Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [100]
Dean’s first reaction was “I’m just gonna sing.” But Ed told him, bluntly, that everyone already knew him as a singer, and it wasn’t enough— that image, by itself, fixed him in the past. Just another nice-looking crooner.... To really make his career take off, Ed insisted, Dean needed to continue being funny on stage.
Then Dean had a stroke of genius. Everyone knew he was going through a tough time—why not have a little fun with it? In our act, he’d often used a glass of apple juice as a prop, pretending it was Scotch. He’d also taught me the trick of keeping anyone who annoyed you at bay by making believe you’ve had a few. Suddenly, he put two and two together and came up with the shtick that would work for him till the end of his life: He would play a drunk on stage. “Write me some stuff like that,” he told Simmons.
Simmons wrote it, Dean lent it his brilliance, and it was a smash hit. Dean went from being someone people liked to see at the Sands to being someone they had to see, everywhere. His nightclub bookings took off.
But then something even more important happened. In the after-math of the breakup, Lew Wasserman and Herman Citron at MCA had decided to put all their efforts into making sure that, despite the word on the street, Dean wouldn’t fail. Ten Thousand Bedrooms had largely been their doing, and they felt terrible about it. Now Citron had an idea about how to make Dean a serious movie star.
A couple of years earlier, Frank Sinatra’s career had been in the dumper, too—and then he played Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity and won an Oscar. Now, in the summer of ’57, a new World War II movie, The Young Lions, starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, was about to start shooting in Europe. There was a third major role in it—a devil-may-care former draft-dodger—that Citron felt was tailor-made for Dean.
There was only one problem: Tony Randall had already been signed to play the part.
Citron pled his case to the producer, and the producer brought the idea to Clift—who, as the box-office megastar of the moment, had creative control over the project. All Montgomery Clift knew about Dean was that he had been the straight man of Martin and Lewis. “Good God, no!” he reportedly said.
Legend has it that Clift then went to see the latest Tony Randall movie, a light comedy, and decided that Tony had a brilliant future—in light comedy. The Young Lions was a very serious picture. Clift decided to give Dean a shot.
The role would pay less than Dean was earning for a week at the Sands. What’s more, he was petrified at the thought of acting next to the great Brando and Clift. In the meantime, there had already been tension between the two hypersensitive Method actors. But then magic happened: When Dean flew to the film’s location in France, his sense of humor and easygoing personality charmed his temperamental costars. Marlon and Monty recognized what a natural Dean was as an actor and fell all over themselves trying to charm him right back. The end result was that the three of them wound up getting along—well, like a charm. The tension between Clift and Brando evaporated, both did some of their best work, and Dean—helped by Clift’s coaching—found depths in his acting that he’d never imagined.
The Young Lions was a critical smash when it premiered in the spring of 1958, but most notable was Dean’s emergence as a brand-new acting talent. “It’s inevitable,” Variety said of Dean, “that his performance...will be likened with what From Here to Eternity did for Sinatra.”
Take that, Bosley Crowther!
The Young Lions went on to become one of the biggest hits of the 1950s, and Dean’s success in it gave him a whole new public image—as an actor to be reckoned with and a multitalented superstar.
He had also never stopped recording, though without a major hit. Maybe he just needed to get out of 1957. In January