JFK (Declassified Files), Marilyn Monroe (The Final Years), Jerry Lewis (Erratic Patterns)

John F. Kennedy was killed on 22 November 1963, about 15m (50ft) from where we were standing on Friday, underneath the sixth-floor window from which Lee Harvey Oswald fired – or didn’t, depending on your point of view. “What hat happened in the window is not true,” said Ron Washington, holding a magazine containing grisly autopsy photographs of the 35th president of the United States. Washington has been on the case for 27 years and comes to Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas to sell conspiracy theory literature to tourists outside the former Texas School Book Depository, which is now a JFK museum. “I believe in the truth and evidence shows, indicates, Oswald’s innocent,” he said, gesturing towards the nearby grassy knoll. “Try to understand that what happened in the window was only a decoy to draw the attention away from the gunman behind the fence.” The imminent release of thousands of documents regarding the assassination is expected to shine at least a faint light on the government’s investigations, possible relationships with Oswald and his foreign trips, including a visit to Mexico City a few weeks before the shooting. Source: www.theguardian.com

Jerry Lewis visiting John F. Kennedy at the White House, 1963.

Marilyn and the Kennedys – The Unequivocal Truth: Peter Lawford’s home, a $95,000 purchase in 1956 from MGM magnate Louis B. Mayer, had been the setting for Marilyn’s encounter with Bobby Kennedy, on Wednesday 4 October 1961. This occasion had also been a party to honour the Attorney General. As part of the Justice Department’s crackdown on organised crime, Bobby was in town to talk with local law-enforcement officials about the rise in mob activity in Los Angeles. Following his brother John’s favourable account of his first real meeting with Marilyn just 11 days earlier, Bobby was keen to meet the great Hollywood star himself. Although it is safe to say that the Attorney General did grow closer to Marilyn than his brother, JFK, extensive research involving their personal schedules proves that Bobby did not have a fully fledged affair with Marilyn. Moreover, details of Marilyn’s supposed encounters with Bobby’s charismatic brother, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, were subject to a similar level of gossip and misrepresentation.

To this day, fans, historians, documentary makers and movie columnists repeat how Marilyn grew up as an orphan in a succession of foster homes. On both counts, that was totally incorrect. In fact, in September 1937, at the age of 11, Norma Jeane was moved to West Los Angeles to live with Grace McKee’s childless 62-year-old aunt, Ana Lower. It was there that she finally found the warmth and maternal affection she had been deprived of. ‘This woman was the greatest influence on my whole life,’ Marilyn recalled in a 1962 interview with photographer George Barris. ‘I called her aunt Ana. The love I have today for beautiful and simple things is because of her. She was the only person I ever really loved with such a deep love you can give only to someone so kind and so full of love for me. One of the reasons why I loved her was because of her understanding of what really mattered in life. She didn’t believe in a person being a failure either. She believed the mind could achieve anything. She changed my whole life.’

Marilyn had been an emotionally battered woman, weaned on rejection and even cruelty in her adolescent years, but she had learned how to ride her life’s punches. There had been agents, directors, and romantic suitors who went to bat for her, who tried to protect her. But she was actually no victim, at least not of the Hollywood studio system as commonly assumed. In 1993, Ralph Roberts (her official masseur since 1959) disclosed that Marilyn had told him she had only had a one-night stand with John F. Kennedy. ‘Marilyn gave me the impression that it was not a major event for either of them,’ he remarked. In another exchange, Marilyn had announced, ‘He may be a good President, but he doesn’t grab me sexually.’ Another confidant was her former, short-term lover, newspaper columnist James Bacon, whom she confided that the President ‘made love like an adolescent.' Bacon retorted to her: ‘But Marilyn. He’s too busy running the country to be bothered about being good in bed.’ In truth, due to his excruciating back pains, intercourse and lengthy periods of foreplay were, regrettably, nigh-on impossible for the President.

Fundamental to Kennedy’s sexual inefficiencies were the persistent and well-attested problems with his back and other ailments. He suffered from osteoporosis, which seriously affected his spine and, from the age of just 20, forced him to permanently wear a brace. His back was damaged further when, on Monday 2 August 1943, during the Second World War, his torpedo boat was hit by a Japanese destroyer in the South Pacific. For 16 straight hours, Kennedy heroically managed to rescue his fellow seamen, but his bravery only managed to put more pressure on his already damaged spine. By his early 30s, the cocktail of steroids he had been consuming for colitis had accelerated his osteoporosis. His thinning bones, which had been supporting his spinal column, were now collapsing and he was now unable to perform even simple tasks. In an endeavour to ease his incessant back pain, surgeons cut open Kennedy’s back and inserted into either side of his lower spine two thin metal plates. But just three days after the operation, Kennedy developed a staphylococcus infection that spiralled out of control and he went into a coma. Within months, the back pain returned, more severe than before. After the operations, his back was weaker than ever.

When JFK moved into the White House in January 1961, he took with him eight personal physicians; doctors who would keep alive the public persona of a young, vibrant, robust President. He basked in his image of vitality and extreme good health. But in truth, it was a façade. His body was a crumbling wreck. Even the most menial of tasks could cause him great distress. By the one and only time he was intimate with Marilyn, in March 1962, President Kennedy, the most powerful man in the world, was in such disrepair that he had trouble even getting out of bed in the morning. Bending down to pull on his shoes and socks caused him immense discomfort. The thoughts of any kind of sexual intercourse outside the realms of the pool were a complete non-starter. Marilyn and JFK would never share a sexually charged session again, and Marilyn never pursued it. Openly dismissive of the former men in her life, Monroe made it clear to the few friends around her that the most significant thing for her at the start of 1962, was to move forward with her life, and that buying a home was the key to this. However, the decision to finally purchase was not entirely her own. It had actually derived from a suggestion made back in May 1961 by celebrated Californian psychiatrist Dr Ralph Greenson, the latest in a line of psychoanalysts who had managed to practise their methods on the star.

