Post by Ajax on Oct 15, 2006 0:31:23 GMT -5
keHere are some articles I found through the databases at my university. They are discussing Jerry's book Dean and Me: A Love Story. Enjoy:
From: Independent on Sunday (London)
July 9, 2006 Sunday
First Edition
SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 28
LENGTH: 799 words
HEADLINE: MEMOIR: Upstaged by a gold-plated Zippo;
Dean & Me By Jerry Lewis & James Kaplan MACMILLAN pounds 17.99 pounds 16.50 (P&P
FREE) 08700 798 897
BYLINE: Tom Dewe Matthews
" Their partnership was based on the organ grinder and the monkey, the crooner
and the clown or, as a columnist put it, "Adonis and Stu-pidus out on the town."
In America, from the mid-Forties and up until the late Fifties, Dean Martin and
Jerry Lewis were the most successful double act, on stage, TV, film and radio.
Curiously, though, Jerry Lewis (the idiot part of the act) has never had much
appeal in this country. So maybe it's fortunate that, though this book is
written by Jerry Lewis, most of its pages are devoted to Martin. Because,
sentimental as it might seem, Lewis really does demonstrate an affection in
these pages for his partner. Certainly, the best parts of the book are when
Lewis lets his admiration take flight and we hear once more the eternally cool
Dino ride his songs with the air of a summer breeze. With hind-sight, though,
the nature of the partnership's appeal is difficult to understand. There are no
films or tapes of their nightclub act. Some idea of their popularity can be
intimated from TV shows recorded live in front of clamorous audiences during the
early Fifties. But Lewis's own memory of how their act broke through confirms
the belief that their humour would now be greeted by silence: "I lifted the
[piano] lid, then dropped it with a huge bang. I then proceeded to half-undress
the piano player." After one such "explosion of pandemonium", Lewis claims, "
Dean and I were not only the most successful act in show business history - we
were history."
Despite the hyperbole, it is irrefutable that in 1947 Martin and Lewis were
an instant sensation. Stars of the magnitude of Boga-rt, Gable, Fred Astaire and
Gary Cooper fought each other for ringside tables to see Dino wink at women and
"Jer" tip over waiters' trays. But why?
Somewhat vaguely, Lewis ascribes their success to the "X factor", that they
had a "deep feeling" for each other and that "deep down" their audiences
understood this. But the reticent author is probably closer to the truth when he
points to America's post-war paranoia during the red scares that consumed the
country throughout the Fifties. The sight of two men squirting water at each
other and making silly jokes released the tension, and no doubt was welcome for
that reason.
Where the book reaches beyond conventional Hollywood sentimentality is in
Lewis's astute reading of his partner and of how his comic craft played across
the stage to ensure that audiences stayed enthralled. Martin invariably appeared
to be a drunk or a buffoon, especially later on in his career when he joined
Sinatra's Rat Pack, but Lewis insists that in fact his partner "was as sharp as
a crap-house rat". To become impeccable in his timing, Dean always watched Lewis
's breathing and never once in 10 years did he step on a Lewis line or spoil a
joke. Today we think of Dean Martin as a style, the template for how "playboys"
were supposed to behave in the Fifties, and Lewis provides amusing glimpses of
Dino's Samurai-like insistence on keeping his cool. "You only have to tell me
once" was his favourite saying to film directors, while his favoured method of
learning lines was to have his caddie cue him on the golf course. Women, of
course, fell for a master of the "swoon-croon school" of singing, but Martin
took that for granted. He knew that in nightclubs it was the men at the tables
who were paying the checks so he directed his voice at them, and, according to
Lewis, men responded with the thought, "Maybe some of that'll rub off on me."
