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speedwayy · 5 months ago

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Can you explain more about dean martin and Jerry lewis? I dont go here but my interest has been peaked

okay i don’t know what to say so i’ll try to give you the rundown off my dome. bear with me it might get hefty.

Martin and Lewis were a comedy duo that lasted for 10 years to the day from July 25, 1946 to July 25, 1956.

Jerry was a teen dad trying to make it in the show biz world to impress his vaudevillian parents, Dean was an easygoing drifter without a care in the world, not even his wife who was living in her parents house with two kids and another on the way. It was a match made in heaven.

Jerry, as I mentioned, was the child of two vaudevillian parents, Daniel “Danny” and Rachel “Rae” Levitch. His identity crisis can be traced back to the day he was born, seeing as even he doesn’t seem to know if he was named Joseph or Jerome. As an only child with parents who were constantly on the road, Jerry lived a solitary life, being passed around the homes of various family members. He recounts as a child aged six or seven, he wandered the streets alone looking for his mother, only to find her entertaining a saloon of noisy drunks. On another particularly egregious occasion, Danny and Rae neglected their son’s Bar Mitzvah.

“Here’s a famous one from when he was a kid.”

His favorite childhood memories more than often were of his grandmother, who cared for him when his parents would not. She became the ideal woman he would search for in all others, the immaculate maternal figure, which he would soon find in his more experienced wife, Patti Palmer. But the spectre of his life was his father, Danny, who had abandoned him as a child, needled his talents as an adolescent, then jealously leeched off his famous name as an adult. He was the one whom Jerry always strove to emulate and impress, and whom he resented and did all to avoid becoming like him.

“In some incomprehensible way I felt guilty, as if everything I had become only made [my father’s] life more painful, much harder to bear.”

Only a few years after he left school at 15 for the allure of the stage his parents couldn’t resist, Jerry would meet the man his biographer, Shawn Levy, dubbed “Danny’s evil twin”: the handsome, lady-loving, baritone club singer Dean Martin.

Danny and Rae Levitch; a young, pre-rhinoplasty Dean Martin. I’ll let you decide if there’s any resemblance.

Whatever Jerry Lewis was, Dean Martin was not. Dino was born and raised in Steubenville, Ohio, the second son to more humble parents of Italian origin, Gaetano “Guy” and Angela Crocetti. Where Jerry knew he was born to be a star, Dino never seemed particularly ambitious one way or the other. And while Jerry was singing his little nine-year-old heart out to Al Jolson tunes, Dino was filling his time with various jobs from boxer (of his twelve fights: “I won all but eleven.”), to steel mill worker, to illegal casino dealer, pocketing money from the house. Singing might not have been his great passion, but he liked it, and he knew he had a pretty enough voice, and so did others, and sooner or later, he ended up singing in bands all the way up to Cleveland. When he was 24, he married pretty and athletic Elizabeth Anne McDonald, and soon enough, Dino was an up-and-coming singer with a new name, an agent, and enough bookings to move his steadily growing family up north.

When they finally met performing in the same club in Atlantic City, circumstances weren’t exactly great for Dean or Jerry. Jerry was floundering with his act that consisted of him putting on outfits and lip-syncing goofily to records (not sure why anyone hired him to do this tbh), and he had to do what he felt was stooping: becoming an MC like his dad to make ends meet while his wife was pregnant. Dean was married too, and already had a couple kids of his own, but was feeling the pressures of fatherhood a little less than Jerry. Dean wasn’t made for marriage. Dean lived his life Dean-style, which consisted mainly of girls, midday naps, gambling, and Saturdays with the boys. Already, Betty was becoming troubled with her husband, and hated her life living between her parents in Philadelphia and the New York apartment Dean was leeching off a friend.

“Suddenly, at Broadway and Fifty-fourth, Sonny spotted someone across the street: a tall, dark, and incredibly handsome man in a camel’s hair coat. His name, Sonny said, was Dean Martin. Just looking at him intimidated me: How does anybody get that handsome?”

They would meet a few other times after crossing on the street that one day. Playing the same clubs, hanging out with friends of friends. They weren’t officially friends yet, and Dean likely gave the scrawny 19-year-old little mind, but Jerry was in love from the moment he set eyes on him. He was nine years older than Jerry, incredibly attractive, charming, cool, “worldly”, as Jerry would say.