After Marilyn's divorce from her third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, was finalized in 1961, Joe DiMaggio came back into her life and, by all accounts, desperately tried to bring some stability and calm to an existence that was veering out of control. DiMaggio was always jealous of the attention she generated from other men. He tried to get her away from people who, to his mind, were nothing but trouble (including the Kennedys), and even proposed to her, asking her to marry him again. DiMaggio had initially been drawn (like a few hundred million other men) to Marilyn's "sex goddess" person, but he was never comfortable with her flaunting it, and was a self-admitted control freak, wanting Marilyn to wear low hemlines and quit being a movie star.

Yet during their courtship, DiMaggio had worked to squelch his possessiveness, and Monroe, who spent her life in search of a father figure, a man who’d never abandon her, found that in DiMaggio. “She’d grown accustomed to his paternalistic guidance and the protective side of his personality,” said Monroe’s close friend dancer Lotte Goslar. “And here was a father figure with whom she could have sex. And the sex was pretty damn good, as she said herself.” DiMaggio never stopped trying to win her back and he started therapy for anger management. In February 1961, when Monroe—who’d been diagnosed by two top psychiatrists as a paranoid schizophrenic like her mother—was forcibly institutionalized in New York City, DiMaggio ­answered her calls for help. In July 1962, a close friend of DiMaggio’s remarked, ‘Joe never sold his home there, the one he wanted for Marilyn. He has never stopped talking about her over the years. I think he believes she’ll eventually find herself and return to him. He’ll wait.’ During the afternoon of 1 August, 1962, now tired of waiting, DiMaggio excitedly flew out to Los Angeles and headed straight to Marilyn’s home in Brentwood where he asked for her hand in marriage. But although appreciative, Marilyn dismissed his offer outright and told him she wished to remain a friend only.

Though there were no doubts that DiMaggio was her best and most trusted friend, the chances of them ever remarrying were very remote indeed. Probably she had no desire to remarry DiMaggio because, put simply, she was no longer in love with him. She saw him now only as a close, platonic friend. And DiMaggio was totally devastated. Genuinely believing she would accept his proposal and imagining he would spend the entire day (and the rest of his life) with the actress, he had cancelled his appearance at that evening’s Fifth Annual Boys’ Invitational Baseball Tournament at Shepherd Stadium in Colonial Heights. His no-show naturally took everyone by surprise. It was something the ever-reliable Joe never did. With Marilyn’s rejection still ringing in his ears, he dejectedly left her home, heading out to San Francisco to prepare for an old-timers’ baseball game which was due to take place at Candlestick Park on Saturday. —"Marilyn Monroe: The Final Years" (2012) by Keith Badman

Scientists pinpoint jealousy in the monogamous brain: Shakespeare's “green-eyed monster” has been written about for centuries, but the scientific study of jealousy is relatively young. Jealousy may have given a fitness advantage to humans in our ancestral environment; current evidence shows that culture also plays a role. “Understanding the neurobiology and evolution of emotions can help us understand our own emotions and their consequences,” says Dr. Karen Bales from the University of California, USA. Unrestrained jealousy can have negative health effects and in extreme cases can even lead to violence. But jealousy also plays a positive role in social bonding, by signaling that a relationship may need attention. It may be particularly important for keeping a couple together in monogamous species like humans. “The neurobiology of pair bonding is critical for understanding how monogamy evolved and how it is maintained as a social system,” says Bales.“ The researchers found that in the jealousy condition, the monkeys’ brains showed heightened activity in an area associated with social pain in humans, the cingulate cortex. “Increased activity in the cingulate cortex fits with the view of jealousy as social rejection,” she adds. “Monogamy probably evolved multiple times so it is not surprising that its neurobiology differs between different species,” says Bales. “However it seems as though there has been convergent evolution when it comes to the neurochemistry of pair bonding and jealousy.” Source: blog.frontiersin.org

"When I kissed her and told her I loved her,  Patti, my Princess, looked into my eyes and I knew my life was first beginning. The letters I received were as important to me as was medicine to a sick man. Time moved slowly… We would meet in New Haven, New York, Boston, whenever we could get away. Our love was so wonderful we thought that surely we were the first to love. The only thing we dreamt about was to get married. We had nothing but our love. There were many times through the ensuing years that I hung onto those words: 'I love her.' My feelings, where my wife is concerned, are very deep and very sacred. She is the very reason I live for she is the only reason I know that makes living worth anything… and the boys are equally worth it, but one day they’ll leave and then there will be only us." 

"I can only answer “God” honestly, and he knows my worth and my intentions, I have no fear of his wrath for I know he knows I’m basically good. Patti is the first human being that has ever cared about me or for me… Oh, there were a few beings that cared, but not enough that I could have survived. It was only when she came into my life that I realized I had a life… I want so much to scream the things that tug away at my heart and my soul… And when I try, the hurt is so strong, and deep, and festered that I clam up, and the relief I want doesn’t come… But I am a very lucky man to have found the real, right, and perfect human being to spend my years with. I want so much to do the right thing to keep her straight and happy… The only emotional thing that can kill me is when she hurts… or when I’ve caused her pain… but my intentions are never to hurt her, never to do her a moment’s pain, never to create a frown on her lovely face…"  —JUST 'CAUSE I LOVE HER by Jerry Lewis (July 4, 1951)

"Friends remember Jerry as being ultra-possessive of me in the early days of our marriage. As the children came along, they saw him as jealous of the time I committed to them. But just when I would start to agree with my friends, I would get a loving note from Jerry about how much he cared for me and the pride he had in my being a good mother. These mixed messages had kept me from separating from Jerry long before we met in court." —"I Laffed Till I Cried" (1993) by Patti Lewis 

On February 24th, 1953, Marilyn was awarded the Red Book magazine award for Best Young Box Office Personality. Her presentation as a special guest was made at the end of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis' radio show (there still is an audio recording available). Marilyn was excellent, and even played Jerry's girlfriend in a live skit on the show. Also there was a lot of 'off the cuff' stuff, the three performers hanging out socially in Beverly Hills. Jerry Lewis would comment about his friendship with Marilyn on Bill O'Reilly's and Larry King's talk shows. On neither occasion did he admitted to sleeping with Marilyn, although Lewis was adamant about defending her. In Marilyn Monroe: A Never-Ending Dream (1986), Marilyn confessed to historian/writer Guus Luijters she had found Jerry Lewis "quite sexy."

