Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [103]
I was doing a guest spot on The Andy Williams Show, with a dance number like a thousand dance numbers I’d done before. Andy Williams, his chorus girls, and me, all singing and high-stepping around the stage—except that all of a sudden I hit a little wet spot and went down like a ton of bricks.
Everyone around me figured I was just doing another one of my pratfalls—after all, I’d been throwing myself around on stage for a good twenty-five years. The director kept the tape rolling and I finished the number.
Then I went straight to the hospital.
I had not only fractured my skull, I’d also taken a chip out of my spinal column, and the results were disastrous: nausea, dizziness, double vision, and horrendous pain. The doctors put my neck in a metal brace and prescribed codeine and Empirin.
The pain got worse.
Over the next year, the doctors eventually told me, a fibrous knot built up around my spinal injury. The pain became constant and agonizing. The medicine they gave me didn’t touch it. Heat and massage didn’t help.
Then one of my doctors prescribed Percodan.
To my absolute astonishment, one pill made me feel like a human being again. The pain that had affected every waking moment, every interaction, suddenly receded, restoring my smile and leaving me free to think about all the things people normally think about. The pain was still there, of course, but in the background, always reminding me that it might come back full-force whenever it chose.
I didn’t want any pain at all. And so, after a little while, I tried taking a second pill during the day. Bingo—no more pain! Suddenly, I was head over heels in love with Percodan. It felt like the best thing that had ever happened to me. But I couldn’t help wondering: If two pills made me feel this good, what would happen if I took a third?
I felt even better.
The third pill had nothing to do with pain; it was all about elation. On three Percodans a day, in the mid- to late-sixties, I felt just the way I wanted to feel—a bit larger than life. Buoyant. Optimistic. Funny.
Then, little by little, the third pill wasn’t doing it for me anymore. And so I took a fourth.
By the early seventies, I have to admit, Dean was not the first person on my mind. I knew he and Jeannie had divorced in 1969, and I felt terrible about it. Jeannie and I had had our conflicts—we both loved the same man, after all!—but I still thought she was a great woman. I still think so. To this day, I believe she was the true love of Dean’s life. The relationships he had afterward were all just flings.
But it was hard for me to concentrate on anyone else’s problems but my own. I had a lot going on, and not much of it (with the exception of the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethons and the film course I taught at USC) was good. For one thing, my son Gary, who’d had a successful recording career himself in the mid-sixties before enlisting in the Army and going to Vietnam, came back from the war a wreck, unable to sleep, unable to erase the horrible images of combat from his mind.
Then, in 1972, Frank Tashlin died. Later that year, my dad had a stroke.
Professionally, things weren’t going much better. The kind of family films I’d been making for a quarter of a century was rapidly going out of style. I was losing my fan base: Kids were staying at home watching television, and a new sort of audience was coming to movie theaters, one that was more in the mood for sex and violence than comedy. Suddenly, I was having trouble financing my pictures. I made a serious Holocaust film called The Day the Clown Cried and lost two million dollars out of my own pocket when my producer skipped town, leaving me unable to finish postproduction. The movie has never been seen. It was like losing a child.
A couple of years earlier, I’d gone into business with a big company called Network Cinema Corporation to start a chain of Jerry