Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [13]
And I was on. I did my seventeen minutes of miming to recordings, and heard what sounded like some applause. They also could have been calling for a waiter.
Then Dean came on.
He took center stage and sang Song One: “Oh, Marie.” Nice! Then he began Song Two: “Pennies from Heaven.”
I’d combed my hair straight and parted it dead center, put on my street jacket, and sat at one of the ringside tables. As Dean finished the number, I caught his eye and nodded at him. Don’t do anything yet was what that nod was saying. He read me, started to introduce his next song.
“I got a special request,” he told the audience. “But I’m gonna sing anyhow.”
A couple of laughs from out in the dark.
As Dean sang the first few notes of “Where or When”—that nice, quiet, romantic tune—I suddenly banged my table as hard as I could. The china and silverware danced. “Waiter!” I yelled in my Idiot voice. “Where’s my Chateaubriand for two, for Chrissakes?”
Dean stopped the band. “Hold it,” he said. And to me: “Hey, I’m tryin’ to make a living up here.”
“Doing that?! Hah-hah-huh-huh!”
“You think it’s easy?” he asked me.
“It’s a piece of cake—you’re stealing the money!” I yelled.
He motioned me to come up to the stage. I looked around—me?— then stood and went up there. Did some shtick with squinting into the lights. Got a laugh, did it some more. Dean went over to the piano, took some sheet music, handed it to me.
“You sing it,” he said.
“Me?”
“You.”
I looked at the sheet, the piano went into the intro, I opened my mouth—and out came Yiddish. Double-talk. “Vay-meen o soy needle rachmon-eetz. . . .” Dean gave me a look. The laughs were coming stronger now.
“Oh, I only sing in Jewish,” I said. “Is that okay?”
“Jewish?” he said. I nodded. “I’m Italian,” Dean said. “You’re Jewish?”
I nodded again, with the Idiot face. Dean was smiling. The people were laughing. Hard. Christ, what a sweet sound! More intoxicating than any booze. “Someone told me you had your nose fixed,” I said in my nine-year-old voice.
“Yeah,” Dean said, pointing to his cheek. “It used to be here.”
This got a roar of laughter. And I blinked. Something had happened in that instant, something only I had seen, and it was giving me goose bumps. Dean’s ad lib had been not just fast but instantaneous. I’d already been in the business long enough to know how incredibly rare that was. Over the next sixty years, I would come to understand it better and better. The vast majority of comedians with good rhythm use beats—small hesitations, often with some comic business or other—to set up their jokes. Dean didn’t use beats.
I was in the presence of magic.
I can’t tell you what this looks like to somebody whose life is predicated on rhythm. Once we became a team, after we’d been together four or five years, there would be shows where I’d look at Dean and go, “Holy fuck.” It was like being in a lab, watching this magnificent experiment come to life. Nobody, I swear, ever had it in his bones like Dean had. My dad used to agree with me. Danny Lewis worked with straight men all through his career. Good ones. But nobody could touch Dean.
George Burns saw us at the Sands in the mid-fifties, and said to me over dinner one night, “He’s the greatest straight man I’ve ever seen.”
George Burns! Who lived through all the two-acts—Smith and Dale. Olsen and Johnson. Gallagher and Shean.
Not to mention Burns and Allen.
George used to tell the classic self-deprecating joke about straight men—namely, that all you really had to do to hold up your end was repeat what the comic said. If the comic says, “I lost my shoes,” you say, “You lost your shoes?” George joked, “It’s terrible, because I was at the beach, and there was a kid in the water yelling ‘help-help-help,’ and I yelled ‘help-help-help?’ And by the time I got to him, he drowned.”
George was so much better than that, of course. And George thought that Dean was the greatest of them all.
Who knew this on July 24, 1946?
July 25, actually—midnight had passed, and we had the twenty-four audience members of the second show at the