Jerry Lewis & Dean Martin: O brother, where art thou?
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O brother, where art thou?
They met as nobodies, became best friends and superstars, but ended up
refusing to speak to each other. Now, in a new book, Jerry Lewis has come
clean about his relationship with Dean Martin. Shawn Levy unpicks the story
Shawn Levy
Friday October 21, 2005
Guardian Unlimited
I am not a superstitious sort. I don't carry rabbits' feet or tap wood or
read a horoscope or even pray. And yet I have a patron saint, albeit one not
canonised by Rome: Dean Martin, or, as I like to think of him, St Dean of
the Whatever. Dean Martin was impeccable and remote, from the top of his
brilliantined curls to the muddy spikes of his golf shoes; from his
exquisite comic timing to the butterscotch fluidity of his voice; from the
droll irony with which he observed life to the passionate heat he inspired
in others.
And the best part of it is that he didn't care. Dean was, as his brilliant
biographer Nick Tosches so appositely dubbed him, the ultimate
menefregista - an "I-don'tgive-a-damn-ist". His indifference is why I
consider him my good luck charm. I have written four books of non-fiction in
the past decade, and Dean has put his imprint of taciturn cool on all of
them, most crucially in King of Comedy, a biography of Jerry Lewis, in which
Dean co-stars as the charismatic big brother figure with whom Jerry spends a
crucial decade in one of the most popular comedy acts in entertainment
history.
Dean was Jerry's hero, ideal, model, chum and chaperone. Jerry was nobody
until he met Dean - and, to be fair, vice versa. Coming from literally
nowhere, the pair rode a skyrocketing 10-year career that made them staples
of American showbiz for the rest of their lives.
They met when they were just two guys scuffling for a break in Times Square,
and they helped forge a new brand of popular entertainment suited to the
postwar mood. By the time of their parting, they were superstars with a
chasm of cold space between them. And then, as if paying a price for their
success, they avoided each other assiduously and spoke perhaps two or three
dozen times over the next four decades - and this after being so inseparable
that people whispered about them.
Yet for all this latter bitterness, Jerry to this day professes an undying
love for his former partner. Dean passed away a decade ago while the rest of
the world was having Christmas supper, and Jerry is marking the
anniversarywith the release of a memoir, Dean and Me: A Love Story. It
contains revelations and confessions of mobsters and women and golf matches
and drunken sprees, and it seems Dean has grown as a comedian and a man in
his former partner's eyes since his death.
For much of the new material, we have only Jerry's word, which can be a
wobbly foundation upon which to rest a nonfictional narrative. Jerry's
memory, while impressive, is often shaped by sentimentality and vainglory
and his purpose of the moment. Dean would never have written a memoir - his
idea of serious reading was a couple of comic books.
Certain things, however, are beyond dispute. In July, 1946, a 19-year-old
comic pantomimist born Jerome Levitch and a 29-year-old Italian crooner born
Dino Crocetti, who had a slight previous acquaintance based on common
friends and a couple of shared bookings, teamed up as a singing comedy act
at the 500 Club on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.
The act came together because Jerry had been bombing on his own and begged
Dean's manager to send the singer down from New York to save his skin. Jerry
was performing a "dummy" or "record" act; he would bring a Victrola out on
stage with him and comically lip-synch and distort himself while various
records played. The sheer elasticity and abandon of the young comic put the
thing over, but you couldn't imagine a lifetime of it - and more
importantly, the gangsters who ran the 500 Club didn't think it was funny.
During the previous winter, Jerry had been on the bill with Dean at a
Manhattan night spot and the two had turned the final show of the evening
into a pastiche, with Jerry antically interrupting songs that, to be fair,
Dean wasn't exactly killing himself to deliver straight. So when he was
threatened with losing his Atlantic City gig, Jerry recollected Dean and
those hijinks and rang him. He came, they threw together an act, and within
days they were a smash hit.
To look at them, they hardly made a natural pair: Dean with his leonine
beauty and slow, assured touch with a song or a joke; Jerry gaunt and gangly
and hysterical and screeching like a klaxon horn. And off stage they were
equally ill-matched. Jerry was Dean's temperamental opposite - needy and
loud and insecure. And yet this marriage of contrasts made for delicious
entertainment.
Their show was a deliberate shambles. Jerry might do a little of his record
act, pretending to be an MC, then introduce Dean, who would start to sing
while Jerry repeatedly interrupted. It was loosely scripted - Dean was, as
Jerry always says, "funny in his bones" and could ad-lib perhaps even better
than his comedian partner. But the main impression was a kind of
Hellzapoppin' breakdown of the normal parameters of nightclub entertainment.
