Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [53]
Clearly, this wasn’t headed in a good direction, especially where Dean was concerned. But Dean played more or less the same game with Wallis that Wallis played with us: He never let the producer know how perceptive he was. I think Wallis thought Dean was a fool... playing golf all the time. That’s where he made a big mistake.
You see, I was in charge of everything where the act was concerned; Dean played golf. That was our arrangement. That was the way Dean wanted it. He loved golf, pure and simple. He loved that game more than he loved women—and he was very fond of women—and much more than he liked alcohol.
Meanwhile, I was falling in love with every aspect of the movie business. And so I had more and more to do with production. Still, while part of Dean wanted things that way, there was another part of him— aided and abetted by all those people who gathered around him as he grew more successful, the people I called shit-stirrers—that began to feel like a second fiddle.
The question might have occurred to you by now: Did I go to Wallis and demand more for Dean to do in our pictures? Sometimes I did. What was always front and center in my brain was the team, and the Act: Were Dean and Jerry coming across on the big screen in some close approximation of the way they came across on stage? If Dean was diminished in that equation, we both were diminished.
But—was my ego growing? Was I enthralled, enamored, enraptured by all that I was learning about film? Was I knocked out by the unlimited comic possibilities for the Jerry character onscreen?
Yes, yes, and yes. It all happened silently, the way one week you can see perfectly and the next week you need glasses: I was developing a certain myopia about Dean. And since my partner feared and hated any sort of showdown, he wasn’t calling me on it. Yet.
But others were beginning to tell him about it. All his life, Dean was a pretty solitary cat. He never went in for cliques or crowds. But his magnetism was so strong that there were always people around who wanted to get close to him, be on his good side. He was Dean Martin, for God’s sake! Guys in bars, casinos, golf-course clubhouses—he spent a lot of time in those places—would sidle up to him, tell him how great he was. All by himself.
At the same time, I think Dean was starting to feel that he was ready to stretch as an actor. But in the meantime, he was seeing all those reviews that put him down or just ignored him. He had to listen to Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, all the time.
And the shit-stirrers kept stirring....
We didn’t disagree about much for the first half of our decade together, with one exception: his singing. I loved it and thought he could do more with it; he would never take it seriously. Once I asked him, point-blank: “Just once, would you sing a song straight?”
He gave me a funny look. “I do,” he said.
“No you don’t,” I told him.
When I pressed the issue, things got pretty sticky between us. I’d been thinking, Hey, maybe he could have a fourth song; it would be great for him. We were on for two hours. What’s the big deal? Another three minutes? It was okay with me.
So I said, “You know something? You’re doing so good in your spot, maybe I’m coming on too early.” He said, “Fuck you! Whattaya talkin’ about? You’re gonna spoil what we got. Forget it.”
His mind was made up, but when we played the Fox Theater in San Francisco in 1951, the reviewer in the Chronicle wrote a big rave about the show—without mentioning Dean once. That hurt. I saw it in his eyes. And—for both our sakes—I found myself giving him a pep talk.
“You know something?” I said. “They’re always going to like the kid who makes the biggest noise. They’re always going to pay attention to the fuckin’ monkey. You’re going to hear more about him than the straight man. Nobody ever talked about George Burns. It was always Gracie.