Dean and Me: A Love Story by James Kaplan, Jerry Lewis Page B

Wedgwood china. It was the same act we’d been doing since the 500 Club, but this was the
Copa
. Our pandemonium worked like gangbusters (literally!) in these classy but mobbed-up surroundings.
    We’d hit it just right. The Copa was the High Temple of nightclubs, but then and now, New York has always loved chutzpah. We were having a little fun with the Holy of Holies, getting right in its face.
    But remember this: An audience is like a jungle animal—it smells fear. It will turn in a second. What Dean and I did on that all-important night wouldn’t have worked nearly so well if the crowd hadn’t caught on, immediately, to our self-assurance (the tuxes helped) and the fun we were having together. This ultrasophisticated audience had never seen a two-act enjoy themselves, and each other, so much. It was like nothing these smart-ass New Yorkers expected, including the critics. (Cough!)
    We were supposed to do twenty-five minutes—and we were well aware of Podell’s ugly temper if you ran long—but we finally left the stage after fifty minutes, exhausted, with the crowd yelling for more.
    We walked off that stage as if we had wings. We flew to our dressing room, and had to come back for three encores, doing fresh shtick each time. In the dressing room, we had the stage monitor turned up so we could hear the applause.
    When it finally subsided, we heard the strains of the headliner’s music as the announcer introduced “the star of our show, Miss Vivian Blaine!” Almost sixty years later, people who were there still recall the eerie silence that followed that announcement. You know
A Night to
Remember
, the movie about the
Titanic
? Well, this was a night to remember, and Vivian Blaine was the
Titanic
.
    We were still listening on the monitor in our dressing room, changing our clothes as she began her opening number, a typical special-lyric song about how “I finally made it to the Copa” (probably written by Sammy Cahn, the special lyricist to the Hollywood heavyweights). At the finish of her number, the applause was something like what a white act, with no rhythm and singing off-key, might get at the Apollo Theater on amateur night. Vivian halfheartedly sang one more song, then left the stage in tears.
    There were at least a hundred people jammed in the hall outside our dressing-room door, waiting to tell us how we’d conquered New York. People were hugging us, kissing us, just wanting to touch us. Every once in a while, Dean and I would glance at each other, shaking our heads.
    Then Monte Proser, Julie Podell’s partner, stuck his head in the door with a grim look on his face. He was a short, balding, very natty fellow, always dressed to the nines—cuff links, stickpin, velvet-collared jacket, black-and-white shoes at the wrong time of year.
Very
natty. He whispered something in Greshler’s ear.
    “What was that all about?” Dean asked.
    “We have to be in Proser’s office as soon as the crowd clears out,” our agent said.
    Proser was sitting at his desk, shaking his head. “I’d be a damned fool if I did nothing about this show,” he told us. “It’s all wrong.”
    Greshler instantly went on the defensive. “Wrong? They took three encores, got a standing ovation—where the hell did you see wrong?”
    “It’s not them I’m talking about,” Proser said. “Vivian Blaine is the problem. After what happened tonight, there’s no way for her to headline. So I’m going with Martin and Lewis. I’m putting her in the opening slot.”
    I glanced over at Dean. He had a pipe stuck in his mouth, and he was doing Eddie Cantor banjo eyes. Leave it to my partner to cut up at the most important moment in our career. But that was Dean’s way of handling big moments.
    Poor Vivian quit the next morning. What else could she do?
    And Podell and Proser extended our engagement at the Copa for twelve weeks, at $5,000 a week.
    It was like stepping onto a merry-go-round spinning at a thousand miles an hour. Between