Jerry resumed live performances in April 1983, a mere dozen weeks after his heart surgery. “His doctors think it’s a good idea, getting back into the swing of things,” Joe Stabile told the New York Post. “He won’t be doing pratfalls, but Jerry’s a spontaneous performer.” In fact, his schedule was curtailed to ensure his recovery was complete. After the previous year’s flurry of movie activity and the commotion of publicity surrounding the release of The King of Comedy, 1983 was a very quiet year. His work on the telethon, for example, was cut back by the inclusion of more and more pretaped segments, many without him at all. Indeed, he’d never again go without sleep for the duration of an entire telethon; guest hosts covered the early-morning hours for him while he got his quota of rest.
He did find the energy to make a film that year, albeit under unusual circumstances. He had long spoken of making a film in France with his admirers there such as comedian Pierre Etaix, but none of those plans had ever come to fruition. In the summer of 1983, however, after introducing The King of Comedy at the Cannes Film Festival along with Scorsese and De Niro, he set to work on a movie directed by Michel Gerard, a maker of broad French comedies that never showed in the U.S., and starring Michel Blanc, the slight, bald actor best known to American audiences for his portrayal of the title role in Patrice Leconte’s Monsieur Hire. In the film, entitled Retenez-moi … ou je fais un malheur (“Hold me back or I’ll have an accident”), Jerry played a Las Vegas policeman visiting France and staying with his ex-wife (Charlotte de Turckheim), who has remarried a stereotypically dapper Frenchman (Blanc); a farcical roundelay follows, with the two men combining forces to crack an art-smuggling ring and the wife having to choose which man she wants to end up with.
It was an extremely low-key affair for Jerry, who seemed almost not to want his countrymen to know that he was working abroad. Spotted by a New York reporter while buying a vase and glasses at Baccarat’s Paris showroom, he snapped, “We don’t pose for pictures! You’re not going to stand there all day, are you?” (He had put on weight, the reporter noticed, and was sucking on an empty pipe, presumably as part of his no-cigarette routine.)
The film opened in Paris on January 13, 1984, to generally receptive reviews (“The recipe is good and the mayonnaise well set,” said France-Soir) and a healthy box office—not quite as strong as for Smorgasbord or Which Way to the Front?, but significantly better than The King of Comedy, which had just as much trouble finding a commercial niche overseas as at home. Americans wouldn’t even get a chance to decide whether they were interested in Retenez-moi, however. Though French viewers heard Jerry’s voice dubbed, an English-language version, To Catch a Cop, was also prepared—but neither Jerry nor the producers could ever find an American distributor for it.
It wasn’t surprising that Jerry’s debut in a French film was well received. But some observers were taken aback on the day it opened to learn that Jerry would be given a state honor by the French government. In a ceremony at the Eiffel Tower attended by more than two hundred journalists and photographers, Jack Lang, France’s Minister of Culture, made Jerry a commander in his nation’s Order of Arts and Letters, the nation’s highest cultural honor. The presentation made for some smirking headlines back home, but the fact was that many artists from around the world were honored in this fashion by the French government: Musicians, painters, and poets far less connected to the French people than Jerry belonged to the Order (a few years later, for instance, Sylvester Stallone would join its ranks).
More startlingly, however, Jerry returned to France two months later to receive a higher honor. On March 12, 1984, during a gala performance by Rudolph Nureyev at the Paris Opera to benefit the Pasteur and Wiezman institutes, Jerry was given the French Legion of Honor for his charity work. While the Order of Arts and Letters was an acknowledgment of Jerry’s unique artistry, the Legion of Honor was another sort of recognition altogether, one normally reserved for foreign heads of state, military heroes, beneficiaries of humanity, and the most absolutely revered artists. It was the most exceptional honor the French government could award, and President François Mitterand pinned it onto sad little Joey Levitch.
Jerry was so proud of this distinction that he wore the ribbon commemorating it when he returned to the States later that month. He showed up at the offices of the New York Daily News ostensibly to promote Slapstick (of Another Kind), but wearing his Legion ribbon on his black sweater and talking about it eagerly. “Anyone who receives the medal gets to wear this ribbon,” he explained. “And every Frenchman recognizes it. Look at the company I’m in. There’s a guy named Pasteur, and there’s Albert Schweitzer, John F Kennedy, Emile Zola, Charles de Gaulle, Dwight Eisenhower, General Pershing, and Alfred Hitchcock. Not bad, huh? When they gave me the medal I couldn’t speak. It was as if I had cotton in my mouth. It was the biggest thrill of my life, and now, when I go to France, I get two bodyguards. I told President Mitterand I didn’t need them. He told me that they need them. They consider us some sort of national treasures. I’m so proud it’s unbelievable.”
It helped to ease the pain he must have felt at being denied a Best Supporting Actor nomination from the Motion Picture Academy for The King of Comedy (Jack Nicholson and John Lithgow were cited for Terms of Endearment, Charles Durning for To Be or Not to Be, Sam Shepard for The Right Stuff, and Rip Torn for Cross Creek, with Nicholson the eventual winner). The fact that Jerry had been castigating the academy in the press for some years no doubt played a role in his being neglected. He had pointedly never received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, for instance, even though the prize had gone to people who’d committed themselves to charitable causes for a year or two or who raised minuscule percentages of what he’d raised for the MDA.
He stubbornly denied harboring any resentment about the academy: “I never even think about such a thing,” he said. “I’ve never thought about it until this second that you’ve mentioned it.” But in fact, he had been complaining about the academy for years. In particular, he saw a bias in the voting toward drama, which he repeatedly told interviewers was an easier art than comedy. “There’s no category for comedy at the Academy Awards,” he groused in 1982. “There’s a category for the guy who puts a new bulb in the toilet of the movie house. They also have a category for magnetic-strip systems that are utilized by the extension of perspiration from a yak’s ass. They have categories for everything, but not for comedy.”
