It had been thirty years since he’d left Irvington High to throw his skinny frame into pantomiming records in burlesque houses. The frame had filled out, and so had the life: He had gotten everything out of show business that he could have possibly wished for. He felt an urge to give something back. The charity work was part of this, no doubt, as was his teaching at USC.
But even when he was making heartfelt gestures of this sort, he liked people to recognize him for it. Hence the title of the telethon—“The Jerry Lewis Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy.” And hence the publication in 1971 of a book based on his teaching: not one of his self-styled anas of cribbed philosophy, but an honest-to-goodness organized and edited volume of his thoughts on the filmmaking process, culled from a half-million feet of audiotape of his USC lectures.
The Total Film-maker, as it was known, was a legitimately remarkable book for its time. Few directors had ever gathered their thoughts on the filmmaking process in a comprehensive volume, and Jerry aspired to just that—a systematic look at the process of filmmaking in chronological order and from the standpoint of every key figure in the creation and marketing of a film. In addition to fourteen chapters of advice, anecdotes, and explanations of the process of filmmaking, the book included more than thirty pages of Jerry’s thoughts on the art of comedy, on film comedy specifically, and on his fellow comedians, pronouncing in conclusion that “the great ones, the giants, are Chaplin, Stan Laurel, and Jackie Gleason, in that order.”
It’s a remarkable volume, choked with the sort of minutiae that bedazzled him. The notion of Jerry Lewis as a director may have puzzled and amused his countrymen, but The Total Film-maker made it obvious that he knew what he was doing. He had an obsessive knowledge of budgeting, lenses, heavy equipment, the operations of scenic and wardrobe and sound departments, and of course, the business of selling a film to the public. He discussed the way to handle a crew, what to do with temperamental actors, and how the money men in the industry viewed the creative process. The title of the book was no lie—from acting to producing to editing to drumming up business in the sticks, he had done it all.
That his USC students must have benefited from hearing this sort of stuff from him was obvious. They had been the original audience for the material, and the book, while published by Random House and intended, presumably, for a nonacademic audience, still carried a sense of propagandism toward the young. The clearest sign of this was its prologue, a brief introduction that, unlike the remainder of the text, was created expressly for the page and not edited from audiotape.
Where the text proper reveals Jerry’s working methods and biases, the prologue is an indication of how he hoped to present himself in the early 1970s—a leader of youth, enthusiastic, empathetic, and hip. He wrote about the world as “our big round put-on,” about young people who “want to say their thing,” and about “leaving the over-thirties to wallow in their own messes.” Then, in a wild riff printed in italics, he let loose:
Film, baby, powerful tool for love or laughter, fantastic weapon to create violence or ward it off, is in your hands. The only possible chance you’ve got in our round thing is not to bitch about injustice or break windows, but to make a concerted effort to have a loud voice. The loudest voice known to man is on thousand-foot reels. Campus chants about war are not going to help two peasants in a rice paddy on Tuesday. However, something might be said on emulsion that will stop a soldier from firing into nine children somewhere, sometime.
With its crazed rhythm, skewed slang, strange details, and advice that readers make themselves heard without attempting to specify what they might say, it’s like some weird Las Vegas incarnation of Allen Ginsberg.
The prologue gets odder: “I have a confession. Crazy. I have perched in a cutting room and licked emulsion. Maybe I thought more of me would get on to that film.”
And odder still: “You have to know all the technical crap as well as how to smell out the intangibles, then go make the birth of a simian under a Jewish gypsy lying in a truck in Fresno during a snowstorm prior to the wheat fields burning while a priest begs a rabbi to hug his foot.”
It finally devolves into a chantlike finale:
More important: make film, shoot film, run film.
Do something.
Make film. Shoot anything.
It does not have to be titled.
It does not have to be color.
There is no have to. Just do.
By the time he got around to writing a conclusion to the book, he had simmered down. “I am moving more behind the camera,” he wrote. “I have been taking pratfalls for thirty-seven years and my ass is sore.” He spoke in sage, prophetic terms about the industry and the future of the director’s craft. He saw a day when new directors would get their starts in television (and indeed, they already had: witness the career of director Arthur Penn, who’d broken in as an assistant director on “The Colgate Comedy Hour”). He predicted that the advent of “home cassettes”—videotaped movies—would revolutionize film exhibition. He spoke admiringly of Michelangelo Antonioni and Stanley Kubrick, two of the industry’s reigning artistic geniuses. Most amazingly, he singled out a twenty-one-year-old director he’d recently met in whom he saw great things: Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg wasn’t a student at USC, but he knew some of the people who attended the school, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas among them. Through the student grapevine, Jerry had heard about Spielberg’s twenty-four-minute homemade movie, Amblin, and he invited the young man to show it during his class. “It rocked me back,” he remembered. “He displayed an amazing knowledge of film-making as well as creative talent.” Spielberg would, of course, get the chance to demonstrate his skills to the world, but not through Jerry’s good offices. Sidney Sheinberg—right-hand man to Lew Wasserman and a high executive in both MCA (which had left the agenting business in 1962 when it was declared a monopoly by the courts) and Universal Pictures—gave the young director his first real break directing episodic TV. Still, Jerry would always claim some credit for having been the first to notice Spielberg’s remarkable talent, and Spielberg wouldn’t deny it.
In fact, several of Jerry’s students went on to careers in the industry, and he saw himself in later years as a kind of foster uncle to them. True, he recognized that there was a limit to his influence: “What could I teach George Lucas?” he once asked an interviewer. “He was my student for one semester, and you know right away he’s got it all. One thing George didn’t have as far as I was concerned was the ability to really crack that young ‘I’ll get that establishment’ syndrome. It was tough to get through. I never knew if I did or I didn’t. George’s success I doubt very strongly had anything to do with his being in my classes.”
But in time, his notion of himself as a father to the generation of gifted directors who debuted in the late 1960s and early 1970s came to include not only such reluctant apprentices as Lucas but directors he’d met only in his capacity as a celebrity being interviewed or others who’d merely read The Total Film-maker. “Randy Kleiser was one of my students at USC,” he said of the future director of Grease and The Blue Lagoon. “Peter Bogdanovich, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas. I had a great group there. I don’t think that they came away with anything that I taught them, although Randy still persists with what he learned from my book. Scorsese carries it on the fucking set. It’s his bible. Marty’ll make no bones about being one of my biggest fans. I make that statement with complete love and affection. Coppola was also a student. In 1961, when I was doing Ladies’ Man, Coppola was on that set every single fucking day. Every day.”
Besides his charity work, and besides passing the benefit of his experience on to a new generation of directors, there was another way Jerry hoped to do something important beyond all the entertainment he’d offered the world over the years. He wanted to make a film on an important theme—and he had had his eyes on a particular project for some years. In 1966, during the production of Way … Way Out, his longtime sound engineer Jim Wright signed on as coproducer of a film based on a script by publicity flack Joan O’Brien and TV critic Charles Denton. The film, known as The Day the Clown Cried, would tell the fictional story of a dislikeable, unsuccessful (and gentile) German circus clown named Karl Schmidt who was sent to Auschwitz for satirizing Hitler and was subsequently used by his Nazi captors to lead unsuspecting Jewish children into the gas chamber. Under the aegis of producer Paul Mart, the film would be directed that spring in Europe by Loel Minardi.
