ROEPER ROEPER REMEMBERS A GENIUS
LOS ANGELES — Jerry Lewis, the manic, rubber- faced showman who jumped and hollered to fame in a lucrative partnership with Dean Martin, settled down to become a self- conscious screen auteur and found an even greater following as the tireless, teary host of the annual muscular dystrophy telethons, has died. Hewas 91.
Publicist Candi Cazau said Lewis died Sunday of natural causes in Las Vegas with his family by his side.
Tributes from friends, co- stars and disciples poured in.
“That fool was no dummy. Jerry Lewis was an undeniable genius an unfathomable blessing, comedy’s absolute!” Jim Carrey wrote Sunday on Twitter. “I am because he was!”
In Las Vegas, amessage honoring the comedian is being featured on amarquee at Caesars Palace, where Lewis was once a headliner and had also hosted telethons. In Los Angeles, fans and admirers gathered at Lewis’ two Hollywood Walk of Fame stars— one for television and one for film.
Lewis’ career spanned the history of show business in the 20th century, beginning in his parents’ vaudeville act at age 5. He was just 20 when his pairing with Martin made them international stars. Hewent on to make such favorites as “The Bellboy” and “The Nutty Professor,” was featured in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” and appeared in Billy Crystal’s “Mr. Saturday Night.”
“Jerry was a pioneer in comedy and film. And he was a friend. I was fortunate to have seen him a few times over the past couple of years. Even at 91, he didn’t miss a beat. Or a punchline,” Lewis’ “The King of Comedy” co-star Robert De Niro said in a statement.
In the 1990s, he scored a stage comeback as the devil in the Broadway revival of “Damn Yankees.” And after a 20- year break from making movies, Lewis returned as the star of the independent drama “Max Rose,” released in 2016.
He was so active, he would sometimes forget the basics, like eating, his associates would recall. In 2012, Lewis missed an awards ceremony thrown by his beloved Friars Club because his blood sugar dropped from lack of food and he had to spend the night in the hospital.
A major influence on Carrey and other slapstick performers, Lewis also was known as the ringmaster of the Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Association, joking and reminiscing and introducing guests, sharing stories about ailing kids and concluding with his personal anthem, the ballad “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” From the 1960s onward, the telethons raised some $ 1.5 billion, including more than $ 60 million in 2009. He announced in 2011 that he would step down as host but would remain chairman of the association he joined some 60 years ago.
In his early movies, Lewis played looselimbed, buck- toothed, overgrown adolescents, trouble- prone and inclined to wail when beset by enemies. American critics recognized the comedian’s popular appeal but not his aspirations to higher art; the French did. Writing in Paris’ LeMonde newspaper, Jacques Siclier praised Lewis’ “apish allure, his conduct of a child, his grimaces, his contortions, his maladjustment to theworld, his morbid fear of women, his way of disturbing order everywhere he appeared.”
The French government awarded Lewis the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1983 and Commander of Arts and Letters the next year.
On July 24, 1956, Martin and Lewis closed shop, at the Copa, and remained estranged for years. Martin, who died in 1995, did make a dramatic, surprise appearance on Lewis’ telethon in 1976 ( a reunion brokered by mutual pal Frank Sinatra), and director Peter Bogdanovich nearly persuaded them to appear in a film together as former colleagues who no longer speak to each other. After Martin’s death, Lewis said the two had again become friendly during his former partner’s final years and he would repeatedly express his admiration for Martin above all others.
Lewis was born Joseph Levitch in Newark, New Jersey, on March 16, 1926. His father, billed as Danny Lewis, was a singer on the borscht and burlesque circuits. His mother played piano for Danny’s act. Their only child was often left alone in hotel rooms, or lived in Brooklyn with his paternal grandparents, Russian Jewish immigrants, or his aunts in New Jersey.
“All my life I’ve been afraid of being alone,” Lewis once said. In his later years, the solitude haunted him, and he surrounded himself with an entourage.