As the surviving member of the team -Martin died in 1995 - Lewis tends to
rewrite history in his favour. Mostly this is petty stuff: supposedly, for
example, Lewis invented their act, when, in fact, it was based on a combination
of past comedians' or he saved his partner from being being beaten up by a Mafia
hoodlum when other sources tell us that it was the other way round. More
seriously, Lewis soft-pedals their dealings with the Mob - and for a more
thorough as well as entertaining account of that connection no one has surpassed
Nick Tosches' biography, Dino. For fans of Lewis and Martin, however, this is an
adequate side dish, a lively memoir from an author who in the end has to
reconcile himself to being effortlessly upstaged by his partner. In a last
homage to his sidekick Lewis admits as much, back-tracking to 1947 when they
started out, Lewis had one of his "zany" ideas. Suddenly, in the middle of Dean
's rendition of "Pennies from Heaven", the lights at the Havana-Madrid night
club go out. Dino doesn't stop, however. He isn't fazed because he's already
figured out how to be seen as well as heard. He takes out his gold-plated Zippo,
flips the lid and holds the flame under his face. As Lewis would discover, Dean
Martin didn't need anybody else to create his spotlight."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2006 EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS
All Rights Reserved
The Express
June 2, 2006 Friday
U.K. 1st Edition
SECTION: NEWS; 20
LENGTH: 1725 words
HEADLINE: How jealousy tore apart Hollywood's zaniest double act;
COMEDY LEGEND JERRY LEWIS REVEALS FOR THE FIRST TIME THE BRUTAL TRUTH ABOUT HIS
BITTER SPLIT FROM DEAN MARTIN
BYLINE: by Jane Warren
BODY:
THE outside world wasn't aware of the gulf that had grown between Dean Martin
and Jerry Lewis but on July 24, 1956, they played their last show at a New York
club. "I thought my heart would break. As well as losing my partner I was losing
my best friend, " recalls Jerry Lewis, sadly.
He had idolised Dean Martin since he was a 19-year-old New Jersey kid trying
to make it as a comic. At the time Martin was a charismatic singer who was also
struggling to find a wider audience. They had become famous together as a double
act but a decade on, being a team no longer seemed to be working. "Could we do
anything without each other? Would the autograph hunters still want us? It felt
like being choked without hands on your throat, " Lewis says.
On their last night they raced through their routine but found themselves
hesitating before the last song in the act, Pardners. It was a bittersweet
moment. "The lyric goes, 'You and me, we'll always be pardners, you and me, we
'll always be friends, '" explains Lewis. "We got through it and closed the
book." They had had 10 great years together but, as Lewis reveals in his
painfully honest memoirs which are published next week, the relationship plunged
into acrimony. "It was a horrific time, " he reveals, saying the final 10 months
were full of "pain, anger, sorrow and uncertainty".
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had come out of the blue at a time when post-war
America was still a buttoned-up nation. Presidents wore hats. Ladies still wore
girdles. Nobody had seen the likes of them before: a straight guy and his
younger funny man, they were stage performers who worked with an audience. But
unlike Abbott and Costello, or Hope and Crosby, they exploded on stage without a
script. Audiences around the globe went wild.
The performers were on the road together 10 months out of the year and formed
an intense attachment. "We found out everything there was to know about each
other - secrets you wouldn't want to share with anyone, " says Lewis. "When Dean
was happy our work was better. The same with me. When either of us was sad the
work broke down a little bit - not always so the outside world could see but we
knew. But as long as Dean and I were laughing with each other we stuck like
glue." According to Lewis, Dean Martin was cool, relaxed and unflappable on the
outside but beneath this calm exterior lay a different man, with many chinks in
his armour.
He says Martin was a born gambler, who once fell in with a group of hustlers
who built themselves several upmarket homes, complete with swimming pools, with
the money they won from him while playing golf.
Hollywood rumour had it that he lost two or three million dollars in all.
"My partner's self-esteem was also a funny business, " says Lewis. "He should
have been the soul of confidence but you never knew when you might strike a
nerve. The problem was he was so good at covering up his vulnerabilities that
you might never realise he was hurt.
"Dean had the innate gift of 'in the bones' funny yet he never understood the
depth of his own skill. He was insecure about it; at the same time he was never
one to betray those insecurities. So he was stuck in a hard place - one that
became progressively harder as the press wrote about the comic brilliance of
'the funny one'." And that was how their reviews went. "The handsome one comes
out and sings pretty nicely, although he's no Bing Crosby. Then the kid comes
out and the act really catches fire." Time after time, Martin had to read those
words. Crosby was his first idol and he often felt he was walking in his shadow.
AND things got worse when Lewis and Martin began making movies together.
Lewis was always "the funniest thing in it".
