Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [71]
Perhaps after seven years as a team, Dean and I were displaying the classic symptoms of Seven-Year Itch. Our ideas about who and what Martin and Lewis were had begun to fray. For seven years, it had been enough for me to bounce around nightclub and theater stages like a crazy person while Dean smiled indulgently. Dean felt that still was enough. I didn’t.
I was approaching thirty. I wanted to grow as a comedian, as an actor. I had, as Shakespeare said, immortal longings in me. Was Chaplin my idol? You bet your ass he was. If you’re going to aim for the stars, why not pick the best? And the one thing that Charlie had—in spades—was something I’d barely tapped into: pathos.
Great comedy, in my mind, always goes hand in hand with great sadness: This is the grand Circle of Life, the mixture of laughter and tears. You can be funny without tapping into strong emotion, but the humor is more superficial. Funny without pathos is a pie in the face. And a pie in the face is funny, but I wanted more.
Dean didn’t agree. In his mind, what we did wasn’t broke, so why should we fix it? We were pulling in money by the bushel; why risk that by getting artistic?
Pathos was, to Dean Martin, the worst kind of flag-waving. Just keep ’em laughing, was his philosophy. Keep it cool and superficial. Audiences don’t want to think when they see us. They don’t want tears. If they want pathos, let them go to a Chaplin movie.
There was a skit we did on our TV show where I played a poor schnook who joins a friendship club. I tried desperately to make friends, but when everyone paired off to go get something to eat, I wound up alone, dancing with a mannequin. Dean hated that skit. He just kept saying, “Why don’t you cut out this sad stuff and just be funny?”
So in Dean’s eyes, I was committing a double sin, flag-waving and acing him out at the same time. The problem had been simmering, and now—encouraged by some of his friends—it was all coming out. Dean kept losing his temper at me and everyone else on the shoot, saying he’d had it with playing a stooge. He often showed up late for work: One afternoon he came in at three o’clock, did a single scene, then walked off the set, saying, “That’s all you’re gonna get from me.” Another morning, he came in an hour late, gave me a look that could kill, and said, “Anytime you want to call it quits, let me know.”
I tried to tease my way out of it. “But, Paul,” I said, “what would I ever do without you?”
“Fuck yourself, for starters.”
This all felt like a nightmare. Literally. I couldn’t sleep; I could barely eat. It was a schizophrenic existence: I loved hanging around with the circus people, I learned a ton from the Clyde Beatty clowns. I enjoyed shooting my scenes. But when the working day was over, that feeling of doom returned. My partner was drifting away from me. Or had he drifted away already? The uncertainty tapped into my childhood fear of being deserted. An icy look from Dean would turn me into a scared nine-year-old. My adult self knew how badly he was hurting, but the child in me could hijack my peace of mind in an instant.
And I was angry, too. It’s satisfying, in a negative way, to lash back when you’re being attacked. To think how right you are. But all the time I knew how dangerous this was, how unnecessary. One afternoon I summoned all my courage and knocked on Dean’s door at the hotel. He was wearing his golf clothes. His face froze when he saw me, and I knew that he was struggling to control his anger. He didn’t want to hate me. “Look, Jer, I’m headed out to the country club,” he said.
“We really have to talk, Paul.”
He sighed. “Why don’t you ride out with me.”
It was good luck, really, that he was on his way to play golf: It wouldn’t have been half as easy to sit down and hash it out face-to-face as it was to talk sitting side by side in his car. I began by telling him how right I thought he was.
“I know there’s less in this role than you deserve,” I said. “I believe