Total Filmmaker Jerry Lewis: Successful Smile

Decades of psychological research has revealed that different facial expressions can communicate different emotional intents. Smiles are arguably the most important facial expression, given their frequent use in day-to-day interpersonal interactions. What exactly constitutes a “successful smile”? In a recent study from the University of Minnesota, Professor of Psychology & Statistics Nathaniel Helwig concludes: The results reveal that no single smile is "perfect" compared to the others. Instead, there exists a window of parameters, or “smile sweet spot,” which creates successful smiles. We observed somewhat of a Goldilocks Phenomenon, such that successful smiles needed just the right amount of teeth. Also, we found that too much smile angle and extent produced fake and creepy smiles. Interestingly, we discovered that smiles with slight timing asymmetries are more successful than perfectly symmetric smiles, but asymmetries larger than 125 milliseconds were detrimental. Past research has revealed that the eyes are important—particularly for distinguishing between “Duchenne” (genuine) versus “Pan Am” (fake) smiles. Our results reinforce the idea that the lower half of the face, particularly mouth movement, is a prominent factor for determining the emotional intent of a facial expression. Source: www.researchgate.net

In the bestselling tradition of Henry Bushkin's Johnny Carson comes The Way It Was: My Life with Frank Sinatra, a candid and eye-opening inside look at the final decades of Sinatra's life, told by Eliot Weisman, his long-time manager and friend. Weisman worked with Frank Sinatra from 1975 up until Sinatra's death in 1998, and became one of the singer's most trusted confidantes and advisers. In this book, Weisman tells the story of the final years of the iconic entertainer from within his exclusive inner circle--featuring original photos and filled with scintillating revelations that fans of all Sinatra stages--from the crooner to the Duets--will love. Capitol/UMe announced a new collection from Frank Sinatra set for release on October 6. Ultimate Christmas collects 20 of the Chairman’s seasonal standards from both his Capitol and Reprise periods, spanning 1954 to 1991, including collaborations with his children Frank Jr., Tina, and Nancy.  Source: www.amazon.com

Jerry Lewis clowns around behind the bar at the Copacabana nightclub in New York City. The paths of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra crossed at the Copacabana in 1948 when Sinatra appeared with the comedian Jerry Lewis. Sinatra thought Lewis was great, the creative dynamo in the tandem Martin & Lewis. “The Dago’s lousy,” Frank said of Dino. However, Frank’s friendship would in time develop with Dean, not Jerry. As writer William Schoell said, “Frank would naturally gravitate to another cool ‘wop’ like Martin than to a crazy, difficult Jew like Lewis.” A reporter once asked Dean just how close he was to Frank. “He is my dearest, closest friend,” Dean claimed. Ironically, Frank’s career in 1952 was on the rocks, but Jerry and Dean were reaching the peak of their popularity. Dean’s second wife, Jeanne Martin, said her husband “had great admiration for Sinatra as a singer, but had no respect for him as a man.” After their split, Jerry Lewis accused Dean of professional jealousy: “I’m sure he felt I was writing the material to build myself up. I’m sure I did things to irritate Dean, but in this matter, my hands are clean. As producer Hal Wallis and others know, I leaned over backwards to give Dean more to do at my own expense.”

Martin & Lewis, despite multimedia triumph, couldn't last: while Jerry loved Dean like a brother, feckless, unreliable Dean said "To me, you're nothing but a dollar sign" which led Jerry to break out of their association. The Martin and Lewis partnership lasted 10 years. Professional jealousy and assorted other tensions brought it to an end, bitterly, in 1956, and although the two attempted occasional cordial meetings, the split lasted the rest of their lives. When Dean became an integral part of the famous Rat Pack clan, he had joked, “Frank is the rat. I am the pack.” Frank was especially interested in hearing about Dean’s experiences with women he had not yet seduced. Dean's conquests included such stars as Pier Angeli, Dorothy Malone, Lori Nelson, Jill St. John, Jacqueline Bisset, and even June Allyson, America’s “sweet-heart” in the mid-1940s. Dean Martin appeared at the Sands in Las Vegas with a bevy of showgirls. Unaware that Montgomery Clift (Dean Martin's co-star in The Young Lions) was a homosexual, Dean told Sinatra: “I at first thought he was fucking Elizabeth Taylor.” In Hollywood, a guy marries a somewhat plain woman who will stand by him on the way up. But when he arrives at the big time, he can go for the sultry siren type. Frank Sinatra was the perfect example of that—from Nancy Barbato to Ava Gardner. 

Frank would later assert to Playboy, “You can be the most artistically perfect performer in the world, but an audience is like a broad—if you’re indifferent, endsville.” Frank persuaded Dean to become part owner of the infamous Cal-Neva Lodge on the border between California and Nevada (the casino was carefully positioned in Nevada). Dean purchased seven percent interest in the lodge. He later learned that Frank owned one-quarter of the real estate. When Dean learned of the mob’s association with Cal-Neva, Dean asked Frank if he could pull out. Frank said he’d make arrangements to have someone else take over Dean’s interests. Introduced to him by Frank, Dean found sex goddess Marilyn Monroe a bit too exotic for his tastes. But in time he'd enter her web of intrigue and emotional dependency. He visited her apartment with a rewritten script of My Favorite Wife, which had starred Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in 1940. My Favorite Wife had been retitled Something’s Got to Give (Marilyn's last film). Originally Fox wanted James Garner for the part, but Marilyn held out for Dean Martin. The blonde goddess had every intention of finishing the movie before Fox fired her for holding up production. She even told Martin that she planned to follow their movie with another script called What a Way to Go, which would costar Frank Sinatra. 

Marilyn crossed out entire pages within her copy of the original script, telling director George Cukor, “It’s unbelievable. Dean Martin would never be attracted to another woman if he had me.” After endless delays on the set, including times when Marilyn didn’t even show up, director George Cukor told Dean he wanted to replace Marilyn with Lee Remick or Kim Novak, Frank’s former girlfriends. Dean held out for Marilyn. “If Marilyn is fired, I walk,” he warned Fox executives. Dean went into a deep depression when he heard of Marilyn’s death on August 4, 1962. He tried to attend the funeral with Frank but Joe DiMaggio had left orders for security guards to bar both of them.

Frank Sinatra called January 25, 1990, the “saddest day of my life.” He’d just put down the phone after a call from London. His beloved Ava had died of pneumonia at the age of sixty-seven. Shortly before her death, she told a reporter, “I drank too much, partied too much in the Fifties. It’s all caught up with me. I didn’t age well, honey child. I was never that great an actress. Now, I’m what is called a faded beauty.” Sinatra, in one of the low points of his career, had joined up with Bogart’s Rat Pack in 1953. After Humphrey Bogart died of cancer in 1957, the original Rat Pack more or less dissolved. Bacall pronounced it “gone forever.” Unlike Bogie’s Rat Pack, which was purely social, Sinatra’s Rat Pack often performed together, either on stage or in the movies. Frank set the rules for the club. The drink of choice was a bottle of Jack Daniels. The dress code was crisp white shirts, shiny sharkskin suits, and thin dark ties. Dean warned Frank, “Don’t ever let Jerry Lewis become a member—or else I’m out of here.” Of all the Rat Packers performing on stage, Peter Lawford was viewed as the least talented—“a louchemeister of limited gifts who was there only because he was married to JFK’s sister,” in the words of one critic.

As Patti Lewis recalled: “Jerry accused me of having an affair with Dean. I did not. We were like family. Dean tried, in his own way, to offer me support, and just knowing someone else was aware of what was going on eased my pain. It also created a bond between us and helped me understand Dean’s feelings.” If Patti understood Dean’s feelings, it may have been, in part, because of their shared experience as show people born to Italian immigrants. Dean and Patti recognized each other across that noisy table at Lindy’s. They were cut from the same cloth, however differently they wore it. Patti might have reminded Dean of his mother. There was nothing sexual between them—Dean usually went for blondes—but that Jerry was married to such a woman surely raised him a notch in Dean’s eyes.

