CREEMEDIA

Descriptions Of A Schizoid Spazz

CREEMEDIA

by Robot A. Hull

The Ritual of the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon: Drenched in That Greasy Kid Stuff, Jerry Lewis, striding in long circles at a gazelle's pace, mocks the sanctimony of the M.D. ceremony by repeatedly stumbling over his own feet. Abruptly he stops clowning, lights a filter-tipped Kool, blows smoke at the camera, and stares into his TV audience, Daddy-O Guilt already breathing hot down their clammy necks. Speaking an interminable harangue, Lewis clumsily gropes toward the abstracts of morality, feeling himself flounder. "All everybody really wants once in a while is a hug. Is that so much?" He picks up a discarded 7-Up bottle and begins sucking on it—"I want my Na-Na!" It's as if he goes through his comic moves reflexijVely, possessed by the complicated twitch of a demented disease. In fact, so similar are Lewis's antics to the movements of gimps, that the sick rumors still hover in the background—that he has sired an illegitimate offspring inflicted with M.D., or that he is paying penance for his career of cruelly ridiculing the afflicted.

But Lewis is too zealous, too schmaltzy, too sentimental to be that kind of slug. On the 13th Annual M.D. Telethon, he paid tribute to amputee > Totie Fields by showing a videotape of her, singing. He warned local affiliates that it would be quite an emotional moment. After Totie's warbling, there was a close-up of Jerry's face, streaked with the torrential tears of a clown. Jerry sobbed to the camera: "Gimme r some money, you pussycats, or I'll pound your faces in!"

. .. Lewis stops sucking the empty bottle. He sits down on a stool to rest, center stage, and starts combing his oily hair. There's a pause as he glances at the tote -board. Intent as a soldier in a * foxhole, he pulls a cigarette from its pack and quickly crams it up his nose.

The Joseph Leuitch Story : Born March 16,1926, in Newark, New Jersey. Even before he became Jerry Lewis, Joe Levitch had a rep as a cross-eyed, skinny teenager—in high school the kids called him "Id," short for Idiot. Kid Joe would have identified strongly with Holden Caulfield. (Lewis once tried to buy Salinger's Catcher In The Rye for movie rights, but Salinger refused.) He worked as a bus boy and bellboy before he went into burlesque. Lewis's routines were adapted from the "lip-sync" act of Reginald Gardiner, who had gained recognition in America by imitating wallpaper.

Strange But True: Jerry Lewis compulsively eats Indian nuts, buying them by the 25-lb. bag—the trunks of his cars are stocked with boxes of them. Every week a barber cutsjLewis's hair with a lawn mover. Lewis has written ' (and published himself) a book called Instruction Book For Being A Person, which contains his philosophy. His house is bugged with microphones and concealed cameras so that everything can constantly be recorded on tape or film. (One bug was given to him by J. Edgar Hoover.) Jerry's dog's name is Irving, and his yacht's name is Pussycat. J. L. has had several TV programs (though nothing as successful as his Labor Day .Telethons) —The Jerry Lewis Show (variety/talk-live, ran 13 weeks, '63, ABC), a variety series on NBC, '67-'69, and Will The Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down? (cartoons based upon the Lewis films, ABC '70-'72); he also substituted regularly on The TonighiShow, post-Paar'and pre-Carson. Lewis had a big hit with Jolson's "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby" \ (Decca) and released an LP, Jerry Lewis Just Sings, but his no. 1 son , Gary (with the Playboys), was more creative in the music dept., shaping bubblegum pop into a fine art . (This Jerry Lewis, of course, is in no way related to that rockabilly lunatic of an identical moniker.) When Lewis plays Vegas, the sweat has to be wrung out of his suit hourly.

Dr. Jekyll Vs. Mg. Hyde: The team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis was unusual for a cpmedy duo. Most comedy teams (Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy) Coexist through madness in defiance of an ogreish world. But Martin and Lewis created comedy through the tension of competitive disparity (both sexual and professional), which really was no act—-their incompatibility was quite genuine. .

The team's first TV appearance was on The Milton Berle Show. They danced the kangaroo hop and hogged the camera, making Uncle Miltie look like a dead oak. When Lewis interrupted a commercial to say, "Milton Berle night! Big deal!," Martin and Lewis became instant hits.

