Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [97]
My first thought, when I heard about his new project, was to hope that the film would be great for him. If that sounds saintly, let me correct you. It was actually quite selfish. My reasoning was as follows: If Dean falls on his ass, I will have guilt for the rest of my life, because I could have prevented it.
How? Because the day that we had our big conclave at Paramount with Y. Frank Freeman and Hal Wallis, Dean had been willing to go on with the act. I was the one who pushed the breakup.
And now the word on the street in Hollywood—and Hollywood is a town where the word on the street always matters—was that I would do fine as a comic, director, and producer, but Dean was probably washed up. If you believed what the critics wrote, Dean was just a pretty good actor with a pleasant singing voice, period. If you believed the gossip, my ex-partner would fade gently into the sunset.
Regardless of the press, I was panicked: I felt incredibly alone and desperate. The fact that everyone around me seemed sure that I’d land on my feet made things worse. I didn’t know what the fuck I was going to do.
It’s hard to explain. Intellectually, I knew all the things I could do— knew where my talents and ambitions could take me. But in those midsummer weeks in 1956, I was unable to put one foot in front of the other with any confidence. I was completely unnerved to be alone, and the Podell episode hadn’t done wonders for my peace of mind.
“You need a rest,” Patti told me. “Let’s go to the desert.”
It sounded good to me. So we headed off to Vegas, along with Jack Keller and his wife Emma, for a little fun and sun at the Sands. For a blessed few days I pretended to be someone else—someone without a care in the world. We played blackjack, we went to shows, we lay in the sun. For four days I totally stopped thinking about my career.
I love being in the middle.
And it worked—I began to smile again. Sure, I knew that this was just a pause in the action, that the pressures would return. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t thinking about tomorrow.
On Monday, August 6, I was packing to go back home, when the phone rang. It was Sid Luft, Judy Garland’s husband and manager.
“What’s up, Sid?” I asked.
“Jerry, Judy’s got a strep throat. She can’t sing. Is there any way you could go on for her tonight at the Frontier?”
“Hey, I’d love to, Sid, but I’m practically on a plane—”
Sid Luft was a real charmer: He could have sold Popsicles to Eskimos. “We’re in trouble, Jerry. You can postpone the flight. Come on, kid, for old times’ sake.”
And that’s how I found myself on stage at the Frontier Hotel, in front of a thousand people who were very much expecting someone else, wearing the one dark-blue suit I’d brought with me and a pair of black socks I’d borrowed from Jack Keller. Judy was sitting in a chair at stage left, and once the audience laughed at my first remark—“I don’t look much like Judy, do I?”—my nerves settled and I found my groove. I did thirty-five or forty minutes of silly mischief, playing to her, because that’s what I sensed the crowd wanted. There were a lot of complicated feelings in the house that night: The breakup was still a fresh wound, and the audience felt for me; they had also come out to see Judy Garland—but they were getting to see her, if not hear her, and they were also getting a surprise, a guy who hadn’t done a single in ten years.
Yes, I’d played Y. Frank Freeman’s benefit at the Shrine Auditorium alone, but that had been just fifteen minutes of ad lib. This was a full act, and unless you’re a performer, you’ll never understand what it feels like to go out in front of a big audience on a moment’s notice to charm them for the better part of an hour. But somehow, it worked. The crowd at the Frontier loved the interplay between Judy and me (with those expressive features of hers, she could do more without saying a word than