Jerry Lewis: A Sincere Phony

“Do you know how many would-be comics there are in this quaint little business we’re in? When there’s a full moon, they all crawl out of the woodwork. There are only half a dozen really top comics. The others will never make it. Comedy is the most serious business in the world. It’s goddamned hard work being funny, whether you’re a comic or a comedian. A comic opens funny doors. A comedian opens doors funny. Did you ever stop to think what makes one comedian a smash and another a failure, 'material'? The last new joke was invented by Aristophanes. Jokes are basically all the same. George Burns can tell six jokes that the guy on the bill ahead of him just told, and Burns will get bigger laughs. Do you know why? 'Personality.' You start with a personality and you turn it into a character. Take Bob Hope. If he came out and did a Jack Benny monologue, he’d bomb. Why? Because he’s built up a character. That’s what the audiences expect from him. When Hope walks out, they want to hear those rapid-fire jokes. He’s a likeable smart-ass, the big city fellow who gets his lumps. Jack Benny—just the opposite. He woudn’t know what to do with a Bob Hope monologue, but he can take a two-minute pause and make an audience scream. Do you know what you’ve got? A lovable face. There’s a naïve sweetness about you. You’re a good kid, but you’re stupid, I guess that’s part of being a genius. If you package it right, it could be worth a fucking fortune.” —"A Stranger in the Mirror" (1976) by Sidney Sheldon

Interestingly, women and men appear to differ in humor appreciation not only in terms of the content of humor but also in terms of the preferred structure of humor, according to Peter Derks (professor of psychology at the College of William & Mary, Virginia) in The Primer of Humor Research (2017). Behavioral studies of humor appreciation have generally indicated that men are more likely than women to enjoy humor containing aggressive or sexual content, whereas women are more likely to enjoy nonsensical or absurd humor structures. Researcher Professor Allan Reiss said: 'Our findings fit the stereotype of how men and women react to humour. We found greater activity in the pre-frontal cortex in women, indicating women are processing stimuli that involve language areas of the brain. The interpretation of that finding is that women tend to respond more to narrative and wordplay than slapstick.' Analysis of a 'feelgood' brain region called the nucleus accumbens also revealed that men and women have different attitudes to humour. Professor Reiss, of Stanford University in California, said: 'Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punchline of the cartoon. So when they got the joke's punchline, they were more pleased about it.' The funnier the cartoon was, the more the women's nucleus accumbens lit up. But this was not the case for men, who seemed to expect the cartoons to be funny from the start. Men are more likely to use 'hostile' humour to criticise each other and establish dominance, while women employ humour to maintain relationships and put each other at ease. Source: www.academia.edu

Mark Twain wrote in Following the Equator (1897): “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” Abraham Maslow (“A Theory of Human Motivation”) discovered that most self-actualized people do not have the same sense of humor as the average person. For example: they do not laugh at unfunny or smutty jokes. Comedians tend to be more introverted than the average person but on the stage they often portrait a different personality. Humor operates through a variety of techniques, which first generate surprise, then amusement, and laughter once the unexpected incongruity is resolved. As different types of jokes use different techniques, the corresponding humor processes also differ. The findings revealed differences in brain activity for an interaction between sex/gender and joke type. Women displayed greater activation in the temporoparietal–mesocortical-motor network than men, demonstrating the importance of the temporoparietal junction presumably for ‘theory of mind’ processing, the orbitofrontal cortex for motivational functions and reward coding, and the supplementary motor area for laughter. Women also showed greater activation than men in the frontal-mesolimbic network including the anterior (prefrontal cortex) for executive control processes, and the amygdala and midbrain for reward anticipation and salience processes. Men of superior intelligence tended to use humor that involved projecting oneself into a different situation. Women were more likely than men to enjoy jokes based on the semantic technique of allusion. The study also found that jokes with double meanings were funnier to men than women, but the difference was not statistically significant. Furthermore, the expressive behaviors of laughing and smiling have been found to directly influences the funniness ratings given by women but not by men. Source: www.ncbi.nlm.gov

It is in Hollywood or Bust and Artists and Models, coming at the end of his partnership with Dean Martin and the start of his collaboration with Frank Tashlin, that the dominant myth of Jerry Lewis begins to clearly emerge. Jerry the simple idiot-boy starts to develop a self-consciousness. In Artists and Models he is a creative comic book genius. And in Hollywood or Bust, the awareness he reveals of Dean Martin’s duplicity is not merely a revelation pulled from Tashlin’s hat. It is a sign of an increasing self-awareness and distance from his stereotyped screen persona. Placed in Tashlin’s surreal universe, Jerry’s increased consciousness serves to reveal the world’s (and Dean Martin’s) hypocrisy. In his child-like personality, he is holier than the Machiavellian adults around him, and his innocence (a basic principle carried over into his own films) in Tashlin’s hands is pure— all the better foil to reflect the films’ caricature of mass culture.

In Artists and Models, Jerry demonstrates the phoniness of the world around him with the same idiotic innocence displayed by Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It. Jerry was the ultimate Tashlinesque male, Joe Schmoe taken to his logical, spectatorial conclusion. In Hollywood or Bust he sets out with his trusty steed, accompanied by Dean Martin (the no-nonsense crook), to find the holy vessel (Anita Ekberg) in the land of dreams (Hollywood). The central developing issue in Jerry's self-directed films, from The Bellboy through The Patsy, is an elaborately choreographed movement around the problem of his uncertain relationship to the world around him. The complexity of the problem assumes schizophrenic dimensions when Lewis begins to spin off alternate personalities. These are Jerry Lewis’ desperate words at the end of The Patsy: “Hollywood: it’s a dumb city... I’m Jerry Lewis. This is a film set.” In The Big Mouth, rather than revealing the falseness of Hollywood (as he does in The Patsy), Jerry Lewis strays only slightly from the reality context of the film’s narrator; and most importantly, has the narrator celebrating with good-natured idiocy the falseness of the medium.