Dino and Jerry made sixteen films together (Frank Tashlin's Artists And Models and HollywoodQr Bust, the two best). Their basic conflict was over the concept of comedy to be used in these films. Martin preferred wild slapstick and nonsensical humor whereas Lewis believed that one could sustain laughter, not with a pie in the face, but with a puppy on one's lap.

This aesthetic disagreement hampered their work, as exemplified in some radio spots they were recording to promote their movie The Caddy in 1953: Dean and Jerry couldn't seem to get through them straight. The crew had just finished taping a 50-sqcond spot when Jerry tagged it with, "See Paramount's The Caddy . . . it'll make you shit!" Lotsa laughter. Dino to the Kid: "You ready? YojU'ain't doin'a fuckin'thing! You're just standing there." They tried.to record the spot again, but Jerry flubbed his first line and then called everybody "cocksuckers." On the next attempt , Dean flubbed it and Jerry yelle/d "Greaseball!" "Five fuckin' lines and we can't get through it," mumbled Martin. With the crew's encouragement, they finally recorded the spot, except at the end Jerry tagged, "See The Caddy . . . with a big cockonit."

None of the Martin-Lewis movies, were directed by Lewis, so it may have been his artistic desires that finally split up the team. Dean Martin has said that things first begaVi to go bad between them when Lewis read a book on Chaplin and then became worse when Lewis bought a Brownie camera and took a picture of a lamp.

In 1963, Lewis retaliated against his former pal's philistinism by directing The Nutty Professor , which features the re-creation of Dean Martin in the Hyde-like Buddy Love. As Andrew Sarris has observed, it isLewis's best film because it contains the rebirth of the Martin-Lewis tension. In terms of the audience's empathy, compared to Lewis's slobbering Jekyll-Professor, the suave Buddy (Dino) Love didn't stand a chance.

Auteur Moronica: American critics rank Lewis's films just a notch above those of Francis the Talking Mule. Primarily, it's French aesthetes who admire the Lewis oeuvre, revering the spastic director as if he were the logical successor to Chaplin's throne. Certainly Lewis has always emulated Chaplin, and he does share Chaplin's ability to be human in the face of adversity. Yet despite Lewis's* admirable aspirations, he's too much of a gawky goof to match the physical grace, say; of Chaplin's ballet with a global balloon in The Great Dictator.

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

(Directed by Jerry Lewis, unless otherwise noted.)

WITH DEAN MARTIN

1949 My Friend/rma (George Marshall)

1952 Jumping Jacks (Norman Taurog)

1953 The Stooge (Norman Taurog)

The Caddy (NormanTaurog)

1955 Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin)

1956 Hollywood Or Bust (Frank Tashlin)

SOLO:

1957 The Delicate Delinquent (Don McGuire)

"The Sad Sack (George Marshall)

1958 Rock-a-Bye Baby (Frank Tashlin)

The Geisha Boy (Frank Tashlin)

1960 The Bellboy

1961 The Errand Boy

1962 It'sOnly Money (FrankTashlin)

1963 The Nutty Professor

1964 The Patsy

lt965 The Family Jewels

1966 Three On A Couch

Way.. . Way Out (Gordon Douglas)

1967 The Big Mouth

Restricted to their visual elements, The Bellboy, The Errand Boy and The Patsy are hilarious films. As the comic performer in these films, Lewis jerks around like Gumby dancing the watusi. Unfortunately, his films fall short when the time arises for verbal wit (whereas Chaplin could manipulate both silence &nd sound). Stripped bare, the films of Jerry Lewis resemble cartoons as they might be animated by a certain Melvin Cowznofski, better known as Alfred E. Newman.

Heave Ho!: Once after Jerry Lewis had guest-hosted on The Tonight Show, he received a special delivery letter that simply read: "I was truly astounded by your ability toxonverse. " Lewis hastily scrawled this snappy reply: "What did you think I'd do . . . vomit?"

A Kid At Heart : In Richard Gehman's biography of Jerry Lewis, That Kid, there's an anecdote about Lewis, while performing, getting a bug stuck in his ear. Being a big shot, he is immediately rushed to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.

Entering the lobby, Lewis sees a small boy sitting on a table, crying, scared to death. He walks over and puts his hand on the boy's shoulder. There is a huge boil just below the boy's left ear. "Does it hurt, pal?" Lewis asks in a whisper. The boy nods, whimpering uncontrollably. "You know what I got, kid? I got a bug in my ear. Isn't that too much? It feels like it's a big brown caterpillar and he's got a hundred of his relatives in there." The child smiles.

