Dean and Me: A Love Story (20 page)

Until that night.

The joint is loaded with the cream of Atlantic City, all those people who have heard about Martin and Lewis but wouldn’t go to Missouri Avenue to see them. This is an audience that waits until you come to them, and nothing has changed over all the years. The venue doesn’t matter; these people lurk around show business because it’s the thing to do. Not to enjoy themselves, but to see and be seen. It’s like owning a twenty-carat diamond ring and hating the weight of it, but loving people to look.

Well, we had them all that night. They’re so stiff, they have to be propped up in their seats. The average age is deceased.... (That’s where the joke comes from—either the Turf Club or West Palm Beach, take your pick.)

Dean and I have no idea what has hit us. All you hear is a cricket when there should be applause. Dean sings his little heart out, and they talk through his songs. They watch me a little because I remind them of their grandkids, but they hardly laugh. For about an hour and a quarter we struggle. This isn’t worth twenty-five thousand, let alone twenty-five hundred.

As we’re sitting in our dressing room after the first show, a lightbulb goes on over my head. “There’s nothing in our agreement that stipulates how much time we do,” the Jew tells the Italian. “Let’s get even, and they’ll never know the difference.”

We go out there, Dean does two songs, I start our bits rolling back and forth, and before you know it—we’ve been on about thirty-five minutes—we close the show with a song and get off.

And the audience is ecstatic, because they’re so old, they can’t wait to go home and go to sleep. And the big boys are even happier, because while the show is on, nobody gambles!

The saddest thing in life is that the good times, no matter how good and no matter how long they last, always come to an end. And so my thoughts return to the winter of 1955–56, when Dean and I shot
Pardners
, in Phoenix, where the weather was almost as miserable as our relationship.

Silence. Coldness. And the worst thing for me: dishonesty. When things were good with my partner, what we had was Truth. When we were clicking on all cylinders, the joy and the wildness—the very things that really got to people—came straight from our hearts. People knew it and could feel it, which sent them to our movies—where, even in the best of conditions, the joy and wildness got freeze-dried. Between the script, makeup, setups, lighting, and multiple takes, the spontaneity (which was the essence of our work) tended to wither.

In the worst of conditions—like Phoenix in the winter of ’55–’56— not only was the spontaneity missing, so was any semblance of fun or joy. Both Dean and I had become cynical and tough. Unpleasant to be around. Unpleasant even to ourselves. My memories of shooting
Pardners
are of a seemingly endless parade of cold and rainy days, only occasionally relieved by the sun that allowed us to shoot. And then of doing my best to make funny faces under my ten-gallon hat. When I’d catch my partner’s eye—or try to—he would be staring over my shoulder.

The best thing about
Pardners
, for Dean, was—after having been in love with Westerns all his life—he was actually starring in one. If he could have known then that in only four years he’d be making
Rio Bravo
with John Wayne, he would have been in heaven.

The best thing for me was learning, from a man named Arvo Ojala, to quick-draw and twirl a pistol, two skills I would eventually develop to world-class levels. (In fact, I don’t mind telling you that I was the fastest draw in Hollywood—no small distinction when you’re talking about the likes of Clint Eastwood, Jim Arness, and Duke Wayne. And the second fastest was... are you ready? Sammy Davis Jr.)

The hardest thing about the picture was the crushing irony of Dean and me singing the film’s title number, written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn:

You and me, we’ll always be pardners,

You and me, we’ll always be friends....

But there was worse to come. Despite Jack Keller’s best efforts, and those of the Paramount publicity department, rumors still abounded that Martin and Lewis were about to break up. And so the studio prevailed upon us to slap on a little coda, after “THE END” came up on the screen. I yelled, “We’re not ready for ‘The End’ yet!” Then Dean and I drew our pistols and fired, shattering each letter as if it were glass. When we were done, we stepped out of character and spoke directly to the audience.

Dean and me and two
Star Search
losers.

“We have something to say to you, right, Dean?” I said.

“We sure do, Jer. We want you folks to know we sure enjoyed workin’ for ya, and we hope you enjoyed the picture.”

“Yeah, and we hope you’ll keep coming to see us, because we like seeing you.”