“Following Danny around burlie houses and Borscht Belt rec rooms was all Jerry ever wanted out of his childhood; now, following Dean as he catted and sang around New York looked like a marvelous career. Just as he’d wanted to marry every girl singer who’d paid him attention, Jerry was smitten with Dean for deigning to spend time with him. That Dean possessed so many of Danny’s attributes—dark good looks, sexual confidence, a great voice—only made the attraction that much stronger.”

Forever after that, Jerry would use Dean as a fulfillment for his ultimate fantasy: to have an older brother, someone who could be his companion, to love him unconditionally, to care for him and understand him. Years later, Jerry would still reminisce about his “big brother” that “[he] had always longed for”.

Dean, a youngest child himself, was probably not so eager for a new member of the family, but even he knew Jerry was an asset that couldn’t be lost.

I’m convinced that there’s no way to describe in words Martin and Lewis’s act that makes it sound funny. It’s a “you had to be there” thing. Hearing a singer shout at a guy spilling water all over patrons for an hour isn’t my idea of a good night out, but it must’ve been something, because people loved Dean and Jerry even before they were Martin and Lewis. Their days of crossing paths evolved into a casual friendship where they would heckle each other and do little bits in the middle of their respective acts. Jerry lived to get laughs and attention from the crowd and his beloved big brother, and Dean’s lazy, unaffected exterior made the perfect foil to his outrageous shenanigans. Then came the fateful day in July.

“He smiled, and it was like the sun coming out on the rest of my life.”

Long story short, a club Jerry had booked had an empty spot needing a singer, and Jerry, having realized very early on he wanted to be with him forever and always, suggested Dean. Somehow, it worked. And everything from there kept on working.

For the first time, they were billed together as Martin and Lewis, contrary to the normal convention of billing in alphabetical order. In no time at all, Martin and Lewis would be appearing above every club in America, and sooner, on magazine covers and movie theater marquees.

The formula was stupidly simple. Dean was the playboy and Jerry was the Idiot. Dean looked perfect as is, Jerry perfected his signature high-pitched whine and had his hair buzzed into an overgrown crew cut to appear closer to an eight-year-old.

“It was like watching the two halves of a personality you wished you could have: insane and unrepressed on the one hand, smoothly poised and confident on the other. And serendipitously enough, they actually enhanced one another, sanding away each other’s brittle edges.”

Throughout their 10 year run, there was very little variation on this dichotomy. There was very little originality in their jokes too, of which they had approximately five of. But it worked. Maybe Jerry was right when he said that people liked to see two men in love (fujoshi ally).

In those years, Martin and Lewis managed a radio show, regular spots hosting variety show, The Colgate Comedy Hour, 16 feature films, endless T.V. appearances, live tours, 12 combined children, and a stinking amount of fame and money. They were the hottest couple in Hollywood. Everyone knew you couldn’t have Dean without Jerry or Jerry without Dean. The names “Damon and Pythias” would quickly become one of Jerry’s favorite ways to describe them.

And they were close, genuinely. When Dean’s marriage imploded, Jerry was the best man at his wedding to his affair partner, Jeanne Biegger. He accompanied him on his honeymoon, and he was just as eager to let Dean a room in his house when the two fought. Jerry found the companionship and security he always longed for in his “big brother” (whom he affectionately called Paul, his middle name), who got physical with anyone who said a word against Jerry, and tearfully accompanied him in the ambulance after a pratfall gone wrong.

Such was it that Jerry felt he was the only person in the world who understood Dean, and vice versa. He would refer to them as twins separated at birth, or like one person. Another was that they had a telepathic bond and felt pain and illness at the same time (I honestly believe it. Explain the Jerry getting sick while filming The Bellboy at the same time as Dean’s Ocean’s 11 cancer scare, and their shared Percodan addiction. Little Charlie voice “Do you believe in telepathy?”)

“My fantasy big brother.”

Their act was more risqué than how Jerry recalls them in the “innocent ‘50s”, between Jerry’s exaggeratedly effeminate affectations and the amount of innuendo they manage to cram into those 100 minute family pictures (see: Jerry spraying Dean’s face with milk and Dean forcing Jerry to lick and eat a cigar— in the same movie! Where Jerry is pretending to be a 12 year old boy, nonetheless!) And most sketches on Colgate involve the two in bed together, or kissing, or groping one another, etc etc. Honestly don’t think they could pull off the bits where Dean plays Jerry’s dad and they end up on top of each other in 2025. Mostly because those are advocating for beating your kid. Idk.

