Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [102]
At first they all just drank and played cards. Sometimes they went out and raised a little hell. But Frank was having so much fun—these were his bachelor years—that he wanted to try and bring some of it to the stage. And meanwhile, he was courting Dean.
Dean hadn’t changed. He still wasn’t about to join any groups, and he still liked to turn in early at night. But he admired Frank, and after doing Some Came Running, Dean knew they worked well together. In early January, Frank conducted the orchestra for Dean’s new album, Sleep Warm, and at the end of the month, the two of them performed together for the first time at the Sands.
A remarkable thing happened when Dean and Frank got on stage together. Among friends, Frank was a funny guy, a great talker and story-teller, but in the past, he’d never been able to convey his humor to his audiences. For most of his professional life, he had done no more than announce the title and the writer of his next song. Eventually, he might add, “Rodgers and Hart—two nice men that I met, and they would love the way you people reacted to their song.”
Frank admired many things about Dean, but one of the biggest was Dean’s ability to ad lib on stage. That drawl, that perfect timing—it struck Frank with the same kind of awe that Dean felt for Frank’s phrasing with a song. Performing together felt like a perfect career move. And what happened the instant Dean and Frank stepped onto the stage at the Sands was that they did a version of Martin and Lewis, with Dean assuming my old role—the cutup, the wise guy (less physical, of course)—and Frank playing the straight man.
It worked beautifully. It let Frank be funny on stage, and it finally demonstrated to the world what a brilliant comic Dean was. He could do absolutely anything.
Dean still wasn’t about to go out drinking and hell-raising with Frank and the others. But the act paved the way for him to get on stage with Frank, Sammy, Peter, and Joey. It wouldn’t take long before the Rat Pack was complete.
If I was making a serious stab at being the King of Show Business, Dean was giving me a serious run for my money. I sure didn’t have to feel guilty anymore. But I also sure missed him: We hadn’t spoken in over two years, and if I’d known then that it would be eighteen years more, I don’t think I would have survived.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
LIFE MOVES ALONG BY ITS OWN MYSTERIOUS SETS OF RULES. By the mid-1960s, Dean and I were in totally separate orbits, in our work and our private lives. For seven years, Patti, our six sons, and I had been living in Louis B. Mayer’s old house on St. Cloud Road in Bel Air. Dean, Jeannie, and their large brood lived in a big place on Mountain Drive in Beverly Hills, just a mile or two away. It might as well have been a hundred miles—our paths never crossed.
I’m sure many young fans were only vaguely aware that we’d once been a team. Dean had continued recording, building strength on strength: In 1964, the year the Beatles invaded America, he knocked them off the top of the charts with his hit “Everybody Loves Somebody.” He’d also continued making movies—fun ones like Ocean’s Eleven and Robin and the 7 Hoods, and, of course, Westerns, like The Sons of Katie Elder. Whether the pictures sank or swam, there was no denying he was a major international star. And after years of doing successful TV specials for NBC, in 1965 he signed a multimillion-dollar deal with the network to star in his own weekly series. In various incarnations, as The Dean Martin Show, The Dean Martin Comedy Hour, and Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts, it would become one of the most successful shows of all time, running until 1984.
Meanwhile, I was trying to concentrate on filmmaking. I made sixteen movies in the 1960s, and either produced, directed, or wrote (or did some combination of the three) on ten of them. Features like The Bellboy, The Ladies’ Man, and The Nutty Professor were hits.
Television was more up and down. After a successful stint guesthosting on the Tonight