After SanDee’s 1989 miscarriage, she and Jerry refused to give up hope of ever having a child together. They began investigating adoption. In the summer of 1991 they found a young pregnant woman willing to give them her child—a baby they’d chosen because it had been confirmed through amniocentesis to be a girl. On March 23, 1992, almost forty-seven years after Gary was born, Jerry and SanDee were at the hospital for the birth of their daughter. They named her Danielle Sarah, after Jerry’s departed father and grandmother. “The tears streamed down my cheeks from complete joy,” Jerry remembered. “I’ve cried before out of sheer happiness, but never out of ecstasy. I’d wanted her for so long.”
He was a born-again father. There was never enough time for Gary and the other boys when he was out conquering the world, but for Danielle he was always available. A few weeks after she was born, Jerry and SanDee showed her off to neighbors at their condominium in the Turnberry Isle development near Ft. Lauderdale. And on May 12, when he appeared on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” he brought along her picture and showed it off to the fawning host. Predictably, the audience cooed; also predictably, Patti and the boys, who hadn’t even known that Jerry was planning to adopt a child, were affronted. It was worse than his annual fawning over strangers’ children on the telethon; he spoke about Danielle as if she were the only child he’d ever raised—as if she were the girl he and Patti had tried to have for years. “I’m having the time of my life with her,” he boasted. “She’s an incredible baby, she’s a miracle baby. I tell everybody, ‘All other children prior to this birth are inauthentic children. They’re not real children. This is a real child.’”
Whereas the boys were fobbed off on Patti and a variety of nannies and housekeepers, Danielle got her father’s attention from the time she opened her eyes. By the time she was a year or so old, they had a complete routine together. “I’m up at seven-thirty every morning,” he said. “And it’s her time with me. I start by opening the door, and that face, when she sees me—and it’s now ‘Daddy.’ She’s very bright: She walked at eleven months old and had a vocabulary of fifty words at eleven months. So I go in and I get her. I change her britches and I clean her and I put her in new britches and put her little shoes on. I take her into the salon, we turn on ‘Barney,’ and she and I have cereal together. We have Sugar Frosted Flakes. She loves them. So does Daddy. We get through with that. We watch ‘Sesame Street.’ Then I warm her bottle, give her her bottle, she lies here with me, and the fucking world could just fall off somewhere. And she finishes her bottle and we talk. She loves my pens and my papers and my stuff on my desk. We write notes. And before you know it, I’ve had two and a half hours of bonding time with her.”
Danielle was taken everywhere her father went; when she was two years and nine months old, he would claim to have spent a mere eleven days apart from her during her whole life. She came aboard the cruise ships where he had begun performing during the summers, toured Europe and Vegas and Atlantic City, came to the telethon. When she was eighteen months old, she even appeared on his annual Parade cover with him in the place usually reserved for that year’s poster child.
It was a telling substitution, if only because his off-camera attitude toward the MDA’s smiling young dystrophics could be so distinct from the way he behaved with them when America was watching. At a photo session with 1993 poster child Lance Fallon, Jerry reacted to the boy’s excitement at seeing him by asking out loud, “What did he get for breakfast? A little Ritalin never hurt any kid.” When, during a lull in the shoot, Lance and another child began playing noisily with one another, Jerry pounced on them: “We can’t have that, children, or you’ll be out of the show so quick you’ll never know what happened.”
And in fact, not all of the news involving his own children was especially sweet. The twice-divorced, thirty-five-year-old Christopher was arrested in 1990 for burglary and grand theft in the disappearance from a suburban Los Angeles warehouse of 168 limited-edition prints by Erté and other artists worth two hundred thousand dollars. In March 1992 he changed his not-guilty plea to one of no contest to one count and faced a possible prison term of up to five years, eight months.
Jerry did a quickie cameo bit in Billy Crystal’s 1992 film Mr. Saturday Night, a three-hour shoot at the New York Friars’ Club done as a favor to the younger comic. He produced three one-hour specials about the Martin and Lewis years that aired on cable TV’s Disney Channel. He taped an appearance on Whoopi Goldberg’s syndicated talk show. It was all the exposure the public and the industry seemed to want of him.
He hated being left out of the business, and he let his hatred be known in interviews. “There’s nothing I want to do more than film,” he told one interviewer. “But I won’t do what somebody believes is filmmaking if it isn’t close. I’d just as soon do the dinner show in Akron. I won’t hide it. They pay a lot of money—a lot of money. I’m happy to work with anybody who brings the same commitment that I do. I’ve seen people who believe in film just as I do, and we’re gonna mesh and get together and do it. I used to sleep overnight at Paramount in my cutting room. Such excitement … I didn’t know where the months and years went, I had such fun. And everything was done with a handshake. Now if I have a meeting with someone who’s the head of a motion picture company, I have to stop by Toys R Us first. I’m talking to a guy about a $12 to 15 million project, and he looks like he has to go caccy.”
Still, he would reveal himself to be frankly jealous of the opportunities available to filmmakers of the 1990s: “I’d give my balls to be able to remake a couple of films with today’s technology. DAT recording, Steadycams, Lumicranes, digital graphics. … The gags that I had to create with practical actual materials because that’s the way it was … I couldn’t wait eight weeks for a process house to show me a little mouse sitting on a window. I’d shoot the joke myself. I’d have the art department build me a mouse, put a battery up his ass and move it. … To this day I wish I had one film left in me where I had this crazy son of a bitch, the twenty-year-old Jerry. If I coulda had him … my Christ! I probably would’ve destroyed him.”
In 1992 the telethon received the most negative publicity it had ever experienced. Piastro and Kemp had laid the groundwork for a public rejection of the MDA, the telethon, and Jerry by disabled rights activists all over the country. Prior to the 1991 telethon, the Alliance for Research Accountability, a charity watchdog group, announced, “We don’t like Jerry’s attitude. We don’t like his use of slick sentimentality to raise money. He portrays those kids as worthless lumps of flesh unless they can find a cure. At the same time, the MDA is making millions of dollars and they haven’t found anything in all their years of research.”
Simultaneously, the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities chimed in with a similarly antagonistic assessment. In a statement from its director, Judge Reese Robrahn, the group said, “We feel that this emphasis on ‘Jerry’s Kids’—pale, wan, brave but probably doomed—has helped create a stereotype of disabled persons which has in turn led to the wrong public policies.”
