Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [10]
Which swung open and hit a bedpost. Dean looked at the room, then looked at me. “What are we paying here a week?” he asked.
I told him $84, forty-two bucks apiece.
He plopped himself on the edge of one of the beds and lit a Camel. And began to giggle. No one on the planet giggled like he did, and it was catching.
“You wanna share with me what’s making you chuckle?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure. That little card on the dresser from ‘The Princess Management.’ Towels every other day?”
“Sometimes they’re still damp!” I assured him.
He laughed, so I laughed. While I had him in the mood, I told him: “Dean, so you aren’t disappointed—when we go to the club, our dressing room is a folding chair.”
Our hotel room was so small, the mice had to go out to change their minds. (Credit: Henny Youngman.) But we were together, and that made me very happy. Loneliness was not my strong suit.
We arrived at the 500 Club at a quarter to five, walked in, and went straight to the band. A really nice bunch of guys . . . a small bunch, but nice. In fact, the music complement was as follows: piano, trumpet, bass, and drums. The drummer was Bernie, and he had a big nose that everyone teased him about, so he and I became compadres—his nose and my entire being up for grabs. Bernie was the first one to tell a funny story about his beak. It seems he’d been drinking at a party and his girl aroused him while they were dancing. Well, he got an erection, walked into the wall, and broke his nose. Pete Miller was the bandleader. A very nice man and a terrific pianist (I was so jealous).
Dean put his bag down, opened it, and took out the sheets for his four musical numbers. These weren’t arrangements, like stars have, but just straight sheet music, for piano only, purchased at Woolworth’s music counter. “That’s it?” Pete asked.
“Just play and let the guys fill in,” Dean told him. “I’ve done it before. It always works.”
It appeared that Dean was trying to comfort the band, yet deep down, I sensed that he was the one who really needed comforting. But would he ever show it? Not even close. It was my first experience with the bravado that would amaze me for the next ten years. Dean was always working, not just when he was performing but throughout his life and times. He made me understand that your life is your own—work it, nurture it, protect it. He said to me one day, “You know, the day you’re born, you get the pink slip on you—outright ownership. You must only share that life with those that you, and only you, choose. We are not brought on this earth as an object of sacrifice.”
Often, Dean would speak philosophically, saying things that I believe had been inside him for a long, long time—things that, over the following ten years, he would tell me and very few others. No, he wasn’t a drunk or a buffoon, as many thought. He was as sharp as a shit-house rat, and he understood every move he ever made (and every move everybody else made). But he loved playacting. That’s how he became the actor he was in films like Some Came Running and Rio Bravo. I learned a great shtick from Dean early on: If you make believe you’ve had a few, or you look like you’ve misplaced your wallet, usually people will stay away. And he did it like a champ. . . .One hour to showtime, we’re waiting in the alley outside the club, and my stomach is doing the aria from Figaro. Dean shows such nerves . . . as he yawns and lights up another Camel.
How’d they get rid of the numbers?
Who could have thought—as we stood in that alley with the smells from the kitchen, the cats going up and down, the one folding chair between us—who could have thought that in four and a half hours, we would have changed the face of American show business? Certainly not us.
Restless, we walked around to the club’s main entrance and went inside for a drink. The 500 Club’s bar was huge, running from the front of the house all the way back to the maître d’s desk at the entry