You know what kills me more than anything? I don’t give a shit what they write. The thing that kills me is that they come with a disguise. That’s what kills me. Why don’t you just come and tell me you wanna do a rip piece? I’ll give you all the material you want. You wanna rip me? I’ll give you shit that’s real. That I’m guilty of. That’ll make great reading. Why the fuck would you have to make up anything? Putz: Ask me! I’ll give you shit that you won’t believe, that no one’s ever written. As long as it’s real, and it’s true, it’s okay with me. I don’t care how I come off as long as it’s the truth.
—Jerry Lewis to the author, 1993
It began in the winter of 1992, soon after I’d begun research on this book.
A friend suggested I contact Suzanne Pleshette, who’d made her film debut beside Jerry, and I wrote her to request an interview. She responded by saying that she’d be happy to oblige me, but that she would never participate in such a project without Jerry’s knowledge and had therefore written him for his okay.
I hadn’t yet made contact with Jerry, though I had spoken to his manager, Joe Stabile, during the writing of the proposal for this book. Stabile told me he suspected Jerry would be only marginally interested in a biography, that a book on Jerry’s film career was in the works,* and that I was welcome to approach the office again once I had a contract in hand.
When I had, in fact, secured a contract, I was a bit reluctant to announce the fact to Jerry immediately. I felt I ought to do some research first in order to make my contact with him as productive as possible. I didn’t want to get canned, press release–style answers to serious questions, and I felt that by eliminating certain lines of inquiry altogether—by concentrating on specific facts and not generalities, for instance—I would reap the most from any potential contact with him. I remember telling an audience at a writing seminar that I would want either twenty hours with Jerry or one truthful answer to one pointed question; anything else, it seemed, would be diluted or superficial.
But, having been outed by Suzanne Pleshette, I wrote a careful letter to Jerry introducing myself, my work (I sent clips), and my intentions. I wrote with a mixture of impersonality and familiarity, I thought—making it clear that I knew a good deal about him, indicating that I respected his privacy and would understand his not wanting to participate in the project, but hoping to hear from him.
In mid-January 1993 I was on the phone with a local editor of mine when the call-waiting beep sounded and I switched lines.
“Hello?”
“I’d like to speak to Shawn Levy.”
“This is Shawn.”
“Shawn, this is Jerry Lewis.”
My heart pounded. “Jerry …” I groped for something to say, hoping to sound casual. “Thanks for getting back to me.”
I don’t recall much of the ensuing conversation. Jerry described his general reluctance to involve himself in such inquiries (“I’m an easy target,” he confessed), but he felt that my letter allowed him to “open [his] heart” on a “new day.” He would be happy to meet with me whenever we could work it out.
And there was one last thing: He’d heard from Suzanne Pleshette; had I been carrying on an investigation behind his back? I assured him that I had approached Pleshette so early in my work simply because she and I had a mutual friend and I was traveling to Los Angeles at that time on other business. He seemed satisfied, and we said good-bye, planning to compare our schedules soon and arrange a time to meet.
Within a few weeks, we had scheduled an April appointment on his yacht in San Diego. I planned a few other research activities, scheduled a few other interviews, sought out an appropriate gift (I settled on a three-volume 1904 edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson—the language’s great biography by a man who actually knew his subject), and flew south for the appointment.
Early one April morning, I arrived at the Marriott Hotel, where Jerry’s boat was docked, about twenty minutes early, and scoped the place out. From across the marina, I could see an especially handsome yacht among the very large vessels in the gate-protected berths: Sam’s Place, it was called, and its home port was identified as Las Vegas. Satisfied that I’d found him, I parked, killed a few minutes looking at the gift shops in a nearby tourist complex, and went into the marina office to call the boat. At the stroke of 10:00 A.M., I walked down to the gate, where Jerry was to meet me.
“I call that timing!” he announced as he saw me, clearly—with my long black pants and black briefcase—the only writer in the vicinity.
“I try to be prompt,” I replied.
