Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [35]
It was usually the lackeys who made trouble.
Take the time that Dean got into a slightly sticky situation with the wrong guy’s girlfriend. This was in Miami in 1950, and the guy was . . . Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Dean Martin in real life was much the way everyone perceived him: cool, relaxed, unfazed by most anything. The guy who could take a nap during a gang war. But beneath that unflappable exterior was a different man, a man I began to understand over our ten years together.
Dean had a number of chinks in his armor, as we all have. And one of them almost led to a disaster. He loved the ladies (as we all do and did and always will), but he didn’t care about the where or when. In fact, I constantly teased him that “Where or When” was the one lyric he had committed to memory.
We were playing a Miami nightclub that shall go nameless (I don’t know who might still be around and reading this!), when Dean spotted a lovely young lady sitting ringside with her grumpy-looking boyfriend, and proceeded to do what he always did when he spotted a pretty woman in the audience: He performed entirely to her. Sang and flirted, as if he were all alone with her.
When the show was over, I went into the men’s room—and saw Dean standing face-to-face with the grumpy-looking boyfriend, who was pointing a .38 Special directly at Dean’s stomach, about one inch away from the pasta he had eaten before the show.
The gun scared me all the more because I knew exactly who this man was, and what Dean and I were dealing with. The man—call him Harold Francis—was a low-level hood, a peripheral associate of Meyer Lansky’s, but more to the point, he was one of the crazy gangsters, a guy very much like the one Joe Pesci played in Goodfellas, only taller. A hood with a hair-trigger temper, for whom knocking someone off, especially someone who had pissed him off, would mean less than nothing.
And so without thinking, I stepped between my partner and the man’s gun (the gun that was now pointed into my stomach) and proceeded to do the verbal tap dance of my life.
I knew he was a mobster, and I knew what a handshake meant. I said, “Harold, you have to understand something. People make mistakes—that’s why they have erasers on pencils. Now, I’m going to admit to you that my partner made a mistake. I know Dean did what you said he did, but I’m going to offer you my hand, to give you my word of honor that I know my partner, and I know that out of respect for you, out of the same respect I have for you, he would never have done this if he had known who this young lady was.”
I was lying through my teeth. But I had no alternative, because Harold Francis was very serious. And as I stood there with my hand extended, I saw something in his eyes change, and I exhaled for the first time since I’d walked into that men’s room.
Harold lowered the pistol. He was still angry, but he had inched back from the boiling point. “This one time,” he said. “This one time. But if he ever—”
“He will never,” I said.
“Ever,” he repeated.
“Won’t happen,” I swore.
Harold gave Dean one last dirty look and exited the men’s room, leaving us to stare at each other for a second. Dean was white, and I was whiter. The quiet was deafening.
Then Dean said, “I’ve never seen a more stupid son of a bitch—you could’ve been killed!”
Flashback to the beginning of my Mob education: The time was 1947, and the place—what better place?—was Chicago.