The lack of such a category hurt such performers as Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Danny Kaye, and Peter Sellers as much as it did him, but Jerry took it as a personal affront. “I have a simple philosophy,” he explained. “Don’t say no swell stuff over my grave. I’m opening up a chain of eulogy stands where anyone can go in, and for twenty bucks they read to you all the swell stuff they’re going to say when you croak. I want to hear it now. Tell me now. That’s all I ever say to the academy, but every year the Irving Thalberg Award [for life achievement] goes to this wonderful conglomerate from Pittsburgh Ball Bearing Paints because it put up enough money to make a two-reeler out of The Great Gatsby, which is a porno film in Tokyo.”
In conjunction with the release of Slapstick, Jerry appeared on the cover of Parade magazine, the nationally distributed Sunday newspaper supplement. It was his first appearance on the cover of the magazine in years, and it marked the beginning of a long relationship between Jerry and its editors. On Labor Day weekends henceforth, Jerry would be shown on the cover of the magazine with an MDA poster child; an article would appear inside under his own byline.
The April 1984 story, however, was a visit-with-a-celebrity piece by journalist Dotson Radar. It told the story of Jerry’s heart surgery, described his wedding to SanDee, and recounted Jerry’s life with all the old stories. Two odd little revelations in the story stood out, however: a statement about the origins of Jerry Lewis in Person—“I think I really wanted to write my biography more to be able to mention that Jack Kennedy and I were friends than anything else”—and a revelation that he had authorized the MDA to continue using his name in its fund-raising efforts even after his death. “It was one of those nights when you can’t sleep and have to get something off your chest,” he said of a memo he’d written to the organization. “I wrote, ‘Turn my death into paydirt. Anybody who’s honest and cares can replace Jerry Lewis, but beg the people to give in his memory. Look at how much he gave; it probably killed him. Turn me into a theatrical martyr, use my death positively. Don’t waste it. Use it.’ That letter was the most devastating thing I ever did in my life.” It might well have been, but for someone who didn’t care to have any sweet words spoken over his grave that were denied him in life, he was pretty specific about the contents of his own eulogy.
“A lot of people who do talk shows are nothing but conversationalists. You need a cuckoo bird, a nut, a man with a point of view and deep concerns. People with the guts to say what they mean.”
It was April 1984, and he was talking to TV Guide. There was a new scheme in the works. Jerry Lewis Films and Metromedia Video Productions had signed an agreement to create and market a week’s worth of talk-variety shows as a pilot for a potential syndicated series with Jerry as the host.
Metromedia president Robert Bennett had come up with the idea when he’d seen The King of Comedy on video and realized, as he put it, “that this man should be on TV in the U.S.” Bennett contacted Jerry in Paris and proposed a course of action, and Jerry happily agreed. “I can’t think of anyone better equipped to perform the role of talk show host than Lewis,” Bennett said. “His close associates tell me this show has him more excited than anything else in the past twenty years.”
They spent two months preparing. Joe Stabile and Bill Richmond were slotted as executive producers, with Richmond also picking up writing duties. Artie Forrest, the man behind the telethons, would produce and direct. Lou Brown would provide the house band. Charlie Callas would be the sidekick and announcer. It was filmed at Metromedia Square in Hollywood, and if it proved a hit in syndication in the spring, a year’s worth would be made that fall.
On June 11, the premiere telecast of “The Jerry Lewis Show” appeared on independent stations across the nation. Jerry greeted his audience with open arms: “I just wish the best wish I could ever wish for you—to have people in show business as your friends.” The first guest was Frank Sinatra, followed by Suzanne Somers. On the second show, Norm Crosby and William Shatner showed up. Mel Tormé and Tony Orlando made it later in the week. No one watched. And, according to Kay Gardella of the New York Daily News, they didn’t miss anything: “There’s just too much backslapping on the program. It’s embarrassing. Just get on with it.” Variety was a touch gentler, calling the show “a mixed bag” and pointing out that Jerry “talked a good deal, more than his guests.” But Metromedia wasn’t encouraged by either the product or the ratings. Poof: Another TV show dead.
Jerry went overseas again to make another French comedy, this time set in Paris and Tunisia. Par ou t ‘es rentre? On t ‘a pas vue sortir (“How Did You Get In? No One Saw You Leave”) was written and directed by Phillipe Clair, a veteran practitioner of low-budget comedies that had more than a whiff of Lewisienne grotesquerie about them, and produced by Tarak Ben Ammar, a Tunisian money man who’d been trying for some time to promote his homeland as a filmmaking mecca. Like his previous French film, this one was a farce, with Jerry as a private eye hired to catch a rich man (Clair) with his mistress so his wife could reap a handsome divorce settlement. When the detective and the rich man become friends, they flee to Tunisia, where they find themselves embroiled in a dispute among Italian, Arab, and American interests in a war of fast-food chains. Jerry’s voice was dubbed, as in his earlier French film, but this time in a comically moronic Algerian accent—rather as if Jacques Tati were to make a Hollywood film and have his voice dubbed as a hillbilly.
When the film opened in Paris that November, it received the worst reviews Jerry had ever had in France. The journal Cinéma, long supportive of Jerry’s career, pronounced it, “incomprehensible, abnormal, absurd, and calamitous,” adding, “You can count the gags on the fingers of a single hand. You smile two or three times … before slipping into a lethal ennui. His previous French film was ominously entitled ‘Hold Me Back or I’ll Have an Accident.’ The accident has happened.” Parisian audiences seemed undeterred by such notices—the new French film was even more popular than his previous one. But once again, no American distributor could be found to touch it.
Jerry himself dismissed his two ventures into French comedy as failures. “These are not very good movies,” he admitted. “As long as I’ve got control, you’ll never see them in this country.” Although he was quick to point out they weren’t his films (“I had no input because I trusted the directors”), he was frank about the work he did: “I gave little energy and that’s what’s on the fucking screen.” How revved up could he have been, after all, at the thought of having to cross an ocean to get a picture made?
He bided his time in Las Vegas golfing, playing racquetball, and riding his bike. He and SanDee went to Italian restaurants. They kept a boat in San Diego and a condo in Miami. He was nearing sixty, and though he felt and looked youthful, he was living as though he were retired. And it was not by his own choice. He still did live appearances, and he had more time than ever to devote to the MDA, but he was itching to do more. When he came to Brown’s Hotel in the late summer of 1985, a reporter asked him about his inactivity and the critics who claimed he was finished. “There’s an element of envy here,” he shot back. “Are they one of the ten most recognizable people in the world? Do they know the royal family in England or the king of Sweden? Do they wear the Legion of Honor on their lapel?”