Unknown to many, Marilyn Monroe became a temporary but rather unstable member of the Rat Pack. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, an enemy of Frank’s, wrote that he dated some of the great beauties and stars of their day, including Marilyn and Lana Turner. “Others,” she claimed, “were fluffy little struggling dolls of show business.” Although Joe DiMaggio socialized with Sinatra, he never completely trusted him, especially around Marilyn, causing a rift in the trio. Marilyn wanted to film What a Way to Go with Sinatra, but one night she decided that she preferred Gene Kelly as her co-star. At 20th Century Fox, executives wanted to co-star Marilyn and Sinatra in Pink Tights, a remake of Betty Grable’s 1943 Coney Island. Marilyn was open to the idea of co-starring with Frank in a film in which her character evolves from a prim schoolteacher to a torch-singing cabaret artiste. 

Privately, Frank had told Dean Martin and others, “I wish Marilyn would divorce Joe. He’s not right for her. For Marilyn to give up her career—now that’s making the big sacrifice.” Frank was playing a dangerous game, being Marilyn’s confidant and protector on the one hand, and DiMaggio’s good pal on the other. Frank allegedly told his friend Jilly Rizzo that he wanted to keep information about his sexual involvement with Marilyn private from DiMaggio. “I don’t need the aggravation. Joe would get seriously pissed off at me. Of course, if Marilyn and I get really serious about this thing, Joe is gonna find out. If she becomes the next Mrs. Frank Sinatra, the whole fucking world will know. Joe already suspects us. He’s not as dumb as he looks.” Marilyn’s secretary and confidante, Lena Pepitone, who wrote a book entitled Marilyn Monroe—Confidential in 1979, claimed that she asked Marilyn why she would consider marrying Frank if she were still in love with DiMaggio. “Joe loves me, but he’s insisting I give up my career. I’ll never do that.” Ironically, Frank, if he’d agreed to marry her, would have insisted that Marilyn give up her career, too. During the last vacation weekend of her life, Frank invited Marilyn to the Cal-Neva Lodge, whose location straddled the border between California and Nevada. When DiMaggio heard of this, he too headed there.

He’d told friends about Sinatra and his influence on his ex-wife Marilyn, “why doesn’t he let her alone? He’s only fucking up her mind. And those are gangsters he’s got her mixed up with!” DiMaggio was no doubt referring to mob boss Sam Giancana who was a guest at the Lodge that weekend. On Sunday, September 18, Frank’s voice, but not Frank, joined Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis on a historic episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour. This was the show where Martin and Lewis, who were in the midst of epic battles and had less than a year to survive as a comedy team, seemed to declare an uneasy truce in a skit spoofing the quiz show The $64,000 Question. When Dean, playing the emcee, pushes Jerry, as the contestant, underwater in a dunk-tank isolation booth, Jerry rises up and splutters, “Haven’t you heard? The feud is over!” In a poolroom sketch later, Jerry, purporting to be a songwriter, tries to sell Dean a goofy tune called “Yet I Can’t Forget Her.” As delivered by Lewis in his Idiot Kid mode, the song is pure malarkey, but when he turns on a radio the next moment, there’s Sinatra singing it, quite charmingly. Frank Sinatra, who was almost incapable of ad-libbing a comic line onstage, envied Jerry Lewis' comedic talents. 

To Frank Sinatra, who always seemed to be crying or killing himself over a woman, who always seemed to be dispatching others to do his dirty work, whose mammismo relationship with his mother was that of a little boy—Dean was la cosa vera, the real thing, the right stuff. Ohio-born Dean Martin had been a former prize fighter and card shark reconverted into suave crooner. As for Dean’s feelings about Frank—well, who knew? He certainly admired him as a singer. Yet, Nick Tosches contends, Martin felt Sinatra “took it all so fucking seriously. He thought he was a fucking artist, a fucking god.” And while Frank’s charisma, volatility, and huge success in the 1950s made him a natural leader, with a group of followers who jumped at his every wish—and often flinched when his temper flared—Dean Martin wasn’t one of them. Though both Sinatra and Martin had dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, Frank possessed a restless, ravening intellectual curiosity; Dean loved watching Westerns on TV and reading comic books. —"Sinatra: The Chairman" (2015) by James Kaplan

“Dean doesn’t have an overwhelming desire to be loved,” Dean's second wife Jeanne said. “He never had a male friend,” Jeanne asserted flatly. Nick Tosches punts on the issue: “He was close to Mack Gray, to Sammy Cahn, to Frank Sinatra, to others,” he writes. “But he did not need friendship.” Jerry Lewis, like Frank Sinatra, was an only child and once said that Dean Martin was the big brother he never had. Sinatra looked up to Martin in similar ways. A song Cahn and Van Heusen would later write for Frank put it unapologetically: “I like to lead when I dance.” With Martin and Lewis, the dance had ended badly. With Martin and Sinatra, the dance went on and on. Jerry Lewis was the most vulnerable of the three performers. Before teaming with Martin, Lewis had toured the vaudeville circuit with a “record act” in which he played back the recorded voices of popular singers and accompanied them with his own exaggerated pantomime. The idea had come while he was romancing Lonnie Brown in her bedroom. These performances undoubtedly not only parodied the sentiments the songs were meant to evoke but revealed the constructed, performed, and artificial nature of the person who was supposed to be exteriorizing these sentiments (thereby subverting the ideology of individuality). In these “Satirical Impressions in Pantomimicry,” Lewis presented himself as a partial or composite being—a personality that existed because of, and through a difference from, another personality. Foregrounding this difference exposed the fictive nature of both personalities.

"Love and laughter has to be what it's all about. Then you'll survive. Maybe we'll all survive. Maybe. But the touch question when dealing with people is: 'How do I know when I'm human enough?' I'm going to use a wrong word because that's the way I want to use it, letting the language purists feel superior. The word I'm talking about is humanities. There is a great deal of confusion between humanism, which means a cultural attitude, and humanity, which really means a kindly disposition toward your fellow man. I maintain we're dealing in a humanities area just as critical, in its way, as open-heart surgery. I don't care how much technical information you have stored away, you blow the picture when you blow the human end. I am not ashamed or embarrassed at how seemingly saccharine something in my films will sound. Actors are a strange breed of people. If you want to attempt to understand actors, read a quote from Moss Hart's Act One: 'The theatre is an inevitable refuge of the unhappy child, and the tantrums and childishness of theatre people are not either accidental nor a necessary weapon of their profession. It has nothing to do with so-called artistic temperament. The explanation, I think, is a far simpler one. For the most part, they are impaled in childhood like a fly in amber.' But there's a contradiction, too. They are there so that everyone in the world can watch them, yet at the same time no one should be permitted to see them act. Actors are very complex people."

"I do love to act, however. Why? There is a tremendous satisfaction in making people laugh. It feels good. The best way to photograph a woman is dead-on and close. A low angle on a woman often distorts. Women are tough to shoot. There is still another misconception in cut coverage, one of those rules to be broken: it says that the director make a single shot of the male if he has made a single of the female. I prefer to do a single of the female and relate her to the male with an over-on, over her on him, at the same time keeping a single of her. With two singles there is no direct tie between the characters. Too many beginning directors play with their cameras, moving them to let the audience know the camera is moving. They should have their hands broken, should have the cameras dumped on them. Again, it is that kid's shout, 'Hey, lookit me!' George Stevens, in directing A Place in the Sun, Giant and The Greatest Story Ever Told, shows mastery in almost every frame, and the viewer, whether or not he enjoys the film or the subject matter, is unconsciously aware of the fine stitching throughout. I respect Hitchcock and his superb talents but he crossed the line of decency and I hate some of his films. I hated Psycho, although it was a good movie. After seeing it at the DeMille Theater in New York I went to a bar and shook a brandy down. I couldn't enter the bathroom in the hotel without shuddering."

