I have never been able to develop a façade to hide behind. My emotions function on a separate wire. I can stand toe to toe with two oxes and never know I’m hurt until I’m picked up bleeding. But if a guy doesn’t say good morning back, I can have a heart attack. I’m more than just a great movie star. I’m also a neurotic, temperamental imbecile.
—Jerry Lewis, 1963
For almost half a century, America has had more of Jerry Lewis than it has known what to do with. Indeed, it has had more Jerry Lewises than it has known what to do with.
His life has been a continuous parade of public and private faces; some the world has loved, while others have been almost universally loathed. The arc of his life and career—from live-wire life of the party to openly angry once-was—holds a dark fascination for anyone interested in America, our popular culture or the psychology of celebrity.
Few entertainers have shed so many skins in public as Jerry Lewis. The first was Jerry the Skinny Young Maniac, who bounced into the American consciousness in 1948 alongside the impeccably disengaged Dean Martin. Eight years later, after the shattering split of Martin and Lewis, emerged Jerry the Consummate Showman, singing Al Jolson songs and acting in sentimental films. With the early 1960s came Jerry the Total Filmmaker, a movie director who strove for the acclaim enjoyed by Charles Chaplin but found an attuned audience only in Europe. Presently, Jerry the Philanthropist was born, cajoling Americans into writing checks for muscular dystrophy research each Labor Day. Since the mid-1970s, a quixotically short-tempered Jerry the Elder Statesman has become familiar, barking out his belligerent claims to greatness in movies, TV shows, and magazine interviews.
And the cadences of this evolution echo our own history. No American entertainer embodied the fate of the nation since World War II more succinctly: the giddy surplus of the postwar years; the arrogant confidence of the Fifties; the incomprehensible unraveling of the Sixties and Seventies; and our subsequent struggle to reclaim a lost mantle and place blame for the downfall. It’s no coincidence that the most triumphant moment of Jerry’s career—the debut of his greatest film, the mounting of a national tour in support of it, and an unprecedented wave of expectation for an innovative new TV series—came just weeks before the death of John Kennedy. Soon after, along with the dissolution of the national consensus, came the marginalization of the Court Jester of Camelot.
Jerry’s reflection of the national soul has been his blessing and, in recent decades, his curse. More than any entertainer of his generation, he became a lightning rod for ridicule, the butt of quick laughs at the expense of charity telethons, French intellectuals, or physical comedy. The very thought of his voice, his comic style, or his movies provokes uncomfortable, snide laughter in many quarters.
Yet love it or hate it, Jerry’s best work is the product of a completely unique comic sensibility. A gifted mimic, he studied a curious mixture of estimable predecessors, from whose work he was able to glean various tropes. Jerry’s comedy evinces some of the Dadaist mania of Harpo Marx, the audience-beseeching brashness of Al Jolson, the gentle, fluent timing of Stan Laurel, the impish meekness of Charles Chaplin, the brassy childishness of Fanny Brice, and the grotesque mercuriality of the lamentably underrated Harry Ritz, whose goo-goo eyes, vocal gymnastics, and wild body language also informed much of Sid Caesar’s art.
Jerry’s gift, of course, was that he could allude to so many different comedic and performing styles while maintaining his air of organic ease. The young Jerry Lewis was a pyrotechnic wonder, a font of gibberish, voices, and caterwauls, a living Gumby doll, a bouncing Super Ball. He was so fast and natural that he made it look elementary, but it wasn’t: Today, the undeniably agile Jim Carrey wows audiences and scoops up $20 million per film with a pale imitation of Jerry, a demeaning act with no taste, no soul, no center. Even at its crassest—and it could be crass and enobling within minutes—Jerry’s comedy tried to be about the human spirit. It just happened to be the human spirit of a truly excitable boy.
It’s no wonder, then, that he’s among the most influential and imitated figures in the history of comedy. Many of the biggest comedy stars of the Seventies (Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, Andy Kaufman), Eighties (Martin Short, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Pee Wee Herman), and Nineties (Jim Carrey, Pauly Shore, Adam Sandler) can trace their comic roots directly back to the Jerry Lewis of the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. He single-handedly created a style of humor that was half anarchy, half excruciation. Even comics who never took a pratfall in their careers owe something to the self-deprecation Jerry introduced into American show business.
It’s easy to see why he was so influential. His career is absolutely unparalleled: He was one of the last, and probably the biggest, of the Borscht Belt comedians; one of the last performers to pass from the variety stage to film and television; half of the most popular two-man performing act of all time; the uncontested premier practitioner of physical comedy during most of his career; the first director who debuted in talkies to direct himself; the first Jewish comedian to direct himself; a technological innovator in the cinema; a Top Ten recording artist; the highest-paid performer in Hollywood; the highest-paid performer on network television—a catalog of feats he accomplished before turning forty. When he turned his attention to philanthropy after his entertaining career began to wane, he raised well over $1 billion. In the annals of show business, he bridges the gap in screen comedy between Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen, on television between Milton Berle on “Texaco Star Theater” and John Belushi on “Saturday Night Live,” on the stage between Al Jolson and Lenny Bruce. He met nine Presidents and performed for more than half of them. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. There is no other story remotely like it.
