Jerry Lewis, In Person. An autobiography by Jerry Lewis. It goes into detail on his childhood, struggles in his career, partnership with Dean Martin, and his life both personal and professional after their breakup.
I stumbled across “Jerry Lewis, in Person” at an estate sale, and I’m very glad that I did. I’d previously read “Dean and Me: a love story“. Which focused primarily on his life during his partnership with Dean Martin. This was written many years earlier, and in many ways is a better autobiography — although flawed.
One thing Jerry Lewis, In Person does extremely well is tell the background of Jerry Lewis. It goes into great detail on his childhood, his family, and how he came to feel abandoned by his parents. Later, he does something that a lot of biographies fail to do. He mentions the various people that he worked with behind the scenes. For instance, reading My Autobiography, by Charlie Chaplin, you’d get the impression that he never worked with or collaborated with anyone.
Jerry Lewis doesn’t do that. For example, he speaks about time with Stan Laurel — and Stan refused to take payment for work that he did for Jerry, since he considered it charity. And Jerry shares a lot of anecdotes with other entertainers of the time, some famous, others not so much.
Something that Jerry does, probably unintentionally, is to shed light on some of the darker points of his personal life. For example, he gushes over and over about his wife Patti. And in the same paragraph admits that he would spend a maximum of seven or eight minutes per day with her.
Something that he doesn’t mention her, that he mentioned in Dean and Me, is that he cheated on her hundreds, likely thousands, of times. And towards the end of the book, he nonchalantly mentions that he divorced her.
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