Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [52]
I looked at Dean. Dean looked at me. Neither of us said a word.
“The Money Song” did all right for us, but since it didn’t look as though we were going to blaze any trails as a novelty act in the music business, Capitol decided to record Dean alone. Interestingly enough, his first solo disk (this was still in the days of the 78-rpm record, just before the LP format came in) was Frank Loesser’s “Once in Love with Amy,” from Where’s Charley?—the Broadway hit we’d seen with June Allyson and Gloria De Haven.
From 1948 to 1950, Dean made quite a few records for Capitol, songs like “Powder Your Face with Sunshine (Smile! Smile! Smile!)” and “Dreamy Old New England Moon”—songs that did not exactly establish him as a solo singer. But then he had a minor hit with a number called “I’ll Always Love You,” from My Friend Irma Goes West , followed by another song called “If,” which Perry Como had recorded earlier and taken to number one.
At the time, it was perfectly fine with Dean to ride Perry Como’s coattails: He still felt as lucky as I did to be soaring along on our fabulous comet. It was always a big part of his charm that he refused to take himself seriously as a singer. But the day was swiftly coming when he would have to rethink that position a little bit.
CHAPTER NINE
YEAR BY YEAR WE KEPT MAKING MOVIES, CRANKING OUT TWO or even three (!) pictures every year. In 1952, we did Sailor Beware and Jumping Jacks. In 1953 came The Stooge, Scared Sti f, and The Caddy.
We stuck with the blueprint that I’d finally been able to talk Hal Wallis into on My Friend Irma, the formula that was the basis of our act: the Playboy and the Putz. But just as we stuck with that formula, we also got stuck with it. We settled into a rut. And if you want to know what kept us from blossoming and finding our highest comic potential onscreen, I can tell you the answer in two words: Hal Wallis.
Ed Simmons, a comedy writer who, along with another young whippersnapper named Norman Lear, wrote The Colgate Comedy Hour with Dean and me, once told an interviewer a story about getting hired by Wallis to rewrite Scared Sti f. “We had always liked Dean,” Simmons said, “ ’cause Dean was very funny, and we felt he wasn’t given a chance to do things in pictures. . . . So we kept putting in scenes for Dean, and Hal Wallis kept sending them back. . . . Finally, he called us up to the office and said, ‘Why do you keep sending me this stuff?’ And we said, ‘Because Dean is funny. And he should be doing this stuff, this is a good scene for him.’ And he said, ‘Fellows, look. A Martin and Lewis picture costs a half-million, and it’s guaranteed to make three million with a simple formula: Jerry’s an idiot, Dean is a straight leading man who sings a couple of songs and gets the girl. That’s it, don’t fuck with it.’”
That was Hal Wallis.
As I’ve said, our producer had had a long and distinguished career in movies—beginning (I kid you not) in 1927 as the publicist for The Jazz Singer, the very first talking picture. He’d made all those great dramas— Casablanca, Sergeant York, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang—as production chief at Warner’s, and, once he’d set up shop as an independent producer at Paramount, had discovered and signed Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Anna Magnani, and Charlton Heston.
And then Martin and Lewis.
But the thing about Hal Wallis was that while he was great with drama, when it came to comedy, he had a sense of humor like a yeast infection. And I told him so. He said, “Listen, kid, I’ve been making films for forty years.”
I said, “You could’ve been making them wrong!”
He wasn’t crazy about any artist who challenged his concept of a movie, and I challenged him big-time. I never let Wallis alone. I was in his office six times a day questioning the script. Needless to say, he wasn’t charmed. His attitude