Dean and Me: A Love Story (7 page)

We sat down in canvas director’s chairs, and a crafts-service gentleman gave us coffee. At about five after nine, George Marshall and his assistant director walked onto Stage 9, along with Marie Wilson and Diana Lynn. Introductions all around—matter-of-fact for Marie and Diana, not so for Dean and me. My God, we had seen them on the huge screen at the Paramount in New York, and here we were standing next to them, getting ready to
act
. To be
directed
. Two little things we’d never done before.

Neither Dean nor I knew anything about Mr. Marshall’s career. And “Mr. Marshall” was what everyone called him—until you knew him much, much better, and then it was “Bones.” That was the nickname for anyone who had
funny bones
: a deep-down, world-class sense of humor, the kind you’re born with, the kind that can never be learned. George Marshall had the funny bones of Laurel and Hardy—in fact, he had directed some of their earliest work, which I didn’t learn until much later. Had I known that morning, I’d have died from fear.

The set was Irma’s apartment. Dean was up first, to play a scene with Diana Lynn as Jane’s boyfriend Steve, an aspiring singer. Paramount had signed Diana to replace the woman who’d played Irma’s sidekick on the radio, feeling that as a known box-office quantity, she might sell a few more tickets. The studio was certainly still unsure that Martin and Lewis would mean anything on the big screen. This test was supposed to give them a clue.

In Dean’s scene, he was to ask Diana’s character to please understand that he couldn’t just get a job—that he loved singing, that was his life. She was to ask him why he couldn’t do both: “Sing
and
work like a regular person.”

The scene went very well: Dean was terrific for his first time. In fact, most of the crew and people around the set that morning were a bit surprised, as was I, at how comfortable he looked doing the scene, how relaxed. The camera doesn’t lie. It takes what you give it—no more, and very often a little less. Dean was my hero that morning: He was giving me a leg up (I thought) on being a movie star. Everybody was ecstatic, and before we knew it, it was time for lunch.

I was to do my test after we ate. I’ve never been less hungry in my life.

Oh, well—off to the Paramount commissary. Pauline Kessinger, head of the commissary and a power broker in her own right (imagine the world’s most exclusive restaurant—seating is everything), gave us a big greeting at the door and steered us toward a good table. Herb Steinberg, head of the P.R. department, had publicity stills taken of us as we entered. Then we sat down. If you craned your neck, you could see Cecil B. DeMille and his entourage at his huge table in the back. As Dean and I ordered our lunch, we stared around the place, trying to see everyone. (A couple of weeks in, after we got comfortable at the studio, we’d be treating the place the same way we treated any nightclub we played— breaking up the joint.) We spotted Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, Marlene Dietrich, Alan Ladd, William Bendix, Bill Holden, Rosemary Clooney, Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, and Kirk Douglas—all in the same place at once! Some of the biggest stars ate in the private dining room, a privilege we, too, would be allowed once we became box-office hits—and not a second before.

Then lunch was over, and it was back to Stage 9, where I would shoot my screen test with Marie Wilson.

Mr. Marshall explained the scene to me: I was to play Al, Irma’s loser boyfriend. Al was a schemer, a leech; Irma basically worked to support him. He was brash, he was pushy—Hal Wallis must have thought that role was created for the Jerry Lewises of the world. Since the movie was, after all, a comedy, Al was supposed to come off as funny, with a kind of Damon Runyon edge to him. Remember Jack Carson in all those B pictures of the forties? But I wasn’t Jack Carson. It was hard for me to think of a way to make this character sympathetic.

Marie and I did the scene. She was cute, she was bubbly—but she was thirty-two years old to my twenty-two, ten years that really made a difference. And I, having never acted before, was trying hard to pretend to be someone I profoundly was not.

Neither my partner nor I could figure out why Dean was essentially playing himself and I was supposed to play someone else altogether. What had Hal Wallis seen at the Copa that made him want to sign us? Where were the two guys he saw that night?

Good questions!