"Make enough films, even if you are Robert Wise, and you'll bomb once in a while. There are many directors not in the category of a Robert Wise, a William Wyler, a George Stevens or a Zinnemann who turn out fine pictures and may someday do their classic. Ninety percent of the avant-garde clique who proclaim, 'Look at the greatness of his film,' are ashamed to admit they don't know what the hell it is all about. They can't wait to run to the coffeehouse to breathe out, 'Wasn't that magnificent?' God forbid someone asks, 'What did it mean?' There's a long silence. Then some creep with a beard and thick lenses says, 'What's the difference?' Insofar as an eight-hour Andy Warhol film is concerned, I lump the avant-garde and the underground in the category of film users rather than filmmakers. Often they are using film indulgently for no other purpose than to create controversy."

"Maybe, for some of us, after we cut away the drivel, comedy is our bag because it is in our gut. We have no choice. It's laugh or cry. People can't hate when they are laughing. A good comedian, I think, comes from a shallow beginning if not a minority group. Shallow emotionally or financially, often both. No one from a silver-spoon family has ever been a top banana. A few have tried but haven't made it. Comedy, humor, call it what you may, is often the difference between sanity and insanity, survival and disaster, even death. It's man's emotional safety valve. If it wasn't for humor, man could not survive emotionally. Peoples who have the ability to laugh at themselves are the peoples who eventually make it. I also feel there is nothing more dramatic than comedy. There must also be relief from laughter as opposed to comic relief. An audience cannot be allowed to laugh too long, or too hard, within anyone period of time. Rolling in the aisles comes from laughter but it also comes from the inability to handle it. There are times when slight laughter is better than a lot of it."

"When my crew are looking at me with some kind of envy: 'Look at this confidence. Cocksure. What he knows he's going to do, he's going to do.' They should only know that 60 percent is confidence. Forty percent is crap. The world is still made up of green apples and dreams and wishing wells; the heart beats fast when a pretty girl winks. All of that is still what it is all about. The important things, the ones some people put down, are the lovely, wonderful things that gives gooseflesh. Sometimes I have been accused of being morally theatrical. I hate that. I’m moral. I like to think I’m moral. There’s a wonderful line: “I care about the demise of a man because I’m involved with mankind.” My involvement is genuine, it’s sincere. I feel that if you’re given a special place in this life, you can’t walk into a small room and close the door with it. I think that’s wrong. Because it’ll be of no consequence to yourself or anyone else, unless you use that gift. Use it how? To get another gift? No, you use that gift to spread the word that made you the recipient of the gift. So I’m kind of idealistic, mid-Victorian, completely old-fashioned. I’ve gotten further with truth than a thousand people hedging, fudging. When you learn, and I have, truth is immediate. Most of the characters that I played had truth as a foundation. Cagey, maybe; but never deceptive. His truth was part of his innocence. And certainly part of his naivety." —"The Total Film-Maker: The New Collectors Edition" (2017) by Jerry Lewis

Whether he appeared in his own films or not, Lewis’s directorial style was too drastic, uncompromising, and strong for even a self-reinventing Hollywood. Like all narratives, the Lewisian narrative, however thwarted or vestigial it may be, poses and answers a question. But in Lewis’s work, the question becomes forgotten or displaced. In The Ladies Man, the master question—Can Herbert get over his problem with women?—is simply dismissed, as Herbert finds himself in a house surrounded by women who overcome his reluctance and persuade him to stay. The Patsy and Cracking Up are especially interesting as the two Lewis films in which he directly confronts the possibility of his own character’s death (as he does, more obliquely, in The Family Jewels and The Big Mouth): the films try to define and preserve selfhood even as they play with its disappearance, only to end up acknowledging the fictional and optional nature of selfhood and (like Three on a Couch) the untenability of any standard of “success.” Though based on a routine premise, The Big Mouth reaffirms Lewis’s commitment to the absurd and his independence from Hollywood norms of narrative and characterization. The possibility that individuality could be eradicated or annulled always lies underneath the dazzling variety of Lewis’s playful constructions of identity. 

Where does life end and performance begin? The Errand Boy and The Patsy propose a continuity between the two. The famed columnist Hedda Hopper tells Stanley’s handlers in The Patsy: “You’ve come across somebody who hasn’t yet learned to be phony. He felt something, and he said it, which was real and honest. And now if you apply that to his performance, you’ve got a great success.” The Errand Boy is neither a celebration nor an evisceration of Hollywood; it is a mourning of it, a lament for its disappearance. One of Lewis’s innovations is making the showbusiness id the instrument and the vehicle of a superior alternate model of self-realization to that of psychoanalysis. In The Errand Boy, Morty’s encounter with Magnolia steers the film away from slapstick and toward a low-key existential meditation, with overtones of the possible beginning of a romantic relationship. Lewis’s semi-documentary style through several films (The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, Hardly Working) marks him as one of the major pop-modernists of American cinema, along with Howard Hawks, Frank Tashlin, and Andy Warhol. In his love scene with Pat Stanley's character in The Ladies Man, Herbert is trying desperately to be that young man that might be her possible choice. The tracking shot of the car wash in The Errand Boy celebrates the sleekness of modernity, aligning the film with some of the major themes of American pop culture (see also the parody rock song “I Lost My Heart in a Drive-in Movie” in The Patsy). 

It’s worth rehearsing how so much of the plot from The Patsy obviously meant to mirror Jerry’s own experience of Hollywood while touching on his favorite narrative themes—the cynical handlers, the clown who comes through with sincerity when his act fails, the women who want to burp him, the lying sycophants and journalists, the absurd means by which nobodies become stars. The film features several Hollywood stars playing themselves—Rhonda Fleming, George Raft, Mel Tormé, Ed Wynn—yet the script asks them all to play phonies. Hedda Hopper appears at a cocktail party with an absurdly oversized hat, and only Stanley has the effrontery to laugh at it. The routine on the Sullivan show is truly bizarre. Stanley, trained as a stand-up comic, is so bad that crickets can be heard chirping in the background at one of his club dates, but suddenly he’s able to pull off a long silent comedy routine with no rehearsal. Even in the logically unstable world of Jerry Lewis (which more than one critic has compared to that of Lewis Carroll), this is hard to rationalize. There was about The Patsy an air of self-deprecation that none of his other projects had.

“Jerry Lewis as The Patsy,” read the opening titles, and the audience can make that identification on several levels. This was not just a simple reappearance of the Kid in a new setting; this was a mature man coming to grips with the fact that his career was built on ephemera and boosted by liars. It’s no wonder the film’s box office was among the softest yet for a Jerry Lewis picture. The pratfalls and silly walks that Lewis devised to delight us movie after movie, resulted in back injuries—not to mention addiction to painkillers—that essentially led to lifelong pain. Being funny hurts. But Lewis was really a musician and dancer rolled into one, even when he was neither playing music or dancing outright. His routines were a glorious rush of improvisatory looseness and seemingly contradictory precision: He’d know intuitively when to cross his eyes or jut his jaw, and if his split-second decisions were as definitive as a well-placed sixteenth note, they also felt wild and a little dangerous, an invitation to reckless freedom and joy.  And Jerry went on alone to be writer-director-star, to flop on TV, to labor for Muscular Dystrophy research, to raise a big family, to fight show-biz segregation. As for his moviemaking decline, Jerry blamed Hollywood's "corporate structure."  —"Jerry Lewis: The Total Film-Maker" (2009) by Chris Fujiwara 

Sexy Innocence, Zany Hyperrealism: Marilyn Monroe, Marie Wilson, Jerry Lewis

Marilyn Monroe had been featured in previous films, but 1953's Niagara—directed by Henry Hathaway—turned her into an instant icon. It was here that her lasting screen image was firmly established; the platinum blonde locks, the pouty red mouth, the va-va-voom walk that makes you imagine timpani hits with each sashay of her hips. Niagara is a rare Technicolor noir—passing up black and white chiaroscuro for vivid three-strip hyperrealism—and Monroe is its dead-sexy femme fatale, slinking her way through a melodramatic plot that crosses honeymoon camp with murder and mental illness. In February 1953 rumours circulated that Niagara was not doing as well at the box office as it had been hoped. Meanwhile, Marilyn attended the Photoplay Awards dinner, dressed in the gold gown briefly glimpsed in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. When she got up to receive her award, the audience yelled and shouted, while Jerry Lewis stood on a table to whistle. On 24 February, Marilyn appeared on Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s radio show, performing a short skit entitled ‘So Who Needs Friends’, before picking up another award, this time for the Redbook award for Best Young Box Office Personality.

