Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [4]
“So—maybe I’ll see you there sometime,” Dean told me.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“Go get your tux out of hock,” he said.
I laughed. He was funny.
Sonny King was a pal, but not a friend. I badly needed a friend. I was a lonely kid, the only child of two vaudevillians who were rarely around. My dad, Danny, was a singer and all-around entertainer: He did it all— patter, impressions, stand-up comedy. My mom, Rachel (Rae), was Danny’s pianist and conductor. So I grew up shuttled from household to household, relative to relative. I cherished the precious times Mom and Dad would take me on the road with them. And for them, the highest form of togetherness was to put me right in the act: My first onstage appearance was at age five, in 1931, at the President Hotel, a summer resort in Swan Lake, New York. I wore a tux (naturally) and sang that Depression classic “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” From that moment on, showbiz was in my blood. So was loneliness.
By the time I was sixteen, I was a high-school dropout and a show-business wannabe. A desperately-wanting-to-be wannabe. I worked the Catskill resorts as a busboy (for pay) and (for free) a tummler—the guy who cuts up, makes faces, gets the guests in a good mood for the real entertainment. That’s what I wanted to be, the real entertainment. But what was I going to do? I was tall, skinny, gawky; cute but funny-looking. With the voice God had given me, I certainly wasn’t going to be a singer like my dad, with his Al Jolson baritone. I always saw the humor in things, the joke possibilities. At the same time, I didn’t have the confidence to stand on a stage and talk.
Then I hit on a genius solution—or what seemed at the time like a genius solution. One night, at a New Jersey resort where my parents were doing their act, a friend of mine, an aspiring performer, Lonnie Brown—the daughter of Charlie and Lillian Brown, resort hotelkeepers who were destined to become very important in my life—was listening to a record by an English singer named Cyril Smith, trying to learn those classy English intonations. I had a little crush on Lonnie, and, attempting to impress her, I started to clown around, mouthing along to the music, rolling my eyes and playing the diva. Well, Lonnie broke up, and that was music to my ears. An act was born.
After a couple of hard years on the road, playing burlesque houses where the guys with newspapers on their laps would boo me off the stage so they could see the strippers, I became a showbiz veteran (still in my teens) with an act called “Jerry Lewis—Satirical Impressions in Pantomimicry.”
I had perfected the act, and to tell the absolute truth, it was pretty goddamn funny. I would put on a fright wig and a frock coat and lipsynch to the great baritone Igor Gorin’s “Largo Al Factotum” from The Barber of Seville. I’d come out in a Carmen Miranda dress, with fruit on my hat, and do Miranda. Then into a pin-striped jacket, suck in my cheeks, and I’d do Sinatra singing “All or Nothing at All.” I knew where every scratch and skip was on every record, and when they came up, I’d do shtick to them. I had gotten better and better at contorting my long, skinny body in ways that I knew worked comedically. I practiced making faces in front of a mirror till I cracked myself up. God hadn’t made me handsome, but he’d given me something, I always felt: funny bones.
And I never said a word on stage.
The dumb act was a rapidly fading subspecialty in those rapidly fading days of baggy-pants comedy, and my own days doing it were numbered. There were a few of us lip-synchers out there, working the circuit, and while I liked (and still like) to think that I was the best of the bunch—nobody could move or pratfall or make faces like Jerry Lewis— I only had around three to eleven audience members per show who agreed with me. Those three or four or nine people would