But protests of this sort sounded hollow. He was more and more becoming an elder statesman, whether he cared to see himself that way or not. Of course, he was always glad to accept the appreciation and respect of younger talents. He gloried in the fact that Steven Spielberg recognized him from the dais after screening E.T. at Cannes in 1982, for instance, explaining to a reporter that the celebrated young director “always knew about respect.” He was supportive of younger comics such as Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Martin Short, and Howie Mandel, whose work often seemed derived from his own best material. In March 1986 he was invited to the very first “Comic Relief” show, an all-star comedy revue held to raise money for the homeless and hosted by Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, and Robin Williams. The air was thick with famous comedians, but when Jerry was introduced to the wall-to-wall show-business audience at the Universal Amphitheater and strolled onto the stage, he got the only standing ovation of the night. “When I saw that audience stand up, and all of my peers backstage,” Jerry reflected, “what they were saying was, ‘Thanks for your body of work.’ They’re the ones that are all my little road companies, who have learned just as I learned from whoever I learned from. What a night. I was dumbfounded. One of the few times I’ve stood on a stage and was, ‘Duh … duh … duh … duh …’”
In the summer of 1986 he performed at the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal. In that city, which he’d long believed was lucky for him, he received something less than the adulation he got at “Comic Relief.” In particular, he got what Variety described as “a mildly negative review” from Lucina Chodan in the city’s English-language daily, The Montreal Gazette. He made the mistake of discussing his reaction to the review with reporters: “You can’t accept one individual’s [opinion], particularly if it’s a female, and you know, God willing—I hope for her sake, it’s not the case—but when they get a period it’s really difficult for them to function as normal human beings.”
Challenged for these remarks by Variety’s reporter, who happened to be female, he put his other foot in his mouth, bullying his questioner with double entendres. “I wasn’t attacking the female gender by any means,” he said. “Not with the type of sex drive I have, honey. I have nothing against women. As a matter of fact, there’s something about them that I love, but I just can’t put my finger on it.”
Local women’s groups, pointing out that Chodan’s review was one of the more positive notices that Jerry’s performance received, were outraged. Sylvia Gold, chair of the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, told Variety, “It’s a message to the MDA that it’s time to find a chief fund-raiser who is more attuned to the values of the day.” Radio talk shows crackled with the voices of women disgusted with Jerry’s attitudes. Back in Hollywood, he released a statement to the press hoping to put an end to the matter: “I really lost my temper and let my anger at one woman put words in my mouth that could easily have been construed to defame all women. That’s the essence of prejudice and I’m guilty. … I didn’t make a movie called The Big Mouth for nothing.”
He had an easier time of it that fall, when he was roasted by the Friars at a luncheon in New York, an event where ribald talk was encouraged. He’d been fêted by the club some sixteen years earlier, but it was the Friars’ eightieth anniversary, and they were pulling out all the old-timers for a new round of lucrative fund-raisers; they’d even roasted Dean a few months earlier. Friars prior Jack L. Green presented Jerry with a watch commemorating the occasion, along with a check for the MDA in the sum of ten thousand dollars, a cost allayed by the hundred-dollar-per-person fee the twenty-six hundred attendees paid for their tickets.
If Jerry had begun to absent himself slightly from the telethon in 1983 in part to save wear and tear on his mending heart, by 1986 he had reoriented himself toward the show entirely. He had taken over the producing reins, dedicating himself to planning the show earlier in the year than he ever had, and spending significant blocks of time backstage during the broadcast itself making sure the show ran properly. Of all the telethons he’d done, it was the one that featured him on screen the least.
In December of the following year, he brought the telethon to France. It was a forty-eight-hour event with Jerry participating in advance publicity and as an on-air performer. Technicians and equipment were donated by unions; the Lions’ Club gathered twelve thousand volunteers to answer the phones and provide other nontechnical support. During the broadcast, a live feed came in from a train traveling throughout the country and collecting money from regional donation centers. The in-studio talent lineup was decidedly more European than the Vegas telethon ever boasted—Marcel Marceau, chanteuse Nana Mouskouri, Paul McCartney, the Bee Gees, a jazz trio led by Michel Legrand. The MDA had never tried anything like it, and they had hoped to raise maybe $10 million over the course of the weekend; they did three times that, garnering $30.2 million altogether. Even though his strongest European box office was in Germany, he always could rake it in in France, and his telethon there became a regular event.
In May 1987 Wilbert J. LeMelle, president of Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York, awarded Jerry an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters, declaring that Jerry was “a shining example for people everywhere that one person can have an impact on society and change the world.”
It was a decade of honors for him. A few years earlier, he’d won Boston University Law School’s N. Neal Pike Award for service to the handicapped. John R. Silber, the infamously caustic one-armed president of the university, made the presentation to Jerry at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York. Earlier still, he’d won the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service and the Hubert H. Humphrey Humanitarian Award from the Touchdown Club of Washington, D.C.
But what he wanted most—to work again in front of big audiences—seemed finally beyond his grasp. He scaled back his expectations and found new kinds of work. In March 1987, along with longtime MDA colleague Patty Duke, he starred in NBC’s made-for-TV movie called Fight for Life, the based-on-truth story of Bernie Abrams, an optometrist from Columbus, Ohio, whose adopted daughter has fallen prey to a rare and virulent form of epilepsy. When he discovered that a drug used to combat the effects of the disease in Europe had not yet been cleared for use in the U.S. by the Food and Drug Administration, Abrams went on TV to plead his case tearfully before the public.
Variety didn’t care for the film, declaring that it was “loaded with sincere good intentions, but the pacing and the action weigh the drama down.” Nevertheless, the film gave Jerry the first opportunity in his life to play an explicitly Jewish role; he wears a yarmulke, quotes the Talmud, coaches his son through the haftarah reading for his bar mitzvah, hosts a traditional Shabbat dinner, describes his desire to fight the FDA as a mitzvah, and speaks aloud to God like Tevye. He also got the autobiographical opportunity to play a man going on TV with tears in his eyes to plead with the public for assistance in his fight against pediatric disease: “I don’t apologize for crying,” he blubbers in surprisingly unconvincing fashion for a man to whom tears come so easily in public. “I’m crying for the children of America.”
