalists, friends, hangers-on, and idling workers from elsewhere in the studio, Jerry’s sound stage was choked with visitors of all ages from all over England, an American nun (who was also a professor of film studies at a stateside university!), and a knot of French writers and critics, among them a contingent from Positif that included Robert Benayoun.
Patti and the boys flew over for a visit—the film was begun in July, giving them a chance to spend their summer vacation abroad (Gary, pointedly, did not make the trip). Jerry allowed Ronnie to work for a few days as an unofficial still photographer on the set, giving him instructions on a professional Bell and Howell camera (Benayoun learned that Ronnie, who was nineteen years old and nearly a head taller than his father, wasn’t allowed to drink so much as a beer because Jerry felt it might lead him to use marijuana and more harmful substances). The boys were on the set when production moved to Eastnor Castle in Ledbury, and they got to meet horror movie stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, who had cameos in the film. Otherwise, it was a sight-seeing trip for them, Patti’s first visit to Europe since 1953; on July 21 she and the boys watched Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon on a gigantic TV screen that had been set up for a throng in Trafalgar Square.
The atmosphere on the set was all back-patting and bonhomie. Sammy and Jerry had long been close; Lawford and Jerry had become friends more recently. There was much hugging and kissing and grinning for press cameras (Jerry didn’t appear in the film, scuttling a scene in which he was to make a cameo). Sammy even announced that he would permit the planned film version of his autobiography Yes I Can! to be directed only by Jerry.
Working wholly behind the camera, Jerry directed in the old Chaplin style, acting out gestures and routines for his actors and encouraging them to follow his example exactly. The only friction occurred whenever producer Ebbins showed up to see how his film was progressing. Jerry detested Ebbins—“He’s not a filmmaker,” he confided to Benayoun—but acted like an obsequious schoolboy in the presence of a grumpy dean whenever the producer appeared. As soon as Ebbins had left the set, though, Jerry would begin to take off on the producer’s body language and vocal mannerisms in a cruel imitation that cracked up the rest of the crew.
With the British journalists and visiting American writers with whom he spoke on the set, Jerry adopted a sagacious mien. The Sunday Times of London sent a team of journalists out to MGM’s Boreham Wood studios to interview him, and they wound up running more than a page of Jerry’s uninterrupted thoughts on filmmaking, film criticism, comedy, the American racial situation (despite its absurd plot and “groovy” trappings, he saw One More Time as a film about brotherhood between blacks and whites), and the struggle for human dignity. One class of humans that, he felt, possessed no dignity whatever—namely, his American critics—came in for a new type of scolding. Compared with their European counterparts, he announced, American critics were not only obtuse but positively fallacious: “I don’t expect the critics to say bravo—they can say any goddamn thing they please—but I want them to look at my films, not send some kid who works in the copy office and say, ‘Tell me what the plot is and I’ll fill up a few lines.’ We only have about six or seven real critics in America—the rest are ex-copyboys, people who used to write about radio, and when that went out, they wrote about television, and now it’s the thing to discuss ‘cinema.’”
The sad fact was, despite his thin skin—did he really expect critics to apply themselves to Hook, Line, and Sinker?—he was right about the state of American film criticism, which was still in a sort of journalistic infancy, especially compared with European models. Most film critics in the States were merely reporters, telling their readers the plot of a film and briefly commenting on whether or not they enjoyed it. The sort of elaborate lengths to which critics elsewhere in the world went to explain Jerry’s talent were utterly beyond the capacity—or, frankly, the desire—of American newspapers to report.
When he wasn’t being so testy, though, he spoke cannily to the Times about his brand of comedy as it related to the comic styles of some of his most famous precursors: “Comedy is a man in trouble, and comedians react to it in different ways. Chaplin was a ballet dancer—he’d dance through trouble. Keaton became part of a well-oiled machine—he’d slip easily through a small opening. I’d have my arms outstretched and get stuck.”
