Excerpt from Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors
Jerry Lewis:
And the premise in my mind always was that I’m going to dig in and get the child within me alive. I cannot see two men standing on the stage and doing what I think we should do together, and be adults and do it. Dean must be the adult, but Jerry has to be the kid – the little guy – and I loved that. I was as tall as Dean, except I worked in a crouch, and I had his shoes lifted. Just so that I could work the crouch better. He always looked that much taller than me on the stage because I’d shrink. When I stood upright introducing him or something, I was six feet.
Bogdonavich asks Lewis: “A lot of times on the Colgate Comedy Hour he’d sing and you’d do shtick while he was singing, which was hysterical.”
Lewis responds:
Right. We had wonderful times. If he didn’t feel like really singing straight from the heart one show, we’d fuck with it. I would just create something. And the most wonderful thing about the two guys was that I could write anything at any time, or create anything at any time with anything. And I was fearless about it. “Let’s go for it!” “Yeah, but you’re on the air live now – there’s like fifty million people tonight. “That’s right. Let’s go for it.” “You mean, you’re going to do this live without …?” “It’s ready. And what’s going to happen to me if I fall on my ass? I’ll be here next week.” “Oh, OK.” Now, the brilliance of Dean was that he would expedite it like he rehearsed it for four years. He wouldn’t get in the way of it, he knew how to hold on to it, he knew where to take me, where to back off. And I’m on the stage and my mouth drops open sometimes because I’m watching this excellence, and 97 percent of it was that he wasn’t even aware of how good he was.
