Dean and Me: A Love Story (23 page)

It worked beautifully. It let Frank be funny on stage, and it finally demonstrated to the world what a brilliant comic Dean was. He could do absolutely anything.

Dean still wasn’t about to go out drinking and hell-raising with Frank and the others. But the act paved the way for him to get on stage with Frank, Sammy, Peter, and Joey. It wouldn’t take long before the Rat Pack was complete.

If I was making a serious stab at being the King of Show Business, Dean was giving me a serious run for my money. I sure didn’t have to feel guilty anymore. But I also sure missed him: We hadn’t spoken in over two years, and if I’d known then that it would be eighteen years more, I don’t think I would have survived.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

LIFE MOVES ALONG BY ITS OWN MYSTERIOUS SETS OF RULES. By the mid-1960s, Dean and I were in totally separate orbits, in our work and our private lives. For seven years, Patti, our six sons, and I had been living in Louis B. Mayer’s old house on St. Cloud Road in Bel Air. Dean, Jeannie, and their large brood lived in a big place on Mountain Drive in Beverly Hills, just a mile or two away. It might as well have been a hundred miles—our paths never crossed.

I’m sure many young fans were only vaguely aware that we’d once been a team. Dean had continued recording, building strength on strength: In 1964, the year the Beatles invaded America, he knocked them off the top of the charts with his hit “Everybody Loves Somebody.” He’d also continued making movies—fun ones like
Ocean’s Eleven
and
Robin and the 7 Hoods
, and, of course, Westerns, like
The Sons of Katie Elder
. Whether the pictures sank or swam, there was no denying he was a major international star. And after years of doing successful TV specials for NBC, in 1965 he signed a multimillion-dollar deal with the network to star in his own weekly series. In various incarnations, as
The Dean Martin Show, The Dean Martin Comedy
Hour,
and
Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts,
it would become one of the most successful shows of all time, running until 1984.

Meanwhile, I was trying to concentrate on filmmaking. I made sixteen movies in the 1960s, and either produced, directed, or wrote (or did some combination of the three) on ten of them. Features like
The Bellboy
,
The Ladies’ Man
, and
The Nutty Professor
were hits.

Television was more up and down. After a successful stint guesthosting on the
Tonight Show
, I tried a couple of series, a variety show, and a talk/variety show that didn’t quite jell. And in 1965, the same year Dean’s TV career soared to a new level, I suffered an on-air disaster.

I was doing a guest spot on
The Andy Williams Show
, with a dance number like a thousand dance numbers I’d done before. Andy Williams, his chorus girls, and me, all singing and high-stepping around the stage—except that all of a sudden I hit a little wet spot and went down like a ton of bricks.

Everyone around me figured I was just doing another one of my pratfalls—after all, I’d been throwing myself around on stage for a good twenty-five years. The director kept the tape rolling and I finished the number.

Then I went straight to the hospital.

I had not only fractured my skull, I’d also taken a chip out of my spinal column, and the results were disastrous: nausea, dizziness, double vision, and horrendous pain. The doctors put my neck in a metal brace and prescribed codeine and Empirin.

The pain got worse.

Over the next year, the doctors eventually told me, a fibrous knot built up around my spinal injury. The pain became constant and agonizing. The medicine they gave me didn’t touch it. Heat and massage didn’t help.

Then one of my doctors prescribed Percodan.

To my absolute astonishment, one pill made me feel like a human being again. The pain that had affected every waking moment, every interaction, suddenly receded, restoring my smile and leaving me free to think about all the things people normally think about. The pain was still there, of course, but in the background, always reminding me that it might come back full-force whenever it chose.

I didn’t want any pain at all. And so, after a little while, I tried taking a second pill during the day. Bingo—no more pain! Suddenly, I was head over heels in love with Percodan. It felt like the best thing that had ever happened to me. But I couldn’t help wondering: If two pills made me feel this good, what would happen if I took a third?

I felt even better.

The third pill had nothing to do with pain; it was all about elation. On three Percodans a day, in the mid- to late-sixties, I felt just the way I wanted to feel—a bit larger than life. Buoyant. Optimistic. Funny.