“The Girl: Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch, and the Birth of an Unlikely Feminist” will be published in May 2018 by Running Press. Written by Michelle Morgan, author of Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed (2007), this new biography is designed to show once and for all that Marilyn was not a dumb blonde. Her most rebellious and powerful years –1954 to 1956– are at the heart of the book, and from there it branches out to show how she has inspired women to push boundaries, and fulfil their dreams. “With an in-depth look at the two most empowering years in the life of Marilyn Monroe, The Girl details how The Seven Year Itch created an icon and sent the star on an adventure of self-discovery and transformation from a controlled wife and contract player into a businesswoman and unlikely feminist whose power is still felt today. The ripple Marilyn’s personal revolution had on Hollywood and in trailblazing the way for women that followed will both surprise and inspire readers to see Marilyn Monroe in an entirely new light.” Source: michellemorgan.co.uk

Although Norma Jeane tried her hand at cooking – baking bread every other day and experimenting on her new relatives – her lack of skills soon became very apparent: she put salt in Jim’s coffee by mistake, and famously cooked carrots and peas just because she liked the colour. Neither Jim nor Norma Jeane knew how to react in an argument, and she once went tearing out of the house in her nightclothes after a fight, only to be followed by a stranger in the street. On another occasion Norma Jeane furiously hit Jim over the head with a trashcan, after he’d criticized the fact that she’d mistakenly fed him raw fish; he was forced to walk the streets until she had calmed down.

Marilyn didn’t make many friends on the set of Monkey Business (1952), and gave off the aura of a lost child who just couldn’t quite fit in. As Cornthwaite remembered: ‘Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant were both professionals and there was no overt behaviour towards Marilyn, but they didn’t particularly welcome her – she had a different level of professionalism. But what held it all together was Howard Hawks because he had such power.’ But not even Hawks could completely control Marilyn’s behaviour on set. She was extremely stubborn, which was her greatest strength but could also be her weakness. ‘Perhaps she couldn’t help her behaviour,’ wonders Bob Cornthwaite. ‘She was so disturbed emotionally and psychologically and just couldn’t help it.’ 

In May 1961, Marilyn declared to columnist Earl Wilson, ‘I like my freedom; I like to play the field.’ Marilyn lost weight, cut her hair short and bought a wardrobe full of new clothes. ‘I’m very glad to be free again; this is the happiest I’ve been in a long time,’ she told Hedda Hopper. She also upped her social life, too: meeting poet and idol Carl Sandburg; travelling to Palm Springs (where she spent time with Sinatra); then dashing to Las Vegas to see him perform with Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr at the Sands Hotel. Marilyn became something of a mascot for the ‘Rat Pack’, as Sinatra’s posse were labelled. She spent time with Dean Martin and his wife in Newport Harbor; discussed making a film with Sinatra; and surprised herself by happily settling into life in Los Angeles. ‘I’ve never had such a good time ever in Hollywood,’ she confided to Louella Parsons.

‘For the first time in many years I am completely free to do exactly as I please. And this new freedom has made me happier. I want to look for a home to buy here; I think I’ll settle in Beverly Hills.’ This was backed up by make-up artist ‘Whitey’ Snyder, who commented, ‘Since her divorce from Arthur Miller she’s been in her best condition for a long time. She’s happy! I’m amazed at how well she is.’ A difficult relationship was the one she had with Frank Sinatra, which went off the boil one day when Marilyn started retelling him about her childhood. ‘Oh not that again,’ he exclaimed. Marilyn was not pleased by his rebuttal of her woes, and shortly afterwards she surprised friends by refusing to give him copies of photos from a recent boat trip. ‘I’ve already given him enough,’ she told them. Marilyn was a warm-hearted person to people she liked, but she could also be something of a ‘monster’, as she admitted to reporter W. J. Weatherby in June 1961. —"Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed - New edition revised and expanded" (2012) by Michelle Morgan

The difficulty some people have discerning Monroe's intelligence as an actress seems rooted in the ideology of a repressive era, when superfeminine women weren't supposed to be smart. They often fail to see past the sexist cliches she used as armor, satirically and otherwise, fail to notice that she was also positing a utopian view of sex, one that was relatively guilt free and blissfully pleasure oriented. Marilyn Monroe wanted to get away from her movie stardom. She managed it for a while, though not without a cadre of protective men. Hedda Rosten viewed After the Fall as “a betrayal of Marilyn.” Arthur Miller reverted to his puritanical view of sex. “It isn’t my love you want any more,” he tells Maggie (Marilyn): “It’s my destruction!” In 1951, Miller had guessed that Marilyn Monroe posed a threat to his existence; in 1964, he knew it. In a curious way, it is precisely American society’s Puritan roots that account for Marilyn’s enduring appeal. In the middle of all that, the vivid image of Marilyn Monroe sends out a contrary message; its power is in proportion to the depth of our own fears. As a symbol, she promises us that sex can be innocent, without danger. That, indeed, may not be the truth, but it continues to be what we wish. And that is why Marilyn remains, even now, the symbol of our secret desires. —"Marilyn Monroe" (2010) by Barbara Leaming 

Marilyn's Miss Lois Laurel character from Howard Hawks' Monkey Business seems somehow inspired by comedian Marie Wilson who in turn was reminiscent of the zany Gracie Allen. Unlike Allen, Marie Wilson was a knockout--with high cheekbones, a wide slash of a mouth and a figure that wouldn't quit. Lois Laurel is a slinky blonde, who has little or no competence as a secretary. "Show business has been very good to me and I'm not complaining," admitted Marie Wilson, "but some day I just wish someone would offer me a different kind of role. My closest friends admit that whenever they tell someone they know me they have to convince them that I'm really not dumb. To tell you the truth I think people are disappointed that I'm not."

Hal Wallis used the production of My Friend Irma (1949) to launch Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis' film careers. It was a cinch that Martin would be cast as Jane’s romantic interest. More difficult to cast was Martin’s partner, Jerry Lewis, whose spastic slapstick style didn’t really fit any character from the original radio show—in fact, Lewis’ stage persona was truly unique. The radio series of My Friend Irma did have another male lead—Irma’s con-artist boyfriend, Al—and Jerry got it into his head that he could fill the role. Lewis ended up begging Wallis to cast him as Al—a part which was totally against his established stage persona: a kind of a simple minded, chaos causing kid brother to Martin. Wallis eventually did have the director, the veteran George Marshall, test Jerry for Al. There were nine screen tests and acting lessons but Wallis remained unsure. He asked Cy Howard to create a new character, a sidekick for Dean with plenty of physical business and verbal foolishness cut from the cloth of Lewis’s stage persona.

