Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [57]
I admitted I’d taken lessons so we could be together more. His look told me: Wrong! But he covered it well, and we went on playing.
After we’d finished the thirteenth hole, Dean was one under and I was two over. Not bad for a beginner! I thought. I glanced at my partner’s face as he filled out the scorecard. Nothing. Throughout the first four holes (back nine, remember), I’d been looking for some acknowledgment of how well I was doing.
Nothing.
Then Dean said, with a strange smile, “Why don’t we make it interesting and bet the last five holes?” he said. “Five hundred bucks, winner takes all?”
“Sure!” I said. Naturally, I would have paid the five hundred just for the privilege of playing alongside him. . . . But then I birdied the fourteenth, and Dean bogeyed it. All at once it was a shooting match: He was at even par, I was one over.
Dean made par on the fifteenth, and—to my great surprise—I birdied again. Now he’s even and I’m even. We both parred the sixteenth, and I scanned his face. No reaction.
A bogey for both of us on seventeen. All tied up.
Then I hit the biggest drive of my life, so did Dean, and now we’re looking at a pretty fancy run for the roses. As I took out a nine-iron for my third shot, he put up a hand. He had a mischievous smile on his face. “Hold on, Ben Hogan,” he said.
“Of course,” I said.
“Side bet of two hundred you don’t par the hole,” he said.
“What about if I birdie?” I asked, all innocence.
He shook his head at my nerve. “Hey, hotshot, you birdie and I’ll pay you a grand!”
I didn’t birdie. (Thank God.) I parred the last hole, as did Dean, making us all even—except that he had lost the side bet. He took the bills out of his hip pocket, counted them, and handed them over. He was smiling, but his eyes were cold. “Boy, talk about beginner’s luck,” he said.
I put my hand up. “That’s okay,” I told him. “I don’t want the money.” I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.
“Oh, no,” Dean said. “A bet’s a bet.” And he stuck the bills in my pocket.
I knew in my heart I had made a great mistake. Not simply by winning the money, but just learning how to play.
When I phoned my dad and told him what had happened, you could have heard his scream across the room. “You fool!” he shouted. “You young, stupid fool! Why did you do that?”
“I just wanted to spend time together playing his favorite game,” I said sheepishly.
“All they ever write about is the skinny kid,” Dad said. “Jerry this and Jerry that—he’s the funny one, he’s the smart one. Don’t you see that all Dean ever had to himself was golf—and now you’re trying to take that, too?”
My dad was smart. Dean and I never played together again, except for a cancer benefit we did for Bing Crosby. But that was it. I never again talked to my partner about my golf, only his.
CHAPTER TEN
A NUMBER OF ENTERTAINERS STAYED OUT OF WORLD WAR II with questionable physical or psychological conditions, but both Dean and I were genuine 4-Fs. My problem was a heart murmur, a congenital defect; Dean’s was a double hernia. Nothing by halves for my partner!
Seriously, though, it had not been fun to be classified 4-F. I had badly wanted to join up, and was devastated to be turned away. (Dean, never a joiner and no fan of uniforms, might not have been as crushed as I was.) But in the mid- and late forties, both Dean and I faced audiences who accused us of draft-dodging—doubtless the same kind of people who had thrown tomatoes at the front of the Paramount Theater when Frank Sinatra, another legitimate 4-F, played there in 1944.
Although the strong emotions stirred up by the war died down by the early fifties, Dean’s hernia had gotten worse. Jack Entratter of the Copa recommended a doctor, and the doctor told Dean he would have to operate. The procedure, at the Harlem Hospital Center on 137th Street in Manhattan, went well. So well that two days afterward, my partner was complaining of hunger pains.
“Is this an endurance contest? When can I have some real food?” Dean said when I visited him.