He looked great. He was sixty-seven years old and extremely fit. He was barrel-chested (just like, as I was to learn later on, his father late in life) and strode spryly on skinny legs. He wore very short white shorts, a synthetic red athletic pullover (rather like a softball jersey, but with no writing or markings), Reebok court shoes, high white sweat socks, and a fair amount of jewelry: a pricey watch, rings, a gold bracelet, a gold necklace.
We shook hands, talked about the weather, and walked down to the boat. Alongside his sixty-eight-foot Grebe motor yacht—“The last size boat for one person to handle,” he explained—was a sporty red motorboat emblazoned with the name Jerry’s Place. I stepped over a red welcome mat bearing the familiar young-Jerry cartoon logo, put down my bag, presented my gift, met the ship’s captain, and sat down opposite Jerry in the main cabin with a Sprite he offered me.
The furnishing was sparse, just like his film sets: baby gear (a stroller, a playpen with toys, diapers and wipes), a small TV with a VCR and a portable cassette player beside it (the sole tape in evidence was a Gary Lewis and the Playboys greatest hits collection), tasteful pale rattan furniture. The decor was largely nautical—brass-and-teak barometers and the like—with one pointed exception: On the glass coffee table was a large, colorful clay statue of Jerry as a clown walking a half-dozen dogs.
The talk turned to my project. Jerry was eager to learn how I’d settled on him as a subject, and I explained that his life had touched so many fascinating subjects—Dean Martin, the auteur theory, charity telethons, slapstick comedy, vaudeville, Las Vegas, and so on—that it was irresistible. I indicated that I thought he’d been neglected as an artist, and that one symptom of that neglect was the lack of a real biography of him.
He took this all in with a pleased look. He told me about run-ins he’d had with the press. He singled out an article that had appeared in Esquire two years earlier and that was filled with shocking, profanity-laced quotations from him. He had called the writer after the article appeared, he said, to declare his displeasure (I had already heard about this incident from a friend of the writer’s). The story was meant to symbolize his principled attitude toward journalism as a craft and his wariness as a subject; as he spoke he grew visibly angry.
Soon enough, the mood passed and we got down to work. I took out my tape recorder and placed it on the table between us, and I began asking questions. At first we spoke of little things—his home in Las Vegas, life with six sons versus life with the new baby (Danielle, asleep below deck, was just over a year old).
Then I broached more important matters. I had wanted to demonstrate to him that I’d done my homework, and I asked him about three specific and relatively obscure incidents: the jewelry heist when he hosted “The Tonight Show” in New York, the night he kept an intruder at bay at his Pacific Palisades house, and the murder of his cousin Judy. He was surprised and, I think, impressed that I knew about these events, and he spoke freely about them—though not, as I knew even then, entirely accurately.
I chose not to challenge anything he said. Indeed, my attitude was one of extreme caution. I was trying to be as forthright as I could, but as I sat with him I knew that I would, at some point in the research or the writing or the release of the book, become in his mind, like the Esquire writer, just another Judas in the press. There was no way to tell this story without telling the negatives, and whenever the negatives were mentioned, I knew, Jerry flew into rages.
But that first day on the boat was cordial and tranquil. He introduced me to SanDee and the baby (when SanDee was headed out to do some shopping, she asked Jerry for cash; he pulled out a roll of bills—ones on the outside, larger denominations within—and handed her “a C-note”), he sat very close to me, eyeing my watch and fiddling with the baggage tag on my briefcase, which sat on the floor by my feet.
We talked for more than three hours, covering a variety of what I thought would be the most innocuous topics: his comic influences, his comic descendants, his teaching, his ensemble of actors, the Academy Awards, emerging film technologies, hired-gun projects he’d made during the 1980s and ’90s. He spoke about muscular dystrophy, and he related the stories of a few afflicted families so honestly and tearfully that I thought I might cry myself. I told him I’d seen a copy of the Paramount camera department report about his use of the video assist on The Bellboy, and he was overjoyed; he asked if I could have it sent to him, and I told him I thought I might—there were several copies of it in the archive I’d been working with, and it would be easy enough, I reckoned, to have the curator at the USC archive send a copy of the report to Jerry Lewis, the very donor of the papers.*
Finally, we parted with promises to keep in touch with each other. Jerry invited me to plan further interview sessions, to do some traveling with him (he wanted me to see his home and office in Las Vegas and to visit MDA headquarters in Tucson), and to think of him, in effect, as a collaborator. It seemed to me he saw in the appearance of an interested young writer a means to resurrect his lot in the public eye.
