Wolf Wergin/Las Vegas News Bureau
Frank Sinatra reunites Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin during the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon Sept. 5, 1976 at the Sahara in Las Vegas.
Monday, Aug. 21, 2017 | 2 a.m.
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Jerry Lewis, the legendary actor, comedian, filmmaker and longtime Las Vegas resident, shared one of his secrets to success in a June 1998 Las Vegas Sun guest column:
“The things you keep, you lose — the things you give away, you keep forever,” the longtime Strip headliner wrote. “If you’ve done it all and done it well … you begin to look around more than ever. You not only smell the roses, but you connect with people you might not have had time for while doing your thing. …”
And Lewis indeed gave everything he had while doing his thing well, whether it was raising billions of dollars hosting the annual Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon, directing and starring in popular movies or delivering snappy one-liners often punctuated with childlike nasally whines, including his trademark, “La-a-a-a-dy!”
Lewis, long regarded as one of the world’s funniest and most talented performers, and one of Las Vegas’ most respected celebrity residents died Sunday. He was 91.
Lewis rose to fame in the mid-1940s as the comedic partner of the late crooner and fellow Las Vegas showroom headlining mainstay Dean Martin. Over a span of 60-plus years, Lewis played numerous Vegas showrooms, including the historic Sands’ Copa Room from the late 1950s to the early ‘60s.
While many of Lewis’s ventures in Las Vegas were happy and successful ones, such as when he passionately and successfully lobbied the Las Vegas City Council to not ban local firefighters’ from conducting their MDA Boot Drive on busy street corners despite danger from passing vehicles, other times were quite disturbing.
Nowhere was that more evident than in 1998, when Lewis’s stalker, Gary Benson, a felon who made numerous threats to kill the comedian, was slated to be released early from a Nevada prison.
In an Oct. 9, 1998, Las Vegas Sun story, Lewis expressed great fear and anger that Benson, who had served just 4.3 years of his six-year sentence, had earned so much time off for good behavior that the parole board was about to set him free.
Benson, a chronic schizophrenic, was convicted of the aggravated stalking – then a brand new crime in Nevada — of Lewis in 1995. Benson served his time in pre-trial jail (1,582 days), lockdowns at mental health facilities (1,151 days) and prison (just 431 days). The lack of prison time riled Lewis and many of his supporters.
Further, the parole board had ruled that Benson would not have to report to a parole officer because he had served what was considered a full sentence. Benson was required only to register as an ex-felon with police in the community where he chose to reside. That too irked Lewis, who feared for the safety of his family.
So much so, Lewis, in anticipation of Benson’s early release and potential return to Las Vegas, went before a Clark County justice of the peace to extend a 1992 protective order that had warned Benson to have no contact with Lewis.
“I am incensed and stressed out,” Lewis told the Sun, noting that he had been stalked by Benson for nearly a decade and that Benson had threatened Lewis’s daughter’s life when she was an infant.
The stalking incident was a case of life imitating the movies. Lewis had starred in Martin Scorsese’s 1983 film “The King of Comedy,” in which Lewis’s character, celebrity late night TV host Jerry Langford, was stalked by obsessive fans portrayed by Robert de Niro and Sandra Bernhard.
Lewis’s efforts to drum up media support to keep Benson in prison for his full term were relentless and, at times, seemingly foolhardy. Such was the case when Lewis went on the “Larry King Live” TV show and, in an apparent moment of macho bravado, pretty much dared Benson to stalk him when he got out of prison.
The implication was that Lewis would shoot Benson if Benson showed up at the front door of Lewis’s 7,700-plus-foot mansion near Charleston and Martin L. King boulevards.
But Lewis’s media blitz worked. As a result of public outrage over Benson’s pending release, the parole board did an about-face and ordered Benson to serve his full sentence, which came to an end in early October, 1999.