Like many people in Hollywood, Jerry had heard tell of this remarkable story, which O’Brien had conceived about five years earlier when she was thinking and reading about the Holocaust while simultaneously doing publicity work for Emmett Kelly. It had an obvious mix of horror, pathos, and drama, and it drew the attention of several important talents over the years, Milton Berle, Dick Van Dyke, and Joseph Schildkraut among them. But none of these performers had been able to pull a film together, and the thing seemed destined never to be made, a legendary “great unproduced screenplay.”
In the spring of 1971, when Jerry was playing at the Olympia Theater, he was visited by Belgian producer Nathan Wachsberger, who had imported European films into the U.S. in the 1930s, been a partner of George Jessel’s in a production company, and made many unexceptional films in Europe. Wachsberger had an option on O’Brien’s script, and he wanted Jerry to star and direct. “I have made a deal with Joan,” Jerry recalled Wachsberger announcing. “We absolutely agree that you are the only one who can play Helmut exactly as she envisioned him.” (Significantly, in Jerry’s memory, Wachsberger uses not the name O’Brien gave her protagonist—Karl Schmidt—but the name Jerry imposed upon the character when he rewrote the script—Helmut Doork.) Jerry had nothing even in the pipeline back in Hollywood. He agreed to look the material over.
His initial response to the proposal, he recalled, was fear. “The thought of portraying Helmut still scared the hell out of me,” he wrote in his autobiography. But Wachsberger laid it out for him as a rare combination of a sweet deal and an important project: French and Swedish financing, the resources of Europa Studios (the very lot where Ingmar Bergman worked), a cast of fine European actors. Jerry finally relented. By August 1, Variety was reporting that Jerry Lewis Productions and Wachsberger had agreed to do the film together with a start-up date set for sometime later that year.
It turned out to be an optimistic plan. Jerry wanted to rewrite O’Brien’s script, and he still had obligations to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas to fulfill before the year ran out. (His three-year deal with the casino, calling for him to appear four weeks a year, was winding down, but he renewed it that winter, stipulating that for 1972 he preferred to work his obligation off in a single month to give him time to make the film.)
In February 1972 he and his new publicist, Fred Skidmore, flew to Stockholm to see to preproduction chores. They went to Germany and Poland to visit the sites of concentration camps. And they went to Paris, where Jerry shot some material for the film while performing with the Bouglione Cirque d’Hiver and saw to his theater business (France’s first Jerry Lewis Cinema opened in March 1972).
On April 5, shooting of the film proper began in Stockholm. To prepare for his role, Jerry, who’d been putting on weight in the past few years, lost thirty-five pounds on a grapefruit diet. Joining him in the cast were Swedish actors Harriet Andersson (longtime collaborator of the great Bergman), Ulf Palme, and Sven Lindberg, along with Jerry’s French admirer, comedian Pierre Etaix. Press releases were distributed. Hollywood trade papers carried announcements.
But something was fishy. Although his $1.5 million film was in production, Nathan Wachsberger was nowhere in sight. After two weeks of filming, Jerry began to get troubling reports of the financial condition of the project. Suppliers hadn’t been paid for film and other equipment. Crew members and performers had been issued rubber checks. Wachsberger remained in the south of France, taking Jerry’s frantic phone calls and assuring him the money was forthcoming.
Wachsberger had very good reason to keep his distance. He may or may not have had the money, but he definitely didn’t have the rights to O’Brien’s material. His option on the script had expired. Wachsberger had paid O’Brien a five-thousand-dollar initial fee, but she never received the fifty thousand dollars due her before production began. As a result, Jerry and his company were in Sweden filming something that wasn’t legally theirs to make. And O’Brien told a reporter years later that she was certain Jerry was aware of it. “Jerry knew the option had expired,” she said, “but he decided to go ahead.”
In the face of intransigence from his producer, and with a great deal of time, energy, publicity, and passion already invested in the film, Jerry paid out of his own pocket for expenses that Wachsberger ought to have incurred. It was an abysmal circumstance, and he couldn’t hide his anxieties from his colleagues. Lindberg, who played a Nazi in the film, recalled how agitated Jerry was throughout the shoot. “It was clear he was not in good order those months here in Sweden,” he said.
And, in fact, Jerry—torn by his anxiety about the state of the production, by the possibility of losing all of the money he was investing in the film, and by the very emotions that the project and his role called up in him—could barely stand the strain. As on his first self-directed films, he pushed himself to his physical limits to see the thing through. “I almost had a heart attack,” he told a New York Times reporter months later. “Maybe I’d have survived. Just. But if that picture had been left incomplete, it would have very nearly killed me.” (Indeed, given his perpetual nerve pain and his drug habits, it might well have.)
At one point, he revealed afterward, he actually closed down the production because of Wachsberger’s failure to perform his duties as producer. Nevertheless, he persevered, bleeding his own bank account in the process. As he explained soon afterward, he turned the stress of his situation into a benefit. “The suffering, the hell I went through with Wachsberger had one advantage,” he said. “I put all the pain on the screen. If it had been my first picture, the suffering would have destroyed me. But I have the experience to know how to use suffering.”
Ultimately, he said, he poured his entire soul into the film in a way he never had before. The experience of shooting the climactic scene struck him as one of the transcendent moments of his life: “I was terrified of directing the last scene. I had been 113 days on the picture, with only three hours of sleep a night. I had been without my family. I was exhausted, beaten. When I thought of doing that scene, I was paralyzed; I couldn’t move. I stood there in my clown’s costume, with the cameras ready. Suddenly the children were all around me, unasked, undirected, and they clung to my arms and legs, they looked up at me so trustingly. I felt love pouring out of me. I thought, ‘This is what my whole life has been leading up to.’ I thought what the clown thought. I forgot about trying to direct. I had the cameras turn and I began to walk, with the children clinging to me, singing, into the gas ovens. And the door closed behind us.”
In June, when production finally wrapped, Jerry told Swedish reporters that Wachsberger, who he claimed never showed up on the set or made himself available for consultation, had failed to make good on his financial obligations. Wachsberger retaliated by instructing his London lawyers to sue Jerry for breach of contract, claiming that he had all he needed to finish the film without Jerry.
Through the following winter and spring, Jerry edited the movie, taking cans of film on the road with him and working long hours in Los Angeles with Rusty Wiles. He still had no way of knowing if the film would be released, and his frustration and bitterness were obvious. He drank beers in the editing room, and he snapped at Wiles when he said that people who’d seen a rough cut of one sequence felt it was a bit long. “Everybody’s an expert,” Jerry barked. “There’s a fucking genius at every screening. Where were they when the empty pages were in the typewriter? Where were they when we were freezing in fucking Sweden, shooting the film? Too long? Jesus Christ! … It was the same thing with the dance sequence in The Patsy. And I told them then that they should just wait till it was fucking finished before they go telling me what’s wrong with it. Just wait till I’m ready. I don’t know who the fuck asked for their opinion anyway.”
He saved his special wrath, though, for a young Swedish extra who made the mistake of turning her eyes toward the camera during a shot that had been exceedingly difficult to capture. “There she is,” he snarled as Wiles showed him the footage. “There’s the little cunt. Same little cunt who tried to rape us before. Watch her eyes. There. See it? Following the fucking camera … the sneaky little bitch. Vamping for the camera. She pulled that same thing in another sequence, remember? I told her to keep her fucking eyes to the front. That it wasn’t a beauty pageant. … There’s no room for Shirley Temple in a concentration camp.”
