Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [65]
Dean took a sip and made a face. “That boy’s got a cast-iron stomach,” he said. “This stuff is lighter fluid.”
I shushed him. “Let’s be polite,” I said. “Just not too polite.”
Suddenly, my partner was wearing a very familiar grin and staring over my shoulder. I didn’t have to be told what was going on; I just needed to know where she was. The answer was two tables away, sitting with a bunch of very theatrical types: an absolutely glorious, dark-haired young lady, twenty-one years old at the very most. She and Dean had locked eyes, and she was smiling in a way that told me I’d be seeing very little of him for the next few nights.
I won’t say the girl’s name here, but she was a celebrated young actress whose future seemed full of promise—yet would, in fact, be filled with heartbreak. At that moment, though, she was like the most beautiful blossom in a meadow, ripe for the plucking. She was also in the midst of a very public love affair with another one of Hal Wallis’s actors, Kirk Douglas. Who was not aboard the Queen Elizabeth.
Dean’s smile, and the young lady’s, grew broader.
The next morning, the entire cruise staff were out rounding up pigeons for shuffleboard, horse-racing games, swimming contests, and, of course, the perennial amateur shows. At breakfast (Dean was still grinning), the two of us decided to enter the show in disguise. We had our bag of tricks with us—makeup, hats, wigs, beards, musical instruments ... Christ, we could go on stage as anyone at all!
Dean decided to do his Bing Crosby impression (which he did quite well), in wig, golf hat, and mustache, and I would do my Barry Fitzgerald imitation (remember the little Irish actor who always played a priest? Well, believe it or not, I did a mean Barry Fitzgerald), in wig, mustache, and turnaround collar.
We auditioned in the Queen Elizabeth’s mammoth showroom and were accepted for the show that night. Just what we were going to do in the show was another question—it wasn’t as if we had a screenplay of Going My Way lying around!
Day turned into evening gradually and gorgeously, as it does at that latitude on the Atlantic: a soft twilight that seems to last forever. And then it was showtime.
At first, back in costume, we were laughing, but as the master of ceremonies got things going, it suddenly hit us again: What the hell were we going to do?
Then I had an idea. We watched the other acts. The juggler needed a day job. The trainer for the dog act forgot the doggie treats. The dog did nothing, except backstage he left us a gift.
Now it was the singer’s turn. She was a beautiful blonde with flowing locks and extra lipstick on her teeth. She sounded like Tallulah Bankhead in heat. Thank God this was almost over. We were scheduled to follow the mind reader, who couldn’t find his blindfold. A waiter was walking by backstage and I stopped him, gave him a twenty-dollar bill, and took his cummerbund. I slipped through the curtain and handed it to the mind reader, who was most grateful! Until the cummerbund’s metal clips started pinching his temples. He went on, wincing in pain, until his assistant arrived with enough gas to go to Cleveland. I mean, she was whacked out of her mind, so everything the mind reader did, didn’t work. They were on and off in short order, leaving the crowd hysterical. Now it was our turn.
We had the MC introduce us as O’Keefe and Merritt—the billing we’d finally settled on after going through McKesson and Robbins, Harris and Frank, and Liggett and Myers...anything but Martin and Lewis! (I’d wanted to use Dill and Doe, but Dean said no.)
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