I had a sinking feeling the next afternoon when we sat down in the executive screening room. Dean’s screen test with Diana was wonderful, as we all knew it would be. Cy Howard was thrilled. George Marshall was ecstatic. Hal Wallis and the Paramount executives in the room were slapping him on the back.

Then came the scene with Marie and me.

It limped onto the screen, and finished even limper. When it was over, it was so quiet in that room, you could have heard a mouse piss on a blotter.

Wallis suggested we meet in his office. We all gathered there—Dean and I, our agent, press agent, and lawyer; Wallis and his minions— around twenty people in all, and the atmosphere was not lighthearted. “Gentlemen, I think we all agree we have a problem on our hands,” Wallis said. “I think we must move ahead with great care, given the very significant commitment we’ve made to Paramount on Martin and Lewis. We have to deliver on that commitment. Now, my suggestion is that we all sleep on this, and reconvene at the end of the workday tomorrow to begin to formulate a plan.”

My heart sank even further. I was a sharp kid, and I knew what Wallis was up to: He wanted to spend the early part of the day on the phone conferring with Paramount executives in New York, seeing what his options were. Maybe cut the Monkey loose and make the Crooner a star? I had to think that was on somebody’s mind. Nobody but Dean would really look me in the eye.

The driver took us back to our hotel. “Sleep on it,” I muttered. “Sleep on what? Sleep on the fact that they
took what we were and
changed us!
”

In our suite, Dean and I sat in silence. Finally, he said, “Hey, who the hell wants to live in Los Angeles, anyway?”

Oops
, I thought.
Here we go. He’s gonna do it. He’s about to make the grand
gesture
.

“Listen,” Dean said. “If they just put the camera on what we did at the Copa, it would’ve been great!”

“But that’s not what movies are about,” I said. “Movies are about personalities playing characters. Movies are about story.”

“Well, I say bullshit,” Dean said. “I say it’s Martin and Lewis or nothing.”

I loved him for it, and I was torn. There was no way in hell I could watch my partner throw away what might be his chance of a lifetime; at the same time, I agreed totally with what he was saying. There was no way in hell I could watch Hal Wallis throw away Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

We decided to forget our worries and go see what the Hollywood nightlife was all about. We called a Paramount car and told the driver to take us to Ciro’s. He smiled . . . and drove us straight across Sunset Boulevard, about sixty-five feet. Who knew?

Jack Keller had set us up with a couple of terrific chicks, and we spent the evening drinking, dancing, smooching . . . having a great time pretending we were having a great time.

I don’t remember exactly how we got back to the hotel, having been at the chicks’ respective apartments, drinking champagne, and doing all the things two guys on the town do. . . . Married or not, you do them— certainly at that age you do.

Dawn came through the curtains of our suite like a lightning bolt. Our schedule for the morning was to meet with the Paramount photo department to have official studio photographs taken of Martin and Lewis—the team that, until that screen test, had been a hot item. Was our photo shoot even still on? While Dean slept, I phoned Herb Steinberg. He confirmed that we were still on, then I summoned up my courage and popped the question.

“Herb, could we possibly arrange for the shoot to be later in the day, so I can make an appointment to meet with Mr. Wallis?”

Herb, a nice man, agreed to postpone the session to three-thirty in the afternoon.

I wrote Dean a note. “Paul, couldn’t sleep,” it read. “Going to Beverly Hills to shop a little. Photo shoot has been moved to 3:30 this afternoon. Just relax till I get back. Love, the Jew.”

Then I went down to the lobby and called Abby Greshler on the house phone.

I told our agent I needed to meet with Wallis, alone, that morning if at all possible, and I told him why. I asked if he could set it up. Greshler said he’d do his best. I told him to call me back in the lobby, explaining that I didn’t want Dean to know about any of this yet.

Then I hung up and counted the seconds.

Imagine you’ve gone in for root canal, and the doctor is delayed, and you’re sitting in the waiting room, not wanting him to show up but desperately wanting the torment to be over. That’s about how I felt.