The Martin and Lewis Show (1953): Dean Martin reveals the identity of the show's secret guest to Jerry Lewis: Marilyn Monroe. Martin and Lewis talk about the cotton dress Marilyn is wearing and her new movie "Niagara"; Lewis attempts to get her to go out on a date with him; Lewis, Martin, and Monroe perform in a sketch about the newspaper editor of the "Daily Hangover" (Jerry Lewis) whose love interest is his star reporter (Marilyn Monroe). Extracted from the radio show's transcript — Marilyn: 'I'm a blonde, and I like to go out with tall, dark, handsome men. You see, opposites attract.' Jerry Lewis: 'Then you'll love me. I'm just the opposite.' Marilyn: 'Look Jerry, you're a man, and I'm a woman.' Jerry Lewis: 'Now that we've chosen sides, let's play.' Dean Martin: 'Won't you give up, Jerry. Marilyn prefers me. I've gone out with women that would not even look at you.' Jerry Lewis: 'So what? I've gone out with women who wouldn't look at me either.' Dean Martin: 'Giving her a kiss doesn't increase the newspaper circulation.' Jerry Lewis: 'But increases mine!' (laughter)

Jerrry Lewis was a perfectionist. But he also showed signs of obsessive compulsive disorder and depressive episodes. Some of his close colleagues thought his brand of childish comedy was a sign of escapism. He had felt like “a dummy, a misfit, the sorriest kid alive” during his childhood. A psychiatrist once even warned him off therapy, saying: “If we peel away the emotional and psychological difficulties, your pain may leave, but it’s also quite possible that you won’t have a reason to be funny any more.” Jerry revealed he had beaten himself up “a thousand times” over his son Joseph’s death, adding: “I’ve worked under the most painful conditions any man has ever felt in his life. But when I walk out on that stage, the pain goes away.” Often ostracized in his late career for his stubborn opposition to the postmodern trends in Hollywood, frequently neglected in an everchanging film industry and overlooked as iconoclast filmmaker in America, he would be vindicated by the likes of Martin Scorsese, who referred to Lewis as "one of the truly greats." To his credit, Lewis was one of the few writers who didn't use systematically his artistic medium as a scoreboard for his grudges or intimate foibles. Obviously, he projected on occasion some of his personal fears or fantasies, but it's not enough to trace  a semblance of autobiographical realism through his filmography in any case.

Jerry Lewis loved to work with segmentation, to divide the frame into separate compartments (the line between stage and backstage in the prom scene of The Nutty Professor, the recording studio scene in The Patsy). Another instance: Music disappears from the soundtrack when a girl disappears around a corner with her transistor radio in The Ladies Man. Lewis's great originality as a filmmaker lies in his art of multiplying segmentation or segmenting multiplicity so as to produce a spiraling disorder that leads miraculously to a reassertion of order (as in the endings of The Family Jewels, Which Way to the Front?, and Cracking Up). His films take place in zones of indeterminacy and combinatorial freedom. In The Total Film-Maker, Lewis called the pattern formed by the comic performer "an erratic pattern." If the confessional aspect of The Nutty Professor and the self-reflexivity of films such as The Errand Boy and The Patsy have often encouraged viewers to see Lewis's work as a distorted autobiography, a set of mirror fictions in which he externalizes various aspects of himself, his films make an equally strong demand to be read as the most vivid and emotionally wrenching American show-business hallucinations ever put on film: representations of a modern world, partly real, partly staged. The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, The Nutty Professor, The Patsy, Three on a Couch, and The Big Mouth are comic masterpieces that propose a rich and haunting combination of realms and values without ceasing to coexist within a single frame. These films do not, and are not made to, offer the reassurance of a cohesive narrative controlled by a stable authorial agency. They set up, instead, a liberating and exhilarating confusion of realms, in which Jerry Lewis (the author), too, is one of the figures that swim in and out of focus. Source: www.movingimagesource.us

Rat Pack Confidential, First Date with Jerry Lewis

How America Lost Its Mind: the ’60s permanently reordered American society and culture and there have been unreckoned costs. The 1960s was the Beginning of the End of Reason. America was created by hucksters and passionate dreamers, which made America successful—but also by a people uniquely susceptible to fantasy, from Hollywood to conspiracy theories. In other words: Mix show business with everything else; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s. The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled. If the 1960s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it. Source: www.theatlantic.com

There was the time when Frank Sinatra, riding high on the early reviews for From Here to Eternity, visited his hero in search of approval. “I saw your picture,” said Bogart. “What did you think?” Frank asked him. Bogart simply shook his head 'no'.  Frank Sinatra saw in Humphrey Bogart all the things he always wanted to be: aloof, profound, world-weary, slightly drunk, slightly sentimental, romantic, tender, tough, loyal, and proud. He could take his hero worship too far. Once, when a date of Frank declared, in Bogart’s presence, “You sound like Bogie sometimes,” the actor laughed and said, “Don’t remind him, sweetheart, the poor bastard’s trying to kick it!” In fact, Bogart was one of the few people who were willing to tell Frank Sinatra exactly what they thought of some of the things he did. 

