Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [14]
And they still wanted more.
By the time we finally were able to get off, we’d been on for over two hours. And this time, it was just Skinny who ducked into our dressing room—the Wolf had stayed away from our door. Skinny was all smiles.
“Now, that’s what I call lightning in a bottle!” he said. It was the first time I’d heard the expression. It wouldn’t be the last. “How come you guys didn’t tell me what you could do together?” Skinny asked.
“Because,” I answered, “we didn’t know it ourselves.”
Atlantic City had a split personality in those days. On the beach side of the Boardwalk, it was all family sun and fun. The inland side was all grown-up pleasures, 24/7. But AC, on both sides of the Boardwalk, was a tightly knit place, the type of place where, if anything out of the ordinary happened, word got around fast.
The following night, there were 200 people at the first show, out of a possible 240 seats. And they loved everything we threw at them—they went ballistic as they watched us trip and fumble through our wares, knowing full well that they were in on something special.
We were on fire. Not only did we remember the stuff from the first night (and do it better), we pulled new things out of the air. The second-night crowd was as enthusiastic as the people the night before—except that 200 people are so much louder than twenty-four! They bellowed with laughter, they didn’t want us to stop. After two hours and twenty minutes, we finally had to.
Soon there were lines around the block for all three shows at the 500 Club, including the two-thirty A.M. Dean and I couldn’t walk on the beach without people stopping us to say, “Bravo.”
But we weren’t leaving anything to chance, either. Forty years earlier, when the great W. C. Fields had played Atlantic City as a young juggler, he’d come up with a publicity stunt known as “the drowning gag.” My dad told me about it, I told Dean, and we brought it back. When the beach was good and crowded, I’d wade out into the surf up to my chest, then suddenly start waving my arms and yelling in distress. Dean would splash out, drag me back to shore, throw me down on the sand, apparently comatose, and act like he was about to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. By this time, we’d have a nice crowd around us. But before he’d begin, I’d sit bolt upright and say, “I’d rather have a malted, sir!”
With Gary Lewis, Atlantic City, 1946. Thank God for Tums.
“We’re fresh out,” Dean would say, smooth as silk. Then: “Hey, don’t I know you?”
“I’m Jerry Lewis!”
“And I’m Dean Martin!”
“I know that—I’m at the 500 Club with you, first show is at eight o’clock!”
And we’d jump up and run like madmen, all the way back to the Princess Hotel.
The bit was corny as hell, but it piqued the curiosity of a showbiz legend named Sophie Tucker, who happened to be walking along the beach one day and caught one of our “drownings.” Sophie was a contemporary of Fields—she probably remembered that publicity stunt from when he first pulled it—who billed herself as “The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas.” She was playing the 400 Club, on the Boardwalk, that July. After her last show, she’d come to see our last show.
She liked what she saw. A lot. She told the local paper, “These two crazy kids are a combination of the Keystone Kops, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello. They will leave their mark on the whole profession.”
There was a little vest-pocket park down Missouri Avenue from the 500 Club. Before shows and in between, Dean and I would hang out there, sitting around on a park bench and shooting the breeze, reminiscing about the past but mostly