Patty Duke wasn’t the only old chum he worked with that year. He teamed with Sammy Davis, Jr., in the fall and winter for a series of live performances. The two had worked together before on a one-shot comedy special for the HBO cable network, but their debut in Atlantic City marked their first real effort at a joint act. They opened their shows together, then alternated back and forth for about two hours, leaving room for improvised bits and mutual joshing. “We try to do things that are commercial,” Sammy told the press, “the things that people expect from us, plus a few surprises.” But the audience response wasn’t enough to warrant taking the act to another level.
A few months later, Sammy teamed with Sinatra and Dean for a national tour of large arenas. “We’re happy to be doing this thing,” Dean told reporters at the big press conference that announced the tour. “What the hell.” He couldn’t hide his contempt for the enterprise, though, or for its self-satisfied opulence. During the opening performance at the Oakland Coliseum, he flicked a lit cigarette into the crowd. A few nights later, he argued with Sinatra and quit the tour, announcing ill health as the cause (belying this bit of PR whitewash, he opened a run in Vegas soon afterward). Jerry would have killed to have filled the slot, but Liza Minnelli was selected as Dean’s replacement.
Another era passed the following summer. He had still been making occasional appearances at Brown’s Hotel, but the Brown family had fallen on hard times. The old Catskills had died in the 1960s with cheap air travel, the demise of traditional Eastern Jewish mores, and the advent of American youth culture. Many of the hotels had hung on by catering to a new clientele, business conventions instead of families. With the rise of casino gambling in Atlantic City, however, even that business dried up. Some hotels were torn down, their acreage converted to condominium grounds. Grossinger’s, the Ritz of the mountains, was sold to a faceless corporation in 1986. And Brown’s Hotel, which had advertised with Jerry’s youthful caricature for three decades, declared bankruptcy in July 1988.
During the proceedings, it became known that Lillian Brown had given Jerry a fifty-thousand-dollar check for recent appearances at the hotel but told him frankly that it wouldn’t clear her bank. Naturally, he sympathized. “This is one of the few times in anyone’s life where they don’t mind waiting for the money,” he told reporters. “When Lillian gave me the check, she asked if I would mind waiting until she told me to deposit it, in light of Brown’s difficulties. Of course I didn’t mind. I have nothing but love and respect for her and the Brown’s resort. We all look forward to performing there again in the future.” But the Brown family sold the hotel, and the skinny, lonely kid they greeted there so warmly more than forty years earlier never returned. “I haven’t been to the Borscht Belt in three or four years,” he said in 1993. “Since my Aunt Lil and the hotel severed, I haven’t been there.”
That November, the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, presented a month-long program entitled “Jerry Lewis: A Film and Television Retrospective.” Scott Bukatman, an instructor at the School of Visual Arts, organized the program along with the museum’s David Schwartz. Together, they selected some two dozen films for screening, from My Friend Irma to Smorgasbord. They contacted Jerry to find out if he could supply them with other materials—TV shows, blooper reels, and so forth—and if he’d be willing to make a personal appearance. “He was obviously suspicious of us,” said Schwartz. “He seemed surprised, first of all, that we wanted to do the retrospective at all. He was even less receptive when we told him we wanted to include some of the television work.”
Eventually, Jerry agreed to provide some items. Archivist Bob Furmanek, who’d been organizing Jerry’s warehouses of memorabilia, film footage, and audiotape since 1984 (“We literally started at one end of the room and worked our way through,” Furmanek said of his ongoing organizational project), gave the museum such items as old episodes of “The Colgate Comedy Hour,” Jerry’s NBC solo specials from the late 1950s, the episode of “Ben Casey” that Jerry directed and acted in, appearances of Martin and Lewis on Milton Berle’s “Texaco Star Theater” and on “Welcome Aboard,” a variety show from 1948. He supplied bloopers and films about the making of films. Most amazingly, he discovered footage of the 1952 Olympic Committee Telethon, when Dean and Jerry ran Hope and Crosby off the stage, and a complete 1954 Copacabana performance, filmed secretly by a member of the audience and then sold to Jerry for his collection.
In addition to being so generous with his archives, Jerry agreed to appear one evening to present and discuss film and television clips. Another night of the month-long program consisted of Bukatman lecturing on “The Film and TV Work of Jerry Lewis.” Despite the outstanding curatorial effort, however, the retrospective was met with snickers in the press. Jerry’s career had been moribund for so long, and the French jokes had become so common, that the very notion of such an undertaking was seen as funny. Some critics, to be fair, knew what a major event the retrospective was—J. Hoberman of the Village Voice wrote appreciatively about Jerry and Frank Tashlin in describing the program—but it wasn’t the career-reviving shot in the arm Jerry had long hoped for.
A few months later, though, a small, enthusiastic TV audience got a chance to see Jerry on a way no one had before, and he went over very well. Stephen J. Cannell, creator of blockbuster TV action series such as “The Rockford Files” and “Hunter,” had admired Jerry’s work in The King of Comedy and approached Jerry with a proposal to guest-star in a multi-episode storyline on his “Wiseguy” series.
A critically acclaimed program with an extremely loyal following, “Wiseguy” was a modern mob drama whose plots, unusually dense for a prime-time series, unfolded over the course of four- to six-week “arcs” that demanded close attention. As a result, the series was never popular enough to secure a definite spot on CBS’s roster; it moved time slots each season, sometimes more than once. Furthermore, frictions between Cannell and lead actor Ken Wahl led to the development of long arcs focusing on different undercover agents so the series could continue without its ostensible star.
In this tenuous atmosphere, Jerry agreed to appear in a five-part story as Eli Sternberg, a Manhattan garment district executive so besieged by mob extortionists that his son hires a bodyguard. Among the players was the fine stage actor Ron Silver, cast as David, Eli’s son and presumable heir. Exteriors for the episodes were shot in New York, but most of Jerry’s work was done in Vancouver, British Columbia, where producer Cannell made all of his series.