In 1948, Sinatra applauded the Martin & Lewis duo, although he considered its forte was really Jerry Lewis. Dean, the tall, handsome, crooning straight man, was more or less along for the ride. And when the ride ended, when Martin and Lewis devolved into an ugly spitting contest and finally broke apart, Lewis went on to solo success, just as everyone predicted, while “the dago” (Martin) initially floundered. It wasn’t that Dean Martin didn’t have the chops. He had a charming voice in the Bing Crosby mood—a stylish singer, if never a real artist. He cut a great figure in a tux, golf clothes: real movie star looks. And he was funny, with a gift for whimsical one-liners and a canny, low-key delivery. But he seemingly didn’t have the drive to go it alone. He was ten years older than Lewis and struggling under an absurd burden of debt when the two had met. Martin took the edges off of Jerry Lewis’s hysteria. By 1954, they weren’t such good pals anymore. Jerry was styling himself a creator of artful comic narratives in a variety of media.

"The unbridled sweep of the all-American ego at its most infantile and traumatized has always been an object of awe and fascination for the French; think of their celebrations of Poe and Faulkner, H.P. Lovecraft and Orson Welles. Call Jerry Lewis “America” and you have a recognizable psychosexual object that signifies something more than slapstick. The childhood sections which predictably dominate depict not only the lonely New Jersey misfit I expected, but also the street-smart chutzpah of a semi-abandoned tough guy who dreamt of murdering his grandfather, killed his cat in a rage when he was five, and hated his small-time show-biz parents." —Jonathan Rosenbaum

Everyone in show business knew that Jerry would do great, but most predicted a dire future for Dean. And when he debuted as a single, it was disastrous. His first picture, Ten Thousand Bedrooms, was numbered for years among the great movie turkeys of all time. Cynics were predicting he’d be out of the business altogether within months. Like Frank with From Here to Eternity, Dean was rescued by fate in the form of a new singing persona and a World War II movie (Some Came Running). Within two years of splitting with Jerry, he found himself teamed, unofficially but semipermanently, with Frank, starting with a trip to some sleepy town in the Midwest. Frank knew that Dean would be a perfect choice for the role of Bama Dillert, a honey-drippin’ card shark in the upcoming film Some Came Running. A gambler, roué, souse with a southern accent just like the one Dean sported as a shtick, he was capable of being played right by no other actor in the world. If it took till mid-’58 for Frank to offer Dean the role, the likely reason is that he was waiting to see how The Young Lions turned out.

Frank was cool in the sense of remote. Zarathustran drama and intoxicating romance: That was Frank’s bag. Dean was warm in the sense of comfortable. Alone, Frank couldn’t relax: He was insistent, a perfectionist, a lionizer of himself and his art. His audience adored him and feared him and envied him and lived through him, but they didn’t exactly like him—and as a singer he never particularly cared if they did. If anyone grew nostalgic for The Rat Pack, if it ever seemed like a more innocent time, that was because it was the last moment of cultural unanimity. For the first sixty years of the century, save a couple dozen months after Elvis made the scene, everybody in every house in America found pleasure in the same type of comedy, music, movies. The Rat Pack bunched it altogether at an unprecedented height and pitch—and for the last time. And nobody seemed to agree about anything ever again after they were toppled from their golden aerie.

Dean Martin: "I want to be remembered as a damn good entertainer, nothing spectacular. A good entertainer who made people enjoy themselves and made them laugh a little. I want them to think 'He was a nice guy'." Dean Martin on The Rat Pack: "The whole world is drunk and we're just the cocktail of the moment. Someday soon, the world will wake up, down two aspirins with a glass of tomato juice, and wonder what the hell all the fuss was all about."

“Both Jerry and Dean are always yelling and falling all over the place when they see me,” Marilyn said with a giggle, “and I love them for it. Other people have criticized me for the way I dress and the way I walk, but Dean and Jerry never do.” So was Sammy Davis Jr., another affectionate prankster who treated her with that brotherly mix of teasing and protectiveness. Back in LA there’d been a rumor she and Sammy had slept together, a rumor they both found hilarious. To the Rat Pack guys she was just Marilyn—no starlet and certainly no piece of studio meat. Marilyn certainly wasn’t dressed like a fashion plate, but that was the whole point. In fact, it was her lack of interest in fashion that gave her such a wonderful sense of style—a style she solidified in New York City. She wore black pullovers and toreador pants to dive bars with Frank Sinatra, flung minks over slips for midnight walks in Central Park. Her style remained unchanged from 1955 to her death, in 1962—a time when fashions and fads moved at warp speed.

Yet she never looked dated. She still doesn’t—a shot of her in pigtails, jeans, and cowboy boots on the set of The Misfits could have been taken yesterday. In New York, Marilyn dined at Gino’s with Frank Sinatra, then swilled cheap scotch at the Subway Inn down the street. She stretched out in her bathrobe on the floor of the Waldorf-Astoria, scrawling poems on crisp hotel stationery. Back in LA, Marilyn really had looked up to Shelley Winters as a big sister: In 1951, they had shared men, minks, swimsuits, and Sinatra records. Milton Greene had long been exasperated with Marilyn’s wardrobe, which ricocheted from skintight to slovenly with little in between. “That looks like a schmatta,” he’d moan whenever she’d show him a dress. He begged her to stop passing out in her makeup and cajoled her into using the gold-plated hairbrush Frank Sinatra had given her on her birthday. 