Increasingly, it seemed that all of the work he was putting into assembling the film would go for naught. Neither he nor Wachsberger had the clout or money to pull the frayed situation together. Europa Studios, claiming it was owed more than six hundred thousand dollars by the production, held on to the negative, although Jerry kept the negatives of the final three scenes (along with duplicates of much of Europa’s holdings) as protection against the film’s being released without his cooperation. “I took the last three shooting days,” he remembered. “I hold those negatives, the last three days. So they have incomplete work there.” O’Brien and her co-writer, Denton, for their parts, refused to sell the rights to their property anew to Wachsberger or Jerry in the wake of the production, even after Jerry pleaded with them personally upon his return to the States and showed them scenes from the film.
Much as he may have thought he could win sympathy for his case by showing O’Brien and Denton his footage, the gesture might actually have turned the writers forever against him. “It was a disaster,” O’Brien said of the film years later. “Just talking about it makes me very emotional.” Jerry had changed more than just the name of her lead character. He had turned him from a mediocre clown into a gifted one, from a gentile to a Jew, and from a bastard into a hero, from “an egoistical clown,” according to Jim Wright, who also saw a rough cut of the film, to “an Emmett Kelly, a very sad clown.” The original story was a tale of horror, conceit, and finally, enlightenment and self-sacrifice. Jerry had turned it into a sentimental, Chaplinesque representation of his own confused sense of himself, his art, his charity work, and his persecution at the hands of critics. Furthermore, he had used the clown theme as an occasion to work into the film some of the silent routines he had been performing in Europe—clown material like the stuff he did on “L’uomo d’oro.” And, to the writers’ chagrin, he had a characteristically relaxed attitude toward details: “In one scene,” bemoaned Denton, “Jerry is lying in his bunk wearing a pair of brand-new shoes after theoretically having been in a concentration camp for four or five years.”
Others to whom Jerry showed his rough cut over the years held similar opinions of what they saw. “I just remember rage,” said Joshua White, director of the 1979 MDA telethon. “He played this rage because that’s what he was filled with then. He never really commits to the character. He’s always just Jerry. He’s supposed to be this schlump, but he’s got this slicked-back hair.”
Comedian Harry Shearer, a longtime Lewis observer and a friend of White’s who was allowed by Jerry to view the rough cut, summed up the experience: “The closest I can come to describing the effect is if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz. You’d just think, ‘My God, wait a minute! It’s not funny, and it’s not good, and somebody’s trying too hard in the wrong way to convey this strongly held feeling.’”
Despite the webs of financing and litigation that kept the film under wraps, it refused to die completely. In 1980, when Jerry’s next film, Hardly Working, proved a hit in West Germany and France, Europa Films announced plans to shop the negative of The Day the Clown Cried to European concerns who would finish and distribute it. At the time, O’Brien reiterated her claim that the film was made without any legal rights and could never be released. “I’m so sick and tired of stories being circulated regarding the Stockholm fiasco,” she said, “that I felt it was time to again state the facts, facts which everyone, including Lewis and the people at Europa Studios, are well aware of.”
Later that year, Jim Wright told the Hollywood trade press that he was still developing a script of the story, with Richard Burton in mind for the lead. Nothing happened. In 1991 producers Tex Rudloff (one of Wright’s original partners) and Michael Barclay announced they would make a version of The Day the Clown Cried in the Soviet Union as a joint production with the Russian company Lenfilm. Again, no film resulted. The following year, yet another plan called for Robin Williams to star and Jeremy Kagan (who’d recently made The Chosen) to direct. Yet again, nothing more was heard of the project. In 1994 Barclay was talking about a William Hurt version. But it seemed no likelier than any of his previous efforts.
For his part, Jerry never surrendered the hope that he could see the project through. Writing about the film in 1982, he said, “I’m still hoping to get the litigation cleared away so I can go back to Stockholm and shoot three or four more scenes.” In 1984 he spoke of finishing the film—and of making The Nutty Professor II.
Eventually, The Day the Clown Cried became a sore point with him; interviewers who poked too closely at the topic could find themselves subjected to withering retorts. A pair of Cahiers du cinéma interviewers who went to speak with him in 1993 wrote that they’d been cautioned in advance against mentioning the film.
Just as he had sworn to himself that he would someday see a cure for muscular dystrophy, he swore he would live to see the release of The Day the Clown Cried: “One way or another, I’ll get it done. The picture must be seen, and if by no one else, at least by every kid in the world who’s only heard there was such a thing as the Holocaust.”
He no doubt meant what he said, even if he was unconsciously paraphrasing the famous malapropism of Samuel Goldwyn: “I don’t care if it doesn’t make a nickel. I just want every man, woman, and child in America to see it!”
In the spring of 1972 Frank Tashlin died after suffering two heart attacks in a span of three days. He had directed his last film four years earlier, but his career had started to peter out a few years before that, at roughly the time that he and Jerry stopped working together. Hollywood had apparently come to see him as “that Jerry Lewis director” and relegated him to movies with Phyllis Diller and an aging Bob Hope.
In the last years of his life Tashlin had turned to writing children’s books, and one in particular captured his resentment at having been abandoned by Hollywood. Peter Bogdanovich described it in an obituary in The New York Times as being about “a carefree possum hanging contentedly from a tree. Some people come along and, because he is hanging upside down, they mistake his smile for a frown, and proceed to take him into civilization in order to make him happy. After several days’ exposure to the real world, he has been made so miserable by what he has seen that his mouth turns downward sadly—though, because he is still upside down, he finally, to the joy of the people, appears to be smiling.”
Later that year, when Jerry was performing at a theater in suburban New York City, he got a call backstage from his mother. Danny Lewis had had a stroke. Jerry flew down to Miami, where his parents had moved once Danny had finally thrown in the towel on his career. Danny spent weeks in the hospital, and when he finally came home to his luxurious condominium, he was diminished in both body and mind. He spent his days in bed and in a wheelchair, attended to by his wife and an in-home nurse, singing occasionally in what his son proudly boasted was still perfect pitch, but unable at other times to remember what he’d eaten an hour earlier.
As Jerry’s working life now consisted almost solely of live appearances in hotels, casinos, dinner theaters, and in the summer, outdoor amphitheaters, he worked Miami into his schedule more frequently so he could see more of his parents. But he was still in demand for overseas performances, which could be staged as events and were therefore much more lucrative than domestic appearances. In the winter of 1972–73 he toured the world as he had two years before—Europe, Australia, Africa. In Hobart, Tasmania, he played a round of golf and struck an eleven-year-old boy on the head with an errant tee shot. In South Africa, he and Patti received a traditional Zulu welcome, and a miles-long throng of well-wishers ushered his motorcade into Johannesburg. “I have that welcome on tape,” he told friends back home. “Nothing like that would happen here.”
In March 1973 he and Milton Berle played a two-week engagement at the Deauville Hotel in Miami. It was a disaster. Berle treated Jerry like hired help: Even though he wrote the routines they were to do together to segue between Berle’s opening act and his own closing act, Jerry had to listen while Berle dictated tempos and line readings and bits of stage business as if Jerry were still the same green kid who once guested on “Texaco Star Theater.” Worse, the crowds didn’t go for Jerry’s act. Where Vegas and Tahoe and Catskills audiences brought their own energy to the theater with them, the retired Jewish couples who swelled a Miami crowd seemed to take Jerry’s energy as an affront. Plus, the Deauville had booked the show into an enormous room that was only half-full for most of the performances. “We were wrong to come here,” Jerry told Patti. “The place is wrong. I don’t belong in Miami.”