Then, little by little, the third pill wasn’t doing it for me anymore. And so I took a fourth.

By the early seventies, I have to admit, Dean was not the first person on my mind. I knew he and Jeannie had divorced in 1969, and I felt terrible about it. Jeannie and I had had our conflicts—we both loved the same man, after all!—but I still thought she was a great woman. I still think so. To this day, I believe she was the true love of Dean’s life. The relationships he had afterward were all just flings.

But it was hard for me to concentrate on anyone else’s problems but my own. I had a lot going on, and not much of it (with the exception of the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethons and the film course I taught at USC) was good. For one thing, my son Gary, who’d had a successful recording career himself in the mid-sixties before enlisting in the Army and going to Vietnam, came back from the war a wreck, unable to sleep, unable to erase the horrible images of combat from his mind.

Then, in 1972, Frank Tashlin died. Later that year, my dad had a stroke.

Professionally, things weren’t going much better. The kind of family films I’d been making for a quarter of a century was rapidly going out of style. I was losing my fan base: Kids were staying at home watching television, and a new sort of audience was coming to movie theaters, one that was more in the mood for sex and violence than comedy. Suddenly, I was having trouble financing my pictures. I made a serious Holocaust film called
The Day the Clown Cried
and lost two million dollars out of my own pocket when my producer skipped town, leaving me unable to finish postproduction. The movie has never been seen. It was like losing a child.

A couple of years earlier, I’d gone into business with a big company called Network Cinema Corporation to start a chain of Jerry Lewis Cinemas around the country. The theaters would only show G-rated pictures. But with the increasing scarcity of that kind of product, the cinemas were running into financial trouble. In 1973, a group of frustrated theater franchisees hit me with a $3 million lawsuit and won.

And then there was Percodan.

By the early seventies, I was up to six of the yellow beauties a day. I’d developed a whole ritual: I would take the first pill in the morning with hot water, believing that the heat and the liquid broke up the medicine and got it into my system faster. On a similar theory, I took the other pills, throughout the day, with Coca-Cola.

The pills kept me going, but there were physical repercussions you wouldn’t even want to hear about, deeply embarrassing things. My marriage was sputtering. I was on a mood roller-coaster, most often headed straight down: When I wasn’t furious, I could be mean as a snake.

On my twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, October 2, 1973, I felt I couldn’t watch the red second hand go around the clock face one more time. I locked myself into my bathroom, took a .38 pistol out of a pad-locked drawer, and stuck the barrel in my mouth. I cocked the hammer. I was ready to go. All the pain, all my troubles, would vanish. I sat there like that for what felt like forever. Then, through the door, I heard my boys, running and playing somewhere off in the house. I took the gun out of my mouth and locked it back in the drawer. I would struggle along somehow.

But there was still plenty of pain to come.

My career was down to two things: the Telethon and personal appearances. While I was on the road, I would often tip a hotel bellboy to come into my room in the morning with a passkey, crush three Percodans in a spoon, and dissolve them in hot water so I could take them and get my day started. I’d lie in bed for twenty minutes until the medicine kicked in, then I’d get up and pop a Dexadrine.

The funny thing was that performing was its own drug. It remains true to this day. No matter how shitty I feel when I get out of bed in the morning, the moment I step onto a stage, the adrenaline takes over. Back then, I would often avoid taking the Percodans before I performed, so my head would stay relatively clear and my timing would be sharper.

After I got off the stage, it was another story.

While I did a number of shows drug-free in those days, there was such a thick haze of Percodan before and after that it’s hard for me to remember them. In fact, I’m ashamed to say that there’s an entire block of MDA Telethons—some four or five years in the mid- and late-seventies—that I have no recollection of whatsoever.

Except one.

I was on stage at the Sahara in Vegas, doing “Telethon ’76,” for the greatest cause on the planet (of course, I’m prejudiced). As I was singing “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” I found myself thinking,
Why do I feel something’s about to happen?