Benson, however, did not spend a lot of time as a free man. He was arrested by the FBI in May 2000 in Wyoming after Lewis reportedly received a letter at his neo-colonial Las Vegas home in April. The letter read, “Dear Jerry. Your (sic) Dead.” The letter was signed, “Your friend, Gary Benson.” Benson died in the Clark County Detention Center of natural causes (hardening of the arteries) on Oct. 22, 2001. He was 57. Benson had been scheduled to stand trial on Nov. 12, 2001, on the most recent charges of stalking Lewis.
The Lewis-Benson incident played a key role in the passage of a 1999 bill before the Nevada Legislature that upped the maximum aggravated stalking penalty from six to 15 years.
In the end, Lewis’s stalking plight made him an empathetic figure among many Las Vegans and his popularity as a local celebrity resident grew.
In April 2000, Lewis was honored locally with a Jerry Lewis Film Festival at The Orleans, where earlier that year, then-74-year-old Lewis signed a 20-year contract to regularly perform his stand-up comedy act in the Orleans showroom.
The film festival came complete with Lewis introducing his classic movie “The Errand Boy” and participating in a post-viewing question-and-answer session. Then-Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman hosted a cocktail reception for Lewis.
Later that month, Lewis performed for four nights at The Orleans – his first Vegas stage appearance since 1989, when Lewis appeared on the same bill with his longtime friend, the late Sammy Davis Jr.
The contract called for Lewis to appear at the Orleans Showroom five times a year, performing four nights during each of the engagements for a total of 20 shows.
One of Lewis’s November 2013 shows at The Orleans was videotaped for the PBS special “An Evening with Jerry Lewis: Live from Las Vegas.”
Although Lewis and Martin bitterly broke up so long ago – in 1956 – and reportedly did not even speak to one another for about 20 years, the two remained forever linked primarily because of their Las Vegas connections.
In 1976, while Frank Sinatra was making a surprise appearance on the MDA telethon, then emanating from Las Vegas, he dramatically reintroduced fellow surprise guest Martin to host Lewis to a standing ovation from the studio audience.
After having both gone their separate ways, Martin and Lewis had long, successful solo careers in Las Vegas, on stages all over the world and in films. During that time, they each refused to comment on the breakup or on the possibility of getting back together for a reunion show or tour.
After their brief 1976 MDA public get-together, the two were known to have shared a stage just one more time. It was at a 1989 show that Martin headlined at the MGM Grand, now Bally’s, during his last series of Las Vegas performances before retiring. Lewis wheeled out a huge cake to celebrate Martin’s 72nd birthday.
Though they never did do a reunion show, Lewis and Martin did reconcile in 1987 after Martin’s 35-year-old son Dean Paul Martin was killed while piloting his National Guard jet that crashed into the San Bernardino Mountains.
Lewis later said that despite his efforts to bring Martin out of the doldrums of a seemingly endless mourning period, Martin ostensibly had lost his desire for life. He stopped performing altogether and died Christmas Day 1995 at age 78.
Lewis, star and director of such hit films as “The Nutty Professor,” began his longtime association with MDA in 1951 with the goal being to try to find a cure for various neuromuscular diseases. The annual Labor Day MDA Telethons that Lewis hosted over the next six decades raised in the neighborhood of $2.6 billion.
The telethons, which each year were aired over about 200 stations nationwide, were headquartered in Las Vegas from the early 1970s until the show was moved back to Los Angeles in 1996.
As a result of the event’s Las Vegas connection, a number of MDA telethon traditions started in Las Vegas, among them the venerable Firefighters’ Boot Drive, which grew into a national happening involving firemen standing on busy street corners asking for passer-bys to put cash donations into their large boots.
Each year the boot drive was one of MDA’s biggest money makers and a grateful Lewis, in turn, became a supporter and advocate for firefighters in Southern Nevada and nationwide.
Lewis started serving as MDA national chairman in 1952, a post he would hold for several decades. He fondly called children afflicted with MD “my kids” and, as a result, the phrase “Jerry’s Kids” became household words.
