Jerry Lewis: Would you have me any other way?

Editor's note: The following is a lightly edited reprint of Daily Herald film critic Dann Gire's Oct. 15, 1982, interview with the late comedian/filmmaker Jerry Lewis, who died Sunday at the age of 91.

After years of experience talking with the press, Jerry Lewis knows how to get a journalist's attention.

“I'm going to let you in on some­thing that no other reporter has ever heard,” he said, his eyes rolling around in their sockets. “Do you know that I have a secret compulsion?

“There is not any hotel suite or any restaurant I have been to all over the world where I have not left my incorrigible mark. Would you like to know what that mark is?”

He paused just long enough for his listener's curiosity to peak. Lewis has nothing if not an acute sense of tim­ing.

“I take this beautiful linen napkin, see. I put a little piece of soft butter in the middle and pull the napkin tight, pffffft! That's what you get.”

Lewis pointed to the ceiling of his ho­tel room at the Ritz Carlton. I looked up and saw it. A small, splattered butter pat decorated an otherwise white ceiling.

Lewis laughed a bratty little kid laugh and beamed with the pride of a small boy who succeeded in throwing a rock through a four-story window on a dare.

“I'm 9 years old, and I'm never going to be any different!” he said. “I still get pretty nuts. As long as I can create fun, I get pretty bananas.

“Would you have me any other way?”

His question was rhetorical because, indeed, if somebody wanted Jerry Lewis any other way, he wouldn't be Jerry Lewis, or, as he's known by his French fans, Le Roi du Crazy, (the king of crazy).

By the time Lewis and I had ex­changed goodbyes, we had burned up a Saturday afternoon with a kaleidos­copic, rambling conversation that touched on his annu­al Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, the growing anti-Jerry movement, the performer's split with one-time partner Dean Martin, plus his impending marriage in February, his recently published autobiography, “Jerry Lewis in Person,” and his three upcoming movies “The King of Comedy,” “Slapstick” and “Smorgas­bord.”

Lewis was dressed in tube socks and white sneakers, athletic shorts and a sports shirt.

He practically glows when guests enter the room, but he doesn't stand up to meet any­ one. This tradition can be traced back to when Lewis attended a party for the powerful and vindictive gossip columnist Louel­la Parsons at Chasen's Restaurant in Los Angeles.

Everyone was there: Bogart, Gable, Peck, Hepburn, Cagney, all the big ones. When Parsons entered the room, everyone stood up.

Everyone but Lewis.

The columnist asked the comedian whether something was wrong — maybe his leg was broken? — be­cause he wasn't standing.

“Louella, that was you who came in, not Her Majesty,” Lewis curtly replied.

That quip cost the comedian his fa­vorite-son status with Parsons, who proceeded to rip Lewis to pieces in subsequent columns. Fortunately, his comedy career had already taken off, so the effect was minimal.

“She was really incensed by my conduct. She was at the point of senil­ity, anyhow,” Lewis said. “The hypoc­risy, the lie of that, of everybody standing up upon her entrance. I'm not putting down anybody. I think what they did was proper. I think what they did was courtesy. I think if I, at that time, had been as wise as 56 makes you, I might have stood. But I don't like to think I would.”

(Note: When I interviewed Lewis in 2014, I asked him bluntly if he knew then what he knows now at 88, would he have stood up? Lewis replied, “If I had it to do over again, I'd stay seated.”)

“Obnoxious and proud of it” might be a suitable tag for the image Lewis has hammered out over his turbulent career.

During the past few years, criticism of Lewis and his telethon has reached hyperbolic proportions. WLS-FM disc jockey Steve Dahl regu­larly takes potshots at Lewis, espe­cially about Labor Day weekend when the filmmaker takes the cam­era's center stage for a show many people regard as a blatant outlet for the star's ego.

The “Let's Get Jerry” campaign seems to be growing.

Lewis said, “It's not really ‘Let's Get Jerry.' It's “Let's Get Any Leader.' ‘Let's Get Anybody With a Point of View.' ‘Let's Get Anyone Who's Got Guts.' And ‘Let's Get Anyone Who's Got Some of the Attributes We Don't Have.' That's what I think.

“The ‘Let's Get Jerry' thing could come from ‘Jerry Has a Big Mouth.' There's no question that he says what he thinks. He's artistic while he's caustic, brash, appears overly confi­dent, cocky, showoff, egomaniac, me­galomaniac. They don't want to know if that's invalid. It's more fun that way.

“But keep in mind while they are festering through that kind of poison, I'm at a cocktail party having a wonderful time. They're in deep trouble. At 56, I can say they have my sympathy, not my anger.

“They not only have my sympathy because they have to do that, but their lives aren't as enriched as they could be if they knew me. That's what I think of me. But it took a lot of years.”

Lewis' image problem pervades his movie career, as well. In 1971, he wrote a book “The Total Filmmaker” in which he castigated the “intellectu­al snobbery” that permits only cer­tain subjects and themes to be considered valid.

That snobbery excludes Lewis' visual brand of humor.

Although his last film “Hardly Working” pulled mediocre box office results and was trashed by a great many critics, Lewis is about to star in “The King of Come­dy,” which will open early next year. It's directed by Martin Scorsese and co-stars Oscar-winner Robert De Niro in the title role. Lewis plays talk-show host Jerry Langford, a Johnny Carson-eqsue personality with high ratings.