I’ve often wondered how movie audiences reacted to seeing that little epilogue on the day
Pardners
was released: July 25, 1956, the day after Martin and Lewis broke up.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

IN THE MID-FIFTIES, DON MCGUIRE, WHO’D WRITTEN THE screenplay for
Three Ring Circus
, told me the legend of Damon and Pythias, friends so close that when Pythias was sentenced to death, Damon was willing to pledge his life as bail. That story fascinated me, reminding me of my friendship with Dean at the height of our partnership.

I asked Don to write a screenplay based on the legend, and he came up with what I thought was a terrific story: I would play a not-too-bright street kid named Sidney Pythias who gets mistaken for a criminal, and Dean would play Mike Damon, a cop who befriends and protects Sidney.

But when Dean saw the script, he was furious. “Are you saying that I play a cop in this thing?”

“That’s right,” I told him.

“In a uniform?”

“Of course.”

“No,” he said. “All my life, I ran from cops who wore those goddamn uniforms. I won’t play one. That’s low class to me.”

I think Dean somehow feared that everyone in Steubenville would feel betrayed if he played a cop. But by now, I couldn’t see beyond my exasperation. “Then we’ll have to get somebody else,” I said.

“Start looking.”

That was the last straw. Both Dean and I had built up such backlogs of fury that, short of going to see a couples counselor—something not too many comedy teams would have thought about in 1956—we had no recourse but to vent at each other.

Which meant we had no recourse.

Dean, as we know, didn’t vent. As for me, my partner loomed so large in my psyche that the idea of giving him both barrels was simply unthinkable.

Others around us got the brunt of our anger.

The two of us had remained civil during the shooting of
Pardners
, but mainly because that picture was for York Productions, our own company. Now we were about to start work on our sixteenth film,
Hollywood
or Bust
, with Hal Wallis producing (and Frank Tashlin directing), and neither one of us was about to treat Wallis or his movie with kid gloves.

I was (by far) the worse offender. Dean’s modus operandi was distance. Me, I’d stick around and get right in people’s faces. Especially if they were people I could push around. It’s not a pretty thing to admit, but I was a bully in those days. And on the shoot of
Hollywood or Bust
, I’ll be the first one to tell you, I was officially off the rails.

My emotions were all over the place: One minute I’d be mad as hell at my partner, the next I’d be hoping against hope for a reconciliation. The result was that I paid almost no attention to what I was doing. I barely bothered to learn my lines. I came up with unfunny ad libs that threw off the rhythm and the schedule of the shoot. After every take, I’d pace around the set grumbling, “That scene is shit”—when I was the one who had messed it up. I constantly picked fights: with Wallis, with most of the cast and crew.

Except Dean.

I see now that he was the one I was really trying to get to, but Dean was not about to let anyone, even me—especially me—get to him.

And (of course) the cooler he acted, the madder it made me.

I had one brief scene with Slapsy Maxie Rosenbloom, the former prizefighter and Hollywood character who had given his name to the L.A. nightclub. The scene should have taken half a morning; I made it last three days, hitting Wallis where it hurt him most: the checkbook. I sprinkled obscenities into every take; I made fun of Maxie for being punch-drunk. He had the good grace not to put my lights out.

But the person who took most of the heat from me was poor Frank Tashlin. I was doing my level best to make Wallis’s life miserable, but he didn’t have to be on the set every day. Tish did. For six weeks I gave him crap, challenging his directions like a surly adolescent. Astonishingly, Frank took it all in stride. It was everyone else on the production who got upset. And after a while, it didn’t matter that Tish could stay cool. His cast and crew were suffering, and that meant Frank had a big problem on his hands. Control is always the issue with a director. Once he loses it, his production is in trouble.

One afternoon, Frank reached his limit. I was starting to disagree, loudly, about a scene we were about to shoot, when he stopped the production. He called the crew around, then pointed his finger at me.

“I want you off the set,” he said.

“You what?”

“I mean it, Jerry. Off! You’re a discourteous, obnoxious prick—an embarrassment to me and a disgrace to the profession.”

Everybody on that sound stage was staring at me. I blushed to the roots of my hair. “Hey, Tish, whoa—calm down. When did you get the right—”

“Jerry, as director of this picture, I order you to leave. Go. Get your ass out of here and don’t come back.”

