Jerry Lewis

Comedian, actor, singer, filmmaker

• Born: March 16, 1926
• Birthplace: Newark, New Jersey
• Died: August 20, 2017
• Place of death: Las Vegas, Nevada

American entertainer

The films and acts of comedian and actor Lewis are celebrated worldwide as comedic classics. In addition to his work in entertainment, Lewis hosted the long-running telethon benefiting the Muscular Dystrophy Association, which led to his 1977 nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize. He also was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 2006.

Areas of achievement Theater and entertainment, film, philanthropy

Early Life

Jerry Lewis, or Joey, as he was called for his first two decades, was born Joseph Levitch to Danny and Rea Levitch, vaudevillian performers in the smaller hotels of New York City, the resorts of the Catskill Mountains, and in New Jersey. They used the surname Lewis, instead of the Jewish name Levitch, to obtain better bookings. Rea wrote the musical arrangements and sang and played the piano for a radio station. Danny, a shorter version of his son, sang and performed Al Jolson imitations.

Lewis liked life on the road with his parents during the summers. The rest of the year he lived with his grandmother, Sarah, who provided a sense of stability for him. There was no question that he would follow his parents into the world of show business. He was, as the saying goes in the entertainment industry, “born in a trunk,” much like entertainers Judy Garland and Donald O’Connor. By the time Lewis was five years old, he was already wearing a tuxedo, bought for him by his father.

The young Lewis missed so much schoolwork because of the travel with his parents that he became the class clown. In high school, he was a cheerleader and often stole the show from the football team. He would cry and scream when the other teams scored. His days as a cheerleader ended, though, when he kicked a bucket of water and the bucket landed on the coach’s head.

After leaving school at age fifteen, Lewis worked as a busboy and did burlesque-type acts by imitating the recordings of successful singers. His first paying job as a performer was for seven dollars a night at the Ritz Theatre on Staten Island. By this time, he had legally changed his name to Jerry Lewis. He then moved up as emcee of an entire evening of shows at a Detroit theater, and also met a pretty dark-haired vocalist named Patti Palmer. His antics in getting her attention succeeded in getting the attention of others as well, including the bandleader, Jimmy Dorsey. Palmer was soon singing for Dorsey’s orchestra. Lewis and Palmer were married by a justice of the peace in October 1944. A few weeks later, for the parents he adored, they were married in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony.

Also in 1944, Lewis met entertainer Dean Martin. They were introduced by a mutual friend at the corner of 49th Street and Broadway in New York City. They both were booked to perform at the Glass Hat Nightclub. Lewis was nineteen years old and making one hundred dollars a week, and Martin was twenty-eight years old, making five hundred dollars a week.

Growing up in the world of show business gave Lewis the opportunity to learn entertainment from the ground up. In making the transition later from stage to television and film, he said he received a life’s worth of education every day as a child. His agent considered him a young Charlie Chaplin.

Life’s Work

Lewis and Martin first worked as a team called Martin & Lewis in Atlantic City, an act, many have said, that combined the antics of the Keystone Kops and the Marx Brothers. Martin & Lewis often had a line of people winding twice around the block waiting to buy tickets. Martin was called “the handsome man” and Lewis “the monkey.” Lewis considered himself the smartest of the comedy team, and because Martin had a penchant for wine, women, and golf (and song), Lewis wrote the duo’s scripts. Their radio show in 1948 was their only flop, mainly because their brand of humor was a visual one, which did not translate to a radio audience.

Lewis once said that he and Martin did a Laurel-and-Hardy-type act, but Martin, however, said that he never changed his own comedy character to fit any “type.” Lewis described his first meeting with Martin as being like “lightning in a bottle,” a rarity, because the two worked together so well. The newspapers said it was a refreshing brand of comic hysteria.

Martin & Lewis’s routine included a series of crazy acts, such as cutting off men’s ties or climbing up to the electrician’s room and shutting off the lights while Martin was singing “If You Smile at the Sun (the Sun Will Smile at You).” They also drew huge laughs by silently imitating prize fighters and strutting around an imagined boxing ring and pretending to fend off each other’s jabs. Martin & Lewis made the transition to television with a six-minute slot on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town on June 24, 1948. Their first film, My Friend Irma (1949), exposed them further to a nationwide audience.

Bing Crosby began a long-running, one-sided feud with Lewis in 1952 when Martin & Lewis agreed to appear at a benefit for the Olympics. On stage, Crosby was relaxed and talking with Bob Hope. When Martin and Lewis came on stage, the stylish, quiet banter soon ended with Martin and Lewis running around the stage, jumping and singing, and taking over the show. In the aftermath, while Hope laughed off the performance, Crosby took it seriously and refused to speak to Lewis. Repeated attempts to have Crosby appear on the Lewis telethon, which began in 1966, failed as well. Crosby never again spoke to Lewis.

In the early film days for Martin and Lewis, the formula for the comic duo remained the same: Lewis was the stooge and Martin was the good-looking leading “straight man,” who would sing a couple of songs and “get the girls.” The first few films showed this standardized Hollywood format. The Caddy (1953) began to show a rift between the two. The team’s eleventh film, Living It Up (1954), is considered to be their best. Living It Up is a remake of a 1937 film that starred Carole Lombard. In the remake, Lewis plays a small-town railroad worker who claims to have been poisoned by radiation. (He had been wrongly diagnosed by his doctor, played by Martin.) After an encounter with a New York-based journalist who heard about his supposed illness, and of his dream of seeing New York City, Lewis gets an all-expenses-paid trip to the city, donated by the journalist’s employer. After fooling everyone involved, Lewis and Martin end up working in the city as street sweepers. The film ends with their singing “Every Street’s a Boulevard (in Old New York).”

