THE WILDEST SHOW IN LAS VEGAS: FRANK SINATRA & THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  

Legsville.com

May 16, 2023

©2023 By Burt Kearns

(From the moment they blasted off in the Casbar Lounge in Las Vegas in December 1954, there was no stopping Louis Prima, Keely Smith and Sam Butera and the Witnesses from becoming the most popular act in show business. No one but themselves. In a pair of exclusive Legsville stories based on long-lost interviews with sax legend Butera and jazz and pop goddess Smith, Burt Kearns unearthed the beginnings of the legendary act, Now, a year later, he traces the beginning of the end — the personal dramas and betrayals that would end the rocket ride, not in a glorious splashdown, but in flames. We return to the Casbar Lounge. Four years after lift-off, it’s now the “Casbar Theatre” — and everybody wants in. Including Frank Sinatra…)

What a time for this to happen! What a time for things to fall apart. Onstage!

It’s March 5, 1959, and if Louis, Keely, and Sam were any hotter, they’d melt. Las Vegas is happening like never before, and they’re a big part of the why. The number of hotels on the Strip has doubled from the lucky seven standing when Sam first blew into that borrowed sax on the day after Christmas 1954. The Stardust is the newest hotel and casino, delayed a year after owner Tony Cornero dropped dead at a Desert Inn craps table during a long losing run. But the Sahara, Milton Prell’s “Jewel of the Desert,” where Louis Prima and Keely Smith with Sam Butera and the Witnesses are doing five sets between midnight and five thirty a.m., is ground zero for entertainment, as atomic as the nuclear test site out in the desert.

The Sahara is the first big sign to come into view on the drive in from Fremont Street. Pull up past the giant plaster camels, leave the car with a valet dressed like an Arabian prince, get a “sim sala bim” from the turbaned doorman, and stumble into a sexy, exciting clash of sights, sounds, and smells in an African-themed adult playground. Clattering slot machines. East coast sharpies in shiny suits. Cheers and groans from the craps tables. Women dolled up, baring cleavage and wearing furs. Chips tossed in the air as the roulette wheel clicks down. Bow-legged cowboys in ten-gallon hats. Greenbacks floating over the blackjack tables. Wide-eyed insurance men from Toledo. The dice bounce. Punches fly. Big, Morocco-themed muscle moves in. And from deeper inside, there’s a sound that makes you want to gamble. Or worse.

Zooma zooma zooma… You notice the line snaking past the one-armed bandits; not leading to the cashier cages or buffet or the Congo Room, where Kay Starr’s show broke before midnight. You’re lured by the shuffle beat, and as you get closer you see it’s a line to the Casbar Theatre, where all the action is happening at two a.m.  It’s like Mardi Gras in there.

 

Louis, Keely, Sam and the Witnesses are in full swing on the small stage behind the bar and the wood-panelled room is just about levitating with laughter, shouts and wild applause. No one has an act like this, the below-the-belt comedy, lowdown and corny, yet very hip —  or music like this, jazz that jumps like Louis Jordan, then honks to the R&B of Big Jay McNeeley, shifts into the Dixieland of Louis Armstrong to, most insidiously, the same rock ’n’ roll that would have this middle-aged crowd sticking their fingers in their ears if it blasted from their kids’ record players.

With no stage lights, spotlight or curtain, Louis, Keely and Sam have turned what was once the Casbar Lounge into the hottest room in Vegas, maybe in all of show business. The room fits maybe a hundred and fifty with a shoehorn, and it’s no longer open to the casino. They’ve got drapes closing it off now, a makeshift mini-showroom with a maître d’, Pancho Aliati, out front taking reservations from a well-dressed and well-heeled crowd and leading vacationers, yiddisher and goombah fans from the east coast, midwestern tourists, oilmen, and goodfellas to the faux-leather red seats crammed around the pizza-sized tables. Off-duty casino dealers have a place at the bar. Lounge comic Don Rickles is squeezing his way through, gladhanding and spitting zingers along the way. Showgirls paper the place, and some of the showroom stars command booths along the opposite wall. Funnyman “Lonesome George” Gobel, headlining at the Riviera up the road, has a booth with his pals.  So does Phyllis McGuire, singing with her sisters at the Desert Inn, who came in with mob boss and secret casino mogul Sam Giancana. Everybody’s grooving to the hilarious act behind the bar.

No one in the room notices that Louis isn’t looking right. No one realizes something monumental is about to go down.

Naked as a jaybird

Louis and Sam and the Witnesses, finetuned now to a precision sextet, have everybody tapping their feet or moving involuntarily to The Sheik of Araby, that 4/4 zooma zooma shuffle rhythm laid down on the snare by Paul Ferrara. The drum kit, upright piano, and bassman Rolly Dee are lined up centerstage behind the action. Like Sam and the other Witnesses, Ferarra looks fine in a dark suit, bouncing along with Louis, who’s at the mic, middle-aged but spritely, a star decked in a bright grey jet age tuxedo, with a continental bowtie and passable toupee. Louis is doing his funny little dance, kicking, twisting, leaping from two feet — not so high that his rug brushes against the low, tiled ceiling.

Louis sings: “Cause I’m the Sheik of Araby –”

The others respond: “Puttin no pants on!”

The crowd hoots!

“Oooh… your love belongs to me –”

“Puttin no pants on!”

Keely stands, seemingly uninterested, in front of the felt Sahara banner that covers the back of the piano, where John Nagy pounds the keys. She’s even more womanly now, oozing pure sex. With her pageboy haircut, tight blouse, torpedo bra and taffeta dress, she’s doing the now-trademark deadpan routine, only after six years of marriage it’s more than a cute act. She and Louis are living out their marital Cold War in front of everyone in the room.

Louis: “And the stars that shine above…”

Keely and the boys: “Naked as a jaybird!”

“We’ll light our way to love!”

“Naked as a jaybird!

Sam is crowded to the left of Louis, a swarthy, stocky Sicilian with a grin as wide as his head, cradling his sax and grooving. Lou Sino, who looks like a square but is a wild N’Awlins trombone-man, and Bobby Roberts, the latest addition on guitar, groove along with him.

All eyes are on Louis as he looks at Keely, does a comic step and tugs at the taffeta. She just stares. Everyone in the room howls and applauds with every double-and triple-entendre they dish up.

“At night when you’re asleep…” 

Everyone, including Keely, responds: “Puttin no pants on!”

“Baby into your tent I’ll creep!”

“Puttin no pants on!”

“And you’ll rule this crazy land with me… I’m the sheiky man, that’s who I be!”

Louis steps back and turns to Sam. “Sam Butera!”