Lewis apparently put an ultimatum to Wallis—he plays Al or else he wouldn’t do the film. Wallis didn’t take the bait and told Lewis that Dean would make his film debut and Jerry wouldn’t. The enormously popular “My Friend Irma” radio show, created by Cy Howard, to which Wallis had bought screen rights, was a situation comedy about a daffy working girl (Marie Wilson's Irma), her best friend Jane, and their misadventures in postwar Manhattan. Wilson delighted people with her dumb misapprehensions and foolish assumptions. Wallis thought that surely the same people who went for Wilson’s dumb blonde act would go for Jerry's. “Marie and I did the test scene,” Lewis recalled, “She was cute, she was bubbly—but she was 32 years old to my 22, ten years that really made a difference. And I, having never acted before, was trying hard to pretend to be someone (a sharpie) I profoundly was not.” So Lewis's character was rewritten for the film version as Seymour, Martin's sidekick, who is almost as big of a dumbbell as Irma. Al has a scheme to make the Martin character into a star and moves the boys into Irma and Jane’s apartment to plan their future. 

“Jerry Lewis is such a nice guy,” Marie Wilson told a columnist. “He won’t steal a scene behind your back. Steals it right in front of you. But I love the boy.” Lewis was also fascinated by the filmmaking process and was constantly shadowing director George Marshall. In retrospect, it’s an interesting battle for Lewis to have fought. He was, after all, to play Seymour, or roles like it, throughout the flush of his career. Yet he began that era refusing to make a film in exactly the guise that had already brought him stage fame. He would never again shun the character so fully, though he would spend years trying to find nuances in it—primarily a level of pathos. Still, this moment of hesitation reveals just how ambivalent Lewis was about his public face. 

As Jerry gained greater control over his career, he would increasingly refer to his character in the third person—“The Kid,” “The Nine-Year-Old,” “The Idiot”—and would reveal in public a sober, sententious demeanor that didn’t so much erase the infantile image as weirdly underscore it. The sight of him out of character was received as an affront. Indeed, it wasn’t until he began doing his muscular dystrophy telethons in 1965 that the public swallowed him in the role of a grown-up. By then, of course, his film career was effectively over, and it was too late for him to re-create himself for the screen. Indeed, with the pain in his neck so severe and his dependency on Percodan, Norodin, and Valium increasing, he was barely under control. “He did not act himself,” said ex-wife Patti. “He was irritable and impatient. At times, the kids, who used to be excited about making signs to welcome him home, fled when he pulled into the driveway.”

In December 1965 Paramount released Boeing Boeing to disheartening notices in the press; though almost every reviewer praised Jerry for his relative restraint as Tony Curtis’s straight man, it didn’t matter—nobody was watching. In February 1966, when Cahiers du cinéma published a special issue devoted to Jerry’s work, he was already in production on his first film for Twentieth Century–Fox. Way… Way Out, written by William Bowers (nominated for two writing Oscars), who’d been producing screenplays since the 1940s. Gordon Douglas, a personal favorite of Frank Sinatra, was the director. For Tony Curtis, the shooting of Boeing Boeing was quite uncomfortable, due to Jerry's mania at dealing with some scenes. Surprisingly, Jerry's Lewis character Robert is also the one who articulates the feminist response in the film, namely “what do the girls get out of this set up?” The script goes a long way towards mitigating the sexism overload by making everyone fallible and annoying, including the stewardesses (if they were perfect, you’d rightly feel sorry for them), and considering this is 1965, by eliminating all of the implied sex completely.

“I’ve got to feed my family,” Jerry told a reporter explaining why he always kept himself so busy. “I’ve had to keep going. I’ve got to make product.” His latest product—dubbed The Big Mouth in classic Lewis fashion—took him to film at Mission Bay, near San Diego. The Big Mouth was the only film that Jerry both wrote and directed while at Columbia, yet in ways it seems less like a Jerry Lewis film than anything else he ever did. For one thing, it parodies a specific movie genre, the spy film, and has a linear (if shoddily assembled) plot. For another, Jerry’s chief character, Gerald Clamson, is not too comic—and not, like Christopher Pride in Three on a Couch or Willard the chauffeur in The Family Jewels, because he’s the starting-off point for a series of comic characters, but because in comparison he’s mildly debilitated in contrast to almost every other protagonist in a typical Jerry Lewis production. Susan Bay reads her lines as if they were random strings of words. Indeed, given Jerry’s own torpor in the vaguely comic role of Gerald Clamson, the film takes on an almost documentary air: Watching the two costars working together at a hotel in San Diego and calling each other “Gerry” and “Suzie,” you get the voyeuristic sense that you’re watching filmed rehearsals. 

Janet Leigh, playing the female lead as Jerry’s romantic interest in Three on a Couch (1966), is a psychiatrist specialized in the romantic traumas of young women. Much had changed since the days when Janet was making silly movies in Jerry’s Pacific Palisades backyard: She and Tony Curtis had divorced in 1962, she’d married stockbroker Bob Brandt later that very year and she’d been nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her famous role in Psycho. Socially, she hadn’t seen much of Jerry since she and Curtis had felt choked out of his circle. In fact, she’d become close with Dean and Jeanne Martin. Janet was particularly impressed at how Jerry had evolved as a filmmaker. “He had matured and grown so,” she recalled. “He was one of the best directors I’ve ever worked with. I’m not saying the best director, but he’s definitely at the top. It was the first time I’d ever seen an instant replay used on the set. And it was wonderful—you didn’t get the full scope, but you could see if the scene worked or not, so you would know whether to do it again.”

Janet praised the bonhomie on Jerry’s set, enjoying the atmosphere so much, in fact, that she led the crew and extras in a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” when Jerry arrived for lunch. Three on a Couch is certainly a more conventionally mature comedy than anything Jerry made at Paramount, with none of the anarchic flavor of his earlier work. One reason that it ends up being among his most satisfying films (aside from having one of the most uniquely organized uses of color cinematography in his body of work—contrasting Chris’s apartment’s panoply of combinations and patterns with the monochromatic psychotherapeutic lights in Elizabeth’s office), is its tendency to find a cosmic relationship between utter chaos and insistent stasis. If Three on a Couch is Lewis’s approximation of the mid-sixties sex comedy, it is also his critique and overcoming of it, his correction of Boeing Boeing. Chris, too, remains a Lewisian innocent – a more mature one for whom sexuality is no longer innocent and who thus must make a conscious choice to maintain his innocence. Source: sensesofcinema.com

The ‘60s sex comedy fused classical threads with high fashion and liberated postwar decadence. You could blame Marilyn Monroe for standing over that subway grate in The Seven Year Itch. You could blame Billy Wilder, who updated Lubitschian naughtiness for audiences of the era of beat poets and jazz. Or you could simply blame the Germans for producing Max Ophüls, the man responsible for the original postmodern love roundelay, 1951’s La Ronde. Marilyn, remarked Jerry Lewis, used sex like he used humor, to make an emotional connection: ‘She needed that contact to be sure it was real.’ In an interview with Larry King in 2003, Jeanne Carmen denied that Jerry Lewis had actually dated Marilyn. Jeanne assured King that Jerry was constantly joking (from her experience, he was a consummate jokester) and that it was also possibly his way of undercutting the role of the Kennedy brothers in relation with Marilyn (hence his quip about how she couldn't have been dating John Kennedy because she was with Jerry!). Probably Marilyn would have benefitted from a few love sessions with Jerry, especially after her divorce from Miller, when she started spiralling down an emotional abyss. A mistake was surrounding herself with the likes of Sinatra or Peter Lawford when Lewis was much more of a friendly listener and lots of fun to boot.

Michael Stern from Bright Lights Film wrote: “Listed in critical ledgers as either a sanctimonious retardate or an inspired genius—or both—Jerry Lewis is clearly and self-consciously extraordinary. But somewhere between the infant-fool and the towering renaissance film-man is the notion of Jerry Lewis the average guy. And central to an understanding of his work is the myth that threads its way through his films with Frank Tashlin in the mid-1950s, and is developed with parabolic dynamism in his first five self-directed films, from The Bellboy through The Patsy. That is the myth of the ordinary man in an extraordinary world—of Jerome Levitch in Hollywood.”

