Jerry Lewis, 1926-2017

In “The Ladies Man,” 1961

In late 2008 or early 2009 I began writ­ing for the MSN edit­or­i­al web­site, spe­cific­ally MSN Movies, and the first thing my edit­or asked me to draft was a Jerry Lewis obit­u­ary. Word on the street, or some street, was that Lewis’ vari­ous ail­ments were about to bring him down for good. As MSN then aspired to a print-style edit­or­i­al stand­ard, it was thought that hav­ing an obit on file would be the good news­pa­pery thing to do. 

I wrote the piece with that stand­ard in mind, so it was news­pa­pery, dry, fac­tu­al , but it does have a thread of crit­ic­al appre­ci­ation run­ning through it. Since the great artist is now gone, hav­ing out­lived the edit­or­i­al web­site of MSN by more than five years, I thought I might offer the obit as I filed it, oddly undated, TKs left unfilled. 

Jerry Lewis obituary

For [REDACTED]  at MSN Movies

By Glenn Kenny

Date Filed: 

Date of death TK

Jerry Lewis, the comedi­an, com­ic act­or, film­maker, invent­or and phil­an­throp­ist who was a defin­ing, con­ten­tious fig­ure in both American show busi­ness and art, died at LOCATION TK, of CAUSE TK. He was AGE TK.

Born in Newark, New Jersey on March 16, 1926, Lewis (whose actu­al last name was Levitch) had show busi­ness in his blood; both of his par­ents were enter­tain­ers on the cir­cuit known as the “Borscht Belt,” which included the resorts in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York that attrac­ted a largely urb­an, Jewish cli­en­tele. Lewis’ humor–boisterous, ener­get­ic, often sar­don­ic and loud—derived from that her­it­age. Before he had even turned 20, he was a bizzer; the high-school dro­pout mar­ried band sing­er Patty Palmer in 1944, and developed a stan­dup act in which he played recor­ded vocals of well-known per­formers and parodied/mimicked their actions. In 1946 he met the Ohio-born croon­er Dean Martin, and they teamed up to con­coct an anarch­ic nightclub act which shot a jolt of adren­aline, or maybe even amphet­am­ine, into the eth­os cre­ated by Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.

Martin and Lewis began mak­ing films togeth­er in 1949, and their pic­tures togeth­er helped define ‘50s cul­ture. Not the bland, con­form­ist, Eisenhower-defined cul­ture of pop­u­lar myth that, the myth con­tin­ues, was upen­ded by the swinging ‘60s, but the roil­ing, indus­tri­al­ist, some­what ruth­less cul­ture of a post-war America that was rede­fin­ing itself as a glob­al power. As the film crit­ic Andrew Sarris put it, “The great thing about them was their incom­par­able incom­pat­ib­il­ity, the per­sist­ent sexu­al hos­til­ity, the pro­fes­sion­al know­ing­ness they shared about the cut­throat world they were con­quer­ing.” That know­in­gess trans­lated on to cel­lu­loid in fas­cin­at­ing ways, par­tic­u­larly when the team was paired with the dir­ect­or Frank Tashlin, who had a back­ground in anim­ated shorts. The later Martin and Lewis films “Artists and Models” and “Hollywood or Bust” are replete with self-conscious, fourth-wall-breaking gags that would later influ­ence not only sit­com humor but high­brow cinema as well. The ten­sion of the Martin-Lewis act itself, with Dean the ami­able, smooth, ser­i­ous one and Jerry as the often remark­ably obnox­ious man-child who always gets the duo into anoth­er fine mess, increas­ingly bled into their off-screen rela­tion­ship, and the team broke up in 1956, after which the two per­formers were per­son­ally estranged for some time.

