Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [79]
Poor Frank. Free from his contract, he sat out our next (and also next-to-last) picture, Pardners. But then Wallis somehow sweet-talked him into returning to direct our last film, a total debacle all too aptly titled Hollywood or Bust. (The “or” in the title should have been replaced by an “and.”) After Dean and I broke up, Tish and I made a half-dozen pictures together (The Geisha Boy, Rock-a-Bye-Baby , Cinderfella, It’s Only Money, Who’s Minding the Store, and The Disorderly Orderly). I continued to learn priceless lessons about film, and comedy, from him. But I think that the give-and-take of the movie business, and especially the stress of having to go up against people like Wallis, probably led to Frank’s much-too-early death, at age fifty-nine, in 1972.
Despite Wallis, and at the expense of Frank Tashlin’s nervous system, Artists and Models became what many regard as one of the best Martin and Lewis pictures. After the film wrapped, Dean and I took Dick Stabile, our twenty-six-man orchestra, and the rest of our staff and went on a two-week theatrical tour throughout the Midwest, then jumped east to the Boston Garden. We put all the pressure and contention and bitterness of the movie business behind us, and for seventeen charmed days in May of 1955, it felt just like old times....
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THAT LOVELY TRIP REMINDS ME OF ANOTHER ONE: AT THE precise midpoint of our ten years together, in July of 1951, we played Grossinger’s in the Catskill Mountains.
Now, that might not sound so strange to you, but in 1951, the likelihood of such an engagement was not even a long-shot bet—no bookie would have taken your action.
Martin and Lewis in the Borscht Belt, even in the heyday of the Borscht Belt? Lewis, yes. Martin, no way!
By that summer, we had turned down Grossinger’s for three years straight, and we planned to keep turning them down. We always had something else going on, and the fit didn’t feel right.
But Paul Grossinger was a young man who didn’t know how to take “No” for an answer. He felt—no, he knew—that everything has a price. That was Paul’s way of thinking, and he was a nice, warm, and friendly man, and personally, I hoped we could do it just on account of his being a terrific guy.
So Paul’s agent called ours: “We want Martin and Lewis for an exclusive one-night show at Grossinger’s.” (Exclusive meaning that we could not play any other hotel up that way—as if we’d finish that show and dash off to Kutsher’s!) The agent went on to say, “We know how many times they’ve turned us down since 1948. They said no to $25,000 and no to $50,000, and they said no to $75,000! We now feel we have to go the last mile and make them an offer of $100,000 for the night.”
Our representative said, “Let me call you back.”
At this point, I, in my house in Las Vegas, whip out my handy inflation calculator and note that $100,000 in 1951 translates to approximately $733,462.38 in today’s dollars. Approximately.
These were not the kind of numbers offered by agents over the phone. Our representative hung up and got me at my office at Paramount. I said, “But we turned them down each time because we were either doing a film or were otherwise unavailable.”
“You know that, I know that, Dean knows that. But they don’t know that.”
I said, “Let me talk to Dean.”
I ran out of my office to Dean’s dressing room, just across the way. He was smoking a Camel, watching a rerun of some old movie, and waiting for Artie, the barber, to come and give him a haircut. I walked over and turned the set off.
“Hey, they were just about to show the murderer!” Dean yelled, getting out of his chair to turn the TV back on.
“Don’t bother!” I said. “I saw it! It was Henry Fonda.”
(Note: Henry Fonda never played a murderer in his entire career.)
“What