And Sam leaps forward and blasts into such a rocking, paint-curling solo that the smoke-filled Vegas lounge could be a club on Central Avenue in Black L.A. While he blows and honks, Sam swings up and down, bringing that sax floorward between his legs and up toward that low ceiling, swinging like one of those dipping “drinking bird” toys at the bar. Sam drops to his knees as he plays, that smile still on his face. He falls – and now he’s playing on his back, blowing and kicking his legs up as he does. Louis waves a handkerchief over him as if to cool him off. Keely looks the other way.

“Go! Go! Go!” Louis and the Witnesses lead the chant and clap their hands in rhythm. Ferrara is standing, pounding the drums, urging Sam higher and higher. The man is about to blow a gasket when a trombone slide pokes toward his head as Lou Sino joins in. Louis picks up the trumpet, and somehow they segue into Dixieland and everyone is on Bourbon Street. (“It was never rehearsed,” Sam insisted. “Everything came about by accident!”)

As is his habit, from a table up front, Harold Smith Jr., whose family owns the Harold’s Club casino in Reno, stands and flips a hundred-dollar casino chip toward Louis, who palms it.

By now, the crowd is ready for the fever to break and Keely to step in with something sultry like The Man I Love, but Louis crooks a finger, the band stops on a dime and segues into Jump, Jive, An’ Wail. Cheers! Whistles! Louis dances, twists and steps like a middle-aged Elvis. He jumps, he jives, he bounces and sings, “Baby, baby, it looks like it’s gonna hail!”  Clowning through the verse, he turns to Keely but her look waves him off. Sam might be the only one who notices the look they share isn’t like the old days. That Old Black Magicmight be their latest hit record, but it ain’t playing tonight.

Keely sings, deadpan, with Sam and the Witnesses: “You gotta jump, jive, and then you wail…”

Louis is slightly off the beat when leans in for the second verse. He glances at Keely and rubs his temples.“A woman is a woman and a male ain’t nothin’… but a male –”

When he doesn’t sing the line that follows, Sam picks up immediately and plays it on his sax. He’s ready for anything — but not what happens next.

Louis staggers, and then he tumbles backwards. Keely steps out of his away, ladylike, casually, as if it’s part of the act, and maybe she thinks it is, until Louis slams against the piano and slides to the stage floor, taking the Sahara banner with him.

The band keeps playing for a moment. There are laughs in the room — until Keely makes it clear something’s wrong. She crouches near Louis, who’s conscious but groggy. Sam cuts the music. The bartender hastily fills and hands up a pitcher of water. Louis blinks, shakes his head and signals to Sam.

“Jack and Jill went up the hill to get a pail!” Sam sings the line from Jump, Jive An’ Wail, then begins to play a solo Night Train. Nagy and Rolly help Louis stand and make his way down the steps that lead from the stage into the audience. Louis, Sam, and Lou Sino usually close each set by marching through the crowd during When the Saints Go Marching In. Standard practice in New Orleans, but a revelation in the desert. This time, Louis gets a standing ovation as he’s marched unsteadily out of the Casbar Theatre.

The mad ad

Louis canceled the following night’s shows, claiming illness, and then he canceled all the shows for the rest of March. Mel Tormé filled in at the Casbar. Louis went one way. Keely went the other – all the way to New York City.

Of course, the story spread across town —Louis Prima fainted onstage. Louis Prima collapsed — and word of what went down in the Casbar eventually made it east, as well. It travelled across the country to a bedroom on East 68^th Street, where Dorothy Kilgallen, the syndicated show business columnist with spies in every corner of show business, was propped up on pillows, tapping out her latest item.

… Louis Prima’s chums are worried about his health.
He’s been suffering from headaches and dizzy spells…

 

Was he pushing too hard? Sure, he was. With records, club dates, television and a movie opening, he’d overpacked the schedule. The real story, though, was between the lines, but Louis couldn’t let the fans, let alone the executives, think he was over the hill. He may have been forty-eight, but he had a thirty-year-old wife and the stamina of a teenager. Louis decided to respond in the only way he knew how. He took out ads in all the Vegas dailies. Full-page ads on Friday, March 27. Oy.

Dear Folks, due to all the rumors and misconceptions that have

been going around, I am taking this opportunity to let everyone

know the true facts…

 

In a long open letter that Variety would label a “mad ad,” Louis explained that he walked off stage on March 5 after he suddenly “began to feel dizzy and faint… accompanied with a pounding headache.” On the advice of his physician, he’d checked into the Sansum Clinic in Santa Barbara, California, where doctors determined he was victim of an “allergic reaction… due to a concentration of tobacco smoke, dust, dirt, and foul air, which is the usual condition that exists in any night club where the ceiling is low and proper ventilation has not been provided… Anyone who was exposed to this condition and is playing a wind instrument or singing is constantly inhaling this foul and unhealthy air.” (Of course, Louis added: “Dr. McNiece’s words were, ‘You have a 100% health rating, and your blood pressure, heart, and lungs are those of a 16-year-old.’ I actually cried with joy when he said, ‘They’ll probably have to shoot you on judgment day!’”)

Louis said he was undergoing two nasal operations to correct the condition, and that the show would be returning to the lounge at the Sahara on March 31 — contrary to “nasty rumors… started by some ignorant goof.”

All that was fine. Worries addressed. After the Casbar gig, it was on to Chicago for a triumphant return to play for the Mob at the Chez Paree and the drive to New York City for the group’s debut at the Copacabana – and The Ed Sullivan Show. But Louis couldn’t leave well enough alone. He had to go and mention the story between the lines, the story about what was really giving him headaches, It was a story everybody in Vegas seemed to be whispering and was going to come out sooner or later.

Also… rumors were started that Keely and I were breaking up.

This is a preposterous lie stated started by some imbecile. We

have a wonderful family life… We have two beautiful children,

and Keely and I love each other very much.

 

Who said anything about breaking up? Well, even Louella Parsons had an inkling, and she was a columnist who knew how to write between the lines. On the same day Louis’s screed was published, she reported that, “recovered from his recent nose surgery, Louis Prima hosted a ‘Return Home’ party for Keely Smith, who returned via jet from New York. He presented her with a sable stole.”  Throwing a “Return Home” party and offering up a very expensive fur didn’t sound like the actions of a man just back from the clinic and recovering from an operation.

Yeah, everyone knew, and every newspaper editor worth his salt ignored the first 562 words of Louis’s open letter and got right to the nut graph: “Louis Prima took full-page ads in the Vegas dailies to scuttle the rumors he and Keely are breaking up.”