Like Las Vegas, Miami had a strip of fabulous hotels—the Eden Roc, the Diplomat, and, especially, the Fontainebleau, the gaudy Moderne pipe dream of architect Morris Lapidus, the most expensive, expansive, and exciting jewel of the city’s glittering string. The Fontainebleau catered to the biggest shots and had the biggest stars under contract, the Sands of Collins Avenue. Miami specialized—even more than Vegas—in spoiling guests. It was also a celebrity magnet, its clubs and hotels offering high fees and, like Vegas, a place for entertainers to relax and watch one another work. In January I960, for instance, just as Dean Martin was making a resort movie at the Sands with Frank Sinatra and the rest of them, Jerry Lewis directed himself in a film at the Fontainebleau, The Bellboy. In the 1960s Rock ‘n’ Roll had happened—rock’s early performers had opened something that no one before them had dared, a kind of bald rebellion that entertainers of the Rat Pack never dreamed of expressing. What seemed like high-spirited fun in the winter of 1960 came to look like debauchery by the summer of 1964; the high hopes of one generation were replaced with the simple adolescent cheeriness (Rock 'n' Roll) of the next one. —"Rat Pack Confidential: Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, Joey and the Last Great Show Biz Party" (ekindle, 2014) by Shawn Levy

Rat Pack Mysteries: I went down to the lobby of The Sands, walking through the fabled casino. As I took a detour to the crowded Copa Room nightclub, the lights went down, which meant that Frank Sinatra would be soon coming out. The room was smoky and dark and a big band was playing on stage. The patrons were dressed to the nines and chain-smoking cigarettes. The Copa Room's showgirls were known as "The Copa Girls." The showroom had taken its name from the former Copacabana in New York City. “Hey, doll, bring me that drink,” the gangster-like man said abruptly, without breaking his mile-long stare. He was pointing to a young waitress fresh from San Gabriel Valley carrying a heavy tray of champagne glasses, her uniform pulled too tight across her farm-girl hips. The crowd went wild when Sinatra walked out and started to sing a rousing rendition of Luck be a Lady. 

While the Dom Perignon flowed freely, Johnny Rosselli chatted about Marilyn Monroe. He had known her since 1948 when Harry Cohn had signed her first contract for Columbia. Cohn had used Mob money to enhance the Columbia Studio’s potential. Usually Johnny laughed at Sam Giancana’s antics, the way he had fallen head over heels with Judith Campbell and Phyllis McGuire, whom had been placed on his pedestal. Any man foolhardy enough to approach Phyllis with romantic overtures would meet a violent end or at the very least a brutal beating ordered by Giancana. But when it came to Marilyn, Johnny didn’t like the way Giancana had wiretapped her Brentwood home by Hollywood private detective Fred Otash. Sam Giancana knew he could use Marilyn’s affair with Jack Kennedy to destroy him politically.

Jerry Lewis simply shrugged when he was left behind the party, sitting in one of the background booths, self-consciously lighting a Kool cigarette. Why wasn't Lewis surrounded by a coterie of starlets like his partner Dean Martin or the Rat Pack allies? Maybe the high-life perks that used to intrigue his mind had lost its gleamy allure for him. He probably was reminiscing about his first girl, Lonnie Brown, harking back to his first serious date with her. He just could see her now placing a hand gently on his arm and talking to him as softly as she could amid the din of the coffehouse. Jerry had wanted to know what kind of kid she thought he was, and Lonnie had said he was cute, a bit silly, vulnerable, and easily hurt. She had seen right through his soul. Then she pulled a small lipstick—like a secret play toy—from her dress pocket and applied a reddish coat that made Jerry's heart beat real fast. Finally, his lips wiped out entirely all the waxy traces of lipstick on her mouth with a spontaneous, urgent kiss. Years later, Jerry would date a few glamourous starlets in Hollywood. But as he suspected tonight, a lot of memories, like old buildings and casinos, would collapse in his time, but not that unforgettable moment with Lonnie. Source: medium.com

A Pure Heart and Endless Regression: Marilyn Monroe and Jerry Lewis

The Film of Her Life (July 1960–January 1961): The Misfits (1961) would nearly rip away Marilyn Monroe's mask by coming very close to a literal presentation of the offcamera Monroe, who had no one to mimic but herself. The filming of Roslyn’s unreconciled state was Monroe’s most arduous assignment. Elia Kazan wrote to Arthur Miller about the film’s unresolved ending, which did not work. In Timebends, Miller virtually concedes that Kazan and Monroe were right. But he confesses that he could not change his approach to Roslyn, because his vision of her emanated from his futile effort to save his marriage. In other words, to expose Roslyn’s shortcomings would mean the end of his effort to repair his rapport with Monroe. Only after Monroe’s death, with the production of Miller’s play, After the Fall, could he reveal the dark side of the Marilyn myth that had enveloped him. In the film, as Roslyn's cowboy companions get to know her, she virtually becomes their source of light, their point of reference, as when Gay tells her, “Honey, when you smile it’s like the sun comin’ up.” The metaphors arising out of seemingly casual speech render the men’s growing sense of discovery that Roslyn has, in Guido’s words, “the big connection.”

Most of these metaphors shift from the concrete impression the males have of her person to rather abstract, even mystical, yearnings, because she does not know where she belongs. She seeks guidance from Gay but cannot reconcile herself to his gentle, paradoxical insistence—so like Sam’s in “Please Don’t Kill Anything” and probably like Miller’s as well—that, “Honey, a kind man can kill.” There are Edenic moments in The Misfits when the characters try to make the desert bloom, when Roslyn goes “all out” and seems equal to enjoying life in its fullness, when Gay blesses her for making him feel as if he has “touched the whole world.”

Enthusiastic and sentimental, Marilyn tended to exaggerate her stories to the point of lying, almost like a swindler, although she was “sensitive, perceptive, and empathic.” In fact, like Dr. Greenson’s other screen patients, she was “psychologically minded” and could spontaneously arrive at important insights, but had “great difficulty in integrating those new insights effectively.” Marilyn tensely recalled her early encounters with studio executives and producers: “I met them all. Phoniness and failure were all over them. Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes – a merry-go-round with beds for horses.”

