Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [106]
The following year, I was able to go back to moviemaking for the first time in almost a decade. The picture was called Hardly Working. We shot it in Florida, and the whole experience was a very mixed bag. I directed, cowrote, and starred, and I have to admit that the awful strain of the past ten years showed in every part of my work. The movie didn’t really hang together, and not so surprisingly, I looked terrible in it.
Still, Hardly Working had some good moments onscreen and off. When the film was released in Europe, it turned out that audiences had missed me: They bought $25 million worth of tickets. And once we were finally able to get a distributor in the States (it wasn’t easy, because of how long it had been since my last picture), the critics, who had a field day putting the movie down, were amazed to see it sell.
But the best thing that came out of Hardly Working was a little scene I did with a fresh-faced young dancer from North Carolina named Sandra Pitnick, nicknamed SanDee, or Sam. Out of that scene came a friendship, from that friendship came a relationship, and from that relationship came a new life. After Patti and I made the agonizing decision to bring our long and difficult marriage to an end, Sam and I became husband and wife in February 1983.
It was just a couple of weeks later that Sam and I went out to dinner in Beverly Hills with my manager Joey Stabile and his wife Claudia, who ran my office. The restaurant was La Famiglia, on Rodeo a couple of blocks north of Wilshire. We’d picked it out because we all felt like some Italian food. Who knew that it was Dean’s favorite restaurant?
I spotted him the moment we’d been seated: He was alone in a red-leather booth by the front door. After a moment, I caught his eye and waved. He waved back. I got up and walked over to his table.
My first reaction as I approached was a double take at how much Dean had aged. I know I was no Prince Charming, but my partner had always looked so magnificently handsome and youthful. He was about to turn sixty-six. There are young sixty-sixes and old sixty-sixes, and Dean was definitely the latter. Whether it was the effects of the sun for all those years, or the accumulated sadnesses of his life, or just the genetic luck of the draw, I don’t know. But it saddened me deeply.
“You workin’?” I said, putting on a brave smile.
He laughed at that, and it made him look younger. “You wanna have a drink?” he asked.
“No, I don’t drink,” I told him. “I used to work with a guy that drank all the time and breathed on me—I’ve had all the booze I can take for one lifetime.”
He laughed again. It was all very playful. But at the same time, I felt that I was imposing on him. With age, his reserve had grown. (Mack Gray, the one man who was at all close to Dean in later years, had died in 1981.) Dean could have had almost anybody in the world in that booth with him—a gorgeous girl, Frank, anyone—but he truly wanted to be alone. I touched his arm, gave him a wink, and went back to my table.
Ten minutes later, a waiter brought over a champagne bucket, covered with a cloth napkin. “Compliments of Mr. Martin,” the waiter said.
I finally went to hell.
I removed the napkin and saw six bottles of Diet Coke sitting on ice.
I laughed out loud, not just at the joke—it was classic Dean!—but with a kind of relief. He hadn’t closed me out. I patted Sam on the hand. “Come on,” I told her. “I want you to meet him.”
She hesitated. Sam is deeply sympathetic to others’ feelings, and that’s just one of the reasons I’m so nuts about her. She didn’t want to impose—on Dean’s privacy, on my relationship with him.
But I felt strongly about this. “Come,” I said. “This is important to me.”
We walked over to his table. Just for a second, I went into the Idiot voice: “Thank you for the lovely champagne.”
He laughed, and I had my opening. “Paul, I want you to meet my wife, Sam.”
He looked up at her with a grin. “I always knew you’d marry a guy.”
We all laughed. We stood there chatting for a couple of minutes, and