As the engagement wore on, he grew increasingly bitter about his situation. When Jan Murray and his wife, Toni, came backstage one night to share Jerry’s birthday with him, Jerry nostalgically spoke of the reception he’d received in foreign cities on his recent tour and pronounced, “Miami’s a toilet. The best thing you can do for it is to pull the chain.”
Some days later, in his hotel room with his assistant, Bob Harvey, he launched into a drunken tirade. “Miami sucks!” he shouted. “The people here know from nothing. Nothing do they know. They know ‘shit’ and they know ‘fuck,’ and anything else is out of their league. If you don’t open with ‘fuck,’ you bomb. ‘Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock: Fuck him, let him stay there.’ Then you’re a hit.”
He slammed a wine bottle against a wall: “I christen this hotel ‘Motherfucker’! Pull out the pilings, you sons of bitches!” And then he busied himself setting an ashtray, a toilet bowl, and a tiled bathroom floor on fire with lighter fluid. “That’s it,” he screamed, as Harvey raced around putting out flames. “Burn! Burn, you motherfucker! Burn down the fucking hotel! Burn down the whole fucking town!”
The ugly finale of the trip came when Jerry was served with a lawsuit in his Deauville Hotel dressing room one night after a show. A group of Jerry Lewis Cinema franchisees led by Karlene Cobb was seeking $3 million in damages for fraud, breach of contract, and antitrust practices. Network Cinema Corporation executives were aware of the pending litigation, which they’d first heard about the previous fall, and they dismissed the incident in Miami as a publicity stunt. But there was no denying that the Jerry Lewis Cinemas were in trouble, even as the chain was expanding in Europe. The hope that there would be 3,000 Jerry Lewis Cinemas by 1976 was becoming increasingly remote; by February 1973 there were a mere 190 theaters.
And those venues weren’t doing very well. It had, in fact, become clear that there simply weren’t enough G-rated movies to keep the theaters stocked with the sort of fare they were meant to show. Some franchisees took matters into their own hands in ways that frankly embarrassed the corporation. In December, for instance, a Jerry Lewis Theater in Greenville, South Carolina, had shown such films as A Clockwork Orange, Oh! Calcutta!, and Fritz the Cat, brazenly violating the chain’s family pictures policy.
That failure to judge what sort of product would be available to the marketplace seemed to extend to Jerry’s choice of business associates. When the corporation found itself suddenly undercapitalized, and Jerry found himself without the support of the partners who’d lured him into the exhibition business, the Jerry Lewis Cinema Corporation declared bankruptcy, thus encouraging investors to sue for the return of their franchise fees. Nearly a decade of litigation commenced, and Jerry was subjected to lawsuits in several states.
Years later, he would view the collapse of his exhibition enterprise from a philosophical remove: “My dream was to see it say ‘Jerry Lewis and Sons Theaters.’ And to put product in there that I’d be proud of. But the product was gone ten days after we even started the fucking company. Oh, well.”
At the time, however, he was desperate. He had an unreleased film on his hands, he had no offers of any sort for film or TV work ahead of him, his father sat addled in an apartment in a city he detested, his oldest son couldn’t shake his drug use or find a way back to a productive civilian life, he himself was taking as many as fifteen Percodans a day—even though he no longer had a prescription for so much as one—and now he was facing a legal cost he couldn’t possibly survive if the time ever came that he had to pay it.
He did his ritual tour of summer theaters that year, appeared as a clown on a German TV special (a live appearance in Cologne was canceled by the threat of anti-American student rioting), held his telethon in Vegas for the first time ever. Even then he couldn’t get things right. Thinking aloud on the telethon about a divinity who could create a disease that took such a horrible toll on innocent children, he told a national audience, “God goofed,” invoking a minor furor in the press (“Not even a militant atheist is as offensive as someone who thinks he is so important he reduces God to a bungling middleman,” wrote one critic) and doubtless repelling viewers across the country.
On October 2, 1973, his twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, the pain, the drugs, and the hopeless situation he felt himself to be in finally overwhelmed him. “I felt everything was finished,” he confessed years later. “I didn’t have the stamina to sustain one more sweep of that red hand on the clock.” He retreated to his sanctum sanctorum, his private bathroom, opened the padlock on a drawer, pulled out a .38 revolver, loaded it, and stuck it in his mouth.
“I came as close as you could come,” he told a reporter. “I had the thumb in the cocking position. You know how you chew a piece of gum sometimes with a bit of tinfoil still stuck to it, that terrible feeling? Put a fucking .38 barrel in your mouth and see what that tastes like.” He sat thinking of the peace and consolation that would follow if he pulled the trigger: “It would be over so fast, and would be such a relief.” And then he heard a couple of his sons running through the house, playing and laughing, and he managed to stop himself from crossing an irreversible line. He took the gun from his mouth and rode his anguish out.
It had to have been the drugs.
Yes, his workaholism had been neutered by his lack of career opportunities. Yes, his financial situation was precarious. Yes, he was anguished at having been abandoned by a public that less than a decade earlier overwhelmed him with adoration. Yes, he was in frequent, horrid pain.
But suicide? Even if the melodrama of the scene is exaggerated, the very notion that he would choose to share such an anecdote indicated how seriously wrong things had gone for him. He had lost control of himself. The drugs were in charge.
He was hooked on Percodans not only because of their inherently addictive nature but also because of their effect on his unremitting pain. He needed them just to get out of bed. “When I got up in the morning,” he told a reporter, “it would take twenty minutes for me to get out of bed, having slept in a brace all night. When I stayed in hotels, I would give a bellboy twenty-five or thirty dollars every day to knock on my door, open it with a pass key, crush three Percodans with a spoon for me, then dissolve them in hot water from room service so they would get into the bloodstream faster. I’d lie there for twenty fucking minutes until I could move, then get up and pop a Dexedrine.”
The addiction had more than just physical and emotional costs. Although his income had greatly diminished in recent years, he was spending more and more money on drugs. He paid a thousand dollars for ten Percodans one night and then five hundred dollars for a single one the very next day. He was buying uppers. And he was buying marijuana, which he had begun to experiment with as both a painkiller and an aphrodisiac. (“Once I came from January 3 to mid-February,” he told a reporter about his experiences combining sex and drugs. “It was the longest shoot in the history of America. I mean, it sucked my skin inward and became part of my marrow.”)
Yet even though he was in the throes of addiction, he recognized that his drug abuse had been instigated by the need to relieve pain. And in an effort to address his pain medically, he was willing to travel the world and try almost anything. He visited neurosurgeons throughout Europe and Asia in hope that something could be done to repair or relieve the damage in his spine. One physician suggested an operation that could as easily leave him paralyzed as cure him. He demurred. And as his quest for a remedy continued, so did his Percodan habit.
The boys weren’t aware of just how severe the problem had become. But they noticed undeniable changes in his behavior. As Anthony recalled it, he had turned from the angry man of a few years earlier to a detached one. “The results of Dad’s addiction were mostly passive,” he said, “such as his sleeping on the couch all day.” He was no longer the heroic father whose return to the house marked a highlight of the day. Indeed, he carried himself like a stranger. “The drugs put great spiritual distance between him and all of us,” Anthony reflected. “He was basically in his own world.” (Only Gary, who’d had his own drug problems, might’ve been savvy to just how badly off Jerry was; in March 1972 Gary was subjected to embarrassing publicity when he was arrested in Van Nuys and accused of illegal possession of sleeping pills, charges of which he was subsequently cleared.)