Insights like these no doubt came to him because the respect accorded him by his European interlocutors sharpened his thoughts. But he had, in fact, been expounding publicly on the cinema and on comedy for some time now. In 1966 Arthur Knight, a professor of cinema studies at the University of Southern California, had invited Jerry to lecture to his students.
Jerry had often made himself available to newcomers to the film business. In 1961 he and UCLA drama instructor Ron Carver had conducted a workshop for young comics on the Paramount lot, auditioning more than five hundred applicants to select a pool of forty young men and women to sit at his feet and learn a few tricks of the trade. In 1965, ’66, and ’67 he directed short films starring actors from the Film Industry Workshops, an institution financed and given work space by Columbia Pictures to develop young talent.
Even with these experiences behind him, Jerry was a bit nervous about lecturing at a university. Knight nevertheless pressed him until Jerry admitted, “Do you realize that I’m a dropout? I have no diploma!” It didn’t matter to Knight, and Jerry went ahead with the class, announcing humbly beforehand to the assembled students that “I’m not a qualified lecturer. Anything I say and feel you’re going to have to pull out of me, but I’ll tell you anything I know.”
It went well. In fact, he liked it so much that he had Jim Flood call Knight a few months later to ask if he could return. Finally, Knight offered him a full-fledged weekly class, the title Professor of Film Studies, and ninety-four dollars a month. Jerry’s Cinema 501 course met Monday nights on USC’s downtown Los Angeles campus, and it quickly became a hot ticket. The standing-room-only crowds included undergraduates, graduate students, and even nonstudents who crashed the lectures with his blessing and crammed the aisles. Jerry positively glowed with the attention, and he did his best to live up to his new responsibilities.
“The homework I used to do before I had a goddamn class was as much as I used to do before I went on the set,” he remembered. And his classes, like his workdays, extended way beyond the norm: “On a Monday night, we would meet at seven o’clock, and before you know it, it’s three in the morning, two in the morning. I’d wrap up the class at midnight, but like twenty of them would stand around my desk. And I’d say, ‘Why didn’t you talk to me about that when we talked about that?’”
The experience overwhelmed him. He recorded his lectures, amassing an astounding 480 hours of audiotape. In the second year of his course, he posed for Esquire with his paycheck in his hand (delighted with his cost-of-living raise to one hundred dollars a month). He saw his position at the university as the triumph of the poor schlemiel who had been expelled from Irvington High: “I had only two years of high school,” he told a reporter. “I want to rub the noses of the people who said, ‘You won’t amount to nothing. Without an education what will you become?’”
Despite all his success and his power as a producer, he had been only a dilettante in business over the years. The radio station, the restaurant, the dinner theaters he’d begun buying up years before—they were hobbies, all of them, not elements of any real financial plan for his future or his family’s security. But in September 1969 he launched a venture meant to change all of that. He had arranged with some people doing business as the Network Cinema Corporation to begin the Jerry Lewis Cinema Corporation, an international chain of franchised automated movie theaters. The company took out ads soliciting interested franchisees not only in Hollywood trade papers and magazines catering to theater owners but in mainstream publications such as Life: “If You Can Press a Button and Meet Our Investment Requirements,” one ad blared, “You Can Own One or a Chain of JERRY LEWIS CINEMAS.”
It was an era when national business franchising was all the rage. The Jerry Lewis Cinema Corporation had two competitors in the United States alone in its theatrical franchising plans—Automated Theaters of America and McGuire Cinemas. Fast food operations and car washes were similarly popular as investments; Jerry’s new partners themselves had made their money in automobile rental and barbecue restaurant chains. Jerry’s wasn’t the only enterprise fueled by a celebrity endorsement, either—Minnie Pearl and Joe Namath had lent their names to chains of restaurants, for instance.
But Jerry Lewis Cinemas would be different from all other movie theaters in the country, chains or otherwise, by virtue of their highly modern design. The architecture and decor of Jerry Lewis Cinemas were created by Broadway stage designer Robin Wagner. Wagner had come up with a spare, modernist look: two-story glass walls, streamlined concrete columns, and globular chandeliers. Wagner had nothing to do with the logo—the familiar caricature of young Jerry with his mouth open and eyes shut would appear on all advertising and signage. Nor did he design the auditoriums. Those adhered strictly to the demands of the automated Italian Cinematographica projection system, in which a single push of the button controlled lights, speakers, curtains, and film projection.
