Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [49]
We said we’d be more careful. That night we cut the crowd visiting us in the penthouse down to forty.
At around four A.M. we would crash—only to remember that we had a 6:30 A.M. wake-up call so we could get to the Paramount by 8:00 and have a half hour in the dressing room before the first show. . . .
And that’s how it went for two solid weeks—to the tune of around $150,000. That was just our end. We let the Paramount Theater have the rest, and it was substantial.
Back in the fall of 1948, when we first went out to Hollywood, Capitol Records approached us. Their idea was to put our act on disk, meaning that Dean would sing straight, then I would chime in in a few of my 897 different voices. Our first Capitol recording was a novelty number, chacha-style, called “The Money Song,” and the chorus went:
Funny, funny, funny what money can do....
And the funny thing about that song was what money was doing to us, and for us, even as we sang it—and what it would continue to do, only much, much more so.
Three years later, September of ’51, we were doing five shows a day at the Roxy Theater in New York and two shows a night at Ben Marden’s Riviera, in Fort Lee, New Jersey. We were taking vitamin C and B12 shots to try to enlist some energy from our exhausted bodies.... Believe it or not, we didn’t look at a girl for the entire two weeks!
We called those two gigs our Bataan Death March. The first four shows, at the Roxy, were at ten A.M., noon, 3:45 P.M., and eight P.M. The eight-o’clock show was a problem. We went on at 8:05 and finished at 9:15—then jumped into a car with a police escort to drive across the George Washington Bridge to the Riviera.
We’d get there around 9:40, then go on for the dinner show, from 9:50 to 10:50—then drive back to the Roxy for the 11:20 show!
Then, when we finished that show, at 12:40 A.M., we drove back to the Riviera for the 1:15 show, which went until around 2:30 in the morning.
And over again the next day. And the next day. . . . For two weeks of fun and hell.
For this ordeal, the Roxy was paying us $100,000 a week, plus a percentage of the receipts—which brought our end up to around a quarter-million dollars. The Riviera was paying us a flat fee of $125,000 a week. So for almost four hundred grand a week, we did the best we could, groaning all the way to the bank.
All the driving back and forth could get a little hairy. One of the first times we were heading back over the Hudson from the Riviera, we ran out of the club and into the car in our tuxes. Big mistake. For one thing, riding in a limo in a tux just isn’t comfortable. For another, it ruins the crease! (Since then, I’ve made a practice of never sitting in my tux, to protect it for the performance.)
So Dean took off his jacket, then his pants. I did the same. Meanwhile, the driver was peeking into his rearview mirror, not so sure about his customers. . . .
Both of us began to giggle. Then laugh out loud. Then we got stuck in bridge traffic. Then Dean had to pee. Then—Jesus, it was catching— so did I!
The driver edged through the lines of cars over to the side of the road—and there, right in front of us, miracle of miracles, was a convenience store. Never has a convenience store been so convenient. We both got out of the car.
In shorts and shirt only.
I was wearing leather boots with my tux, and Dean had on patent-leather loafers: We looked ridiculous! As we walked into the store, there were six or seven customers browsing the aisles. They recognized us right away and wanted autographs. Then someone found a camera. (We politely declined to be photographed.)
Dean went to the john, then so did I. We bought some candy and headed back to the limo—where two of the largest highway patrol officers I’ve ever seen were waiting for us, glaring. “You’re disturbing the peace!” one of them said.
“Please, Officer, give us a break,” Dean said. “I’m his lawyer and he