Sam Butera knew. Looking back all those years later, he laughed out loud at the “foul air” excuse. “We were working the Sahara for what? Five years prior to that? And all of a sudden the ventilation got that bad? Bullshit. I figure it stemmed from, you know, (the situation) with Keely. It must have been, because it was fifty-nine. That was when the shit started to fly.

“I guess he was just pissed. He said, ‘Fuck it. I’m going home.’ Then he might have told people, ‘I had a dizzy spell.’ To cop out. He didn’t faint on stage. Never. Louis could pull some shit, man.”

Quickie visit

Truth was, Sam knew it, everybody knew, that Louis and Keely’s marriage was in trouble. It was a given that Louis had been fooling around for years. It was a surprise, and never acknowledged publicly, that Keely, portrayed in Life magazine as the devoted wife and doting mother of baby daughters, was stepping out on Louis.

“Yeah, yeah.  I knew they weren’t — everybody knew they weren’t getting along,” Sam said. “We all said, ‘How can Louis put up with this, her fucking around like this? How can he put up with it? Then you think back, ‘Well, how can she put up with it? And we’d all shake our heads. “I don’t know, man. There’s a wild situation here.’

“The way I surmised it, Louis was a swinger all his life, man. He had five wives, you know, and he liked, liked, liked ladies. He loved ladies, man, and I guess Keely must’ve not been blind.  Louis, man, I think right from the get-go, was seeing other broads. That wasn’t no new thing for him. But he was at least a little discreet.  She wasn’t.”

Louis had to hold things together, ward off the rumors and keep the act moving forward. This was a crucial time, because plans were in place for the big deal: moving from the lounge to the showroom. With columnists picking up on the story that “Louis Prima denies any stories of marital rift,” he was lucky that no one in 1959 put the pieces together, connecting Louella Parsons’ fur stole story with an item in George Bourke’s Miami Herald nightlife column a few days before Louis’s ad.

Keely Smith in Quickie Visit

“Quickie” was the proper — and accurate — term in Bourke’s report that “Mrs. Louis Prima” had made a side trip to Miami Beach before returning to Las Vegas. It just happened that was exactly the time when Frank Sinatra had opened an engagement at the new La Ronde showroom at the Fontainebleau Hotel at 4441 Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.  Keely’s affair with Sinatra had begun a year earlier, after her and Louis’s stand next door to the Fontainebleau at the Eden Roc. It was something she wouldn’t fess up to, at least not publicly, but if she did, she could always blame Louis.

“He allowed me to go on a train with Frank Sinatra from Florida to Chicago, with my manager Barbara Bell, and another man, Murray Wolf, who was with Frank,” Keely recalled. “The four of us went on the train, Frank and I in one cabin and Murray and Barbara in the other, and we went to Chicago. And Louis’s the one that pushed me to do it.  My God, if you’re with Frank Sinatra, you know damn well you’re going to wind up going to bed!

“And that’s the occasion I woke up in the middle of the night, and Frank was sitting, looking out the window like the saddest little boy I’d ever seen, with tears coming down his face.  It was pitiful.  He’s a very lonely man, and he loved trains.  He still loves trains today.  He has all kinds of trains at home.  When you think about it, and I tell people, gee, I went from Florida to Chicago with Frank on a train, they look at you like, ‘How could you have done that?  You were married.’  But at the time, I didn’t question it.  Maybe because I was so thrilled at being able to do it, I didn’t question if it was right or wrong.

“I was never a promiscuous person, but it was okay at the time when I did it,” she’d admit. “Looking back on it, it wasn’t okay. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t do it to a husband since then or a husband in the future, but for some reason with Louis, it was okay to do it.”

Did she and Louis have an “understanding?”  “No,” she replied. “I probably did what I did in retaliation, but I didn’t know it at the time.”

A pounding on the door

Weeks later and Sinatra was back in Vegas, on his home turf, in his own digs. The Sands was the place Sinatra stayed, played, and gambled when he wasn’t making movies or playing the top nightclubs. Sinatra first sang at the Sands in 1953 and had recently bought shares in the place, sharing ownership along with hidden owners like Jewish mobsters Meyer Lansky and Doc Stacher.  Sinatra’s latest engagement at the Sands’ Copa Room was a real party. A year before they came up with the idea to create a “Rat Pack,” he was the King Rat, and his suite at the Sands was one swinging rat’s nest.

Louis knew Sinatra was in town with a lot of time on his hands Even so, he drove solo to Los  Angeles on business, and left Keely on her own, with a ticket waiting at the Copa Room box office.

“He knew I was going to go see Frank, who was appearing at the Sands that night,” Keely said. “And he went on the road. So I go to see the show and I wind up in Frank’s suite.”

The scene in Sinatra’s suite was among those that led to the legends, an endless bash like the one captured in Life magazine, when he tried the old tablecloth trick – and almost succeeded in yanking out the linen without making a mess with the dishes. There was alcohol and food. There were women – many women — and men who were quick to laugh and say “That’s a good one, Frank,” when Sinatra cracked a joke. The goodfellas who usually stayed behind the scenes could relax in Sinatra’s suite. Top boss Sam Giancana was there, as was Al Capone’s cousin Joe Fischetti. And so was Keely.

“All kinds of people, all kinds of girls.  It was a nice party,” she recalled. “Never an orgy of any kind have I ever been to, with Frank, Sammy, nobody.  But that night, I spent the night with Frank.”

After everyone cleared out and the blackout blinds were drawn, Keely and Frank went to bed, and exhausted, finally fell asleep in each other’s arms. There would not be a repeat performance in daylight. In the early morning hours, they were awakened with a start.

“There was a pounding on the door like you can’t believe!” Keely said.

Then, suddenly, the bedroom door burst open. Scrawny Sinatra rolled toward the nightstand, one hand on his toupee and the other reaching for a revolver. It was Joe Fischetti, on the run from the front room, frantic.

“Frank, it’s Louis! It’s Louis fuckin’ Prima!”

Louis Prima was not in Los Angeles, after all. He was in the hallway outside the suite, and he was looking for his wife. The banging on the door continued. It sounded as if the big ape would pound his hairy fist right through the wood. “They didn’t open the door to him,” Keely said. “In some kind of way, I got dressed and went out through a side door to my car.”

Keely was outside the Sands, fumbling for the keys to the Corvette Louis had gifted her on her birthday, when Louis’ Cadillac sped toward her.

“Get in!” he demanded.

Keely sighed and got into the passenger seat. When the door slammed, Louis hit the gas and skidded out onto Las Vegas Boulevard in the direction of home. Keely tried to project nonchalance. She was deciding that Louis probably wouldn’t mention the incident again, when suddenly he slammed on the brakes and pulled over.

