Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [75]
She said it with a slight note of sadness, but it was all Dean and I could do to keep the grins off our faces. We were seated in the center of this very open restaurant, with all eyes on ... guess who? She might as well have been having dinner with Price and Waterhouse! We ordered drinks and made lots of small talk. At one point, Marilyn teased: “Dean, don’t you think you’d make a perfect leading man for one of my films?”
Dean laughed and said, “Well, you know, every good screen team has a dog!”
I spoke right up in the Idiot’s voice: “I will not be a dog for anybody!”
Marilyn laughed, the captains laughed, the waiters laughed. And that’s what we did the whole night—laughed and laughed.
How amazing it is to think that it was only seven years after that night—both a short time and a lifetime—that Dean was cast as Marilyn’s love interest in Something’s Got to Give, for 20th Century Fox. By that time, poor Marilyn was falling apart. She was fired from the picture and, not long afterward, took her life. Christ, what a loss!
In that same eventful fall of ’54, Frank Sinatra invited Dean and me to visit the set of his latest movie, The Man with the Golden Arm. Based on the novel of the same name by Nelson Algren, the film is a harrowing story of a former card dealer and heroin addict named Frankie Machine struggling to get his act together after he’s released from prison. Frank played Frankie, and his performance was, I think, his greatest, even more spectacular than the work he’d done in From Here to Eternity two years earlier.
The Man with the Golden Arm was being shot at the Goldwyn Studios, and the man in charge was Otto Preminger, the director from hell! He was good, but nasty to actors. The fact that I never worked with him probably added twenty years to my life.
Frank introduced us to Preminger when we walked onto the set, and the little director was quite cordial—he even told us that he’d caught our show at Slapsy Maxie’s and thought it was the best he had ever seen in a nightclub. We thanked him and stayed out of the way.
They were shooting a scene they’d rehearsed all morning—the climax of the movie, in which Frankie, who has slid back into addiction, goes through heroin withdrawal. Everyone was a little anxious, as people get when a big scene is about to explode. The set got extremely quiet. Prop men moved materials into place. The cinematographer checked last-minute light. Preminger called the roll, then cried, “Action!”
In the scene, Frank was in the corner of his bedroom, screaming at the top of his lungs as he underwent his horrific ordeal. Dean and I were standing directly beside the camera, and as close as we were, and as well as we knew that it was just a movie, we both had gooseflesh watching Frank’s incredible performance. It ran for the better part of four minutes, and was simply explosive. He hit every beat and every nuance. Then Preminger yelled “Cut!” and Frank got up off the floor and lit a cigarette. He walked toward the director to see how he liked it. “That was great, Frank,” Preminger said, “but we need one more take!”
Frank whirled around. “Another take?” he said. “For what, if that one was so good?”
I’m sure Preminger wasn’t surprised. Frank’s approach to a film never varied: He learned his dialogue, knew every scene by heart, rehearsed as much as the director wanted (though Preminger was the first filmmaker Frank ever rehearsed happily for), and was ready for the camera. He knew that any extra takes would lose spontaneity, and he was dead right. That’s why he was so good in everything he ever filmed. “One take and print it!” was his motto. It made directors a little testy, because it meant the actor was in charge, and the one thing that directors can’t stand is losing control. Frank walked back to his dressing room, calling Dean and me to follow, and we did.
Frank poured himself a tumbler of Jack Daniel’s, which he needed after that scene. We couldn’t stop telling him what a great job he’d done and how strongly it had affected us. “I knew it was perfect