Jerry’s response that year was to plea even more fervently for people to give to the telethon. At the very opening of the 1991 show, he addressed the protests that had preceded it. “I’ve never used the terms ‘disabled’ and ‘handicapped,’” he claimed. “Please, I’m begging for survival. I want my kids to live. I don’t ask you to pity them. I’m asking you to keep them alive.” America responded as it almost always had—with at least a dollar more: $45.07 million altogether.
Still, Jerry wasn’t satisfied to let Evan Kemp and those like him have their say. On February 6, 1992, Jerry wrote to George Bush asking that Kemp be fired. Describing himself as “a point of light,” Jerry wrote that Kemp was “misusing the power of his governmental office” in attacking him and the telethon. Indeed, he could only explain Kemp’s feelings as rooted in revenge, telling Bush that Kemp began speaking out against the MDA when he was refused a grant for his Disability Rights Center.
But really, the thing that hurt Jerry the most about Kemp’s criticism was the personal dimension. As he confessed to Bush, Kemp’s attacks had taken an emotional toll on him. “The blitzkrieg of critical abuse we at MDA have had to withstand over the past several months has had a severely demoralizing effect on me,” he wrote. “If this undeserved vicious attack has the blessing of the nation’s highest office, I don’t see how I’m going to be able to do the telethon.”
For about a week, Jerry didn’t hear back from the President, and he got so angry that he wrote White House chief of staff Samuel Skinner to complain about his treatment and reiterate his objections to Kemp’s behavior. Kemp wanted to meet Jerry face-to-face to discuss their differences, but Skinner and his staff preferred to handle Jerry themselves with a public statement indicating that the White House had “no position” on the MDA or the telethon. When Kemp asked to read the letter before it went out, he was refused. That summer, he spoke out in The Washingtonian magazine about the telethon and how he’d been frozen out of the White House’s reaction to Jerry’s letters. This indiscretion evoked yet more protests from the MDA and earned Kemp a public rebuke by Skinner, who wrote to the MDA to assure it that “we have talked further with Mr. Kemp, reiterating the President’s full and enthusiastic support for the MDA and the Labor Day Telethon, and our expectation is that he will refrain from attacking the organization and the event in the future.”
But the White House couldn’t stifle all of Jerry’s critics. And at least one particular group of them was irresistible to the media. Mike Ervin and Chris Matthews were a brother and sister from Chicago in their mid-thirties. They had both spent their lives coping with neuromuscular disease, and they had both been, many years earlier, MDA poster children. In reaction to Jerry’s insensitive Parade article and his apparent hostility to critics of the telethon, they and some other former poster children formed an organization called Jerry’s Orphans and made plans to picket the facilities that were hosting local telethon hookups in various cities.
“Our goal is not to put the MDA out of business,” said Ervin. “Our goal is to put Jerry Lewis out of the disability business. He has no business being there. He doesn’t understand in any way, nor does he wish to, the majority of the [disabled] population.”
Matthews agreed that theirs was almost a personal crusade against the very figure of Jerry. “They have a spokesperson who thinks he’s the god of disability,” she said. “And he just totally misrepresented what we’ve spent our lives fighting for. … He painted the worst picture of disability he could paint.”
In 1991 Jerry’s Orphans organized pickets against the telethon in Los Angeles and two other cities. No one had ever seen anything like it—people in wheelchairs carrying placards and chanting against a charity event they had once been instrumental in promoting. But Jerry’s Orphans were representative of a burgeoning movement among disabled Americans, a grass-roots civil rights movement that could be as radical and provocative as the African-American, gay, and women’s movements. The movement had voices that spoke toward national consensus such as Mainstream, a magazine with a circulation of more than fifteen thousand that called the telethon a form of “high-tech begging.” And it had saucier voices such as those heard in The Disability Rag, a made-on-the-fly publication with a circulation of two thousand that referred to disabled people as “crips,” had lifestyle pages that defined “disability cool,” and castigated consensus builders in the disabled community as “Uncle Tiny Tims.”
Jerry’s Orphans alerted the media that they and similar organizations such as Disabled in Action and the Tune Out Jerry Coalition would be picketing the 1992 telethon in more than twenty cities across the country, and they got a great deal of attention in the press, which reported that the group now boasted a mailing list of three thousand names. When the Associated Press called Evan Kemp to get his reaction to the protesters’ activities, he seemed to side with them, saying, “I have always had problems with the pity approach to raising money.” This evoked a furious response from MDA executive director Bob Ross, who wrote to George Bush that “Evan Kemp’s continued disregard for your express wish that he cease his criticism of our Labor Day Telethon … is not only grievously … damaging to the association … but represents in a very real sense an outright rebuke of your authority.”
In the face of such opposition—in the face of his ‘kids’ grown into angry young men and women—Jerry was completely flustered. Twice in the week before the 1992 telethon the Associated Press tried to get him to comment on the activities and opinions of the protesters, and twice he claimed not to be able to find the time to speak to the news organization—“the first time in more than a decade,” the AP reported, that he didn’t speak out when asked to. He showed up on Larry King’s television show to defend himself, and appeared on ABC’s “Prime Time Live” broadcast in a similar role. At all times, he spoke about the good work that MDA did, but he never failed to get his shots in at the protesters personally, just as he suspected that they were rejecting him personally.
“You have to remember they’re sitting in chairs I bought them,” he told Vanity Fair soon after the 1992 telethon. “This one kid in Chicago [Ervin] would have passed through this life and never had the opportunity to be acknowledged by anybody, but he found out that by being a dissident he gets picked up in a limo by a television station. What do they want me to do? They want me to not raise $120 million Labor Day? They want me to stop work in the labs? There’s nineteen of them that are telling me not to raise $120 million. I don’t give a good goddamn what they call it; I am giving doctors money so that your new baby and my new baby never have to deal with this. I must be doing something right; I’ve raised one billion three hundred million dollars. These nineteen people don’t want me to do that. They want me to stop now? Fuck them. Do it in caps, FUCK THEM.”
Others connected to the MDA defended the telethon, the organization’s fund-raising tactics, and Jerry himself in calmer, less inflammatory fashion. Various adults with neuromuscular disease, some of them MDA board members and familiar faces to longtime telethon watchers, said they felt no indignity in being referred to as “kids.” Others pointed out that the most pernicious strain of muscular dystrophy did indeed strike only children—and kept them from ever becoming adults. And for many people, Jerry and the telethon were a symbol of American charity that no protesters could discredit, however intimately they were connected with the struggle themselves. Still, it was a confusing spectacle: disabled people boycotting an event intended to help them and hosted by a man who had risen to fame with an act many viewers took to be a caricature of disability.