Martin had to read about how he would be more at home on the screen with more
experience.
"The drumbeat was incessant, " says Lewis. "Although Dean had, in many ways,
made me into what I became he didn't have a speck of ego about it. He just
carried on like a champ." Over time, as they cranked out two or even three
movies a year, Lewis found himself becoming increasingly interested in the film
business and became more involved in the production side. Meanwhile, Martin
played golf. "That was our arrangement, " he remembers.
Still, while part of Martin wanted things that way, there seemed to be
another part of him that began to feel like a second fiddle.
"Was my ego growing? Was I knocked out by the unlimited comic possibilities
for my character on screen? Yes and yes, " admits Lewis.
"Since my partner hated any sort of showdown he wasn't calling me on it.
Yet. But others were beginning to tell him about it. People would still sidle
up to him, tell him how great he was.
At the same time I think Dean was starting to feel that he was ready to
stretch as an actor.
"Did I feel bad that Dean was overshadowed? Sure I did. But did I also feel
excited about what was happening? You bet your butt I did. Did I suck all of the
air out of the room?
Sometimes. I never claimed to be a shrinking violet. For 10 years, he gave me
the huge gift of his presence and he protected me. Maybe part of our problem, as
I got older and surer of myself, was that I needed his protection less." Then
they came to Britain and played the London Palladium. "It was a terrific show,
one of our best. Dean sang wonderfully and I thought I had never been funnier.
And then the boos began. They were ugly and assaulting.
What was going on?"
EVERY newspaper the next day carried a variation on the same huge, black
headline: Martin and Lewis booed at Palladium opening. Although it turned out
that it had been started by two Left-wing, antiAmerican students, and that most
of the dissent had been directed at the students' rudeness, Martin took it very
hard. Soon he was stoking headlines back in the US about not being up to dealing
with negative press.
"I began to worry that this could affect our ticket sales, " says Lewis.
"So I called Dean at home in LA and asked him to, please, let it go. He cut
me off. 'Listen, pal, I've just begun.' I'd never heard him like this.
"Next time I saw him the twinkle in his eye had dimmed. The months passed but
he always seemed on edge. If he heard someone had bought a coat made in England
he'd go off on a tirade. I'd have to work to settle him.
"More and more I learned that there were certain resentments that seethed
behind his cool facade. His tendency to bottle things up would come to hurt us
both but at the time I just kept wondering where all the anger was coming from."
In January 1954 the duo were shown the draft script for their next film. "I
worked with the scriptwriter to beef up Dean's character but there was no
getting around the fact that this was a movie called Three Ring Circus and I was
playing the clown, something I'd always wanted to do, " says Jerry.
Approaching 30, he wanted to grow as a comedian. Chaplin was his idol and he
wanted his character to tap into deeper emotions but Martin hated this actorly
conceit. "He kept losing his temper at me, saying he'd had it with playing a
stooge, " reveals Lewis.
He also started showing up late for work. "One morning, he gave me a look
that could kill and said, 'Any time you want to call it quits, just let me know.
' My partner was drifting away from me." As far as their millions of fans were
concerned, the duo were still at the top of their game. But over the next year
Martin let Lewis down badly on several occasions. He refused to attend the gala
premiere of their 13th movie, You're Never Too Young, even though it was being
hosted by rich friends of Lewis who had mentored and supported him at the start
of his career. Martin then gave a widelysyndicated newspaper interview in which
he spoke of wanting to strike out on his own. The pair's strife had gone public.
Because they had commitments worth tens of millions of dollars, they briefly
reconciled but shortly afterwards came a blow from which they were to never
recover when a letter arrived stating that they jointly owed $650,000 in unpaid
taxes.
"Because we were both running very high overheads - mansions, servants, cars,
staff - and neither of us had that kind of cash lying around, I went begging to
a studio executive, Y Frank Freeman, for help, " says Lewis. "He explained the
studio wasn't able to advance the money but that he would make me a personal
loan.
"Sixty days later I repaid the debt in full. A couple of weeks later he asked
Dean and I to help him out by appearing at a charity gala at Los Angeles's
Shrine Auditorium for his favoured charity. Absolutely, I told him, knowing that
Dean must agree to this after the colossal hole Mr Freeman had just dug us out
of.