As a companion film to The Nutty Professor, The Patsy even more directly tackles the problem of Jerry Lewis’ troublesome image. Paralleling the transformation from Julius Kelp to Buddy Love is the gradual transformation of Stanley Belt, bellboy, to Stanley Belt, the great comedian. More harmonious in tone than The Nutty Professor, The Patsy is surely no more comforting to watch than its predecessor, through a clearly expressed bitterness toward the world of show business. Is it any accident that the supporting characters of Jerry’s rags-to-riches-and-fame story are played with appropriate ghoulishness by horror and gangster film veterans Peter Lorre, John Carradine, Everett Sloane, George Raft, and Phil Harris? Clearly, The Patsy is a horror story. But whereas the transformation of character in The Nutty Professor occurred within a traditional horror plot (Jekyll and Hyde) in a traditional horror location (a scientific laboratory), here the plot is more Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life — the settings are the Beverly Hilton and the sound stages in Hollywood. Peter Lorre, playing the film director, says at the beginning of The Patsy, “This scene has all the makings of a great melodrama.” And for Jerry Lewis, the Hollywood melodrama is a horror story — his horror story.

Thus also begins his willing victimization, which would be horrible if it weren’t funny. His hair falls out at the barber; he destroys his voice at the teacher’s house; and, finally he bombs at the Copa in a nightmare vision of failure and inadequacy. Deserted by all the leeches who have tried to make him into something other than Stanley Belt, he seems to invent an act that, in itself, recapitulates the structure of the film. He has proved—as Julius Kelp proved—that he isn’t an idiot. Upon his success, the question arises of how deliberate were his earlier failures. One suspects that Stanley may have played the fool purposely—to expose the insincerity and opportunism of his promoters. This attitude is the protest of an ordinary man against the constraints of his stardom. He is obstinate with his promoters in order to retain an identity outside of the image they want him to become. In one expressive, low-angle shot, we see that he has been made over, his innocence lost. But, as if this transformation from well-meaning clod to powerful star is too much to take (as it was in The Nutty Professor), the new Stanley falls off the balcony to his death. Are we to read this as a lament for the old, lost Stanley? Apparently, so Ina Balin starts to cry. The average guy has climbed to the heights and fallen. And unlike his fall at the beginning of the film, he can’t bounce back. Lost with his innocence is the magic. But a new magic enters the picture along with what looks like a third Stanley Belt: Jerry Lewis the director.

In another move of psychic desperation. Jerry Lewis’ relentless self-criticism has boxed him into a corner. The appearance of “Jerry Lewis” in front of the camera does not clear up the unsolved questions of what happened to the old, original Stanley. Instead, the Pirandellian ploy underlines the nightmare quality of the two Stanleys and their inexplicable appearance/disappearance. To say it s only a movie at the end of a film that has shown the movie business in such a frightening light is hardly reassuring. The Patsy is the last Jerry Lewis film to deal so directly with the director-star’s ambivalent feelings about his alternate or concurrent screen image. In The Family Jewels, Three on a Couch, The Big Mouth, and Which Way to the Front?, there is always a constant Jerry Lewis character. Even when other roles must be played, never again does the director allow the “other characters” to vie for center stage, as they did in The Patsy and The Nutty Professor. The Patsy is Lewis as Hollywood burnout. He's Buddy Love desperately trying to turn back into Julius Kelp—a phony, but a sincere phony.

Within the slick aesthetic precision of Three on a Couch, the appearance of alter-egos Warren, Rutherford, Ringo, and Heather seem positively therapeutic in contrast to the compulsive personality shifts in the earlier films. Christopher Pride, far more than any previous Jerry Lewis character, is not only normal, but, as his name suggests in contrast to Heebert, Stanley, Gerald, etc., is an integrated heroic character. In a comic style reminiscent more of Lubitsch than of Keaton or Chaplin, Three on a Couch for the first time presents Jerry Lewis the actor playing a character quite distant from the clods or clowns or egomaniacs who populate the worlds of his earlier films. A character who might easily have been played by Cary Grant, Christopher Pride is a smooth operator who plays his roles with a full consciousness of logical purpose. Of course, in these roles are remnants of the other Jerry Lewises — aesthetically synthesized into the story and emotionally integrated into the clear conception of the main character. Source: brightlightsfilm.com

Marilyn Monroe, Jerry Lewis, Peter Pan Syndrome

Marilyn Monroe's gold-plated earrings, designed by Eugene Joseff of Joseff of Hollywood, have sold at auction for $112,500—well over the original estimate of $60K-$80K. The famous costume baubles, which were styled with a gold lamé pleated gown by Travilla, were worn in an image to promote the 1953 musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Separately, Monroe's pearl earrings, also by Joseff, went for $81,250. Other items sold during Julien's Auctions' "Property From Joseff of Hollywood: Treasures From the Vault" auction included Shirley Temple's crown from The Little Princess (1939) for $37,500; Rita Hayworth's gold-plated bracelet from Gilda (1946) for $31,250; and Elizabeth Taylor's snake cuff bracelet from Cleopatra (1963) for $21,875. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

There is some controversy regarding the issue of whether Marilyn was a model for the Tinkerbell character in Peter Pan. Since Peter Pan was released in 1953, just as another curvaceous blonde, Marilyn Monroe, was becoming America’s most popular screen actress and sex symbol, it’s easy to make the assumption that Tinker Bell was intended to be a Monroesque minx. However, at the time Peter Pan went into production, Marilyn Monroe was not the world famous epitome of the sexy, glamorous 1950s star she is now. Although far from unknown, back then Marilyn was still working her way up the Hollywood ladder of stardom in a series supporting roles and bit parts — she had not yet been featured in a starring role, planted her handprints in front of Graumann’s Chinese Theatre with Jane Russell, or appeared as the centerfold in Playboy’s premiere issue. Source: www.snopes.com

JM Barrie might be most famous for his classic story of a flying boy who never grows up, but the author was also far ahead of his time when it came to cognitive psychology, according to a Cambridge academic who argues the Peter Pan author’s whimsical stories deliberately explore the nature of cognition. Neuroscientist Rosalind Ridley, of Newnham College in Cambridge, claims in Peter Pan and the Mind of JM Barrie that the author’s work identifies key stages of child development. One scene she spotlights in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, published in 1906, sees a girl giving a tearful Peter her handkerchief, which he is confused by. “So she showed him, that is to say she wiped her eyes, and then gave it back to him, saying: ‘Now you do it,’ but instead of wiping his own eyes he wiped hers, and she thought it would be best to pretend that this is what she had meant,” writes Barrie. The narrative of Peter Pan is a coming-of-age story, a fantasy for children and adults, and the myth of a golden age, but was also invented by the author “essentially for himself in order to explore and perhaps make some sense of his own emotional difficulties, to investigate the interplay of the world of facts and the world of the imagination and to rediscover the heightened experiences of infancy”. “In the process,” she writes, “he created a work of genius.” Source: www.theguardian.com