But the most unusual attribute of the theater chain was its booking policy. In order to maintain their franchise agreement, theater owners and operators would be required to exhibit films selected and booked by the chain itself. And each of those films, the plan maintained, would qualify as family fare. Jerry, once again on the stump to denounce films that contained nudity, violence, or profanity, declared, “We have all these mimic-morons copying the Swedish films, and I think they’ve gone about as far as they can do. I’m not a prude; a lot of that stuff is marvelous as long as you don’t put it on camera. I wonder about the people who make such crap. I wonder if they have children.”
In February reporters were invited to Warner Brothers Studios, where Jerry was shooting his latest film, Which Way to the Front?, for a press conference with the principals of Jerry Lewis Cinemas. On a set bedecked with giant Nazi flags, reporters were fed a buffet and allowed to mingle with NCC board members Gerald Entman (who was also president), Jerry Rudolph, James Journigan, and Charles Beaumont, the newly appointed West Coast marketing director. Jan Murray, who had a feature part in Which Way, came out to schmooze with the press and tell everyone that Jerry was running late.
That evening, reporters learned the specific financial details of the corporation’s franchise plans. They learned that since the initial offering, more than 140 theaters had been contracted. As a result, the company’s original plan to build 750 theaters in five years was expanded to a projected 3,000. Owners of individual theaters would pay franchise fees of ten to fifteen thousand dollars, a cost that did not include property, buildings, or equipment packages—all of which they had to buy or lease on their own. A prospectus issued to potential investors promised, among other perks, the cooperation of Jerry himself in publicizing new theaters. Under the heading “Jerry Lewis: Your Image Maker,” the document announced that “Jerry Lewis makes personal appearances as his schedule permits. … Jerry Lewis, always major news copy, holds press conferences to enhance the image of your cinema. … Jerry Lewis has written, directed and performed in a color movie to introduce your cinema to your audience.”
On March 25, 1970, with 354 theaters slated to open in a total of eighteen states, the first Jerry Lewis Cinema opened in the Wayne Shopping Mall in Wayne, New Jersey, eleven miles north of Irvington. Jerry himself arrived for a ribbon-cutting ceremony five days later, flying up from Washington, D.C., where he’d spent the afternoon testifying before the Senate Small Business Subcommittee on Urban and Rural Economic Development. At the request of New Jersey Senator Harrison A. Williams (who would be exposed a decade later in the Abscam sting), Jerry spoke on “The Impact of Franchising on Small Business.”
Apart from his celebrity cachet, Jerry could rightfully address the body, because his business was booming. By May there were five hundred units under contract. In January an ad in Variety had declared that thirty-one states had licensees (as well as Ontario, St. Croix, the Virgin Islands, and Italy). Surprisingly few of these agreements, though, were translating into actual theaters. In April 1971 there were only twelve operating Jerry Lewis Cinemas in the U.S. (At the grand opening of the one in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, a local mother and her kids buried porno films under the theater’s cornerstone.)
The next month, Gerald Entman told Variety there would be fifty theaters running by the end of the summer, that 1,720 theaters had been contracted for, expansion was expected into Canada, England, France, West Germany, and Italy, and the company would do $500 million in business in the next five years. But by January 1972 one-third of the regional areas remained unclaimed, even though start-up costs had shrunk. When the company’s exhibitors and area directors met at Caesar’s Palace that month for their annual national convention (featuring a dinner show on opening night starring Jerry himself), interested investors who attended the event and signed on had their airfare and hotel bills paid for by NCC. It was the first outright financial incentive the company offered, a sign that its projected revenues might be more than just a little optimistic.
