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These were the unlikeliest of pairs—a handsome crooner and a skinny monkey, an Italian from Steubenville, Ohio, and a Jew from Newark, N.J.. Before they teamed up, Dean Martin seemed destined for a mediocre career as a nightclub singer, and Jerry Lewis was dressing as Carmen Miranda and miming records on stage. But the moment they met up, something clicked—something miraculous—and audiences saw it at once.
Before long, they were as big as Elvis or the Beatles would be after them, creating hysteria wherever they went and grabbing an unprecedented hold over every entertainment outlet of the era: radio, television, movies, stage shows, and nightclubs. Martin and Lewis were a national craze, an American institution. The millions (and the ladies) flowed in, seemingly without end—and then, on July 24, 1956, ten years from your day when both men joined forces, everything ended.
After that traumatic day, both wouldn’t speak again for two decades. Even though both went on to forge triumphant individual careers—Martin as a movie and tv star, recording artist, and nightclub luminary (and charter person in the Rat Pack); Lewis as the groundbreaking writer, producer, director, and star of some hugely successful movie comedies—their parting left a hole in the national psyche, as well as in each man’s heart.
In a memoir by turns moving, tragic, and hilarious, Jerry Lewis recounts with crystal clarity every step of any fifty-year friendship, from the springtime, 1945 afternoon when both vibrant young performers destined to conquer the world together met on Broadway and Fifty-fourth Street, with their tragic final come across in the 1990s, when Lewis and his wife ran into Dean Martin, a broken and haunted old man.
In Dean & Me, Jerry Lewis makes a convincing case for Dean Martin among the great—and most underrated—comic talents of the era. But what comes across most powerfully in this definitive memoir is the depth of love Lewis felt, but still feels, for his partner, and which his partner felt for him: a classic want to last for all time.