“I still maintain the loveliness of our world is children and unfortunately that loveliness turns into darkness because they have to grow up. Look in the mirror and see value. ‘Cause there’s a lot of people out there who aren’t sensitive enough, aren’t caring enough, and that’s negative, but it’s fact. Optimism will get them out of your way. If it sounds like a pipe dream, try me. What have you got to lose? But, everything to gain.” —Jerry Lewis, Inside The Actor’s Studio, 1999

"Jerry has the propensity to will himself in so many constructive as well as destructive ways.”  —Patti Lewis

Born Sarah Joan Todd on June 7, 1935 in Boone, Missouri, Sally Todd entered The Miss Tucson Beauty Contest in 1952 and won first prize, which was an all-expense paid trip to Hollywood. Once on the west coast, Sally began modeling for the ladies swim wear company Cole of California, and in 1953, she made her film debut in a Jane Russell film for RKO called The French Line. In 1956, Sally was offered a screen test with 20th Century Fox. As perhaps a possible threat to a discontented (and increasingly temperamental) Marilyn Monroe, the studio quickly signed the newly platinum blonde Sally to a contract with the intentions of grooming her for the type of sex symbol parts Monroe had begun refusing. Fox promoted their new starlet in the L.A. Times as “a young Lana Turner and much prettier than Marilyn Monroe”, and placed her in background roles in The Revolt of Mamie Stover (again with Jane Russell) and The Best Things in Life Are Free.

Sally Todd: In the summer of 1955 I signed a contract with NBC to do six weeks work on the Colgate Comedy Hour. I was thrilled to learn that I would be working that summer with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Even though they were feuding with each other by then, I still was very excited because they were still enormously popular as a comedy team. Jerry and Dean were so much fun to be around. The Colgate Comedy Hour was broadcast live each week which meant that I had to join the AFTRA union, of which I had not been a member previously. Well, Jerry evidently took a romantic shine to me as soon as he met me and he offered to pay for my union card, which I thought was kind of unusual, but I took him up on it as I really wanted the job. The shows I did with Dean and Jerry were great. We would do different comedy skits each week and I would play a sexy nurse one week and maybe a secretary the next week and a girl in a bathing suit the following week. As time went on, I noticed during rehearsals that Jerry was becoming more and more attentive towards me.

But, I didn’t mind it too much as I was learning how to flirt with a man and then how to run away as quickly as possible afterwards. I didn’t want to lose my job over something stupid like a false rumor going around that I was having an affair with Jerry Lewis. I knew I could be replaced at any time if people started believing that. So, I always managed to outrun him and still have fun on the show and then on the last week of work one of the other girls came up to me and said, ‘Jerry is looking everywhere for you.’ At almost the same time, the assistant director came over to me and said, ‘Sally, we were all looking for you. Jerry wants to talk to you about your AFTRA card.’ (laughs) So, that’s the story of my almost-romance with Jerry Lewis, God love him. Source: www.john-odowd.com

“It was a real Jekyll-Hyde situation at home as well as on the set. When I played the scientist everything was O.K. but when I played the other character things would get chillier at home. And this kind of shook me up and I said, 'You’re telling me I did a very good job.' And my wife Patti said, 'You did a marvelous job playing the worst human being I’ve ever seen in my life'.” —Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis, Frank Tashlin, Frank Fenton

Why Jerry Lewis, the preeminent actor of the 1950s was so enormously popular at the time and was violently rejected later? Probably because he represented a blend of satire and celebration of the old Hollywood system. An effective reason for Frank Tashlin's limited reputation is his association with Jerry Lewis, with whom subsequent generations of Americans have had big problems. Frank Tashlin's extremist humor parallels the rise of rock and roll in its abrassive and loud obsession with sex during the fifties. The idea of affirmative sexuality seems to be in conflict dramatically with critical preconceptions about film comedy of the 1950s. To admit Tashlin is admit popular culture at its most radical. And that just wouldn't seem like the fifties. As Gore Vidal observed: "Although the United States is the best and most perfect of earth's societies, we have yet to create a civilization, as opposed to a way of life." Lewis's loony male neurotic—who inhabitated a space of imminence— was hatched by American culture in the Fifties. 

Jerry Lewis is the embodiment of the Fifties hysteria in its most clinical form. His grotesque tics may be seen as powerful expressions of an underlying social insanity. Scott Bukatman describes how Lewis's whole career had been largely involved with acting out his own warped masculinity. The very explicitness of Jerry Lewis's movement toward delirium and lunacy, as well as obsessive male paranoia, legitimated him to the rank of genius by French critics. The theme of the Double in Jerry Lewis's films had even converted Truffaut from stern critic to admirer. Robert Benayoun noticed the consistency with which Lewis's characters "fragment into doubles or distorted aspects of themselves." Tashlin's fusion of surrealist outrage and Hollywood cinema attracted the attention of the militant surrealists of Positif magazine and Cahiers du Cinéma in France, who saw his comedies with Lewis as bearding the legacy of surrealism. —"Laughing hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s" (1996) by Ed Sikov

"Jerry Lewis represents the sole unconcerned, unworried individual in today’s terrifying world," wrote Robert Kass in his article about Lewis in 1952.  Dean Martin was the suave crooner who got the girl, and Jerry Lewis was his manic, apelike sidekick who caused problems. After his split with Martin, Lewis altered his persona radically, bringing to the fore a latent sentimentality and combining it, occasionally awkwardly, with his trademark nutty behavior. This important change crystallized in Lewis’s first solo film, The Delicate Delinquent (1957). The film’s romantic subplot, in which Sidney falls for Patricia (Mary Webster), is handled with none of the flailing immaturity that typically marks Lewis’s characters’ infatuations with women.

