Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [91]
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
IN THE MID-FIFTIES, DON MCGUIRE, WHO’D WRITTEN THE screenplay for Three Ring Circus, told me the legend of Damon and Pythias, friends so close that when Pythias was sentenced to death, Damon was willing to pledge his life as bail. That story fascinated me, reminding me of my friendship with Dean at the height of our partnership.
I asked Don to write a screenplay based on the legend, and he came up with what I thought was a terrific story: I would play a not-too-bright street kid named Sidney Pythias who gets mistaken for a criminal, and Dean would play Mike Damon, a cop who befriends and protects Sidney.
But when Dean saw the script, he was furious. “Are you saying that I play a cop in this thing?”
“That’s right,” I told him.
“In a uniform?”
“Of course.”
“No,” he said. “All my life, I ran from cops who wore those goddamn uniforms. I won’t play one. That’s low class to me.”
I think Dean somehow feared that everyone in Steubenville would feel betrayed if he played a cop. But by now, I couldn’t see beyond my exasperation. “Then we’ll have to get somebody else,” I said.
“Start looking.”
That was the last straw. Both Dean and I had built up such backlogs of fury that, short of going to see a couples counselor—something not too many comedy teams would have thought about in 1956—we had no recourse but to vent at each other.
Which meant we had no recourse.
Dean, as we know, didn’t vent. As for me, my partner loomed so large in my psyche that the idea of giving him both barrels was simply unthinkable.
Others around us got the brunt of our anger.
The two of us had remained civil during the shooting of Pardners , but mainly because that picture was for York Productions, our own company. Now we were about to start work on our sixteenth film, Hollywood or Bust, with Hal Wallis producing (and Frank Tashlin directing), and neither one of us was about to treat Wallis or his movie with kid gloves.
I was (by far) the worse offender. Dean’s modus operandi was distance. Me, I’d stick around and get right in people’s faces. Especially if they were people I could push around. It’s not a pretty thing to admit, but I was a bully in those days. And on the shoot of Hollywood or Bust, I’ll be the first one to tell you, I was officially off the rails.
My emotions were all over the place: One minute I’d be mad as hell at my partner, the next I’d be hoping against hope for a reconciliation. The result was that I paid almost no attention to what I was doing. I barely bothered to learn my lines. I came up with unfunny ad libs that threw off the rhythm and the schedule of the shoot. After every take, I’d pace around the set grumbling, “That scene is shit”—when I was the one who had messed it up. I constantly picked fights: with Wallis, with most of the cast and crew.
Except Dean.
I see now that he was the one I was really trying to get to, but Dean was not about to let anyone, even me—especially me—get to him.
And (of course) the cooler he acted, the madder it made me.
I had one brief scene with Slapsy Maxie Rosenbloom, the former prizefighter and Hollywood character who had given his name to the L.A. nightclub. The scene should have taken half a morning; I made it last three days, hitting Wallis where it hurt him most: the checkbook. I sprinkled obscenities into every take; I made fun of Maxie for being punch-drunk. He had the good grace not to put my lights out.
But the person who took most of the heat from me was poor Frank Tashlin. I was doing my level best to make Wallis’s life miserable, but he didn’t have to be on the set every day. Tish did. For six weeks I gave him crap, challenging his directions like a surly adolescent. Astonishingly, Frank took it all in stride. It was everyone else on the production who got upset. And after a while, it didn’t matter that Tish could stay cool. His cast and crew were suffering, and that meant Frank had