'Hey, man, I told you. It's OK, ' said Dean when I checked with him."
ON THE afternoon of the performance Martin committed the ultimate betrayal by
failing to turn up. "When I asked him next morning What?! had happened he
just said, 'Nobody told me there was going to be a gala.' He was as cool as
could be. It was like having a limb amputated." Lewis says that it's hard to
explain to an internet-connected world what it felt like to be a big act in a
much simpler era, having very public trouble.
"Then imagine the commercial implications of a rift between Dean and me, " he
says.
The duo had deals worth millions of dollars. They had TV and radio contracts,
theatre bookings and commercial endorsements.
During the death throes of their relationship, Lewis told Martin that what
they were going through felt similar to the break-up of a love affair. Martin's
response chilled him. He remembers his partner closed his eyes, gazed downwards
for what felt like a long time and then looked him square in the face.
"You can talk about love all you want, " Martin said. "To me, you're nothing
but a f****** dollar sign." They shot their last two movies together under a
cloud. Desperate to salvage the situation, the studio producing Pardners
prevailed upon them to stick a little coda after The End came up on the screen.
"We're not ready for The End yet!" yelled Jerry Lewis.
"We want you folks to know we sure enjoyed working for ya " said Dean Martin.
"Yeah, and we hope you'll keep coming to see us because we like seeing you, "
added Lewis.
"I've often wondered how movie audiences reacted to seeing that little
epilogue, " says Lewis now.
Pardners was released on July 25, 1956, the day after Martin and Lewis broke
up.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Database: Academic Search Premier
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Dean & Me' really is a love story
Section: Life, Pg. 03d
Dean & Me: A Love Story By Jerry Lewis and James Kaplan Doubleday, 340 pp., $26.95 --- A showbiz act every bit as big as what Elvis Presley and The Beatles were later to become, the comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis dominated movies, TV and nightclubs for 10 years until they broke up acrimoniously in 1956. Until Martin's death on Christmas Day in 1995, the two reunited on stage only twice -- each time a brief, surprise walk-on by one as the other was performing.
Both of those ambushes were publicly joyous affairs between Martin, the Neapolitan singing straight man, and Lewis, the Jewish whirling dervish nine years his junior. Between those times, the two reconciled in periodic phone calls, forging an even stronger bond after Martin's son, Dean Jr., died while on Air National Guard maneuvers in 1987.
So, as a title for Lewis' long-awaited team remembrance, Dean & Me: A Love Story isn't misleading -- though the relationship had to overcome Martin's lifelong tendency toward emotional withdrawal.
Because Lewis was never associated with such restraint, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that his book is quietly funny, almost terse in its prose style (it's co-written with James Kaplan) and much shorter than earlier rumored.
The book fractures time by hopping back and forth between the '40s and '50s, sailing over some major career events (including many of the team's 16 movies).
But when Lewis has a story to tell, he lets it breathe.
One of the stories involves the team's 1946 folkloric debut at Atlantic City's 500 Club: a gargantuan dud in the first show and -- following Jerry's frenzied creation, from scratch, of "routines" on a greasy dressing room sandwich bag -- a smash in the second.
And that episode set the pattern: The team's supposedly loony half ran the act, even if, off-stage, the more life-experienced Martin once saved his partner from the wrath of a mobster to whom Lewis had gotten jokey. It's no surprise, given M&L's long nightclub tenure, that the Mob is ubiquitous here.
Lewis says he even paid two A-list songwriters -- secretly, and out of pocket -- $30,000 to write Martin a huge pop hit the singer needed (That's Amore), a need indicative of a problem. Though Martin later proved to be very funny on his own, the brilliant straight man lauded by Lewis could never stop moviegoers from rushing the popcorn stand whenever he broke into a ballad.
A major rift came when Look magazine cropped Martin out of a photo promoting the 1954 film Living It Up while the team was shooting 3 Ring Circus, a movie that already was giving Martin hardly anything to do. They got through their final film, Hollywood or Bust (which Lewis says he won't watch to this day), without speaking. Lewis is upfront about his contributing ego problems, calling himself a "bully" during this period.