Miguel Marías in The Disappearance of Jerry Lewis, and Some Side-Effects writes: “One of the sad events that marked the sudden decay of the American cinema during the 1960s was first the slow-down, and then the cessation of activity by Jerry Lewis, the ‘total filmmaker.’ His absence went unnoticed by most – his rare partisans hoping for his return, his far more numerous enemies welcoming his defeated silence. It is not so strange that he had to pay the price for such a breach of the unwritten commandments of American filmmaking.” Charlie Largent suggests that “Lewis’s formidable successes and inevitable failures might best be understood through the lens of his acrimonious bust-up with Dean; once that rocket ship fell to earth he simply brushed himself off and replaced the easy-going crooner with the movie-going public. That so many in the audience would react as did Dean didn’t seem to faze him, in Jerry’s mind he probably felt like he gave too much. In some respects, perhaps he did.” Source: www.lolajournal.com

The Columbia executives were beginning to look at Jerry the way their counterparts at Paramount had: With his hands in producing, writing, directing, and acting, they felt he was becoming less and less marketable. Boeing Boeing, Three on a Couch, and Way… Way Out hadn’t clicked with the adult audience to which they were pitched. Jerry was struggling to keep up with his metamorphosis, and his bosses at Columbia and NBC didn’t want him to experiment. They didn’t even want him to direct. When Jerry set to work on his next Columbia film, a marital comedy entitled Hook, Line, and Sinker, he was forced to hire a director, even though he was producing the film. He went and hired George Marshall—the seventy-eight-year-old director of My Friend Irma. Jerry had many champions among the fraternity of French film critics, ranging from converts like François Truffaut to wild-eyed enthusiasts like Jean-Luc Godard, who wrote, “Jerry Lewis is the only American director who has made progressive comedic films,” adding that Jerry “was much better than Chaplin and Keaton.”  —"King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis" (1997) by Shawn Levy

Passion and Paradox: Marilyn & Jerry Lewis

Joshua Greene, whose father Milton Greene shot about 3,900 pictures of Marilyn Monroe between 1953 and 1957, has turned restoring and preserving those images into a career, with a new book set to hit shelves October 16 that he says will be the "last hurrah." Greene has a seemingly endless photo archive—Unfortunately, many photos deteriorated considerably. With The Essential Marilyn Monroe by Milton H. Greene: 50 Sessions, Joshua believes he has assembled a definitive collection that represents his father’s collaboration and friendship with the iconic star. The Essential Marilyn Monroe features images, ranging from candids and studio sessions to on-set photography while Monroe was filming 1956’s Bus Stop and 1957’s The Prince and the Showgirl. Of the book’s 284 images, 160 are never before seen.” Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Marilyn Monroe often wondered if she was “frigid” or “lesbian.” These issues bothered her even more as she became older and achieved success as the world’s great heterosexual sex queen, and yet was attracted to women. In the 1950s, federal and state governments passed laws identifying homosexuals and lesbians as dangerous perverts. Given such attitudes, Norma Jeane sometimes felt like an “anomaly” because she didn’t respond to men. At times she didn’t feel human; sometimes, she said, she wanted to die because of her same-sex desire. She described these feelings in My Story (written at the height of her fame for a series of magazine articles in the mid-50’s with the help of Ben Hecht). By Christmas 1941, Norma Jeane’s sex appeal became an issue, as the numbers of servicemen in Los Angeles soared with the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. Her first husband, Jim Dougherty, relished the role of being her savior, of taking this sweet “love child” under his protection. He was not the last man to cast himself in the role of Norma Jeane’s protector—Jim honestly loved her for her loving spirit, her beauty, her kindness and grace. The wedding occurred on June 19, 1942, three weeks after Norma Jeane’s sixteenth birthday, when she attained the legal age of sexual consent. A traditional man, Jim didn’t want Marilyn to work outside the home.

Marilyn stated that she hadn’t liked their sexual routine: “The first effect marriage had on me was to increase my lack of interest in sex. My husband either didn’t mind this or wasn’t aware of it.” But, she continued, they were too young to discuss such an embarrassing topic. According to Elia Kazan, Marilyn told him that she hadn’t enjoyed sex with Jim, except when he had kissed her breasts. In 1953 Marilyn was earning $750 weekly salary at Twentieth Century Fox. On February 9, 1953, Marilyn arranged for her mother Gladys to be transferred to Rockhaven Sanitarium. The day before, on February 8, 1953, she had attended The Crystal Room at the Beverly Hills Hotel to receive the Photoplay’s award. Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky gripped Marilyn’s elbow, steering her inside. As she came through the door, Jerry Lewis, the master of ceremonies, spotted her from the stage and jumped on a table, shrieking “Whoooo!” That triggered the crowd. Laughter, whistles, cheers and jeers filled The Crystal Room.

Marilyn probably derived some of her free-love ideas from the photographers Andre de Dienes, Laszlo Willinger, and Bruno Bernard. Bernard wrote, “The artist’s fascination with the female figure is rooted not in simple allure but in the aesthetic satisfaction he gets during the quest for beauty.” She followed their free-love doctrines when she stated that sex was the key to life and that all aesthetic endeavors came from it—literature, art, music, poetry. Her second husband, Joe DiMaggio, gave her gifts all the time, including a full-length black mink coat at Christmas 1953, which she treasured. Marilyn always said that Joe was a wonderful lover. She called him her 'slugger' (“well hung”) and said that he could hit the ball out of the park. If sex was all there was to a marriage, she and Joe would be married forever. Her third husband, Arthur Miller, remembered Marilyn experiencing extreme manic-depressive cycles in her mood: “She meant to live at the peak always; in the permanent rush of a crescendo.” When the wave receded, she would turn against herself and then she couldn’t sleep.

However dominant, “Marilyn Monroe” was only one persona among many that emerged from and were created by the original Norma Jeane Baker before her name was changed. According to Shelley Winters, sometimes Marilyn took a Percodan for menstrual pain, washing it down with several shots of vodka. Percodan, an opiate, had been developed in the early 1950s. In addition to lessening pain, it can produce euphoria. It is also highly addictive. By 1947 some 1,500 variants of barbiturates had been developed: Nembutal, Seconal, and Amytal were among the best known. By 1952 Marilyn was using prescription drugs, especially the barbiturates Nembutal and Seconal for anxiety and insomnia, and amphetamines for energy. In December 1961 Marilyn's psychiatrist Dr. Greenson called her a 'borderline paranoid schizophrenic' in a letter to Anna Freud. Judging from his treatment Greenson had difficulty pinning Marilyn down under one category. On one occasion when he was trying to persuade her to give up drugs, Greenson told her that it was either “Mr. Nembutal or me.”

Female “dumb-blonde” comics also influenced Marilyn. Anita Loos combined “Dumb Dora” with the blonde to create the classic “dumb blonde” in her 1925 novella Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Dark-haired and witty, Anita Loos participated in intellectual New York circles, but she also was friends with Broadway chorus girls. Loos was inspired to write the book after watching a sexy blonde turn intellectual H. L. Mencken into a lovestruck schoolboy. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Loos positioned her chorus girls—Lorelei Lee and Dorothy—in the guise of the traditional fool, a historical character to be found in Shakespeare’s plays, who was wise under a mask of stupidity. Loos also made fun of the myth that the chorus girls were “gold diggers” who fleeced men. Loos emphasized that those men deserved what they got.

Marie Wilson, best remembered as the title character in My Friend Irma (1949) with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, inspired partially Marilyn's onscreen persona. Mae West and the fast-talking dames dominated female style in films in the 1930s, but the dumb blonde still existed, represented especially by Marie Wilson. Wilson isn’t well known today, but she was very popular from the 1930s through the 1950s. She had a childlike look, a fey personality, and a zany intellectualism, as she quoted from books and got them mixed up. She was a hit as the dumb blonde in Ken Murray’s Blackouts, a variety revue, in the 1940s. Marilyn Monroe borrowed directly from Marie Wilson. The difference lies in three features. Wilson had a typical tinny “dumb-blonde voice—high-pitched, nasal, slightly harsh.”