“There was an edge of cruelty to Dean—especially on screen, where he was always cast as a conniver who at the last minute turned good—while Jerry was more like a puppy dog that kept wagging its tail even when it was being kicked. It was a new concept in comedy, and it was widely imitated: A case can be made for their being the models for Gelsomina and Zampanò, the innocent clown and the egoistic brute of Federico Fellini’s La Strada[.]”

While the audience became so accustomed to Martin and Lewis that they struggled to extricate their comedic personas from their real identities, so too, it seemed, did Jerry.

In his 20s, he was still a child desperate for validation, with a paralyzing fear of being abandoned. I suppose most comedians must be like that, but Jerry was truly a severe case. Like a child, he swung from sensitive and cloying to selfish and cruel. But children are only like that because they’re only children and still figuring out people also have feelings and needs and shit. Jerry never seemed to reach that stage.

He loved Dean, but was petty and jealous when it came to him. Whenever Dean would come up with an ad-lib that got a particular amount of laughs, Jerry would coincidentally wind up with a terrible stomachache that required the attentions of everyone in the room. It’s embarrassingly immature to the point where you can’t even get mad about it.

More sinister, he told David Letterman that one time he dosed Dean with Seconal then went on stage alone.

“Each person is really two people.”

You may be wondering, what’s Dean’s feelings about all this?

Listen,

I don’t know.

He’s just too enigmatic. Maybe Jerry was right in saying he was the only one who really knew him. Maybe Dean was right in saying no one knew him.

I think maybe Mack Grey had it figured out, but he’s for a different post.

Anyways. Jerry is too simple. It’s all Psych 101. But what does Dean have going on? It’s either genuinely nothing, or inside he’s more fucked up than anyone can possibly imagine. Jerry would chalk it up to simple repression. Dean’s parents told him having feelings was for fags so he resolved never to have one again. I. Don’t. Know.

Surely, he must’ve felt some type of way about Jerry. At times, he was referring to their relationship in the terms of a marriage (“Till death to us part,” and sorta weirdly, “We’ll be together until Jerry dies.”) at other times, he seemed more or less indifferent. He clearly loved and was affectionate towards Jerry, but I wonder how much he considered the actual depth of Jerry’s feelings. His son, Ricci, wrote that a motivator for the break-up was that Dean didn’t want to father Jerry, and that the latter “seemed to want more warmth and compassion than [Dean] provided.”

The truth may be that Dean was a tulpa manifested by Jerry’s overwhelming desire to have a brother to freak on. The truth may be that Dean was destined to die in a horrific steel mill accident, but he somehow evaded his fate and was living as a half-zombie. The truth… we shall never know.

"Those close to him could sense it: He was there, but he was not really there; a part of them, but apart from them as well. The glint in his eye was disarming, so captivating and so chilling at once, like lantern-light gleaming on nighttime sea: the tiny soft twinkling so gaily inviting, belying for an instant, then illuminating, a vast unseen cold blackness beneath and beyond. The secret in its depth seemed to be the most horrible secret of all: that there was no secret, no mystery other than that which resides, not as a puzzle to be solved or a revelation to be discovered, but as blank immanence, in emptiness itself."

The real reason for breakup, in my opinion, was kind of simple. They were burnt out on each other. Jerry had ambitions of making films on his own, just like his idol, Charlie Chaplin, and Dean was sort of a pleb who didn’t think movies were real art. Plus, his tolerance for Jerry’s antics was hitting its threshold, and he was fed up with the roles he was getting in their movies (asshole, asshole but he’s a gangster, asshole but he’s super rapey, list goes on) and Jerry undermining him to the public. Dean was lazy, Jerry was controlling. Dean was unsympathetic, Jerry was needy. They feuded, but made up, for the most part. It was likely easier for Dean, who treated the rest of the world like water off a duck’s back, than for Jerry, who spent his entire adulthood thus far attached to Dean. By 1954, their fighting hit its peak on the set of 3 Ring Circus, but they had two more years to tough out. It was very easy to send Jerry to the hospital by stressing him out. Times were hard.