Dean & Me may not tell us everything, but its love is abundant. It also is mellow, not mawkish -- the kind of look-back you write when, like Lewis, you're 79.
From: Independent on Sunday (London)
July 9, 2006 Sunday
First Edition
SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 28
LENGTH: 799 words
HEADLINE: MEMOIR: Upstaged by a gold-plated Zippo;
Dean & Me By Jerry Lewis & James Kaplan MACMILLAN pounds 17.99 pounds 16.50 (P&P
FREE) 08700 798 897
BYLINE: Tom Dewe Matthews
" Their partnership was based on the organ grinder and the monkey, the crooner
and the clown or, as a columnist put it, "Adonis and Stu-pidus out on the town."
In America, from the mid-Forties and up until the late Fifties, Dean Martin and
Jerry Lewis were the most successful double act, on stage, TV, film and radio.
Curiously, though, Jerry Lewis (the idiot part of the act) has never had much
appeal in this country. So maybe it's fortunate that, though this book is
written by Jerry Lewis, most of its pages are devoted to Martin. Because,
sentimental as it might seem, Lewis really does demonstrate an affection in
these pages for his partner. Certainly, the best parts of the book are when
Lewis lets his admiration take flight and we hear once more the eternally cool
Dino ride his songs with the air of a summer breeze. With hind-sight, though,
the nature of the partnership's appeal is difficult to understand. There are no
films or tapes of their nightclub act. Some idea of their popularity can be
intimated from TV shows recorded live in front of clamorous audiences during the
early Fifties. But Lewis's own memory of how their act broke through confirms
the belief that their humour would now be greeted by silence: "I lifted the
[piano] lid, then dropped it with a huge bang. I then proceeded to half-undress
the piano player." After one such "explosion of pandemonium", Lewis claims, "
Dean and I were not only the most successful act in show business history - we
were history."
Despite the hyperbole, it is irrefutable that in 1947 Martin and Lewis were
an instant sensation. Stars of the magnitude of Boga-rt, Gable, Fred Astaire and
Gary Cooper fought each other for ringside tables to see Dino wink at women and
"Jer" tip over waiters' trays. But why?
Somewhat vaguely, Lewis ascribes their success to the "X factor", that they
had a "deep feeling" for each other and that "deep down" their audiences
understood this. But the reticent author is probably closer to the truth when he
points to America's post-war paranoia during the red scares that consumed the
country throughout the Fifties. The sight of two men squirting water at each
other and making silly jokes released the tension, and no doubt was welcome for
that reason.
Where the book reaches beyond conventional Hollywood sentimentality is in
Lewis's astute reading of his partner and of how his comic craft played across
the stage to ensure that audiences stayed enthralled. Martin invariably appeared
to be a drunk or a buffoon, especially later on in his career when he joined
Sinatra's Rat Pack, but Lewis insists that in fact his partner "was as sharp as
a crap-house rat". To become impeccable in his timing, Dean always watched Lewis
's breathing and never once in 10 years did he step on a Lewis line or spoil a
joke. Today we think of Dean Martin as a style, the template for how "playboys"
were supposed to behave in the Fifties, and Lewis provides amusing glimpses of
Dino's Samurai-like insistence on keeping his cool. "You only have to tell me
once" was his favourite saying to film directors, while his favoured method of
learning lines was to have his caddie cue him on the golf course. Women, of
course, fell for a master of the "swoon-croon school" of singing, but Martin
took that for granted. He knew that in nightclubs it was the men at the tables
who were paying the checks so he directed his voice at them, and, according to
Lewis, men responded with the thought, "Maybe some of that'll rub off on me."