Aside from hosting a press conference to promote his theaters on its set, Which Way to the Front?, Jerry’s fortieth film, was noteworthy for a number of reasons. For one thing, it marked his return to a movie set for the first time since One More Time wrapped—a span of nearly fourteen months. For another, it was his third consecutive film for a different studio. Warner Brothers had gone partners with him. Jerry invested his own money in the shoot, and the studio distributed the film and shared revenues, much the same arrangement he’d had with Paramount for The Bellboy, but without the security of a long-term deal beneath it. He would produce and direct the new film himself, a task he hadn’t attempted since The Big Mouth.
In several key ways, Which Way would be among his most interesting works. It was a World War II story—his first period film since Cinderfella—and another film in which Jerry played a character somewhat like his real-life self: Brendan Byers, a rich, bored, 4-F egoist who cannot abide his rejection from the military. Determined to help his country, Byers capitalizes on his striking resemblance to a Nazi general and forms a private army to kidnap and replace him, sabotage the German military machine, and kill him. Jerry didn’t write the material—the script was by Dee Caruso and Gerald Gardner, who’d originated the idea along with Richard Miller—but its clear dependence on Chaplin’s antifascist masterpiece The Great Dictator held obvious appeal for him.
With the exception of the moderate success of The Big Mouth, he hadn’t had a hit in years, and this material was further from the commercial mainstream than anything he’d ever done. Warner Brothers might have sensed as much—the company was tuned-in enough to have bought the rights to Michael Wadleigh’s documentary Woodstock, which was still being edited, and Donald Cammell’s Grand Guignol rock film, Performance. If they thought they were getting a comedy franchise by signing Jerry, they didn’t seem overly concerned that he would be launching it with so anachronistic a project.
Jerry shaved his beard down into a natty goatee that gave his bored millionaire the air of a satyr and his Nazi general that of a devil; he actually looked pretty good. He set to work on November 30, 1969, on Warner’s Sound Stage 2. As when he first arrived at Columbia four years earlier, he brought favored crew members along for the picture—Rusty Wiles, Wallace Kelly, Lou Brown, Hal Bell, and Joe Stabile, the core of his organization for the past few years. And he hired performers who had worked with him frequently (Kathleen Freeman, Milton Frome, Fritz Feld) or whom he had known for years, Jan Murray chief among them.
As on other shoots, Jerry spent a fair bit of time distracted by business matters—the start-up of his theater business, in this case. But the overall atmosphere was spirited and genial. “We had such laughs on the set,” Murray remembered. “We had so much fun. At night, I would come up with jokes—because I’m a stand-up comedian, that’s the way my mind works—and I’d come in the next day, and he’d say, ‘Great, Jan, but I was thinking of the scene, too. Let me just run down my idea of the scene and then you can tell me and maybe we can incorporate it.’ Well, he would put in such hysterical shtick and we would scream laughing, and he’d say to me, ‘What were your things?’ And I’d say, ‘Forget it. I had two jokes.’ I didn’t understand the motion picture process the way that he did.”
Murray also recalled the pains Jerry took as a director and producer to see that everything in the film came out just right. “We were out on location,” he said, “and Jerry yells, ‘Cut!’ And he says, ‘These actors are too damn uncomfortable in these uniforms. They don’t fit right, they don’t look right.’ He shut down for a few hours, and he made a call, and all of a sudden a half-dozen seamstresses and tailors showed up, and they worked feverishly for a few hours to make the costumes look the way he liked it.”
The film wrapped in February 1970, and Jerry and Rusty Wiles edited it under the eyes of Warner Brothers executives. When it was released that summer, however, it was to apathy and disappointment. “As a comedy,” wrote Variety, “Which Way to the Front? is a tragedy. … The film, which might as well be titled The Six Stooges Go to War, is not only unfunny but embarrassing.” Howard Thompson of The New York Times was far gentler, admitting he found some of it “really hilarious.”
There were some precious moments in the film, which is surprisingly more coherent than anything Jerry had done in several years—surprising because it was so different from his typical fare. Much of the gagging is less than inspired, in part because Jerry delegated the mugging to Franken, Murray, and Willie Davis (as his black chauffeur, Linc). But once Jerry dons a Nazi uniform and starts screeching inane orders in a thick mock-German accent, the film spins with a new energy altogether. He has good scenes with Kaye Ballard, who plays his Italian mistress, Paul Winchell as his adjutant, and even son Ronnie Lewis—his adopted son, the only blond in the family—who plays a Lieutenant Levitch, whom Jerry pummels in the course of awarding a medal.