When the “Rag Trade Arc,” as the episodes were know, aired in early 1989, reaction to Jerry’s performance was extremely positive. Though it was unusual for critics to review installments of established series, Hank Gallo of the New York Daily News broke with standard practice to tell readers that “Lewis really shines.” Cannell was delighted with Jerry’s work, announcing to the press, “This guy has some great acting strokes that he really hasn’t shown.”
Indeed, of all the roles he’d had since The King of Comedy—and maybe even more than the role of Jerry Langford—Eli Sternberg brought out something of the beast that inhabited the real Jerry. In part it’s because the role allowed him to play the bully. As a comic actor and as a writer of comedy, he had often created scenes in which a blowhard withered an underling, but Jerry had always played the mouse suffering the lion’s roar. In his “Wiseguy” episodes, however, he played a boorish, insinuating, brusque, egoistic, driven, foul-mouthed son of a bitch who yelled at mobsters, employees, picketers, bodyguards, his cousin, his wife, his son. And while in a good many of these tirades Jerry’s diction betrayed an unconvincing shallowness—a sense that he really hadn’t tapped his natural store of anger—some of them were hair-raisingly deep. As the episodes wore on, and Eli’s inevitable financial and emotional ruin became apparent, he achieved a weary, caustic air wholly in character with some of his off-camera attitudes.
Lord knows the script afforded him many opportunities to see himself in it. Whether the “Wiseguy” writing staff knew it or not, they were handing Jerry lines he could have lifted from his own recent life: “It’s cheaper than another heart attack.” “I’m gonna end up in court till the end of the century. If I live that long. And in all probability, I’m gonna lose my house. And my future earnings, assuming there are any.” “I was thinking of my father and how ashamed of him I was. Of his accent, his clothes. He was married to my mother for fifty-eight years.” “For forty years I told myself I was building a business for others. But that was a lie so I could delude myself into thinking that the accomplishments were justified. I lied to the only person who believed it.”
Some of this dialogue must have been shattering for him to utter (and surely Jerry contributed to it: His parents had been married exactly fifty-eight years at the time of Danny’s death). And the notion of a once-successful father whose business lies in ashes and whose son is unable to inherit anything from him must have struck an equally deep chord. There are other attributes of Eli that mark him as Jerry—a fetish for guns, a weepiness that seems based in genuine exhaustion and grief. But the bluster and self-analysis were exceedingly personal for him, and even though he worked with five different directors on the episodes, he walked away with dramatic scenes consistently.
Advance word about his work on “Wiseguy” was so strong that Jerry found himself cast as a gangster in director Susan Seidelman’s feminized Mafia comedy Cookie. Co-written by novelist Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, the film told the story of Dino Capisco (Peter Falk), a mobster recently paroled from a thirteen-year prison term and reunited with his illegitimate daughter, Cookie (Emily Lloyd). Jerry was cast as Arnold Ross, a higher-up in the organization.
The film’s potential for broad comedy was never quite realized—the plot was preciously overcomplicated in faux screwball fashion, and perhaps Seidelman wasn’t quite close enough in sensibility to her mobsters to bring their coarse humor to life. There were undeniably tasty scenes of mob-family reuniting and quarreling, and the sight of Jerry bedecked in his characteristic jewelry and slick suits and talking about his sex life or his desire for revenge against a character named Dino was charming. But the film opened in the summer of 1989 to tepid reviews and like box office, and despite Jerry’s winning presence in it, no new projects for him arose.
In the spring he was working with Sammy again in Vegas, this time at Bally’s Hotel. On Wednesday, June 7, a night when he wasn’t playing there, he showed up anyway, shouting from the wings, “How the hell long are you gonna stay on?” and wheeling a giant birthday cake out to Dean, who was in the middle of his act. “You surprised me,” Dean said honestly—his birthday wasn’t for another ten days—and he added, “I love you and I mean it.” Jerry saluted his old partner: “Here’s to seventy-two years of joy you’ve given the world. Why we broke up, I’ll never know.”
They had actually rekindled their friendship two years earlier, when Dean suffered the sort of calamity that never failed to stir Jerry’s heart. Dean Paul Martin, Jr., the oldest of Dean’s children from his second marriage, died in a plane crash when the jet he was flying as a member of the California Air National Guard crashed into a snow-covered mountain. Jerry called with his condolences, and in the ensuing conversation the resentments between them began to look trivial.
They began to talk now and again. Jerry would have preferred a more intimate relationship, but Dean, always reserved, had become markedly reclusive. So his former partner settled for periodic contact by phone. In ensuing years, whenever he was asked by interviewers about Dean, he would always claim that he had just recently spoken to him. “I talked to him like ten days ago,” went one such account. “He’s very happy: ‘How you doing, pallie?’ I said, ‘You still don’t remember my fucking name?’ ‘Aw, come on, you know what I mean.’ ‘Are you okay?’ ‘Aw, I’m fine, having a ball.’ He’s not having a ball, but he wants me to think he is.”
Jerry, of course, had never lost a child, but he suffered such a massive affront at the hands of one of his sons that year that he must have felt as if the loss of a son would have been a relief. In May 1989 Joseph, his bitter youngest son, appeared as the primary source of a three-page cover story in the National Enquirer describing Jerry’s violent outbursts, his indifference toward his children, his philandering, and his drug abuse. It was a resounding slap in the face. No matter what he had done over the years, he’d always thought of himself as a good father. But here was a rebuke he couldn’t hide or deny.
Jerry was already suspicious of Joseph’s behavior because of the trouble the twenty-six-year-old had been giving Patti, and he suspected that his son had been paid twenty-five thousand dollars by the tabloid newspaper for his story. Still and all, the piece was shocking in its details and virulent in tone.