Patti, however, knew more than her sons about the side effects of her husband’s spinal injury and drug abuse: bowel irregularities (including what he called “shameful” incidents and “weeks” of constipation), impotence, disequilibrium, numbness, blurred vision. To her, though, the onset of Jerry’s drug abuse was related not only to the physical pain he was suffering but to the state of his career. “I felt he was going in circles of diminishing size,” she remembered, knowing how desperately he had worked in the past and how desperately he desired to keep on working. She came to see that his loss of himself in drugs had supplanted his former loss of himself in work. “I believe Jerry’s work symptoms were precursors to his chemical addictions,” she said. “It would have been wonderful if, in some way, we could have personally filled Jerry’s empty space with our love for him, and our deep pride in him.” But he needed more than his family’s support—he wanted the world’s. And it was no longer his to summon forth.
Two books about Jerry were published in 1973, and even that honor proved mixed for him. In France, Robert Benayoun published Bonjour, Monsieur Lewis, a cornucopia of praise for the great comic star, part scrapbook, part wacky French theoretical treatise, part exacting factual encyclopedia; the handsome work was never translated into English, but Jerry had a case of French copies in his office. At almost the same time, Arthur Marx, Groucho’s son, published a scathing and factually dubious dual biography of Dean and Jerry. Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime (Especially Himself) painted a portrait of Jerry as a petty, egoistic has-been while depicting Dean as a dignified, talented scallywag. Jerry loathed the book; he claimed never to have read it, but he attacked NBC talk-show host Tom Snyder for asking him about it.
The two books perfectly embodied the chicken-and-egg situation of Jerry’s career: Just as he was beloved and loathed at once, he had no work and was in no shape to work. Throughout the mid-1970s, he toured Vegas, the Catskills, the Poconos, Reno and Tahoe, Miami, Europe, and the summer amphitheater circuit. He still traveled in the style he had become accustomed to in his flush days—over one hundred pieces of luggage, limousines, and first-class airline seats. And he still comported himself like a persnickety star if things weren’t to his liking. In August 1975 he became furious when his two-night engagement at a twenty-thousand-seat arena in Cleveland was cut back to one night, shouting at the promoters and refusing to meet some locals who’d won a contest by raising money for the MDA (the one-night stand, as it happened, drew only five thousand attendees, even with Pat Boone and Connie Stevens sharing the bill). In September 1976 he stormed off the stage at the Westbury Music Fair, a suburban New York theater that had long been a regular venue for him, when the sound system acted up.
He made a very few TV appearances, mostly as a talk show guest (in 1974 he did some deep-sea fishing on “Celebrity Sportsman”). There was talk that he would appear in a Broadway comedy—entitled, ironically, “Feeling No Pain”—that never came to be. He even turned up with Patti on a couple of televised specials with evangelist Oral Roberts and directed a short film for Roberts’s syndicated television network.
This last curiosity resulted in part from Patti’s withdrawal from the turmoil of her marriage into a variety of spiritual outlets—Roberts’s ministry among them—and from a mutual recognition between Jerry and Roberts that they were, in fact, at the top of the heap in the same business. Roberts had been one of the inventors of televangelism, soliciting money from a worldwide congregation linked electronically by television. And Jerry, of course, had become more and more widely known to the American public as The Man Who Did the Telethon.
The 1970s were the absolute heyday of “The Jerry Lewis Telethon” and of the telethon as a genre. What had begun as a last-gasp version of the vaudeville and burlesque revue in the late 1950s was by the 1970s a practice conducted on a huge scale by a few charities (the United Negro College Fund, the March of Dimes, the Fund for Cerebral Palsy), by religious entrepreneurs like Roberts, and by Jerry Lewis.
Jerry had turned the telethon into his career—indeed, the fight against muscular dystrophy seemed to have become his life’s work. And ironically, while his film, TV, and stage projects floundered and even dried up, his philanthropic career burgeoned. In 1972, the last year the telethon originated in New York, he raised $9.2 million in a broadcast that was carried on 140 stations. Moving to Vegas the next year, he raised about 35 percent more ($12.4 million) on almost 10 percent more stations. Every year, the thing grew more lucrative and spread its electronic net wider. In 1975, when $18.8 million was raised, “The Jerry Lewis Telethon,” carried on 195 stations, was the thirteenth most-watched broadcast in the history of the Nielsen TV ratings.
It was a queer sort of triumph for Jerry, who broke down into tears of gratitude at various moments during each annual broadcast—most characteristically during the finale, when he sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” a staggeringly inappropriate song from Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, to the “kids” for whom he exhausted himself. On the one hand, he was the star of a hit show—a hit for which the nation not only dropped all else on a summer holiday weekend but actually opened its wallets, to staggering results. On the other hand, whereas the success of his films had always seemed to him an obvious personal triumph, he could never be certain with the telethon that it was to him and not his cause that the American public was responding with its support.
Throughout the decade, the telethon came to embody a kind of show-business excess that previous generations had unthinkingly supported but that seemed self-parodic in the age of punk rock and “Saturday Night Live.” It regularly featured such performers as Charo, Don Rickles, Tony Orlando and Dawn, Norm Crosby, Steve and Eydie, Sammy Davis, Jr., Vic Damone—exemplars of a waning era of showmanship and entertainment. Jerry was flanked by a cadre of emcees who spelled him for various episodes during the broadcast—David Hartman, Chad Everett, and the omnipresent Ed McMahon, who early in his service with the telethon became famous within the organization for his ability to predict the final tally that the tote board would register.
With time, the telethon would become synonymous with the sort of tackiness and glitz that Americans understood by the words “Las Vegas.” Of course, there was more than just Vegas on the screen each Labor Day: The telethon still had a New York adjunct, along with a Los Angeles feed, and viewers would be treated to entertainment segments broadcast from those locations and featuring performers who couldn’t be in Vegas in person. And in each of the MDA’s satellite cities—the two hundred or so stations across the country that carried the broadcast—local celebrities such as weathermen and disc jockeys spoke directly to their neighbors in an effort to raise money. But the telethon’s emphasis on money, gaudiness, broad emotionalism, and lounge-style entertainment all glittered with the vulgarity the casino city represented.
This tacky aura was reinforced by the impression that the telethon had mutated over the years from a charity event into a Jerry Lewis event. It was more than just the elision of the words “muscular dystrophy” from the name of the program, more than just the omnipresent cartoon caricature of Jerry, more even than the streams of celebrities coming on stage and singing Jerry’s praises. It was the sense—not just among show people, but among the public at large—that Jerry had come to see the telethon (and the fight against neuromuscular disease) as an extension of himself.
The telethon utterly consumed him. Where in the 1960s he would meet a handful of times per year with MDA officials, film a few public service announcements, and maybe do something as visible as a telethon, by the 1970s he was devoting himself to MDA business more than to his own career affairs. There were frequent meetings (he had an office on the twenty-seventh floor of the MDA’s New York headquarters and personalized it with his usual decor of mementoes, gadgets, and photos, though none of his family), there were appearances across the country at events staged by MDA’s corporate sponsors, gratis performances at charity events sponsored by various celebrities in exchange for their work on Jerry’s telethon, commercial tapings for MDA and for its sponsors, planning sessions and rehearsals for the telethon. … It never stopped. Even for a man who could be consumed by his work, it was a harsh routine. And it paradoxically kept him from the work that had made him what he was. As his manager, Joe Stabile, told a reporter in the mid-1970s, “Jerry spends so much of the year on muscular dystrophy that he’s not developing film and TV projects like he should be doing.”
