Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [3]
“Hey, Dino!” Sonny said as we came up to them. “How ya doin’, Lou?” he said to the older man.
Lou, it turned out, was Lou Perry, Dean’s manager. He looked like a manager: short, thin-lipped, cool-eyed. Sonny introduced me, and Perry glanced at me without much interest. But Sonny looked excited. He turned to his camel-coated friend. “Dino,” Sonny said, “I want you to meet a very funny kid, Jerry Lewis.”
Camel-Coat smiled warmly and put out his hand. I took it. It was a big hand, strong, but he didn’t go overboard with the grip. I liked that. I liked him, instantly. And he looked genuinely glad to meet me.
“Kid,” Sonny said—Sonny called me Kid the first time he ever met me, and he would still call me Kid in Vegas fifty years later—“this is Dean Martin. Sings even better than me.”
That was Sonny, fun and games. Of course, he had zero idea that he was introducing me to one of the great comic talents of our time. I certainly had no idea of that, either—nor, for that matter, did Dean. At that moment, at the end of World War II, we were just two guys struggling to make it in show business, shaking hands on a busy Broadway street corner.
We made a little chitchat. “You workin’?” I asked.
He smiled that million-dollar smile. Now that I looked at him close up, I could see the faint outline of a healing surgical cut on the bridge of his nose. Some plastic surgeon had done great work. “Oh, this ’n’ that, you know,” Dean said. “I’m on WMCA radio, sustaining. No bucks, just room.” He had a mellow, lazy voice, with a slightly Southern lilt to it. He sounded like he didn’t have a care in the world, like he was knockin’ ’em dead wherever he went. I believed it. Little did I know that he was hip-deep in debt to Perry and several other managers besides.
“How ’bout you?” Dean asked me.
I nodded, quickly. I suddenly wanted, very badly, to impress this man. “I’m just now finishing my eighth week at the Glass Hat,” I said. “In the Belmont Plaza.”
“Really? I live there,” Dean said.
“At the Glass Hat?”
“No, at the Belmont. It’s part of my radio deal.”
Just at that moment, a beautiful brunette walked by, in a coat with a fur-trimmed collar. Dean lowered his eyelids slightly and flashed her that grin—and damned if she didn’t smile right back! How come I never got that reaction? She gave him a lingering gaze over her shoulder as she passed, a clear invitation, and Dean shook his head, smiling his regrets.
“Look at this guy,” Sonny said in his hoarse Brooklyn accent. “He’s got pussy radar!”
One look at Sonny’s eyes was enough to tell me that he idolized Dean—whose attention, all at once, I felt anxious to get back. “You ever go to Leon and Eddie’s?” I asked, my voice sounding even higher and squeakier than its usual high and squeaky. Leon and Eddie’s was a restaurant and nightclub a couple of blocks away, on fabulous Fifty-second Street—which, in those days, was lined with restaurants and former speakeasies, like “21,” and music clubs like the Five Spot and Birdland. Live entertainment still ruled America in those pretelevision days, Manhattan was the world capital of nightclubs, and Leon and Eddie’s was a mecca for nightclub comics. Sunday night was Celebrity Night: The fun would start after hours, when anybody in the business might show up and get on to do a piece of their act. You’d see the likes of Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, Danny Kaye. It was magical. I used to go and gawk, like a kid in a candy store. Someday, I thought. . . . But for now, no chance. They’d never use a dumb act—one needing props, yet.
“Yeah, sometimes I stop by Sunday nights,” Dean said.
“Me too!” I cried.
He gave me that smile again—warm but ever so slightly cool around the edges. It bathed you in its glow, yet didn’t let you in. Men don’t like to admit it, but there’s something about a truly handsome