Still Nutty

The Dyed-black hair is now fully gray, the face jowly and furrowed, but Jerry Lewis keeps going at a pace that would make much younger men wheeze. At 86, he still travels the U.S. to do a one-man stage show (the latest, in early July, at the FireLake Grand Casino in Shawnee, Okla.); pops in and out of New York City for events at the Friars Club, which keeps coming up with new ways of honoring him; gets rushed to the hospital; recuperates; and bounces back for more.

Now America’s most outspoken clown is pursuing one last, and some would say impossible, dream: to direct his first Broadway musical. The show is The Nutty Professor, based on his 1963 movie about a nerdy chemistry professor who transforms, Jekyll-and-Hyde-like, into a sleazy, lady-killing lounge singer named Buddy Love, and it has brought him for much of a very hot summer to Nashville, where he’s mounting a production of the show at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. The musical is better than you might expect, with a tuneful score by the late Marvin Hamlisch, a solid book by Rupert Holmes and a terrific lead performance by newcomer Michael Andrew, reprising Lewis’ famous dual role under the guidance of the man who created it. “I’m walking a mile in an out-of-body experience,” says Lewis. “This kid is going to be the biggest star ever on Broadway.”

If so, it will be a triumph for Lewis as well, following what surely was the most humiliating blow in his long, protean and often combative career. A year ago, he was unceremoniously dumped as host of the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) telethon, his annual Labor Day showcase for 45 years. The breakup was abrupt and mysterious. First the MDA announced that Lewis was retiring from his on-air role but would make a goodbye appearance at the end of the show. Then, after a few weeks, came a curt announcement that he would not appear to say goodbye after all and had resigned as the MDA’s national chairman.

The circumstances have not been explained, and Lewis still won’t talk about it. “That’s not a place I want to go to,” he says when I raise the subject. “Because if I go there, you’ll never get me back.” But bitterness obviously remains. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it. But I have already ingested all that I want from that whole f—ing adventure.” Clearly he was forced out, and the cancellation of his farewell spot apparently came after he and the MDA brass couldn’t agree on its length and format. (Jerry wanted it live; the MDA wanted it taped.) Without him, the telethon seems to be withering. This year’s show will be a mere three hours long (down from last year’s six and from 21-plus in the Lewis era), with no announced host and no tote board tallying donations. “We honor Jerry Lewis, we admire the work he’s done for us, and we respect his decision to retire,” says interim MDA president Valerie Cwik. Yet nowhere in the press announcement of this year’s show is the name Jerry Lewis mentioned.

Nonetheless, Lewis seems to have moved on, focused and re-energized. He lives in Las Vegas, where he settled 33 years ago to escape the Los Angeles traffic (“Now I’ve moved to a city that’s double worse than that,” he says), retreating occasionally to his 75-ft. yacht in San Diego. His second wife, Sam–a former dancer 25 years his junior whom he met in Miami and married in 1983–tends to him devotedly. In June, after he was hospitalized in New York City, she got him to trim a three-week stay for Nutty Professor rehearsals and return home. “Got him some home cooking, he did physical therapy to get stronger, every day at home for a few weeks, and it made a world of difference,” she says.

One-Man Show

There’s something both poignant and heroic about Lewis these days as he battles age, physical frailties and the fading memories of his “Hey, Laaaaaady!” glory days. He’s had two mild heart attacks in the past six years. In June 2011 he had to cut short a personal-appearance tour in Australia when he was hospitalized for exhaustion. Two months ago, he was rushed to the hospital again in New York after he fainted because of low blood sugar, the result of diabetes. He gets around with a motorized scooter (he can walk but needs helps for long distances) and is so hard of hearing that he uses an earpiece contraption hooked up to a tape recorder to amplify voices. He can sometimes wander off the subject, lose his train of thought or grope for names–hardly unusual for an octogenarian but still frustrating. Perched on a director’s chair in a theater dressing room in Nashville, he stops at one point in our conversation and asks for a pad of lined paper. On it he scrawls, a little shakily, a large number 75.

“Before I was 75,” he says, “I would think of something in an interview like this–I wish I could remember what I was about to tell you, but I forgot. That’s what’s happening to me. I set up the story, but I’m forgetting the finish.” An assistant hands him a glass of water, and he takes a sip. “Where’s Mama?” he asks, looking around for Sam, who is usually by his side but has left briefly for an errand.

The famous ego is still on full display, along with a certain defensiveness and a hint of grievances unresolved. Asked to describe his one-man stage show, Lewis calls it “2 hours of f—ing marvelous entertainment. I think what I give the audience is sensational.” Why does he think the French are, famously, his biggest fans? “Because they’re smart.” Who makes him laugh today? “Anyone who’s qualified,” he snaps. (Pressed to name some of the qualifiers, he cites Robin Williams and Billy Crystal.)

He holds no love for a film industry that basically rejected him 40 years ago–after 10 years as one half of the most popular comedy team in America (with Dean Martin) and an additional 15 as a solo comedy star and innovative director of many of his own films, starting with The Bellboy in 1960. “I giggle at the stupidity of people in our industry,” he says. “We live in a mimic-like business. If something’s good, there’s five associate producers that are gonna put it together for a Monday talk-through with their producer. Star Wars–we had 17 movies about it! All of those people haven’t the capacity to originate anything.”

The films he most enjoys are traditional heart-warmers like The Notebook. He hates digital special effects. “That’s not movies,” he says. “The thing that’s missing is that when you see a hero in a movie, he’s not really appreciating what he’s done.” He reaches for the name of director James Cameron. “What he’s done with Titanic and all the accoutrements that go with it is amazing. Now he’s got Avatar. The first week, they did as much money as all the other films did together. And it’s a piece of s—. You should pardon my expression.”

Lewis’ annual Labor Day marathon of sentiment, self-regard and showbiz schmaltz made him for years something of a punch line. (“You know why they love Jerry Lewis in France?” a comedian told me not long ago. “In France, they don’t get the telethon.”) But his work raised an estimated $2 billion for “Jerry’s kids,” and he’s hung around long enough to be enjoying a warm, late-career reappraisal. Jerry Seinfeld, Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino were among those singing his praises in a recent cable-TV documentary, Jerry Lewis: A Method to the Madness. Richard Belzer, a stand-up comic and co-star of Law & Order, has developed a close, almost father-son relationship with him. “He has become a very centered elder statesman,” Belzer says. “He has come back from adversity even more whole.”

The Great Crusade

Lewis has a new movie role on his agenda: playing an 85-year-old man trying to age with dignity in Max Rose, from a “beautiful script” by Daniel Noah. But The Nutty Professor is his great, career-capping crusade. Getting it to Broadway is far from a sure thing. Lewis has never directed a Broadway show (he’s acted in only one, the 1995 revival of Damn Yankees), and he’s 86, two facts that many theater insiders view as stumbling blocks. But he claims that directing for the stage has come easily for him. “You’re putting out the same energy,” he says of theater vs. movies. “You’re just more attuned to the work you’re having reproduced. You have to be careful. You can’t get sloppy.”

“He’s got incredible instincts,” says Andrew, the show’s star, who began doing Nutty Professor imitations at age 9–and first proposed the musical (with his manager, Ned McLeod, now the show’s producer) to Lewis seven years ago. “He’s fascinating. He’s complicated. He reaches so deep into his own soul that it’s touching.” The perfect setup, it would seem, for an aging comedy superstar who still craves the attention, and the love. “These young people that I’m working with, they’re awestruck,” says Lewis. Just call them Jerry’s kids.