If on-set reports are accurate, Lewis appears to have had more creative control over Cinderfella (1960) than over any of his other Tashlin pictures; the film’s heavy sentimentality is generally seen as evidence of this new Lewis persona. Howard Prouty writes that Lewis “appears to have cut about nine minutes” from the film; Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen assert that Lewis “drastically altered the structure of Tashlin’s script by cutting most of Tashlin’s gags.” In this way, the film might perhaps better be regarded as belonging to the Jerry Lewis oeuvre than to Tashlin’s. David Ehrenstein makes a similar claim, adding that Lewis made the changes against Tashlin’s wishes, but the anecdotal evidence suggests that Lewis used Cinderfella as a dry run for his directorial début (The Bellboy) in 1960. 

The last scene in Cinderfella, in which Fella and the princess (Anna Maria Alberghetti) finally fall for each other, contains no elements of comedy. Rather, both Lewis and Alberghetti play the scene with misty eyes and forlorn expressions. The next pairing of Tashlin/Lewis It’s Only Money (1962), was one of their zaniest. The final two collaborations with Jerry Lewis that followed: Who’s Minding the Store? (1963) and The Disorderly Orderly (1964). Like the cartoons, most of Tashlin’s live-action features are frontally composed; many are shot in so staid a fashion as to appear stage-bound. This frontality is partly a function of Tashlin’s reliance on performative comedy, a tendency that in itself evokes vaudevillestyle comedy. Tashlin admitted to letting Lewis’s performance determine the placement of his camera. That he allowed Lewis to play a part in dictating his camera placement reveals the general frontality of Tashlin’s features is an adaptation to the fact that a highly controlled mise-en-scène is far less easily achieved in live-action film than in animation. Frontal camera placement is, for Tashlin, the best way to allow performative comedy to unfold. 

Comedians who had worked the Borscht circuit had to be, like vaudeavillians, well-versed not only in joke-telling, but in singing, dancing, mimicry, and juggling. The Borscht Belt comedians relied on spontaneity and extemporaneousness. The summer resorts in the Catskills Mountains is where Jerry Lewis obtained his impressive improvisatory skills. Lewis’s uncommon gift for verbal comedy was not lost on Tashlin. More than any other director Tashlin understood Lewis’s mastery of these dimensions of performance. Tashlin uses Lewis’s penchant for disruption to engage one of his own preferred comic modes: diegetic rupture. Indeed, of all Hollywood genres, comedy is the one that most readily lends itself to such techniques as diegetic rupture and (self) reflexivity, techniques also frequently found not just in Godard films, nor just in the films of the French Nouvelle Vague, but in art cinema films in general. —"Tashlinesque: The Hollywood comedies of Frank Tashlin" (2012) by Ethan de Seife

“Every so often in the annals of Hollywood critiques, there appears a fulsome treatise executed by some literary figure of the hour who has gone to Movieland to do a writing chore; and invariably he writes a memoir.” Frank Fenton never got around to writing a memoir. With a resume of over 60 feature films and television shows over a 40-year career, he was too busy for self-reflection. Fenton was establishing himself as a proficient scenarist of B-films when the above-quoted lines appeared in the November 1938 issue of The American Mercury. He would pen several other fictional short stories about the Hollywood movie scene whose posturing he mocked. Another Fenton piece, “Boy Meets Gorilla,” was published in Collier’s the following month. His story of a Hamilton, Ohio, hick who is transformed into an acclaimed Hollywood writer-producer after saving a movie star from a gorilla on the set of a South Seas potboiler was a spot-on satire of Tinseltown pretentiousness. Fenton the man is nearly as elusive as his first novel “A Place in the Sun,” 1942. The respected California writer-historian Carey McWilliams believed A Place in the Sun was one of only four novels (including Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, John Fante’s Ask the Dust and The Boosters by Mark Lee Luther) “that suggest what Southern California is really like.” Frank Fenton’s description of pre-war Los Angeles in A Place in the Sun:

“Down the foothills into the city the air changed. The lingering mist of morning fog was rising and in the fog there was the salt flavor of the sea. Then the shreds of fog melted and the great yellow and white city lay at the mercy of the sun. It was all beautiful. A million bungalows and mansions of all conceivable architectures; flowers he could not name, and trees he had never seen before. A strange and wonderful city. It was not like some Middle-Western city that sinks down roots into some strategic area of earth and goes to work there. This was a lovely makeshift city. Even the trees and plants, he knew, did not belong there. They came, like the people, from far places, some familiar, some exotic, all wanderers of one sort or another, seeking peace or fortune or the last frontier, or a thousand dreams of escape.

And all these malcontents had joined in a dreamy effort to create a city of their dreams… A themeless city with every theme. Chicago, St. Louis and Denver had each been different; each had its own sordidness and strength and fury. Each was lusty and titanic in its own way, joyful and somber in its own way, and each was indubitably American. But not this Los Angeles. It had the air of not belonging to America, though all its motley ways were American. It was a city of refugees from America; it was purely itself in a banishment partly dreamed and partly real. It rested on a crust of earth at the edge of a sea that ended a world.”

A Place in the Sun would be eclipsed in the public's mind by the 1951 Academy Award-winning movie of the same title directed by George Stevens, adapted from Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy. Despite his essential contributions, Frank Fenton’s name was omitted from the credits of Out of the Past (1947) in favor of Daniel Mainwaring, who added a final polish to Fenton’s rewrite and got sole screen credit with his Geoffrey Homes pseudonym. —"Frank Fenton’s Hollywood Nocturne" by Alan K. Rode (Noir City #22, 2017)