De Niro plays Rupert Pupkin, an inept comic who has a screw loose. He kidnaps Langford and threatens to kill him unless the host not only teaches Pupkin a good come­dy routine but puts it on his TV show.

“That ‘King of Comedy' is a dan­gerous title with Jerry Lewis' name tied to it.” Lewis said. “Bobby is the king of comedy, not me. It's De Niro's insanity where he thinks he's going to be the king of comedy.”

For another film, Lewis fought against using its original title, “Slapstick,” arguing that his image will mislead people into thinking it's a comedy.

“It's a Kurt Vonnegut story,” he said. “Madeline Kahn and I play 7-foot, 3-inch twins battling an army of 3-inch-tall Chinese. You can't get more off the wall than that.”

At Lewis' urging, director Stephen Paul changed the title to “Slapstick of a Different Kind.”

His third movie, “Smorgasbord,” is the only one in which Lewis returns to his auteurist roots by writing, directing, producing and performing all in the same vehicle. Lewis talked about it cautiously.

“I play the whole world in that one,” he said. “It's the best work I ever think I've done. What's it about? Name it.”

Lewis has another film waiting in the wings, a film that stands to set the world on its ear if it's ever released.

“The Day the Clown Cried” is the true story of Helmut Doork — Helmut the Great, a very famous German clown. Under the Nazi regime, Doork was arrested by the Gestapo, jailed in a concentration camp and forced to march Jewish children into the ovens. He used his clowning talents to keep children from screaming and crying for their mothers.

For funny guy Lewis to play the clown adds a disturbing irony to the telling of the story. The film had barely completed principal photography several years ago when the financial structure — a cooperative effort between Sweden and France — collapsed, throwing “The Day the Clown Cried” into legal limbo along with two Ingmar Bergman projects and a Louis Malle film.

“I lost 40 pounds to make the picture, then I had the prison garb made slightly larger.” Lewis said. “When I watched myself on the screen, I was looking at a man I don't know.

“If Helmut was presumably the great German clown at the age of 40, by the time he was 70 or 78 (when the film takes up), his life was shattered and he had become an alcoholic. He was awful compared to the giant he was in his younger years.

“The toughest thing was I had to destroy my own comic timing to put it on an amateur level, a disintegrating level of comic ‘ability. I had to take what I have sharpened and honed over all of these years as a comic and hope to go back 40 years for less informa­tion, for less timing, with not-so-perfect a comic move. If you think that ain't tough, it's almost as tough as when you ain't got it and you're hoping you get it.”

With some luck and hard work by Lewis' attorneys, “The Day the Clown Cried” could be out of the courts before next spring. Once Lewis gets his hands on the principal footage, he can add the score, sound effects and dubbing necessary for a final print.

“I have great, great pangs of anticipation,” he said.

(Note: In our 2014 interview, I asked Lewis if “The Day of the Clown” will ever be released. His blunt answer: “No. It's my movie and my decision!”)

Lewis continues to grind out films, although not as many as he used to. His greatest cinema achievement still re­mains “The Nutty Professor,” a 1963 satire based on Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The title character is an asexual, insecure professor who imbibes a secret formula and becomes super-macho Buddy Love, an obnoxious tough-guy who croons his way into Stella Stevens' heart.

How Lewis developed the nerdy voice for his nutty professor is one of the tidbits of trivia he divulges in his autobiography “Jerry Lewis In Person,” now available at area bookstores.

Lewis co-wrote the book with Herb Gluck, a self-avowed Lewis fan since the age of 6.

“I really did the book because of him. Once I got into it with him, I was very glad I did,” he said. “That was 4½ years ago. If we had printed it all, it'd make War and Peace look like a pamphlet.”

The book begins on a high point, the last live comedy show Lewis performed with his singing partner Dean Mar­tin. From there, it backtracks to tell the early life of Joseph Levitch, a Jew­ish kid born to vaudeville parents in New Jersey. Even before he changed his name to Jerry Lewis, Levitch had a reputation for being obnoxiously proud. (In fact, he once was expelled from high school after punching his principal for uttering an anti-Semitic remark.)

In 1944, he married Patti Palmer, a former singer with the Jimmy Dorsey band, and fathered six sons. (He recently divorced and now travels with his fiance, Sandee Pitnick, who's nicknamed Sam.)

In the book, Lewis comments on his life, recalling his friendship with John Kennedy, his addiction to the drug Percodan, his rock star son Gary Lewis' tour of Vietnam, and the time he was thrown off a studio lot by a director who called him “discourteous, obnoxious, an em­barrassment and a disgrace to the pro­fession.”

Remember that butter pat thing? Lewis has another naughty hotel quirk.

“When there are prints in a hotel, not original paint­ings, I love to put little birds in the sky,” Lewis said. “My birds are in some of the finest hotels in the world.”

Once, there was what Lewis calls an “oops” with his permanent ink markers.

“I was staying at the presidential suite in the Waldorf Astoria. I put some birds in a 15-foot by 10-foot painting. By the time the third bird was there, a raised part of the painting hit my pinkie, and I realized I was put­ting birds in an original work.”

Lewis grinned sheepishly, the grin of the little boy who had been caught throw­ing a rock through a fourth-story win­dow on a dare.

“We no longer stay at the Waldorf Astoria in New York,” he said. “The tab for that little incorrigible move I think was $5,000 to $10,000 to repair the art­work.”

Would you have him any other way?