“All my life I’ve been asked what it’s like being Jerry Lewis’s kid,” Joseph said. “And all my life I told the same lie: ‘It’s great, he’s great.’ It wasn’t great. It was pure hell. There were always whippings, and he was always yelling. My older brothers got chased around the house and slapped and punched. Even today we’re all afraid of him. But I’m finally speaking out because I feel people need to know that the clown they see on the screen is not the same man who raised six terrified sons. My dad is a mean-spirited, self-centered jerk. Thank God for my mother. She was a saint.” He concluded his revelations with a caustic comparison of himself and the muscular dystrophy patients for whom Jerry campaigned. “There are two sets of Jerry’s Kids,” he said. “Those physically crippled by a dreadful disease and those emotionally crippled by a dreadful father.”
In the article, Joseph recounted his version of Jerry’s violence toward his sons. The most hideous of these, recalled by Joseph as the worst beating in family history, was a punishment administered on Anthony with a wide leather belt that Jerry had dubbed “The Strap.” According to Joseph, the incident began when he and Anthony were playing grocery store in the kitchen and a can fell on the younger boy’s foot, eliciting a wailing cry. “Dad came charging in, grabbed Anthony—who was about nine—and dragged him to where The Strap was kept,” remembered Joseph. “‘I’ll teach you!’ he yelled at Anthony. He pulled down Anthony’s pants and whipped him a good twenty times with The Strap. Then he screamed at Anthony: ‘How many more do you want?’ Anthony’s poor, scared reply will stay with me forever: ‘Not many more, Daddy.’ My father proceeded to beat him another ten times. I was so scared I almost wet my pants.”
When Joseph’s claims were printed in the Enquirer, Jerry’s office explicitly denied that Jerry had ever beaten his sons.* But the article was a public embarrassment Jerry couldn’t countenance. He developed a pure hatred for Joseph, writing him out of his official press biography (which henceforth spoke of his “five sons”) and speaking about him as if he were dead. “He’s in Forest Lawn,” he said. “I buried him. I wish I could tell you that I close the door at night and cry my heart out, but I don’t. Someone who lives by a code of loyalty as I do, and to do that to someone close to you for money, I could never forgive. Love hard, hate hard.”
He would grow visibly upset as he described his feelings of betrayal, but he would soften as he spoke about the way Joseph’s story caused his other sons to rally around him. “Five sons came to Las Vegas to say they were ready to go to Florida [where the Enquirer is published] and tell about the father they knew,” he revealed. “And I loved them for their naïveté in thinking it would be something they could do.” (Later accounts by some of Joseph’s brothers would talk of violence by their father, but none was as specific or venomous.)
The article came at a particularly unfortunate moment for Jerry and SanDee, who were trying to start a family. SanDee, in her late thirties, had never had a child of her own. Jerry, already the grandfather of six, was still longing for the daughter he and Patti had spent so many years Thinking Pink for. When SanDee finally did conceive, Jerry was so delighted he announced to an audience in Paris that he was going to be a father again. Joseph greeted his father’s news by declaring, “I pity that poor baby. Jerry Lewis doesn’t know how to be a human being, much less a father. … That child will be held up and hugged in front of the camera, and it will raise millions for a wonderful cause. But it will never know the love of a real father.” The dire prediction turned out to be moot: SanDee miscarried.
In 1990 Jerry fulfilled his long-held wish to direct a film abroad. As part of How Are the Children?, a UNICEF-sponsored anthology film exploring the rights of children worldwide, he made an eight-minute segment called “Boy.” It was an almost completely silent film about an eleven-year-old white boy living in an all-black world and being subjected to quiet, insidious racism and outright racist bullying. In an ironic final twist, it was revealed that the boy’s mother, father, and sibling were black as well. There was a delicacy to the film that was neither sentimental or mawkish—two obvious traps for this sort of material. The camera work, along with a score by the great French film composer Georges Delarue, was subtle and assured. The acting was somewhat wooden, but at least the youngster wasn’t some sort of anguished Joey Levitch fighting his fate with tears or tomfoolery. Alongside short films by Filipino director Lino Broca, Nigerian director Euzhan Palcy, and the Franco-Swiss team of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Melville, it held its own as a sober, assured work and indicated, more than anything else he’d made, what he might do as the director of a real drama.
But not all of his late-life meditations on the plight of the less fortunate were so felicitously realized. On September 2, 1990, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the telethon (which for that one year originated from Los Angeles), he wrote his annual cover story in Parade. This time, he had a novel idea: Rather than tell the story of a poster child, boast about the MDA’s research gains, or try to find a new way of pleading for donations, he would write a work of fiction. He would write about what his life would be like if he had muscular dystrophy.
“What if… the twist of fate that we hear so much about really happened? What if … when the gifts and the pains were being handed out, I was in the wrong line?” he began. “I decided, after forty-one years of battling this curse that attacks children of all ages … I would put myself in that chair … that steel imprisonment that long has been deemed the dystrophic child’s plight.”
What followed was one of the most tone-deaf appeals in the history of charity fund-raising. He began by imagining trying to use the bathroom: “It’s still only the early hours of the day, and already I am beginning to feel trapped and suffocated trying to visit that bathroom.” He imagined himself having to be pushed to get places, being abused by students at school (whom he suspected of “spilling oil in my path when I’m going it alone”), having able-bodied people fill the handicapped parking spaces with their vehicles, being manipulated into a photogenic posture for a family snapshot, having poor access to restaurants, airplanes, hotels, and sports arenas, finding himself at the mercy of intrusive therapists, whispered about and pointed at in public.
After refiguring his own life, he pushed toward a finale. “I know the courage it takes to get on the court with the other cripples and play wheelchair basketball,” he wrote.
But I’m not as fortunate as they are, and I’d bet I’m in the majority. I’d like to play basketball like normal, healthy, vital and energetic people. I really don’t want the substitute. I just can’t half-do anything—either it’s all the way or forget it. That’s a rough way to think in my position. When I sit back and think a little more rationally, I realize my life is half, so I must learn to do things halfway. I just have to learn to try to be good at being half a person … and get on with my life.
I may be a full human being in my heart and soul, yet I am still half a person, and I know I’ll do well if I keep my priorities in order. You really cannot expect the outside world to assist you in more ways than they already do, and I’m most grateful for the help I receive. But I always have the feeling in the pit of my stomach that I want to scream out: “Help!” Or: “See what has happened to me!” Or: “Is anybody watching?” But those screams are usually muffled by the inner voice that tells me what to do and when, and tells me softly and strongly, “Be still … Hush … Drive quietly … Try to make as few waves as possible.”