For the MDA, the stakes of this battle were monumental. In addition to the more than $45 million it expected to raise each Labor Day through phoned pledges, it took in another $50 million or more in corporate donations and combined donations from groups like firefighters and postal workers during the telethon. Indeed, about 90 percent of the organization’s total income for the year was generated by the telethon. It could not let the event be sunk. Rumors circulated that Jerry was under pressure from the organization to give up his prominent position. And the MDA ignored his refusal to hear out the protesters by constructing a more balanced telethon. The show was reconfigured to include lengthy informational spots about adults with neuromuscular disease who had families and careers; more time was spent discussing the MDA’s work with people stricken by nonpediatric strains of the disease. Watching this newly sensitized telethon, even Evan Kemp announced that he was “extraordinarily impressed” by the progress the MDA had made.
All the controversy surrounding the telethon inevitably invited reporters to investigate the MDA’s financial affairs. There had been inquiries by journalists ever since the suspicions about Jerry skimming money from the telethon first arose, but no such exposé turned up anything. The general impression these investigations left was that while MDA might not have been a saintly organization—its executives made handsome salaries, and it functioned out of a lavish headquarters—neither was it crooked. In 1993 Money magazine, in an article devoted to telling its readers which charities were on the up-and-up, rated the MDA fourteenth in its survey of large charities (with incomes over $100 million annually), as judged by the percentage of overall income spent on patient, research, and education programs.
But Dianne Piastro and Memphis Business Journal reporter Scott Shepard dug deeper, investigating the particular nature of these programs, and came away with a more unsettling view. One thing that Piastro discovered was that the MDA didn’t care to share its financial information, even though required, as an untaxed, not-for-profit group, to submit financial statements each year to the IRS. And when she did uncover the MDA’s tax filing, she discovered some information that ran contrary to the image that the organization tried to project.
The MDA told the IRS that it raised $109.7 million in 1990 and earned another $9 million in dividends, interest, rental income, and the like. The organization also reported that it owned a $101.9 million portfolio of stocks, treasury notes, and money market fund shares. “It could look,” wrote Shepard of these assets, “like MDA was settling in for the long haul.” And, indeed, the organization wrote off $14 million as a loss when it gave up its New York headquarters and relocated to Tucson, Arizona, where it hoped to build a new facility—a strange gesture indeed for a body that was working to put itself out of business by curing a disease.
MDA executives, Piastro learned, were paid handsome salaries even by big-time charity organization standards: Bob Ross was paid more than $288,000 per year, despite the fact that MDA was a funnel, a middleman, and not an actual research organization. Several other key MDA officials earned near-six-figure pay-checks, and salaries for MDA employees rose 11 percent in 1990, a year during which much of the country felt the pinches of recession.
Most damningly, Piastro demonstrated that the MDA didn’t so much pour its research and patient service dollars into the scientific and dystrophic communities as sprinkle them. In 1990 MDA gave $20 million to 459 researchers, or an average of $43,000 per donation; similarly, $20.2 million was spent on 315,530 donations to patients, averaging about $64 a head. (Both of these total figures were lower than the $22.2 million that MDA spent on fund-raising, and they looked lower still when stacked against such figures as the $6.9 million for unspecified travel expenses that the MDA incurred for itself.)
In effect, despite a high ranking from Money magazine, which reckoned that the MDA spent 76.7 percent of its income on such “good works” as research, patient services, and public education (much of which was itself a form of solicitation and fund-raising), the organization’s actual expenditures were a bit more limited in scope and, in many cases, more internal than you would think if the telethon were your only source of information. Furthermore, despite the high profile that Jerry’s work had afforded the MDA, it barely qualified for Money’s list of charities with annual budgets of $100 million or more—all the more reason to question the way the organization chose to manage the relatively small amount of money that the public gave it.
Ironically, the public feuding between the MDA and its critics and the resulting investigations into the MDA’s financial affairs all took attention away from the fact that the organization had actually sponsored some groundbreaking work in combatting Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, the strain of neuromuscular disease that so tragically affected young boys. In 1986 geneticists at Children’s Hospital in Boston identified the gene that, when defective, caused Duchenne’s to occur. The gene provided the blueprint for a protein called dystrophin, which was essential to the proper development of nerves and muscles; in its deformed version, it produced a defective form of dystrophin that kept the host’s muscles from developing appropriately.
As heartening as this discovery was, the chance to perform therapy on the dystrophin gene was considered slim, for the gene was too large to be manipulated. For several years, neuromuscular research was stopped at this chasm between recognizing the problem and developing a solution to it. (An ironic sidelight, and one the MDA didn’t advertise, was that the identification of the culpable gene would allow parents to screen their unborn children for neuromuscular disease and terminate pregnancies if they discovered that their child was subject to Duchenne’s.)
In 1992, however, Jeffrey Chamberlain, a thirty-four-year-old geneticist at the University of Michigan whose research was partially funded by the MDA, announced that he and his colleagues had developed a “minigene” to correct the flawed dystrophin-producing gene and had successfully inserted it in the fertile eggs of mice carrying the flawed gene. In effect, the mice—which were only single-celled embryos at the time of the gene therapy—were bred to carry Duchenne’s and were then cured by the insertion of the minigene. The next step, the insertion of the minigene into a human specimen, was a long way off, but Chamberlain’s research proved that gene therapy could solve the problem and that the potential for a cure to Duchenne’s (and, by extrapolation, other genetically determined diseases) was very real.
And this was only one avenue of research, albeit the one closest to Jerry’s heart: MDA-financed scientists had, in fact, isolated the genes that, when flawed, were responsible for fourteen other neuromuscular diseases. All of a sudden, it seemed, a new world of potential cures was opening in front of them.
For Jerry, this was the miracle he’d been awaiting for four decades. “I’m gonna beat this cocksucker, that I promise you,” he said when asked how research was progressing. The MDA’s scientific advisors were optimistic that he might be right. At a 1993 meeting in Tucson, they told him, “‘For your seventieth birthday you’re gonna have the cure.’”
Prior to the 1992 telethon, however, he got a scare that made him wonder whether he’d ever see his seventieth birthday. Every August, before production on the telethon began, he would fly to Houston for a complete physical and a consultation with Michael DeBakey. In the summer of 1992, after all the tests were completed, Jerry and SanDee were informed by DeBakey that Jerry had prostate cancer.
