Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [92]
One afternoon, Frank reached his limit. I was starting to disagree, loudly, about a scene we were about to shoot, when he stopped the production. He called the crew around, then pointed his finger at me.
“I want you off the set,” he said.
“You what?”
“I mean it, Jerry. Off! You’re a discourteous, obnoxious prick—an embarrassment to me and a disgrace to the profession.”
Everybody on that sound stage was staring at me. I blushed to the roots of my hair. “Hey, Tish, whoa—calm down. When did you get the right—”
“Jerry, as director of this picture, I order you to leave. Go. Get your ass out of here and don’t come back.”
That walk off the set and out to my car was the longest of my life. I drove home in a daze, lay on a couch in my den for hours, staring at the ceiling, wet-cheeked with self-pity, trying to figure out how I’d gotten myself into this mess.
That night I called Tish at home. He wouldn’t come to the phone. I kept calling back. At last he picked up. “Yes, what is it?”
“Tish, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I was wrong. All I ask is, please, let me come back.”
He thought about it for a moment. “Will you behave?”
I gave him my solemn promise that I would.
“Okay,” he said. “Report to work in the morning. The shoot is at seven o’clock.”
“I’ll be there at six. And Tish... thanks.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know, maybe for saving my life.”
I behaved. I did whatever Tish told me. The set calmed down, and the cast and crew stopped looking miserable. What didn’t change was the relationship between Dean and me. It had ended. Outside of the lines we spoke to each other in the script, we weren’t talking at all. Just try doing comedy with someone when you’re not on speaking terms. As the two of us passed each other on the sound stage, or on the way to our cars after work, our eyes never met. Oh, we were cool. Tough and manly.
For Dean, this was business as usual. Whatever mixed feelings he had for me, his habit of not letting his emotions show—even to himself—kept him from feeling his own pain, which I have to believe was on a level with my own.
And while I don’t want to glorify my own anguish, I really was suffering. My partner’s aloofness (and the effort of pretending to be cool, myself) hurt so much it affected me physically.
On Friday night, May 18, I was toastmaster at a Screen Actors Guild dinner for Jean Hersholt, the actor turned humanitarian, who was dying of cancer. Between the gravity of the occasion and the stress in my own life, I was able to strike the right note. The dinner badly needed laughs— and not from the Idiot, but the thirty-year-old Jerry Lewis. I respected Mr. Hersholt, and the audience approved.
Afterward, as I walked out to my car, I was struck by a wave of intense nausea. I took a deep breath and it passed. Probably just the rubber roast beef I’d eaten.
But when I walked in the door, Patti looked alarmed. “What’s wrong? You’re as pale as a ghost.”
I shrugged it off, but all at once my legs turned to rubber. I sat down, breathing hard. My chest hurt like a son of a bitch.
“I’m calling Dr. Levy,” Patti said.
An ambulance took me to Mount Sinai Hospital, where my physician, Dr. Marvin Levy, ran a battery of tests and found that the heart attack he’d feared was in fact just an arrhythmia. Dr. Levy, who knew me—and what was going on in my life—very well, said that what I’d suffered was probably a reaction to all the fury I was holding inside.
He looked me in the eye. “I’m gonna write you a prescription,” he told me. “Do a single.”
The only sound under the oxygen tent was the hypnotic hiss of the life-giving pump. The tent itself was made of thin plastic, translucent but not transparent, and when I saw a shadow flicker across the surface, I knew someone had come into the room, but I had no idea who it was.
Could it be—the wild fantasy actually crossed my mind for a second—my partner?
The tent had a flap in it so the doctors could check my vital signs or