“And he slapped me,” Keely recalled ruefully. “He was furious. When Lou would get angry, he’d kind of get very emotional and he cried. He cried very easily. And he just didn’t yell. He wasn’t a yeller. He was not a physical man when it came to anger.

“That’s the only time he ever, ever touched me in physical anger in his life. So I wouldn’t say that anything I did, Louis really condoned.  I don’t know how to explain this.”

As Louis drove on, tears falling down his cheeks, Keely couldn’t quite figure out what he was feeling. Was it shame? Embarrassment? Frustration, now that the act was so close to achieving that longheld dream?

“I don’t know, because there were so many other times — for instance, the train trip,” Keely said. “He used to put me on a plane to come to L.A. each Monday to be with Frank, to be in his company — not that I went to bed with him every time I came in. But I was always at his house with Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, all kinds of writers. Sammy was there a lot. Peter and Pat Lawford. And all we did was have dinner and watch a movie. And then all of a sudden one time I wound up going to bed with Frank.

“And then he just kind of was wherever I was in the country, and Louis accepted it. I don’t think it’s because it was Frank Sinatra, but I really don’t know why.”

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MAKING THE WILDEST SHOW IN LAS VEGAS PART 1: SAM

MAKING THE WILDEST SHOW IN LAS VEGAS PART 2: LOUIS & KEELY

 

Burt Kearns is the author of three books, including Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy. He also writes and produces nonfiction television and documentary films.

EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT FROM THE NEW LAWRENCE TIERNEY BIOGRAPHY: THE TOUGH GUY RETURNS TO HOLLYWOOD

Legsville.com
December 9, 2022

©2022 By Burt Kearns

Exclusive to Legsville.com

The first biography of the legendary and notorious actor Lawrence Tierney was published on Tuesday, December 6, by the University Press of Kentucky. Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy, by Legsville contributor Burt Kearns, traces Tierney’s career from his overnight success in the 1945 film Dillinger, through the drunken scenes, brawls, and arrests that derailed his career, to his “rediscovery” by Quentin Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs. In this exclusive excerpt, it is 1985, when we find Tierney returning to Hollywood after the death of his brother, the actor Scott Brady, who early in his career had changed his name from Gerard Tierney… for obvious reasons.

From Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy

Renaissance Man

After Lawrence Tierney zipped up and made his way home from his brother’s funeral, he walked into a refreshed career. At sixty-six, his presence in a film or television episode added a dimension of menace, authority, sly humor—or a mixture of the three. Audiences might not place the face, but producers and writers knew his unique place in Hollywood history and often hired him because of it. Thanks to a video rental market that had expanded greatly in the past half decade, Tierney was also appreciated by a new generation of cinephiles educated on VHS tapes of vintage films they could study, over and over again. One of the most intense “students,” a twenty-two-year-old movie obsessive, was hired in 1985 as a clerk at the Video Archives store in Manhattan Beach, California. Quentin Tarantino would spend the next five years there, watching movies, taking notes, and writing scripts.

Tierney was no longer considered a frightening, incorrigible menace to Hollywood society, but an entertaining if unpredictable relic of a more genuine age. He settled into a small apartment in Hollywood and began befriending many movie fans much younger than himself. It was a natural connection. While many of his contemporaries had died or long been domesticated, he continued to frequent the Hollywood dive bars and taverns that were now patronized by young people as well as old drunks.

It was this group of relative youngsters—filmmakers, writers, movie fans, scenesters, and others in his path—that in this late stage of Tierney’s career would take the place of the gossips and newspaper columnists of old. They would chronicle and spread word of his exploits and outrages in person, in print, and years later, through social media.

“Larry knew he could get away with murder with people who respected his film career. And he did,” film historian David Del Valle observes. “People that have lived rough, that literally have stripped themselves of all pretension, become very manipulative, because being on the street you get to read people instantly. You know exactly where you can go with whatever it is you’re trying to do. And Larry was that. Larry got away with murder because he was a movie actor.”

“He was such an outsized personality, a truly unique person, and he was the first person I met who had a connection to old Hollywood,” recalls Todd Mecklem, who was in his mid-twenties when he became friends with Tierney. “And the dichotomy of this big, powerful guy with the sweetness, but then the edge—it was kind of exciting. He took a liking to me, and once he liked you, you were part of the club, you were his pal.”

C. Courtney Joyner, the screenwriter and director, was twenty-six when he met Tierney in October 1985. “My friend [movie director] Jeff Burr and I had gone to the Chinese Theatre and seen the movie Silver Bullet. Larry was in it, playing a rough and tough bartender who takes on the werewolves,” he says. “Later, Jeff and I were down at Boardner’s [bar], which was our regular hangout, and had been one of Larry’s since the forties. And in he walked! I got introduced to him. When I told him I was a big fan, Larry goes, ‘What are you a fan of?’ I said, ‘Well, I really loved The Ghost Ship.’ ‘Okay, Ghost Ship, that was a good one. All right. Where you sittin’?’ And the next thing you know, he was sitting with us!”

Tierney invited the young men and their friends—a group that included writers and actors Will Huston and Ron Zwang—to his apartment on North Beachwood Drive. “I had an MG Midget and he wanted a ride home,” Huston says. “I said, ‘Well, it’s a two-seater and I already have somebody in the seat.’ And he sits down on the hood of my car and says, ‘Let’s go.’ I said, ‘Get off, Larry.’ ‘No, I ain’t getting off. Take me home.’ So we drove down Hollywood Boulevard and up to Beachwood, all the way with Larry sitting on the hood of my MG Midget.”

“On the way, he wanted to stop at the Mayfair market to pick up a few things,” Jeff Burr recalls. “And not knowing Larry, that sounded completely innocent. It’s probably two in the morning, after the bars closed, and there are very few people in the market. He just starts walking down the aisles, opening up stuff—and he would say stuff like, ‘Smell this cheese, it smells like my brother’s feet,’ as he’d pick up pieces of bread and ham, making himself a sandwich. He ended up shoplifting a whole bunch of stuff, just stuffing it down his pants! And this was our introduction to him! It was unbelievable—and he had absolutely no guile about it.”

C. Courtney Joyner and Tierney at the Hollywood Athletic Club. (photo: Todd Mecklem)

 

“We ended up in his apartment, and he made us sandwiches,” Joyner remembers. “And of course, the place looked like a bomb had gone off, which I found out was Larry’s norm.”

“Stacks and stacks of newspapers from who knows how far back,” Huston says. “Looked like he’d lived there for twenty years, and he’d lived there for like three months.”

“It just started from there,” Joyner says, “and the old, ‘Listen kid, gimme your phone number, ’cause I’m gonna be calling you.’ And boy, did he ever.”