Marilyn Monroe & Tony Curtis affair, Fifties Blondes & Jerry Lewis

Stereotype holds that when it comes to intelligence, blondes struggle to keep up with their darker-haired peers. But a new study brands this "dumb blonde" typecast as nonsense, after finding that blondes are no less intelligent. Study author Jay Zagorsky has published his findings in the journal Economics Bulletin. Zagorsky found that blonde-haired white women even had a slightly higher average IQ than darker-haired women; the average IQ for blonde women was 103.2, compared with 102.7 for women with brown hair, 101.2 for those with red hair and 100.5 for black-haired women.  Additionally, compared with darker-haired women, blonde women were slightly more likely to be in the highest IQ category and marginally less likely to be in the lowest IQ category. Zagorsky notes that the difference is not statistically significant: "I don't think you can say with certainty that blondes are smarter than others, but you can definitely say they are not any dumber." Zagorsky says his study is unable to pinpoint a genetic link between hair color and intelligence, but he did come across one factor that could explain why blonde women showed marginally higher intelligence: blonde women grew up in homes with more reading material. Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) will be screened at 1pm, November 19, at the Campus Theatre in Lewisburg, PA, as part of their free Sunday Classics series. Some Like It Hot will be screened at 1:15 pm on Tuesday, November 21, at St Clare’s church hall in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, as part of a ‘Feelgood Films’ series. The role was intended for Fox queen Betty Grable, but her fee was more then ten times Marilyn’s. So Marilyn got her chance and took it! Fox rushed her into another dumb blonde role in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). Some Like It Hot will be screened at 1:15 pm on Tuesday, November 21, at St Clare’s church hall in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, as part of a ‘Feelgood Films’ series. 

Jerry Lewis turned down the role of Jerry/Daphne in Some Like it Hot, which was ultimately played by Jack Lemmon. Lewis revealed his greatest regret to film director Martin Scorsese and critic while being induced into the Comedy Hall of Fame this week. “I would have had a chance to kiss Marilyn Monroe. Instead, Billy Wilder called me ‘the schmuck who turned down Some Like It Hot for the rest of his life.’’ Marilyn was very fond of Jerry Lewis. She appeared on his radio show with Dean Martin in 1952, and later named Lewis among a list of attractive men in a magazine interview. When Jerry Lewis was being honoured for charitable work in 1955, Marilyn stepped up to the mic to give him a kiss, adding, ‘I love you, Jerry.’ However, Lewis wouldn’t have had an opportunity to kiss her again in Some Like it Hot. While Marilyn and Lemmon chastely shared a bunkbed during the train scene, her love interest in the movie was played by Tony Curtis. Source: blog.everlasting-star.net

Marjie Millar and Jerry Lewis during rehearsal for Money from Home (1953) directed by George Marshall.

Marjie Millar  had a promising start to her career when she signed a contract at Paramount studios in 1953 and starred in Money from Home the same year with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. At 11, Millar had entertained the soldiers at Fort Lewis with a song-and-dance routine and while in high school she starred in the theatre play Janie (1948). In 1952 she left Tacoma for Los Angeles and soon afterwards was crowned “Miss Hollywood Star of 1952.” She played Nadine in the drama About Mrs. Leslie (1954). At the 1954 presentation of the Academy Awards, she and starlet Sara Shane modeled the costumes that were nominated for the Oscar. She was titled “a promising newcomer” and did some TV (most notably playing the character of Susan in 28 episodes of the Ray Bolger show, Where’s Raymond?, which aired in 1954) and played a starring role in Republic’s When Gangland Strikes (1956). On April 23, 1955, she had married television producer John Florea. A car accident in 1957 left her partly crippled and Marjie was forced to give up her acting career in 1958.

Pat Sheehan and Jerry Lewis during rehearsal for The Colgate Comedy Hour (Season 6, Episode 7), on November 13, 1955.

Pat Sheehan was a Las Vegas showgirl, made a couple of movies in the fifties: Kismet, Daddy Long Legs, and was a Playboy playmate in October 1958 (together with actress Mara Corday). In 1956 she was called NBC’s answer to Marilyn Monroe, while appearing in The Colgate Comedy Hour. This show really put her name up there, and in a 1956 magazine article she proclaimed, “From now on my parts will be larger. I’m so excited!” What really happened was less exciting; she got no more movie roles (except a cameo in Gigi, 1958) and was seen sporadically on television. She did date many famous men, including Frank Sinatra, Howard Hughes and Bing Crosby; but settled down with the latter’s son, Dennis Crosby (whom she was married to from 1958—1964). Dennis Crosby will marry Arleen Buell in 1965 and commit suicide with a gun in May 1991. On January 14, 2006, Pat Sheehan died from a heart attack in Beverly Hills, California. —"Fifties Blondes" (2016) by Richard Koper

In 1949, I went out to a club in downtonw LA with Betty Thatcher, an actress who was also a knockout. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were working there the weekends, doing their show in the club. That’s when I met Jerry—and that’s when Jerry met Betty. It was obvious right away that he had big eyes for her. I had just met her, and we weren’t emotionally involved, so I stepped out of the way. Jerry Lewis was absolutely hilarious to be around. We’d be walking down the street together and he’d start skipping, just like a little kid. I’m telling you, he was crazy, a helluva lot of fun, and completely impossible. 

I first saw Marilyn at Universal just walking down the street. She was breathtakingly voluptuous in a see-through blouse that revealed her bra. Her beauty was intimidating, but there was something about her smile that made her seem approachable. She gave off an extraordinary aura of warmth and kindness, of generosity and sexuality. I’d never experienced anything like it. We went into the Mocambo, which had one wall lined with canaries in cages. Marilyn was wearing a flowered dress, nothing fancy, but she still looked fabulous. Howard Duff had a house down the beach just outside of Malibu. He said to me, “Use the house whenever you want.” I called Marilyn, and we agreed to go to the beach. I picked her up, and we had a nice dinner at a popular drive-in restaurant that served steaks and hamburgers. I was feeling a bit nervous; we went over to Howard’s place, which was a wonderful little bungalow with a cozy fireplace. We continued seeing each other for a while. I would arrange a place we could go, or she would. We would go to her friend Jeannie Carmen’s place, or Howard’s bungalow. We almost never went out at night in public, though. I was falling in love with her. I loved Marilyn Monroe. I could tell she liked me too. 