As the surviving member of the team -Martin died in 1995 - Lewis tends to
rewrite history in his favour. Mostly this is petty stuff: supposedly, for
example, Lewis invented their act, when, in fact, it was based on a combination
of past comedians' or he saved his partner from being being beaten up by a Mafia
hoodlum when other sources tell us that it was the other way round. More
seriously, Lewis soft-pedals their dealings with the Mob - and for a more
thorough as well as entertaining account of that connection no one has surpassed
Nick Tosches' biography, Dino. For fans of Lewis and Martin, however, this is an
adequate side dish, a lively memoir from an author who in the end has to
reconcile himself to being effortlessly upstaged by his partner. In a last
homage to his sidekick Lewis admits as much, back-tracking to 1947 when they
started out, Lewis had one of his "zany" ideas. Suddenly, in the middle of Dean
's rendition of "Pennies from Heaven", the lights at the Havana-Madrid night
club go out. Dino doesn't stop, however. He isn't fazed because he's already
figured out how to be seen as well as heard. He takes out his gold-plated Zippo,
flips the lid and holds the flame under his face. As Lewis would discover, Dean
Martin didn't need anybody else to create his spotlight."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2006 EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS
All Rights Reserved
The Express
June 2, 2006 Friday
U.K. 1st Edition
SECTION: NEWS; 20
LENGTH: 1725 words
HEADLINE: How jealousy tore apart Hollywood's zaniest double act;
COMEDY LEGEND JERRY LEWIS REVEALS FOR THE FIRST TIME THE BRUTAL TRUTH ABOUT HIS
BITTER SPLIT FROM DEAN MARTIN
BYLINE: by Jane Warren
BODY:
THE outside world wasn't aware of the gulf that had grown between Dean Martin
and Jerry Lewis but on July 24, 1956, they played their last show at a New York
club. "I thought my heart would break. As well as losing my partner I was losing
my best friend, " recalls Jerry Lewis, sadly.
He had idolised Dean Martin since he was a 19-year-old New Jersey kid trying
to make it as a comic. At the time Martin was a charismatic singer who was also
struggling to find a wider audience. They had become famous together as a double
act but a decade on, being a team no longer seemed to be working. "Could we do
anything without each other? Would the autograph hunters still want us? It felt
like being choked without hands on your throat, " Lewis says.
On their last night they raced through their routine but found themselves
hesitating before the last song in the act, Pardners. It was a bittersweet
moment. "The lyric goes, 'You and me, we'll always be pardners, you and me, we
'll always be friends, '" explains Lewis. "We got through it and closed the
book." They had had 10 great years together but, as Lewis reveals in his
painfully honest memoirs which are published next week, the relationship plunged
into acrimony. "It was a horrific time, " he reveals, saying the final 10 months
were full of "pain, anger, sorrow and uncertainty".
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had come out of the blue at a time when post-war
America was still a buttoned-up nation. Presidents wore hats. Ladies still wore
girdles. Nobody had seen the likes of them before: a straight guy and his
younger funny man, they were stage performers who worked with an audience. But
unlike Abbott and Costello, or Hope and Crosby, they exploded on stage without a
script. Audiences around the globe went wild.
The performers were on the road together 10 months out of the year and formed
an intense attachment. "We found out everything there was to know about each
other - secrets you wouldn't want to share with anyone, " says Lewis. "When Dean
was happy our work was better. The same with me. When either of us was sad the
work broke down a little bit - not always so the outside world could see but we
knew. But as long as Dean and I were laughing with each other we stuck like
glue." According to Lewis, Dean Martin was cool, relaxed and unflappable on the
outside but beneath this calm exterior lay a different man, with many chinks in
his armour.
He says Martin was a born gambler, who once fell in with a group of hustlers
who built themselves several upmarket homes, complete with swimming pools, with
the money they won from him while playing golf.
Hollywood rumour had it that he lost two or three million dollars in all.
"My partner's self-esteem was also a funny business, " says Lewis. "He should
have been the soul of confidence but you never knew when you might strike a
nerve. The problem was he was so good at covering up his vulnerabilities that
you might never realise he was hurt.
"Dean had the innate gift of 'in the bones' funny yet he never understood the
depth of his own skill. He was insecure about it; at the same time he was never
one to betray those insecurities. So he was stuck in a hard place - one that
became progressively harder as the press wrote about the comic brilliance of
'the funny one'." And that was how their reviews went. "The handsome one comes
out and sings pretty nicely, although he's no Bing Crosby. Then the kid comes
out and the act really catches fire." Time after time, Martin had to read those
words. Crosby was his first idol and he often felt he was walking in his shadow.
AND things got worse when Lewis and Martin began making movies together.
Lewis was always "the funniest thing in it".
Martin had to read about how he would be more at home on the screen with more
experience.
