Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [15]
Our future was closing in on us fast. One night, Skinny came up to the bench, a little out of breath. “I been looking for you turkeys everywhere,” he said. “I got a surprise for you.”
I went into the nine-year-old voice. “Tell us, oh tell us, oh please, Mr. D’Amato,” I screeched. “We love surprises!”
“Wolfie and I decided we want to hold you for the rest of the summer,” he said. “Four more weeks. Seven hundred fifty a week.” He gave us a look, dead serious. “Apiece.”
We went nuts. We kissed Skinny, kissed each other, kissed our lucky park bench. As soon as we really hit it big—and it wouldn’t be long— Skinny had that bench put in the club, bolted to the floor, with a plaque on it. The plaque read: “Here, on the stage of the 500 Club, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis became a team in the summer of 1946.”
Oh—by the way. I still have that brown-paper pastrami-sandwich bag. (I keep it in my safety-deposit box.) Sixty years on, the grease spots are still there. Apparently, great comedy, and pastrami grease, are forever.
CHAPTER THREE
FROM THE BEGINNING OF SHOW BUSINESS, IT’S BEEN UNDERSTOOD that you’re only as good as your billing. You’re on top, you’re on the bottom, or you’re in the middle. If you’re just starting out, your name goes anywhere. When you knew you’d arrived, there was only one place to look—on top. Billing matters. A lot.
In late August of 1946, Dean and I knew we were on our way (only five weeks after we’d begun!), and we were discussing that very interesting and always somewhat sensitive matter. We both knew “Crocetti and Levitch” wasn’t going to make it . . . that was a no-brainer. Because I’d brought Dean into the mix, the 500 Club had made up early posters that read, “Lewis & Martin.” I knew that was wrong. Why? I’ll never know, but it was wrong. So we talked.
“What about alphabetical order?” Dean said.
“Then we’re back to Lewis and Martin,” I said.
“Not if you go by first names.”
“Just ‘Dean and Jerry’?” I asked.
“No, idiot—‘Martin and Lewis,’ but we use the first names, too, so it’s ‘Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis,’ and we make that contractual. We demand that it can’t ever appear otherwise.”
I thought about it. I reminded Dean that it was never “Bud Abbott and Lou Costello”; it was always just “Abbott and Costello.”
“But they had alphabetical working both ways!” Dean exclaimed.
“Yeah, and L is before M,” I said.
And Dean said, “You wanna call this act ‘Dean Lewis and Jerry Martin’?”
We both laughed at that, and I still laugh thinking about how sharp Dean’s mind was. We ultimately agreed that “Martin and Lewis” sounded great, but that “Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis” sounded better. So it was written into all contracts and agreements, and the billing could not ever be compromised.
We went back to the Havana-Madrid that fall and scored big-time with our nonsense. And it was nonsense—just the same tomfoolery I described earlier, with improvements and variations: The maître d’ and the busboy. The drill sergeant and the recruit. Don Juan and the monkey. The playboy and the putz.
Dean was always the suave one, the cool one, the one in charge. I was the wacked-out, terminally insecure (but dangerously uninhibited) nine-year-old.
What he did, his singing and comedy, could have worked without me—if he’d had the self-confidence. But what I did would never have worked without him.
Because everything that I did, I did off Dean. Every move I made was because he went, “Ah, ah.” No one understood what “Ah, ah” did. It stopped the body of a wildcat.
For Christ’s sake, if he wasn’t there, you’d have had a loose cannon! They’d have had me living in a rubber room!
He watched me breathe. He knew my breath. He was so intent, always watching for the exact right second to come in. He knew that there were a couple of breaths coming after this one; he knew to lay back until just the right moment.
I could time anything. Never once, in ten years, did he ever get in the way. Never once stepped on a line, spoiled a joke.
He was, quite simply, impeccable at what he did.
He was yin to