That walk off the set and out to my car was the longest of my life. I drove home in a daze, lay on a couch in my den for hours, staring at the ceiling, wet-cheeked with self-pity, trying to figure out how I’d gotten myself into this mess.

That night I called Tish at home. He wouldn’t come to the phone. I kept calling back. At last he picked up. “Yes, what is it?”

“Tish, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I was wrong. All I ask is, please, let me come back.”

He thought about it for a moment. “Will you behave?”

I gave him my solemn promise that I would.

“Okay,” he said. “Report to work in the morning. The shoot is at seven o’clock.”

“I’ll be there at six. And Tish... thanks.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know, maybe for saving my life.”

I behaved. I did whatever Tish told me. The set calmed down, and the cast and crew stopped looking miserable. What didn’t change was the relationship between Dean and me. It had ended. Outside of the lines we spoke to each other in the script, we weren’t talking at all. Just try doing comedy with someone when you’re not on speaking terms. As the two of us passed each other on the sound stage, or on the way to our cars after work, our eyes never met. Oh, we were cool. Tough and manly.

For Dean, this was business as usual. Whatever mixed feelings he had for me, his habit of not letting his emotions show—even to himself—kept him from feeling his own pain, which I have to believe was on a level with my own.

And while I don’t want to glorify my own anguish, I really was suffering. My partner’s aloofness (and the effort of pretending to be cool, myself) hurt so much it affected me physically.

On Friday night, May 18, I was toastmaster at a Screen Actors Guild dinner for Jean Hersholt, the actor turned humanitarian, who was dying of cancer. Between the gravity of the occasion and the stress in my own life, I was able to strike the right note. The dinner badly needed laughs— and not from the Idiot, but the thirty-year-old Jerry Lewis. I respected Mr. Hersholt, and the audience approved.

Afterward, as I walked out to my car, I was struck by a wave of intense nausea. I took a deep breath and it passed. Probably just the rubber roast beef I’d eaten.

But when I walked in the door, Patti looked alarmed. “What’s wrong? You’re as pale as a ghost.”

I shrugged it off, but all at once my legs turned to rubber. I sat down, breathing hard. My chest hurt like a son of a bitch.

“I’m calling Dr. Levy,” Patti said.

An ambulance took me to Mount Sinai Hospital, where my physician, Dr. Marvin Levy, ran a battery of tests and found that the heart attack he’d feared was in fact just an arrhythmia. Dr. Levy, who knew me—and what was going on in my life—very well, said that what I’d suffered was probably a reaction to all the fury I was holding inside.

He looked me in the eye. “I’m gonna write you a prescription,” he told me. “Do a single.”

The only sound under the oxygen tent was the hypnotic hiss of the life-giving pump. The tent itself was made of thin plastic, translucent but not transparent, and when I saw a shadow flicker across the surface, I knew someone had come into the room, but I had no idea who it was.

Could it be—the wild fantasy actually crossed my mind for a second—my partner?

The tent had a flap in it so the doctors could check my vital signs or the nurse could hand me a drink. Suddenly, the flap opened. It was my dad.

“Jerry, what happened to you?”

I was in a haze of painkillers. “Nothing,” I told him. “Getting a tan.”

He pushed his face in closer to mine. “Do you know what you’re doing to your mother?”

Ten days later, I was back at work, feeling like a different man. My frightening episode had made me realize that something simply had to change between Dean and me: We couldn’t go on this way. So one afternoon on the lot, I took a deep breath and walked right up to him.

“I’ve got to talk to you.”

“Talk.”

“You know, it’s a hell of a thing,” I said. “All I can think of is that what we do is not very important. Any two guys could have done it. But even the best of them wouldn’t have had what made us as big as we are.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Well, I think it’s the love that we had—that we still have—for each other.”

He half-closed his eyes, gazing downward for what felt like a long time. Then he looked me square in the face. “You can talk about love all you want,” Dean said. “To me, you’re nothing but a fucking dollar sign.”

Put it in context. He was as hurt as I was that the partnership was coming to an end. The writing was on the wall, the ink was dry. Martin and Lewis were going to be no more.