“I think Marilyn was a very sick woman, a classic schizophrenic,” said Johnny Strasberg, son of Lee and Paula Strasberg: “She was dedicated to love. It’s a thing schizophrenics talk about, love. They’ll do anything for love and, additionally, they are totally infantile; they have no boundaries, as the rest of us have. The amazing thing about her is that she survived as long as she did. There was enough capacity for life had she been lucky enough to find a therapist who could treat her problems. That’s the tragedy. People loved her. But nobody could say no to her. No one would or could take responsibility for her. With Marilyn, you’re dealing with an abandoned infant who’s not an infant anymore.” Science journalist Claudia Kalb explains: 'What is clear is that Monroe suffered from severe mental distress. Her symptoms included a feeling of emptiness, a split or confused identity, extreme emotional volatility, unstable relationships, and an impulsivity that drove her to drug addiction and suicide -- all textbook characteristics of a condition called borderline personality disorder.'

Like other screen patients, Marilyn was not able to assimilate or clearly comprehend her past: “Almost all the important people of their past lives are remembered as essentially black or white figures.” This “rather disturbed relationship to time” promotes a blurring of past and present, with the past remaining so alive in patients’ minds that they project “a youthful quality and their self picture is many years younger than their chronological age.” In movies, Marilyn Monroe was screened in precisely this way; that is, she was literally screened or blocked off from her true age, from a character who should have been maturing. Just like other screen patients, Monroe’s characters had to be created anew. At home, where nobody could see her, the actress “might not be able to put herself together very well,” Greenson wrote to a colleague. Monroe, he pointed out, thrived on the public perception of her as a beautiful woman, “perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Cukor claimed that she could not be directed: “You couldn’t reach her, she was like underwater.” But Monroe had acted this way with other directors she deemed unsympathetic. Dean Martin refused to do the picture with Lee Remick as replacement. Sociologist S. Paige Baty observes that Marilyn Monroe assumes the “traces of the decades.” Marilyn is a “poster girl for the 1950s,” evoking nostalgia for a bygone and seemingly innocent era, representing somehow a safer world that was destroyed by President Kennedy’s assassination. But she is also ‘shorthand’ for the confusion, mourning, nostalgia, and loss—the marks of a common contemporary condition.” —"Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, revised and updated"  (2014) by Carl Rollyson

Dr. Ralph Greenson was not alone in his belief that Marilyn Monroe was probably suffering from borderline paranoid schizophrenia. Rather than work in a vacuum, Dr. Greenson obtained a second opinion by consulting psychologist Dr. Milton Wexler. After taking a doctorate at Columbia University, studying under Theodor Reik, a disciple of Freud, he became one of the country’s first nonphysicians to set up in practice as a psychoanalyst. Also a member of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, Dr. Wexler would go on to become a pioneer in the study and treatment of Huntington’s disease, forming the Hereditary Disease Foundation. Wexler also felt strongly that Marilyn Monroe suffered at least from borderline paranoid schizophrenia after sitting in on three sessions with her in Dr. Greenson’s home. “Yes, I treated her,” he said in 1999. “I won’t discuss that treatment but will say that I agreed with Dr. Greenson that she presented borderline symptoms of the disease that had run in her family. I found her to be very proactive in wanting to treat those borderline symptoms, as well. One misconception about her treatment is that it was Dr. Greenson’s idea that she move in with his family. She never moved in with the Greensons. Instead, it was my suggestion that she spend as much time there as possible in order to create the environment that she lacked as a child. That was my theory at the time and Dr. Greenson agreed.” All of these many years later, to ignore the findings of these two doctors makes no sense. 

Donald Spoto wrote, "No serious biographer can maintain the existence of an affair between Marilyn and the Kennedys. All we can say for sure is that the actress and the President have met four times, between October 1961 and August 1962, and it was during one of those meetings, that they called to a friendly relation of Marilyn from a bedroom. Shortly after, Marilyn confided this sexual relation to her close relatives, insisting about the fact that their affair ended there." The late actress Susan Strasberg, whose father Lee was Marilyn's acting coach and who considered Marilyn to be "a surrogate sister," wrote in an unfinished memoir that Marilyn did spend that night with the president, but denied any sort of ongoing affair. "It was OK to sleep with a charismatic president," Strasberg said, adding that "Marilyn loved the secrecy and the drama of it, but Kennedy was not the kind of man she wanted to spend her life with, and she made that very clear."

Marilyn often embellished the truth, and not just to the press, which would have been an acceptable form of public relations, but to her friends as well. Her publicist Pat Newcomb put it this way: “Marilyn told several people a lot of things, but she never told anybody everything.” Indeed, just as recently as a few months earlier she had told many of her friends that she and Bobby Kennedy were about to go on “a date.” It turned out, of course, that it was a dinner party attended by many others, not a date. Susan Strasberg said of Marilyn that night. “From what she’d told me, each time she caricatured herself, she chipped a piece out of her own dream.”

In September 1961, Marilyn joined Frank Sinatra in entertaining guests on his yacht for a four-day cruise to Catalina Island. “By now I would have cut any other dame loose. But this one—I just can’t do it,” admitted Sinatra. “They were definitely a couple,” said one of the partygoers. “She was acting as if she was the hostess, not a guest. She seemed in good spirits, but definitely not quite right. I had heard that there’d been some trouble getting her there. Everyone knew she was not well, that she was under the care of doctors.” Mickey Rudin—who was both Marilyn’s and Frank’s attorney—said in 1996, “Frank is a very, very compassionate person. He brought Marilyn to Cal-Neva to give her a little fun, a little relief from her problems. If she was upset during the time, well, she could have a crisis over what she was having for lunch, she was that emotional and high-strung. She could have had an imagined crisis, in fact.”