Spurring him on, inevitably, was the sheer success of the thing: high Nielsen ratings, a wide network of stations, record-breaking donations each and every year. Ever since Boeing Boeing, Jerry had tried to find a forum in which the public would allow him into its good graces as an adult. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that the telethon began less than a year after that film’s failure. Seeking a way out of his screeching Kid character, he tried romantic leads and sophisticated comedies, but only the persona he presented to the public in the telethon seemed to hook an audience. Furthermore, it was a success in television, his old bête noire, on his own terms: no network executives, no censorious sponsors, no week-to-week grind of ratings worries and rehearsals. For a single day, all over the country, he had, in effect, his own TV network and the freedom to do whatever his instincts told him would be right.
To his family, the telethon was both a point of deep pride and another omnipresent obligation that stole him from their company. Patti saw in his dedication to the cause the same sort of all-consuming escape that had driven him into performance and drugs and performances. She was glad to see that the boys were asked to assist their father in the telethons more and more frequently as they grew older. But she recognized that the telethons were a source of pain for her sons—“His work addiction left its mark on the boys”—and that they were especially stung to see their father, who so rarely had time for them, pleading in public for a group of strangers he identified as his “kids.”
In fact, this aspect of the MDA fund-raising drives—the use of children to tweak the national conscience—was intimately intertwined in the public consciousness with Jerry’s very personality. Other charities—especially the March of Dimes, whose campaigns the MDA imitated in particular—had long used children as symbols of the ravages of disease in an attempt to curry America’s guilt and open its wallets. But Jerry and the MDA made a particular point of the tragedy of childhood disease.
To be true, this approach was, for the most part, apropos to muscular dystrophy: Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, the disease that undoubtedly first drew Jerry’s attention to the cause, cruelly attacked young boys and rarely allowed its victims to live into their twenties. (There were, of course, many other strains of neuromuscular disease that the MDA was invested in discovering cures for, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—better known as ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease—which most commonly struck down people in their thirties or even older.)
To the end of exploiting the pediatric aspect of neuromuscular disease, the MDA pursued two lines of attack that eventually became identical in the public consciousness with the telethon and with the disease itself: the use of an annual “poster child,” a squeaky-clean, photogenic young muscular dystrophy sufferer; and the creation of the slogan “Jerry’s Kids.” The success of these tactics became evident as references to poster children and “Jerry’s Kids” bled into the popular culture as phrases in the national lexicon, as fodder for stand-up comics, even as appropriated by the Grateful Dead (the rock band whose acolytes adopted the name “Jerry’s Kids” in honor of guitarist Jerry Garcia). Promoted tirelessly in MDA-related advertising for national products such as breakfast cereal, soda pop, and beer, and on ubiquitous billboards and point-of-purchase ads in convenience stores, fast-food restaurants, and even bowling alleys all over the nation, the notion that Jerry was doing all he could for some otherwise helpless kids became an intrinsic part of the MDA’s charity drive.
Of all of the telethons Jerry did for MDA, the archetypical one had to have been the 1976 show. An audience of between 84 million and 100 million viewers tuned in to two hundred stations during the twenty-one-and-a-half-hour broadcast and pledged $21,723,813 in donations. They saw more than 150 acts, ranging from Tony Bennett, the Moiseyev Dancers, and Lola Falana to the University of Kansas cheerleaders and novelty lounge acts right off an antique vaudeville stage. And they got nearly a full day’s worth of a fifty-year-old Jerry cajoling, cavorting, pleading, excoriating, singing, dancing, and mugging his heart out at the Sahara Hotel’s Space Center convention facility, in an effort to get them to donate, as he put it in his opening remarks, “a dollar more.” (Each year, the MDA boasted, the telethon earned more than it did the previous year, and on this eleventh annual broadcast, Jerry kept that record intact; the 1975 broadcast had pulled $18.8 million.)
As in previous years, the MDA hierarchy was in attendance: Bob Ross, Mucio Delgado, and MDA president Pat Weaver, among others. But added to the organizational family was an entire group of technicians and other volunteers who over the years had come to make up the telethon’s in-studio “family”: director Artie Forrest; his wife, Marcy, the show’s talent coordinator; his son, Richard, the associate producer; tote board tabulators Fred Schaefer and Jerry Weinberg; Jerry’s manager, Joe Stabile, and his wife, Claudia, also serving in production capacities; even the men of the United States Navy, who for years had served the telethon—in uniform—as ushers and a backup security force. Lou Brown, Jerry’s longtime bandleader, was on hand. And five of Jerry’s sons (Gary was the sole exception) were listed in the show’s credits as production assistants, along with the Forrests’ sixteen-month-old daughter, Nicole. (Patti, too, was there for moral support, though she didn’t speak on camera or appear in the credits.) The telethon was so big that Bicentennial summer that three journalists for major publications turned up in Las Vegas to chronicle the overnight grind: Harry Shearer (whose story, “Telethon,” ran in Film Comment), Michael Tolkin (the future author of The Player, then writing for the Village Voice), and Jerry’s old friend Peter Bogdanovich (on assignment for Esquire).
The show was fabulously costly: $1 million for lights, video, sound, microphones, sets, and so on, including payments to the stations on the Love Network to compensate for the advertising revenue they would forfeit during the broadcast; $1 million for the elaborate phone system that was the hub of the pledge drive; $750,000 to the Theater Authority for performance waivers that allowed entertainers to donate their appearance time. Jerry had a trailer parked inside the hotel as his private retreat and dressing room; it was outfitted with a milkshake machine, oxygen tanks, kosher salamis, turkey legs, bottled water, and blackberry brandy. A consort of private security guards augmented the Sahara’s own force. Every member of the crew wore a custom-made dark blue shirt with an Al Hirschfeld caricature of Jerry crooning into a microphone emblazoned on its back. Jerry had a large red book with “Telethon ’76” embossed in gold ink on the cover. Every conceivable inch of space was taken up with Jerry’s logo and the title of the show. Just like the Jerry Lewis Theater on Vine Street, the Sahara had been thoroughly rebuilt and refitted to his exacting specifications.
Not only did the schedule call for Jerry to stay up for the entire twenty-one and a half hours of the show (he’d be onstage almost all that time), but he would also be up for a full day before that, rehearsing, revving up his crew and staff, seeing to the sort of last-minute details he characteristically refused to delegate to others.
At 6:00 P.M. Pacific time on Sunday, September 6, the show began. The opening number combined footage of Jerry pensively preparing for the telethon in his trailer with a prerecorded vocal track—a ballad about his mixed feelings at the outset of the huge task before him (“Before the show begins tonight, my life goes flashing by …”). As the song wound down, he walked deliberately toward the stage and then through the curtains, where a standing ovation greeted him. He immediately launched into a bossa nova–style rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” with special lyrics written for the telethon. After another ovation, he introduced Ed McMahon (“my pussycat”) and began his first speech of the evening, telling the country about his need to raise that “dollar more.” Then came the first of the myriad of guests, singer Vicki Carr, who capped her performance with a plea for donations in her native Spanish (off camera, Jerry mocked her by muttering gibberish to an appreciative group of sponsors in a down-front box).
