Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [46]
Did they actually decide to do that? I doubt it, but if you read what I have in the files, you’d wonder, too. And I think the critics refused to change their minds because Dean never let them know he even read what they wrote. He carried himself like a champ, and they hated him for it.
On the morning of October 6, 1950, a golden fall Friday, Dean and I and Jeannie and Patti took a picturesque, hour-long drive: west from Pittsburgh (where we were playing a show at the Stanley Theater), across the state line and through a dog-poor sliver of West Virginia, then over a big iron bridge straddling the Ohio River and into Steubenville. The occasion was to be a weekend-long celebration of the town’s Local Boy Made Good: Steubenville had declared that Friday Dean Martin Day.
The parade began at noon. Fifty cars and several marching bands snaked slowly around narrow streets lined with thousands of locals, every other one of whom seemed to know Dean personally. Finally, we wound up at the Municipal Building, where the mayor presented Dean with the key to the city.
Dean thanked him and said, “I love getting the key to the city. When I lived here, my folks wouldn’t give me a key to the house!”
After giving a performance at the very high school my partner had dropped out of seventeen eventful years earlier, we were ushered around town, stopping in at all of Dean’s old haunts: the poolroom where he hung out, the steel mill where he worked, the after-hours club where he sang, the back rooms where he dealt poker and blackjack.
And we met his old friends. Oy, did we meet his old friends! Coming out of the woodwork were: Mindy, Ross, Jiggs, Smuggs, Ape-Head, Cheech, Vigo, Teeth, Harry the Spoon, Doggy, Spongie, Locust, Brains, Meat-Jaw, Meathead, Teeth Mancini, Breathless Andriano, Choker DiStefani, and Apples (she married Boneyard Carbieri). They could have cast The Godfather 1, 2, and 3 from this crowd.
The only Jew who lived in Steubenville didn’t show up, because he didn’t particularly care for our act.
Never before had either Dean or I had our cheeks pinched, our backs slapped as much as we did that weekend. I loved it. But Dean hated it.
He smiled, he ate, he made the small talk—but I could see that he was unhappy. He never said anything, but I know what he was feeling: He had left Steubenville. It was a gray, sooty steel town, where the best any of his old friends could hope for was a sixty-bucks-a-week job in the mill. He was the one who got away. He didn’t want to go back, not on Dean Martin Day or any other day.
And here’s the thing: My partner had made it out of Steubenville on a smile and a shoeshine and the sheer force of his personality.
And a lot of what we’d done was just about luck and moonshine and having a good time.
Dean: “Did you take a bath this morning?”
Jerry: “Why, is there one missing?”
Milton Berle: “I still don’t know what they do!”
We believed in our skill, our funniness, our chemistry—but at the same time, nobody understood how incredibly lucky we’d been. I think Dean was superstitious about our luck. Didn’t want to be reminded of it; didn’t want to think about how fragile it all was.
We were flying high, the two of us—high above the earth, with its steel mills and factories and offices, its nine-to-five, grocery-buying, bill-paying concerns. Why should we ever come down?
CHAPTER EIGHT
BY THE END OF 1950, DEAN AND I HAD RELEASED THREE movies—My Friend Irma, My Friend Irma Goes West, and At War with the Army—and had another, That’s My Boy, just about in the can. That September we’d begun our new Sunday-night television show, The Colgate Comedy Hour, on NBC. Our national radio show (also on NBC) was chugging along merrily. Much of the reason we were so successful was that in a tense and conformist time, the country needed wildness, needed nonsense. Elvis