After part­ing ways with Martin, Lewis threw him­self into his solo film career with great fero­city, and began pro­du­cing films right off the bat. He had ever been an apt pupil of the medi­um. In 2003 Lewis told the crit­ic Chris Fujiwara, “The first year Dean and I were on the lot, they couldn’t find me. I was in the cam­era depart­ment, I was in edit­ing, I was in mini­atures, I was in ward­robe, in makeup, in post; they had to find me to get me on stage to do a scene.” Despite hav­ing been thrown off the set of “Hollywood or Bust” by Tashlin for bad beha­vi­or that was a by-product of the deteri­or­a­tion in his rela­tion­ship with Martin, Lewis re-teamed with the dir­ect­or for such innov­at­ive pic­tures as “Cinderfella” and “It’s Only Money.” His debut as a dir­ect­or was 1960’s “The Bellboy,” star­ring him­self in the title role. A lengthy series of situ­ations and gags set in and filmed at the then hyper-modern Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida, it’s largely a homage to the clowns of silent cinema; Lewis’ bell­boy char­ac­ter does not speak through­out, and the film­maker con­sul­ted with the great golden age com­ic Stan Laurel on the script. It was on this film that Lewis pion­eered the “video assist” that has since become a staple of film­mak­ing; a video sys­tem, with its cam­era moun­ted con­cur­rent to the film cam­era, recor­ded the action so that dir­ect­or Lewis could instantly assess a take from per­former Lewis.

Lewis also appeared as him­self in “The Bellboy,” and the dif­fer­ence between the “self” he por­trayed in that picture–a slick, arrog­ant, uncar­ing star sur­roun­ded by sycophants—was a stark con­trast to the inept, silly, but at least ostens­ibly sweet and lov­able over­grown child who was the title char­ac­ter here, a vari­ation on whom made up the stand­ard Lewis onscreen per­sona at the time. This dicho­tomy recalled the ten­sion that anim­ated the Martin-Lewis team-ups, and reached an apo­theosis of sorts in 1963’s “The Nutty Professor,” in which Lewis played the good-hearted but clumsy and grot­esque sci­ent­ist Julius Kelp, who trans­formed, with the help of a potion of his own con­coc­tion, into the unc­tu­ous, mean-spirited, and multi-talented “lady killer” Buddy Love. This eye-popping update of “Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde” was seen by some as a com­ment­ary by Lewis on the rela­tion­ship between him­self and Martin. But Lewis him­self more or less admit­ted that the cock­sure Buddy Love was merely anoth­er ver­sion of him­self. The vari­ous con­tra­dic­tions he embod­ied in his private self and his pub­lic per­sonae were also reflec­ted in his char­ity work. In March of 1952 Martin and Lewis co-hosted their first “telethon,” a midnight-to-nearly‑5 p.m. tele­vised vari­ety show to which view­ers could call in to donate funds for a cause; in this case, the con­struc­tion of a car­di­ac hos­pit­al, and the char­ity chosen by Martin and Lewis them­selves, the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation. Since 1966, Lewis has been the driv­ing force behind a Labor Day Weekend telethon for the found­a­tion, and the phrase “Jerry’s Kids” (Muscular Dystrophy is a dis­ease that tar­gets chil­dren) has entered the pop cul­ture lin­gua franca. Lewis’s all-nighters host­ing these telethons, dur­ing which he was by turns wheed­ling, dis­missive, treacly, man­ic, and often genu­inely flab­ber­gas­ted and over­whelmed (as when a sur­prise on-air reunion with Dean Martin, engin­eered by their com­mon friend Frank Sinatra, happened in 1976) are still the stuff of show busi­ness legend.

As is his repu­ta­tion as a film­maker. His solo pic­tures of the ‘60s were ter­rif­ic money­makers, but were largely crit­ic­ally reviled in his nat­ive land. In France, how­ever, the intel­lec­tu­als at pub­lic­a­tions such as “Cahiers du Cinema” and “Positif” took him quite ser­i­ously indeed. His work pro­foundly influ­enced the critic-turned-director Jean-Luc Godard, whose “cut­away” set of a saus­age fact­ory in his 1972 “Tout va bien” (co-directed with Jean-Pierre Gorin) was a dir­ect ref­er­ence to a sim­il­ar piece of stage­work in Lewis’s 1961 “The Ladies Man.” A joke among main­stream American middlebrows of a cer­tain gen­er­a­tions runs along the lines of “Well, what do the French know; they think Jerry Lewis is funny/an artist.” (Indeed, as for the lat­ter des­ig­na­tion, Lewis was offi­cially induc­ted into the order of the Commandeurs of the Légion d’honneur in France in 1984.) There is also the mat­ter of Lewis’s self-directed for­ay into “ser­i­ous” drama, the notori­ous, much-speculated-upon but never-released 1972 pic­ture “The Day The Clown Cried,” in which Lewis plays a once-celebrated clown in a Nazi death camp. “When Lewis decides he has some­thing to say, it comes out con­form­ist, sen­ti­ment­al and banal,” Andrew Sarris said of the film­maker sev­er­al years pri­or to the mak­ing of “Clown.” Never offi­cially com­pleted, it is unlikely that the pic­ture will ever be seen.