After six long minutes, Greshler called back. Wallis would see me at eleven A.M.

“Sit down, Jerry,” Mr. Wallis said kindly. We were in his big office at Paramount, and my heart was pounding. He gave me a look, and I gave him a look back. It was a tense moment, and we both knew why.

He pushed a button on his intercom. “Evelyn, hold my calls,” he said. “Thank you.” Then he looked at me again. “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

“Mr. Wallis,” I said, “this Martin and Lewis thing is my baby. I put it together, and I’ll be damned if I let it go down in defeat without trying to correct the situation. I know what went wrong here.” I actually hadn’t the slightest idea of what I was about to say—except that my feelings were so strong, I knew they’d take me in the right direction.

“I’d love to know that myself,” Wallis said.

“Okay, then. If you loved what you saw Dean and me do on the stage at the Copa, why not film the essence of what you loved?”

“Which is what, precisely?”

“The handsome guy with the monkey.”

“Go on,” he said, looking intrigued but puzzled.

“Dean, as the straight man, can be any straight character,” I said. “But Jerry cannot be anyone or anything other than Jerry. If you take that away, or separate the two of them, you’ve lost the essence of the act.”

All at once, Wallis seemed excited. “Will you sit down with Cy Howard and try to get a handle on this?” he asked.

And that was how Seymour was born. After I told Dean some terrible lie about the terrific chick I’d met shopping in Beverly Hills, I spent the evening—and then the rest of the night—at Cy Howard’s house, hammering out the idea for a less-than-bright pal for Dean’s character Steve. (Dean managed to entertain himself while I was away—believe me, he was not lonely.)

“Why Seymour?” Cy asked, making a face. It was his real name, and he hated it.

“Because that’s what Jerry is,” I told him. “He is Seymour, Marvin, Melvin, Norman, and Bernie, and so on. He’s Mr. Everyone in the World That Gets Shit On. He is
not
Al. Al needs an actor. Jerry needs to be Seymour. Make him Steve’s pal and we hit pay dirt!”

Cy and I met with Wallis first thing the next morning, while Dean slept off a wonderful hangover. The producer glanced back and forth at the two of us while we bubbled over with excitement. We went on and on about the need to have the team be just that—a
team
. Dean could still sing, be the leading man, the romantic interest, but with a sidekick—the busboy, the waiter, the parking attendant, the usher, the American Everyman.

We had him. Wallis was sold. He called the Paramount production department and ordered another screen test.

I ran into our room at the Sunset Towers and jumped on Dean’s bed, waking him from a deep sleep. “We’ve got it!” I yelled. “We’ve got it!”

“You and the chick?” Dean asked.

“What chick?” I said.

“What are you talking about? What’s happening?” he asked—but I could see he realized something big had changed since he tied that last one on.

I told him the whole story. And then, after he had slapped me on the back and gone to shower, I finally gave in to the emotions that had been building up over the past five roller-coaster days.

A few hours later, we were once again on Stage 9, for “Martin and Lewis Screen Test 2.” Instead of Irma’s apartment, we were standing by the orange-juice stand that Steve and Seymour operated—Steve out front, selling, Seymour in back, squeezing. Within minutes, we would develop the business about Seymour’s occupational injury, the hand that became a claw from so much orange-squeezing....

But what we had already developed, in the time it took to make that second test, was the Martin and Lewis we all grew up with—including me.

The act that would work not only for Paramount but also for companies like RCA, Liggett & Myers Tobacco, Famous Music Corporation, Kodak Corporation, Technicolor Corporation, Chapman Boom Corporation, Mitchell Camera Corporation, Panavision Corporation . . .

This chain of companies, entities, and individuals would never have come together if it hadn’t been for that second screen test—

The same screen test that led (it could be argued) along a winding but certain path to our breakup eight years later.

CHAPTER FIVE

WHILE WAITING TO SHOOT, WE GOT BUSY IN OTHER WAYS.

