Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [69]
It was complicated. Christ, everything between two human beings is complicated! And in a relationship like Dean and I had (which was unlike any relationship I’ve ever known), it was much, much more so.
I felt guilty.
Guilty that for years, Dean had had to put up with the Bosley Crowthers of the world, to listen to Jerry this and Jerry that, to grin and bear all the horseshit about what a genius I was. The press utterly ignored the fact of Dean’s genius. And many of the critics didn’t just ignore his gifts, they demeaned and humiliated the man himself. One Thomas O’Malley, staff writer for an early-fifties magazine called TV Forecast , once wrote:
Although Martin is probably the best partner Jerry could ever have teamed up with, let’s face it, Lewis could have paired off with Walter Brennan and been a sensation. He IS the team. If his stu f ever becomes ho-hum material, Dean certainly wouldn’t be able to carry the slack.
You must understand, this was what Dean had to put up with. The drumbeat was incessant, and it would have destroyed a lesser man than my partner. I sure couldn’t have lived with it for anywhere near as long as he did.
I wanted to flag-wave for Dean. I told any number of writers how brilliant he was, how much I owed him. Do you think that’s what they wrote about? No. They didn’t believe me.
So I tried to do things for Dean, to repay him, but I knew that part of his anger at the English press was really caused by the way the American critics treated him.
And I also worried that some of Dean’s anger was at me, for getting the lion’s share of the attention. If I had told him about buying him “That’s Amore” (a small voice in me reasoned), maybe he wouldn’t be mad at me. But I was also a smart fella: I thought of Lend-Lease, and how furious at America it had made some Brits feel.
So I continued to keep my mouth closed.
Dean was in a funny place that fall. With his number-one hit song, he was feeling his oats as a performer for the first time. But at the same time, all the indignities he’d suffered had built up. And there were more to come. The last straw was floating down toward the camel’s back.
In January 1954, Hal Wallis showed us the first-draft script for our next film, a circus story to be called Big Top. It was a story I had very high expectations for: I’d wanted to play a clown ever since I’d seen my idol Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 picture The Circus. But when Dean and I read the script for Big Top, we were bitterly disappointed.
The screenplay had been done by a pal of mine, Don McGuire, who’d recently written Meet Danny Wilson for Frank Sinatra. That movie, a dark drama about an up-and-coming nightclub singer with a rough-and-tumble past, was a powerful and complicated version of Frank’s own story.
Leave it to Hal Wallis to hire a writer for Martin and Lewis who didn’t write comedies. Still, Wallis was aware of my friendship with Don, and thought it might make the project move along more smoothly to go with a writer I knew. And in fairness to Don, Wallis sat on him so heavily throughout the process that a Neil Simon would have been hard-pressed to come up with laughs.
There were a couple of other big problems. The biggest was that as the screenplay was written, Dean and I didn’t have a lot of scenes together. The first twenty pages of the script—twenty full minutes on the screen—had ten minutes of my character, then ten minutes of Dean’s, before the two of us even met.
When you have a Martin and Lewis picture without the “and,” you don’t have much.
For a few weeks, Dean and I let preproduction go on without us. In other words, we staged a sit-down strike, and for a while it looked as though the only Big Top Hal Wallis was going to get was the top he’d wind up blowing.
While Dean and I agreed we hated the first draft of Big Top, the fact is, we hated it for totally different reasons—selfish reasons on both our parts. At first we didn’t really