Huston adds: “Like they say in Devil Thumbs a Ride, they gave him a ride home and changed their lives forever.”

 

Tierney as the warden (& David Del Valle, 3rd from right) in From a Whisper to a Scream, 1987, directed by Jeff Burr, cowritten by C. Courtney Joyner.

 

The fortuitous meeting would also lead to a major change in Tierney’s life, career, and fortunes. For his young friends, though, it was a red flag. “Looking back on it now, it’s not really a laughing matter, because I guarantee you he was bipolar, either non-diagnosed or self-medicated,” Burr says. “I think that certainly fueled the manic ups and downs of his career and just a willful screwing up of real possibilities.

“And another thing, and he probably did it that night—he had a big thing about public urination. I mean, there’s twenty empty stalls five feet away, he would choose to open a door and urinate outside or on Hollywood Boulevard. This wasn’t when he was infirm. This was fifteen years earlier, when he was absolutely able to get around. It was a choice, just a blatant disregard for anything or anybody, authority-wise.”

 

Lawrence Tierney in Stephen King’s Silver Bullet (1985)

 

Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy is available online and in bookstores. Signed copies can be ordered from Hollywood’s Larry Edmunds Bookshop.  More info on the book — and its Tierney double feature launch event — at LawrenceTierneyBook.com.

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Burt Kearns is the author of three books. He also writes and produces nonfiction television and documentary films.

VIDEO: THE FRIENDS OF LAWRENCE TIERNEY, HOLLYWOOD’S REAL-LIFE TOUGH GUY

©2022 By Burt Kearns

 

More than sixty films. More than thirty television roles. More than seventy arrests.

 

Lawrence Tierney was the toughest, meanest, coldest actor in Hollywood, onscreen and off. An overnight sensation in 1945 as Public Enemy #1 in the movie Dillinger, he proceeded to drink and brawl his way out of a career by the early 1950s – or so it seemed. Lawrence Tierney is the great untold story of the dark side of Hollywood – a story of alcoholism, madness and violence, but also survival, loyalty, and genius. Much more than another fall-from-grace-to-the-gutter entry in Hollywood Babylon, Tierney was a truly gifted actor, and after Hollywood had forgotten him as the tall, handsome, fearsome star of its Golden Age, he made a comeback as a craggy, gravel-voiced, bald-headed — and fearsome — old man who befriended and inspired a new generation of filmmakers and writers, from John Sayles to Quentin Tarantino.

 

My new book, Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy, is the first biography of this legendary Hollywood figure. In October, I got together with some of the people who are featured in the book – Tierney’s friends – for NoirCon, the virtual film noir conference. Director Jeff Burr; screenwriter, author and director C. Courtney Joyner; film historian and horror movie maven David Del Valle; and Tierney family historian and Tierney’s nephew Tim Tierney, joined me and film noir scholar Dr. Jason A. Ney for a freewheeling, clip-filled discussion about the life and crimes of Lawrence Tierney.  The panel discussion had been restricted to folks who bought tickets for the conference, but now, we present it on Legsville.com.

 

More to come. And more information at LawrenceTierneyBook.com, where first edition copies of the book from the University Press of Kentucky are now on sale.

 

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Burt Kearns is the author of three books, including Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy, which is available for sale on Amazon.com. He also writes and produces nonfiction television and documentary films.

THE ULTIMATE JERRY LEWIS INTERVIEW: WHY LABOR DAY WEEKEND WILL ALWAYS BE JERRY’S WEEKEND

September 2, 2022

Legsville.com

©2022 By Burt Kearns

Labor Day Weekend will always be Jerry’s Weekend. It will for a great many people at least, at least a great many people I know. For us, Labor Day and Jerry Lewis go together like, well, like Jerry Lewis and France — or Jerry Lewis and people who can’t stand Jerry Lewis. In any case, for forty-four years, Jerry Lewis gave his life to and hosted the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon (soon to be officially the “Jerry Lewis Telethon”) from New York, from Los Angeles, and for twenty-eight years from Las Vegas, raising over the course of those years, more than two and a half billion dollars for the cause. And for some reason, he took a lot of abuse from critics for doing it.

The Jerry Lewis Telethon was an annual tribute to the kind of show business that Jerry Lewis ruled, twenty-one and a half hours of personal psychodrama, meltdowns and crying jags, lectures and pure lunatic comedy. Contemporary and even some pop stars had a place among the Borsht Belt  comics and oldies acts like Cornell Gunter’s Coasters and a nonstop procession of corporate check-presenters. It was the last gasp of 20th century vaudeville, really, more outdated and incorrect as the years passed. The writing on the wall was clear in 2007, when Jerry had to apologize for calling someone “an illiterate fag” on the air – it was late in the broadcast, Jerry was fooling around, it was a gag that would’ve gotten a laugh at the Friars’ Club, but it really spelled curtains for the 20^th century. Jerry was in his eighties and in 2010, the MDA gave him the unceremonious boot. Jerry always said the Telethon was bigger than he was, but that was the end. They cut the hours the following year, kept cutting until the telethon was a television special with no-name hosts. In 2014, it was over. Jerry died in 2017, fifteen days before Labor Day. There was no vigil outside his Las Vegas mansion, a vacant lot away from Martin Luther King Boulevard and the 15 freeway, but he lives on Labor Day weekend.

So why will Labor Day Weekend always be Jerry’s Weekend?  What follows should provide some answers. It’s an interview, conducted on the eve of the 1989 telethon from Las Vegas.  I’d been following Jerry around with a camera crew for about a week. He was comfortable. He was sixty-three.  He was surrounded by fans.  His family was always close by. His second wife, SanDee (“Sam”) was there, along with his doctor. Three of his six sons showed up to show off grandkids and maybe help out. A fourth son arrived with his band to perform on the telethon in the wee hours of the morning.  (The Telethon was always the one place Gary Lewis and The Playboys could play for a national audience.) Another son was somewhere out there, stalking Jerry, threatening to kill him. A security team was in the area, hoping to stop him before he did. (He didn’t. Joey Lewis died, a suicide in 2009).  Jerry had recently lost another child when Sam miscarried (he and Sam would adopt Danielle, born in 1992). When we sat down for the interview, Jerry was comfortable. He knew we were fans. I’d just given him one of my copies of Jerry Lewis Just Sings. He was low key. And he talked about loyalty, revenge, cruelty, drug addiction, miscarriages — and even talked about himself in the third person. This may be the purest expression of Jerry Lewis.

 

You meet, what? Hundreds of kids every year, dystrophic kids?

JERRY LEWIS: Sure.

