Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [16]
The more successful we got, the bolder we got. We’d squirt seltzer on each other (and the audience); we’d dump pitchers of water on each other—and the audience. The audience howled.
Please realize that these were very uncertain times. No matter how many images you conjure of the triumphant armies marching home, the sailor kissing the girl in Times Square, the years just after the war were dark and uncertain ones. Millions had been killed and maimed. Russian communism was looking like a very bad thing. Nuclear weapons were being tested. The Red Scares were beginning.
Meanwhile, our G.I.s, back from the war, were encouraged to embrace peace and prosperity. Everybody was supposed to get into harness and turn the U.S.A. into paradise on earth. There was a lot of unease and rebellion just under the country’s placid surface.
And so the sight of two grown men in a nightclub squirting water at each other and making silly jokes was a very welcome one. But our appeal went way beyond that.
What audiences saw, in a time of people hating each other, was the look in Dean’s eyes as he watched me wreak havoc. It was the look in my eyes as I watched him sing and be so perfect. You can’t fake that, nor was there any need to disguise it.
And people got it. Instantly, on a gut level. Our audiences had grown up with great comedy teams: Laurel and Hardy. Abbott and Costello. Hope and Crosby. Bob and Bing were the most modern team of the bunch, and in a way, even when we were just starting out, Dean and I were going up against them. But from the word go—in my mind—there was no contest.
Bob Hope was a great monologist and Bing Crosby was a great singer. Their “Road” pictures for Paramount were a huge success. (And an accidental one: Paramount had thrown that first script at them, Road to Singapore, in 1940, because the studio had nothing else to give them.) But everything they did together was totally scripted, even the live performances, and I don’t think the two men particularly liked each other, and I believe that deep down, it showed. The audiences laughed because the material was funny and the performers were skilled. But Hope and Crosby never generated anything like the hysteria that Dean and I did, and that was because we had that X factor, the powerful feeling between us.
And it really was an X factor, a kind of mystery.
The world of show business was so much smaller then than it is today. Word of mouth didn’t just shoot up and down the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, but up and down the Eastern Seaboard. So as soon as Dean and I hit big at the 500 Club, word about the new hot guys traveled at lightning speed to New York City, and agents and managers and performers hustled down to catch our act.
They realized we were a hit, but they all left scratching their heads: What is it that these guys do?
The news, and the mystery, got around fast. So fast that when we actually arrived in Manhattan for the first time as Martin and Lewis, we were instant celebrities. There was a ton of curiosity about us—and a ton of confusion.
You remember I mentioned Sunday nights, Celebrity Nights, at Leon and Eddie’s, the Fifty-second Street club? Only a few months earlier, Dean and I had gone there to star-gaze; now we figured it was our time to step up. So one night after our second show at the Havana-Madrid, we strolled across town.
The celebrity show at Leon and Eddie’s usually began about 3:15 A.M.; Dean and I walked in around 3:20—and immediately found ourselves in the midst of Showbiz Central. Milton Berle was on stage, getting heckled by Red Buttons, Jack Carter, Henny Youngman, Morey Amsterdam, Buddy and Jerry Lester, Alan King, Sonny King, the Ritz Brothers, Danny Kaye, Harvey Stone, Pupi Campo, Shecky Greene, Buddy Hackett, Joey Bishop, Tony Martin . . . More names than I’ve got type for.
With Sophie Tucker. She wasn’t sure who she’d go home with.
It was an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experience.