Through the following hours, the familiar telethon pattern would be followed—a roundelay of live acts (Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Lainie Kazan, Abbe Lane, Dionne Warwick, Joe Williams, Jan Murray, Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, and Freda Payne among them), a parade of sponsors bearing huge checks, a dozen or so songs from Jerry, and educational and inspirational segments featuring MDA researchers and MDA patients and their families.
Breaking up this flow were three taped segments featuring Jerry and an uncredited actress as the parents of a child with neuromuscular disease—played in clown makeup, in pantomime. In a similarly maudlin vein, Jerry sang live the jingle that had been used by 7-Eleven to advertise its campaign asking America to let MDA keep its change for Jerry’s Kids. “Can I have your love?” it began, a raw expression of Jerry’s defining impulse. Somehow in his heart he had conflated America’s charitable instincts with love for himself as a public figure and even as one more lonely child. Of course, he could be so shameless about his emotional neediness only on the telethon—no Vegas or Catskills audience would tolerate such a plea for pathos. He admitted as much to a reporter soon after the telethon ended, saying that in those other contexts “people are paying money to see a man work, whereas here I am begging. There’s a big difference. There has to be.” And as a beggar, he seemed to feel, he had the right to emote from a profoundly needy portion of his soul.
The scheduled highlight of the 1976 telethon was certainly the appearance of Frank Sinatra, who was performing at Caesar’s Palace, just down the strip. Sinatra hadn’t appeared live on a muscular dystrophy telethon since Dean and Jerry’s epochal one in 1953, and at the height of the “Ol’ Blue Eyes” phase of his career, he was easily the biggest name on the show. He would do two sets, the first coming right before his own midnight show at Caesar’s. His appearance was the occasion for yet another layer of security to spring up at the Sahara—thick-necked, menacing types who unconvincingly sported the identification pins that marked the hotel’s own, less imposing guards. Finally, preceded by Pat Henry and Sam Butera, the two comedians who were billed under him in his own act, Sinatra hit the stage. It was just before midnight Pacific time—almost 3 A.M. back east.
After performing a song, Sinatra called Jerry over, presented him with a check from a Vegas hotel, and accepted Jerry’s hugging and cooing. “This man meant $2 million to us last year,” revealed Jerry, speaking of Sinatra’s videotaped 1975 performance.
Then Sinatra began to ad-lib, catching Jerry, who had a page of scripted material in his hand, off guard.
“Listen,” he said. “I have a friend who loves what you do every year, and who just wanted to come out.” He turned toward the wings: “Would you send out my friend?”
The curtains parted, and a shriek went up in the audience. Jerry couldn’t see what was happening at first. And then Sinatra’s friend turned the corner and walked toward center stage.
It was Dean.
They hadn’t seen each other in more than a dozen years, and now, on live television, in front of millions of people and the godfather of show business, they were together.
Dean, looking lean and sharp, wore a wide, mischievous grin as he paced deliberately toward center stage, a cigarette in his right hand. Jerry, shaking his head at Sinatra with an amazed “how-could-you” demeanor, passed his microphone to Lou Brown and tucked his pages into his jacket. Dean approached him from behind Sinatra, almost timidly, but Jerry reached right out to him. With huge, heartfelt grins, they embraced. Dean was closest to the camera, his eyes locked closed in a swoon.
They held on to each other for a good ten seconds, Jerry mumbling to Sinatra, Dean kissing Jerry on the cheek. They drifted slowly apart, but they couldn’t keep from touching one another: Jerry held Dean’s lapel, Dean tapped Jerry on the nose.
It was so intimate Sinatra couldn’t stand it: “All right, all right, break it up. What is this here?” he barked in mock gruffness, stepping in between them. But he, too, felt the authentic warmth of the moment. “I think it’s about time, don’t you?” Sinatra asked, to which Dean responded by kissing him.
Jerry could only stand staring at his former partner, his mouth churning as he bit his lower lip in an effort to allay the tears that already filled his eyes. He and Dean reached across Sinatra and patted each other on the cheek. Jerry muttered to Sinatra, “You son of a bitch,” breaking all three of them up. Sinatra finally backed away: “There they are, folks.” All the while a standing ovation washed over them. It was an undeniably historic show-biz moment, electric even for those who had no taste for Jerry or his charity work.
Finally, after almost two minutes of nervous stares and smiles and all that wild applause, Jerry found a way out of it. He slipped into the Kid: “So, are you workin’?” It was a great line, and Dean matched it: “I do a couple of weeks at the MGM Grand.” Jerry, encouraged, tried another line, saying he’d heard a rumor that they’d split up, but Dean didn’t respond. Sinatra stepped in, shooing Jerry away; Jerry made a big show of dejection as he departed, shuffling his feet and whining, “There he goes again!” Then Sinatra and Dean started to sing, and Dean did something pointedly antic and attention grabbing. While Sinatra sang relatively straight, Dean screwed up the lyrics, wandered around the stage, and broke jokes to the band. He did Jerry, and Jerry stood at his dais chewing his lip in amazement. He was thinking of how they could be friends again: “We’d play golf together; we’d talk and reminisce, catch up on the last twenty years, maybe look forward to better times ahead.” But Dean’s act seemed a redoubt to such a scenario. As Jerry had after the split, he seemed to be expressing his independence by playing both halves of their old act. They embraced one last time and Dean left, waving. “So long, Jer!”
Jerry was floored. The telethon was supposed to be an emotional roller coaster for him, but nothing could compete with what he’d just been through. Sadly, he was almost unsure that it had even happened. He was so addled by his Percodan-and-Dexedrine diet that he would need to be reminded of Dean’s appearance. “I didn’t have any recollection of it the next day,” he later confessed. “I had to run a videotape to see what happened because I was told that Dean and I were on television.” Worse, he felt some resentment. Dean had smelled of booze; “Jerry was very hurt by the fact that Dean was drunk,” a friend told a reporter soon afterward. Indeed, the next afternoon, when a tape of the reunion was replayed for the national audience—most of whom had been asleep when it occurred—Jerry spoke to the telethon audience in a way that denied his own emotions: “I have some strong principles. That man made a success of me, but I didn’t like some of the things he did, and I’m sure he didn’t like some of the things I did. And I still wouldn’t work with that drunk.”
It was, of course, partly a joke, but its grotesquely hectoring tone was consistent with the sort of posture Jerry generally adopted in the later hours of telethons. Early on Monday morning, for instance, after Freda Payne had performed for them, Jerry sensed a lethargy settling in over his in-studio audience and chose to counter it with a lecture. “I think it’s very important to make two disclaimers,” he began. “I have to do this, because my instinct usually serves me well. One: The early hours of the morning. People that are seated in the studio. It’s hardly possible for you to be totally energetic and enthusiastic. But these performers are coming from all parts of the world to help us. They have no way of knowing our appreciation and gratitude. They only know and live and survive on an audience’s applause. So if you would be kind enough, as you indeed are the audience in the studio, if you could just acknowledge that, it only takes a moment, and I repeat, as any good doctor will tell you, it’s good for the system. ’Cause you’ll atrophy just sitting there. It makes performers feel good, and it then lessens my load of having to let them know you are indeed grateful. Because that’s just words. Who says they really believe that? So I would appreciate it if you would consider that, the next time a performer steps on this stage.”
He continued with another pointed speech about the need to greet taped appearances by performers such as Kirk Douglas, Mary Tyler Moore, and Peggy Lee with appreciative ovations as well: “I think they’re entitled to the same applause as the performer that’s here live.”