We might have passed on MGM, but we didn’t overlook two of that studio’s loveliest young stars, June Allyson and Gloria De Haven. June was the same age as Dean, an established screen presence, a sweet woman who specialized in wholesome, girl-next-door parts. The beautiful Gloria was, like me, in her early twenties, and (unlike me) playing mainly ingenue roles.

Dean and June found each other almost as soon as we arrived in L.A. There was never any stopping my partner, and there was no stopping women once they’d set eyes on him! And since June and Gloria were best pals, it made sense—by the peculiar rules of Hollywood, and of up-and-coming young performers—that Ms. De Haven and I would get together.

What made a little less sense was that all four players in this little roundelay were married . . . to other people.

June’s husband was the movie star Dick Powell (
42nd Street
). They had a little boy and a young daughter. Gloria was married to the movie star John Payne (
Miracle on 34th Street
). They had a little girl and a baby boy. Dean and I, of course, were married to Betty and Patti, with four children between us.

Were we nuts?

Sure we were, but try to understand. My partner had established his ground rules well before we met: A real man has a wife and kids—and whatever he can get on the side. And Dean could get plenty.

He was handsome and suave and funny beyond compare, and I wanted to be just like him—to the extent that anatomy allowed. Dean could get women before he had a dime in his pocket. I had to wait. But not any longer.

When fame and money come all at once, even the strongest men will get their heads turned around. I had plenty of strengths, but avoiding temptation was not one of them. Imagine—just months before Dean and I played the Copa and Slapsy Maxie’s, I was lucky to have fifty bucks to my name.

Now I was walking down Fifth Avenue (we were back in New York, to plan the upcoming year) with three grand in hundred-dollar bills in my pocket. And plenty more where that came from.

Same with my partner.

Can you blame us for going a little hog wild?

Dean and I booked two suites at the Hampshire House on Central Park South. Previous to this, we’d usually shared a hotel suite. But with all the action we were about to show New York, we needed space!

Now, imagine our surprise and delight when the very same two young ladies we had been squiring in Hollywood suddenly showed up in Manhattan and checked into the Hampshire House....

June and Gloria had come to New York, without husbands, to go on a shopping spree. It was the kind of thing that young actresses did then—a chance to kick up their heels and get some publicity at the same time. The MGM publicity department underwrote the whole trip, even their shopping bills. It was all stage-managed to the nth degree. Little did MGM imagine the kind of publicity their two young stars would actually generate.

Dean and I happened to be in the lobby when their limo pulled up and dropped them off. We watched the girls check in. We made some small talk, and then the desk clerk called for a bellman to take the young ladies and their bags to their suite. Another bellman took care of us.

We all rode up on the elevator together: Martin and Lewis, Allyson and De Haven, two bellmen, and twenty-seven suitcases. The four of us had some giggles, while the bellmen pretended not to notice. It was as if we were all in on a big, delicious secret. Some secret it would turn out to be.

June and Gloria were dressed to the nines in Lord & Taylor clothes and mink stoles. (While Dean and I, wearing the first civilian suits that we owned outright, were undressing them in our minds.) For the five days they were staying in New York, the girls had ten or fifteen changes of clothes: dresses, skirts, blouses, ball gowns, riding habits—all of it provided by the humongous Metro wardrobe department, the use of said garments approved by L. B. Mayer himself.

He was a pure showman, always demanding that his contract players carry themselves with grace, charm, and manners, as well as expensive attire. When the actor or actress didn’t personally own the appropriate clothes, it was SOP that the studio would step in and provide what was needed to maintain the glamour and glitz—and protect its investment, which was considerable.

The star system was big business. The studios would find talent and nurture it with everything from acting to voice and piano lessons. The stars-to-be would learn to move their bodies gracefully enough to pass muster in the world’s biggest and most demanding fishbowl. Hollywood was always watching, alert to every step, every gesture—and every slipup.

And so when two of Metro’s newest, most sought-after female stars decided to fly off to New York and unwind—and encountered the new comedy team of Martin and Lewis, both Hollywood (though 3,000 miles away) and New York sat up and took notice.

