Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [7]
“Who ordered steak?” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
Needless to say, Dean was compelled to interrupt his number.
I have to admit, there was a heart-stopping instant when I wasn’t sure how he would react. Most any serious performer would be furious at being upstaged by such an asinine prank. But I had made a calculation about Dean: Remembering the incredulous smile on his face as he told me his life story, I figured him for a guy who didn’t take himself too seriously, who saw all of life as one big crazy joke.
And in the next instant, my calculation proved correct. Dean did a long, slow take for the audience, looked to the side of the stage where I wasn’t, and then—slowly, milking it for all it was worth—turned to face the monkey who had ruined his song. Our eyes met, and in that precious second, I saw the indulgent smile of the older brother I had always longed for. Dean was shaking his head at me, but he was grinning ear to ear.
Now and then, over the following weeks at the Havana-Madrid, Dean and I would get up together at two or three in the morning and ad-lib some comedy for the late-night audience. After my initial foray, he had taken to retaliation, banging my record player while I was in the middle of my act, making it jump at unexpected moments. Of course, I had to retaliate back. And escalate.
I’d put on a busboy’s jacket and run around the place at top speed, chasing the cigarette girl and dropping plates. I’d borrow a maître d’s jacket and seat people at the wrong tables. I’d take a trumpet or drum-sticks from one of the guys in the band and blow that horn or bang those drums as loudly as I possibly could. I’d come out with a mop and bucket and swab the floor, very messily, as Dean sang. And while I went nuts, Dean, with the brilliant comic instincts that nobody but me had suspected him of, flawlessly played it straight. He kept right on singing, giving me that far-off stare of his (with an indulgent smile always playing around the edges), which gave the audience the space to work itself into a frenzy. Then, when I did my act, he’d heckle me right back. The people, instantly sensing how totally we clicked, ate it all up.
We were just screwing around, really, but an eerily farsighted journalist named Bill Smith sensed that something was cooking. “Martin and Lewis do an after-piece that has all the makings of a sock act,” he wrote in Billboard. “Boys play straight for each other, deliberately step on each other’s lines, mug and raise general bedlam. It’s a toss-up who walks off with the biggest mitt. Lewis’s double-takes, throw-aways, mugging and deliberate over-acting are sensational. Martin’s slow takes, ad libs and under-acting make him an ideal fall guy. Both got stand-out results from a mob that took dynamite to wake up.”
Martin and Lewis, the man wrote. Those two names, together in that odd, unalphabetical order, had never appeared in print before. The phrase had a nice sound to it, but at that point, in early 1946, it was meaningless. We weren’t an act; we were just two young guys battling the show-business odds. If we’d never met that day on Broadway and Fifty-fourth, if we’d never both happened to play the Havana-Madrid, we would have gone our own middling ways through the entertainment industry. Together, we ignited, and made America scream. Why? You tell me. Chemistry is chemistry. But I have a few pretty good ideas.
CHAPTER TWO
ATLANTIC CITY IN THE SUMMER OF 1946 WAS A VERY DIFFERENT place than it is today. Before the Bally and the Trump Taj Mahal and the rest of the megacasinos, long before gambling got legalized and the street life went indoors, there was a lively, milling, seaside-carnival feeling about the Boardwalk: You heard the sounds of hurdy-gurdies and happily screaming kids, you smelled the salt air and hot buttered corn on the cob and sarsaparilla. Of course, there were more grown-up amusements, too. . . . And, just as Vegas used to be, AC was very