It was an appalling performance. Not only did he explicitly invoke the notion that muscular dystrophy sufferers were “half” people, but he underscored their plight by making himself the focus of it. The editors of the magazine did him no favors by letting it run, but it was surely a precise reflection of his thoughts. Worse, it was exactly the sort of thing that people had begun grumbling about a decade earlier, when he found himself confronted on “Donahue” by a host and audience who mistrusted his tactics as a fund-raiser. Not only had he not renounced the pity approach, but he was willing to extend it shamelessly to himself to draw attention to his cause. It was in his bones—the Book of Job laced in schmaltz—and he saw absolutely nothing wrong with it.
Attitudes toward the disabled had changed elsewhere, even if Jerry, the nation’s most visible champion of those suffering from crippling disease, hadn’t seemed to notice. Just weeks earlier, George Bush had signed into law the Americans With Disabilities Act, the most sweeping body of civil rights legislation since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Henceforth, those who discriminated against the disabled could face the same sort of legal prosecution to which practitioners of racial and sexual prejudice were subject. And sitting by Bush’s side as he signed the ADA into law was the man whom he’d appointed to oversee the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the administrative body charged with enforcing right-to-work laws: Evan J. Kemp, Jr., the same Nader’s Raider who’d first spoken out against Jerry a decade ago.
Kemp was first named an EEOC commissioner by Ronald Reagan in 1987, and he advanced to the agency’s chair when Clarence Thomas was named to the federal bench by Bush. Now, as the nation’s most powerful opponent of discrimination against minorities and the disabled, he was prepared to use the full force of the government to quash the sort of bigots who’d made his own life so hellish. And here was the most visible and arrogant of them, making more of a spectacle of his insensitivity than ever. In effect, Jerry was telling the world that the disabled were pitiful children unable to fend for themselves at a time when even a Republican administration was making equal opportunity for the disabled the law of the land.
With his New York Times piece, Kemp had already succeeded in getting the campaigns for Easter Seals and cerebral palsy to reconsider the use of pity and the exploitation of children in their fund-raising. “Other telethons called me and wanted to know what problems I had with the pity approach and what other methods they could use,” he recalled. But now he had the power to go after the MDA, which had thus far assiduously ignored his arguments. Not that they had ignored him, exactly: According to Kemp, the MDA actually hired an adult with neuromuscular disease to get close to him at the Disability Rights Center and report back to them on his activities. Eventually, this “spy” confessed to Kemp. “He told me they wanted to know what I would do,” Kemp says.*
Less deviously, the MDA made the magnanimous gesture of inviting Kemp, then their only public critic, to appear on the 1982 telethon, where he gave a ninety-second speech about living independently with a disability. “The MDA seemed to feel if I’d be quiet, all their problems would go away,” Kemp said. But given the bully pulpit of EEOC chairmanship, he was determined to speak his mind. In 1991, at a fund-raiser for Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburgh, Kemp released a statement to the press contrasting political fund-raising with the Jerry Lewis telethon. “The MDA got ahold of it and they hit the roof,” Kemp recalled.
Actually, the MDA was of two minds about such criticism. One group within the organization was already working to alter its image so that the very beneficiaries of MDA’s work wouldn’t feel belittled by it. In 1991 these people put together a task force within the MDA to get feedback on the telethon, and MDA advertising and activities, from sufferers of neuromuscular disease. Jerry, on the other hand, was among the hard-liners who refused to acknowledge that there was any validity whatever to the criticism. In his mind, Kemp was like the film critics or the TV critics or the Nazi bullies of Irvington—someone who disliked him personally, someone before whom he would not bend.
Kemp wasn’t the only pebble in the MDA’s shoe. Dianne B. Piastro, a nationally syndicated columnist based in Long Beach, California, responded to Jerry’s Parade piece with shock and anger. “In a single two-page article,” she wrote in “Living with a Disability,” a column distributed to more than seven hundred newspapers through the Newspaper Enterprise Association wire service, “he managed to violate every tenet of the disability rights movement, and to send ‘his kids’ the message that disabled people have been working for years to erase: Your life is not worth anything if you have a disability. … Jerry Lewis is so terrified and repelled by disability and wheelchairs that he gets people to cry and feel pity to prove his fears are justified. But in doing so, he robs kids of dignity and pride. His efforts seem to have nothing to do with understanding or caring about their full participation in society. Many believe Lewis’ form of benign oppression has finally gone too far.”
Piastro, an investigative journalist with ties throughout the disabled community, began to write regularly about the actual dispersal of funds by the organization among researchers and sufferers of neuromuscular disease. She requested income tax forms from the organization, cited examples of waste, inconsistency, and futility in MDA’s expenditures, and became a vocal critic of the lavish salaries received by such MDA officers as executive director Bob Ross, who took home the third-largest salary of any charity executive in the nation even though MDA was a funding organization and not a patient-care or research entity.
Piastro’s columns drew the ire of the MDA: Ross threatened to sue both her and the NEA syndicate (a threat he never saw through), and the organization launched a letter-writing campaign against Piastro, giving its loyalists not only the addresses of newspapers that carried her column but her home address as well (that she was a grandmother confined to a wheelchair had no tempering effect on their response). And, in time, various newspapers that regularly carried “Living with a Disability” began to kill columns that dealt with the MDA’s financial affairs.
A new film project came along, a strange hybrid of foreign art film and American screwball comedy. A French producer, Claudie Ossard, and a Yugoslavian director, Emir Kusturica, hired Jerry to play Leo Sweetie, an Arizona Cadillac dealer engaged to a woman half his age (supermodel Paulina Porizkova). When Leo summons his nephew Axel (Johnny Depp), a daydreaming New York State fish and game warden, to Arizona for the wedding and offers him a new life as a car salesman, the young man finds himself involved with a flighty widow (Faye Dunaway) and her unstable stepdaughter (Lili Taylor). A would-be actor cum Casanova (Vincent Gallo) working at Leo’s car dealership rounded out the principal cast. This most improbable of stories—written, according to Jerry, by Kusturica at more than twice the length of the average screenplay—was known as The Arrowtooth Waltz.