He did not want to authorize the book in the sense of reading it prior to publication. He spoke at length about the disappointment he had suffered at the meager sales of Jerry Lewis in Person, his 1982 autobiography, and he understood that my entering into a relationship with him would necessarily preclude any editorial authority on his part. He asked if the book would be called “the unauthorized biography,” and I told him that such a title was generally meant to signal a more salacious book than I intended to write. But he agreed that we’d both be best served if I were to remain strictly independent. He would speak with me, show me things, provide me with materials, and give the okay to any friends of his who sought clearance from him before speaking with me. He seemed to bless the project wholeheartedly when he told me that the book he’d written in 1982 had been a “nice” book but hadn’t sold, adding that “nice sucks” and that I could only “take care” of myself and my family by doing the job right.
In the following weeks, Jerry positively effused over me. He called my home several times, once catching my wife in my absence and telling her about all my fine qualities. He sent me a few items he thought I’d appreciate. When I told him my mother would be attending an upcoming performance of his at the Westbury Music Fair, he insisted that I find out for him exactly where she would be sitting so he could “give her the thrill of a lifetime.” (As it turned out, on the night of the show Jerry wasn’t able to reach her seat, but afterward she found her way to the dressing room and identified herself. “Shawn Levy’s mother has been found,” an assistant declared, and my mom and her friends were invited backstage, where Jerry greeted them in a kimono and posed for photos. Again, Jerry told my mother about all the wonderful things he’d discovered in her son; he was extremely excited to work with me, he said, to which my mom responded, “It’ll be good for you.”)
Throughout this honeymoon, I kept lapsing into uneasiness. I couldn’t forswear my obligation to write a truthful book—a book that would be filled, I knew, with episodes that would be painful and upsetting to Jerry. But I also couldn’t cut the line between us and deny myself the access he was promising me. It was clearer to me as time went on that I would have to do something to make a break between us—that I couldn’t hypocritically smile and hug him, on the one hand, and write honestly about his personal and professional traumas, on the other. But I didn’t know how to do it.
It didn’t matter.
The second time I met with Jerry on his yacht was in early July 1993, and it was as distinct from our first meeting as could be.
Driving to San Diego that morning, I took a curve in the highway too fast and spilled hot coffee all over myself. I stripped to my underwear and tried to dry my clothes out with the air-conditioning, then raced to a shopping mall to buy a new shirt and a new pair of shorts and make it to the boat on time.
When I arrived, I was immediately struck by a change in the air. Jerry arrived to meet me at the marina gate in the company of a young deckhand and, for the only time in our two meetings and ten or so phone calls, used the Idiot voice: “It’s Shawn Levy, and he’s getting dangerously close to me!”
That was a strange way to say hello, I thought. Then he added, “I’ve got a lot to do today so I wanna get you out of my hair.” Although I was the Golden Biographer and had flown a thousand miles, I was now officially a nuisance.
We began our talk pretty quickly (I hadn’t brought a gift). We spoke generally about anti-Semitism—he showed me the charm he’d designed for his necklace: a cross and a Star of David combined—and then we got into specific questions.
I had used up a lot of my softball questions last visit, and I’d decided to speak more directly with him and ask him about specific predecessors whose work his act resembled, about the split of Martin and Lewis, about Abbey Greshler, Hal Wallis, the Arthur Marx book, his inactivity in the 1970s, The Day the Clown Cried. It was a risk, I knew, but in broaching these subjects, I would give him a chance to define our relationship once and for all: Were we going to be honest collaborators, or was I just a bright youngster who’d be told and allowed to say only good things?
