Dress up, sit down and settle in: Jerry Lewis is playing the Smith Center

By John Katsilometes

Saturday, Sept. 27, 2014 | 2 a.m.

We’ll call this fictional hovel Jerry’s Joint, and Jerry Lewis runs it. Jerry’s Joint is where entertainers work and play, inside the Jerry Resort Casino on Las Vegas Boulevard, “The most glamorous street in the world,” as Jerry says.

Jerry has a few rules about Jerry’s Joint. I know, shocking.

“The first thing you do is you dress it up, make it beautiful,” Lewis says during an interview at his Las Vegas home, where the reason for the confab is his upcoming appearance at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Smith Center. Tickets are $29 to $99; call (702) 749-2000 or hit the Smith Center website for information. “That will bring quality people in. And you take losses for a while until you get the reputation of bringing quality into the place.”

There will be a dress code, too. Well, maybe not a strict code that would be enforced by aggressive security overlords. But there will be an expectation of how to dress up — put on a jacket — at Jerry’s Joint.

“I remember walking onstage with my partner, at the Flamingo, in 1947,” Lewis says, his voice climbing to a shout. “We looked out, Dean and I, and we were playing to about 35 tuxes, ringside — tuxes!”

There would be flexibility allowed the performers who appear at this joint. Decades ago, Lewis was known to jet from show to show, as if unable to thwart his artistic momentum.

“I came off the stage at the Sahara, and I’d go right into the lounge and do another show with (Don) Rickles. I just did two hours, and now I’m doing another hour and a half with him,” Lewis says. “But that was the glory of Vegas. This was not work. It was fun.”

There would be room for such contemporary, acrobatic, performance art-driven shows as Cirque du Soleil at Jerry’s Joint. But just one Cirque show. Let’s not overdo it.

“I think what Cirque does is glorious. But, we have eight Cirque du Soleil shows? Eight? Go get ’em!” Lewis says. “But apparently they are doing very well. It is definitely a miracle show. When you’re watching Cirque, you think you are sitting there thinking it’s a miracle. To watch a guy do a triple turn on a rope 45 feet high, then drop and grab a knot five feet from the stage — I saw that guy coming down, and I thought he was toast.”

And Jerry will control what is on the marquee promoting Jerry’s Joint. No steak specials. No slot tournament updates. No special promotions. No DJs to publicize, as there will be no DJs spinning at this joint.

“I’m looking at names on these marquees, on the buildings, the billboards while I’m going to the airport, and I don’t know what I’m looking at,” Lewis says, his eyebrows arching as if surprised that he doesn’t know of today’s superstar electronic-music headliners. “I say to the guys, “What the (heck) is Anzonio? ‘He’s the biggest in the racket!’ ‘What racket?’ ‘He’s a disc jockey!’ What about Romario? So is he? And Influenza? Him, too?”

Lewis pulls these names from the air like a juggler snaring rubber balls. He is a bounty of opinions and a fountain of information, even today, at age 88. He is seated behind a desk littered with notes, mementos, photos, and in the background a TV glows with an unbroken montage of photos of him greeting well-wishers, fans, those suffering from Muscular Dystrophy.

As usual, he is wearing the famous red shirt with the cursive “JL” stitched into the pocket. He’s fired up on this particular afternoon, lively and forceful, and he seems not to have shaved for at least one day. Who has time? Open in front of him is a typed description of his show at Reynolds Hall.

What are we going to see Tuesday night, Jerry?

“Beats the hell outta me,” he says, flipping pages in the binder. “I’ve got clips that go up to the number … Jesus, the number is 16! Eighty minutes of clips that go from dumbest, silliest (crap) you’ve ever seen to very, very meaningful pieces. You try to give people a little bit of everything. When you get to be my age, you can’t do everything live anymore.”

This is a version of the show Lewis has performed at South Point Showroom, most recently in 2013, and also has taken on tour. Lewis sits in his famous director’s chair, his lone prop a microphone, and introduces a series of remarkable film clips, TV segments and tucked-away moments from his personal collection of home movies.

