Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [94]
Meanwhile, our agents went to the suits at NBC, who also set our ransom high. They would sign with us as individuals rather than a team, but at $5 million a year rather than $7.5 million. We would then owe the network thirty-four TV specials over the next five years, seventeen from each of us as a solo act.
A solo act. What on earth would that be?
With so many agents, lawyers, producers, and studio and network executives involved, it didn’t take long for the news to leak to the press. On June 18, it was formally announced: Martin and Lewis were over.
The following day, we wrapped Hollywood or Bust. It’s the single one of my movies that I’ve never seen, and never will.
Incredibly, we still had uncancellable obligations. We both had committed to attending the premiere of Pardners in Atlantic City at the end of June, and then, for old times’ sake (and for Skinny D’Amato, who was in financial trouble), we were going to put our feelings on hold and do ten nights at the 500 Club.
Imagine—ten nights in Atlantic City with a partner I wasn’t speaking to. Ten years after our shining beginning: same place, same time of year. Somehow we made it through those twenty shows, persuading the audiences to laugh without ever once exchanging a warm remark, a reminiscence—anything—when we were offstage. At one point, the Today Show interviewed us, live, at the Club. There’s a kinescope of that segment, and it’s painful to see: Dean and I can hardly bear to look at each other.
We stayed at the Ritz-Carlton. Naturally. Different suites, different floors. Naturally. I don’t recall ever giving a thought to the Princess Hotel, if it was even still in business at that point.
In early July, we did a twenty-one-hour muscular dystrophy telethon, broadcast from Carnegie Hall by a local New York TV station. It was our final television appearance together. More songs, dancing, comedy. More silence between us.
And then the Copa.
In time-honored Copa tradition, we opened on a Thursday night—July 12, 1956. We would do three shows a night, seven nights a week, for a total of thirteen days, winding up on July 24, our tenth anniversary as a team.
We played to the same New York audiences that had always come to see us at the Copa, except now there was an extra electricity in the air, a morbid curiosity: “Are they really going to split up?” When Dean accidentally stepped on my foot during some onstage horsing around, fracturing two of my toes, I let out a yell louder than an air-raid siren, and the Freudian-minded New York press had a field day.
“Was that really an accident?” somebody asked. “Or has the feud turned physical?”
“Purely an accident,” I said (after counting to ten). “Next question.”
And since everyone in New York takes a special pride in being in the know, the interest around those Copa shows built as the days passed toward our last performance together, ever. The club stopped taking reservations for the last three Martin and Lewis shows a week before we opened.
During that time, friends had told me the gossip going around Manhattan, in spite of the city’s worldly facade, was touchingly hopeful. Otherwise sophisticated people just didn’t want to believe that the two of us were really going to break up. “Are they crazy? Look at the money they’re making.” And “How would they get along without one another?”
One night during that week, the National Children’s Cancer Society held a benefit at the Versailles, a nightclub in the East Fifties, and Dean and I were invited to appear, between shows at the Copa, to do a brief performance. It was the last thing either of us felt like doing, but where children and cancer are concerned, how can you say no? So we went, and we acquitted ourselves like pros.
The comedian Joey Adams was the master of ceremonies. After we did a couple of numbers, he came out to take us off the stage. But then, instead of going on with the rest of the show, Joey called, over the applause, “Hey! You guys come on back out here for just a minute!”
And so we did—Dean on Joey’s right side and I on his left. Joey threw