I got my answer quick enough. I used the word “spastic” to characterize his onstage body language.* It provoked the first outburst of the morning: “The word ‘spastic’ is terrible. Some fucking writer who didn’t take the time to watch the work titled my work.” Okay.
I asked about the comics who’d charged that Jerry had borrowed bits from them. One in particular, Catskills stand-up Gene Baylos, drew a lengthy, hostile response. “He’s the biggest joke in show business. His name is a joke. Gene Baylos had every chance to be a big comic if he would’ve used his head, but he didn’t. I wouldn’t take anything from Gene Baylos. Unless I was in biology class. No unkindness meant.”
Fortunately, this discussion led us into a discussion of comic styles, the sort of generic Grand Old Man of Comedy topic that he loved to talk about. And that led us to a discussion of the mechanics of mounting the telethon, and of other sorts of MDA business that he oversaw. For a long time, we spoke placidly.
And then I asked about Dean. At first he talked in familiar terms about how the partnership was “a love affair” and about specific things they did in the act that the critics and audience never caught on to: the difference in the thickness of their heels, the way they subtly shifted into acting as each other’s straight man.
He became more somber as talk of Martin and Lewis wore on, and he got up to get himself a beer—at about eleven o’clock in the morning.
In the next minutes, he spoke bitterly about Hal Wallis, he described the painful experience of making Hollywood or Bust, he talked about the psychic toll of the feud between him and Dean, about the trouble he’d had at home with Patti as a result of his struggles with his partner, about the trauma of finally separating himself from Dean and heading out on his own.
In ways, it was a remarkably frank talk. “If you sat with Dean, you’d never have this discussion because he was never really that within,” he said. But it seemed to drive him deeper and deeper into the funk he’d been in ever since I arrived. “Let’s talk about something else,” he said. “I’m starting to get depressed.”
I can’t say that I was conscious of the decision, but I must have known by the tenor of the discussion that we wouldn’t be talking at this sort of depth very much more, if ever. I told him I wanted to discuss the demise of Martin and Lewis just a bit more.
He didn’t like it. “What do you wanna do, a Kitty Kelley book? Just be careful, ’cause I’ll come after you. I still have a picture of your letter to me, what brought us together. I respected what you put in your letter. You better just be that.”
Satisfied at having delivered this warning, though, he answered my next question, but it wasn’t long before he wanted me to know exactly what he thought of my kind. Reflecting on contemporary accounts of his split with Dean, he suddenly launched a tirade against reporters in general. “The press, of course, are cunts, like they’ve always been and they always will be. They’re getting worse. They’re not getting better, they’re getting worse. They’re just absolutely fucking scum.”
He had a specific instance in mind. “I just did a fourteen-page layout for Vanity Fair and I have the worst hunch in my life, I have the worst hunch. I took her into my home, took her here on my boat, had her at my child’s birthday. I mean, we really did an in-depth piece for Vanity Fair, and now I’m starting to get some vibes. I have a feeling I’m gonna get fucking shot down. And it’s not like they got a virgin, but my instinct is too fucking good. I just fell in love with this dame. She’s a very heavy nice wonderful lady, a good journalist. Something’s telling me I’m in for it. I have no idea why I feel that. Nothing has happened. Haven’t heard from her. She’s well and happy with her husband and her children and she’s a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. I did the photographs. We did a great layout with my daughter and my wife and did all the things you do for a big layout. Yesterday, I got up and I said to Sam, ‘I have a feeling that I’m gonna get fucked. Royally. But not easy. I have a feeling I’m really gonna get zetzed.’ She says, ‘Oh, my God.’ Because she knows when I get that instinct it’s usually right. We finished it like six, eight weeks ago. Something told me yesterday morning. It just hit me like that. Why do I feel this? I’m just hoping I’m wrong.”*
He had a pet theory about why the press had such an ambivalent relationship with him: “See, they will pursue anything that will smell or that they can infer smells. They’ve been that way all their lives. That’s why I have such a wonderful feeling about the press. I use them like they use me. I want their space. And I want it before the telethon. If that’s my contribution to my kids, that’s my business. But to think for one minute that they’re noble or that they have any integrity or morality … you’re a fool to think that. And I give of myself totally. I spew out my emotions. Nobody gives interviews like I give. ’Cause I have nothing to hide. I just pour out. But some of the shit that I pour out, if it’s misconstrued or it’s written poorly, it sounds strange. Well, that’s the chance you take in our business.”