A doctor enters the scene. Still clowning, Lewis says, "It feels like there's a Goodyear blimp in my ear, doc. " The doctor squirts warm water into Lewis's ear while acute pain begins to register over the mask of the idiot's face. "That last try got him," says the doc, holding a drowned bug triumphantly in front of Lewis, whose teeth are exposed in a ferocious grin.

Lewis thanks the good doctor, starts to exit, but after two steps, Whirls and returns to the little boy still sitting on the table. "What's your name, pal?" "Larry." "How old are you, Larry?" "Seven."

"Why, isn't that a coincidence?!" Lewis exclaims, genuinely started. "I'm seven, too. Nokiddin', I am I'm seven years old. " He talks quietly with the child for another five minutes, aqd when he is through, one more child is laughing.

The doctor, staring at the bug still betweep his thumb and forefinger, says to himself, "I think I'll take this home to show to my kids."

OK, Hose Down Them Stones Fans One More Time

HEROES OF ROCK 'N* ROLL (ABC)

Produced by Malcom Leo,/Andrew Solt

We all know what to expect from a TV "rockumentary" by now, right? A few mangled filrrt clips of old groups that're as unfamiliar as something you'd find in a strange refrigerator. A stilted photo-collage or two of the Beatles dressing up snowmen and Elvis aiming a bazooka at his snooze alarm. The dreaded I-remernber interview with Kenny Loggins ("I remember the first time 1 saw HeeHaw .. ."). And, of course,va Heartfelt Tribute to Burt Sugarman by host Wolfman Jack.

That is, until ABC's Heroes Of Rock 'N' Roll came along and finally demonstrated that rock on the tube can hold onto an attention span longer than that of table salt. For once, the clips were excellent and often obscure, the music continuous and the narration low-key, minus the usual "hey you dummies, this is history" claptrap.

Although Jeff Bridges seemed rather an odd choice as host, he established his credentials early on by naming "Fingertips Pt. 2" or anything else by blind guys as his top tune. Bridges, to paraphrase his own estimation of Alan Freed j came off as a vaguely out-of-it actor whose heart is in the right place. That's right—Sandusky, Ohio.

Heroes was packed with highlights both musical and Kultcheral. On the pop side, there were vintage clips of Bill IHaley coining the word "daddeo" and Pat BoOne, posing next to a FREE AIR AN D WATER sign, as the free air. An Elvis segment featured outtakes from Kurt Russell's greatest films—including that hilarious moment in The Boatniks where Kurt squats on a dinghy—while* the Beatles appeared in a rare take from their Cavern days, playing "Some Other Gu£" to a curiously preoccupied crowd. Early Clash fans.

The more recent performers were somewhat less exciting, such as Janis Joplin humiliating a mike stand, Jefferson Airplane with the dry-look Gracie and the Byrds on Shindig demonstrating their trademark survival-of-the-fittestlive harmonies, a technique later perfected in Fleetwood Mac's performance of "Go Your Own Way," where Stevie Nicks' voice writes a new chapter in the history of raccoon torture.

Newsworthy items included Spots from several foresighted rock-as-menace movies, the winner being the Reverend Adamsapple's warning to parents that rock 'n' roll would be the downfall of the white1 race. And this before disco! Deja huh? struck as well in a 50's high school dress code film featuring Debbie Harry as all of the DON'Ts, a rock festival shot where nitwits scrawl f-u-c-k in the mud and a newsreel of German police hosing down a mob of lip-hungry Stones fans, something I'd like to see more of today.

Aside from fast music and funny pictures, the real point of the show was neatly summed up when a reporter asked Alan Freed, "Do you really think there's room for integrity in the rock 'n' roll business?" Freed rolls hi? . Nixon-fishy eyes arid mumbles "yeah, uh, sure" as a small jar of white powder spills out of his pocket onto the naked woman clutching $100 bills who's licking his shoes. Integrity? What do you think we've been trying to do away with the last twenty-five years?

