Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [81]
Then I told Dean.
It was the following morning, and my partner did not look pleased. In fact, he gave me such a glare that the little hairs rose on the back of my neck. Suddenly, all the ill will that we’d sidestepped for months came flooding back. “You should have consulted me first,” Dean said.
I fought back feelings of panic—alone, he’s going to leave me all alone. But I could always act as tough as anyone, even Dean. “I’m consulting you now,” I told him. “Give me the word and we’ll do it. If not, we won’t.”
He took a long, slow breath. “Actually, Jerry, I really don’t care where we hold it.”
I took this to be tacit approval. (We hear what we want to hear.) And so I got right on the phone with Uncle Charlie, who went straight to work on the extensive preparations for the big event.
The night before our fifty-plus-person party was to get on the east-bound Super Chief, there was a knock on my office door at Paramount. It was Mack Gray.
Mack, aka Maxie Greenberg, was a onetime prizefighter who had worked as George Raft’s man Friday for twenty years. He’d been very much present at Raft’s pool party on our first night in Hollywood. When Raft couldn’t afford to keep him on anymore, Gray went to work in the exact same capacity for Dean. I always had a full staff buzzing around me; Dean mostly just had Mack. Mack was a gofer. If Dean needed a pack of cigarettes, or a girl driven home at seven A.M., Mack was his guy. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but I liked him. Thought I did, anyway.
Now he was staring at me with that sad tough-guy’s face. “Your partner isn’t making the trip,” he said.
“Are you putting me on?” I said.
“Look, Jerry, I’m relaying this straight from Dean’s mouth. He said he’s tired. He’s going to take Jeanne on a trip to Hawaii. What else can I tell you?”
I felt like somebody had kicked me in the stomach. At the same time, some part of me couldn’t help but marvel at how Dean had once again avoided confrontation by sending Mack. He had also stuck it to me by bailing at the very last minute. It was all too symbolic—my partner and I were headed thousands of miles in opposite directions. I got on the train the next morning with my family and the rest of our large party and traveled east in a miserable rage, unable to explain my despair even to my nearest and dearest.
Meanwhile, before heading to Hawaii, Dean sat down with syndicated columnist Earl Wilson and fired another couple of shots across my bow: “I want a little TV show of my own, where I can sing more than two songs in an hour,” he told Wilson. “I’m about ten years older than the boy. He wants to direct. He loves work. So maybe he can direct and I can sing.”
Then Wilson asked him why he hadn’t gone east with me. “Outside of back east,” Dean said, “who knows about the Catskills?”
A trickle of blood had first leaked into the water when we had our troubles on Three Ring Circus, but the press was slightly more discreet in those days, and then the story of Martin and Lewis’s troubles died down.
Now, however, it was back again in full force, and there was a crowd of hungry reporters waiting for me when I got off the train at Penn Station on June 9. I was completely unprepared for their questions.
“Where’s Dean?” “Why didn’t your partner make the trip?” “Are you feuding?”
I must have looked like a man on his way to the gallows. “No comment” was all I came up with.
“Then where is he? Can you comment on that?”
“No. You’ll have to ask him.”
They were all yelling at once. “Have a heart! C’mon, Jerry, you’re not helping us!”
“If I commented, it wouldn’t help me.”
The drive north to the Catskills was more miserable with each passing mile. Route 17 was plastered with billboards announcing the appearance of Martin and Lewis at Brown’s Hotel. And when we pulled into the driveway of the resort, there were Uncle Charlie and Aunt Lil standing on the big front porch, beaming out into the light rain.
I was moved; I was terrified; I was mortified. I gripped Patti’s hand for dear life. “Momma, what am I going to tell