But he was only prepared, he announced, to take such chances for so much longer. “One day I’m gonna do what Frank [Sinatra] did. One day. I’m just gonna say nobody, ever again, about anything, before anything, at any time, until I die. Which I’m getting very close to. Frank and I have talked about it a number of times. He said, ‘Listen, my life is better, my peace of mind is better, my stomach is better, and I’m a better person because of it. I feel self-esteem that I won’t let this scum into my life.’ And you can’t argue with it. You can’t. He said, ‘They get into my life in spite of what position I’ve taken, because when I appear somewhere they’re in my life. But they can’t come close to me. They can be in my life from a fucking distance.’ He said, ‘And that’s what you should do if you wanna survive.’ I said, ‘I’ll do it, Frank, the day that I decide I don’t need them anymore, I’ll do it.’”
The tension as he launched into these attacks was palpable and sickening. The phone rang—someone calling about MDA business—and I was grateful for the chance to consult my notes and change the subject. Unfortunately, I had prepared to discuss only topics that weren’t likely to dispel his ugly mood.
After a few more questions, and feeling like the air was draining from the cabin, I turned the conversation to The Day the Clown Cried and the period of inactivity that followed the dissolution of the incomplete project. How did it feel, I asked, to be left without something significant to work on?
“What do you think? What do you think?”
He was shouting.
“How can you ask a question like that?” He pointed to my tape recorder on the coffee table. “You should hear what you just asked me. You’re an insensitive prick, you know that? What the hell is wrong with you? What sort of sick childhood did you have, or what’s missing in your life that you can sit there and ask me things like that?”
I was absolutely stunned to be hearing this sort of thing. I knew that he was in a twisted mood from the time I’d arrived, and the conversation of the preceding hour had been extremely uncomfortable for me, but until this moment I thought we’d been speaking as grown men with a common interest and purpose.
I was apparently alone in that impression.
“I had a sense of this the last time we spoke,” he continued, “but I didn’t say anything because I figured, ‘He’s young.’ But you need to hear this. Frank Tashlin once gave me a talking-to like this, and I learned from it. We could’ve done good work together, but now you’re just gonna get bits and pieces and it won’t be any good.”
I did the only thing I could do. I listened, red-eared, and tried to keep looking him in the face, and then, when he’d petered out, I apologized, saying that if I’d in any way stepped beyond the bounds of decency I was truly sorry. Groping for a way to explain any impropriety, I said that perhaps my hours of isolated research on him had numbed me, that I was perhaps guilty of seeing him more as a subject than as a person, that I never meant to offend him with my questions.
He took this as an occasion for a second salvo, misconstruing what I’d said as a confession that I was awed to be in his presence and suggesting that I ought to choose another line of work if I found myself overwhelmed by “a hero.”
The tape recorder had clicked audibly to a stop during my apology, and I had to resist the impulse to throw a new tape in it. In part, I was honestly afraid he would have restrained me or resorted to some other physical means of bringing the conversation to an end.
I apologized again—I can’t even recall what I said—and he launched into a third assault, which I’ve also repressed (there was something about my book’s being “buried in the cinema section at Waldenbooks”).
Finally, he seemed to accept my apologies, saying something like “If you tell me that’s what you meant, then I believe you, and I believe you’re sorry.”
Before I realized what was happening, he grabbed my tape recorder: “I’ve never talked to anyone like that before, and I have to have this.”
“That’s mine,” I said, “and it’s got an hour and a half of my work on it.”
