The Devil Gets His Due, page 47
Jerry Lewis, by contrast, never forgot his primary obligations as a comedian: to keep the audience laughing all through his movies and to leave them feeling happy. Since the kind of comedy he wrote was slapstick farce, in which violence is present everywhere, this was not easy to do. Yet he somehow always managed to make the poke in the eye, the slap on the face, the kick in the ass, the hit on the head and the pratfall, which was his trademark, seem not to matter. In any case, he presented them so that the audience did not respond with gasps of horror but continued to giggle and chortle, as also did the other characters on the stage. Only the protagonist never laughed but responded with a wordless cry of anguish, at which the laughter of everyone else was doubled.
To some of his critics it seemed that he did this by exploiting the shameless tendency of us all to be more delighted than dismayed by the calamities that befall others. It seems to me, however, that what we really laughed at in Jerry’s films was not the otherness of the suffering but the sameness to our own. We are all cripples, he seemed to be saying, both those we call handicapped and we whom they call TABS, meaning “temporarily able-bodied.”
The same message is contained in the riddle the Sphinx poses to Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedy, when she asks, “Who walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?” Oedipus correctly answers, “Man”—which is to say, all humans, who begin crawling abjectly on all fours in our infancy, then stride proudly on two legs in our prime and, when we are old, hobble unsteadily with the aid of a third leg, a crutch or a cane. To be sure, this melancholy thought is more compatible with tragedy, whose final words of wisdom are “Let no man consider himself happy until he is dead,” than with comedy, which concludes with “happily ever after.”
Jerry’s typical endings, however, though they are not tragic or even melodramatic, are not what most people call happy either. It is hard to find any proper name for his endings, since they do not end with a victory for the protagonist; and what victory would be possible for the nerds who are the anti-heroes in the stories Jerry tells? Defined from the very beginning as losers, they cannot kill a dragon, find the Holy Grail and become saints or kings; nor can they be convincingly portrayed as overthrowing a tyrant and freeing his oppressed people—or even getting rich and being elected Lord Mayor of London. The world in which Jerry’s protagonists find themselves is one in which politics and religion play no important role. State houses and churches seem to be permanently closed, and the only well-lit places are the classrooms, gymnasiums, laboratories and auditoriums of seedy second-rate colleges flanked by sleazy nightclubs, bars and soda parlors to which the students flee when school is out.
The potholed streets over which these protagonists move from place to place seem much to me like those of Newark, New Jersey, a city that began to die before it began to live. It was there I once worked in a shoe store side by side with a crew of losers, one of whom was Danny Levitch, Jerry’s father. Although he boasted constantly about his rosy prospects in the theater, he always seemed to end up working as an extra salesman. His father’s habitual failure must have haunted Jerry and fueled in him a relentless desire to succeed, but that desire is not shared by the comic creeps who survive in his films. None of them seems to be dreaming of success or, indeed, any other fully adult goal. Instead they yearn for what is called, in the jargon of the young, “popularity,” hoping to be accepted, applauded and loved not for what others believe and they fear they really are—namely, wimps—but as sleek and loveable hunks, which they hope they can become or at least seem to become by finding the right style of dress or shade of lipstick or way of dancing. The reward for thus renewing themselves is perhaps the oldest of all happy endings: “getting the girl.” Sometimes they modernize this dream of their fathers and grandfathers by making it “getting the girls.” The shift from singular to plural, however, makes no real difference, since whether they strive to have and to hold just one woman until death do them part or to bed down many, their beloved turns out to be the same bubble-headed blonde shiksa, whom his protagonists think they desire but whom Jerry himself probably could not have stood for a single minute.
There is a slight note of irony in all his portrayals of such females, as he did not realize fully, until Dean Martin had become his inseparable stagemate, that he really thought of those women as rivals for his true love, who was not a woman at all but a glib, sexy, self-confident male much like Martin. The series of movies in which Jerry explored in depth his ill-fated relationship with Dean and Dean’s rejection of him—from My Friend Irma (1949) to Hollywood or Bust (1956)—are not only the saddest and funniest he ever made but absolutely unique.