Rick Johnson

Drank Drivers From Outer Space

DELTA HOUSE (ABC) "

BROTHERS AND SISTERS (NBC)

COED FEVER (CBS) __

Isn't college life cute? Living with thirty-five roommates in a cinderblock hovel originally designed as a pompom sweatshop; playing the beloved Elevator To The Tombs prank on > unsuspecting freshies; chugging Old Sardine at bars with names like Luv Kage and Chesthair's and waking to hangovers that leave your mouth tasting like you'd dined on street signs the night before. No, collegetisn't cute, it's adorable.

^t least that's what the screen-weins out in Video Village have decided. In a programming laSt-gasp unprecedented since the late 60's wave of Nehru-jacketed "youth shows," all three major networks (ABC, CPA and na-na-na) have trotted out their own watered-down versions of the monumentally detrimental National Lampoon 's Animal House.

Talkabout watered down, these three shows—ABC's Delta House, NBC's Brothers And Sisters, and CBS' Coed Fever (since cancelled) — are so damp with filler that they should be reviewed with a bucket under the set. What the network tube rubes have failed to grasp is that the success of Animal House w&s due to it's npt being a study in plastic grossness. What I want to know is, if these guys are so rich, howcum they ain't smart?

Delta House, which carries over some of the actors and bigwigs from the film, is the funniest of the lot. It's the good assholes of Delta vs. the bad assholes of Omega, although any frat that won't admit folksingers doesn't sound so bad to me. Still, yotf can't help but hate Omega boss Niedermeyer, kvhqhasthe permanent expression of someone who's just sat on PearkBailey's kisser, or Dean Wormer, who apparently took his last shit in 1948.

The Deltas are so toned down you could paint a nurses' station with them. The one exception is Josh Mostel as Blotto, the you nger brother of Bluto, whom Wormer refers to as "that distant cousin of manBuilt like the combined glands of the Three Stooges piled on sneakers, Blotto's porkpie mind is the only lovable quantity in a cast of blankopaths like fatso Flounder, whose entire body has Ugly Panty Lines, D-Day, a sorry reject from the Village People, or chapter prez Hoover, who has obviously studied too many novels with heroines named Rebecca.

The writing will make any self-suspecting Happy Days fan cringe with recognition. Take this Expert Plot Summary from the second episode: "Flounder gets caught cheating, Blotto gets mad from constant picking, Niedermeyer pushes hirn too far, they all yell and laughDeep stuff, huh? You could almost bury a script in it! Actually, the only purpose of the plots is to set the stage for some Little Rascals-styled clowning at the end. The Sha Na Na show set to words.

NBC's BrothersAnd Sisters has nothing to do with "I wanna see a sea o' hands" and a lot to do with Room 222+ only taller. This one's set in the actual 70's thus giving NBC another opportunity to inject a bunch of "now" music. Oh yeah, it be hep. Just pad of that network's plan to stun America with their totally strange programming.

The characters on B&S are virtually interchangable with those of Delta. The only standout is Zipper (Jon Cutler), the outcast hippie-type whose body moves as though it's being controlled by drunk drivers from outer space. A couple of big names taste the dregs of fame in this one: Chris Lemmon, Jack's son, lives up to his complete lack of advance billing and Mary Frances Crosby, who had this poor eye-suck out searching for a sperm enlarger, suffered permanent damage to her image when a Crosby family orange juice commercialturned up in one episode. But does she squeeze her own?

Enough torture, we won't `even discuss the writing except to say that it's certainly the equal of CBS' Coed Fever, which was cancelled after just one precedent-setting episode. When nearI~j half of an enormous audience dragged in by Rocky actually gets up and changes the channel, with only half an hour to go until the news no less, you know you've gotsome kind of dud.

Or as they'll say when all three of these campus clunkers are re1egat~d to daytime syndication in Antarctica~ ratings~don't kill ad TV shows, people do. It's our little way of passing along to the networks that famed motto of chicken ranchers-PLUCK IT OR FUCKIT!

Rick Johnson

Hope For The Hypermnesic,

THE FACE QF ROCK & ROLL: IMAGES OF A GENERATION

by'Bruce Pollock and John Wagman (Holt, Rinehart and Winston)

What we have here.is a collection of album covers in a rather large book, covers covering rock fronri Bill Haley and the Comets to Richard Hell aftd the Voidoids with some tangential excursions into R & B, Country & Folk, Jazz and a few droppings like The Lettermen and Firesign Theatre. Album covers. Mgybe over a huhdred of'em. In color. Yep.