In 1995, Dean Martin recalled, “I met Marilyn in 1953, before she met Frank, before she met Peter, before she knew any of us. I met her before she was all screwed up, so I knew what she was like then and what she had become, and I felt badly for the kid. At the same time, I was a little tired of all the bullshit. In fact, no one had an easy life. We were all screwed up in our own ways. We all had problems. I was no saint, either. But I showed up for work. That was the priority. I’m not saying she wasn’t sick all of those days. Who knows? I wasn’t following her around like the FBI, I was just sitting on my ass waiting for her to show up at the studio. However, the few scenes we did, I enjoyed, but getting to them… oh my God, I mean, the takes, one after the other, it would drive any man crazy. But… look… I liked her. She was a good kid. But when you looked into her eyes, there was nothing there. No warmth. No life. It was all illusion. She looked great on film, yeah. But in person… she was a ghost.” —"The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe" (2009)  by J. Randy Taraborrelli

Jerry Lewis: "When I talk about him (my screen character) in the third person, people look at you askance. Are you fuckin’ schizophrenic? Yes, in the creative, yes. I can talk to you much better about Jerry, being the creator of him, and we’re talking about the nine-year-old within me."

The Stooge (1952) is reportedly Jerry Lewis's favorite Martin & Lewis picture. In one sense, this isn't surprising. It has the heavily lacquered sentiment Lewis seems to prefer, and his character is beloved by audiences, his family, and his girlfriend. His character Ted Rogers is also fiercely loyal and protective of Bill, and completely modest about his own abilities. Rogers doesn’t even know he’s supposed to be part of the act, but he steals it with his purity of spirit—just like the character Chaplin played in The Circus, who had no idea the audience was enjoying his unintentionally funny antics. It’s a philosophy of comedy that helped Jerry reconcile life and art throughout his career—his comedy, the argument ran, came from some genuine store of humanity within him. According to “The Colgate Comedy Hour” writers Simmons and Lear: “Jerry accented some of the things that were most irritating. He hasn’t welcomed collaboration in his life. He would pay no attention. It isn’t that Jerry changed. It’s that he should’ve changed but didn’t. Because he is still the Kid. And Jerry did not grow, in my estimation. His nightclub act is the same. Everybody who does an impersonation of Jerry Lewis does Jerry from the Fifties.” 

Dean Martin moved Jeanne Biegger (Jeanne Martin, the gourgeous Orange Bowl Queen blonde he had met at Beachcomber Club in 1948) to a rented house in West Hollywood in early 1949. They got married in Herman Hover's mansion, on September 1, 1949. It was quite an affair, small and private but lavish. Jerry Lewis was best man. "As it turned out, Jeannie was the best thing that ever happened to Dean," asserted Jerry: "They had a loving, strong, and enduring relationship. A complicated relationship, yes—it was impossible to have any other kind with Dean. Though he and Jeannie would eventually divorce (in 1973), I always felt that was just legal paperwork. They never stopped caring for each other. I guess I loved her, too, in my own way. Someday I may tell her." Jerry seemed to have the good sense—borne, perhaps, of insecurity—to see his affair with Gloria DeHaven as the crazy fling it was. “What we were doing was playing our little fantasyland,” he confessed. “I never had fifty bucks in my pocket at one time; now I’m walking around with thirty-five hundred in hundred-dollar bills, and I got a starlet on my arm. It’s fantasyland.” He was also smart—or scared—enough to be discreet, keeping well away from DeHaven when his wife Patti joined him in New York. 

Jerry Lewis incorporated self-referential notations, lines and situations that resonate with his own biography. In The Big Mouth, the joy of Thor (Harold J. Stone) at learning of the supposed death of Valentine (the gangster played by Lewis) can be heard as a comment on the animus against Lewis expressed by many critics. In the same film, the hotel manager and other characters harbor an irrational, excessive hatred of Lewis. The San Diego resort area in The Big Mouth really exists and is filmed accordingly, but it becomes a fantasy of itself. As early as The Bellboy, Lewis shows his consciousness of the difficulty of his position in American popular culture: standing with his boss in front of the hotel, waiting for the arrival of a famous star, a hotel employee apologizes for his initial outburst of enthusiasm (“And it’s Jerry Lewis!”) by saying deprecatingly, “Our mother used to take me to see him when I was a kid.” The most extreme reversal in Lewis’s work is the ending of The Patsy, in which the reverse field of every film shot—the field containing the camera and the crew—is finally revealed. The tossed-off quality of the ending (parrying Ina Balin’s calling him “a complete nut,” Lewis remembers that he’s having “nuts and whipped cream for lunch” and leads the cast and crew off the set, as his remarks trail off rather than reaching a neat period) perhaps acknowledges the impossibility of ending: the subject of this implicitly autobiographical film being still alive, the film cannot close (as Lewis says, “I couldn’t die”—the latter is also a statement of the endlessness of art). Jerry Lewis chose the fantasy over reality, love over madness. Lewis’s America belongs partly to fantasy and partly to documentary.

Editor Johannes Binotto explores Jerry Lewis’s breaching of the fourth wall specifically through his industrial details. He loves pointing out the way movies work, the way comedy works, and somehow none of that stops his humor from landing.

The most interesting motif in The Stooge, and one that became a theme throughout Jerry’s work, is the notion that an untrained, unrehearsed neophyte can somehow perform before a live audience and score a hit merely on the basis of having a funny personality and a sincere heart. (This alone may account for the fact that decades later Jerry would declare The Stooge his favorite Martin and Lewis film.) Bill, Dean Martin's character, is the extreme opposite: a mean, petty drunk, who forces his wife into unhappy retirement, who refuses even modest billing to his wildly popular stooge, and so completely unfunny on his own you can almost hear crickets chirping in the audience when he goes at it alone. Curiously, no one ever discusses his talents as a singer, but the implication is that even this aspect of his talent would go nowhere without Ted's comic genius to support it, to give the act, as Bill finally admits, its "spark."