To be sure, the concept of male couples joined by a sublimated passion “which passeth the love of a woman” yet is “indifferent to men and their erections” is central to many American works, from the minstrel show to such classics as The Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn, about which I have written at length. But the love that joins Jerry and Dean is in many ways different from that which joins the paleface audience to the black actors in the minstrel shows and Huck Finn to Jim, Ishmael to Queequeg, Natty Bumppo to Chingachgook. These all have a racist, political dimension, since in all of them a white and a nonwhite male, though their people back at home are fighting each other, discover it is possible in the wilderness or at sea to find temporary peace and love in a relationship physical but not fully sexual. But Jerry and Dean both would have been more likely to be considered black than white by the WASPs who wrote those books, since one was a Jew and the other Italian, and both therefore too swarthy to be placed on that high rung of the evolutionary ladder WASPs occupied. Of course, the first generation of Italians and Jews were deeply suspicious of each other because of their different religions and cultures, but their children born in America began by playing together on the streets of their neighboring ghettos and, in their quest for upward social mobility, ended up with similar careers as gangsters, boxers or actors. It was in the theater that Dean and Jerry entered into their bond, which, like many such theatrical unions, they announced to the world by fusing both their names into one, calling themselves Martin and Lewis. But unlike Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Burns and Allen, they were as drastically different from each other as the stereotypes of their races: the kike Jerry Lewis (née Joseph Levitch) sober, modest, hardworking but afflicted by self-doubt, chiefly sexual; the wop Dean Martin (née Dino Crocetti) charming, articulate and talented but with an unfortunate propensity for getting drunk. One thinks of him primarily, however, as he apparently thought of himself: as one of the mythological Italo-American lounge lizards like Rudolph Valentino and Frank Sinatra.
There were no such mythic erotic role models for Jerry, yet it was he who truly loved, rather than Dean, who would only let himself be loved. And it was Dean who ended the marriage, of which Dean never seems to have been fully aware. So, too, he was not aware of how traumatic was their final separation, which sent Jerry back to his legally married wife and family. But even there Jerry could never forget the cruel words Dean had spoken to him at the moment of what Jerry felt as a divorce: “You can talk about love all you want. To me, you’re nothing but a dollar sign,” Dean said and then continued his career as leading man and singer of schmaltzy Neapolitan love songs without interruption.
Jerry, however, made fewer and fewer movies, filling his growing hours of idleness with busy work as national chairman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, whose activities on behalf of victims of such neural disorders climaxed in a Labor Day telethon that since the 1960s has collected millions of dollars. But life has not otherwise been kind to Jerry. As he has grown older he has suffered other disasters, including prostate cancer, a heart attack and a general failure of his body—which he felt for many years was invulnerable. Especially his buttocks and lower back, on which he had fallen hundreds of times, were wracked by pain so bitter that he turned to Percodan for relief. Instead of giving him a surcease of pain for which he hoped, that drug left him only with an addiction that lasted for fifteen years. Nevertheless, I do not like to think that Jerry ever regretted the tortures to which he submitted his flesh for so long, since they had given real pleasure to so many. Among these I count myself, to whom his routines seemed so attractive that I learned how to do some of those falls myself to entertain friends and break up dull parties.
Despite his multiple afflictions, Jerry kept trying to compose a movie with a happier ending than the one that seemed to lie ahead of him in real life. To do this, he was aware he would have to exorcise the ghost of Dean Martin, which continued to haunt him, by rewriting the story of their love. Ultimately, he did so. As late as 1982, Jerry agreed to appear in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983), which contains an account of his relationship with Dean Martin, with their roles reversed: that is, Scorsese cast as the unattractive loser, hitherto portrayed by Jerry himself, Robert De Niro, who is of the same ethnic origin as Scorsese and Dean Martin. He then used Jerry to play the part of the successful “king” of showbiz, who rejects De Niro/Jerry.
But Jerry years earlier had made, in The Nutty Professor (1963), a more radical revision of their relationship in which only one member is real. The Jerry-like protagonist is called Professor Julius Kelp, while the Deanlike character, called Buddy Love, is not the real antagonist he seems, only an imaginary alter ego. When the film starts, however, nobody seems to know this, not even the professor himself, who feels that to win the heart and hand of the woman he thinks he loves he must turn himself into that younger, more attractive male. The woman is also convinced that it is the nonexistent Dean-figure she really loves. In the end, however, she discovers that she wants and needs someone much more like the unbeautiful professor, and it is that professor she is about to marry when the movie ends.
This seemed to me such a totally satisfactory ending to the story that I could not imagine why anyone would or could add anything to it. I was therefore astonished and a little dismayed when, as we entered the third millennium, I saw a notice in the TV Guide that another movie called The Nutty Professor (1996) was playing on cable. When I actually saw it, I discovered it was indeed a continuation of Jerry’s original film, though his name was not listed as one of the writers or actors but only as one of its executive producers.
It had, moreover, a new ending in which the professor turns out to be a double winner, getting both “the girl” and “the girls.” He can do this because, in the new version, he is a kind of Dr. Jekyll, able to turn himself into Hyde with the chemical compound he has invented. This makes it possible for him to be shown, as the action draws to a close, asleep in a bed where he has earlier made love to three lusty bimbos and then, on waking, dressing himself in the proper garb for a marriage to the blonde young starlet he was always convinced he desired. She, however, has changed too, being now no longer a bubble-head but a serious graduate student and also, despite her yellow hair, black. So are most of the other major characters, including the professor, who is played by Eddie Murphy, an African American actor much admired by young people both white and black and whose name alone seemed to guarantee a large audience for the film. This time, moreover, the professor comes onscreen looking not like a medical textbook figure or a terminal victim of muscular dystrophy but instead a grossly fat, aging man destined apparently to get even fatter—a disability at which it is possible to laugh without stirring up the strong negative reactions prompted by Jerry’s earlier mocking of the maimed.