So Dean needed to lash out. He was furious because I couldn’t fix it, and at the same time, he didn’t
want
it fixed. People around him were saying, “Get on with it; you don’t
need
him; you’ll be better without him.”

And as hurt as I was—and believe me, Dean couldn’t have hurt me any worse if he’d kicked me in the nuts—I too needed to take my work somewhere new, and I had to go there by myself. Terrifying.

But at the time, all I knew was that my heart was broken.

On June 7, Dean had a party for his thirty-ninth birthday at L’Escoffier, a fancy restaurant on the eighth floor of the new Beverly Hilton hotel. Patti and I were not invited. On the fifteenth, Paramount held a preview of
Pardners
at a ranch north of Los Angeles: studio executives, publicity people, two hundred reporters, and me. No Dean. We waited and waited; finally, two hours late, he phoned in sick.

I’d like to tell you I suffered these injuries nobly, except it isn’t true. Yes, I was heartsick, but I was also enraged. I went to Lew Wasserman and told him I wanted to cancel all our contracts, to formally dissolve Martin and Lewis.

I knew Warner Brothers had asked Dean to star opposite Doris Day in the movie version of
The Pajama Game
. I wanted to go ahead solo, at Paramount, with the Damon and Pythias project.

Lew responded like the master agent he was: cautiously. Still speaking of Dean and me as a team, he said, “Here’s your potential for the next year and a half: eleven million—apiece.” I tuned out while he detailed movie, television, nightclub, and concert deals. Then there was a silence, and I tuned back in to see Lew staring at me through his big horn-rimmed glasses. “Good heavens, Jerry, compromise. What in the world is perfect?”

But I knew I couldn’t live with it, even though nothing is simple when a lot of people and money are involved. Y. Frank Freeman called Dean and me to a meeting at Paramount with Wallis and him. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Thank God for Mr. Freeman’s warmth and good manners. If he hadn’t been there, the three of us might have killed one another. Y. Frank told us that Paramount president Barney Balaban was ready to release us from our contract. Hal Wallis, on the other hand, was ready for no such thing.

Our agreement with Wallis stipulated that we work as a team no matter who was producing the picture, and he was adamant we abide by the contract. Y. Frank reasoned with him. “For heaven’s sake, Hal,” he said. “These boys both want to stretch their wings. Can you blame them?”

Amazingly, Wallis gave in—a little. He said he’d let us do one picture apart if we did three more for him as a team. If we wanted to get out of that, he told us, it would cost us. Big: a million and a half dollars, plus ten percent of the money we’d earned on our last two movies.

Meanwhile, our agents went to the suits at NBC, who also set our ransom high. They would sign with us as individuals rather than a team, but at $5 million a year rather than $7.5 million. We would then owe the network thirty-four TV specials over the next five years, seventeen from each of us as a solo act.

A solo act.
What on earth would that be?

With so many agents, lawyers, producers, and studio and network executives involved, it didn’t take long for the news to leak to the press. On June 18, it was formally announced: Martin and Lewis were over.

The following day, we wrapped
Hollywood or Bust
. It’s the single one of my movies that I’ve never seen, and never will.

Incredibly, we still had uncancellable obligations. We both had committed to attending the premiere of
Pardners
in Atlantic City at the end of June, and then, for old times’ sake (and for Skinny D’Amato, who was in financial trouble), we were going to put our feelings on hold and do ten nights at the 500 Club.

Imagine—ten nights in Atlantic City with a partner I wasn’t speaking to. Ten years after our shining beginning: same place, same time of year. Somehow we made it through those twenty shows, persuading the audiences to laugh without ever once exchanging a warm remark, a reminiscence—anything—when we were offstage. At one point, the
Today Show
interviewed us, live, at the Club. There’s a kinescope of that segment, and it’s painful to see: Dean and I can hardly bear to look at each other.

We stayed at the Ritz-Carlton. Naturally. Different suites, different floors. Naturally. I don’t recall ever giving a thought to the Princess Hotel, if it was even still in business at that point.

In early July, we did a twenty-one-hour muscular dystrophy telethon, broadcast from Carnegie Hall by a local New York TV station. It was our final television appearance together. More songs, dancing, comedy. More silence between us.