I finished the number and introduced Frank Sinatra, who came on to a standing ovation ... just for being there. He sang a couple of songs and stopped the show cold—as he always did. Then Frank and I talked about his healthy grandchildren, and he made a five-thousand-dollar contribution to the Telethon. While I was thanking him, he interrupted, saying, “I have a friend who watches what you do here every year and thinks it’s terrific. I’d like to have him come out.” Frank then yelled, “Hey, send my friend out here, will ya?”

And out walked Dean Martin, my partner, and I was in a time warp. My hands got sweaty, my mouth turned dry. I tried to stand tall as he approached me, and we hugged hard, very hard. He kissed me on the cheek, and I did the same to him. The audience in the theater was going wild! For the first time in twenty years, we stood side by side—as always, Dean stage right, me stage left. “I think it’s about time, don’t you?” Frank said. The two of us nodded yes in tandem. We talked ... a little. I prayed to God for something to say that wouldn’t make me sound like an emotional idiot.

“You workin’?” I finally asked, looking directly into Dean’s eyes.

I wish I could say Dean and I reconnected then and there, but it took a little while. I had to get my own house in order first. My spine pain was like an insatiable monster. I was living in a private world of agony and addiction, and my family saw me—when they saw me—at my worst. I kept those who had been nearest to me at the greatest distance, and some permanent emotional scars formed. My long-suffering wife suffered the most. My boys came a close second.

Meanwhile, I traveled around the world, not just performing but also seeking out doctors of every description, trying to find one who could bring me some relief. A famous surgeon said he’d be glad to operate on me, but that there was a good chance I’d get worse instead of better after the procedure, and a 50 percent chance that I’d be paralyzed for life. I’ve always liked to gamble, but I didn’t like those odds.

Friendship is priceless.

It seemed as though there was no way out. I don’t even like to think about the desperation I was feeling by 1978, when I was up to thirteen Percodans a day. Even hardened survivors of drug addiction get wide-eyed when they hear that number. My self-medication was a full-out assault on my internal organs.

Then fate stepped in, with a little sleight of hand. I’ve always liked magic tricks—the key is getting the audience to look one place while the trick happens somewhere else. It was a bit like that in my case: God played a card trick.

One night at the end of September, I was at the Sahara in Vegas, talking with the hotel’s music director, my pal Jack Eglash. Jack had always suffered from migraines, but that night he had a particularly incapacitating one. I got an idea. “Well, Jack,” I told him, “you should have a specialist check you out. As a matter of fact, there’s a top medical team at Methodist Hospital in Houston. I can call and make the arrangements.”

“Forget it,” Jack said. “I’m scared to death of doctors. And hospitals.”

But I’m a stubborn SOB, and for whatever reason, Jack’s case got me going. The next day, I phoned the world-famous heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey at Methodist Hospital. Michael had been a member of the MDA Scientific Advisory Committee since 1970, and over that time he’d also become my best friend. I talked with him at length about Jack’s condition, and Michael felt he ought to be seen. I had a room set aside for him at the hospital.

Jack dug his heels in. “I’m sorry, Jerry. I can’t do it. I’m not going.”

“Jack, Dr. DeBakey has a team of specialists waiting. Don’t be a baby. I’ll take you there myself.”

We were in Houston the next day. Jack was in his hospital room, getting a workup, and Michael DeBakey, his assistant, and I were headed down the hall to see him when I keeled over.

I came to in a hospital bed just a few doors down from Jack. Dr. DeBakey thought I’d had a heart attack—the pain in my stomach and chest was excruciating—but tests soon ruled out a coronary. When they X-rayed me, they found an ulcer the size of a lemon in my abdomen. The Percodan had masked the pain as the ulcer grew. Michael said that if it had remained undetected, I probably would have bled to death in two weeks.

Jack went home, but I stayed. When Michael sat down and talked to me about my condition, I fessed up about my addiction. He knew I’d been taking Percodan, but he’d thought it was two or three pills a day. When he heard what I’d actually been swallowing, he knew we had two goals: to eliminate the ulcer, and to kill the monkey on my back. Dr. DeBakey put me under heavy sedation, with a drip feeding me liquid nourishment, and gave me periodic steroid injections for the spinal pain. I lived in a twilight state for the next ten days as my blood circulated through an instrument and came back clean. When I woke up, my ulcer was gone and so was my addiction.