He had to. His father was a largely unknown vaudeville comic who called himself Danny Lewis and he goaded young Jerry all the time, and just like the kid who grows in physical stature to eclipse (thought it would be a while before you saw that word again, didn't you?) his father, Danny sat back and watched as young Jerry went from doing a pantomime act to records to teaming up with Dean Martin to become the hottest act in show business for exactly ten years to the day, at which point Dean walked away.
Jerry, for his part, would write autobiographical sketches that never mentioned Dean, but always told the story of how Jerry bought his dad a brand-new Cadillac one day, and showed up at the house to see his father accept the gift, the shiny black sedan with a big red bow on the hood.
And Danny Lewis, God rest his soul, expressed his gratitude with these crushing words: "So? You couldn't afford a convertible?"
Jerry once told a New Yorker writer, when things went wrong technically as he performed in a Dallas theatre, "You don't know what it's like! I have to live with Jerry Lewis!"
A complicated man, a talented comedian, a generous soul with problems galore. (Been a while since I saw that word, too!)
Over the weekend we also lost Dick Gregory, born Richard C. Gregory in 1932. I read his autobiographies as a teenager and always enjoyed his take on America's inability to reconcile issues of race and class. He used that most awful of racial slurs for the title of one book, and said he told his mother that for the rest of her life, whenever she heard someone using that term, she should figure it was just someone promoting his book.Dick Gregory said he was once in a restaurant and had ordered a chicken dinner when a KKK member walked up and said, "Whatever you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you!"
And Dick Gregory, God rest his soul in eternal peace along with Jerry Lewis, leaned over his plate and kissed that chicken's rear end!
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