"The drumbeat was incessant, " says Lewis. "Although Dean had, in many ways,
made me into what I became he didn't have a speck of ego about it. He just
carried on like a champ." Over time, as they cranked out two or even three
movies a year, Lewis found himself becoming increasingly interested in the film
business and became more involved in the production side. Meanwhile, Martin
played golf. "That was our arrangement, " he remembers.
Still, while part of Martin wanted things that way, there seemed to be
another part of him that began to feel like a second fiddle.
"Was my ego growing? Was I knocked out by the unlimited comic possibilities
for my character on screen? Yes and yes, " admits Lewis.
"Since my partner hated any sort of showdown he wasn't calling me on it.
Yet. But others were beginning to tell him about it. People would still sidle
up to him, tell him how great he was.
At the same time I think Dean was starting to feel that he was ready to
stretch as an actor.
"Did I feel bad that Dean was overshadowed? Sure I did. But did I also feel
excited about what was happening? You bet your butt I did. Did I suck all of the
air out of the room?
Sometimes. I never claimed to be a shrinking violet. For 10 years, he gave me
the huge gift of his presence and he protected me. Maybe part of our problem, as
I got older and surer of myself, was that I needed his protection less." Then
they came to Britain and played the London Palladium. "It was a terrific show,
one of our best. Dean sang wonderfully and I thought I had never been funnier.
And then the boos began. They were ugly and assaulting.
What was going on?"
EVERY newspaper the next day carried a variation on the same huge, black
headline: Martin and Lewis booed at Palladium opening. Although it turned out
that it had been started by two Left-wing, antiAmerican students, and that most
of the dissent had been directed at the students' rudeness, Martin took it very
hard. Soon he was stoking headlines back in the US about not being up to dealing
with negative press.
"I began to worry that this could affect our ticket sales, " says Lewis.
"So I called Dean at home in LA and asked him to, please, let it go. He cut
me off. 'Listen, pal, I've just begun.' I'd never heard him like this.
"Next time I saw him the twinkle in his eye had dimmed. The months passed but
he always seemed on edge. If he heard someone had bought a coat made in England
he'd go off on a tirade. I'd have to work to settle him.
"More and more I learned that there were certain resentments that seethed
behind his cool facade. His tendency to bottle things up would come to hurt us
both but at the time I just kept wondering where all the anger was coming from."
In January 1954 the duo were shown the draft script for their next film. "I
worked with the scriptwriter to beef up Dean's character but there was no
getting around the fact that this was a movie called Three Ring Circus and I was
playing the clown, something I'd always wanted to do, " says Jerry.
Approaching 30, he wanted to grow as a comedian. Chaplin was his idol and he
wanted his character to tap into deeper emotions but Martin hated this actorly
conceit. "He kept losing his temper at me, saying he'd had it with playing a
stooge, " reveals Lewis.
He also started showing up late for work. "One morning, he gave me a look
that could kill and said, 'Any time you want to call it quits, just let me know.
' My partner was drifting away from me." As far as their millions of fans were
concerned, the duo were still at the top of their game. But over the next year
Martin let Lewis down badly on several occasions. He refused to attend the gala
premiere of their 13th movie, You're Never Too Young, even though it was being
hosted by rich friends of Lewis who had mentored and supported him at the start
of his career. Martin then gave a widelysyndicated newspaper interview in which
he spoke of wanting to strike out on his own. The pair's strife had gone public.
Because they had commitments worth tens of millions of dollars, they briefly
reconciled but shortly afterwards came a blow from which they were to never
recover when a letter arrived stating that they jointly owed $650,000 in unpaid
taxes.
"Because we were both running very high overheads - mansions, servants, cars,
staff - and neither of us had that kind of cash lying around, I went begging to
a studio executive, Y Frank Freeman, for help, " says Lewis. "He explained the
studio wasn't able to advance the money but that he would make me a personal
loan.
"Sixty days later I repaid the debt in full. A couple of weeks later he asked
Dean and I to help him out by appearing at a charity gala at Los Angeles's
Shrine Auditorium for his favoured charity. Absolutely, I told him, knowing that
Dean must agree to this after the colossal hole Mr Freeman had just dug us out
of.
'Hey, man, I told you. It's OK, ' said Dean when I checked with him."