The final break with Martin came over a period of years. On the set of their last film, Hollywood or Bust (1956), Martin had abruptly turned to Lewis and told him that he could talk about love all he wanted, but to him, Lewis was nothing but a dollar sign. A short time later, in July 1956, they ended their act. The only time they met in public again was during the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association Labor Day Telethon in 1976, a meeting arranged by Frank Sinatra. The men reconciled following the death of Martin's son, Dean Paul Martin Jr., when his Air National Guard jet fighter crashed in 1987 during a snowstorm in the California mountains.

Lewis returned to films in 1957 with what many have called his most poignant and biographical film, The Delicate Delinquent. He then went on to write, produce, and direct several other films. He even developed the technique of using video cameras to allow the director to view the scenes at the same time they are being filmed. In his acclaimed performance in The King of Comedy (1983), Lewis plays a television host stalked by obsessive fans. He later starred in many television comedies, several as the voice of cartoon characters. In 1995, he began playing the part of the devil in a reprisal of Broadway’s Damn Yankees, fulfilling a lifelong dream of his to actually work in a Broadway show.

In 2011, Lewis agreed to coexecutive produce the remakes of three of his early films, The Bellboy, Cinderfella, and The Family Jewels. In 2008, he produced and reprised his role as Julius Kelp, the nutty professor, in a computer-animated film by the same name. Drake Bell provided the voice of Lewis's grandson in the sequel. After receiving the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his charitable work in 2009 and hosting his last Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon in 2010, Lewis directed a musical theater version of the film in Nashville, Tennessee, during the summer of 2012.

Lewis announced in 2009 that he was returning to film and was cast in the leading role of the 2013 movie Max Rose. Despite still being in post-production editing, the film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 2013. Final editing and production took several more years to complete, and the film made its US premiere in 2016. In the meantime, his personal archives had been given to the Library of Congress in 2015. Also in 2016, while still continuing to perform in select one-man shows, he made his final appearance in a feature film, playing the father of the main character (played by Nicholas Cage) in the crime film The Trust.

Still struggling with various illnesses, Lewis was hospitalized in June 2017 for a urinary tract infection. Almost two months later, on August 20, 2017, he died at his home in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the age of ninety-one.

Significance

Lewis, a lovable entertainer with fans around the world, is also remembered as the host of the hugely successful telethons benefiting the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). In 1950, he cofounded the MDA and began working with them in 1952. In 1954, he started hosting an annual MDA fund-raiser, as they were called in their first decade. The Labor Day MDA Telethon was first broadcast to a New York television market in 1966, raising more than one million dollars for the MDA during the nineteen-hour show. In 1968, the telethon began its national reach.

Asked about the reasons for his lifelong dedication to the cause, he refused to answer. During his years of being in film, he worked each year for three months and then volunteered the remaining nine months with the MDA.

In 2006, the French minister of culture awarded Lewis the prestigious Legion of Honor, France’s highest civilian honor, in recognition of his comedic talents. Naturally, Lewis made a comedy of the ceremony, arriving in slippers, yawning, and faking sleep while the audience laughed throughout the event. The French official called Lewis “the French people’s favorite clown.”

Bibliography

Kehr, Dave. "Jerry Lewis, a Jester Both Silly and Stormy, Dies at 91." The New York Times, 20 Aug. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/movies/jerry-lewis-dead-celebrated-comedian-and-filmmaker.html. Accessed 8 Sept. 2017.

Krutnik, Frank. Inventing Jerry Lewis. Smithsonian Institute Press, 2000.

Lewis, Jerry, and Herb Gluck. Jerry Lewis in Person. Atheneum, 1982.

Lewis, Jerry, and James Kaplan. Dean and Me: A Love Story. 2005. Pan, 2014.

Lipman, Steve. "Jerry Lewis's Unseen Holocaust Comedy Brought to Light." Jewish Week, 13 Jan. 2016, jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/jerry-lewis-unseen-holocaust-comedy-brought-to-light/. Accessed 31 Mar. 2016.

Schuessler, Jennifer. "Jerry Lewis Archive Goes to Library of Congress." The New York Times, 14 Sept. 2015, artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/14/jerry-lewis-archive-goes-to-library-of-congress/. Accessed 31 Mar. 2016.

Turnquist, Kristi. "What Happened to the Jerry Lewis Labor Day MDA Telethon, and 7 Facts About the Former TV Staple." Oregon Live, 4 Sept. 2015, www.oregonlive.com/tv/2015/09/what‗happened‗to‗the‗jerry‗lew.html. Accessed 31 Mar. 2016.

Winfrey, Graham. "Jerry Lewis Wows MoMA at World Premiere of Max Rose." Indie Wire, 11 Apr. 2016, www.indiewire.com/2016/04/jerry-lewis-wows-moma-at-world-premiere-of-max-rose-21685/. Accessed 12 Apr. 2016.