Again, there will be a Q+A with people in the audience (go easy on the praise, folks, as Lewis can get really impatient when awaiting a question). The difference at the Reynolds Hall performance is Lewis will be joined by longtime music director and master pianist Vinnie Falcone, who has backed Lewis in many stage and TV productions and also worked with Frank Sinatra late in Sinatra’s career.

Lewis’ memories of the old days in Vegas were reinvigorated just this week when he was one of the bevy of stars booked for the Nevada Sesquicentennial All-Star Concert at Reynolds Hall. Deana Martin, daughter of Dean, snuck up on Lewis backstage and referred to him as “Uncle Jerry.”

“That took me back, of course. Of course,” Lewis says. He notes the unique and tight-knit partnership the two shared for a decade. Though the split was nearly 60 years ago, Lewis still holds vivid recollection, and he’s said in past conversations he still dreams of the man he alternately refers to by his first name, middle name (“Paul”) and simply, “My partner.”

“The very nature of what Dean and I did, and in preparing to do what we did, took a lot of time and thought. Everything that I told him about show business, he trusted, especially my theatrical awareness,” Lewis says. “He trusted that I would take care of the stage, the lights, the presentation, etc., etc., etc. It was the same thing with Laurel & Hardy. Stan Laurel did it all, and Ollie was at the golf course. Dean and I had the same set of circumstance. It was unbelievable. He would come from the golf course, and I would show him a sketch that I had written, and had staged it, on a soundstage.”

Just when it seems Lewis is scooping up all the credit for the team’s success, he praises the man he has called one of the great comic geniuses of all time.

“Then we would shoot the scene about three hours later, and Dean wouldn’t miss a beat. Didn’t miss a beat,” Lewis says. “He was out at the golf course when I started setting this all up 3 1/2-4 hours earlier, he walked in, looked at it, I talked him through it, went in, set it and shot it. That’s how good he was.”

Lewis has been busy for the balance of this year, having been honored by the Friars Club in New York on the event of the 50th anniversary of “The Nutty Professor,” which has been reissued in a slick, 1964-styled box set. He appeared on “The Tonight Show,” with a delighted Jimmy Fallon, turning in a funny bit of mimed comedy that reminded of the “Chairman of the Board” scene in “The Errand Boy.”

Lewis’ charity work is still being recognized, as last month at the Smith Center he received a Member of the Order of Australia medal honoring his work with that country’s Muscular Dystrophy Foundation. And a series of his photos, “Painted Pictures,” were placed on exhibit at UNLV’s Barrick Museum from May through August. A series of his great films were screened each week as a complement to that exhibit.

What is next? We ask Lewis that, all the time.

“This show, first,” he says, grinning. “Here is an adage my dad taught me: ‘If you are going to do great theatrical work, make sure someone is going to be there to see it.’ So I’m making sure people see it.”

It is not nearly as easy for Jerry Lewis to fill a house in 2014 as it was back in the glory days, he so readily recalls. The city is fickle. The audiences are more aware of all the options of shows and stars available, and ticket prices have become so exorbitant that even Jerry Lewis shakes his head at spending upwards of $1,000 for a group of five people to see a top-level show.

Even as Lewis spent much of his career throwing himself onstage and across TV and movie sets, wrecking his back in the process, it seemed so much easier in the old joints.

“We did three shows a night at the Sands, and that was the only place we ever did three shows, but we had audiences lined up and out there after the second show had sold out,” Lewis remembers. (Sands GM) Jack Entratter comes up to me and says, ‘You wanna talk to Dean about maybe a third show?’ I said, ‘Oh yeah, lemme talk to Dean, but you know what? He’s a ham. He’ll do five shows. He’s not your problem. I’m your problem. What do you mean, a third show? For who?’ “

Lewis said that if Martin and he spotted a single empty seat, they would return to the two-show schedule. Instead, that show sold out, too, and people began lining up outside the Copa Room hoping for a fourth performance.

“We had standing-room-only for that third show,” Lewis says. “It was glorious, and the third show gave us another thrill (laughs). When I remember that, it makes everything today feels so much more important. I look into that audience and I see the faces of people who I’ve known, and who have known me, since they were children. All of them. That’s the way I like to think of it, that we’re all kids.”

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWiththeDish.