{"id":5300,"date":"2006-09-14T08:39:40","date_gmt":"2006-09-14T12:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5300"},"modified":"2022-10-11T20:51:05","modified_gmt":"2022-10-12T00:51:05","slug":"dean-martin-appreciation-day-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5300","title":{"rendered":"Jerry Lewis on Dean Martin: “The best thing he ever had working for himself was his way of standoffishness.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Peter Bogdanovich’s wonderful Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors<\/a>\"\"<\/i>. <\/p>\n

Excerpts from the chapter devoted to Jerry Lewis.<\/p>\n

The last time I saw Dean was one evening in front of the Beverly Hills restaurant La Famiglia, less than a year before he died. This popular Italian restaurant was nearly always where Dean ate when he went out. Just as I was walking past, Martin started to come none too steadily out the front door. He looked alarmingly thin, face gaunt and pale. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, it seemed as though one of his knees gave out, and he had to catch himself by the door to stop from falling. He made a funny surprised expression and, looking down, said with a touch of dry irony, “Ooops …” Right up to the end, I thought, he’ll go for the laugh. Then Dean straightened himself to full height, shoulders back, and slowly moved toward a waiting car, weaving only slightly. The image had become the reality.<\/p>\n

Or had the reality always been different than we thought? Five years after Dean died, I said to [Jerry] Lewis once that I had always had the feeling (right from the start) that Dean was usually kidding the whole crooning thing, that he was never really serious about it. “There’s a lot of truth in that,” Jerry said right away. “See, Dean could never ever sing and do it with a full heart because he wasn’t clear about his worth. He did not have self-esteem. He didn’t have self-esteem of any kind. So he would kid the singing and he would never allow it ever to get serious so that people would compare him to anybody. I don’t think he knew this.” I asked why did he think the self-esteem was so low, and Lewis said, “I heard about his demons, his fears, talkinga bout his mother. She was a two-fisted Italian woman who gave him one credo to take through life. And that was: you take money into your pockets, you never take it out. Take. You never give. You cry, you’re worthless. You have emotional feelings, you’re a fag. And all of that was ground into his head…”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I, personally, will always love him for how he stuck up for Marilyn Monroe during her disastrous last moments at Fox. She was fired from her last movie – co-starrin Dean Martin – and he refused to continue if she wasn’t in it. Not a lot of people would behave that way – but he did. The draw for him was HER, being in a movie with HER. Funny thing: Marilyn Monroe was obviously a woman who “got around”, so to speak. She slept with a ton of people. People snickered about her. BUT: her friends, her good good friends, outside of Shelley Winters, were all men. Those guys might have passed her around … but they also recognized and loved talent. They protected her, an army of powerful men. Fox was fucking with her – and Dean Martin was disgusted by it. He walked off the set.<\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt from the book Marilyn Monroe: The Last Take<\/a>\"\"<\/i>:<\/p>\n

At 3:45 pm, Fox hairstylist Agnes Flanagan knocked on Dean Martin’s dressing room door to ask his opinion of the story that Kim Novak had been hired to replace Monroe.<\/p>\n

“I don’t think so, honey,” Martin said. “I’d certainly have heard about that.”<\/p>\n

But it wasn’t long before Buck Hall made it official by posting a notice on the call sheet next to the main entrance to soundstage 14. “Set Closed Until Further Notice – Per Instructions from the Legal Department.”<\/p>\n

About the same time, Whitey Snyder got a tip from a source in the front office. Not only had Monroe been fired, but the studio had worked quickly to replace her. Lee Remick, who owed the studio two films, was already in wardrobe, being fitted for Monroe’s costumes.<\/p>\n

Snyder approached Martin, who was still in golf clothes from a noon game at the Los Angeles Country Club. “Dean I think they’ve fired Marilyn,” Snyder said.<\/p>\n

“What?” Martin said.<\/p>\n

“Then Dean had his assistant run to the production to verify the story,” Snyder remembered.<\/p>\n

A few minutes later, the assistant was back. “Yep,” he said. “Monroe has been fired and Lee Remick’s going to be your leading lady.”<\/p>\n

Martin put his putter down, grabbed his coat and headed for the Fox parking lot. Snyder walked part of the way with him. “Whitey, I made a contract to do this picture with Marilyn Monroe,” Martin said. “That’s the deal; the only deal. We’re not going to be doing it with Lee Remick or any other actress.”<\/p>\n

When Martin arrived home half an hour later, Vernon Scott, the Hollywood reporter for United Press International, coaxed a brief interview out of him. Martin told Scott that he had walked off the set and didn’t plan to return. “I have the greatest respect for Miss Remick as an actress,” Martin continued. “But I signed to do this film with Marilyn Monroe.”<\/p>\n

Shortly after 6 pm, the UPI wires broadcast this bulletin: “Dean Martin quit the Twentieth Century-Fox film because Marilyn Monroe was fired.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus began a long PR nightmare for Fox but Dean stuck to his guns. I will always admire him for that. Monroe didn’t have many friends at the end of her life. Now he might not have been her “friend” – his concern was that he wanted to do a movie with HER. The biggest female star in the world. But at that time – Fox was punishing her for her success. They saw her as a slut who got lucky. They trapped her in a horrible contract, where she was underpaid, and she knew it. Martin gave her the respect she deserved. A ballsy move – to just walk off the damn set.<\/p>\n

More from Marilyn: The Last Take<\/a>\"\"<\/i>:<\/p>\n

Dean Martin never elaborated on his reasons for putting his career and his future on the line for Monroe, but it was typical of a man whose on-screen image as an easygoing good guy was identical to his off-screen persona. An ex-prizefighter and ex-cardsharp, Martin had been laboring in a steel mill when he began singing nights and weekends in small clubs. After he teamed up with frenetic comedian Jerry Lewis in 1946, he assumed the role of a handsome, not-so-bright straight man. The Martin and Lewis partnership endured for ten years, eleven films and a thousand appearances in nightclubs.<\/p>\n

When the partnership collapsed in the mid-fifties, many Hollywood producers thought Maritn wouldn’t survive as a solo act. But half a dozen number-one hits, including “Volare” and “Memories Are Made of This”, smoothed his way to film and television superstardom. In 1958, his role in Some Came Running<\/i> opposite fellow “Rat Packers” Sinatra and MacLaine proved his value as a dramatic star.<\/p>\n

However predictable, Martin’s loyalty to Monroe was far from popular. “Nasty sayings were scrawled on his dressing-room door,” production secretary Lee Hanna remembered. “By insisting on Monroe, it seemed as if the film would shut down for good – with the loss of one hundred and four jobs.”<\/p>\n

Hedda Hopper warned the actor in her Los Angeles Times<\/i> column. “The unions are taking a dim view of Dean Martin’s walkout,” Hopper wrote. She quoted a union official as saying, “Dean’s putting people out of work at a time when we are all faced with unemployment.” …<\/p>\n

Levathes, who flew back to Los Angeles on Sunday, was determined to change Martin’s mind but, just in case, had Ferguson begin drafting a $5.6 million lawsuit “for breach of contract”.<\/p>\n

The three-hour meeting among Feldman, Levathes, Frank Ferguson, Martin and Herman Citron was an exercise in frustration. The executives were determined to sell Remick to the increasingly skeptical actor.<\/p>\n

When Feldman tried to verbally recap Martin’s “rejection of Remick,” Martin interrupted him, saying, “I didn’t turn down Miss Remick. I simply said that I will not do the film without Marilyn Monroe. There is a big difference between the two statements.”<\/p>\n

Levathes countered, “What kind of position does that put our investment in?”<\/p>\n

Martin answered, “That’s not a fair question to ask me. I have no quarrel with anyone.”<\/p>\n

Levathes forged ahead. “We think Miss Remick is of adequate stature,” he said. “After all, she has appeared with Jack Lemmon [in Days of Wine and Roses<\/i>] with James Stewart [in Anatomy of a Murder<\/i>], and with Glenn Ford [in Experiment in Terror<\/i>].”<\/p>\n

Martin patiently explained that he had taken the role mainly because “the chemistry between Miss Monroe and myself was right.” The actor also said that the whole point of Something’s Got to Give<\/i> was Martin’s desertion of his new bride, Cyd Charisse, for Monroe, which was something which wouldn’t happen, Martin said, “with Lee Remick.”<\/p>\n

The production chief disagreed. “This story is a warm situation in which th ehusband, with his children, loved his former wife, but was caught in an embarrassing position because he had remarried,” said Levathes. “This is not the case of a man who chucks one woman for a sexpot.”<\/p>\n

Martin shook his head.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They went round and round, at a total impasse. Martin would not budge. He would not do the film without Marilyn Monroe, and that was final.<\/p>\n

Balls. Integrity. I totally admire that.<\/p>\n

More from Bogdonavich’s Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors<\/a>\"\"<\/i>:<\/p>\n

When I asked Jerry to take me behind Dean’s supposed coolness, he said, “Dean had a wonderful device in his life. ‘Recluse’ was wonderful for him. ‘Above the crowd’ was wonderful for him. The best thing he ever had working for himself was his way of standoffishness. And I think throughout all of it, he must have peeked through the door to see what everyone was doing. I never knew that he did that, but I always wondered if he did. And did he come away from the door saying, ‘Whew, I don’t need that.’ Or did he come away from the door saying, ‘Why can’t I be with them?’ If you know about his background, you’ll see the complicated is simple. He came from a Mafia-like upbringing – an insensitive set of parents. And certainly sad to have to say they were also incredibly dumb … Then, at his twentyninth birthday, he put his arms around me because I got my arms around him. And he liked it. And then he would push me away like I’m the kid brother: ‘What’s with the hugging?’ And he loved it. He used to do what his grandmother did. He pushed me with this hand and pulled me with that hand. Because I was the only human on God’s earth that he would communicate with then. He was kind, he was generous, he was silly, he was simple. He read comic books because that was easy. And I used to say to him, ‘Will you stop sending people for comic books? Go yourself and buy them. What are you hiding?’ He said, ‘Aw, you know, Jer.’ I said, ‘”You know, Jer”? my balls! This is something an individual, who has the inalienable right to live as a human being, with the pink slip on himself, won’t go over to a stand and buy what the fuck he wants with his own hard-earned money?’ He said, ‘Can I please send out for them?’ And I said, ‘OK.’ He was so fuckin’ cute. He loved sitting in the corner and having a beer and he had his fuckin’ comic books. And if a Western was on, he tabled that and the Western is on!”<\/p>\n

That Dean Martin died on Christmas Day was the kind of black joke he might have made. It didn’t seem real to me until I heard that all the casinos on the Vegas Strip had turned off their lights for one minute to commemorate Dino’s passing. You could almost hear Dean saying, in amazement, “One whole minute? I must have been a big shot.” He was.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n