The high point is indeed Jerry’s tête-à-tête with Hitler (Sidney Miller, a teen actor of the 1930s). When Jerry’s character and Hitler first meet, they rush at each other in slow motion like lovers in a bad melodrama—a moment clearly inspired by some of the Hitler-Mussolini takeoffs in The Great Dictator. The two characters engage in all kinds of burlesque shtick:
Hitler: (pointing to a single head in a photo of a huge Nazi rally) Who is that?
(Byers shrugs.)
Hitler: It’s Max!
Byers: Max who?
Hitler: Max no difference! (The two men howl.)
When the meeting ends, the energy drains lamentably from the film. Fortunately, there’s little left to resolve before it ends.
Two of Jerry’s acolytes, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, had made their debuts as directors in the time since Jerry had made The Big Mouth, and in the vitality of Which Way to the Front? one can sense Jerry’s enthusiasm at a new kind of license in filmmaking. He comes as near to swearing as he ever had in a film—“Damn it!” he yells at one point, and “What the hell is going on here?” a moment later. And if the notion of a comedy about Nazis seems derived from Brooks’s classic “Springtime for Hitler” sequence in The Producers, recall that Brooks’s Hitler character was explicitly theatrical, whereas Jerry’s is the real man. It’s a full-scale Jewish comedy about Nazism—the first since Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be nearly thirty years earlier. Jerry wasn’t driven to the project by social conscience, but he obviously relished the freedom he felt in the liberal filmmaking environment of the late 1960s. Responding to his lifelong fascination with the Nazis—and his sense of having been persecuted by critics and the Hollywood establishment—he made a film mocking the thing he most feared. It wasn’t as personal as The Nutty Professor or The Patsy, but it was unjustly ignored.
Jerry, however, wasn’t too proud of it. “I got a little sloppy,” he said a few years later when discussing the film. Murray also thought it could have come off differently. “There’s a better movie on the cutting room floor,” he said. “What bothered me was that that hysteria, all that marvelous comedy that we ourselves were shrieking at and that we shot—I didn’t see a great deal of that on the screen. I thought we had a funnier picture.”
While respectful of his friend’s talent, Murray came to see that Jerry the editor wasn’t quite up to the prospect of putting together a film made by Jerry the actor and Jerry the producer. “I remember saying to him, ‘Jerry, why are you cutting this thing?’ “he reflected. “I said, ‘Why don’t you take a month off so you can see it with a new eye—and then don’t you cut it.’ You can’t be objective: When I would go to see the dailies, I would see nothing but myself. And when I suggested this to him, he said, ‘Jan, when I cut the film I don’t see Jerry Lewis, I just see the character.’ And he thinks so, but I think it’s very difficult to do.”
The most galling thing about the film from Jerry’s point of view, though, was the way Warner Brothers handled the release. As he saw it, the company decided the film was a stinker and cut their losses by releasing it as a B-feature. For years he bitterly complained against his treatment at the hands of his new employers. “Which Way to the Front? wasn’t even seen in this country,” began a typical reminiscence of the events. “Warner Brothers had a picture called Woodstock, so everything else they had was shoved on the back burner. My children couldn’t even see Which Way to the Front? in a theater in Los Angeles. I had to show it to them at home. Fortunately for me, it played in Germany in Berlin for sixty-four weeks. I got the negative costs of the film out of this one engagement.”