Kusturica was a brilliant young director widely respected in critical circles both in Europe and the United States for his ability to combine dreamily poetic imagery with coarse, earthy humor and political themes. His 1981 film Do You Remember Dolly Bell? had won a prize for the best first film at the Venice Film Festival. Four years later, his second film, When Father Was Away on Business, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. His third, Time of the Gypsies, was produced by Columbia Pictures and won him a Best Director prize at Cannes. Six months after its premiere, he was awarded the Roberto Rossellini Prize for life achievement in film by a group of European critics. He was thirty-four years old.
In 1988 Kusturica had been lured to the U.S. by Czech émigré Milos Forman to teach cinema at Columbia University, and he had begun conceiving of projects to make in America, among them an adaptation of Crime and Punishment set among Russian immigrants in contemporary Brooklyn. But the financing for The Arrowtooth Waltz had come together first, so in April 1991 he set off for Douglas, Arizona, to make it.
Right away, Kusturica had trouble. Like many European directors, he was used to working with small budgets, nonunion crews, and producers who respected the authority of the director the way impresarios respect the egos of opera stars. In the States, however, even with European money and fellow Yugoslavs as principal crew members, he was under much more pressure to perform. Besides which, the script was overlong and incomplete. The producers were so intent on meeting a schedule and cutting the script to fit their budget that they literally drove Kusturica off the set six weeks into the production. When they looked for him the next day, they found him not in his Arizona hotel, not in his New York apartment or in his Paris apartment, but in Sarajevo.
Production was shut down while Kusturica regrouped and worked on the script (the press was told that the director, who “had trouble adjusting to the fast-paced working style of the American crew and felt overburdened with pressures from completion bond parties to wrap up shooting,” had suffered “a nervous collapse”). Jerry sat and watched, an innocent bystander.
“I like Emir so goddamn much,” he recalled. “He’s such a sweet man—thirty-five years old, energetic, enthusiastic, wonderful man. He got fucked and refucked. Oh, what they did to him. He had a script that was 265 pages. They said ‘Go away, shut the picture down, take a rest.’ But 265. ‘We can’t put up any more money,’ they said. ‘Cut the script.’ He went away for two weeks, we all sat in Arizona, he came back, it was 294. It was then, I suspect, they realized there was no fucking way. … He started out with a $19 million budget and it swelled to about $32 million.”
Actually, the hiatus was more like three months—in part, said some observers, because Kusturica, according to news reports, “was said to be ‘reluctant’ to resume the film or deal with his difficult stars,” namely Jerry and Dunaway. Eventually, enough of the script was shot so that production could cease, but Kusturica lost control of the film in the editing process, and any trace of his original conception was lost as well.
“They took it from him,” Jerry said. “And they just indiscriminately cut it. It makes no sense. I did it because it was off the wall. There ain’t no fuckin’ wall left with what they’ve done to it. … His first cut was nine hours. Then he said he would give them a break and bring it down to two-forty. They said, ‘We can’t sell a movie over two hours.’ He cut it to two-twenty. But after they had taken it from him and cut it, he had nothing to cut.”
The film languished for the better part of a year while Ossard tried to convince Warner Brothers, which owned the American distribution rights, to release it. Newly retitled Arizona Dreams, it opened to enthusiastic box office and moderately positive reviews in Paris in January 1993. The next month, it was shown at the Berlin Film Festival, where critics in the Hollywood trade press took it as a failed but worthy effort on Kusturica’s part; strangely, none of their reviews had a word to say about Jerry’s performance.
Jerry himself didn’t know what to make of it. “I saw the film in Paris,” he said. “And the lines were around the block. No one understands it. And the journalists wrote, ‘Jerry Lewis’s name is on the film, why should there not be people around the block?’ The film makes no sense. … What they have on the screen changed from what I read in the script to something that doesn’t make any sense. But I mean, any sense. … It’s the worst piece of shit you’ll ever see in your life. It will never be seen by American eyes as far as I’m concerned. If the picture takes off, it’ll take off for like a minute and a half until word gets around.”
Warner Brothers, the same company that wouldn’t release Smorgasbord in theaters a decade earlier, agreed with him. They showed it at film festivals in North America in 1994, and released it on video the following spring. (A longer director’s cut saw a limited release in 1995.)
It was rather a shame that the film was so cursorily distributed: Arizona Dreams was no artistic triumph, but plenty of inferior films were given more sporting chances. Like Kusturica’s other films, it was filled with audacious cinematic inventions—flying ambulances; fish swimming through the desert air; Eskimos; bizarre nightmares, sets, and, situations. In its two-hour video version, it hardly holds together and rarely gives the impression that it ever had a chance to be coherent, but it’s got plenty of charm and vitality.
As Leo, Jerry does some interesting things with a relatively small part. At first he’s extremely sympathetic, courting his nephew and his own young fiancée with a patient, even patronizing tone, smiling through his frustrations and seemingly shrinking back from his urge to dominate the screen. But in scenes where he tries to sell a car to a balky customer or loses his temper with his nephew’s older lover, traditional Jerryisms emerge: the wheedling voice, the mercurial body language, the angry gravity (he actually uses the word “fuck” with Dunaway, a career first). In his last two scenes, he’s quite affecting. In the first, he dies in an ambulance, weakly muttering a stream of hallucinatory phrases; in the second, he appears in his nephew’s dream as an Eskimo, chattering away lovingly in a cryptic tongue presumably of his own invention (the scene is subtitled in English). The love in Depp’s face at these moments seems real both within the film and without, as the regard a young, physically limber actor might hold for an old master of his craft.
For all that didn’t work in Arizona Dreams—and there was a lot of it—there was plenty that did, and Jerry’s work was indisputably among the positives. He was pushing toward a stage in his life when he could truly play a living legend, adding grace and weight to projects without the onus of carrying them on his back. But nevertheless, his career seemed finally to have petered out. He was welcome in America’s homes for twenty-one and a half hours a year, but otherwise they didn’t seem interested. He had set out to become Charlie Chaplin—and he almost had—but now he was treated more like Charlie Callas.