Jerry Lewis: In Memoriam

By Ed Garea

I’ve never known anyone who was neutral when it came to Jerry Lewis. One either loved him or hated him; there was no middle ground for a man who, over the years, had become a household name. 

Lewis died at his home in Las Vegas August 20 at the age of 91.

Born Jerome Levitch on March 16, 1926, into a family of entertainers, he began performing at the age of 5 with his parents. Father Daniel was a song-and-dance man and mother Rae (nee Rachel Brodsky) played piano for a radio station when not accompanying her husband. They played in vaudeville and at various resorts under the names of Danny and Rae Lewis. Because they were often on the road, young Jerry was often left in the care of Rae’s mother. In his autobiography, Jerry Lewis: In Person, he attributed his aspiration and need to be on stage to the loneliness brought on by his parents’ frequent and long absences. 

When it came to school he was indifferent, more interested in performing in school shows than in his classes. When his parents landed a gig at the Hotel Arthur in Lakewood, N.J., in the winter of 1938-39, they took their son along. Left to his own devices when his parents were rehearsing or performing, formed a comedy act with the daughter of the hotel’s owners in which they exaggeratedly mimed the lyrics to popular songs.   

Now that he was making a living in the world of entertainment, he took the professional name of Joey Lewis. In his autobiography he said he changed his first name to Jerry in order to avoid any confusion with the established stand-up comedian Joe E. Lewis and boxer Joe Louis. Whatever interest he had left in school vanished and at the age of 16 he dropped out of the 10th grade. He began performing his lip-synching act as a solo, first at movie theaters between shows and later in vaudeville and the lower echelon of burlesque clubs. He took notice of his fellow comics and began to add bits of physical comedy to the exaggerations he already employed in his act, including mimicking various musical instruments in addition to lip-synching.  

Classified 4-F by the army due to a heart murmur, he continued touring with his act. While performing at Detroit’s Downtown Theater in 1944 he met Patti Palmer (nee Esther Grace Calonico), a 23-year-old singer with Ted Fio Rito. They began dating and on October 3, 1944, they married. 

In 1945, Lewis was performing at the Glass Hat nightclub in Manhattan when he made the acquaintance of Dean Martin, a young crooner from Steubenville, Ohio. As they began talking they agreed their individual prospects were less than promising. At the time Jerry was dressing as Carmen Miranda, lip-synching her songs in his act and Martin was a singer moving farther and farther down the bill. Lewis admired Martin’s persona of the handsome and self-assured cool cat, while Martin admired Jerry’s talent for physical comedy.

In March 1946, they found themselves once again on the same bill, this time at the Havana-Madrid nightclub in Manhattan. Agreeing that nothing had changed since they last met they decided that they could at least have a little fun and began holding impromptu sessions after the evening’s last show, during the course of which Jerry would cavort around as an inept busboy, dropping tray, throwing food and desperately trying to break the cool demeanor of Martin, who ignored the disruptions as he sang. A reviewer for Billboard magazine. gave them a rave writeup, noting that the act had the makings of a big success.

Later that summer, while performing at Atlantic City’s 500 Club, Lewis was informed that the singer on the program had quit. He quickly recommended Martin to the club’s owner, and they put together a routine based on their antics at the Havana-Madrid. It became so successful that, before the week was over, they were drawing sellout audiences and even receiving mentions in Broadway columns. They returned to the Havana-Madrid in September with an act that was wildly popular.  

Bookings at bigger and better clubs soon followed, and by the summer of 1948, not only were they were headlining at the Copacabana in Manhattan, they were also performing at Times Square’s 6,000-seat Roxy Theater.  

They spent the next two years refining their act with NBC signing them for their own radio show on its Red Network. On June 20, 1948, they made their first television appearance on CBS’s Toast of the Town variety show (later re-christened The Ed Sullivan Show). They were a unique tonic for an America worn down by four years of war that were now replaced by the tension of the Cold War. Whereas other comic teams relied on planned skits, Martin and Lewis fed off an improvised interaction. Audiences could just sit back and relax with an act whose unique chemistry felt new every time it appeared.  