Jerry may not have been right about Woodstock, which was released into theaters in April 1970, when Which Way was still being edited. But the last detail of his story was more or less true: Which Way to the Front? was hugely popular overseas. In France, where One More Time hadn’t even been released—partly because of its erratic distribution pattern, partly because there wasn’t much interest in a Jerry Lewis film without Jerry himself in it—Which Way, under the title Ya, ya, mon général, was his most popular film since The Nutty Professor. But at home, it was barely shown; in July 1970 it got a brief run in Los Angeles, and limited national distribution six months later. According to one Warner Brothers insider of the period, “The picture was dumped, thrown away. … See, a Jerry Lewis picture always had a floor. You knew you could probably get your money back. But it also had a ceiling. And about this time investors started looking only for things that had the potential of going way over the top.”
More than ever, Jerry was convinced that American journalists—and now the American studios—were engaged in a personal campaign against him. He did almost no publicity for Front, even though it was his own production, and when he did show up for a press conference at a New York hotel, he couldn’t hide his contempt. “He entered, looked around the now half-filled room, forced a tight, congealed little smile to his lips, and in a voice tinged with heavy irony, began to speak,” wrote one reporter who covered the event. “Throughout the hour in which he answered questions, the irony never left and was sometimes expanded to extreme bitterness.”
The rest of 1970 was a blur of little projects. Jerry directed an episode of the TV series “The Bold Ones” entitled “In Dreams They Run,” dealing with muscular dystrophy. He appeared on “The Englebert Humperdinck Show.” He hosted (with Sammy Davis, Jr., and Charlie Callas) a TV special about circus clowns. He and Patti came to New York in the spring, where they had dinner at 21 with Earl Wilson, and Jerry snapped back at the columnist’s comment that there was “something marvelous” about Martin and Lewis: “There was something marvelous about the Hindenburg, but it burned and you don’t keep talking about it.”
He had begun appearing as a character in an animated TV series that aired on Saturday mornings on ABC. “Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down?!” was a half-hour show in which a cartoon Jerry donned disguises and adopted voices and got in and out of wacky troubles (David L. Lander, who later would play Squiggy on “Laverne and Shirley,” did Jerry’s voice). It was, in effect, a throwback to the Jerry of old—not the filmmaker, not the would-be romantic comic, not the talk-show host and telethon personality, but Frank Tashlin’s favorite cinematic instrument, the rubbery wild man with no fear of embarrassment. This cartoon Jerry—a janitor with the Odd Job Employment Agency—was essentially the same character that had been featured in D.C. comic books during the mid-1960s, when Jerry’s star shone brightly enough to support such a strange tie-in. Those comic books—“The Adventures of Jerry Lewis”—had been an adjunct of his career, an additional means of exposure; now Jerry’s animated alter ego had more of an audience than he himself did. Despite his efforts, he hadn’t found a way to surpass his own past in the minds of the American public; unable to replay the Kid into his mid-forties, he bequeathed the role to a cartoon character.
Only the telethon was working out for him. After the success of the 1966 edition, the public had endorsed the newly annual event by pledging more and more money each year: $1.25 million in 1967, $1.4 million in 1968, $2.039 million in 1969. That year, he inaugurated what he called “The Love Network,” a coast-to-coast linkup of stations that carried the broadcast. For a single day, the telethon would be seen on almost as many stations as one of the three big networks. It worked spectacularly: When the 1970 telethon ended, with an exhausted Jerry wringing out a lugubrious rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” the tote board read $5.093 million. It was his most successful enterprise of any sort since he’d left Paramount.
The Friars roasted him at the end of 1970; the March of Dimes named him Man of the Year a few months later. He would no longer work with Warner Brothers—someone in its distribution office had allowed Which Way to the Front? to go on a double bill with Deep Throat, he claimed—and talks with Twentieth Century–Fox for a multipicture deal had ceased. He blamed the times. The scripts were morally repugnant, the audiences willing to settle for depravity. It became a point of pride for him that he wouldn’t consent to the kind of projects the studios were asking him to make. “I was waiting for the theaters to be cleaned out,” he said some years later. “I had scripts put on my desk: ‘The Ant That Sucked Denver,’ ‘The Homosexual Matricide Case of the Undernourished Faggot Who Loved a Rabbi.’ But how many times can you watch two chicks in a motel with some guy with black socks whipping the bejesus out of some S&M?”*
However wild his exaggerations, there was no doubt he was fed up with Hollywood, maybe even with America itself. In April 1971 he played a few dates in Philadelphia and Chicago and then flew to Paris, where he would play at the great music hall l’Olympia. And he mused to an Associated Press reporter that he was seriously considering taking up residence overseas: “There’s a great peace of mind in Europe,” he said. “I have seen a world of friendliness here the like of which I’ve never seen before.” Of course, he had enjoyed warmth and affection at home, but that was decades ago, when he and Dean were in the flush of their success and he could stop traffic in Times Square by tossing photos of himself out of his dressing room window. Now that he had to travel seven thousand miles from home for a similar feeling of goodwill, he felt spurned. He had won over America with a comic character born of abandonment; now America was abandoning him. And for the first time in his life, he seemed not to have the energy to fight back.