He was given a choice of treatments—a two-month regimen of radiation and chemotherapy, or surgery, which, given the early detection of the condition, was likely to be successful. He chose the surgery, but asked the doctors if they could wait until after the telethon. They agreed. Then he stalled them some more, pointing out that he would be in Houston in mid-October to address a convention of ALS researchers. The doctors pinned him down to a date: They would perform their surgery on October 19.
The telethon went on as planned, with Jerry revealing his condition only to Joe and Claudia Stabile, his closest friends and business associates. He was so guarded about his condition that he kept it a secret even from his sons. Gary spoke to his father within a week of the operation and knew nothing about it. “He didn’t tell me he was having surgery for cancer,” he told the press. Anthony, too, was in the dark: “He hasn’t said anything to me.” Jerry’s office went so far as to issue a phony press release saying that he was in Houston to have back surgery.
On October 18, Jerry, SanDee, and Danielle arrived at Methodist Hospital in Houston. Jerry had arranged for the room next to his to be set up as a nursery for the baby, and he arranged with DeBakey to have the anesthesia administered in his own room so he wouldn’t have to be conscious when he was separated from his wife and daughter. The doctor agreed, Jerry was put under, and the four-hour operation was carried out successfully. At sixty-six, he had dodged another bullet.
It was, as a result, a slow winter. In the spring of 1993, he performed in Europe, where he was appearing more frequently as opportunities at home grew more scarce. Later on, he was invited by his old friend Alan King to participate in a comedy festival he was putting together in New York—not as a performer, but as the emcee of a night of Catskills comics at Avery Fisher Hall. He hadn’t played Manhattan in more than a decade. Prior to the show, he performed a sold-out concert at the Westbury Music Fair. Soon after these New York dates, he played a few concerts in the midwest at conventions of MDA sponsor corporations. The shows so invigorated him that he began to formulate plans to do a national tour after the telethon.
When the telethon rolled around, however, he had a small brushfire on his hands. The cover of that week’s National Enquirer bore the headline, “BLOCKBUSTER NEW BOOK: My Nightmare Life with Jerry Lewis … by his wife of 36 years.” Patti had written an autobiography, and she spared him little embarrassment in the process. I Laffed Till I Cried: Thirty-Six Years of Marriage to Jerry Lewis was a strange volume indeed. Coauthored by “non-disclosure writer” Sara Anne Coleman, it told Patti’s life story in a choppy style that revealed its probable origins as a series of taped interviews. It relied for many of its facts on Jerry’s autobiography or on press releases from his office. It included passages written by each of the couple’s six sons (including Joseph, back in his mother’s graces despite having permanently alienated his father). Its three appendixes described the contents of Patti’s Westwood house, some favorite recipes of the Lewis clan, and Jerry’s films, with annotation and analysis by Scott. And it was released by WRS Publishing, a religious book publisher in Waco, Texas, that included in its books’ back pages an 800 number that readers could call to suggest new book ideas.
For all that, however, the book was an extremely candid portrait of life around Jerry and his many moods. It spoke about—without explicitly describing—incidents of infidelity, drug abuse, hostility, financial mismanagement, even violence against the boys (including some of Joseph’s long-public accusations, which were borne out by his brothers’ testimony and by the very fact that his mother included them in her memoir). Patti claimed she had written the book to help support herself; that Jerry’s alimony payments were insufficient was evinced by her need to give up her Westwood house in 1993 and move into a small West Los Angeles apartment. But there was clearly a measure of revenge involved; the book may even have begun after Patti heard the news that Jerry and SanDee had adopted a baby girl. Jerry never said a word about the book in public. And Patti determinedly tried to maintain an air of dignity. “She’s too much of a lady to let the whole story come out,” her coauthor said. Indeed, approached with requests for interviews about her marriage, Patti would let Jerry know that someone had been asking questions about him.
Jerry still worked extremely closely with the MDA and its sponsors, virtually on a daily basis. He toured the country fulfilling commitments to sponsors—showing up at cocktail parties, emceeing banquets, even giving full-fledged performances. He met with scientific advisors to the MDA, and he was proud of the unique way he could forge working relationships among laboratories. “You should hear some of the fucking speeches I give to them,” he boasted. “One day I said, ‘Do you realize that you might have 40 percent of the answer and he’s got 60 and I don’t see the two of you talking? How would you like that I don’t see that you’re funded this fucking year?’”
Perhaps his proudest point, though, was the Love Network itself, the national chain of independent stations he organized each year to carry the telethon. Even though the MDA paid stations a fee for the commercial-free use of their airwaves for the duration of the broadcast, it was still incumbent upon Jerry and the organization to make sure the station managers were disposed toward carrying the show each year. His old Catskills instincts kicked in. “I organized the general managers’ meeting where we bring them all to the national headquarters in Tucson,” he explained. “We had 185 of them this year. I get the Loews Hotel in Tucson to give me housing and food for all of them. I then get United Airlines to fly them to me. I then get 7-Up to do the dinner, then I get Budweiser to pick up all their golf, all of their extras. I’m talking about hitting Budweiser for $450,000. Between Budweiser, 7-Up, United Airlines, we’re talking about $1.6 million. It doesn’t cost MDA a nickel, and we really put it on.
“This year, I did a concert for them with the Tucson Symphony. Wynton Marsalis, Maureen McGovern, and myself performed with the Tucson Symphony, and all these general managers with their wives and friends, and we did it at the university, a two-thousand-seat house. We were getting three thousand dollars a ticket for outsiders. We filled the house. And I made nice with the general managers. We had a cocktail party, reception, big dinner, prizes, golf, tennis. And my greeting to them every year is the same thing: ‘Good morning, gentlemen. Welcome to Tucson. You are here for our obsequious drill. We hope that you know you’re gonna be brown-nosed from now until the time you leave. We will suck around and do whatever is necessary to give you pleasure.’ I do it every year. I tell ’em the truth. And they love it. They fuckin’ love it.”
The telethon itself had mutated over the years. Though it still epitomized the Vegas exemplar, it had skewed its talent roster toward a more Middle American palette than during its 1970s heyday. By the early 1990s the principal entertainment came not from New York or Los Angeles but from Branson, Missouri, the Ozarks tourist trap where many older country and pop stars had opened theaters to perform for folks too moral or budget-conscious to visit Vegas, Atlantic City, or Florida. From the Osmond Brothers (without Donny or Marie) to Tony Orlando to Mel Tillis to Yakov Smirnoff, the town was rotten with acts on the downslide.
