Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [30]
So Dean got up, walked over to the door captain, and insisted on getting the fifty back. Which, even in front of a lot of people, didn’t faze my partner at all.
Not so amazingly, we got a waiter right away. Whereupon Dean strolled back to the door captain and gave him the fifty all over again— plus another fifty. He grinned all the way back to the table.
Once he was back, we asked the girls to dance. There we were out on the dance floor, which was lit by a hundred baby spotlights: It was a little bit like a night game at Chavez Ravine.
We danced with complete abandon—in hog heaven—until we were spotted by Radie Harris, a monkey-faced little gossip columnist who wrote “Broadway Ballyhoo” for the Hollywood Reporter.
If the cat hadn’t come out of the bag before, it sure did now....
For the next week, all anyone in Manhattan talked about was the “Fearsome Foursome,” dining, dancing, making the city our very own. We went to more Broadway shows and sat together. We strolled arm in arm through Central Park. We made reservations at the best restaurants, and we had some pretty heavy-duty parties in the three suites at the Hampshire House. Meanwhile, all the bellmen and telephone operators who were on the arm to Winchell and the rest of the newspapermen in Gotham made sure we stayed the talk of the town.
Oh, we had a ball. We didn’t even find time to see our attorneys and agents—the reason we’d come to New York in the first place... or so we said. The girls extended their stay another week. I must have lost five pounds, and I was only 124 to start with. Dean just basked in it all, looking like a cat with a mouth full of canary.
Then came the telephone call.
It would be sunrise in an hour or two, and I had just drifted off into some badly needed shut-eye: We had a date to go horseback riding in Central Park at eight A.M.—the girls had to use those riding habits!
The phone sounded like a jackhammer in the middle of my brain. I grabbed at it just to make it stop.
“Hey, Jer, this is important,” I heard my partner saying.
“What time is it?” I croaked.
“It’s four A.M., and I just had a great hour on the phone with Betty!” Dean said.
“Oops,” I said, and I knew in my heart—I’m next!
“Maybe we better cut back a little,” Dean said. “There are more eyes on us than I ever could’ve imagined.”
A fact that was borne out to me when my phone rang again twenty minutes later. It was—of course—Patti. Two hours later, with the Manhattan sky turning gray, I was still trying to explain to my wife.
“Listen, you schmuck,” she said. “If you have to get your rocks off, why do it in Madison Square Garden?”
“What do you mean?” I asked innocently.
“It’s all over the papers about you, Dean, and the two chippies you’re with,” she said. “Didn’t you know that what you were up to would have consequences?”
Patti was a band singer, a show-business veteran who’d been around the block a few times. She knew how men—especially successful men in show business—acted. She just didn’t want me humiliating her, and of course she was completely right. I pacified her as best I could.
But Dean and I had a date to go riding in Central Park, and we both meant to be there, and so we were at eight A.M., like pointers in the hunt, ready and willing! The four of us rode all over the park, having fun—as were the reporters following us on horseback.
Our public-relations guys, George Evans and Jack Keller, had both handled Sinatra; they were used to this kind of thing. But that didn’t mean they liked it. “Do you guys realize,” George said, “that your anonymity is gone? That you are now public property? That you cannot do whatever you want anymore? Don’t you realize that you, you