“It’s a good feeling to be working live again,” he told a reporter in 1971 at the start of what turned into a world tour. “It’s rejuvenating.” He would begin in Paris, and proceed on to London, Rome, New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Fiji, Sydney, Tokyo, Honolulu, and Miami. Then he would do a big tour of outdoor theaters in the eastern United States and Canada. But France was the favored destination. The trip began and ended there, and no single engagement was as long as the one at l’Olympia.
Although he had played the London Palladium with Dean and as a solo, he had never performed live on the Continent. He would spend several weeks in the French capital—rehearsing, performing, taping television interviews (he appeared for ninety minutes on the enormously popular Sunday night talk show “L’invité du dimanche” with a panel composed of Louis Malle, Robert Benayoun, and Pierre Etaix), cementing the presence of Jerry Lewis Cinemas in France, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom, appearing on the prestigious broadcast of the “Gala de l’Union des Artistes 1971” (where, in clown garb, he upstaged host Maria Callas), and investigating the possibilities for film and TV projects in Europe.
He arrived with an entourage of perhaps a dozen. Patti had planned to accompany him but stayed instead in California to attend to Joseph, who was beginning to develop a difficult asthmatic condition (she would eventually arrive to catch Jerry’s final show in Paris and spend some time traveling with him). Ensconced in a suite at the Hilton, Jerry gave interviews to journalists and spent time reading a book that Patti had lent him: Your Inner Child of the Past by pop psychiatrist W. Hugh Missildine.
He opened at l’Olympia on April 15, heralded by preview stories in the major French newsweeklies. The bill opened with a bike act called the New Dollys, the Frank Olivier dancers, and singer Freda Payne (who had just had a hit with “Band of Gold”). After an intermission, Jerry took the stage to the strains of “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” and launched into his act. He conducted the orchestra, he did a bit of the old record act, he pantomimed a boxer who became a crooner, he danced, he sang. He kept props and bits of costumes tucked into Lou Brown’s piano and pulled them out to juggle or to adopt a character. In short, he did the same things he had been doing in American theaters for years and years to an increasingly indifferent public. But the French audience went absolutely wild. According to The International Herald Tribune, “He holds an alien audience’s delighted attention for 45 minutes, leaving it begging for more.” The review noted that though Jerry confessed to being “a poor linguist and a lazy scholar” and thus performed in English, “he has curtailed his customary effusive chatter … concentrating on song, imitations, comic pantomime and monkeyshines. … There is skill, precision and finesse to all Jerry Lewis does.” A dazed Robert Benayoun—who lingered around Jerry’s hotel for the whole of the comic’s stay in Paris—called the show “an extraordinary lesson in subtle control of comic art.”
In September, after the remainder of the tour had been completed, he returned briefly to Paris to create, direct, and star in a half-hour special for Italian TV. Dressed in full clown regalia, he played in some fifteen skits with such generic burlesque titles as “The Prestidigitator,” “The Thirsty Man,” “The Airplane Passenger,” “The Shave.” It was a display of the very sort of pantomimicry that his European audience most appreciated from him, and, in fact, the nearest thing he’d done since The Bellboy to silent comedy. Shot over four days, it aired that fall under the title “L’uomo d’oro”: “The Man of Gold.”