Free Dean and Me: A Love Story by James Kaplan, Jerry Lewis

idea—in hindsight!) United Artists thought we’d be good in a remake of
Of Mice and Men
. Columbia, in the person of the notorious Harry Cohn, told Abby Greshler we were nothing more than The Three Stooges, minus one. Warner Brothers offered us the most money—but only if we signed for a seven-year deal.
    Finally, our agent mentioned the one studio I’d silently prayed we would hear from—Paramount.

    First tux: Chicago was never handsomer.
    Hal Wallis, the producer who’d come on so strong in our dressing room at the Copa, was back with a serious offer: fifty thousand a picture to start with, working up to a ceiling of $1.25 million a film over the next five years. The money sounded good. But I told Dean and Greshler that for me there was a lot more to it than money.
    For about a year, when I was seventeen and eighteen, I’d worked as an usher at the Paramount Theater in New York, the site of Frank Sinatra’s first great triumph in the early forties. And so I had a sentimental feeling about Paramount, but it was more than sentiment. While I was ushering, I had the chance to see the studio’s in-house promotional films, which showed the stars on the lot, the sound stages, the art department, the camera department, the wardrobe and makeup departments, the stars’ dressing rooms, the commissary, and—most fascinating to me—the editing room. Wow! I thought Paramount was just the greatest studio of them all, the best of the best. That name! Those stars ... W. C. Fields, Gary Cooper, The Marx Brothers, Mae West, Claudette Colbert, William Powell...
    “A lot of people have serious money on the table,” Greshler reminded us. “I can go back to Mayer. . . .”
    “Let’s go with Paramount,” Dean said.
    Greshler said, “You’re sure?”
    “My partner’s sure,” Dean told him.
    When Dean and I signed to make movies with Hal Wallis and Paramount, I thought all our troubles were over. Little did I know they were only beginning.
    After all, becoming a movie star is the American dream, right? Sign on the dotted line; fame and riches follow! Well, the movies would bring us a ton more money; they would spread our fame around the world. But they would never take us to the artistic heights we achieved in live performance: in clubs, theaters, and on television (much of early TV was broadcast live).
    Why was that?
    When my partner and I got up in front of an audience, any audience, we and they knew that at any minute absolutely anything could happen. Our wildness, our unpredictability, were a big part of the package. It was thrilling to an audience that we could do all the mischievous things they might imagine but would never really do.
    This was only half of it, though.
    The other half was that indefinable something I’ve talked about: our obvious pleasure in performing together. Audiences have a great desire to
feel along with
their favorite performers. Dean and I had an uncanny ability to get an audience to not just be viewers but to participate in our fun.
    In films it wasn’t as easy to generate those feelings. In fact, it was damn near impossible. After all, the pleasure of movies is not in spontaneity but in story. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl get back together. Three acts—that structure is as old as the hills. But there are parts of the human spirit that three acts can leave out.
    For his first project with Martin and Lewis, Hal Wallis had decided to try a low-risk proposition: plugging us into a low-budget movie project he’d already started. The picture, called
My Friend Irma
, was to be based on a popular radio series of the same name, about a ditzy Manhattan career girl, Irma (played by Marie Wilson), her best friend Jane (played by Diana Lynn), and their adventures. The series had been created by Cy Howard, who had also written the screenplay. With a little revision, Wallis thought, Dean and I could be plugged into the script as Irma and Jane’s boyfriends.
    So he thought.
    It felt like