Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [58]
“I’ll go to Lindy’s and get you some nice chicken soup,” I told him. “That’ll be good for you.” And without giving him a chance to say anything, I dashed out of his room and ran down the stairs. (Hospital elevators always have old men gasping for air in them.)
I hailed a cab and told the driver, “Take me to Lindy’s at Fifty-first Street and Broadway, and step on it!” We were just crossing 121st Street when a roar of thunder and a flash of lightning almost stopped my watch. The rain looked like something out of one of those old Saturday-afternoon King Brothers B movies where the dam breaks.
The traffic moved agonizingly slowly: A half hour later, we were only at Eighty-fourth Street, and it was another half hour before we got to the restaurant. I ran in and ordered hot chicken soup, with lots of noodles, to go. It was only when I stepped outside that I realized I should have kept the cab and let the meter run, because when it rains in New York, every taxi in the city is taken.
I started to walk. From Fifty-first and Broadway I was going to walk to the hospital at 137th and Lenox, assuring myself that I would be able to hail a cab along the way, or at least find one letting someone off. Not in this lifetime!
I am now at Seventy-eighth Street, with only fifty-nine blocks to go, and it feels as if I’ve been walking for days. I am so wet, my skin is wrinkled. Cabs are still zooming by, keeping their passengers comfy and cozy. All I see are silhouettes of happy people, dry and comfortable, while I am trying to keep my Jewish Boston Marathon going.
The next time I glance up at a street sign, I see Broadway and 112th Street. Christ, only another twenty-five blocks to go! Half the sole of my shoe has come unglued, and the faster I walk, the louder the flapping. I stop... it stops. I start, it starts. What am I doing? Just playing, but I really did feel Dean had no one but me, and I couldn’t let him down. . . .
It was four hours later when I returned to Dean’s room. He was watching television, smoking a Lucky, and totally relaxed! I scraped off the remnants of the soggy paper bag and proudly showed him the big jar of cold soup.
“No matzo balls?” was all he said.
I remembered the chicken-soup fiasco a couple of years later, when I tried to come up with an original present for Dean’s thirty-fifth birthday—Saturday, June 7, 1952. A big landmark, it seemed to me, but also a big challenge: What do you get for someone who has everything?
The answer to this particular riddle flashed into my aspiring director’s brain like a comic setup from one of our movies. It involved spectacle, excess, absurdity—my favorite elements!—along with a warm personal nod to my partner’s greatest passion.
I saw, in my mind’s eye, hundreds of bags of golf clubs.
Great. Now, how to make my vision real?
I drove out to the Riviera Country Club in Brentwood and told the pro at the driving range about Dean’s big birthday and my big idea. His face lit up as I talked: One of the major perks of fame is that not only does everybody know you, but they all want to do things for you, too. And as it turned out, the driving-range pro at the Riviera Country Club had more than 150 bags of clubs to rent. Now, we’re not talking fancy equipment here—this stuff was the equivalent of bowling-alley or bike-shop rentals. But the point was the big picture, not the details.
I next went to the transportation department at Paramount and talked with the head man, a nice guy who loved Dean. I told him of my plan—and another face lit up. He arranged for a studio truck and five guys to go the Riviera Country Club, pick up a hundred bags of golf clubs, and deliver them to Dean’s house right smack in the middle of his birthday party!
Patti and I were to arrive promptly at seven P.M., so I told the transportation head to have his truck and handlers arrive at 9:45—just about (I calculated) when Dean would be opening his presents.
The party was great, and Dean was his most outgoing. In later years, I’ve heard, he would often leave a dinner party at his house and go to the den to