Dean had a suite on the twenty-third floor, and mine was on the twenty-fourth floor, with but one flight of stairs between us. The girls were staying together in a suite on the twenty-fifth floor. . . . By God, I thought,
what a swell arrangement.

The four of us were so totally wrapped up in one another that we never gave a thought to how things would look. So we played and played, and didn’t give a gnat’s ass about anything but having a good time. Wine, women, and song up the kazoo.... We had it all—and then some.

But you always have to pay the fiddler.

The first night at the hotel, we had a champagne toast and, full of anticipation, prepared to go to the theater. Did we think about the fact that, in the winter of 1948, Broadway had an oversized media apparatus and thousands of gossipmongers—not to mention everyone who worked at the hotel and at the shops and restaurants we patronized?

We did not.

And so we, the Fun Foursome, strolled delightedly and without the slightest compunction into the St. James Theater to see that season’s hot new musical, Frank Loesser’s
Where’s Charley?

Everyone that was anyone had seats for that performance, and we became an added attraction. Until the houselights went down, we were the show. We loved the play—Ray Bolger was awesome—and after the final curtain we were off to a quiet dinner at one of New York’s most laid-back spots, where being noticed wasn’t something we had to be concerned about . . . El Morocco!

We arrived at the fabulous nightclub on East Fifty-fourth Street— where, if you were a celebrity, trying to be unobtrusive was like being Mark Spitz calling for help in a pool. After we squeezed into one of the zebra-striped banquettes, we had to sit cozily, without being able to get a waiter so we could order drinks and dinner, for forty-five minutes— and that was after the fifty-dollar bill we handed the leech at the door! Later, we learned that the El Morocco staff did not share in one another’s gratuities; the tradition there was dog-eat-dog.

So Dean got up, walked over to the door captain, and insisted on getting the fifty back. Which, even in front of a lot of people, didn’t faze my partner at all.

Not so amazingly, we got a waiter right away. Whereupon Dean strolled back to the door captain and gave him the fifty all over again— plus another fifty. He grinned all the way back to the table.

Once he was back, we asked the girls to dance. There we were out on the dance floor, which was lit by a hundred baby spotlights: It was a little bit like a night game at Chavez Ravine.

We danced with complete abandon—in hog heaven—until we were spotted by Radie Harris, a monkey-faced little gossip columnist who wrote “Broadway Ballyhoo” for the
Hollywood Reporter
.

If the cat hadn’t come out of the bag before, it sure did now....

For the next week, all anyone in Manhattan talked about was the “Fearsome Foursome,” dining, dancing, making the city our very own. We went to more Broadway shows and sat together. We strolled arm in arm through Central Park. We made reservations at the best restaurants, and we had some pretty heavy-duty parties in the three suites at the Hampshire House. Meanwhile, all the bellmen and telephone operators who were on the arm to Winchell and the rest of the newspapermen in Gotham made sure we stayed the talk of the town.

Oh, we had a ball. We didn’t even find time to see our attorneys and agents—the reason we’d come to New York in the first place... or so we said. The girls extended their stay another week. I must have lost five pounds, and I was only 124 to start with. Dean just basked in it all, looking like a cat with a mouth full of canary.

Then came the telephone call.

It would be sunrise in an hour or two, and I had just drifted off into some badly needed shut-eye: We had a date to go horseback riding in Central Park at eight A.M.—the girls had to use those riding habits!

The phone sounded like a jackhammer in the middle of my brain. I grabbed at it just to make it stop.

“Hey, Jer, this is important,” I heard my partner saying.

“What time is it?” I croaked.

“It’s four A.M., and I just had a great hour on the phone with Betty!” Dean said.

“Oops,” I said, and I knew in my heart—I’m next!

“Maybe we better cut back a little,” Dean said. “There are more eyes on us than I ever could’ve imagined.”

