Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [32]
Then the houselights came up, and a roar from the audience told us, “Here he comes!”
The lights slowly dimmed, and we heard the strains of “I’ll Never Smile Again.” The big band headed by Axel Stordahl blew all the notes that made your heart stop.
The opening act was Phil Silvers, the comedian. Phil was in fine form, telling a series of jokes about Sinatra and his thin frame. The crowd loved him, but only for about eight minutes.
Then the lights came all the way down.
The band hit “Put Your Dreams Away,” and out he came! No announcement... no nothing. Just Frank in a dark-blue suit, cuff links, a flower handkerchief in his breast pocket.... He reeked of California— sunshine, bucks, style. And he started to sing the moment the crowd stopped screaming. They settled in and just listened for a while, but screamed at the end of every song.
Frank did forty-five or fifty minutes, and the theater exploded once again as he thanked the audience, shouting to make himself heard above the tremendous uproar. Then he went off, and the stage descended into the gigantic pit and out of sight, to the last strains of “I’ll Never Smile Again.”
Dean and I didn’t say a word all the way back across town, a pretty long walk from Times Square back to the Belmont Plaza. (Cabs weren’t that expensive, but they were definitely over our budget.) When we got to the hotel, Dean said, “You wanna get coffee?” It was the first time either of us had spoken in half an hour.
We went into the drugstore next door and sat in a booth. The waitress brought his coffee (and my usual, a vanilla milk shake), and I thought about what we had just seen. It was all so perfect: the band uniforms; the light cues; Sinatra’s newly shined loafers; the way his bow tie flopped loosely, with studied carelessness, under that bobbing Adam’s apple....
Dean shook his head. “Man, I couldn’t believe the way that guy phrases a lyric,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It makes you feel—”
“Jealous!” Dean said. “That’s what it makes you feel!”
“Yeah—I guess you’re right,” I sighed. “I kept seeing myself up there in front of four thousand screaming fans.”
“It’s great to live in a country where a kid from Hoboken, New Jersey, can have the world in the palm of his hand,” Dean said.
“Well, I guess we can dream,” I said.
Dean banged the table with his palm, making me jump. “Dreaming is for loafers who never do anything. I don’t have time for dreams,” he said. “I want action. I want a car and a home and all the things you get when you get there. If you don’t push through the crowd, you’ll be stuck here your whole life.”
I had never heard him talk this way. I didn’t know how to respond. “Well,” I finally said. “I bet my impression of Sinatra will be better tonight than it ever was before.”
But Dean was barely listening. His gaze had drifted to some far-off place. . . .
By our fourth week at the Copa, we’d introduced so many celebrities from the stage that it was getting ridiculous. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re thrilled and honored to have in our audience tonight... Mr. Yul Brynner! Miss Ethel Merman! Mr. Lee J. Cobb!”
But there was one celebrity we hoped for beyond all others: Frank Sinatra. It was right around then that Frank was beginning to get in some very public hot water about Ava Gardner, as well as his supposed Mob associations. As to the latter, I’ll maintain till the end of my days— which of course will be a long, long time from now—that in the 1940s and ’50s, before the Mob lost its hold on nightclubs and Vegas, it was literally impossible for an entertainer, any entertainer, not to deal with them. I also maintain that they were a class of men who could, under their own particular set of rules, be very honorable. Dean and I had our own strategies for handling the wiseguys. As for Frank, maybe he romanticized them a little. Maybe he hobnobbed a bit too much. But ultimately, he was always his own man.
The next five years wouldn’t be good to Frank. But just then no one was a bigger or brighter star, and one night