Later in the day, as the tote board showed a number that threatened not to eclipse last year’s total, he launched into a tarter tirade: “We’ve had fun. I guess we’ve been a little lazy. We really got some work to do. I’ve been tiptoeing. I’ve been passive, and I guess that doesn’t do the job. I have a reputation for being abrasive, for being an egomaniac. I guess I have to turn some of that on now. You might examine the possibility that I’m a fool, doing what I’m doing up here. I doubt that. I like what I am. Maybe it’s time for you to examine what you are.”
He then grabbed a white bucket from a stagehand and sallied into the audience to provoke them into emptying their wallets for him, announcing, “End of Mr. Nice Guy.” It was a routine as old as the telethon itself: The band played a rousing number and Jerry ran up and down the aisles, whooping and teasing and shouting and practically grabbing money right out of people’s hands. When it was over, he returned to the stage and showed off his loot to the camera: “See this? I grabbed a bundle from this little cocking crowd.”
The hours ticked down. Oral Roberts came on to endorse the MDA. Jerry sang a rewritten version of Barry Manilow’s “Could It Be Magic?” “Help me to help them now! now!” Sinatra returned, in a leisure suit, to sing “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown.” Lola Falana, the Moiseyev Dancers, another replay of the Martin-and-Lewis reunion.
Finally, just after 3 P.M., the tote board rang up $20,160,994: a new record, and the first time the tally ever exceeded $20 million. In the remaining half-hour, another $1.5 million would be added. But Jerry was coasting by then, assured of his “dollar more” and then some. He made a final, grateful confessional speech: “My sons can say that I did something with my life, but I want to say that I’m ashamed of myself. Around nine-thirty this morning I almost gave up. Oh, boy, I almost gave up. I was quitting emotionally. Last year’s figures had been much higher and I didn’t think I could make it, but this is proof that if you hang in there, the man upstairs, he won’t let you down.” He launched into his obligatory finale, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” with the inevitable catch in the throat toward the end. Putting his microphone down, he turned and walked directly off the stage, ignoring the standing ovation he left in his wake.
Most telethons ended right there, with the tote board still tallying pledges (in those pre-computer revolution days, it ran about forty-five minutes behind the actual phoned-in totals; moreover, the MDA always proudly boasted that its actual donation levels perennially exceeded the pledge total by some 5 to 10 percent.) The momentous Martin-and-Lewis reunion, however, provoked a few overtures on Jerry’s part toward his old partner; he sent Dean a handwritten note that evening, and, getting no response, sent gold medallions to both Dean and Sinatra a few days later, engraving messages of thanks and love on them. Sinatra phoned his thanks; once again, Dean remained silent. The following August, Jerry had Joe Stabile visit Dean at the MGM Grand to invite him to that year’s telethon and to request a meeting between Dean and Jerry at Dean’s convenience. Dean promised to visit Jerry at the Sahara, but never showed up.
Peter Bogdanovich had long looked forward to a reconciliation of the former partners. “A few years before,” he remembered, “Harold Hayes at Esquire said to me, ‘We want to do a Christmas cover. We want to do Jerry and Dean embracing. We want to do “Peace on Earth, goodwill to men.”’ Jerry was willing to do it, but Dean wouldn’t.”
The 1976 telethon gave Bogdanovich new hope, however, that the old partners might work together on a movie he was hoping to get off the ground with Sinatra in the lead role. “Frank coordinated it,” he recalled. “I was working on Jerry, and Frank was working on Dean. And Frank got Dean to say okay. Or, as Frank quoted him, ‘Who gives a fuck?’ Which was his way of saying, ‘All right, let’s do it.’ And Jerry said he’d do it, and it just didn’t work out for a variety of reasons.” The plot sounded irresistible: “The characters never spoke to one another till the very end. Frank was the leader of these guys who were degenerate gamblers and really down on their luck and just scraping by, conning people, stealing. And Dean and Jerry played these two guys who were in the same crowd but never spoke to each other in person. It all went through Frank or one of the other guys in the group. And they didn’t actually speak to each other until the very end, and then it was just a look where they kind of both smiled at each other.”
But like the hypothetical reunion of the team, it never came to be.
It was during this same period of unprecedented fund-raising success that the telethon first had suspicions cast on it. There were whispers, never substantiated, that Jerry skimmed money off the top—why else would he work so hard at it, right?—and that the organization covered up the profits it diverted to its spokesman with crooked bookkeeping practices (one of the most nefarious theories was that Jerry took for himself all of the monies received beyond the actual pledge total, the famous “extra money”). These charges of fraud were, in part, a manifestation of the public’s awareness that Jerry’s career had, save for the telethon, all but ended. How, the doubters seemed to ask, could he maintain his famously opulent lifestyle on his meager string of personal appearances? (The answer, as Patti might have told everyone, was “not very well.” The Lewises’ massive house was, in her words, “falling into disrepair. In fact, the boys often wondered if the house would withstand a good hard wind!” Though she knew about his lavish spending habits—clothes, gifts, absurdly luxurious travel habits—she had no clue how much money he was spending on drugs, amassing, by his own testimony, thousands of pills; besides not working as much as he used to, besides not curtailing his regal ways with money, he had the same financial burden of addiction as any junkie on the street.)
Jerry maintained that conspiracy theories about the telethon reflected not public awareness that his career had slowed but rather the mood of the nation after Watergate. “From 1949 to 1974,” he said, “that’s twenty-five years—we never heard that Jerry Lewis got paid by the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Never did we receive a piece of mail or a postcard, or hear an innuendo or an assumption. Never, in twenty-five years. You know when it started? Right after August 9, 1974, when Richard Nixon left the White House. The first letter came into my office in New York with that question, then a couple of postcards, then a couple of letters, and then a newspaperman.”
The rumors disgusted him, he told a reporter at the time. “I was fucking beyond myself to think there are people saying that there was one cocksucker who was saying anything negative.” He became physically ill thinking that even in this, the most selfless work he’d ever undertaken, he could be ridiculed. “I would either throw up—literally,” he remembered, “or I’d have to stay in bed—twelve, thirteen hours in a dark room—and just lie there.” Approached by journalists with charges of malfeasance, he could become hostile and caustic. “Yeah, and every time one of my kids dies, they give me the wheelchair so I can melt it down for an ashtray,” was his retort to one. Still, as much as he hated the innuendoes, he knew he couldn’t lash out at whispers and shadows.
In August 1977, though, a flesh-and-blood version of his nemesis emerged when he heard that a radio talk-show host in Cleveland had announced on the air that Jerry was pocketing 40 percent of the telethon take. Soon after the telethon, Jerry flew to Cleveland and, along with an MDA lawyer, walked in on the disc jockey unannounced, eliciting an over-the-air apology and a full-page ad in the major Cleveland papers absolving Jerry and the MDA of the charges; the deejay, to cap the episode, was fired.
That same fall, Jerry got another shocking phone call about his charity work. This time, though, it was unbelievably good—an Associated Press reporter calling to get his reaction to the news that Representative Les Aspin of Wisconsin had placed his name in nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in the fight against dystrophy. “Jerry Lewis is a man for all seasons, all people, and all times,” announced Aspin. “His name has, in the hearts of millions, become synonymous with peace, love, and brotherhood.” The prize, awarded in the fall of 1978, went not to Jerry but to Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in the wake of the Camp David accords; but Jerry would boast about his nomination for years, even claiming in an autobiographical 1994 TV special he produced that he was nominated not for his charitable work but “for bringing forty years of laughter to the world.”