The infusion of Branson performers in the telethon marked not only a shift away from Jerry’s once cosmopolitan, ethnic, and coastal audience to a Bible Belt crowd—the same folks that televangelists hit up for money—but also a general diminution of the stature of the telethon itself. Where it used to host the biggest names in traditional show business, it had become a refuge for old friends of Jerry’s (Steve and Eydie, Norm Crosby, even Gary, still singing “This Diamond Ring” at forty-nine) and young acts who’d passed Jerry’s auditions. The parade of sponsors—7-Eleven, Kellogg’s, Budweiser, Harley Davidson, Brunswick Bowling Centers—seemed tawdrier in this light, the spectacle of tuxedo-clad Jerry accepting checks from strangers creepier than ever. If the 1970s telethon was a kind of acme of postwar American show business, the 1990s telethon was a parade of lowest-common-denominator signifiers of post-capitalist America. Jerry didn’t even cry at the end any longer, even though his final tallies inched closer and closer to $50 million every year.
Jerry put together a national tour in the fall and winter of 1993. It was to be a true career-summing act, a two-hour, one-man show (with musical accompaniment) reviewing everything he’d ever done in show business. There would be film clips of him and Dean onstage and in movies, clips from the films he made with Frank Tashlin and on his own, clips from telethons. He would sing, dance, tell jokes, do impressions and pantomime, conduct the band, perform sleight-of-hand tricks with cigarettes and canes and audience members’ handkerchiefs, even take questions from the audience and greet them in a reception area after the show. As a capper, he would bring Danielle out onstage and sing to her, a touch the audiences in New York had really enjoyed in the spring (apart from the baby, longtime fans had seen the whole act before). Entitled “Jerry Lewis … Unlimited,” the tour was mounted by Columbia Artists Management, a booking agency primarily involved in developing tours for classical artists such as symphonies, dance troupes, and instrumentalists. The company had, however, scored well with recent tours built around such performers as Steve Allen, Sid Caesar, and Mel Tormé, and took that as an indication that it could promote Jerry successfully as well.
The “Unlimited” tour had two halves—a midwest, southwest, and Pacific coast tour in October, and an Atlantic coast tour in February and March. It would take him, by a customized touring bus, to seventeen states, Canada, and Puerto Rico, though not necessarily to the biggest or likeliest sites. It kicked off in Ohio, but in Toledo, not Cincinnati, Cleveland, or Columbus; in Southern California, he would play Azusa and Cerritos, not L.A.; in the Bay Area, San Raphael and Cupertino, not San Francisco or Oakland; in New York, Queens College and Brooklyn College, but not Manhattan. In effect, he was booked like a specialty act into college auditoriums and performing arts centers, not the large downtown theaters where popular acts usually performed. With stops like Peoria, Sarasota, Elmira, Schenectady, Kalamazoo, and Hershey on the itinerary, it sounded like one of Danny’s burlesque circuit tours or the sort of thing Jerry himself was doing forty years earlier when Abbey Greshler turned him into an emcee.
Jerry promoted the tour with appearances on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” “Later with Bob Costas,” and “Sally Jesse Raphael” (this last appearance was so filled with praise for Jerry from friends and son Gary that it seemed a pointed rejoinder to Patti’s book and the negative publicity the telethon had been getting). Despite all the publicity, however, the tour had troubles from the start. In Toledo, the first stop, ticket sales were so sluggish that the promoters offered two-for-one pricing in the final few days before the performance; even then, only a two-thirds house turned up. His performance at the University of Illinois in Champagne-Urbana was similarly undersold. In Amarillo it was weaker still—less than half the house. “It’s not that we’re dealing with a financial bonanza here,” admitted Bob Kay of Columbia Artists.
By the time he got to the West Coast, disaster struck. Bill Graham Presents, the booker for two dates in the Bay Area and two in the northwest, found itself sitting with virtually empty theaters after the first week of sales. “We’re used to seeing 50 percent of the house sold after the first weekend of sales,” said the organization’s Lee Smith, “not the eighty or one hundred tickets that it actually was.” Smith was so appalled by the initial advance sale that he wrote Kay to warn him that Jerry was in for a major disappointment if these shows went on as scheduled. “We were so stunned by the sales that we told them that these dates shouldn’t play,” he recalled, “and they said, ‘Tough.’ They were going to play these dates if there were one hundred people in the house. They gave us absolutely no indication that they would allow the dates to be canceled.” It was shaping up as a major embarrassment—after nearly six weeks of sales in Portland, Oregon, for example, some 250 tickets were sold for a 2,700-seat auditorium.
Finally, the Graham organization convinced Kay to spike all four shows and bought out the contract. On the night he closed in Cerritos, Jerry got the news from Kay—they would not be heading north. Jerry would get paid by Columbia Artists regardless—he had a guaranteed contract with the agency—but he was crestfallen. “It was very difficult for him,” remembered Kay. “He was majorly depressed in his dressing room. He had tears in his eyes.”
There was, of course, some finger-pointing afterward. Kay blamed the Graham organization: “They didn’t do any promotion.” But Smith saw it as a matter of Jerry’s audience having changed its habits since the last time he’d tried anything as large as the “Unlimited” tour. “The demographic that goes to these shows is declining in size and in the desire to go out to live performances,” he reasoned. Indeed, only in places where he could count on a large vestige of Jerry Lewis fans from the old days did he play before the sort of houses he’d hoped to: Southern California, New York City, South Florida.
And if those audiences had read the trade reviews, they might have stayed home, too. Variety’s Jim Farber called “Jerry Lewis … Unlimited” “a show that thrives on saccharine sentimentality and sarcastic abuse.” While he acknowledged that the audience “seems to love it all,” he complained that “every element of the show seems unlimited: The length (especially without an intermission); the stream of corny, abusive, racially tinged jokes; the song-and-dance numbers; even the grainy film clips.”
In the Los Angeles Times Lawrence Christon, the paper’s regular reviewer of comedians, wrote that “Jerry Lewis is far from tired. Would that were true of his act.” Like Farber, Christon found the show overlong, but he was more analytical in explaining his distaste: The rap on Lewis by his knowledgeable peers is that he was never able to metamorphose his Idiot persona beyond postadolescence, “and you can see here how he shored up his incapacity for change by taking refuge, like so many other stalled performers, in Las Vegas, where time never registers.”