These multiple changes make clear what Murphy realized was always true, though less evident earlier: that the major theme of this movie was not disability or interethnic male bonding or even race but reality and illusion. This play on what is and what merely seems Murphy made even more complex by announcing to the audience in publicity releases that he himself was a kind of shape-shifter who would be playing not only the professor but some six or seven other characters. He does indeed play them in full sight in the most hilarious scene of the film, which takes place at a family dinner for the professor: Murphy is made up as the professor, sitting in the midst of three generations of his family, clearly also played by him. This involves, of course, Murphy appearing simultaneously as male and female, old and young.
This kind of age- and gender-bending, as well as the trifling with illusion, seems more characteristic of high art than of pop. Certainly, it is to be found in the Mannerist literature and painting of the fifteenth century and also in the avant-garde schools of art of the twentieth century, such as Surrealism, Dada, Futurism and Postmodernism. But it is also to be found in the popular minstrel show, in which nothing is as it seems and the audience knows it. Those who pretend to be black turn out to be white, and those who come on in the garb of women turn out to be men, and that which seems a typical Southern plantation is revealed finally as a stage of the theater actually located in Buffalo or Boston or New York City. To be sure, so that the movie audience does not miss this affinity, Murphy in the key dinner-table scene makes his characters speak, move, and relate to one another and to the audience in ways much like those characteristic of a style first used by blackface minstrels and later transmitted to the purely white audience of vaudeville, musical comedies, and “talking movies” by an older generation of Jewish American actors such as Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor and, to be sure, Jerry Lewis. It is Al Jolson whom we best remember, but Murphy reminds us that Jerry actually made a best-selling record of the minstrel-show tune “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” some thirty years after Jolson had made it a hit.
But thirty more years after that release, Jerry seemed about to disappear not just from the stage and screen but from the memory of the audience; or worse yet, it seemed as if he might end up being remembered only as the celebrity announcer who every Labor Day presides over the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon and whose picture is displayed, between those genteel money-raising orgies, on posters everywhere in this country.
On those posters, he who was once accused of slandering the disabled is portrayed as their smug and kindly benefactor. Lest anyone miss the point, he is shown hugging a photogenic child purported to be a victim of muscular dystrophy. Typically these victims are girls, usually white, and always scrupulously clean and with the fixed smiles of professional models. Though they have come to be officially known as “Jerry’s Kids,” I think of them as “this year’s Tiny Tim,” and of the portly, solid citizen who beams down on them as this year’s Scrooge: not the earlier Scrooge who is almost indistinguishable from a “stingy old Jew” but Scrooge after his conversion into the professional founder of the feast for all the deserving poor.
Thanks to Eddie Murphy, however, Jerry has been delivered from this ignominious fate, his older, truer self having been resurrected, as it were, and displayed once more on screens, actually being watched by a new audience that includes the young as well as the old and the black as well as the white. It seems, in fact, that Jerry will not die again for a long time, since the box-office success of the first blackface version of The Nutty Professor was so notable that it has been followed by another, The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000). This seems to me to be the single-handed accomplishment of Murphy, who was cool enough to appear before the cameras pretending to be a white man pretending to be black—or rather, perhaps, pretending to be a Jew pretending to be a white man pretending to be black. We therefore owe him thanks for having restored to us in a strange new form the original Jerry Lewis, one of the makers of that mulatto culture that is America’s gift to itself and the rest of the world.
SAMUELE F. S. PARDINI (1969–), a native of Tuscany, holds a Laurea Degree in Letters and Philosophy from the University of Pisa and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from SUNY Buffalo. His work on Italian Studies, American Studies, Literary Criticism and Popular Culture has appeared in Acoma, ArtVoice, BuffaloReport, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Modern Fiction Studies, The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, and The Bruce Springsteen Reader. He has edited and translated into Italian two collections of Leslie Fiedler’s essays, Vacanze Romane (2004) and Arrivederci alle Armi (2005). He has taught at SUNY Buffalo, UCLA and Vanderbilt University. Currently, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of Foreign Languages at Elon University.
Copyright © 2008 by the Estate of Leslie Fiedler
Editing and Introduction © 2008 by Samuele F. S. Pardini
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions.
Every effort has been made to secure permissions. We regret any inadvertent omission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fiedler, Leslie A.
The devil gets his due : the uncollected essays of Leslie Fiedler / Leslie Fiedler; edited by Samuele F. S. Pardini.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59376-188-2
ISBN-10: 1-59376-188-0
1. American literature—History and criticism. 2. English literature—History and criticism. 3. Popular literature—United States—History and criticism. 4. Literature—Philosophy. 5. Popular culture—Philosophy. I. Pardini, Samuele F. S. II. Title.
