Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [8]
Paul D’Amato (everyone called him Skinny; he’d picked up the nickname in his teenage years and held on to it even after he filled out a bit) was a rough-and-tumble character with a good heart, a guy who stayed on the right side of some very influential people by minding his business. He was always suspected of being—as they say—a friend of the friends, but no one ever knew for sure. That was a big part of Skinny’s mystique: He kept you guessing. Still, his hand-tailored suits, Parisian silk ties, and custom-made shoes seemed like a big clue. With a little help from his Philadelphia pals, and along with a partner, Irvin “Wolfie” Wolf, Skinny ran the biggest nightclub in Atlantic City, in a yellow-brick-fronted building with a theater-style marquee on South Missouri Avenue, just a couple of blocks up from the Boardwalk. The marquee read “500 Café,” but most everyone knew it as the 500 Club, or the Fives, for short.
Inside were sixty tables, zebra-skin bar stools, an ever-present blue cloud of cigarette smoke, and an off-the-books gambling casino in the back room. Nightclub paradise. The Fives was where Abner Greshler had booked me that July, for the princely sum of a hundred fifty bucks a week, on a bill with the headliner, Jayne Manners, a busty blonde who told a few jokes and sang a few songs and wound up in the papers a lot, and a long-lashed tenor named Jack Randall.
A hundred fifty a week! It may not sound like much, but it was a 50 percent raise over what I’d been earning. And when you consider that a dollar in 1946 was worth about ten today, 150 per meant I could bring my bride and my almost-one-year-old Gary down for a real beach vacation, complete with a twelve-dollar-a-night room at the Princess Hotel, one block off the Boardwalk. And this, my friends, was paradise.
Except that there was trouble in paradise. Skinny, who micromanaged every detail of what went on in his club, from the precise proportion of water in his watered-down Scotch to the exact depth of the décolletage on Jayne Manners’s gown, hated Jack Randall with a passion. “Christ, what was I thinking when I booked this finocchio?” Skinny said. “He sings like his nuts are caught in his zipper.”
Nor did he seem any too pleased with me. “You’re running short, kid,” he told me as I came off stage to polite applause from maybe thirty people. “Throw in a couple more impressions, see if you can stretch it to twenty minutes.”
Then I watched Skinny’s face as he watched Randall sing. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
And then, one cool July morning, as a fog bank rolled in off the Atlantic, Jack Randall came down with laryngitis.
On one hand, Skinny was overjoyed. On the other, he was out one-third of his show. When I heard him bitching about it to Wolfie, I couldn’t help piping up. “Excuse me, Mr. D’Amato, Mr. Wolf,” I said. “But how about Dean Martin?”
Skinny winced. “Another crooner?” he said. “Christ, I need that like I need a third ball.”
“Oh no, Mr. D’Amato,” I said. “Dean doesn’t just sing. We worked together lots of times—he and I did all kinds of funny stuff together.”
I was tap-dancing, but fast, for two reasons: One, I was worried about my own spot on the show. I knew that Skinny’s partner, Wolfie— a sharp-eyed, heavyset fellow who would just as soon have your thumbs broken as look at you—was not my biggest fan. In fact, Skinny wasn’t my biggest fan, but at least he chuckled now and then at my record act. Wolfie didn’t chuckle. As I stood on stage in my fright wig, he kept shooting me looks that said he wouldn’t mind breaking me like a stick.
The child no one would claim.
But the other reason I was pushing for Dean was that I missed him. I was telling the truth about the funny stuff. We’d had fun together. You didn’t see that too often in show business. People tried hard, performed skillfully, but fun was for the audience.
Maybe Skinny read this in my eyes. After thinking a minute, he nodded. “Okay, okay, I’ll book your buddy,” he said. “But only