Background
Lewis, Jerry was born on March 16, 1926 in Newark. Son of Danny and Rae Levitch.
Actor comedian director author
Lewis, Jerry was born on March 16, 1926 in Newark. Son of Danny and Rae Levitch.
Lewis dropped out of Irvington High School in the tenth grade.
The first six films directed by Lewis deserve a place in any study of American comedy—even if The Nutty Professor is also the most disturbing version of the Jekyll and Hyde story. It shows the somber side of Lewis’s imagination usually obscured by sentimentality. It seems to reflect on Lewis’s own appearance and the pain of all those disparaging asides in Ins partnership with Dean Martin.
In 1946, Lewis and Martin formed a night-club act that Hal Wallis later transferred to the movies. Their films together were broken affairs if only because the two men were at such odds: Lewis seemed hurt by Martin’s callousness, just as Martin was offended by the proximity of a slob. That they prospered was due to Paramount’s plugging, hard work, and the support of a largely juvenile audience: My Friend Irma (49, George Marshall); My Friend Inna Goes West (50, Hal Walker); At War With the Army (51, Walker); That’s My Boy (51, Walker); Sailor Beware (52, Walker); Jumping Jacks (52, Norman Taurog); The Stooge (53, Taurog); Scared Stiff (53, Marshall); The Caddy (53, Taurog); Money from Home (53, Marshall); Living It Up (54, Taurog); Three Bing Circus (54, Joseph Pevney); You’re Never Too Young (55, Taurog); Artists and Models (55, Tashlin); Pardners (56, Taurog); and Hollywood or Bust (56, Tashlin).
Lewis’s range grew as the series went on, and Hollywood or Bust was an advance in Tashlins matching of the idiot with the idiotic American dream—with Jerry’s glasses knocked askew' hr Anita Ekberg’s boobs. When the partnership ended, Lewis was able to carry on solo. His films with Tashlin enlarged his skill as much as his ambition: The Delicate Delinquent (57, Don McGuire); The Sad Sack (57, Marshall); Rock-a- Bye Baby (58, Tashlin); The Geisha Boy (58, Tashlin); Don’t Give Up the Ship (59, Taurog); and Visit to a Small Planet (60, Taurog).
Once he w'as directing himself. Lewis mixed his owm projects with appearances in other people’s films: Cinderfella (60, Tashlin), where his rabid pathos eliminated much of Tashlins original satire; It’s Only Money (62, Tashlin); Who’s Minding the Store? (63, Tashlin); The Disorderly Orderh/ (64, Tashlin); Boeing Boeing (65, John Rich); Way Way Out (66, Gordon Douglas); Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River (68, Jerry Paris); and Hook, Line and Sinker (69, Marshall).
But by 1967, Lewis’s momentum faltered. Three on a Couch had marked his departure from Paramount. Indeed, One More Time was made without his presence as an actor, but with the savorless Salt and Pepper—Sammy Davis and Peter Lawford.
He was a trussed-up straight man to De Niro and Sandra Bernhard. He has also acted in Slapstick of Another Kind (84, Steven Paul); Fight for Life (87, Elliot Silverstein); and Cookie (89, Susan Seidelman). For TV. he was very good for a season as Eli Sternberg, a veteran in the garment business, in Wiseguy (88-89). In recent years, he has been seen in Arizona Dream (93, Emir Kusturiea) and Funny Bones (95, Peter Chelsom).
Commander Order of Arts & Letters, France, 1984. National chairman Muscular Dystrophy Association. Member Screen Producers Guild, Screen Directors Guild, Screen Writers Guild.
Lewis maintained the American comic preoccupation with the little man beset by an incomprehensible, heartless, or intractable world. Keaton responds with disdain, Harry Langdon daydreams, Stan Laurel muddles through, while Chaplin practices all the guile and simpering of a waiter who plans to whip away the lat man's chair.
Jerry Lewis’s response is as novel as it is alarming: he becomes demented. In part, this is a clever exaggeration of a disposition toward cross-eyed goofiness, a tongue tied in knots, and a shambling walk. But no other performer went so far in suggesting a man animated by machinery or by the processing of human instincts implicit in advertising.
Lewis’s period with Frank Tashlin was instrumental in drawing out this gibbering, spastic automaton. It also seems to have inspired Lewis to direct himself, and to see his character as not just the pathetic jerk patronized by Dean Martin, but as a Stan Laurel hero discomposed by every convenience of modern life. Just as Tashlin's movies are cartoon distortions of a world twisting to see itself in deceiving mirrors, so Lewis is adman’s man, a robot degenerate oveiprogrammed by the conflicting gods of Americana, made schizoid by the clash of material luxuries and abstract ideals. The Nutty Professor deals with transformation and the side-by-side images of the loony scientist, timid, inept, sentimental, but inventive, and Buddy Love, the caricature of the Dean Martin “Dino” figure, a blasé stud, relaxed, insolent, and decadent. Lewis had nursed The Nutty Professor for ten years—from the period of his partnership with Martin—and it shows the troubled, naïve vein of seriousness on which his comedy is based.
Lewis is still a household name in America— loved or loathed—because of his annual Labor Day telethon on behalf of children with muscular dystrophy. Few other occasions say so much about America, and surely the event would have lapsed but for Lewis’s commitment to it. It is an orgy of money and sentimentality on the one hand; and on the other, a ponderous, tasteless reflection of a country of huge wealth and boundless idealism. Lewis puts a year of energy into its twenty-four hours, and the event catches all his contrary moods—inspired clowning, trained imbecility, the breakdown of language as fatigue grows, and the heavy, maudlin boasting about feeling. The pressure of solemnity on a f ragile intellect may be just as evident in Lewis’s unreleased movie, The Day the Clown Cried. It was shot in 1974 and finished a year later, but legal problems or someone’s reticence kept it back. It is not a comedy; it is about a circus clown employed by the Nazis to assist in the killing of children in concentration camps.
To live in America is to experience the native incredulity at Lewis being taken seriously. Few things are held against the whole of France more fiercely than French love of Lewis. He is hardly a filmmaker now. The telethon has been Lewis’s annual movie, his life, and his show—and there in twenty-four hours one can still see the monster of his own sentimentality and the genius of timing— to say nothing of Buddy Love. In other words, Jerry Lewis has become not just an institution but a site, as lovelv and/or depraved as Las Vegas, where the telethon has been done.
Married Patti Palmer, 1944 (divorced, 1982). Children: Gary, Ron, Scott, Chris, Anthony, Joseph. Married Sandra Pitnick, 1983.
1 child, Danielle Sara.