Dave Kehr's excellent review of the new Martin and Lewis boxed set is as good an excuse as any to admit that I read and very much enjoyed Dean & Me (A Love Story). Either Lewis had one hell of a ghost writer or he's a memoirist on par with Groucho: casually funny, (somewhat) dishy, and faux-humble to a tee. Bound to be a bald-faced hagiography, the book ends up revealing as much about the aged man-child as his beloved crooner. I'm happy to innocently soak it all up when the experience brings me this close to understanding just how perfect and perfectly doomed their alchemical partnership really was....
And on another note, my once-removed anecdote about Mr. Lewis: While we were putting the OA DVD together, I sent the intrepid Mike Powell after an appearance by the Treniers on Martin and Lewis' Colgate Comedy Hour . The OA is a non-profit and couldn't pay for any clips, so we were hoping for a "donation." Worth a shot, but Mike later received this message from the man himself (he missed the call!):
So what you're saying is you're just another poverty-stricken group of people trying to do something interesting. I have a great deal of respect for young people and their projects. We received $1000 PER MINUTE for our clips; if that falls within your abilities, call me.
You have got to love that!
It really is a love story, isn't it? Complete Hollywood folie à deux. No other partnership story quite as intense as theirs, not even Dietrich/von Sternberg or Brackett/Wilder. Lewis can be such a pill, such as with his ludicrous assertions about women not being funny. But all I have to do to soften up on him is recall the story about Lewis slipping into the funeral for Dean Martin's son, staying unobtrusively in the back.
Posted by: Campaspe | July 09, 2007 at 08:18 AM