Farber and Christon were both particularly appalled at the way Jerry turned the show’s question-and-answer session into a chance to ridicule his audience. Both writers mentioned an overweight woman who stood up to announce that she considered him the second most important man in her life after her father and that she’d been waiting forty-two years to see him in person. His response? “I’m in room 134 at the Sheraton. Come up after the show and we’ll make it true.” Then he turned to the band and said, “That’s the broad I’ve been telling you about. There’s enough for everyone!” When a young couple stood up to express their admiration for him in noticeably tongue-tied fashion, Jerry told them that they looked “like two perfect schmucks.” Nevertheless, when he left the stage that night, as on most nights throughout the truncated tour, he received a warm standing ovation. He could prove it; at his request, one of the Cerritos performances was videotaped so that his daughter could see it when she was older.
Though he’d passed Social Security age, he kept pursuing ways to reemerge as a significant presence in the business. In 1993 he had appeared on an episode of the NBC sitcom “Mad About You” as an eccentric billionaire who wanted to hire someone to make a film about his life. Playing alongside popular young stand-up comics Paul Reiser and Steven Wright (a droll, deadpan wit and Jerry’s perfect opposite), he made a winning elder statesman—tan, full of energy, and surprisingly generous with the spotlight. Brandon Tartikoff, the former NBC and Paramount chief who had set up his own production company, liked Jerry’s appearance so much he was inspired to begin talks with the comic about a sitcom pilot—Jerry would play a foul-tempered attorney—but nothing material emerged from the discussions.
The following year, Jerry found himself cast in a feature film role that would take advantage of those very qualities that Tartikoff responded to, in addition to the darker side he’d shown in The King of Comedy and “Wiseguy.” Funny Bones is the story of Tommy Fawkes, a struggling young comic whose father, George, is a famously successful comedian. After flopping hideously on a Vegas stage in his father’s presence, the young comic flees to England, his father’s birthplace, an Eden less golden than he has been led to expect.
Jerry, of course, played the dad, and Tommy was played by the American actor (and remarkable late-Jerry lookalike) Oliver Platt; Leslie Caron played a character from out of Jerry’s past (a sly reference to Jerry’s famous French following). Peter Chelsum, the English writer-director of Hear My Song, a film about a legendary Irish tenor and the larcenous young theater owner who tries to book him, wrote and directed. Chelsum set the film in the British seaside resort of Blackpool—his own birthplace, a sort of cross between Atlantic City and the Borscht Belt, a once-popular tourist spot now gone to seed but still famous for the variety of show-business acts it birthed in its heyday.
With his affection for old-time show biz and physical comedy, Chelsum wrote the script with Jerry in mind, and sent it to the comic without thinking of who else might have played the role. Reading this paean to entertainers with “funny bones,” Jerry responded immediately. He called Chelsum to accept and then asked him, “How do you know all this stuff?” Chelsum responded that he didn’t know how—he just knew it.
“Are you Jewish?” Jerry asked.
“No.”
“Well, you sell like a fucking Jew!”
Jerry put on some twenty-five pounds to play George Fawkes and went off to spend two months in England shooting the film. Chelsum and his producer, Simon Fields, were a bit jittery about the star’s arrival. “You hear stories, and you do worry,” Chelsum admitted. “But Simon had to deal with all that.” When Jerry and his scores of suitcases turned up, Chelsum found that the star was a perfect gentleman on the set. Like Martin Scorsese, who’d directed Jerry through his last really worthy film role a decade earlier, Chelsum declared that he and Jerry “got on terribly well.”
He recalled that on the comedian’s last day on the set, he received a call from his agent at William Morris, who asked him point-blank “how Jerry had been.” Afterward, Chelsum told Jerry—another Morris client—about the conversation: “‘And how did they ask that?’ Jerry wanted to know, and I told him that I’d laughed and said that he’d been impeccably directable.” Indeed, on Jerry’s last day on the film, Chelsum revealed that he was surprised at just how cooperative Jerry had been. “I told him, ‘You know, Jerry, you saw me scratching my head some days, and you never said anything, as you might’ve done,’” he recalled.
Chelsum appreciated not only Jerry’s cooperativeness but the inimitable aura he brought to his role and even his modest improvisatory touches. Entering Tommy’s dressing room in Vegas, for instance, Jerry was told by the director to lay claim to the place. He created his own bits of business, pacing the room as he spoke to his son, helping himself to the grapes in the congratulatory fruit basket on the coffee table, gesturing toward the wall with his chin and murmuring, “Hmm—new mirrors.” Later on, he upstages his son’s debut by stepping up to the mike before him and doing shtick, feigning humility but grinning broadly at the ovation. It’s a moment so Lewisian as to feel documentary.
Chelsum claimed not to know much about Jerry’s life, but parts of his script would be impossible for anyone else to have played. In addition to the show biz–starved son whom he forever eclipses, George Fawkes has another son, a bastard child who lives in England and works as a comedian—a pantomimist with a dummy act! Lee Evans, the brilliant English comic playing the role, is as close a simulacrum of the chimplike young Jerry as Platt is for the barrel-chested older man. Indeed, while the film is most explicitly concerned with the two brothers and the vexing question of what makes for real comic inspiration, it is also a kind of tribute to Jerry Lewis and the strains of comic performance that have emanated from him: the young-wild-man comedy practiced by entertainers like Evans, Jim Carrey, and Pauly Shore, and the slick Vegas act embodied by Tommy Fawkes and the thousands of faceless stand-up comics who have passed through the Labor Day telethon.
Funny Bones had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in the winter of 1995, and advance word on the film was very strong. Jerry made the trip to drum up interest in the picture, and Chelsum gave an interview to The New York Times in which he revealed that Disney was at sea as to how to release the film: “Your stars make it look like a B-picture,” he was told. Variety loved the film, calling it “a tour de force,” while acknowledging that its “commercial prospects are … likely to be erratic.” Jerry and Leslie Caron, reviewer Leonard Klady noted, “are magical in roles that blur the boundaries of their real and screen personae.”
Chelsum, of course, wasn’t the first director to add weight to a film by hiring Jerry to appear in it. But Martin Scorsese’s casting of Jerry in The King of Comedy, had a different effect, revealing the sobriety, loneliness, and anger inside the telethon host. The role might have served as a restorative to Jerry’s waning career, but it left the creepy suspicion that Scorsese had captured his actor’s ugliness a bit too accurately. Chelsum’s Jerry, however, is closer to the public image of the man: Jerry the Vegas guy, Jerry the French guy, Jerry whose son was a big pop star, Jerry who was once a force of nature as a physical comic. If he doesn’t have the ferocity of Jerry Langford, George Fawkes is instead a perfect embodiment of what is best about the actor. He is the Jerry of the charming surface, of the legend, the guy who gave David Letterman such pleasure as a guest on his show—the Tony Bennett of physical comedy, dug by youngsters who had no prior association with him but who ate up both Jim Carrey and Harry Connick, Jr.
