Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [68]
He was stoking the headlines: “DEAN MARTIN CALLS LONDON GARBAGE CAPITAL OF EUROPE,” one read. “MARTIN AND LEWIS WILL NEVER GO BACK TO ENGLAND,” said another. Dean was quoted in one piece vowing, “I will use all my power to see that no Martin and Lewis film will ever play in England again!” I began to worry that this kind of talk could affect our worldwide ticket sales, a major part of our income. Of course, Wallis was beside himself. I later found out he was phoning Dean, sending him telegrams, telling him, begging him, ordering him to cease and desist. And Jack Keller was frantically trying to get in touch with me. “We’ve really got a problem here,” he said when we finally connected.
So I called Dean at home in L.A. “Dean, please let it go,” I said. “You’re making this a very tough situation for us—”
He cut me off. “Listen, pal, I’ve just begun.” I’d never heard him like this. Part of me wondered where all this anger was coming from. “These motherfuckers can’t get away with this bullshit!” he yelled. “They’re gonna be sorry they didn’t go after Cohn and Schine instead of Martin and Lewis!”
I could see I wasn’t going to cool his anger on a staticky international phone. Patti and I continued our vacation, and I did my best to put the whole thing out of my mind. I did face some local press now and then, and they all had the same question: “What really happened at the Palladium?” I said the same thing to all of them: “We were great at the Palladium, and the English people loved what we did. The whole incident has been blown completely out of proportion.”
I was trying to put the best possible face on the situation, but I was still worried. When I got back to Los Angeles, Dean and I had a meeting at NBC about our radio show. It was the first time I’d seen him in three weeks. We hugged, but I immediately saw something different—the twinkle in his eye had dimmed. I tried desperately to jolly him out of his mood, to do whatever I could to ease the pain of what he’d had to read in the papers for the last few weeks.
But the American press was in full swing. The San Francisco Chronicle ran an editorial taking us to task for not being up to dealing with negative press. Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper—the two biggest noise-makers in America at that point—both went after us. Winchell accused us of “a Major Bubu: You never publicize the raps.” Hopper said we should have made fun of the bad reviews on the Colgate Comedy Hour. Dean was taking a lot of the heat. Ironically, he was getting all kinds of unwanted attention from the same people who usually ignored him.
It has taken me a very long time (a full half-century, to tell the truth) to finally learn the sad lesson: If you knock even the most hateful human being, you will come out of the encounter looking less than heroic. People almost always side with the one being attacked.
The months passed, and as our memories of England faded, Dean and I got back up to all our old tricks. Still, my partner always seemed on edge. If he heard about someone wearing a coat made in England, he’d go off on a tirade. I’d have to work the room to get him settled. More and more I learned that there were certain resentments that seethed behind his cool facade. His tendency to bottle things up would soon come to hurt us both.
That’s twenty-twenty hindsight, of course. At the time, I just kept wondering: Where was all this anger coming from?
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE CADDY HIT THE THEATERS IN AUGUST OF 1953, AND BY THAT fall, the movie’s big hit song, “That’s Amore,” was selling out of the record stores. Naturally, Dean was thrilled. The twinkle was back in his eye, and I could see a new lift in his step. I was pleased, too, even if I felt like something of a martyr, knowing that it had all been my doing. Some small part of me wanted to tell Dean about my generosity,