Jerry Lewis’ Agent Dispels the Three Biggest Myths About the Comedy Legend
Rick Saphire, who managed Jerry Lewis for the last decade and a half of his life, says parsing fact from fiction about the comedy legend is no easy feat. “I always used to say that the two worst places to go for factual information about Jerry Lewis would be the internet and Jerry Lewis himself,” Saphire tells me.
The truth is out there, though, in the form of Saphire’s book, The REAL Jerry Lewis Story: A Memoir, which he released last year. In it, Saphire shares his own personal journey with Lewis, including how he first met him in 1953 at age six, then became his protege at age nine, and decades later, in the early 2000s, became Lewis’ manager. And with the use of birth certificates, draft cards, newspaper articles and personal accounts, Saphire refutes the common falsehoods Lewis loved to perpetuate.
This article not your thing? Try these...
While he’s the first to admit that Lewis was a difficult man, Saphire also loved Lewis dearly and hopes the public gets to know his true self. So, in honor of Lewis’ 99th birthday, he offers up three of these myths and the truth behind them.
Jerry Lewis’ Real Name Has a Dark Origin Story
Jerry Lewis' name was never Joseph Levitch, which you’ll read all over the internet, including Wikipedia. There are some very dramatic reasons why Jerry lied about his real birth name, which was Jerome Levitch.
In school, Jerry was Jerome Levitch, and he kept getting thrown out of school. It happened in Newark, New Jersey and Irvington, New Jersey, here and there, largely because he was a wacky kid. He was always getting himself into trouble.
Jerry admitted on a TV program — but he didn't admit the whole thing — that he beat up his high school principal at Irvington High School, supposedly because the principal made an ethnic slur about the Jews. Jerry supposedly took exception to that and punched him so hard that the principal went through a plate glass window and fell to the ground.
When Jerry attacked the principal he was immediately expelled, but for the rest of his life, Jerry believed he might have been responsible for the principal's death because he died a year after Jerry’s attack. Over the years, nobody knew the cause of death, but I tracked it down. It happened to be a rare form of stomach cancer that he’d been diagnosed with a couple of weeks after Jerry attacked him.
In 1943, Jerry had no idea that he was going to become a big star. In 1945, he had a son and they were living in Newark, which neighbored Irvington, and he figured his son would probably wind up going to school in Newark, New Jersey. The name Jerome Levitch was poison because rumor had it that Jerome Levitch might have killed this principal, so he started using Joseph Levitch. He never knew that he wasn’t responsible for the principal’s death, so he continued to perpetuate the myth for decades afterwards.
When Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis First Started Clowning Around
The story that everybody knows about how Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin first teamed up on stage is that Jerry was working at the 500 Club in Atlantic City in 1946, and they needed a singer because the singer got sick. So, Jerry recommended his friend Dean Martin and that was the first time they worked together. This story has been going around forever, and it's totally untrue. Even the name of the club is wrong, as it was still called the 500 Cafe then.
By that time, Dean and Jerry already had about three months of experience working together at the Havana Madrid Nightclub in New York City. The owner of that club, Angel Lopez, was the one who put Martin and Lewis together. They first performed separately, and they were billed separately, with Dean as a singer and Jerry as a record mime. But then they did an aftershow where you kind of let your hair down and Martin and Lewis would clown together, and they did that for three months before they went to the 500 Cafe.
A Very 1940s Secret Behind His Marriage Date
At the time that they were married, Jerry Lewis’ first wife was a very popular big band singer named Patty Palmer. Every place you read about Jerry and his first wife, you read the wrong year that they were married and the wrong information about the birth of their son, Gary Lewis. The reason why there was so much wrong information is because, back in the mid-1940s, they had to cover their tracks: Gary Lewis was born just three months after Patty and Jerry were married.
Nowadays people wouldn’t really care very much, but in those days, if you had a child out of wedlock it was a killer. And, even if you were married, if you had a kid right after, people would figure out that it wasn’t the full nine months.