By the time we shot the yacht scene in Some Like It Hot, Marilyn was into it. When we kissed, I was on the receiving end of her tongue, and of her grinding. I had a hard-on (but don’t tell anybody) all through that scene, and she knew it, which made her even more aggressive. She knew I wasn’t acting when I expressed my desire for her. She could feel it—in more ways than one—and when Billy Wilder yelled “Cut,” she pushed herself off me and gave me a big, satisfied smile. In the end it turned out that we all had misunderstood Marilyn. We didn’t realize that her way of finding out who she was came from acting. In her early career, her films were flimsy, poorly written affairs, so of course she had trouble getting a handle on the material. But in Some Like It Hot the material was beautifully written, and she absolutely shone. —"American Prince: A Memoir" (2009) by Tony Curtis

Jerry Lewis' "The Patsy": the integrity of the kid

We see Everett in The Family Jewels (1965) only backstage, in the act of removing his makeup and becoming the naked man, at a moment when he doesn’t know he’s being viewed by an audience (one of the “squealing brats”, who is dejected by the revelation of the clown’s misanthropy). This scene is the converse of the one near the end of The Nutty Professor (1963) in which Professor Kelp’s Buddy Love mask melts away: there, the audience’s presence is known to the performer and inescapable, forcing him to a confession, and the slipping of the mask inspires love. The Family Jewels is a moral film, and the morality is stated most clearly by the little heiress Donna (Donna Butterworth), speaking of the man she loves, Willard (Lewis): “He should be my father.” The right of the child to have the father she wants and needs is fundamental to Lewis’ view of the world, but it’s equally significant that in order to become this father, Willard must assume the disguise of the misanthropic Everett. Willard makes the same choice – of passing through his own opposite – that the timid Kelp in The Nutty Professor in becoming the aggressive Buddy Love and that the neurotic American millionaire Byers makes in Which Way to the Front? (1970) in becoming the Nazi general Kesselring. In Lewis’s work the conception of film as a medium of transformation and escape, is aligned with a tradition of Hollywood luxury and artistry—a conception that prevails from his first film, The Bellboy (1960), to his last Cracking Up (1983).

In The Errand Boy, Magnolia reaffirms the limitless power of (cinematic) imagination by explaining to Morty, “You believed what you liked” and validating his access to a private world in which imaginary creatures appear as fully real partners in a continuing conversation.  Morty’s melancholic insight introduces a new metaphor in a film full of metaphors, and a new master narrative for the film’s plot, suddenly revealing depths of loss and sadness beneath the relationship between the cinephile and the object of his love.  The extremism that marks Jerry Lewis's public reputation—as genius or embarrassment—began in the 1960s, when, following hot on the heels of the heretical politique des auteurs, French film critics launched their most devastating broadside yet against the fortress of traditional evaluative criteria. In 1967, for example, Jean-Luc Godard had the nerve to proclaim that "Jerry Lewis is the only one in Hollywood doing something different, the only one who isn't falling in with the established categories, the norms... Lewis is the only one today who's making courageous films. And I think he's perfectly well aware of it. He's been able to do it because of his personal genius." In his 1968 book The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris fired off a 12-pronged salvo against Jerry Lewis's value-as-an-artist, and against the French critics' fundamental error of taste and judgment. But Lewis had himself fanned the flames of the controversy by canonizing himself as a "total film-maker" and declaring that: "When you make a film yourself, write it, produce it, direct it, perhaps star in it... a piece of your heart enters the emulsion. It stays there the rest of your life, good film or bad."

Whereas the onscreen Jerry Lewis-figure lacked coordination and control, behind-the scenes he was an accomplished and ambitious achiever. This paradox irked Lewis critics no to end since his self-directed films not only subjected his familiar comic persona to some highly accented transmutations but they also displayed an idiosyncratic cinematic and narrative style that marked a significant departure both from Lewis's earlier work and from the generic norms of the comedy. In their cultivation of a personal style and voice, the self-directed films reveal an auteurist project and assert the victory of the Creative "Jerry Lewis" over the regimentation of the Hollywood "entertainment machine." With the widening gulf between the spasticity of the Idiot-Kid and his new aspirations as filmmaker, Lewis was attacked by established reviewers for his "betrayal" of comic innocence-especially for films like The Errand Boy (1961) and The Patsy (1964), which addressed the processes of stardom and the values of entertainment. In 1978, Leonard Maltin echoed the sentiments of the 1960s American reviewers when he berated Lewis for overextending himself. 

In such accounts, Lewis is persistently castigated for self-indulgence, for his refusal to be "simply funny." Moreover, his aspirations to totalizing authorship are attributed to an ego run riot. "There was no longer anyone to veto an idea," Leonard Maltin accused, "so Jerry allowed to milk gags far beyond endurance, and discarded conventional notions of continuity, and-oddly enough-humor." American critics like Maltin seem affronted by the way that the self-directed films upset the balance between creative individualism and conformity that normally exists in the comedy. By disrupting structural conventions of continuity and humor, and by offending standards of tasteful self-effacement, Lewis could no longer be so easily contained within the acceptable province of the comedian-as-jester. But the "problem" with Lewis pre-exists his directorial work: in many ways the extremism of his auteurist films is an extension of the excesses of his performance style. In a review of the comedian's first screen appearance in the 1949 film My Friend Irma, Bosley Crowther wrote that: "The swift eccentricity of his movements, the harrowing features of his face and the squeak of his vocal protestations, which are many and varied, have flair. His idiocy constitutes a burlesque of an idiot."

Bosley Crowther identifies here a key feature of Jerry Lewis's style: the complex relations he establishes with both the conventional figure of the misfit and the conventions of comic performance. "Idiocy" is "burlesqued," not presented directly; and Lewis is perceived to be moving beyond the basic requirements of the comic spectacle. Underlying this complaint is the idea that comic effectiveness depends upon restraint. Lewis quite clearly commits offenses against the desired decorum of comic delivery-his performance ensures that gags and comic reactions are far from precise and contained. Restraint and precision play a crucial role in enabling the spectator to escape from potentially disconcerting ramifications of the comic spectacle. In an integrated film narrative, gags operate as moments of potential rupture. They halt, and throw into comparative disarray, procedures of logic and communication. But the rupturous effect tends to be trammeled: like narrative in general, gags have their own conventions of order-of elaboration and containment. What is important to the process of the gag is not the disruptive event in itself, but how it is made over as a controlled and contained moment of "disorder"-so it can "cleanly" generate laughter. But if the film lingers upon the victim of the pratfall and his injuries, then pain or embarrassment can intrude. The gag allows potentially serious events to be transformed through disavowal-it simultaneously displays yet pulls away from the serious consequences of the action. But if the balance is upset, and the "machinery" of comic disavowal is thrown out of alignment, then the carefully hidden "other face" of the gag may be revealed. 