An aging Lewis stopped doing the telethons in 2011 and, four years later, MDA decided to discontinue the annual star-studded Labor Day event.
Although many Lewis fans felt that Jerry’s heart had to have been made of pure gold based on his charitable deeds, Lewis also had an abrasive personality and a greatly inflated ego that many critics found neither charming nor endearing.
Lewis’s often rude and condescending attitude was well known among members of the Las Vegas press, as well as the national and international news media.
“Lewis’s greatest achievement is the creation of Jerry Lewis,” wrote Frank Krutnik, author of the book “Inventing Jerry Lewis” (Smithsonian Institution Press). “His personality is so caught up in his public profile that … you arguably can’t distinguish him.
“It’s difficult for Lewis to step aside. He is the scientist and the monster.”
Some of Lewis’s harshest critics went so far as to go to Lewis’s newly-released films with the sole intention of panning them in their columns or rave against Lewis when he made misconceived, outspoken and ill-advised public statements.
Nowhere was that more evident than in February 2000 when Lewis stunned an audience at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., by saying he did not like female comics.
A few days later, Lewis, while back in his more familiar Vegas surroundings, issued a press release with a “humble apology” to quell the angry responses he had received. Lewis admitted that there were a few female comedians he liked, including Whoopi Goldberg and Phyllis Diller.
As Lewis reached his mid-80s and his health seriously faltered, Jerry’s abrasive side also mellowed and he became a more loveable, grandfatherly figure in the entertainment world and an inspiration to several generations of comedians.
Lewis faced several serious health issues during the last 50 years of his life: a 1966 back injury during a failed slapstick routine that almost paralyzed him; double bypass heart surgery in 1982; heart attacks in 1983 and 2006; blurred vision and other symptoms at the 1985 telethon that limited his on-air time; prostate cancer; diabetes; and pulmonary fibrosis, which was treated with Prednisone just before the 2002 telethon, resulting in the grotesque swelling of his facial features.
In 1999, at age 73, Lewis was hospitalized during a performance in Australia. His second heart attack – accompanied by a bout of pneumonia – occurred on June 11, 2006, while Lewis was on a Las Vegas-homebound commercial airline flight following a New York City performance.
Lewis received numerous major awards for his charitable deeds and contributions to the entertainment world: a 1977 nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize for his MDA work; the French Legion of Honor in both 1984 and 2006; the 1985 U.S. Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service; the 2005 Governor’s Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for his telethons; and a special 2009 Academy Award for humanitarian work.
Lewis also has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, honoring him as a comedian, actor, film producer, writer and director.
In a March 2016 Las Vegas Sun interview on the eve of his 90th birthday, Lewis mused, “It is a hell of a big number — it’s a monster.”
“I think it has helped that I am so curious about what has been happening to me, and that I have enjoyed watching the changes through my life,” Lewis said. … “I am intrigued by everything, and that keeps my brain working.”
As for regrets, Lewis apparently had just one – that his time was almost over.
“That hurts, he said. “It hurts to say that. It hurts to think, ‘I’m not going to see my friends, my family, for much longer.’ I am approaching the thrill of being 90. I will have a good time, but I don’t have any misgivings about it. The only negative part is it’s almost over.”
Lewis is survived by his second wife, former airline hostess and Las Vegas dancer SanDee (formerly Pitnick) and a daughter, Danielle Lewis.
Lewis had six sons from his first marriage to former Big Band singer Patti Palmer, including pop star Gary Lewis, who with the rock ‘n’ roll group The Playboys, in 1965 recorded the U.S. No. 1 song, “This Diamond Ring.” Lewis’s other living sons are Ronald, Scott, Christopher and Anthony. Lewis was preceded in death by his son, Joseph, who died in 2009 from a drug overdose at age 45.
Ed Koch is a former longtime Las Vegas Sun reporter