For all that, Lewis acquit­ted him­self bril­liantly in a more-or-less straight dra­mat­ic role, play­ing com­ic and talk-show host Jerry Langford, who falls vic­tim to seem­ingly goofy celeb stalk­er Rupert Pupkin (played by a here very uncool Robert DeNiro), in Martin Scorsese’s chilly, ali­en­at­ing 1983 show­biz par­able “The King of Comedy.” In 1983 he also made his final fea­ture as a dir­ect­or, “Cracking Up.” His film appear­ances began to dry up (he did a turn oppos­ite Johnny Depp in the eccent­ric 1993 pic­ture “Arizona Dream,” dir­ec­ted by the Serbian film­maker Emir Kusturica), but he non­ethe­less con­tin­ued to seem a tire­less enter­tain­er, par­tic­u­larly in light of the vari­ous health crises he has had since at least the mid-60s, when a spin­al injury from a fall led to an addic­tion to paink­illers that he conquered in the mid-70s. Heart attacks, dia­betes, pro­state can­cer and oth­er such troubles plagued him, and he non­ethe­less sol­diered on like the trouper he always took pride in being. In the mid-1990s he played on Broadway and toured with a pro­duc­tion of the music­al “Damn Yankees.” In addi­tion to con­tinu­ing to host his telethon, he made scattered tele­vi­sion appear­ances, and talked often of adapt­ing his film “The Nutty Professor” into a Broadway show. Seemingly unable to help being a light­ning rod for con­tro­versy, his unfor­tu­nate pen­chant for wise­crack­ing con­cern­ing homo­sexu­als caused some to protest his receiv­ing a 2009 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. More recently, he raised some eye­brows with his sug­ges­tion that troubled star­let Lindsay Lohan might bene­fit from a spank­ing. Through a career that spanned more than half a cen­tury, he estab­lished, and retained, a remark­able fig­ure that achieved solid­ity and grandeur almost entirely via its con­tra­dic­tions. “I know Jerry,” Lewis told Chris Fujiwara; “I sleep with him, remem­ber? I know him, I know that son-of-a-bitch in and out. I know his needs, I know that without him I wouldn’t have food on the table. He works for me and very well. When I talk about him in the first per­son, people look at you askance. Are you f—kin’ schizo­phren­ic? In the cre­at­ive, yes.”

Lewis’s 1944 mar­riage to Patty Palmer endured to 1984; the couple had six chil­dren, includ­ing Gary Lewis, whose band The Playboys had a ‘60s hit with the Al-Kooper-penned “This Diamond Ring.” In 1983 Lewis mar­ried SanDee Pitnick. Lewis is sur­vived by her and sev­en chil­dren and TK grandchildren.

There is not much emo­tion in the above so I will say now that Lewis is a sub­ject near and very dear to both my heart and my aes­thet­ic. The more you learn of his work, the more impress­ive he becomes. I do not believe I entirely agree with Andrew Sarris’ estim­a­tion of Lewis’ attempts at ser­i­ous state­ment, although I can­’t say he was entirely wrong either. What remains true it that the one sure sign in film con­ver­sa­tion that you are deal­ing with a near-irredeemable phil­istine is a “Well they love Jerry Lewis in France” remark. 

UPDATE: Thanks for read­ing this but my friend Dave Kehr’s obit for the New York Times, which was also writ­ten a while ago as Dave is no longer with the paper, is the one.