Within weeks of that first recordbreaking gig in Atlantic City, the two were
playing at New York's Copacabana club to a glittering audience of movie
stars, mafiosi and swells. Almost immediately they were signed to make
movies and given their own radio and TV shows, and Dean got a recording
contract. Barely one year later, My Friend Irma, the first of their 16 films
together, was released to smash box-office. The following year, they joined
TV's Colgate Comedy Hour as monthly hosts, regularly beating the powerhouse
Ed Sullivan show in the ratings. Their live shows created sensations on a
Beatlemania scale.
But as they rose, they lost some of their éclatamong the cognoscenti. During
their initial ascent, Orson Welles declared that they were so funny "you
would piss your pants". But before long, first at the instigation of
producer Hal Wallis and then following Jerry's instinct for the box-office,
they geared their work toward a family audience. Jerry became a favourite of
kids while Dean's role as a serious singer was shunted off to their stage
appearances.
Ever the control freak, Jerry had another important bit of input to the
team's image, one that cemented the world's impressions of both men. Each
stood about 6ft 1in, but Jerry added lifts to Dean's shoes and had the soles
and heels of his own shaved so that Dean appeared taller; on top of that,
Jerry always worked in a crouch, so that the Monkey, as he referred to
himself, never seemed equal to Dean's Handsome Man.
There was an unusual physical intimacy to their act - Dean would lift Jerry
in his arms like a big baby, they would pat one another's cheeks, they
nearly kissed on camera at times, staring into each other's eyes with big,
sincere grins (try to imagine the same of Laurel and Hardy or Morecambe and
Wise). There was a strange hint of something like sexuality between them:
twice the pair remade classic romantic comedies as buddy movies, with Jerry
appearing in what had been the female lead role (Living It Up, originally
Nothing Sacred, and You're Never Too Young, originally The Major and the
Minor). Another time, in The Caddy, Jerry wore an apron and unironically
scolded Dean like a housewife for missing dinner while playing around with
some floozy. This sort of subtext fed ludicrous backstage rumours that Dean
and Jerry were lovers, a rumour that nevertheless persists in modern skin -
witness Rupert Holmes' novel Where the Truth Lies, now a film by Atom
Egoyan, in which a Dean-and-Jerry-like pair engage in an ambi-sexual menage
a trois with fateful consequences.
Eventually, the two simply outgrew one another. For the last three years of
their partnership, Jerry's almost visceral need to control the act
conflicted with Dean's characteristic lassitude. More and more often,
writers and directors of Jerry's choosing were shaping their material, while
Dean's parts shrank
Dean, who had been a blackjack dealer and a boxer before hitting on singing
as a career, wasn't blind to Jerry's machinations, and he dismissed his
partner's ambitions to comic genius as "Chaplin shit". But he had people
whispering earnestly in his ear that Jerry was holding him back from greater
things, and Jerry had sycophants giving him similar advice. They fought
openly on film sets and privately behind the scenes. They tried to split as
early as 1954 but were bound to their contracts by their film and television
masters. Finally, they separated for good precisely on the 10th anniversary
of their 500 Club debut, playing a farewell show at the Copacabana.
In the subsequent years, they literally didn't speak. Once or twice they
collided on the back lot at Paramount or in some Vegas green room. But often
they deliberately ducked one another. In 1960, when Dean went off Rat
Pack-ing, Jerry was persona non grata, and it's a sign of his hurt and
resentment that he responded to the Rat Pack's Las Vegas shoot of Ocean's
Eleven by going to Miami and making a resort hotel movie of his own, The
Bellboy. By 1970, Jerry's career had spun out of control in a haze of drug
addiction and the changing fashions in comedy, but Dean was a bigger star
than ever, with a smash hit weekly TV series and a film and recording career
to rival Frank Sinatra's.
In 1976, Sinatra tried to mend fences between the estranged partners,
surprising Jerry during his annual muscular dystrophy telethon by bringing
Dean out from the wings. It was a truly spontaneous and emotional reunion -
the two stood patting each other and smiling through tears as though a loved
one had returned from the dead. But despite Jerry's entreaties after the
show, Dean never rejoined him on stage or even for mere social interaction.
Finally, in 1987, when Dean's golden son, Dean Paul Martin, died in a plane
crash, Jerry reached out to him, instigating, at least by Jerry's account, a
sporadic telephone relationship.
It's a great story, a showbiz epic of brothers who find and then lose one
another. And in its heroic dimension it stands in stark contrast to the
actual record Dean and Jerry leave behind - even the best of their film work
is formulaic and lazy, and their TV appearances only hint at the brilliance
that endeared them to a nation. Nothing can compete with the truth of what
the two achieved and what they felt for one another during and after it.
Factual accuracy aside, Jerry is no doubt being emotionally honest in Dean
and Me. In giving us more insight into this amazing, unlikely marriage - and
how could he not? - he metes out showbiz gold.