You get to know a lot of them personally. You called them on the phone today. What is it like for you to know them? And then, what does it do to you when you lose ’em?

JL:  When I lose a dystrophic child, or one of my kids — which they, by the way, chose to be called. I’m rapped for that too, you know, “my kids.” They also chose “Never Walk Alone” as their theme song, and I did it for them — But when I lose one of my kids, I feel a void, and I feel like I am not doing the job. Then when I have a moment to reflect on it, I turn that into positive energy. I get angry. I get very angry.

For example, there’s a chairman of the board of an important corporation that was giving me iffy answers about a project that I wanted to work on that would enhance the research in a certain city in this country. I was allowing him to procrastinate, and I was allowing him to put me off somewhat. Then I lost little Eddie Brooks in Atlanta, Georgia. Eddie was eleven. Eleven years old. I was shattered and — and then I got angry. The day that it happened, I called this CEO. I said, “I want to see you tomorrow, and I will fly to where you are.” And he said, “Okay.” And I flew to where he was, and I walked in on him. And I said, “We’ve been batting the ping pong ball back and forth for three months. I’m leaving here one way or another. I will disrupt your company with the worst kind of gossip that you ever heard in your life, or you’re gonna become one of the greatest heroes since Patton. Now which is it gonna be?” And we talked. And I walked out of there with enough money to build a research center in a city in this country that I’m very proud of, that’s gone up with this man’s help out of anger.

Now, it doesn’t always happen that way, but that one worked.

Today, if something goes wrong, I’ll turn it into positive energy. I’ll do some kind of gag about it, make my crew member feel better about it, and the audience will never know whether I’m really having a problem or not. So it’s all positive. This way is better. Positive energy. I sound like Norman Vincent Peale, for Christ’s sake.

How long have you had this attitude? Has it always been this way for you?

JL:  No, no, no, no, no, no. As you get older, you get wiser. As you get older, you look back. And I’m a born reviewer. I look at material over the years. I like to look and see the work that I’ve done. I don’t go back too far, but I do like to look at the material, and I like to look at attitudes.

I remember in 1978, I was cleaned out. I was a Percodan addict, and I was in very big trouble for a number of years. I blew the whistle on myself in People magazine, because I felt I could help other people that were in the same trouble. So I wanted to review what I looked like in ’77. Could you see it in my eyes? I was taking thirteen Percodan a day. I mean, I’m talking about heavy-duty, world-class addict. That came from prescription drugs, because I had injured my spine, a pain that I live with every day of my life. Still live with it.

When I put that tape on and looked at ’77 — (laughs) Oh, holy Christ. I didn’t even remember doing that telethon. I didn’t remember. There’s a period between ’73 and ’77 that’s black. I don’t remember making the four films that I made, the five telethons. I don’t remember the twelve weeks that I appeared at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. I don’t remember the Royal Command Performance for Her Majesty and the family. I don’t remember my opening or the fifteen concerts in France. I remember nothing from ’73 to ’77. So I like to look at those years and see what that man was. How did he get on that stage? But by God, he performed. He did it. When you’re performing since you’re five years old, which is now, fifty-eight years for me, you have a know-withal and a tremendous ability to rise above stuff, which is what I was doing in that period. That’s the best editorial I can give you. I was rising above whatever the problems were, and the professionalism was carrying me.

So I looked and I looked and in reviewing as I did the material, I helped myself change a lot of that conduct, ’cause a lot of that conduct, even though I wasn’t responsible — or he, Jerry, wasn’t responsible for a lot of his actions — I sure didn’t like a lot of the stuff I saw. And whether it was the Percodan or it was Jerry’s attitude, one or the other displeased me. And I made sure to fix a lot of that, starting with (laughs) no longer being addicted. And secondly, fixing things that were really best for him the performer and the audience.

 

Do you have any apologies about Jerry over the years?

JL:  No, not really. He never meant to hurt anybody. That I can say for him. And I can be as objective about him as anybody. I sleep with him. That’s as close as you can get. He’s been raucous. He’s been defined as a — and I’ve recognized a lot of this – he’s been rowdy, boisterous, distasteful, abrasive, caustic, abusive. Always to give someone pleasure though. Always to get a laugh. Uh, very young in a lot of cases, which is a defense that I don’t think will hold up.

He — I’m better now, but I wouldn’t apologize for anything, other than sitting down and, by design, looking to hurt somebody. Now, I know there are people like that that plan to do harm to someone, or that don’t care that they’ve done it. I can’t live with myself if I hurt somebody or if I do the wrong thing. If I’m abrasive, yes, or caustic or pushy or aggressive, the defense for a lot of that is because very often you have to include that in your menu, or you’re half a performer.

In the case of going on the air Sunday night, you can’t badger your audience, but you do have to be strong in your convictions. They’re not going to like ya if you’re a wimp, and they may not like ya if you’re too strong. So if you can find that wonderful middle somewhere, and I don’t like to police me. I don’t put up on the board: “In the third hour, Jerry will become emotional.” I get emotional when I get emotional. I cry when I cry. This audience has had forty years to scrutinize me. If I’m holding 100 to 120 million people throughout this twenty-four hours, many of this audience has grown up with me. They trust me. They believe in what I’m doing. You can’t hold an audience that long unless they do. Then the numbers on the board validify that fact.

I get letters from people sometimes that say you should have challenged that guy that wrote what he wrote. Well one year I did. I took off on the press, and I really — well, this is not the platform for it. It was wrong. I apologized after the fact, because I realized was wrong. Everything I said was right, but this is not the place for it. So that was wrong. And I’m the first one to tell you I’m wrong. You know why it’s easy for me? Because I’m gonna be the first one to tell you I’m right. Now, before you can do that, you gotta do the other. People will not take hearing from you that you’re right unless they hear from you when you’re wrong. Simple. Everybody will go with you. They’ll go with you a hundred percent.

What kind of changes do you go through emotionally and otherwise during the telethons? Staying up, that sleep deprivation period and everything else?

JL:  Well, it’s a roller coaster. That’s what it is. There’s highs and there’s lows. My eyes are three-sixty. I see everything happening in the theater, whether it’s music is in place or it isn’t in place. If I see a corporate sponsor making a move towards the stage prematurely, I’m catching that. My roller coaster dips and has now taken the high ride, because he should have been in place. Now, I have to fill so the audience doesn’t know. That’s a charge or a rush I have to give myself so the audience doesn’t know there’s trouble.

