Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [70]
And where Big Top was concerned, all I could think about was how excited I was to be doing a circus movie, and about how really involved I would be in the moviemaking process. Selfish? Sure. Shortsighted? Absolutely.
Meanwhile, Dean stayed on the golf course, at a safe distance from unpleasantness. I think he knew, deep down, that coming clean about why he disliked this script was going to require a big-time confrontation. As a matter of fact, if he was to be completely truthful, he would have to face me with his dissatisfactions, which would be the hardest thing of all. That bottle stayed corked for a little while. The easier showdown (but still a very hard one for Dean) was with Hal Wallis.
We were both coming to hate the cookie-cutter scripts that Wallis wanted for all our movies. The formula had at least given me more room for experimentation than it had given Dean. In Big Top , he’d once more be playing my handsome sidekick, except that this time his character had fewer songs than usual and was even more of a heel.
After avoiding Wallis for a few weeks, having our secretaries field ever-angrier phone calls mentioning breach of contract, we finally agreed to a script meeting at Paramount. It was a big conclave in Wallis’s office, full of agents, lawyers, and writers; the atmosphere was, to put it mildly, tense. I spoke my piece, but what shocked me was that Dean finally spoke his.
With Hal Wallis, 1948. First screen test for crotchety producer.
More than that: He really let our producer have it. Tapping all too easily into the reservoir of anger that seemed to have built up over the last six months, he said that he didn’t want to play a cheat, that he didn’t even know what he was doing in the picture. “Huntz Hall could play this part,” he told Wallis.
Wallis, no shrinking violet, gave as good as he got. He reprimanded us both for our “belligerent attitude.” We shouted right back that he was selling us short with this script. After a lot of back-and-forth, we finally hit on what appeared to be a compromise that we could all live with. Dean and I would get into line and do our wardrobe and color tests for the picture, and I would work with our TV writers, Arthur Phillips and Harry Crane, on a revision of the script. Dean seemed completely satisfied with this solution.
More likely, he was just in a hurry to get back to the golf course.
We shot on location in Phoenix, Arizona, with the Clyde Beatty Circus, which should have been a delight. Unfortunately, the making of the movie that would eventually be released as Three Ring Circus was troubled in every way. (For starters, Hal Wallis only wanted to pay for one ring, not three! Fortunately, our director, Joe Pevney, was able to convince him that One Ring Circus didn’t exactly cut it.)
But the shoot’s main problems were between my partner and me. Things got off on a bad footing a few days after production started, when Look magazine published a photograph taken on the set of our soon-to-be-released picture, Living It Up. The photograph was originally of Dean and me with our costar, Sheree North. But for some idiotic reason, Look cropped Dean out of the photo so that only Sheree and I appeared together.
Dean was furious, justly so. He crumpled up a copy of the magazine and threw it in Jack Keller’s face. The slight seemed all too symbolic of the neglect he’d been enduring for years, a neglect that I can see came to a head with Three Ring Circus. The writers and I had worked hard on the script, but no matter how hard we tried, we just couldn’t find much for Dean’s character to do in the story. We tried to beef up his scenes and emphasize the musical