ON THE afternoon of the performance Martin committed the ultimate betrayal by
failing to turn up. "When I asked him next morning What?! had happened he
just said, 'Nobody told me there was going to be a gala.' He was as cool as
could be. It was like having a limb amputated." Lewis says that it's hard to
explain to an internet-connected world what it felt like to be a big act in a
much simpler era, having very public trouble.
"Then imagine the commercial implications of a rift between Dean and me, " he
says.
The duo had deals worth millions of dollars. They had TV and radio contracts,
theatre bookings and commercial endorsements.
During the death throes of their relationship, Lewis told Martin that what
they were going through felt similar to the break-up of a love affair. Martin's
response chilled him. He remembers his partner closed his eyes, gazed downwards
for what felt like a long time and then looked him square in the face.
"You can talk about love all you want, " Martin said. "To me, you're nothing
but a f****** dollar sign." They shot their last two movies together under a
cloud. Desperate to salvage the situation, the studio producing Pardners
prevailed upon them to stick a little coda after The End came up on the screen.
"We're not ready for The End yet!" yelled Jerry Lewis.
"We want you folks to know we sure enjoyed working for ya " said Dean Martin.
"Yeah, and we hope you'll keep coming to see us because we like seeing you, "
added Lewis.
"I've often wondered how movie audiences reacted to seeing that little
epilogue, " says Lewis now.
Pardners was released on July 25, 1956, the day after Martin and Lewis broke
up.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Database: Academic Search Premier
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Dean & Me' really is a love story
Section: Life, Pg. 03d
Dean & Me: A Love Story By Jerry Lewis and James Kaplan Doubleday, 340 pp., $26.95 --- A showbiz act every bit as big as what Elvis Presley and The Beatles were later to become, the comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis dominated movies, TV and nightclubs for 10 years until they broke up acrimoniously in 1956. Until Martin's death on Christmas Day in 1995, the two reunited on stage only twice -- each time a brief, surprise walk-on by one as the other was performing.
Both of those ambushes were publicly joyous affairs between Martin, the Neapolitan singing straight man, and Lewis, the Jewish whirling dervish nine years his junior. Between those times, the two reconciled in periodic phone calls, forging an even stronger bond after Martin's son, Dean Jr., died while on Air National Guard maneuvers in 1987.
So, as a title for Lewis' long-awaited team remembrance, Dean & Me: A Love Story isn't misleading -- though the relationship had to overcome Martin's lifelong tendency toward emotional withdrawal.
Because Lewis was never associated with such restraint, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that his book is quietly funny, almost terse in its prose style (it's co-written with James Kaplan) and much shorter than earlier rumored.
The book fractures time by hopping back and forth between the '40s and '50s, sailing over some major career events (including many of the team's 16 movies).
But when Lewis has a story to tell, he lets it breathe.
One of the stories involves the team's 1946 folkloric debut at Atlantic City's 500 Club: a gargantuan dud in the first show and -- following Jerry's frenzied creation, from scratch, of "routines" on a greasy dressing room sandwich bag -- a smash in the second.
And that episode set the pattern: The team's supposedly loony half ran the act, even if, off-stage, the more life-experienced Martin once saved his partner from the wrath of a mobster to whom Lewis had gotten jokey. It's no surprise, given M&L's long nightclub tenure, that the Mob is ubiquitous here.
Lewis says he even paid two A-list songwriters -- secretly, and out of pocket -- $30,000 to write Martin a huge pop hit the singer needed (That's Amore), a need indicative of a problem. Though Martin later proved to be very funny on his own, the brilliant straight man lauded by Lewis could never stop moviegoers from rushing the popcorn stand whenever he broke into a ballad.
A major rift came when Look magazine cropped Martin out of a photo promoting the 1954 film Living It Up while the team was shooting 3 Ring Circus, a movie that already was giving Martin hardly anything to do. They got through their final film, Hollywood or Bust (which Lewis says he won't watch to this day), without speaking. Lewis is upfront about his contributing ego problems, calling himself a "bully" during this period.
Dean & Me may not tell us everything, but its love is abundant. It also is mellow, not mawkish -- the kind of look-back you write when, like Lewis, you're 79.