Very few people who saw Funny Bones weren’t favorably impressed—only Terrence Rafferty of The New Yorker, among nationally read critics, didn’t like it—but very few people saw the film. Disney never quite figured out how to release it—“They don’t know whether to make fifty prints or five hundred,” said one regional publicist for the company—and the hesitant, low-key distribution and advertising pattern resulted in a weak box office. Jerry had made a favorable impression, but it wasn’t widely felt.
Disney also played a large part in another project of Jerry’s, the ongoing dream that he would be able to make a sequel to The Nutty Professor. There’d been talk about such a film for a decade. In 1984 there was a script co-written by Jerry and Bill Richmond to be produced in part by Jerry’s son Chris for Triad Productions. Two years later, Warner Brothers was said to be producing a version of The Nutty Professor with Jerry merely acting in it and Joe Piscopo playing his son. In 1988 Jerry told the press he had $9 million raised for a Nutty film of his own, with Patti, of all people, as his coproducer. Three years later, during the break in filming Arizona Dreams, he was back to discussing the movie with Warner Brothers, hoping to film it before touring the nation in a revival of Sugar Babies (the successful knockoff of Hellzapoppin’); neither project materialized. Finally, appearing on Sally Jesse Raphael’s syndicated talk show in the fall of 1993, he announced to great enthusiasm from the audience that “The Nutty Professor 2” was going to be made by Disney.
Not quite. Early in 1994 it was announced that Eddie Murphy, himself a onetime king of comedy fallen on leaner years, would be acting in a remake of—not a sequel to—The Nutty Professor, with Lewis fan John Landis directing and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment producing for Universal. Murphy would play Julius Kelp not as a clod and a swinger, as Jerry had, but as a fat man and a normal-bodied man, a choice that all but removed the pathos from the material (USA Today even ran a photo of Murphy in his fat-guy makeup). But there were creative differences among the filmmakers; Landis left, making way for Tom Shadyac (who directed faux-Jerry Jim Carrey in the wildly popular Ace Ventura, Pet Detective), and playwright and “M*A*S*H” TV series creator Larry Gelbart was called in to rewrite the script. After several months Gelbart, too, left the project, declaring, “I’m sorry, but it became two different pictures.” Jerry, for his part, objected to the way the project was proceeding without his input. According to Brian Grazer, the film’s producer, Jerry was “Machiavellian” in negotiating away the right to make the film. “Jerry was very nice at first, then he hardened his stance,” Grazer explained. Eventually, Jerry was assured an executive producer credit and a chance to appear in a small role, and the film began shooting in May 1995.
Jerry had problems closer to home to contend with. In the late 1980s he and his family were being stalked by Gary Benson, a middle-aged Navy veteran who had apparently gone from admiring the comedian to wanting to harm him: Rupert Pupkin come to life. Benson continually called Jerry’s house, visited Jerry’s offices, and had gone so far as to date a woman who worked as a housekeeper for Jerry and SanDee and thereby gain entry to their home. Another time, he arrived at the office and told one of Jerry’s secretaries he was armed with a gun and wanted to get Jerry. Jerry’s lawyers were successful in getting a judge to issue a restraining order against Benson, but the man was clearly beyond reason. In February 1994 he got too close to Jerry again and was arrested by Las Vegas police; a judge ordered him held on $1 million bail. A year later, Benson pled guilty to a felony charge of aggravated stalking and was released on his own recognizance pending enrollment in a psychiatric care program.
Late in 1994 news of another project materialized. Jerry would tour the country in the road production of Damn Yankees, the classical musical that had debuted while he and Dean were still together. It had been revived on Broadway to brilliant reviews and solid box office in 1992. Jerry was slated to play the Devil, known in the play as Mr. Applegate, a figure who transforms a baseball fan into a brilliant player and the lowly Washington Senators into a pennant-contending team.
In December the show’s producer, Mitchell Maxwell, announced a radical plan. He had already announced that the Broadway production would close at the end of the year—it had enjoyed a healthy run, but it was winding down, and he wanted it to bow before the usual midwinter box-office lull. Now, however, with Jerry’s name available for the marquee, he would reopen the show on Broadway at the end of February, hold it there for a few months, and then take it out on the road. They would do nine shows a week; it would be the busiest Jerry had been in decades.
There was an air of uncertainty about the enterprise; no such hiatus had ever been pulled off on Broadway before. Unions, performers, theater owners, investors were all asked to let the red ink pour for a few months. Yet Maxwell was confident that he could swing it. “I’ll lose money going on hiatus,” he said, “but it’s an exposure that doesn’t cripple the show in the long run.” He was so confident, in fact, that he made his nonbilled actors, whose contracts expired at the end of the regular run, an informal promise to rehire them all. “I don’t think I’m going to see any attrition,” he announced.
Jerry could afford to sit back and see what happened. He was already cast in the touring company, and he had no qualms at all with Maxwell’s ambitious plans. If the producer felt he could reopen Damn Yankees in New York with Jerry Lewis as the Devil, then Jerry Lewis would do nothing to stop him. In January 1995 he held a press conference in a room above Sardi’s, boasting to reporters that he would bring “brilliance” to the hit play. He tap-danced for the cameras, he did shtick (“There’s no humility in my family. I got it all”), and he even lost his temper, albeit with a smile on his face: Asked if he’d done enough singing in his career to handle the musical portions of his role, he snapped at the questioner: “What do you do, live in a cave? Did you know Lindbergh landed in Paris?”
He was beaming, thrilled at the prospect of doing the one thing he’d never done before professionally, of performing just the way Jolson had, as Danny Lewis had always longed to. It seemed possible: People spent more than $100 million three times in 1994 to watch Jim Carrey do Jerry’s shtick in movies. Why wouldn’t they show up to watch the real thing in person? At sixty-eight, he stood poised to make his Broadway debut—in a role for which, he joshingly admitted, he’d inadvertently been rehearsing all of his life.
The thing sold tickets.
The New York area had always been good for him, but the presales for Damn Yankees surprised everyone. The deal had been structured so that Jerry would directly profit from ticket sales, and the public thirst to see him in the show was so great that he would earn a reported forty thousand dollars a week—the highest salary ever paid a performer on Broadway according to a variety of reports (but, astoundingly, the same sum he commanded as a live solo performer in the late 1950s). It was such a huge bonanza that it wiped away all other memories: Approached by a reporter who wanted to know about the Hellzapoppin’ debacle, he shot back, “You want to talk about Auschwitz? Is that interesting to you? I don’t talk about anything negative,” and walked away.
