In 1946, what would be Lewis' first, and arguably, greatest show business success began when he teamed up with singer Dean Martin as a duo act that played nightclubs and halls with Martin playing the crooning straight man to Lewis' zaniness. The first gig of Martin and Lewis was at the old 500 Club in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
They began their film career in 1950 at Paramount Studios (back when the studio system of managing talent still ruled the day) with At War With the Army. That was followed by more than a dozen films, including That's My Boy (1951), The Caddy (1953), Scared Stiff (1953), Pardners (1956), and their last film Hollywood or Bust (1956).
Their popularity was so big, there was even a comic book series based on them that ran for five years, called The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
The duo split up in 1956 after much tension between the two as Lewis began to get much more attention than did Martin. After ten years, the team of Martin and Lewis was no more, with both pursuing very successful solo careers. The two had very rarely seen each other after the split, but Frank Sinatra, during Lewis' 1976 telethon, snuck Dean Martin on stage, marking the first time two had been together in twenty years. It is still regarded as one of the telethon's highlights.
While Dean Martin scored as a nightclub performer (solo and with The Rat Pack), recording artist, film star (over forty films), and television star (The Dean Martin Show, The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast), Lewis went on to great heights in film, appearing in over thirty movies, many of which he directed and/or starred in and/or produced. He also added singing to his achievements, even though he's more well-known for singing loudly and off-key, with the release of his 1956 album Jerry Lewis Just Sings, which went to #3 on the Billboard charts and sold more than one-and-a-half million copies.
His greatest on-screen successes, although he had many, were The Nutty Professor in 1963, considered by many (including me) to be his masterpiece, and The King of Comedy in 1982, alongside Robert DeNiro. Although he had commercial failures in film as well -- Three on a Couch (1966), Way...Way Out (1966), Slapstick of Another Kind (1982), Cracking Up (1983) and others -- his most infamous film, even though it was never released, was The Day the Clown Cried. The film, a 1972 drama about a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, was plagued with problems almost from the start, including loss of financing (for which Lewis put up his own money), script rewrites, and studio pressure. Lewis hated the film and refused to release it. To this day, forty-five years later, it has never been publicly shown, although some individuals have claimed to have seen it. Sadly, his final film, Max Rose, released last year, was a box office failure.
While filming The Bellboy, he invented the video assist, a means of watching a film take immediately afterward on video, which became, and remains, standard practice in film making. In the late 1960's, Lewis taught a film directing class at the University of Southern California . (Two of his students were George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg.)
In 1952, he began his charity work on behalf of the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) It was in that year that Lewis began hosting telethons to benefit the MDA, although most mark the telethon's beginning as 1966, which was the year it went national. In the roughly half-century during Lewis' involvement, the telethon raised more than $2.6 billion for MDA. (Lewis insisted that the toteboard not include contributions from major corporations and contributors so that the viewers never felt in competition with entities that could raise more money.) Lewis' name and the MDA's annual Labor Day telethon were synonymous for decades.
Later in life, Lewis did make several verbal missteps, like making off-color or insensitive jokes during his final few years of hosting the MDA Telethon, not being fond of female comedians (adding that women have no place being crude in their comedy), and publicly stating his right-wing views in the last years of his life. There are many parts of his life that are not all pleasant and they have been recounted in many an obituary in print, on television, and on the Internet. My intent is not to whitewash those parts of him, but to simply acknowledge them here and recap the parts of his life more well-known.
There have been many funny moments from his films remembered through the years. Probably one of the most famous comes from his 1963 film Who's Minding the Store? (not to mention the music from it having been played by orchestras around the world) in which Lewis is "typing" away ...
Or dancing as Professor Julius Kelp in The Nutty Professor ...
Or a little distraction before doing the dishes in Who's Minding the Store? ...
Or trying to fix a hat (you can see Lewis cracking up a couple of times) in The Ladies Man ...
Or trying to get comfortable in his psychiatrist's office in Cracking Up ...
But my favorite scene from his films is the board room scene in The Errand Boy ...
Lewis also appeared on the Great White Way, making his Broadway debut in the 1995 revival of Damn Yankees at age 69!
Lewis had a myriad of health problems, including heart disease, diabetes, and chronic back problems. It was due to pulmonary fibrosis that he began taking the steroid Prednisone in the Spring of 2001. It bloated his body to where he was almost unrecognizable. I remember watching the 2001 telethon and I truly thought he was wearing some sort of full-body prosthetic. He trudged on, even in this bloated condition, continuing to be weaned off the drug, to host the telethon ... looking about the same in 2002, far less bloated in 2003, and back to just about normal in 2004.
Over the course of his long career, Lewis received a multitude of awards. A partial list includes the Legion of Honor (Légion d'honneur) merit award (France), the Los Angeles Film Critics Association's Career Achievement Award, the Goldene Kamera Honorary Award (Germany), the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (Academy Awards), an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Chapman University (California), and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009 and was made an honorary member of the Order of Australia in 2013.
Even though his rubber-faced expressions and physical slapstick comedy fell out of favor over the generations, Jerry Lewis made me laugh, hard, and much more than once or twice. I loved his unbridled silliness. He once said in an interview that we all have that inner child that we suppress as we get older; he just tapped into his much more. Next to love and kindness, in my book, the greatest gift one can give is laughter. Jerry Lewis gave us all that in abundance.
In France, he's known as Le Roi du Crazy ("The King of Crazy"). In Italy, he known as Picchiatello ("Crackpot"). On a 1978 episode of The Mike Douglas Show, Brazilian soccer star Pelé said that people in his country called Lewis "Crazy Boy". By most, he came to be known as The King of Comedy.
And so, to The King of Crazy, Crackpot, Crazy Boy, and The King of Comedy, we say congratulations on a hell of a life, thanks so much, and rest in peace.
Terry
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