Jerry Lewis's films are especially interesting for the way that linguistic deformations are accompanied by a pervasive deformation of familiar principles of gag structure and articulation. As director-performer, Lewis repeatedly diverts the gag from its ostensibly-signalled direction: many of his gags refuse to build to conclusions-they frequently lack a conventional pay-off climax or finish with an expressly weak one. Jean-Pierre Coursodon suggests that Lewis specializes in the "eluded" or "eliminated" gag, the gag that provides, instead of the expected mechanism of disruption and reordering, a process of deformation through which, paradoxically, the "gagness" of the gag is itself frustrated, dissipated, or gagged. While American critics like Leonard Maltin tend to regard Lewis as failing to provide the conventional pleasure in gag-comedy, Coursodon implies that Lewis's comedy operates as a "second order" process of "gagging." The raw material of many Lewisian gags consists of already familiar gags, or of recognizable gag-situations. They are, in essence, "metagags." Where comic play is generally set in motion by the disruption of rules, procedures, and discursive registers-if only to reinstate them-Lewis's films themselves play with the conventional forms and procedures of comic play. As Coursodon remarks, "these fascinating films are not always very funny, but their originality lies precisely in the fact that, while nominally slapstick routines, they so transcend categories that laughter in their case ceases to be the test of success or failure." 

The process of gag-deformation finds its most symptomatic articulation when, as comic performer, Lewis himself serves as its vehicle. A characteristic example occurs near the beginning of The Patsy. The entourage of recently deceased comedian Wally Brandford hit upon the idea of training "some nobody" (The Lewisian bellboy) to take his place. Whereas Bob Hope's controlled wisecracks served to wrap up and seal off the threat to the ego, but when the Lewis-figure is faced with an intimidating situation he offers not verbal mastery but linguistic breakdown. Stuttering, stammering, physically contorting, Lewis's misfits lose control over both body and language. Whereas Hope's characters can overcome the threatening situation quickly, the Lewis-figure seems branded by it. In his performance, the mouth becomes disconnected from the mind-in order to turn the speech act into an expressive vehicle for the unruly body. And this is made all the more excruciating for the spectator when, as in The Patsy, the situation is not inherently threatening. This kind of deforming strategy permits the film to make an exhibition of the Lewis-figure's inability to deal at all adequately with the external world. Scott Bukatman observes that these films foreground structural "inarticulacy"-in the form of hesitancy, fragmentation, and obsessive repetition: The carefully delineated narrative, situations and conflicts which constitute the logic of the syntagmatic chain inevitably fall victim to a degeneration into a series of isolated sketches unrelated to the main narrative. The discursive operations of these films are dominated by digression and repetition, rather than by causal logic and narrative closure.

Lewis's gags and performative routines slide away from their anticipated trajectory, persistently deform conventions of narrative structure. The insistence of such structural deformations of the gag, of language-may invite the temptation to enthrone Lewis as some kind of (post)modernist 'roi du crazy.' But the motivation behind Lewis's drive to assert himself as "total film-maker" merits closer attention. Once more, the opening sequence of The Patsy provides a useful starting point. After Stanley makes a spectacle of himself in the doorway, he is approached by Brandford's staff. He backs away as they advance, spluttering and squirming, until he finds himself against an open window-and falls out. When his "persecutors" begin to peer out of the window, the film cuts to a view of the hotel's exterior. Stanley, facing the camera, starts to descend through the center of the image. But this is a still-photographic image of Stanley-his figure is frozen in movement, suspended in midair. This still-image is then pushed over to one side by the appearance of large blue letters announcing the name "Jerry Lewis"-the beginning of the film's credits. Stanley Belt, the fictional Lewis-figure, is halted in his descent by the intrusion, from outside the diegesis, the name of the performer turned Author. The ending of the film rhymes with this sequence. After a triumphant appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" boosts Stanley to immediate stardom, he makes a brash proposal of marriage to Ellen Betts (Ina Balin) in his hotel room. Ellen then advances towards him, and Stanley retreats from her nervously, backing out onto the patio. He reaches the balcony wall-and topples over it. Hands covering her face in sorrow, Ellen turns around to face the camera. But Lewis then reenters from the side. Lewis steps out of the fictional guise of Stanley Belt to present himself as "Jerry Lewis," addressing Ina Balin by her real name, rather than "Ellen," and announces that they're standing on a studio set. 

The Patsy, the most conceptual of Lewis’ films, first presents the ascendancy of the Lewis-figure as a comic performer, and then moves beyond this-to provide apotheosis to a more elevated status. Out of the "death" of Stanley Belt-the conventional Lewis misfit turned showbiz success-comes the "birth" of the "total film-maker." A self-willed metaphor for Lewis's career, this film presents Lewis as a totalizing presence who exceeds both his familiar space as star-comedian and the "entertainment machinery" of Hollywood. The Patsy demonstrates how Lewis's deformations of structure and performance are motivated by the desire to validate his own differentiated space within the Hollywood system, and to flaunt his newfound enunciative power. But this amounts to more than a simple case of self-promotion, for the auteurist films produce a series of contradictory representations of "Jerry Lewis." Although Michael Stem sees Lewis seeking within these films to come to terms with "the conflicting concepts of Jerry the ordinary guy-or extraordinary genius," the Lewis-problem exceeds such a simple dualism. His self-directed films open up a complex series of schisms within the subjective and discursive presence "Jerry Lewis." These films are especially fascinating-or, to some tastes, infuriating-for the degree to which Lewis defines himself not by means of the conventional cultural machinery of Oedipal narrative but in relation to different facets of "Jerry Lewis"-as famous star, as comedian, as enunciator. He flamboyantly hijacks the Hollywood comedian-film and reroutes it in the process, transforming it into a nontraditional vehicle for the construction of a discourse of the self. Although-as The Patsy shows-the concept of control is crucial to this discourse, his films offer a more radical splitting of Lewis-not simply into performer and auteur, but into multiple personae. The manipulative and self-obsessed Buddy Love is also a monstrous incarnation, implying that Jerry Lewis has "consumed" his former partner Dean Martin.