One member of that audience was producer Hal Wallis, who signed them to a five-year contract with Paramount. Looking for a suitable vehicle for their first movie, Wallis decided on a low-budget project based on the popular radio show, My Friend Irma. The film starred Marie Wilson, who reprised her radio role as the scatterbrained Irma Peterson, with Diana Lynn steeping into the role of Irma’s level-headed roommate, Jane Stacey. Martin and Lewis were cast in supporting roles as Steve Laird and his partner Seymour, who befriend Irma and Jane. The film did so well it spawned a sequel, My Friend Irma Goes West (1950). That same year saw them in a stint as the first of a series of hosts of NBC’s popular show, The Colgate Comedy Hour.

Using a loophole in their Paramount contract that allowed them to make one film a year “outside” the studio, the duo starred in the military spoof, At War With the Army (1951). The film created the formula for the relationship that would continue through all 13 subsequent Martin and Lewis films: Dean, the smooth-operating ladies’ man, forms an unlikely friendship with the hapless Lewis. The friendship is tested over the course of the movie, but in the end they would prevail with the friendship stronger than ever. 

At War With the Army was another box office hit and was followed by That’s My Boy (1951), The Stooge (1953), Sailor Beware (1952), Jumping Jacks (1952) and The Caddy (1953), original productions with such writers as John Grant, Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo (who wrote for Abbott & Costello) and Elwood Ullmann (who wrote for the Three Stooges and the Bowery Boys) supplying the plots and jokes. In 1953, they starred in Scared Stiff, a remake of Paramount’s earlier The Ghost Breakers (1940), starring Bob Hope. Living It Up (1954) was a remake of the 1937 Carole Lombard screwball comedy, Nothing Sacred, and You’re Never Too Young (1955) was a remake of The Major and the Minor (1942). It didn’t matter – they were all hits.   

Frank Tashlin took over the director’s chair for Artists and Models (1955) and Hollywood or Bust (1956). A writer-director who first made a name for himself at Warner Bros. directing Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig cartoons, he viewed Lewis as a perfect compliment for his style. Together they created sight gags that stretched the limits of absurdity, but ultimately failed in their quest to create a live-action alternative to animation. Tashlin also became a mentor to Lewis, who was becoming more interested with filmmaking. Although their partnership was successful for both, it came at the expense of Martin, who found himself shuttled off into a corner as his roles in their films diminished.

Martin resented this treatment voicing his dissatisfaction in interviews where he spoke of reviving his solo singing career. This in turn angered Lewis, who felt Martin was betraying him. Rumors of a split surfaced during the filming of Pardners (1956), a remake of director Norman Taurog’s 1936 production, Rhythm on the Range, starring Bing Crosby and Frances Farmer. Though the pair denied the rumors, by the time filming began on Hollywood or Bust they were barely on speaking terms. They made a final appearance at the Copacabana on July 25, 1956, and then went their separate ways.   

Lewis benefitted immediately, with his recording of “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody” becoming a Top 10 hit and its accompanying album, Jerry Lewis Just Sings, reaching the No. 3 slot on Billboard’s charts, outselling anything Martin had released.

He returned to movies with The Delicate Delinquent (1957), signed for a series of personal appearances along with a contract for a series of specials with NBC in addition to renewing his relationship with the Muscular Dystrophy Association by hosting a 19-hour telethon.

Tashlin directed three more comedies, Rock-a-Bye Baby (1958), The Geisha Boy (1958) and Cinderfella (1960), before Lewis felt ready to both produce and direct. His first film in that new role was The Bellboy (1960), a homage to silent-film comedy with Lewis as a luckless bellboy working at Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau Hotel. 

   

Lewis cranked out five more hit films during the next five years, including The Ladies Man (1961), The Errand Boy (1961) and one that became his personal favorite, The Nutty Professor (1963), a wild variation on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As painfully shy chemistry professor Julius Kelp, Lewis creates a formula that turns him into Buddy Love, a swaggering egotistical nightclub singer based spitefully on Dean Martin. But although it was a hit, by 1967 Lewis’ momentum had begun to fade. An attempt to switch to a more mature style with Three on a Couch (1966), failed and caused him to revert more to form with  The Big Mouth (1967) and the World War II farce Which Way to the Front? (1970), but neither set the box office on fire.

In looking for the reason for his declining popularity, Lewis failed to search himself. Over the course of the ‘60s he has come to take himself too seriously, projecting an image as an intellectual during various appearances on television. A large part of this was due to the fact that the French has come to embrace him as a serious auteur whose films questioned and challenged the cultural status quo of America and Hollywood. To quote film historian  David Thomson in The New Biographical Dictionary of  Film (6th edition), “Few things are held against the whole of France more fiercely than French love of Lewis.” He had now become a relic, his style of comedy being seen as passe in a Hollywood now dominated by the likes of The Graduate, Easy Rider and MASH. He hit both a personal and professional nadir when The Day the Clown Cried, a presumptuous comedy-drama set in a Nazi concentration camp that he wrote, directed and starred in, collapsed under the weight of litigation in 1972. Combined with an addiction to the pain killer Percodan, Lewis took an eight-year hiatus from the world of filmmaking.   