“My partner was drifting away from me. Or had he drifted away already? The uncertainty tapped into my childhood fear of being deserted. An icy look from Dean would turn me into a scared nine-year-old.”

Still, they would make up, and continue their going around in circles. It lead to some memorable moments: Dean kicking and stomping on Jerry’s bicycle after an argument, Jerry knocking Dean’s head around during his performance of That’s Amore, Dean maybe breaking Jerry’s toe, Dean waterboarding him in a giant tank. And of course, Dean’s infamous “You can talk about love all you want, you’re nothing to me but a fucking dollar sign.”

There were four more movies after 3 Ring Circus. Actually very impressive. Jerry did a lot of public crying about how Dean didn’t love him. Dean, who had a valid enough reason to hate Jerry, might’ve actually kept the partnership together despite it all, worried that he’d flounder without Jerry and that public opinion was already against him. But for Jerry, the world he had built around Dean Martin was gone forever and there was no coming back. Anyways, he needed the freedom to make the greatest comedy film of all time: City Lights Part Two: Return of the Tramp.

Their last show was played at the Copacabana, exactly 10 years after their debut. They ended with the title number from their second to last film, Pardners (Hollywood or Bust wouldn’t be released until after the breakup). “When other friendships fail / We’ll still be on that long, long trail…”

It is said that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

And when the show was over, the only thing that made everyone feel safe that Jerry didn’t hang himself was the three hours of wailing coming from his dressing room…

“We had some good times, didn’t we, Paul?” “There’ll be more.”

Jerry would go on to become one of the most polarizing figures in film with works like The Bellboy and The Ladies Man. His most popular film, The Nutty Professor, is really also his most psychological. But really it’s my least favorite… Anyways, some people would tell you that Buddy Love, the evil bisexual that Jerry turns into after drinking his potion, is supposed to be a parody of Dean, which I don’t really see. Jerry conflates himself, Dean, and his father a lot, and I think that’s what The Nutty Professor is about. There’s not enough time now to go into it.

Dean, as everyone predicted, flopped a little at first. But it was a very minor bump, and soon he started palling around with Frank Sinatra (an obsessive, lonely, only child from New Jersey in his own right) which made him into the Dean Martin we all know today. Though, Dean would lapse into some familiar old ways, getting laughs out of a crowd by heckling Sinatra while he crooned, or pretending to be a busboy and getting in the way of his show. But Frank Sinatra was really no Dean Martin (not intended as hate because I love Frank like a sonboyfriend).

In the immediate aftermath of the “divorce”, as they all referred to it, they had their run going at each other in the press. Dean got bitter and snide, blaming Jerry’s immaturity and accusing him of being jealous of his wife (which was true, as Jerry would be the first to say, but he didn’t have to say it.) A weird one was when he got really heated about Jerry removing all photographs of Dean from his home. He was going on about how Jerry was an asshole for that since he was still genial enough to leave up a picture of Jerry in his kids’ bedroom (which is true. On an Architectural Digest style program where he gives a house tour, the only decor on his children’s walls are a wooden crucifix and a picture of him and Jerry.)

Jerry was wandering the moors and shit. He wrote columns about how Dean broke his soul and held him back as an artists and about how he had to go to therapy and his therapist told him to stop looking at Dean as his father and instead rely on the maternal support of his wife. Good ol’ 1950s style psychoanalysis.

"Everybody likes to hear ‘I like you.’ Now because of Dean's personality and the way he was with his bravado, yet, I think, scared of his innermost feelings, I'd have to rush these things. That's a terrible frustration. That's like loving a girl or boy for years and years, and waiting for them to tell you that they love you too, and just at the exact moment when they are getting ready to say it, being yanked back into the real world only to realize that your happiness was a flimsy dream that didn't come true. That's what it has been like for me."

In 1966, Jerry picked up his 24 hour Muscular Dystrophy Association telethons. Martin and Lewis had been associated with the charity, but Dean wasn’t ever into that kind of thing. It was on this Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon, September the first, 1976, 20 years after their break up, that Dean and Jerry had their great reunion.

“I got a friend who loves what you do every year…”

It wasn’t really that great. Thanks Frank Sinatra.

To clear a few things up: Jerry and the rest of the world want to have you convinced they really hadn’t spoken for 20 years. This is not true. They had varying degrees of contact from the late fifties to early sixties, and had mini-reunions performing short bits if they happened to be in the same club. Dean had even expressed that he wanted to be friends again, but with the implicit understanding that the relationship would now be on his terms. For Jerry, it was incestuous roleplay codependent marriage or bust.