Fortunately, there's a text accompanying the covers (not a very long one—you can read it in an hour if you're not too stoned) > The foreword by New York dj Pete Fornatale explains the premise, which is that albums are artifacts that often capture the mood and nature of a particular time and that album covers are often more interesting than the records they enclose. All of which is true . The foreword also sez, "A lot of books in the last few years have attempted to capture the emotional impact of rock. This one is different. It succeeds. " Wrong, o'viny 1 breath. What this book is is a very expensive nostalgia trip (shame prevents me from telling you how much I spent on it). You can stare at the cover of The Paragons Meet The Jesters on the % Jubilee label until your brain locks and then stare at the cover of Connie Francis' Dance Party until you blubber over your lost innocence (assuming you' ve lost it). But most of the covers are fairly recent (released during the last 15 years) and if you don't already have them, you can go to a record store and stare at them for free.

Is there anything worthwhile about this book? I considered having the book laminated and hanging it from the ceiling to find out who my real friends are (real friends would just tell me I'm nuts whereas false friends would patronizingly assure me thait that was a very interesting thing I had hanging there), but I didn't want to invest any more money in this folly. Actually, the text, alide from the introduction, is quite good. There's a lot of free-associating, a lot of fantasizing, somecrisp memories and, if you're too young to remember the 50's and early 60's, a lot of information. It'd make a good article'in Esquire.

In sum, not &s good as Anatomy Of A Duck by Milton Ferber but definitely on a par with My Life \Vith Thor by Wilhamina Heyerdahl and far superior to Eat Me by Julia Childs (which was utterly tasteless). Essentially, thisisa coffee table book for people who like to look at album covers. I know I do, but I don't have a coffee table. I don't even like coffee. The hell with it.

Richard C. Walls

Banana High

BANANAS

(Scholastic Magazines, Inc.)_

For humor-lovers lamenting the appropriation of National Lampoon satire by the collegiate crowd and the usurpation of Mad parody by the geriatric set, here's some high school madness guaranteed to keep you hee-hawing until graduation day. Published by Scholastic Magazinesand distributed by teachers to their sweathogs every month, Bananas contains more lunacy than an enema party with the Three Stooges.

A typical Bananas table of contents lists articles like these: "20 Ways To Change Your Looks with a Hammer," "12 Hollywood Stars Choose Their Favorite Radial Tires," "A Closer Look At Merv Griffin's Knees," "How To Use That Wasted Space on the Back of Your Neck." However, the Bananas contents page is always phony, a pretext forewarning the uninitiated.

Naturally there are regular features. "National Banana," a Star/Enquirer parody, headlines screwy stories from way-wayout. ("Popular singer Barry Manilow has announced that he is so happy with himself he has decided to turn himself into a mantlepiece trophy for his den.") "Granny Meatloaf's Advice Column" offers helpful suggestions to today's troubled teens: "Boils are a serious health problem, and they won't go away even if you squeeze them real hard" . . . "Why does every creep in the universe write to me?"

But the thrust of Bananas (its mockery of adolescent folly and frustration) is captured regularly in the photo-feature "The Teens of Ferret High. " In the episode "Ferret High , Career Day," characters reveal their ambitions. '"I plan to become a wrecker,'sez senior Iwanda Wye. For her class project, Iwanda wrecked the auditorium. " Another episode starred Ruthie the babysitter, who uttered great lines like "Ugh! I gotta charge five dollars more when the kid's that ugly." The best Ferret teen, though, was Dirt, who took his date to an Italian restaurant and then embarrassed her by rubbing meatballs under his armpits. Other regular highlights are the "Teenage Hall of Shame" ("Moe Bill, 16, was nominated to theHall of Shame because he laughs at anything. Congrats, Moe Bill!"), TV parodies ("Charlie's Angels' Dogs"), lotsa comix (Punk's John Holmstrom's "Joe"), Uncle "Chester" Buzzy (runs a bargain basement selling cynimal juicers and used pudding), and the "It Never Fails" column ("... on the day you dissect ffogs 3rd period, you have macaroni and cheese 4th period!").

A notch below even sophomoric hilarity, Bananas aims for the gutter, completely misses, and then grovels in dumbness. Meanwhile, the winners of the Ugly Dog Contest will be announced next issue.

Robot A. Hull