The Talk of Show Business

The two young nightclub comics were feeling desperate. They had been on for ten minutes and it was still so quiet you could hear a gin fizz. The manager was waiting grimly at stageside to fire them. Suddenly they strode to a ringside table, snatched up some dishware and smashed it on the floor. The audience gasped, then shouted with laughter.

Heartened, the boys grabbed trays from waiters, flung steaks, bullied the customers into sitting on the floor, singing campfire songs and joining a conga line.

After that roughhouse evening at Atlantic City's 500 Club, Dean Martin (born Dino Crosetti) and Jerry Lewis (born

Joseph Levitch) were the talk of the town. Last week, almost three years later, Martin & Lewis were the talk of show business. At Manhattan's copious Copacabana, the team had just smashed an eight-year house record for receipts--and in the depth of a general nightclub depression. The first Martin & Lewis movie, My Friend Irma, in which they have supporting roles, would be shown this fall in first-run houses. NBC, which had just handed them a Sunday night radio hot spot (6:307 p.m., E.D.T.), was dishing out over $10,000 a week to break them into radio harness. (Variety seconded NBC's judgment: "Potentially the boys have got it.")

Last week, Martin & Lewis got three offers from TV sponsors, turned them all down to wait for a sponsor who will parlay them on both radio & television. Even without sponsors, the team will earn close to $750,000 in 1949. But radio cannot show the half of what Martin & Lewis have; they must be seen, on television or in a nightclub.

Dean Martin is a handsome, 31-year-old ex-millhand, ex-pug and ex-croupier in a casino, with a post-Crosby baa in his baritone. The zanier half of the comedy is furnished by Jerry Lewis, a 23-year-old with horse teeth and a bangtail bob, who is probably the most precocious comic to come out of the wings since Milton Berle was a Wunderkind. Young Jerry already has good control of half-a-dozen comedy styles. He can deliver a gag, dance & sing, play the sappy adolescent ("If I go wit' girls, I get pimples") or ape a romantic singer ("Dance, Mrs. Resnick, dance!"). When Dean asks, "Why did you bring your car to New York?" Jerry says, in what seems the perfect answer for Jerry: "I need it here for accidents."

The Martin & Lewis nightclub act is a far smoother vehicle than the one they started rolling in Atlantic City, but it is still built along the same lines. It would be even better with tightening. The boys kid the orchestra, imitate each other, pour water on people's cigars, whisper secrets, shout non sequiturs at the mike, fight for its possession, spoil each other's jokes, order the customers to laugh, discuss them cattily when they don't--and altogether are apt to ramble on for two hours or more without a break. "We know how we're gonna get on," says Jerry, "but sometimes we wonder how we're gonna get off."

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