“I’m just going to erase that part of it,” he replied, “and I’ll send it back to you.”
I could have taken the tape from him, but I was shell-shocked. I chose to take him at his word and give him a chance to erase his outburst (which I wrote down on paper immediately after we parted).
I then stood up, told him I was leaving, and gathered the rest of my things. He said we’d talk again, he shook my hand, and he had the young deckhand walk me to the gate.
For the next few weeks, I absolutely could not work; indeed, I could barely sleep. The thought of spending another year or so researching and writing about Jerry Lewis positively shook me with nausea. The tape arrived in the mail—with no note attached—and was uncorrupted save for the sudden silence after my final question. I called his Las Vegas office to leave the message that I’d received it.
About a month later, Jerry wrote to me. An “Author’s Query” I’d sent to The New York Times Book Review—a month or so before I’d ever written Jerry—had finally appeared in print. Jerry, obviously not familiar with the format of these open requests for interviews, reminiscences, letters or photos, declared it, “highly unusual to say the least.” I called him up, still holding on to the illusion that we were going to continue speaking to one another, to assure him that such queries were a standard practice. He shrugged it off.
Finally, in mid-August, I sent him a fax requesting the opportunity to attend the telethon. He called the next day, telling me that there was “a problem with the ticketing” and he didn’t know what he could do. Besides, he said, he’d be too busy to talk with me. I didn’t want to take any of his time, I assured him; I just wanted to observe the telethon as a fly on the wall, as it were. He said he’d see if that was possible and that he’d get back to me.
Not twenty minutes later, the phone rang again. It was Jerry calling to say that he hadn’t been honest with me and that he “didn’t want [me] there,” that he was only interested in “surrounding [himself] with people that supported [him].”
I told him I wasn’t antagonistic to him or his work and that I was truly puzzled as to how he got such a negative impression of me.
“I’m not your therapist,” he snarled.
Fine.
“Good luck with the telethon,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
And that, I figured, was that.
A few months later, there was a strange denouement to it all. In December 1993 I wrote a letter to Patti Lewis after reading her book, requesting an interview and letting her know that I had spoken with Jerry and that he had chosen not to participate in my research. I didn’t hear back from her.
The following January, I was visiting Los Angeles and woke up at five-thirty in the morning, shaken from my sleep by the Northridge earthquake. My host’s home was far enough from the epicenter that we still had power, and I spent the early morning watching TV accounts of the disaster. I called my wife when I knew she’d be awake and told her what had happened. About an hour later, she called back.
“Someone just called here looking for you, and I think it was Jerry Lewis, but he hung up without leaving a message.”
It didn’t make any sense to me. I was speaking to a lot of old friends and acquaintances of his in Los Angeles, but I had been doing as much all along, and I’d always taken care to let people know that Jerry knew about the project and wasn’t involved with it.*
The next day, it all became clear. He had followed his call to my house with a call to my editor at St. Martin’s. Patti had sent the letter I’d written her, and he was calling to denounce me and my work. I was “doing a National Enquirer job,” he said, and I “needed a personality transplant.” He didn’t care if I spoke to Patti, he said, but he wanted St. Martin’s to know what they were getting into by working with me.
My editor assured Jerry that he’d seen several hundred pages of the manuscript and that the writing was respectful and fair. Jerry seemed calmed by this and by the editor’s respectful tone, but before he ended his call there was a warning: “The ball’s in your court now, I can’t do anything until the book comes out, and when it is [out], I’ll take whatever action is necessary.”
And that really was that.
Jerry went on to make his so-called rapprochement with the press during the season of Damn Yankees.
And I went on to write this book—conscious that many of the awful things I heard about him were true.
It was an extremely difficult task, as each day of work revived in my mind the hostility I’d encountered on that boat in San Diego. But, ironically, I think Jerry and I were both well served by his outburst and subsequent rejection of me and my work.
He was able to avoid what I’m sure he now takes to be a gross betrayal and distortion.
And I was able to write the most truthful account of his life that I could.