About positives, however, he was downright effusive. In the weeks leading up to previews of the show, which began on February 28, he was everywhere in the media: all the New York newspapers, TV talk shows (he did his second “Late Show with David Letterman” in a year and a half), magazines. Ensconced in a suite at the Waldorf Towers, he did tons of press, all of it fluff: He joked about being the devil, he bragged about losing the twenty-five pounds he’d put on for Funny Bones (“What I’d do for a knish,” he wailed; “I’d have an affair with a lesbian”), he showed off his little girl Dani (the only one of his children or grandchildren whose photos he hung in his dressing room), and he talked—almost obsessively at times—about his father. In every single interview he gave, he paused at some moment to announce that his appearance on Broadway was the fulfillment not only of his own lifelong ambition but the greatest ambition that Danny Lewis ever held for himself or his son. “It was a dream of my dad’s that I’d make it here,” went one such passage. “My dad is looking up over a cloud giggling,” went another. During still another, he merely looked heavenward and muttered, “Dad … Dad …”*
When the play finally opened officially—on March 12, 1995, just four days before his sixty-ninth birthday—it was received resoundingly well. “Jerry Lewis is legitimate at last,” wrote Vincent Canby in The New York Times. Remarking the “surprisingly self-effacing” quality of Jerry’s performance (“he seems to have acquired that laid-back Las Vegas body language”), Canby actually did something no other American critic had ever done: He asked Jerry to do more. “On those few occasions when he seems on the verge of mugging, that is, when his eyes discreetly cross or his voice takes on the idiot edge, the fans scream with pleasure. … At this point in its run, Damn Yankees looks as if it could use a little more of the anarchic Lewis spirit. … It will be interesting to see what Damn Yankees is like in several months, especially if (as seems possible) Mr. Lewis has his own Applegate whispering in his ear, ‘Go on, Jer, let her rip.’”
“How did the Bar Mitzvah boy do?” asked Clive Barnes in the New York Post. “Just dandy. … Although he keeps outrageousness delicately at bay, he occasionally indulges in a devilish double-take or fiendish grimace, just sufficient to indicate to the faithful the divine lunacy that still lurks round the corner.”
The new, subdued Jerry didn’t sit well with everyone. “If Jerry’s going to be in a show, why shouldn’t he be Jerry?” wondered Howard Kissel in the Daily News. And there were some outright negative comments: “He dwelleth in the uneasy limbo of overacting and underdoing,” wrote Linda Winer in New York Newsday.
But in all it was a smashing debut, especially considering the sort of treatment he’d received over the years. The opening night crowd was star-studded: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Matthew Broderick, Molly Ringwald, John Turturro, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and Penelope Ann Miller were in attendance (though there were some reports of tickets being sold outside the theater for less than face value). Frank and Barbara Sinatra sent a card, Leonard Nimoy (husband to Jerry’s Big Mouth leading lady, Susan Bay) sent a bouquet, Jerry’s son Chris sent a jar of caviar. Afterward, still more celebrities (Tatum O’Neal, Barbara Walters, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, Ben Vereen) showed up at Tavern on the Green to sip Dom Perignon with Jerry and pore over the early editions of the papers; Jerry was so pleased with Canby’s notice that he read it aloud to the room.
In fact, Jerry Lewis as Applegate was a bit of all right. Though Damn Yankees was, like all the revivals dotting Broadway during the Nineties, a bit of a shell game—familiar books and scores gussied up with new sets and sold to tourists at outrageous (but presumably New York–style) prices—there was an undeniable appropriateness to Jerry’s playing the part of Beelzebub (“The devil is a role made in heaven, for Chrissakes,” he told an interviewer), and there was a genuine buzz about the appearance of such a storied star in a live show.
Knowing that they were there to see him, Jerry played to the crowd. He smiled at his own funny lines, he joshingly urged applause from the audience with hand gestures, he stopped to bathe in the thrilled responses that followed on his slipping into The Kid’s voice or his squeal of “La-a-a-a-a-a-dy.” For the most part, he wasn’t really acting: Very few of his line readings had any dramatic weight to them; he rarely sounded as if he was playing a role at all. But he did some truly terrific physical bits (being dressed down by the temptress Lola, he sat in comic stupefaction à la Stanley from The Bellboy), and he absolutely brought down the house with his one-man number, “Those Were the Good Old Days,” showing some fancy footwork and a dazzling ability with a cane and top hat.
It was an entirely apt song: Traipsing a stage in the very Times Square that he and Dean had drifted through anonymously fifty years earlier, performing in a show that had originally appeared on Broadway at around the time he and Dean had begun to feud, he had found a kind of time warp that seemed to preserve only the best aspects of his talent. He had always loved to work live, and the audiences were literally exultant in the familiar bits he threw at them. Never mind that some of his shtick was in questionable taste (he did some nance stuff; he closed the first act by lying on his back and spreading his legs with his hands while yelling “Make a wish!”), never mind that some of it was the very stuff America had grown so tired of in the Seventies and Eighties. Damn Yankees fed upon its audiences’ love for a bygone era, and it wasn’t too hard for people to remember how ubiquitous Jerry was in those greener days. Of course, he was having the time of his life.
The next weeks were his most jubilant in decades. He was the subject of a long segment on NBC’s “Dateline” in which Bob Costas practically canonized him. He appeared live on CBS’s “Late Late Show with Tom Snyder” after a day in which he gave two performances, and was up at the crack of dawn the next day, his birthday, to sit in for Regis Philbin on “Live with Regis and Kathie Lee.” As the spring wore on, plans were made for a film of Damn Yankees, and for a year-plus of European touring with the show; if it all held together, he’d play Applegate until the millennium.
There were more print interviews; the epitome was an invitation to speak to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In a yellow shirt open at the neck and a dark jacket, he declared, “My war with the press is over,” defended “polack” jokes, claimed to have spoken at “seventeen hundred universities” and to “five thousand film and acting classes,” declared that he was utterly indifferent to groups that protested his fund-raising techniques, and answered questions from the audience with the self-satisfied air of a precocious little boy who knows the adults approve of him.
It was a truly remarkable Indian summer—a late-life embrace from a public many believed had recoiled from him forever. Jerry himself, though, never lost the hope that the people loved him.
“They have put me right where I am,” he declared, “giving me glowing affection and support. I’m an American icon.”
And he was.