Marilyn talked softly, with childlike inflections. When Marilyn turned herself into an outré dumb blonde, with hip-swinging walk, puckered mouth, half-lidded eyes, childlike voice, and skin-tight dresses, she parodied herself. None of Marilyn’s imitators—neither Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren, nor Sheree North—matched the subtlety of her parody of sensuous femininity. Eve Arnold called her “a practitioner of camp.” Marilyn Monroe combined the “high arts” of photography, drama, and literature with the “low arts” of burlesque, striptease, and the pinup. She moved among them, dividing and uniting them to create varying looks, personas, and meanings. —"Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox" (2012) by Lois Banner

Stella Stevens was the 1960s’s sexy blond bombshell par excellence, a voluptuous young woman with an adorable air that heightened her allure. Jerry Lewis was absolutely bowled over by her. Three weeks into the production of The Nutty Professor, he stayed late at the office to write what could only be described as a love note to her. “I was completely inspired last night,” he assured her. “You are the reason men can’t live without the pride and thrill of direction. Perhaps one day you too will know the feeling.” Jerry must have realized how far overboard he’d fallen, admitting that his favorite Buddy Love moment was the cliff scene when he tells Stella Purdy "Here y'are, baby. Take this, wipe the lipstick off, slide over here next to me, and let's get started." Allegedly, Jerry had affairs with sizzling Stella Stevens, 'girl next door' Gloria DeHaven and bombshell Jeanne Carmen.

Patti Palmer (married October 3, 1944—divorced September 1980) was Jerry Lewis' first wife. Jerry had fallen in love previously with Lily Ann Carol in 1943 after meeting her at the Central Theatre in Passaic, but he was just a virginal kid to her. Jerry was still thinking of Lily Ann when he met Patti Palmer (born Esther Calonico) at the Downtown Theatre in Detroit in August 1944. Patti was a diminutive, dark-haired doll beauty. From the first glimpse of her ankle, he was hers. Jerry was a 60 dollars a week intermission act and Patti was Ted Fio Rito Orchestra's singer. When the engagement in Detroit came to an end Jerry had proposed to Patti and was pursuing her with letters and gifts. At eighteen, Jerry Lewis felt he had to marry each girl who smiled at him. Unlike Lily Ann, Patti fell in love with him. Patti quit the Jimmy Dorsey band and would never work again: “Jerry had to support me,” she explained, “because I believe in a one-career marriage.”

SanDee Pitnick (married February 13, 1983—until his death): Jerry had auditioned a hundred dancers to pull off a parody of Saturday Night Fever in a fantasy sequence of Hardly Working. Among the auditioners was Sandra (or SanDee) Pitnick, a divorced, twenty-nine-year-old dancer originally from North Carolina. Not only did SanDee get the part, but she got a dinner invitation from Jerry. “I didn’t know she was turning me on,” Jerry said later. “I just wanted someone to have dinner with. I fell in love with her pins (legs).” SanDee recalled: “One of the most precious things he ever gave me came within the first week, when I confronted him, ‘Wait a minute! What are your motives? What do you see in me?’ He said, ‘If I can just be your friend and give you self-confidence, I want to try to do that.’” Whether she was simply starstruck or he had really told her something truthful about herself, it worked. Jerry had danced in Living It Up like an amphetamine-riddled chimp with Sheree North. But in Hardly Working his reflexes and agility are gone. Jerry and SanDee dance very closely together—Jerry doesn’t even try to make a joke of the scene.

In 1982 Jerry and SanDee were openly living in a condominium at the Las Vegas Country Club. One week before The King of Comedy’s nationwide opening, Jerry and SanDee flew to the Sonesta Beach Hotel in Key Biscayne to be married. “There wasn’t another marriage in my life,” he said. “The first was so long ago. I felt like a young stud starting out all over again.” Indeed, the wedding in Key Biscayne rather echoed his secret elopement to Connecticut with Patti Palmer. His father Danny was gone, his mother Rae was sick at home in Las Vegas, and none of his six sons were present. Jerry had, in fact, failed to reconcile with most of the boys since the divorce and focused on his new family. The mention of his wife in interviews led him to lyrical speeches on love. In his last years, Jerry would credit SanDee and their adopted daughter Danielle with keeping him alive and happy.

The traditional Dean Martin character may have been a small-time conniver, a cad with the ladies, a singer, and an occasional tippler, but he didn’t do any of it with the headstrong purposefulness of Buddy Love. While Jerry Lewis opens and closes Dean & Me with heartfelt admiration, Dean Martin’s character suffers the death of a thousand condescensions. Even as Lewis starts by recalling their last performance together in 1956 at New York’s Copacabana, for example, he muses that while “truth was my greatest ally, Dean could lie if it would spare someone’s feelings. I had difficulty with that.” And from the beginning, it’s the older Martin (in a “big brother” role that Lewis conjures) introducing the kid to hard liquor and other women. Jerry eventually confesses they hooked up with MGM peaches-’n’-cream married actresses June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven in what is described as an extended Manhattan shack-up. In his review of Dean & Me Lawrence J Quirk writes: “the biggest question of all: Why on earth did Gloria DeHaven bother to sleep with Jerry Lewis when she was married to handsome hunk John Payne at the time?” Probably Lewis was a better lover than his clueless onscreen persona would suggest. Never a 'ladies man' as Martin or Sinatra, however Lewis had a very appealing style when not 'on character.' Martin’s consistent insensitivities and ingratitude ended up annoying Lewis. Martin played golf while Lewis dealt with rehearsals, and at one point was a no-show at a charity commitment. Lewis blew up and initiated the split.

On March 5, 1965, Jerry took time off from The Family Jewels to drive up to Burbank for a taping of “The Andy Williams Show.” Jerry came on stage and he slipped in a puddle of water, landing on the base of his skull. In terrific pain, he wrapped up his number—people must have taken it for just another Jerry Lewis pratfall. “I finished the last three minutes of that show unconscious,” he told Hedda Hopper. “I don’t remember anything for about forty minutes after the show, when I woke up in the hospital.” He had suffered a serious injury; radiologists at Mount Sinai Hospital detected a “fine linear skull fracture.” Jerry had another severe accident fifteen days later, on March 20, 1965, while taking a pratfall off a piano during his closing show at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. The pain was horrendous, almost paralyzing, and it wouldn’t stop. The doctors fitted him with a metal neck brace and prescribed codeine and Emprin to relieve his pain. It’s plausible that Jerry damaged his spinal column as well as his skull when he first fell in Burbank. He sought help from neurologists and orthopedists, but the prognosis was always pessimistic: A knot of fibrous tissue had developed along the nerves where his spinal column had cracked. Not even surgery could help him; he would have been luckier if he had broken his back. The pain was grueling and persistent, and to alleviate it, all the doctors could offer him was a regimen of heat, massage, rest, and medication. The codeine and Emprin were not enough to numb him and, in due time, he would become addicted to Percodan. —"King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis" (1997) by Shawn Levy

Women love a guy with a sense of humor. How much? So much it drives them over the edge. In a good way of course. And according to a new study published in Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology, it’s all about the laughs. The results? Well the results showed that “how often women experienced orgasm as a result of sexual intercourse was related to their partner’s income, self-confidence, and how attractive he was. Orgasm intensity was also related to how attracted they were to their partners.” “Those with partners who they rated as more attractive also tended to have more intense orgasms,” the study reads, suggesting the hotter you are, the better her orgasms will be. Apparently, the sexiest personality trait a man can have is a sense of humor, and how funny a dude is can predict a woman’s “propensity to initiate sex, how often they had sex, and it enhanced their orgasm frequency in comparison to other partners.” In fact, having a good sense of humor was rated sexier than physical appearances, which really says something. So it helps to be super good looking and rich, but ladies looking for the perfect orgasm should set their sights on funny dudes. Source: www.craveonline.co.uk

