Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [48]
Dick hit the downbeat, I wandered into the wings, and Dean sang— as well as he could over the screaming. I looked on in wonder from stage left: My God. It’s Sinatra at the Paramount all over again.
Then I bounced back on stage and Dean and I did our forty-five-minute routine of singing, dancing, leading the band, playing our instruments—trumpet for me, trombone for Dean. Dean played the trombone about as well as I played the trumpet, but no one cared.
After we finished, our latest movie came on—That’s My Boy . When the first credit came up on the screen, the audience exploded again.
The band platform sat back at the bottom of the great orchestra pit, and the musicians hustled off to grab some breakfast. After all, it was almost 10:40 A.M.! Dean and I hurried back to our dressing room, where we would literally be prisoners until the next show, in precisely two hours.
Prisoners because six stories down, outside the Paramount’s stage door on Forty-fourth Street, was a crowd of at least 20,000 people, waiting to catch a glimpse of us. To clear the theater between shows, the Paramount management had told each audience that Dean and I would be giving out pictures backstage.
It was a little white lie, but it got them all out of the theater. (Had we not done it, they’d have stayed there for six shows.) Up in our dressing room, we’d throw up the sash, sit on the ledge, and bask in the excitement. We would yell jokes, sing (both of us!), play our horns, throw stuff down to the crowd: T-shirts, hats, handkerchiefs. And thousands upon thousands of black-and-white, five-by-seven publicity photos.
The crowds were backed down Forty-fourth Street and around the corner onto Broadway. The mayor himself, the honorable Vincent Impellitteri, came to personally welcome us to New York—and to personally plead with us to cut out the dressing-room shows. His cops couldn’t handle the traffic!
And the musicians couldn’t get out the door to get breakfast. We had to begin bringing in food for the crew, the band, the acts. Dean and I would have deli sent in from the Stage Delicatessen (naturally, we patronized the restaurant that named a sandwich after us: tongue and ham!).
We had contracted to do six shows a day. But at the conclusion of our sixth show on opening day, Bob Weitman, the shrewd, stingy managing director of the Paramount, came up to our dressing room with a bottle of champagne and some glasses and said, “Today, you guys smashed every record held at the Paramount! Now, here’s my problem— we have 4,000 seats in this house. With the Fire Department’s blessing, we can stand 800 in the orchestra and 600 in the balcony. So for all intents and purposes you played to just about 30,000 people today. But we turned away more than 50,000 people! Now, what do I do, pray tell? I have to get a seventh show tomorrow!”
Cross-eyed at the concept of trying to work a seventh show into an already very full day, we left Bob Weitman at the backstage door and shoved our way through to our car. Twenty police officers were on hand to help. When we finally got into the car, our chauffeur said, “Hey, guys, I can make five hundred bucks if you give me the used blades you shaved with this morning!”
And Dean and I, in unison, said, “Take us home, please!”
We were staying in our favorite hotel, the Hampshire House, in two adjoining penthouse suites. Around eighteen people in our entourage were staying on the floor just below us, and we rented a huge storage room in the hotel basement for stage props, music cases, and cartons and cartons of those publicity photos.
The next day, after seven shows, it was back to the hotel to try and get some rest. But needing rest and getting it, in those days, were two very different things. We were on such a rush after performing that we had to come down before trying to sleep. So we played, and we played hard! Drinking, women, fun, parties—the whole “we’re rich and famous” bit. One night the managing director of the Hampshire House came