I see two or three of my kids seated in wheelchairs, I might see somebody push the wheelchair to make room for a camera. That tends to upset me, watching a wheelchair getting shoved. That’s back on the roller coaster. Now I’m on the air, and I have to let the audience (laughs) know that the next performer’s gonna really entertain them, and I can’t wait to get down there to whoever it was that pushed the wheelchair to take care of that. Well, I can’t let the audience know that. They’re never gonna see it. So you’re on the roller coaster again.

Now I’m looking at the wee hours of the morning, and the tote board isn’t moving. The phones aren’t going. Now unlike other telethons, you’ll see any other telethon that goes on the air, the host goes to sleep around midnight. And they come back the next morning refreshed around ten o’clock. That’s not a telethon! I walk out there at six o’clock Sunday night, and I don’t leave that stage until twenty-two hours later. Now, I am off during the cutaway to take a shower, change tux. That happens maybe five, six times. Last year, we calculated I was off the stage — literally off the stage, showers and tux changes — thirty-nine minutes.

Is that a performer’s dream or a performer’s nightmare?

JL: Oh, it’s a nightmare. It’s an absolute nightmare. It’s the commitment you’ve made. And I believe you either do a telethon or you don’t. See, I call the others halfathons. Want to do a halfathon? Good. Start it, do three hours, go to sleep for ten hours, and come back and do six hours. That’s a halfathon.

Is it easy to fall asleep after this?

JL: No, I usually have a production meeting after we go off the air. I’ll rap with my crew for anywhere between three and four hours talking about what we can do to make it better. My next production meeting is only six weeks after the show is over. The first production meeting for the next year is like the, uh, second week in October.

And then it starts all over again.

JL: You bet. It’s the only way you can sustain. There’s a reason we’re number one, and there’s a reason why we’re able to do what we do. It’s not slick, it’s not straight cut with edit tech, commercial, sponsor, Hollywood, Vegas. Half of them are doing the things that we have created, that we have, as the originators, have stopped doing. But still, with it all, you have to do the best entertaining show you can. That’s the most important thing is to entertain the people. And inform.

Now, through all these years, there’s been one question that people always have asked. And there’s been rumors about it, and you’ve never answered it. I don’t think you’re gonna answer it now, but why do you do it? What made you start it?

JL: I just have to do it. Something personal happened to me. It had nothing to do with any of my children, none of my family were ever afflicted with this disease, which is why most people do those things. But something personal traumatized my life in 1949 and I have told people for the last forty years, the important thing is not why I do it, but that I do it. That’s the only answer I got for you.

How is the pressure building now on you as we get closer to the telethon?

JL: Well, I work well under pressure. I have always worked best under pressure. I write best when I’m on deadline. I perform best when I get to the dressing room. I gotta get into my tux and get downstairs. (laughs) I don’t know why that is but pressure has never really bothered me. Stress is a killer. Stress, I can’t handle. Now, the difference between pressure and stress, I think, at least in my own humble opinion, is pressure is what we all go through in our own respective work. Stress is when you are thrown into a working condition with incompetence and they’re not doing the job. You’re working under tremendous energy, getting the things done that must be done. And the kind of stress that comes from someone who doesn’t care, and that’s why they’re an incompetent, can give you chest pains. Chest pains is the beginning of going to the OR, where they open your chest with a Black & Decker, like I had.

Which you know about.

JL: Yeah, which I know about. So stress is what really slows me down.  I had a perfect example of it today. My crew was working in the theater. There is an act that uses smoke in the act. I don’t think it’s necessary to blow everyone out of the theater in a rehearsal with that smoke, which will take us some time to clear out. And I told my crew, “Rehearse them without the smoke. They are not in their outfits. They’re not dressed in that number that they’re gonna do come showtime. What do you need the smoke for? We know there’s gonna be smoke.” The smoke has been checked. We’ve checked it technically, that the cameras will read it, lights can photograph. Well, people are coughing and choking. (laughs) They overloaded with smoke, and I could have saved them that if they just would have listened. They mean to listen, but they really think that they’re doing the right thing. Then I get stress. I have to walk in a corner, just for about two minutes, and talk myself out of the stress, and I’m okay.

 

You mentioned people that are incompetent leading to this stress. It seems that you’re the one who makes sure that everyone that’s working for you cares. You’re in the middle of everything. What drives you all year to do this?

JL: Well, I am part of a team. I have a marvelous director and I have a marvelous co-producer. I have to have their undying and their unrelenting loyalty in this parcel. And you don’t do that just by saying, “How do you do? I’d like you to be loyal.” You do that over a period of ten, twelve years. And I’ve had that good fortune of having these people for ten and twelve and twenty and twenty-five and thirty years. I’ve got them to the point where they understand that I care deeply and desperately about what we’re doing. I can’t expect them to care as I do, but what I do expect of them is to just give it a shot. Try to open up enough so that you give me your talent while you care about giving me your talent. But when I see a technician look at his watch and yawn, that’s a virus. That’s contagious. That runs through the crew. Now, most crew members are very proud people. They’re very, very proud of their creative output. When there’s a member of the crew that goes – (exaggerated yawn) —  that’s a depressant. The crew doesn’t want to see that guy, ’cause it’s catching. Yawning is catching, anyhow.  So he tells me he doesn’t want to be here. So what I do is I pay him off. I pay him for what he would’ve earned had he worked the entire program. But the important thing is to get him away from the good hard-working members of this company.

Now you don’t make friends doing that, but I have wonderful people that take care of that for me. I’ll go to (the director) and I’ll say, “Tom, this guy hasn’t done a day’s work of any consequence, plus the fact he’s injecting our wonderful crew with a virus. Let’s get rid of him.” It doesn’t happen but maybe once or twice in the entire year, but it has to be handled.

When it comes to MDA, you’ve been doing this for forty years now. Do you regret any of the career sacrifices you had to make because of this? Do you look back and wish you spent more time as a director?

JL: No. I have no, I have no regrets, really. And I don’t think that it, uh … I don’t know how I could have changed it, because the thing that I set out to do, although I didn’t know would be a lifelong experience, hasn’t limited me from doing the other work I want to do. I have been fairly active, and I’ve done a lot of things I wanted to do. I still have many things I want to do where MDA will get in the way sometimes. And I have to juggle to make it work. For example, there were two or three very important seminars that we hold around December, January that I head up. And it pumps up our staff, our field staff of some 2,000 people out there that are responsible for a lot of money that comes in Labor Day. Well, I was doing a five-part Wiseguy on CBS and I was in Vancouver shooting every day. I had to make arrangements with the Wiseguy company to be sure that I could escape to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix for these seminars to head them up and see that the MDA was covered, and I didn’t hurt the company and the shooting. I got back, did what I had to do. So I make those arrangements. It doesn’t always work. And then I make choices. Sometimes I’ll make the choice of the work. I would hate to pass up directing a marvelous film that I have great faith in, but there’s always a way it can be handled. You can do two things at once.