A fact that was borne out to me when my phone rang again twenty minutes later. It was—of course—Patti. Two hours later, with the Manhattan sky turning gray, I was still trying to explain to my wife.

“Listen, you schmuck,” she said. “If you have to get your rocks off, why do it in Madison Square Garden?”

“What do you mean?” I asked innocently.

“It’s all over the papers about you, Dean, and the two chippies you’re with,” she said. “Didn’t you know that what you were up to would have consequences?”

Patti was a band singer, a show-business veteran who’d been around the block a few times. She knew how men—especially successful men in show business—acted. She just didn’t want me humiliating her, and of course she was completely right. I pacified her as best I could.

But Dean and I had a date to go riding in Central Park, and we both meant to be there, and so we were at eight A.M., like pointers in the hunt, ready and willing! The four of us rode all over the park, having fun—as were the reporters following us on horseback.

Our public-relations guys, George Evans and Jack Keller, had both handled Sinatra; they were used to this kind of thing. But that didn’t mean they liked it. “Do you guys realize,” George said, “that your anonymity is gone? That you are now public property? That you cannot do whatever you want anymore? Don’t you realize that you, you Italian idiot, are married with three children,
and
you’re Catholic? Which is just a tad more serious than it is for the Jew with the one kid? Your people still go to confession!”

Did the four of us have any concerns about what effect this conduct might have on our careers, not to mention our marriages? Professionally, the girls had much more to lose than we did. In effect, they were the property of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio giant that could snatch your stardom back as easily as they’d conferred it and send you straight back to where you’d come from. Dean and I were independent contractors, with only Hal Wallis to answer to—and how I loved giving him all the wrong answers! (Another story, for later.)

Professionally, we would all recover. How our little playtime would affect the four of us personally was another question.

Stars have always played around, but in those days most were a bit more discreet than they are now—as was the press. Even Frank Sinatra kept up his reputation as a family man until the end of the forties, when his P.R. people could no longer keep the lid on his affair with Ava Gardner. But in April 1946, Frank’s image was still relatively unsullied, and his fame at its zenith. And that month, not long after Dean and I had first met, Sinatra was about to open at the Paramount—
in person
, for Christ’s sake! Dean and I had just begun hanging around together, and one thing we discovered we had in common was a huge admiration—and believe me, that’s not putting it quite strongly enough—for Sinatra.

We thought we might get in and see the best singer around do his thing, but the crowds of fans were so great we couldn’t get near that theater, much less get tickets.

Then the proverbial lightbulb flashed on over my head.

Stella Ardis, a nice lady who worked in the administration office at the Belmont Plaza, was my very first all-out fan. She would come down to the Glass Hat to see my show at least three times a week; she told me she thought I could be a big star one day. I would smile and nod, thinking: Mouthing to records? I don’t think so, honey.... Still, it was nice to hear.

When you’re on the lower rungs of show business, you’re constantly around people who aspire upward—hangers-on, wannabes, and (sad but true) mostly never-will-bes. But everybody seems to have an angle, a connection. So when Stella, the nice lady in the administration office, said, “You know, Jerry, I’m kind of in show business myself,” I responded politely.

“Oh, really, Stella?” I said. “How so?”

“Well,” Stella said proudly, “my cousin, Mark Leon, is the head usher at the Paramount Theater.”

Needless to say, this conversation came back to me in full force when Dean and I found we couldn’t get near the Sinatra show.

Did I want to see Sinatra? You bet. Did I want to impress the hell out of Dean? You bet. I made a beeline for the administration office at the Belmont Plaza and told Stella I had a little favor—oh, hell, a big favor—to ask her.

She smiled. “For my brilliant Jerry? Anything.”

Two hours later, Dean and I were standing at the employees’ entrance of the Paramount with a watchman who told us to stay right where we were, since Mr. Leon had to come back from a meeting through the very door we were standing by. Long minutes afterward, the door opened and an important-looking fellow emerged. “Mr. Leon,” the watchman said, “these two young fellows were looking for you.”