The next thing is, Jerry told an extremely easily disprovable lie that he and Dean became close friends after this moment and spoke every day. Idk why he said that it’s actually sad. He tried sending a heartfelt note to Dean, but he never responded. Just one time, did Jerry confess that he was on pills at the time and he didn’t actually remember that Dean had come on.

They wouldn’t speak again until 1987, after the death of Dean Paul Jr., Dean’s fifth child and the first from his second marriage, in an Air Force training accident. Since Jerry had telephoned his sincere condolences, they rekindled a long-distance friendship. They were never to achieve the intimacy they once had, and that Jerry had once dreamed of them having when they were both older and more mature, but Dean, who already seemed septuagenarian since his youth, was now matching that physically, and he liked Jerry best two or three arms’ lengths away. He had divorced Jeanne years before for a short-lived marriage to 26-year-old receptionist Catherine Hawn, and after that, he never remarried. He had also met the fate that all members of Frank Sinatra’s inner circle suffered sooner or later: he got booted, or rather he quit, in the middle of the Rat Pack’s 1988 Together Again tour. His spot was filled by Liza Minnelli.

By all accounts, Dean spent most of the later years of his life eating alone in his favorite restaurant. To Jerry, who had divorced his wife of nearly 40 years and was re-wed to SanDee Pitnick, and was still puttering along with films (notably, King of Comedy and his last directorial effort, Cracking Up/Smorgasbord) and MDA work, this listless existence seemed miserable. But Dean always took things as they came.

They would meet again face-to-face in 1989, when Jerry surprised Dean on his 72nd birthday while he was playing Bally’s Hotel in Las Vegas. They embraced, Dean was nostalgically warm: “I love you and I mean it.”

“I gotta kiss you on the lips.”

On Christmas day in 1995, Dean passed away.

He had never dreamed of fame, rather it was “thrust upon him by ambitious friends”, as Shawn Levy puts it in Rat Pack Confidential. But today, Dean Martin is remembered as a symbol of the good ol’ days, when men were men and Vegas was run by the mob. His songs are ubiquitous, his sleazing drunk character beloved by oldheads globally. Life has a funny way of working out.

A New York Times article published in 2002 (for the release of the made for T.V. biopic, Martin and Lewis) described the two as America’s Catherine and Heathcliff. And so it was, for Jerry who had dreams of Dean after his passing. He penned his 2005 memoir, Dean & Me (A Love Story), he played the clip of the two reuniting in 1976 at his shows, mentioning Dean's name in interviews was an easy way to get the old man in a bittersweet, reminiscent mood. Until the day he died (in the year of Dean's centennial, coincidentally), Jerry remembered Dean as the greatest love of his life, the singular person who was more important to him than his parents, his wife, his children.

“I always wanted to do good for him. I wanted him to be proud of me, my big brother.”

"I happen to love the kid like a brother."

"He was my hero. He was my father, my brother, my friend."

There's still so much gone unsaid. There was the time Dean bought Jerry a scooter and he fell off and hit his head and had to go the hospital. There was the time he wrote a love song for Jerry's birthday. There was the time they were reported to the FBI for being on a list of known homosexuals. There was the time Jerry misread Dirk Bogarde's name as Dick Bogarde. There was the time they were at the same Judy Garland show in 1958, but Jerry was also making out with Frank Sinatra. There was the time they owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the IRS and Jerry had to get them out of it without letting Dean know because in his 78 years of living, he never seemed to fully understand the concept of money. There was the time Atom Egoyan made an erotic thriller that was very obviously based off of them, written by the guy who wrote the piña colada song and starring Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth, and Colin Firth, who’s the Dean of the situation, tries to stick his dick inside Kevin Bacon during a threesome and then kills himself. There was Martin Scorsese and there was Rainer Werner Fassbinder. There was Wiseguy and there was The Sopranos. There were tears of sorrow and tears of joy. And most of all... There was Amore.

(If you made it this far, thank you, and you are entitled to a free shirt at the door.)

#THIS IS A MONSTER IM SORRY #i got carried away #apologies for any inaccuracies. opinions are my own. etc #martin and lewis #incestinas and fujos go here

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