Calling Lewis "mercurial" is rather an understatement. He was generous, but he could be something else, with an ego bigger than Las Vegas, where he televised his MDA telethons for many years. Evidently he let the French admiration of his comedy, which was an acquired taste to say the least, go to his head.
Never was that ego more evident than his "live" television program of the 1960s, titled--not surprisingly--The Jerry Lewis Show. He insisted on total control, totally unscripted, and it was one of the big flops of that decade. At times his film projects bordered on the downright offensive, namely the unreleased (and possibly destroyed by Lewis) The Day the Clown Cried, a film about a clown (Lewis) who entertains children in Nazi concentration camps and eventually leads them to their deaths or something. Only a handful of people ever saw it, and Lewis, embarrassed over the whole thing, shelved it, decreeing it would never be seen. A few clips have surfaced, however.
More about the masterpiece that never was:
When you watch a movie you haven’t seen for a long time (like, say, 10 or 20 years), it can look extraordinarily different from how it looked before. And that’s a fascinating thing to behold, given that the movie itself hasn’t changed one bit. It’s you that’s changed — or, just as likely, the era around you. In the case of “The Day the Clown Cried,” the infamous Jerry Lewis Holocaust drama that no one — save Harry Shearer — has ever seen, because it has never been shown, the passage of time may work in even more mysterious ways. About 30 minutes of this legendary 1972 fiasco, which Lewis wrote, directed, and starred in, then permanently shelved because he was embarrassed by how bad it was, surfaced in a rough assemblage on YouTube a couple of days ago. Bits of the footage have leaked out before (most of it lifted from a German documentary about the making of the film), but this is the first chance that anyone has really had to glimpse the full-scale, jaw-through-the-floor “The Day the Clown Cried” experience. And here’s the surprise: The movie does look pretty awful, but it no longer looks shockingly awful. If anything, its kitschy-ghastly four-hankie macabre shamelessness now seems both clueless and weirdly ahead of its time.
It remains one of the Holy Grails of bad movie lovers.
Lewis helped organize and for many years hosted the annual Labor Day telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, one of the first if not the first celebrity to host a telethon. It raised tens of millions of dollars over the decades, but disability rights advocates found the whole thing exploitative and condescending to the disabled. They were known to organize protests against it. Lewis hosted the telethon from 1966 to 2010, stopping after a dispute with the head of the association.
During one memorable telecast, guest Frank Sinatra managed to get Lewis and Lewis's former partner Dean Martin to reunite onstage for the first time since the mid-1950s. It was a bit tense, but the pair did it. Previously, Martin and Lewis, who had had a highly successful team, with Martin the singing straight man and Lewis the comic, had a well-publicized falling out. Even with this reunion, Martin and Lewis didn't get close again until the tragedy of Martin's son Dino Paul dying in a plane crash. According to the Times obit, they did resume being on speaking terms.
Lewis had six sons with first wife Patti Palmer, who was a few years older than he was when he married her in 1944. They divorced in 1980. According to the Times obit, four of the six sons survive him (though many sources say five did, with one son dying of a drug overdose in 2009) including musician Gary, who scored several big hits in the 1960s with his group, Gary Lewis and the Playboys ("This Diamond Ring," "She's Just My Style," "Count Me In," to name a few). He is also survived by his daughter from his marriage with SanDee.
NYT:
Jerry Lewis was born on March 16, 1926, in Newark. Most sources, including his 1982 autobiography, “Jerry Lewis: In Person,” give his birth name as Joseph Levitch. But Shawn Levy, author of the exhaustive 1996 biography “King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis,” unearthed a birth record that gave his first name as Jerome.
His parents, Danny and Rae Levitch, were entertainers — his father a song-and-dance man, his mother a pianist — who used the name Lewis when they appeared in small-time vaudeville and at Catskills resort hotels. The Levitches were frequently on the road and often left Joey, as he was called, in the care of Rae’s mother and her sisters. The experience of being passed from home to home left Mr. Lewis with an enduring sense of insecurity and, as he observed, a desperate need for attention and affection.
An often bored student at Union Avenue School in Irvington, N.J., he began organizing amateur shows with and for his classmates, while yearning to join his parents on tour. During the winter of 1938-39, his father landed an extended engagement at the Hotel Arthur in Lakewood, N.J., and Joey was allowed to go along. Working with the daughter of the hotel’s owners, he created a comedy act in which they lip-synced to popular recordings.
By his 16th birthday, Joey had dropped out of Irvington High and was aggressively looking for work, having adopted the professional name Jerry Lewis to avoid confusion with the nightclub comic Joe E. Lewis. He performed his “record act” solo between features at movie theaters in northern New Jersey, and soon moved on to burlesque and vaudeville.
Part one of a couple of YouTube uploads of a 1965 interview Lewis did with David Susskind:
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