Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [29]
June and Gloria had come to New York, without husbands, to go on a shopping spree. It was the kind of thing that young actresses did then—a chance to kick up their heels and get some publicity at the same time. The MGM publicity department underwrote the whole trip, even their shopping bills. It was all stage-managed to the nth degree. Little did MGM imagine the kind of publicity their two young stars would actually generate.
Dean and I happened to be in the lobby when their limo pulled up and dropped them off. We watched the girls check in. We made some small talk, and then the desk clerk called for a bellman to take the young ladies and their bags to their suite. Another bellman took care of us.
We all rode up on the elevator together: Martin and Lewis, Allyson and De Haven, two bellmen, and twenty-seven suitcases. The four of us had some giggles, while the bellmen pretended not to notice. It was as if we were all in on a big, delicious secret. Some secret it would turn out to be.
June and Gloria were dressed to the nines in Lord & Taylor clothes and mink stoles. (While Dean and I, wearing the first civilian suits that we owned outright, were undressing them in our minds.) For the five days they were staying in New York, the girls had ten or fifteen changes of clothes: dresses, skirts, blouses, ball gowns, riding habits—all of it provided by the humongous Metro wardrobe department, the use of said garments approved by L. B. Mayer himself.
He was a pure showman, always demanding that his contract players carry themselves with grace, charm, and manners, as well as expensive attire. When the actor or actress didn’t personally own the appropriate clothes, it was SOP that the studio would step in and provide what was needed to maintain the glamour and glitz—and protect its investment, which was considerable.
The star system was big business. The studios would find talent and nurture it with everything from acting to voice and piano lessons. The stars-to-be would learn to move their bodies gracefully enough to pass muster in the world’s biggest and most demanding fishbowl. Hollywood was always watching, alert to every step, every gesture—and every slipup.
And so when two of Metro’s newest, most sought-after female stars decided to fly off to New York and unwind—and encountered the new comedy team of Martin and Lewis, both Hollywood (though 3,000 miles away) and New York sat up and took notice.
Dean had a suite on the twenty-third floor, and mine was on the twenty-fourth floor, with but one flight of stairs between us. The girls were staying together in a suite on the twenty-fifth floor. . . . By God, I thought, what a swell arrangement.
The four of us were so totally wrapped up in one another that we never gave a thought to how things would look. So we played and played, and didn’t give a gnat’s ass about anything but having a good time. Wine, women, and song up the kazoo.... We had it all—and then some.
But you always have to pay the fiddler.
The first night at the hotel, we had a champagne toast and, full of anticipation, prepared to go to the theater. Did we think about the fact that, in the winter of 1948, Broadway had an oversized media apparatus and thousands of gossipmongers—not to mention everyone who worked at the hotel and at the shops and restaurants we patronized?
We did not.
And so we, the Fun Foursome, strolled delightedly and without the slightest compunction into the St. James Theater to see that season’s hot new musical, Frank Loesser’s Where’s Charley?
Everyone that was anyone had seats for that performance, and we became an added attraction. Until the houselights went down, we were the show. We loved the play—Ray Bolger was awesome—and after the final curtain we were off to a quiet dinner at one of New York’s most laid-back spots, where being noticed wasn’t something we had to be concerned about . . . El Morocco!
We arrived at the fabulous nightclub on East Fifty-fourth Street— where, if you were a celebrity, trying to be unobtrusive was like being Mark Spitz calling