Since I don’t know the full story, were these two actually friends at one time that eventually got angry with one another because one thought he was more popular or working hard than the other one? Or were they simply co-workers that got on each others’ nerves from time to time? What exactly is the reason for their breakup?
Dean apparently got fed up with being a straight man, while Jerry was the one who ran away with the yocks. He also got tired of Jerry’s pretensions as a filmmaker.
If you’re interested in reading about it from Dean’s point of view, you should try and find a copy of Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams by Nick Tosches. Jerry was interviewed for the book and actually expressed sympathy for Dean, as well as regret for what happened.
Anyway, it’s a superb biography of Dean Martin up to the early 1990s (he died on Christmas Day, 1995).
Basically, there was just no way Dean Martin was ever going to get equal public recognition in that partnership. People went to a Martin & Lewis film to watch Jerry’s antics and Dean was just there to (brilliantly) set his partner up. Martin wanted his own career and split. Lewis, of course, was hurt by this decision and it created a distance between the two that was never really ever closed.
Pretty sure nobody thought that Dean could survive without Jerry. Off course it turned out that he had a much more successful career as a singer, actor and entertainer than he would have had if he had stayed.
Jerry openly admitted that Dean was the real reason for their success, since he wouldn’t have been half as funny if he hadn’t had him to play off of. Seeing and hearing how the public adored Jerry at the same time they basically ignored him, Dean found himself in an unbearable situation.
There’s a made for TV movie that was sanctioned by Jerry Lewis (played by Sean Hayes) on YouTube. While I cannot put into words the degree to which I despise Jerry Lewis now and in his prime, I have to give him props for not trying to make himself look like a saint; in the movie he comes across as a neurotic and petty ass who walks away with 90% of the attention but goes nuts for the 10% Lewis got.
And of course the famous Labor Day Reunion. It was years more before they spoke again.
It wasn’t just Lewis that Martin was aloof towards, though; he had a reputation for being one of the most guarded and private of people. Even Sinatra didn’t feel he really knew Dean. (There was a joke that “Sinatra wants to be a mob boss while every mob boss wants to be Dean Martin”.)
Ditto this. I never thought he was funny. He seemed like a pretentious, blowhard faker.
All of the above plus the fact that Lewis was just louder publicly. Whenever he was on a television show or a personal appearance or an interview, he ran amok, screaming and mugging and playing pranks and jokes and rending his clothing. Think of Jim Carrey on acid-spiked coke. If he was in the room, you could pay no attention to anyone else. He just wouldn’t let you.
Now image a decade of that. Most rock bands break up in that amount of time from very similar pressures. (See: Stones, Rolling and Jagger, Mick.)
Back in the dead old days of vaudebille, the straight man got 60% of the money for a duo because people in show business knew they controlled whether the act worked or not. And the majority of duos wound up hating one another but forced to work together, as Neil Simon portrayed in The Sunshine Boys. It’s a psychologically unstable dynamic that almost never lasts. Martin couldn’t take being slighted year after year and came to resent Lewis. It was inevitable.
Rupert Holmes wrote a fascinating roman a clef about them titled Where the Truth Lies. The characters are so obviously Martin & Lewis that is almost gets in the way of the plot, but the psychology - from someone who himself spent decades in all aspects of show biz - rings very true, whatever the closeness to the actual facts. The psychology: I’m pretty sure the plot, which revolves around a murder, is pure fiction.
Oh, and while I also came to hate Lewis’ personality over the years, he was fantastically talented. He was the first to write, direct, produce, and star in his own films, years before Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, who get all the credit today, and which made even more money than the M&L films. He invented the system of attaching a video camera to the film camera to get instant results on takes. He took on the system that saw him as the character he played and smashed it in their faces. But then the decade changed and he didn’t. Tragedy all around.
I think Orson Welles still gets credit.
:rolleyes: Welles produced some, but not all, of his films. And many of the silent movie stars, like Chaplin, were doing it long before. Do we really have to play that game?
In the era I’m talking about, though, Lewis was first. The studio system was dying and he saw earlier than almost anyone else what that could mean. Brooks and Allen still get credit for many things Lewis did earlier and with more box office return. They caught up and surpassed him eventually but that was a decade later.
Their work ethic was over-the-moon; 20 hour days were not at all uncommon and a 16 hour day was practically a vacation for them. This followed Martin into the Rat Pack and Lewis into his solo film career.
What was the Jerry Lewis film with the enormous multistory set? Cinderfella I think- anyway, it was considered one of the most technically innovative films ever made. There’s a scene where Lewis runs up the staircase on the set that became famous because IRL Lewis had a major heart attack at the completion of the scene. He still completed the movie.
Sounds like “The Ladies Man”
(Headline from one of the Wikipedia references: “COMIC CONSTRUCTS EDIFICE FOR FILM: JERRY LEWIS CONCOCTS A 40-ROOM BUILDING FOR ‘THE LADIES’ MAN’” NYTimes Dec 2, 1960)
I’ve heard this many times, and it’s strange because Martin’s public image was very much that of the hard-drinking, hard-partying wild man. Martin was always an introvert, and after the death of his son, seems to have become a near recluse.
My favorite Dean story, which I heard from Mark Steyn, was that Frank Sinatra once tried to cheer Dino up by sending a gorgeous, high-priced hooker up to Dino’s hotel room. When she got there and tried to seduce him, an apathetic Martin told her, “To tell you the truth, I was just going to order a sandwich from room service, watch TV a while, and go to sleep. You want a sandwich?”
So, he ordered sandwiches for both of them, and they watched TV a while. Then, when he was ready to turn in, he gave her a hefty tip and said, “Tell Frank I was the best you ever had.”
That’s it, thanks.
