Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [17]
We spoke those last few words as we got on stage, and there in front of us was all of show business . . . still not clear about what, exactly, we did! Dean started a song that the piano player didn’t know all that well, and the pianist hit a few clams. Well, that was all we needed. While Dean took out his pocket handkerchief and busily cleaned the piano’s keys, I lifted the lid, then dropped it with a huge bang.
I then proceeded to half-undress the piano player.
The audience was beside itself.
As the pianist sat there beet-red and bare-chested, Dean asked, “Would you like to try it again?”
The pianist hit the same clam.
And we both yelled, “Perfect!”
When we got off, Berle looked at the crowd and said, “I still don’t know what they do!”
The reason Dean and I had such fun ad-libbing and going completely crazy on stage is that we both knew we had a great act—something we didn’t ever stray too far from, no matter how wild I got. And believe me, I had to get pretty wild to top myself. One time I’d gone so far that Dean and I found ourselves literally standing nose to nose, with maybe an eighth of an inch of air between us. And he said, with genuine anger in his voice, “I have finally come to the point in our relationship where I am going to have to tell you, if you do that again, it’s over. Do you understand that? O-V-U-R!”
I planted my mouth on his, gave him a big kiss, and said, “I understand perfectly.”
Now, I have to tell you—the first time I ever did that, Dean had absolutely no idea it was coming! None! Ninety-nine out of a hundred guys in the business would have blanched, would have flinched and killed the gag. Not my partner. He didn’t budge. Meanwhile, people in the audience were crying with laughter.
The act might have looked like chaos, but we could always get back to where we needed to get on a moment’s notice. We had musicians (that we carried) always at the ready. Cues, lights, sound, all knowing, “They will steer this machine—just be aware and ready!” We had that down to a gnat’s ass.
Either Dean and I, together, would save us, or Dean would save me, or I would save him. It was a brilliant concept. One that we never sat down and discussed. And once you recognize that the magic is there, you sooner or later become fearless and do just about anything that comes to you . . . always making it look like it has been totally planned. As I write it, it scares me a little to think of the guts we had.
After the Havana-Madrid, we played the Latin Casino in Philly, Loew’s State Theater back in Manhattan, the Rio Cabana in Chicago, the Stanley Theater in Camden, New Jersey, the Earl Theater in Philadelphia, return gigs at Loew’s State and the 500 Club, and Ben Marden’s fabulous, glass-roofed Riviera, overlooking Manhattan on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. These were all prime venues of the day (although the venue of venues—which I’ll tell you about in a moment— still eluded us), and Dean and I were building momentum as we went, getting better and better known—and, in the process, getting to know each other, and the foundations of our act, ever more deeply.
Three little (but really not so little) things happened along the way, things that made us more us. One night while we were playing Chicago, Dean took a look at my pompadour and said, “What do you do, get your hair cut from the inside?”
It was clearly time for a change.
A little-known fact is that Dean, whose dad was a barber in Steubenville, was a deft hand with the scissors himself. He told me about it that very night—then sat me down in the hotel room, put a sheet over me, took out the snippers he always carried to trim his own curly locks, and made my pompadour history. I was a little shocked when I saw the result—“Where’s the rest of me?” I said, stealing Ronnie Reagan’s line from King’s Row—but I understood the wisdom of Dean’s move in our very next