Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [99]
“As early as 1949, things began to be different,” I said in the piece. “Dean divorced Betty and married his second wife, Jeanne, and suddenly our families weren’t friendly anymore. As time went on, I grew to believe that Dean wasn’t the strong, self-reliant character I thought he was, but, if anything, felt even more insecure than I. We both discovered that we were completely different in temperament and in our outlook. I don’t blame Dean ... it probably developed out of his tough childhood—but he was never as warm and outgoing as I hoped he’d be.”
That was definitely the hurt talking. I didn’t feel I was being unfair, but Dean hit the roof. Apparently, my mentioning Jeannie had set him off. “Jerry was jealous of Jeanne,” he told a reporter. And: “I respect other wives. I could talk about Patti and Jerry knows it, but I wouldn’t.”
If my hurt could talk, so could Dean’s. At the end of January, a new NBC TV show featured live coverage of a party at the Beverly Hilton. Dean was there, he’d had a couple of drinks, and the enterprising interviewer, seeing an opportunity to further stir things up between us, ambushed him. Dean finally vented some of his own feelings, saying some not very complimentary things about me and my artistic aspirations, and the press—having set him up for the fall—hit him hard for it afterward.
And then Ten Thousand Bedrooms came out.
The critics really killed Dean this time, and none more enthusiastically than his old nemesis at the New York Times, Bosley Crowther. “More than a couple of vacancies are clearly apparent in this musical film,” he wrote. “One is the emptiness alongside of Dean Martin, who plays the lead without his old partner, Jerry Lewis, and that’s some emptiness indeed. Mr. Martin is a personable actor with a nice enough singing voice, but he’s just another nice-looking crooner without his comical pal. Together the two made a mutually complementary team. Apart, Mr. Martin is a fellow with little humor and a modicum of charm.”
On one hand, this was just one more nasty critic giving Dean the same crap the critics always had given him, but this time Crowther was trying to finish Dean off. And unfortunately, he was right about the movie itself, which simply wasn’t very good.
So 1957, the year Dean turned forty, was a tough one for him. They loved him at the Copa Room at the Sands, where he’d just signed a five-year contract. He would always have a home in Vegas. But that was only a few weeks out of the year. He had to let the rest of the country know who Dean Martin really was.
Still, I want to tell you something about who Dean really was. One night while he was on stage at a club in Pittsburgh, a rowdy fan yelled out something derogatory about me and Dean stopped the show. “Sir,” he said, “I want you to know that even though we’ve broken up, I have the greatest respect for Jerry.”
It put that audience in the palm of his hand. Almost fifty years later, it puts me in the palm of his hand, too. There he was, getting slammed by the critics—and still taking the high road.
That July I played ten nights, as a single, at the 500 Club. Skinny D’Amato’s financial woes had worsened, and I wanted to do what I could for him. (Frank and Sammy, too, would both step in and help him out that summer.) But there I was again: July in Atlantic City—except that this time I was alone. It was a strange feeling. And strangest of all was how small and seedy Skinny’s club looked to me now that I’d had a taste of the best. It seemed frozen in the past. But I kept my head in the right place, played my ten nights, and moved on.
I was on a kind of furious tear, a single-minded quest to become the King of Show Business, and over the next decade, to the degree that I succeeded, it was at great cost to myself and those close to me.
Then, at the end of 1957, Dean’s solo career began to turn around. He would succeed beyond his wildest dreams.
Ed Simmons, who with Norman Lear had cowritten The Colgate Comedy Hour for us,