But it’s hard to keep an auteur down. Lewis returned to films with Hardly Working  as an unemployed circus clown who finds fulfillment in an unexciting job with the post office. Released in Europe in 1980 and in the United States in 1981, Roger Ebert noted it was “one of the worst movies ever to achieve commercial release in this country.”    

His 1983 follow-up, Smorgasbord (aka Cracking Up), also misfired. It was the last time Lewis directed a feature film. However, his decline as a filmmaker was matched by a revival of popularity as an actor, mostly thanks to his performance in Martin Scorsese’s 1982 The King of Comedy as a talk-show host kidnapped by an aspiring comedian (Robert De Niro) desperate to become a celebrity. He also had a celebrated guest role as a garment manufacturer threatened by the mob in the television series Wiseguy (1988-89) in addition to working in independent productions. He later expanded his acting ambition to the stage, played Mr. Applegate (a.k.a. the Devil) in a Broadway revival of the musical Damn Yankees. He later took the show on an international tour.

Despite a series of serious ailments, including bouts with prostate cancer, pulmonary fibrosis and two heart attacks, Lewis continued his charity work with the Muscular Dystrophy Association, continuing a tradition he began in 1966 of hosting the association’s annual Labor Day weekend telethon. Over his 40-plus years as host he raised more than $2 billion for the charity. 

Lewis also learned the meaning of the old adage that charity begins at home by reconciling with estranged partner Dean Martin. The two had not spoken since their 1956 break-up,. Even Frank Sinatra failed to break the ice when, in one of the more memorable moments of the MD telethon in 1976 he staged an on-air reunion between Lewis and Martin. Although they tried to joke with one another, the visible discomfort of both men was obvious to all who watched at home.

The hatchet was finally buried when Lewis attended the funeral of Martin’s oldest son, Dean Paul Martin Jr., who had been killed in a crash while serving as a pilot in the California Air National Guard. They began speaking again, and would do so occasionally until Martin’s death in 1995. In 2005, Mr. Lewis collaborated with James Kaplan on the memoir Dean and Me (A Love Story), in which he placed most of the blame for the breakup with Martin on himself.

Although Lewis was never honored for his film work by never honored, he was awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his charitable activity in 2009. Other honors include two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame – one for his movie work, the other for television – and a 2006 induction by the French government into the Légion d’Honneur.

In 2013, Lewis was honored at the Cannes Film Festival. A preliminary cut of Max Rose, his first movie in nearly 20 years, was screened there, in which he starred as a recently widowed jazz pianist in search of answers about his past. In 2015, Lewis donated his personal archives to the Library of Congress, and was quoted as saying that “Knowing that the Library of Congress was interested in acquiring my life’s work was one of the biggest thrills of my life.”

On the personal side, Lewis had six children with wife Patti. They divorced in 1980. In 1983, Mr. Lewis married SanDee Pitnick, and in 1992 their daughter, Danielle Sara, was born.     

His oldest son, Gary, had a series of hit records in the ‘60s with his band Gary Lewis and the Playboys.

Trivia

While most sources, including Lewis’ 1982 autobiography Jerry Lewis: In Person, give his birth name as Joseph Levitch, Shawn Levy, who wrote the definitive biography of Lewis, King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis, located a birth record that listed his first name as Jerome.

In 1952, with Martin and Lewis at the height of their fame, a Lewis look-a-like comic named Sammy Petrillo teamed with a Dean Martin sound-a-like singer named Duke Mitchell. They played various clubs and even starred in a movie, an atrocious low-budget effort titled Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952). When Lewis was informed of the duo he successfully sued to stop their act, after which they broke up. Petrillo continued as a comic, working such dives as strip joints and burlesque theaters. He later successfully ran a comedy nightclub in Pittsburgh called The Nut House, where he gave both Richard Pryor and Dennis Miller their starts. Petrillo succumbed to cancer on August 15, 2009. Duke Mitchell died from lung cancer at the age of 55 on December 2, 1981.