The Nutty Professor explicitly pinpoints how Lewis's self-directed work is engaged in a process of rewriting its subject's "history." It is The Patsy, however, that provides Lewis's most sustained and polemical discourse on his "art" and career. Like The Errand Boy, which is set in a Hollywood studio, The Patsy propagandizes for entertainment that comes from the heart-more specifically, from Lewis's heart. The uncoordinated misfit Stanley Belt is taken in hand by Brandfords' executive committee, who seek remorselessly to shape him into an all-round entertainer, a showbiz machine. Out of the unpromising raw material presented by Stanley, the Brandford team seek to manufacture a star who is a puppet to their collective dictates. In their view, individual talent can be shaped, and even created. Just as The Nutty Professor uses the narrative framework of the Jekyll and Hyde story, The Patsy invokes the Frankenstein myth. At the start of their corporate adventure, Chic Wyman (Everett Sloane), the leader of Brandford's retinue, declares that "This kid can and will be whatever we want him to be." What they demand is "some nobody," a will-less automaton who can be programmed and controlled. Within this paradigm, that star is nothing but a designed personality whose distinguishing traits are the well-worn tricks of showbiz experts. The committee relentlessly drills him for a stand-up comedy act, but at his debut at the Copa Cafe Stanley is overwhelmed with stagefright. He stumbles onstage, knocking the microphone over, and instead of delivering prepackaged verbal gags, he offers a characteristically Lewisian-yet uncommonly discomfiting-spectacle of maladjustment. Stanley presents his jokes in the wrong order, turning them inside-out. The extent to which this scene cannibalizes and deforms a familiar comic performance mode qualifies it as the most emphatic and extended "second-order" gagging sequence in Lewis's films.

It offers simultaneously the "gagging" of a conventional process of gag-delivery and a persuasive representation of the characters' pain: as with the opening scenes of the film, the spectator is made acutely aware of Stanley's suffering (of Jerry Lewis's suffering for extension). The ambivalent feelings raised here make it difficult for both the club-audience and the film-spectator to accept this as "funny" in anything like a conventional sense. This calamitous outing contrasts with Stanley's solo performance after the Brandford team have deserted their misbegotten star. Determined to show his would-be puppet-masters what he can offer on his own, Stanley replaces the stand-up routine with a sketch entitled "A Big Night in Hollywood." He casts himself as a movie-struck kid-similar to the Lewis figures in Hollywood or Bust (1956) and The Errand Boy-who gazes on in fascination at the movie stars attending a swank Hollywood premiere. When he looks the part, he strolls jauntily off to the theater, and is allowed to enter-and the sketch ends. As in The Errand Boy, Lewis/Stanley plays the eternal fan who, through his innate talent, realizes his ambition to become part of the magical (Hollywood) world. Although outwardly he must conform, inside he retains the integrity of the kid. For Stanley, the sketch is the articulation of his own ideal of stardom-and, indeed, he becomes an immediate success as a result of it. But the sketch also functions as an allegory of Lewis's own rise to power. In the circuit of subjective overdetermination, "A Big Night in Hollywood," is itself an extended version of a sketch Lewis had performed on one of his TV specials in 1957, when he was attempting to consolidate a solo career.

Although Stanley directly turns the tables on Brandford's men, a different tactic is required for Ellen Betts. The only two people in the film who, from early on, recognize and encourage Stanley's natural talent are women: Ellen, and gossip-columnist Hedda Hopper. At a promotional party, Stanley takes one look at a ludicrous umbrella hat worn by Hopper and is unable to restrain his desire to collapse into hysterical laughter. But instead of feeling affronted, Hopper says to Stanley's PR agent: "You've come across someone who hasn't learned to be phony. He thought something, and he said it-which was real and honest." Ellen also recognizes Stanley's worth; she is guided by an idealistic and familial agenda that contrasts with the mercenary motives of the men in the Brandford team. She beseeches: "Let's have an understanding as to why we're going to do this. Are we going to do this because we're spoiled-and used to a comfortable, well-oiled machine? Or is it simply because we've been happy working as a family, and we hate the thought of breaking up?" It is revealing, though, that Stanley is not merely incorporated into the "family" at the end of The Patsy, but he secures the central position of power. This suggests that the driving motive behind Stanley's success is not really the finding of a place among others-a sense of belonging-so much as the achieving of dominance over them. This receives a somewhat ambivalent representation. Stanley's humanizing of the machinery of professional entertainment coincides with his total control, but in the process Stanley is himself transformed. As he fires off instructions to his newly appointed staff, the business-suited Stanley Belt acts with the polished self-assurance (and implicit self-regard) of Buddy Love. However, once the danger of corruptive egomania is introduced as a possible consequence of stardom, and after Stanley has brusquely commanded Ellen to marry him, he's immediately killed off. 

The most acutely self-mythologizing of Lewis's films, The Patsy postulates that the self can be destroyed and reformulated at will, and that the creation of the self is precisely the responsibility of the "creative self." Throughout most of the film, Ellen's principal function is to serve as a maternal presence: she provides emotional and psychological support, nurturing Stanley's fragile ego in his moments of dejection. But where Stanley disappears from the screen for his miraculous rebirth as "Jerry Lewis," the mask of "Ellen" is stripped from Ina Balin onscreen-and at the command of her director. The ending of The Patsy suggests how Lewis simultaneously exploits and reorders the Hollywood cinema's capacity for heightened illusionism, for fantasy-making. For Lewis, film is expressly a vehicle for magic-it makes possible a reformulation of the world, of the self.  More pointedly, by giving expression to the "kid" within him, Stanley Belt proves his superiority to the group of manipulative adults who had tried to make him conform to their wishes. Lewis's films repeatedly enact such childlike fantasies of revolt against the demands of the adult world. —Sources: "Jerry Lewis: The Deformation of The Comic" (1994) by Frank Krutnik and "Deconstructing Jerry Lewis as Director" (2016) by Chris Fujiwara  (Senses of  Cinema  Issue 79)