Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [93]
“Jerry, what happened to you?”
I was in a haze of painkillers. “Nothing,” I told him. “Getting a tan.”
He pushed his face in closer to mine. “Do you know what you’re doing to your mother?”
Ten days later, I was back at work, feeling like a different man. My frightening episode had made me realize that something simply had to change between Dean and me: We couldn’t go on this way. So one afternoon on the lot, I took a deep breath and walked right up to him.
“I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Talk.”
“You know, it’s a hell of a thing,” I said. “All I can think of is that what we do is not very important. Any two guys could have done it. But even the best of them wouldn’t have had what made us as big as we are.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Well, I think it’s the love that we had—that we still have—for each other.”
He half-closed his eyes, gazing downward for what felt like a long time. Then he looked me square in the face. “You can talk about love all you want,” Dean said. “To me, you’re nothing but a fucking dollar sign.”
Put it in context. He was as hurt as I was that the partnership was coming to an end. The writing was on the wall, the ink was dry. Martin and Lewis were going to be no more.
So Dean needed to lash out. He was furious because I couldn’t fix it, and at the same time, he didn’t want it fixed. People around him were saying, “Get on with it; you don’t need him; you’ll be better without him.”
And as hurt as I was—and believe me, Dean couldn’t have hurt me any worse if he’d kicked me in the nuts—I too needed to take my work somewhere new, and I had to go there by myself. Terrifying.
But at the time, all I knew was that my heart was broken.
On June 7, Dean had a party for his thirty-ninth birthday at L’Escoffier, a fancy restaurant on the eighth floor of the new Beverly Hilton hotel. Patti and I were not invited. On the fifteenth, Paramount held a preview of Pardners at a ranch north of Los Angeles: studio executives, publicity people, two hundred reporters, and me. No Dean. We waited and waited; finally, two hours late, he phoned in sick.
I’d like to tell you I suffered these injuries nobly, except it isn’t true. Yes, I was heartsick, but I was also enraged. I went to Lew Wasserman and told him I wanted to cancel all our contracts, to formally dissolve Martin and Lewis.
I knew Warner Brothers had asked Dean to star opposite Doris Day in the movie version of The Pajama Game. I wanted to go ahead solo, at Paramount, with the Damon and Pythias project.
Lew responded like the master agent he was: cautiously. Still speaking of Dean and me as a team, he said, “Here’s your potential for the next year and a half: eleven million—apiece.” I tuned out while he detailed movie, television, nightclub, and concert deals. Then there was a silence, and I tuned back in to see Lew staring at me through his big horn-rimmed glasses. “Good heavens, Jerry, compromise. What in the world is perfect?”
But I knew I couldn’t live with it, even though nothing is simple when a lot of people and money are involved. Y. Frank Freeman called Dean and me to a meeting at Paramount with Wallis and him. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Thank God for Mr. Freeman’s warmth and good manners. If he hadn’t been there, the three of us might have killed one another. Y. Frank told us that Paramount president Barney Balaban was ready to release us from our contract. Hal Wallis, on the other hand, was ready for no such thing.
Our agreement with Wallis stipulated that we work as a team no matter who was producing the picture, and he was adamant we abide by the contract. Y. Frank reasoned with him. “For heaven’s sake, Hal,” he said. “These boys both want to stretch their wings. Can you blame them?”
Amazingly, Wallis gave in—a little. He said he’d let us do one picture apart if we did three more for him as a team. If we wanted to get out of that, he told us, it would cost us. Big: a million and a half dollars, plus ten percent of the money we’d earned on our last two