Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [77]
I looked him in the eye. “If you trust my instinct,” I said, “you’ll change your plans.”
He pursed his lips, thought a second, and said, “All right, I’ll humor you.”
Humor? I thought. Where will he get it?
As we were riding to the theater in the limo, I was suddenly struck by a thought: What if Carol Haney got better, and the girl I saw will never be heard from again? I was ready for the Intensive Care Unit until we got to the theater and picked up our tickets at the box office, where the sign said:
In Tonight’s Performance, Miss Carol Haney’s Role Will Be Played by Miss Shirley MacLaine
I breathed a sigh of relief, and in we went.
At eleven P.M., Hal Wallis and I were on our feet along with the other 1,700 people in the St. James Theater. I thought Shirley had been terrific at the matinee—but that night she simply exploded on that stage. Not long afterward, Wallis gave her a screen test, then signed her to a contract, and my partner and I had a leading lady for Artists and Models, a lady who would go on to make a great career for herself, and whose path would cross again with Dean’s.
Often, others see us with the sharpest eyes. Then again, even the sharpest eyes can miss the whole truth. There’s a series of wonderfully vivid verbal snapshots in Shirley MacLaine’s Hollywood memoir, My Lucky Stars, of my partner and me during the shooting of Artists and Models. Shirley remembers what look like good times: The two of us going wild in the Paramount commissary, throwing food as Marlene Dietrich and Anna Magnani watch in horror, smearing butter all over the suit of production chief Y. Frank Freeman as Y. Frank, the courtliest of Southern gentlemen, sits in discreet shock (his real shock was yet to come). She recalls us racing golf carts around the studio lot, honking horns; jumping into strangers’ cars and screaming that we’re being kidnapped. She remembers the way Dean used to light a Camel with one of his gold cigarette lighters, blow out the flame, and throw the lighter out the window. These were all hijinks we’d been pulling for years, but Shirley was young and admiring, and witnessing them for the first time. It wouldn’t take her long to see the strain beneath the jolly surface.
So we had a leading lady; we also had a new director. The last half-dozen of our films, with the exception of Three Ring Circus, had all been under the watch of Norman Taurog or George Marshall. I had the utmost respect for Norman and George, but Wallis’s new discovery, Frank Tashlin, was a man I would come to revere.
Frank—or Tish, as I renamed him—started out as a newspaper cartoonist, then did some animation directing at Warner Brothers and other studios. A side job writing gags for Hal Roach’s low-budget comedies led to more gag-writing for live-action pictures (including a couple of the Marx Brothers’ and Bob Hope’s), then screenwriting, then directing. By the mid-1950s, Tish was a full-fledged movie director—the only important director ever to make the transition from animation to live action. But his background in cartoons always gave him a priceless instinct for outrageous comedy. (They said about him that he directed his cartoons like live-action comedies and his live-action comedies like cartoons.) He had an incomparable mind for the kind of humor that was right up our alley.
Unfortunately, Hal Wallis was standing halfway down the alley with a blackjack in his hand.
Wallis initially hired Tashlin not because Tish was a great comedic director but because Artists and Models was a story about comic books and cartoons. Hal Wallis was always a cut-and-dried fellow, and it was as cut-and-dried as that. Remember, Wallis knew as much about comedy as he did about atomic energy. But then, Hollywood deals always start with a smile and a handshake and a good deal of blindness about what’s going to happen next. I think that Tish never knew precisely what he was getting into.
With Ben Hogan. They won’t let me mark my ball.
Frank and I liked each other right away. He was a big bruiser