There’s been many times when I’ve put in twenty-hour days — eight hours for one project, twelve hours for another project, and you sleep sometimes in the car. You get it done.

Did you ever envision that forty years later, that your life, your career would take that turn where you would go from being known mainly as a comic to a comic actor to a director to now, Jerry Lewis – 

JL: Fundraiser.

— humanitarian, fundraiser?

JL: (laughs) Yeah. No, I never thought forty years ago that, that that would happen. What I thought was that I would enlighten the public and maybe get them to help, and then it would take off. I never realized that once I made the commitment, there wasn’t anyone that’s gonna take my place. There wasn’t anyone I could turn it over to. There were times when I thought maybe that was a possibility in the early days. But you can’t. You just can’t. The responsibility is too great now.

And there are too many people that depend upon me, and there are too many people that I could tell you stories about that would blow your mind, that really are alive because they believe in what I’m doing for them. And if I were to walk away from them —  I have to be careful not to place myself in such a place that it sounds like I am the Messiah. That’s not what I’m saying.

Could this telethon exist without you? Do you ever see a time when you would retire, step down, hand over the baton?

JL: Oh, I don’t think there’s anything larger than the telethon. I’m sure that it could do very well with someone else if—

Do you see that time coming?

JL: Not this weekend, no.

(laughs)

JL: I made a vow almost forty years ago that I wouldn’t quit till I beat it or till I couldn’t walk anymore. So I’m not about to walk away. There’s no reason for me to walk away from it. We are getting so close and the inroads have been so wonderful that it makes some of my fantasy thoughts of, “Hey, let a younger guy stand there for twenty-four hours, let a younger guy put in eleven months putting it together.” Those fantasies, thoughts are shattered when I get this close to airtime and recognize that the fearless leader has to be there for all the pieces to fall into place. Eh, it’s a great feeling. It’s the most selfish thing a man could do, what I do, because I get such satisfaction out of seeing the fruits of the labor, that it’s unbelievable.

 

With all the work you’ve done, all the good that you’ve done, all the work that you put into it, you have detractors. There’s the cynics.

JL: Sure.

What does that do to you when, when you, when you pick up something, and they say, “Oh, Jerry takes money under the table,” or —

JL: (laughs)

… “Jerry’s phony sentimentality on the air.”

JL: It hurts. It hurts, because you’re giving every ounce of truth and every ounce of energy that you have to do a good thing, and I don’t believe there is a human who can say, “That doesn’t bother me.” I don’t believe there is that human that isn’t bothered by a dissenter. The human condition is a very interesting, very, very wonderful laboratory study, the human condition. It’s a study for me, because I learn when I write comedy, the best thing in the world for me to do is to sit at a street corner and just watch the traffic for six, seven hours, and watch people waiting to cross the street. It’s a great laboratory, the human condition. And I don’t believe there’s anyone that does good work or that does something from his heart that isn’t hurt when he’s challenged or when he’s disbelieved or when he’s doubted or when someone is cynical about it or pessimistic about it.

Now, I can get five thousand letters patting me on the back and wishing me all of the wonderful things in life. In that batch of five thousand letters, I need to read just one who disbelieves me, doesn’t particularly care about what I care about, and thinks that I’m a jerk, I’m shattered by that letter. And Sam, my wife, says to me, “Please help yourself get over that letter by rereading the five thousand.” And I know she’s right, but the human condition says to me, “This is addressed to me. How do I get him?” The human condition would like everybody should think they’re terrific. You can’t. And the only way you’re really gonna get wisdom is the day you wake up and honestly say to yourself as an introspective man, “I cannot please everybody.” The day you can do that, you will have wisdom. I haven’t done it yet. So I don’t have wisdom. (laughs)

Does it get you angry?

JL: Well, you get angry when, when it’s a cheap shot. You get angry when you know damn well that the letter came from a man who is an attorney, reputable attorney, has a marvelous business in this town, and writes you a seething, pessimistic letter of that nature. And you know the reason for the letter was because you turned down going to his cocktail party. Well, now I know that that’s the reason he wrote the letter. I don’t want to go to his cocktail party. I don’t like cocktail parties. I don’t go to cocktail parties. But isn’t it interesting that it was a week later that I got this letter from him? Said nothing about a cocktail party. Said nothing about anything, but the work I do on Labor Day. He just attacked me. Well, it, I know where it’s coming from.

He told some friends, “Jerry Lewis is coming to the cocktail party.” Well, Jerry Lewis didn’t show up. But I had never agreed to show up. The invitation was sent. There was no RSVP. It was just absolutely, blatantly, that’s what it is. It still troubled me. So, I have to fix it.

You mentioned in the new Parade article that’s gonna to be coming out Sunday.

September 3rd. Sunday, yeah.

You talk about how you lost a baby this year.

JL: Mm-hmm.

What has that done to you? I mean, someone like you, you’ve done so much for kids, for children, for newborns, for pregnant women. What’d it do to you?

JL: Killed me. It took me, both Sam and myself, we were… we were on a six-week binge of just… we were as reclusive as you could ever be. She was two or two-and-a-half months gone, and we were skipping around like two children going shopping every day, buying baby clothes, and buying this and buying that and having such a wonderful time and dreaming of this excitement that was ahead of us. And it just didn’t happen. And I don’t remember ever being as disappointed or as shot down or as shattered, whether it was because I was so shattered for her, because she’s such a great lady and such a loving, caring, marvelous human being who wanted nothing more than to reproduce the man she loves. And she told me in no uncertain terms, she said, “Can we have a baby? I want a piece of you. I want just a piece of you.” I don’t know of any man in the world could be given a greater gift from someone that loves him that she gave me when she said that. And I said, “If that’s what you want, then I want it even more, so I can have a piece of you.” And, it was a lovely, lovely plan we had. But we’re, we’re still trying. And if you weren’t sitting here with me taking up my time, I could be home working on it. (laughs)

Anything  you’d like to say to America the day after the telethon? Any kind of message about Jerry Lewis?

JL: No. I don’t think there’s anything that I would like to say that I wouldn’t have said last night and the night before. I could say that, for those that understand, no explanation is necessary. For those that do not understand, no explanation would suffice. So they know I love them for the help that they give me. And for those that don’t, I love them, too. They don’t, because they have reasons. And I am older and wiser now and recognize that you can’t win ’em all.

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Burt Kearns produces nonfiction television and documentary films and is the author of three books, including Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy, which will be published in November and is available for pre-sale on Amazon.com.