Marilyn Monroe, Her True Image

Marilyn Monroe was bipolar and often disassociated from reality. People who saw “the gorgeous substrata of her life could not even imagine on what subsoil her roots were feeding.” Significant among my discoveries about Marilyn are her lesbian inclinations. She had affairs with many eminent men—baseball great Joe DiMaggio, playwright Arthur Miller, director Elia Kazan, actor Marlon Brando, singer Frank Sinatra, the Kennedy brothers—and she married DiMaggio and Miller. Yet she desired women, had affairs with them, and worried that she might be lesbian by nature. How could she be the world’s heterosexual sex goddess and desire women? Voluptuous and soft-voiced, the Marilyn we know exemplified 1950s femininity. Yet she mocked it with her wiggling walk, jiggling breasts, and puckered mouth. She had an ironic and sometimes ribald wit, engaging in puns and wordplay. She loved to play practical jokes. She sometimes was a party girl who did “crazy, naughty, sexy things,” including engaging in promiscuous sex, displaying what we now call “sex addiction.” In her paradoxical manner she covered untoward behavior with a mask of good intentions, justifying her promiscuity through advocating a free-love philosophy, which connected friendship to sex. That philosophy circulated sub rosa among the avant-garde throughout the twentieth century. 

In another guise she was a trickster who assumed aliases, wore disguises, and lived her life as though it was a spy story, with secret friends and a secret apartment in New York. “I’m so many people,” she told British journalist W. J. Weatherby, “I used to think I was going crazy, until I discovered some people I admired were like that, too.” However dominant, “Marilyn Monroe” was only one persona among many that emerged from and were created by the original Norma Jeane Baker before her name was changed. That happened when Norma Jeane signed a contract with Twentieth Century–Fox in August 1946 and began her ascent to stardom. Marilyn would become a great actress, arguably more effective in her private life than on the screen. She told people what they wanted to hear, sensed the person they wanted her to be and became that person. Given her manic-depressive tendencies and the anger she had brought to the surface of herself, Marilyn wasn’t easy to live with. “She could say things that put a hook in my belly. Cruel, vicious insights,” Arthur Miller wrote. 

On February 8, 1953, at a ceremony in the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel that evening, Marilyn received Photoplay’s award as the year’s best newcomer. She borrowed a dress from the Fox wardrobe department to wear to the ceremony. It was made of gold lamé with a deep V-neck; Billy Travilla had designed it for a scene in Gentlemen that was cut from the movie. Travilla didn’t want her to wear it, because it was too small for her.  Giving herself enemas, she lost ten pounds in two days. (Film actresses used colonic cleansing to lose weight in a hurry.) Even after the weight loss, the dress was still so tight that it hugged her body, accentuating her hipswaying walk and the absence of underwear under the dress. She was sewn into it because it hadn’t been finished and had no zipper. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were masters of ceremony at the event. As Marilyn walked with mincing steps to the podium to receive her award, Jerry leaped on the table and hooted like a chimpanzee, while Dean broke into a hip-swinging dance. The audience howled with laughter.

Cecil Beaton described Marilyn in his book The Face of the World as a “hypnotized nymphomaniac,” “as spectacular as the silvery shower of a Vesuvius fountain” and “an undulating basilisk. Her performance is pure charade, a little girl’s caricature of Mae West. She is quintessentially American. She is a composite of Alice in Wonderland, Trilby, and a Minsky [burlesque] artist.” In real life, Marilyn usually chose tall, dark, and powerful men as partners—all father figures. But in her films from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on, she was often cast against small, unprepossessing men, whose confidence she shores up by praising their gentleness as central to real masculinity. Such redemptive women were everywhere in 1950s films, according to Brandon French in her classic study. In The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn describes the Black Lagoon creature in the film she saw with Tom Ewell as only needing “a sense of being loved and needed and wanted” to end his destructive behavior. She tells Tom Ewell’s character that “women prefer gentle men, not great big hulks who strut around like a tiger—giving you that ‘I’m so handsome, you can’t resist me’ look.”

“I didn’t like the world around me much because it was kind of grim,” Marilyn would tell Richard Meryman in the summer of 1962. Despite the tremendous challenges in her life, Norma Jeane was an average student. She earned good grades in bookkeeping, journalism, office practice, and physical education, and C’s in social living and science. Her essay on Abraham Lincoln was rated best in the class. “A little thing, perhaps,” she would recall, “but it encouraged me. I didn’t feel so dumb anymore.” Norma Jeane also escaped the negative aspects of her life through the cinema during 1939. Perhaps the film to resonate most with Norma Jeane in 1939 was MGM’s musical adaptation of Frank C. Baum’s beloved children’s book, The Wizard of Oz.

Norma Jeane frequently contributed to a column in the school paper, The Emersonian, and once wrote a piece about gentlemen preferring blondes. For the article, Norma Jeane and other classmates tabulated the responses of 500 student questionnaires regarding the qualities of a “dream girl.” Norma Jeane’s column prophetically described an idealized blonde female image into which she would eventually evolve: “According to the general consensus of opinion, the perfect girl would be a honey blonde with deep blue eyes, well molded figure, classic features, a swell personality, intelligent, athletic ability (but still feminine), and she would be a loyal friend.”

Sidney Skolsky publicized Marilyn’s performance in Love Nest in his column, referencing a scene in which she undresses and takes a shower. On the day she filmed the sequences, the set was crowded and quiet with silent and gawking studio employees assigned to other productions. The electric energy she emitted was palpable. Notorious for sometimes faltering on her lines, having an audience boosted Marilyn’s confidence and ability to find her performance. June Haver observed Marilyn warming up with a few takes in front of the gathered crew and undergoing a complete metamorphosis.

In a memorable scene, Roberta sunbathes in the back yard of the building in a polka-dot bikini bathing suit with ruffles as she sips Coca-Cola out of a bottle. The swimsuit is modest by modern standards, even covering her navel, but considered racy in its day. “Marilyn became so uninhibited in her movements, the way she sat in that chair—so gracefully, naturally graceful—and seductive at the same time,” Haver would tell Carl Rollyson. “Suddenly, she seemed to shine like the sun.”

The Coca-Cola Company would later use the scene in a 1953 Coke soda commercial, and Marilyn would pose in the bikini—showing off her washboard abdominal muscles. Designer Renie Conley (1901-1992) designed several elegant outfits for Marilyn aside from the fetching bikini. Over the course of her career, Conley would be nominated for a total of four Oscars.

“She was a difficult person because she wasn’t sure of herself,” director Joseph Newman would recall of Marilyn at age twenty-five. “I don’t think she ever got to be sure of herself. That was her major difficulty. She had exceptional ability and this childish charm coupled with great sexual attraction. She had a great natural talent, but I don’t think she ever realized it. She was always insecure. Instead of just being satisfied with her native talent, she tried to develop into a great dramatic actress. When I worked with her, though, she was basically a nice, naïve girl.” —"Icon: The Life, Times, and Films of Marilyn Monroe - Volume 1: 1926 to 1956" (2014) by Gary Vitacco-Robles

In the 1950s women wore heavy makeup—a result of the return to femininity after World War Two and the power of advertising to create a demand for cosmetics. Marilyn led the trend. To make her lips larger and more lustrous, she applied four layers of lipstick and drew her lip line outside its natural shape. She put Vaseline on her lips to make them look wet. It was part of what Billy Travilla called her “fuck-me” look, especially when she held her lips in an O. She darkened the mole on the right side of her face near her lips to draw attention to them. She used eyebrow pencil to darken her eyebrows and make them heavy and straight, although she sometimes plucked them into a peak. She often wore false eyelashes. Whitey Snyder said that she knew makeup techniques that she kept secret even from him; one was to put white makeup on her eyelids to make her eyes seem larger. Source: medium.com