The Stooge operates from several faulty conceits about the nature of comedy, one that Lewis would return to time and again. Ted is no professional clown. He's funny because he's a dimwit, but also because of a natural ability and, most importantly, because he has a pure heart. Like his character in The Patsy, Ted magically ad-libs a polished routine complete with costumes and props. Hal Wallis was right to be nervous about the The Stooge; Dean Martin has a meaty role and sings a lot of swell old songs, but he’s an outright creep. 

The Disorderly Orderly (1964) was the last movie Jerry Lewis would make with Frank Tashlin. It wasn’t that he and Tashlin were weary of one another. The truth was that Paramount was learning the same lesson that ABC had learned, although not at a similar cost or to a similar degree of public ridicule: Jerry’s commercial potential had leveled out, if it hadn’t actually begun to drop. Even before The Patsy went into production, Barney Balaban told a reporter from the Saturday Evening Post that Cinderfella and The Ladies’ Man “did not necessarily show a profit.” When The Patsy (1964) was released, it made for yet one more blemish on Jerry’s record. The critics weren’t enthusiastic about it. Hook, Line, and Sinker would be the final film of George Marshall’s career, and Jerry’s last film for Columbia. In February 1969, Jerry finally broke off relations with Columbia Pictures. He was frustrated with the studio’s insistence that he not take on so many diverse responsibilities on his films; they wanted him just as an actor. But he still felt he could do it all, and he was beginning to prefer directing. Variety reported that Columbia didn’t mind seeing Jerry go, “in view of some recent softening of Lewis’ box office performance.” Three years earlier, Paramount had suggested he was “unprofitable.”

Jerry was, in fact, beginning to talk about the movie business in the sort of contemptuous terms he usually reserved for television. He continued to decry the increase of profanity, nudity, and violence that had characterized the American cinema since the film industry had eased its production code. After more than a decade of struggling to find a voice and an audience on television, he sounded serious about washing his hands of it forever. “Television destroys dreams,” he told The New York Times. “Television has been one of the most destructive forces in our society. Ask me about violence, and I’ll tell you television has caused it. Sirhan Sirhan would never have carried a gun if he had not seen the way Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in a crowded corridor.” As for his own experience in the medium, he was grateful it was over: “I knew I was going to be part of twenty hours of trash that would never be seen again. Psychologically I couldn’t put very much into it. The temporary nature of television destroyed me. Essentially, I always have in mind that my great-great-great-grandchildren will see me in my pictures, that I have to be impeccable for them. And I hated the endless hypocrisy and lying, the crap, the stopwatch. My funny bone has no time for statistics. I couldn’t bear the clock dictating when I would start and finish a joke. And the network censors are stupid, anticreative men. What those stupid morons don’t understand is that when you’re given freedom, you don’t abuse it.”

In 1969, Richard Zanuck, Darryl’s son, had, tried to interest Jerry in appearing in a film adaptation of a hot novel by a Jewish writer from Newark—the naughty best-seller Portnoy’s Complaint. Jerry absolutely refused to do it. “The picture business was not doing what I believed they should be doing,” he recalled. “I got a whole moral code about that. I turned down discussions with Zanuck at Fox about Portnoy’s Complaint. I told him he’s a fucking lecher. Ha! I said not only wouldn’t I participate in Portnoy’s Complaint, I wouldn’t know how to participate in it. I read it because it was the thing to do in Hollywood. I wouldn’t know how to fucking make that movie, nor would I know how to appear in it. And Zanuck says to my attorney, ‘He can’t turn down this kind of money.’ And my attorney said, ‘You’d be amazed at what he can do. The first thing he can do is tell you that you can’t buy him for that project. Not for any money.’ Zanuck said, ‘Everyone’s got a price.’ My attorney said to him, ‘You ain’t getting this kid. Try.’ Zanuck tried everything he knew. Everything. He was going to donate five hundred thousand dollars to Muscular Dystrophy. I said, ‘My kids don’t want your fucking money for what you want me to do for it.’ He said, ‘This is above and beyond the deal. This is a bonus.’ And my attorney said, ‘He doesn’t want your fucking money.’” 

In 1976, however, Jerry was desperate. He had an unreleased film (The day the clown cried) on his hands, he had no offers of any sort for film or TV work ahead of him, his father sat addled in an apartment in a city he detested, his oldest son Gary couldn’t shake his drug use or find a way back to a productive civilian life, he himself was taking as many as fifteen Percodans a day and now he was facing a legal cost he couldn’t possibly survive if the time ever came. The addiction had more than just physical and emotional costs. Although his income had greatly diminished in recent years, he was spending more and more money on drugs. He paid a thousand dollars for ten Percodans one night and he was buying uppers. Yet even though he was in the throes of addiction, he recognized that his drug abuse had been instigated by the need to relieve pain. He visited neurosurgeons throughout Europe and Asia in hope that something could be done to repair or relieve the damage in his spine. One physician suggested an operation that could as easily leave him paralyzed as cure him. He demurred. And as his quest for a remedy continued, so did his Percodan habit.

The boys weren’t aware of just how severe the problem had become. But they noticed undeniable changes in his behavior. “The results of Dad’s addiction were mostly passive,” his son Antony said, “such as his sleeping on the couch all day.” He was no longer the heroic father whose return to the house marked a highlight of the day. Indeed, he carried himself like a stranger. Patti knew more than her sons about the side effects of her husband’s spinal injury and drug abuse: impotence, disequilibrium, numbness, blurred vision. To her, though, the onset of Jerry’s drug abuse was related not only to the physical pain he was suffering but to the state of his career. “I felt he was going in circles of diminishing size,” she remembered, knowing how desperately he had worked in the past and how desperately he desired to keep on working. She came to see that his loss of himself in drugs had supplanted his former loss of himself in work: “I believe Jerry’s work symptoms were precursors to his chemical addictions.” Throughout the mid-1970s, Jerry toured Vegas, the Catskills, the Poconos, Reno and Tahoe, Miami, Europe, and the summer amphitheater circuit. —"King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis" (1997) by Shawn Levy