Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [45]
Just as things were getting interesting, Leo Durocher walked in with the most gorgeous goddamn woman ever seen on earth! Legs up to her ears, breasts (if they were real) far out enough to ring her own doorbell! Every man in that joint had a community erection. Then Dean hit on her. Jackie Gleason hit on her. Leo loved to laugh (guess he liked comedy better than sex), because he forgot she was with him the minute he saw Gleason. So she became fair game, and most everyone there that night was trying to get her attention.
Guess who left Toots Shor’s with her?
About 4:15 A.M., Dean strolled into our suite and entered his room. I heard him moving about while I was still busily engaged in explaining to this lovely lady how my wife didn’t understand me. There was a knock on the door. I continued sipping Dom Pérignon along with my new friend, and I heard, “Hey, Jer, you in there?”
I didn’t answer. I told her to be very quiet.
“Come on, Jer, I know you’re in there!”
We let Dean knock and knock, and I finally yelled out, “What do you want?”
“I want sharesies!” he said. “Don’t we always share everything?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We share sandwiches, makeup, towels, tux ties, but we never share ladies. I would never let you near mine, and you would never let me near yours.”
“Did you ever hear of an amendment?” Dean laughed.
George Burns understood the depth of my partner’s comic genius. Danny Lewis understood it. Millions of people—including some otherwise quite intelligent people—had no clue. “In the bones” funny is a gift: You’re either born with it or you’re not. Gleason had it. Milton Berle had it. Sid Caesar and Stan Laurel had it. Charlie Chaplin had more of it than anyone else. Discussing Chaplin’s genius would be like measuring the ocean with a cup.
Dean had it, too, yet he never understood the depth of his own skill. He was insecure about it; at the same time, he was never one to betray his insecurities. So he was stuck in kind of a hard place—one that became progressively harder as the press wrote about the comic brilliance of “the funny one.” And that was how our reviews went: “The handsome one comes out and sings pretty nicely—although he’s no Bing Crosby. Then the kid comes out, and the act really catches fire.” Time after time after time, Dean had to read those words.
And you wonder why he never bought a newspaper?
It got worse when we began making our movies. After My Friend Irma, the august Bosley Crowther (you think he made that name up?) of the august New York Times opined as follows: “We could go along with the laughs which were fetched by a new mad comedian, Jerry Lewis... the swift eccentricity of his movements, the harrowing features of his face and the squeak of his vocal protestations . . . have flair. His idiocy constitutes the burlesque of an idiot, which is something else again. He’s the funniest thing in it. Indeed, he’s the only thing in it that we can expressly propose for seeing the picture.” Crowther, that sniffy bastard, called Dean my “collar ad partner.”
Meaning: Handsome but empty. A mannequin. A prop.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Examiner said Dean would “undoubtedly be more at home on the screen with added experience,” but “he shouldn’t oughta listen to any more Bing Crosby records.”
Cruel, cruel, cruel. And what was my partner’s reaction? He didn’t react, not at first. You have to understand: Even though Dean had saved me from a lifetime of lip-synching, even though he had in many ways made me into what I became, he didn’t have a speck of ego about it. He didn’t have enough ego, really. There was a big part of him that felt supremely lucky to have made it to where he had. The money, the broads, the life—why should he give a shit about what some pointy-headed schmucks wrote about him in the papers?
If the shoe had been on the other foot, if I had been the kind of target for the press that Dean was, I wouldn’t have lasted anywhere close to ten years. I’d have been out of there by the third year, at the latest—and I would have made