And yet, despite its uniqueness, Jerry’s career constitutes a cultural history of American show business. One of the last performers to pass through the closing doors of burlesque comedy and Borscht Belt showmanship, Jerry would always carry traces of those bygone forms in his art; indeed, Jerry’s entire career has been a version of Saturday night in a Catskills hotel, a series of variety acts strung together by an adrenalized emcee. But Jerry Lewis has never been a nostalgia-monger; his combination of slapstick comedy, traditional Jewish humor, and vaudeville brashness has always been startlingly modern. From the debut of Martin and Lewis, his was a groundbreaking act—tearing up stages and sets, breaking through the fourth wall of the TV and movie screens, skewering the conventions of show business even while dutifully emulating them.
In almost every medium at which he tried his hand—nightclubs, film, television, charity broadcasts—he has had a lasting impact. It can be put quite bluntly: American show business would simply not be the same today if Jerry Lewis had taken up another line of work.
In movies especially he was a pioneer. Many important stars of the late studio era produced some of their own works; but where John Wayne and Kirk Douglas (to name two) were only nominally producers, hiring other people to do the day-to-day work, Jerry ran his production company with obsessively minute control. Likewise, where actors such as Charles Laughton and James Cagney dilettantishly directed a film apiece in their ebbing years, Jerry started directing himself regularly in 1960, at the height of his career, reaching a position of artistic control that no one else in talking comedies had achieved besides Charles Chaplin (and that no other would until 1969, when Woody Allen took the director’s chair for Take the Money and Run only after learning that Jerry was unavailable).
As a director, Jerry filled his works with radical experiments in sound, editing, decor, cinematography, even plotting. His movies—with their spare, modernist sets, their brightly colored furnishings and wardrobes, their brassy swing scores, their purely cinematic jokes, their aural and physical impossibilities, their meditations on multiple personality and childhood pain—constitute as coherent a body of work as that of any comedy director in history. The plots of his films have become standards: It’s no exaggeration to say that almost every film comedian in his wake—from Peter Sellers to Whoopi Goldberg—has made a Jerry Lewis film.
He’s even had an ineradicable impact on the worlds of science and philanthropy. Before he took the cause of muscular dystrophy as his own and worked so feverishly to make the public aware of the ravages of neuromuscular disease, telethons were occasional amusements; no one had ever heard the words “poster child” or “Jerry’s kids.” In addition to making an ignorant world aware of the nature and scope of muscular dystrophy, he turned televised fund-raising into a universal practice and the show-biz telethon into a global cultural institution.
Of course, there is more to the Jerry Lewis story than a list of public accomplishments. It’s the story as well of a private man: the only child of small-time show people, a lonely kid who dropped out of school to follow his parents onto the stage, a lovesick teenager who proposed marriage to every girl he was sweet on, a puppy dog who convinced the heppest cat in New York to take him on as a partner, a young comic who made Hollywood his rumpus room, a budding businessman, an ambitious artist, a self-serving partner, a tyrannical boss, a mercurial husband and father, a sentimentalist, a bully, a guru, a boor. At times, this non-fictional person matches up with the various guises by which his public knew him. But just as often, the links between the man and the media image are fogged over or too repressed ever to come to light.
Jerry acknowledged all of the conflicts of his life—the gaps between Jester, Thinker, and Private Man. He, more than anyone, knew that behind the clown, the showman, the director, and the philanthropist stood another person altogether—the “real” Jerry Lewis. Always introspective, always open in discussing himself, a dabbler in psychology and an autodidact with a taste for aphorism, he relished the notion of presenting more than one persona to his public. In 1984, he posed for a photograph with half his face in clown makeup and the other half at rest in humorless stolidity; if this book attempts to decipher anything, it’s that imperceptible line where the mask ends and the man begins.
Though it’s sometimes hard to remember, if not believe, Jerry Lewis was the most profoundly creative comedian of his generation—and arguably one of the two or three most influential comedians born anywhere in this century. He once claimed to have been one of the ten most recognized people on the planet—and at moments during his life, that was true. Nearing his seventieth year, he made such a hit in a revival of Damn Yankees that he became the highest-paid actor in Broadway history, in a late-life resurgence even more miraculous than his initial ascension. As 1995 closed and he took Yankees on the road, he had become the Tony Bennett of physical comedy, a retro-chic act with plenty of miles left in it and a whole new audience to entertain. The only career like it in this American century, with its five-decade cycle of acmes, nadirs, rebirths, and reevaluations, is that of Richard Nixon.
Chronicling Jerry Lewis’s professional life reveals just how vital his contributions to the culture have been; detailing his private life reveals the roots of some of those contributions. But by looking simultaneously at his work, his life, and the strange, thrilling spaces in between, it’s also possible to contemplate the forces that drive anybody to love or hate or laugh or cry or work or suffer or scream—to see Jerry Lewis as a neglected linchpin in show business, yes, but to see him as a human being as well.