Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [80]
“Because,” I whispered, “Grossinger’s wants to give us one hundred thousand dollars for one show. One night. The most money ever paid to anyone in the history of show business.... Including Frank, Bing, Caruso, and Mario Lanza.”
For one of the few times I can remember, Dean was hooked. “Tell me you’re joking,” he said. “Tell me I can’t really pick up fifty grand for doing one performance!”
“I’m telling you you can pick up a hundred grand for that one show, but I get half. So work it any way you want—just tell me to okay it!”
He jumped onto his couch and bounced up a couple of feet in the air. “What the hell are you still doing here?” he yelled. “Go and say yes!”
A Saturday night in the Catskill Mountains in the early 1950s was a lot like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. There was no other hotel like Grossinger’s. The dining room fed 1,600 people at a time (with two sittings, like a cruise ship), at big round tables seating twelve. Before that there were cocktails. There was milling, there was shmoozing, there was kvelling and yelling. There was tummling, by busboys who would grow up to be comedy headliners. In short, Jewish pandemonium! And tonight the pandemonium was compounded by our presence at Paul Grossinger’s table.
Watching Dean on this turf was priceless. All the little old ladies would come to the table and just flat-out kiss him on the face, rub his hair, pinch his cheeks.
And Dean was loving it. He was loving it, but I also recall that he was hungry, and anxious to get into the half-grapefruit already sitting in front of him, with a little American flag stuck in the center. There were also pickles and horseradish and rye bread—but no butter. Kosher is kosher. Dean picked up a slice of bread and scanned the entire table for butter. No one would say anything, so I told him: “Butter you get here for breakfast and maybe lunch, but not for a meat meal!”
Dean shouted, “Then I’ll eat what I need to eat to get some butter!” I glanced over at Paul Grossinger, who gave me a look as if to say, “No way!”
I crept around the table, knelt by Dean, and whispered the ground rules to him. “We just traveled three thousand miles,” he said. “You couldn’t tell me to buy butter?”
“And no milk,” I tell him. “And no cream.”
“So why do the Jews hate cows?”
Now we move forward four years to the spring of 1955. You may remember a friend of mine named Charlie Brown—the man, not the cartoon. Charlie and his wife Lillian were hotelkeepers who let me busboy and bunk at the Arthur, their Lakewood, New Jersey, resort, when I was just starting out. I had sweated through the earliest performances of my record act on their stage. In the interim, Charlie and Lily had moved their establishment to the Catskills, and now Brown’s, in Loch Sheldrake, New York, was one of the important hotels of the Jewish Alps.
So when Uncle Charlie called me and asked if Brown’s could host a gala premiere, in early June, for the thirteenth and latest Martin and Lewis movie, You’re Never Too Young, I was absolutely thrilled. Charlie was offering to pay for everything—transportation, accommodations, food, cocktail parties, and press receptions. He was even offering to permanently dedicate Brown’s newly constructed theater, the site of the proposed premiere, to Martin and Lewis, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis Playhouse! It was irresistible.... I thought back to my early days at the Arthur Hotel in Lakewood, perspiring as I lip-synched to Frank Sinatra and Danny Kaye, then imagined myself returning to the Browns, a celebrity.
When I brought up the idea at a meeting of our production company, everyone there—Hal Wallis; director Norman Taurog; Paul Jones, line producer for York Productions, the company Dean and I had started; the Paramount head of publicity; and Jack Keller—found it equally irresistible. Wallis, in particular, was ecstatic at the idea of Charlie’s footing the entire bill. “Terrific deal!” he said. “Can’t go wrong! This oughta save us