As an 8-year-old, I wrote a letter to Jerry Lewis.
No one thrilled me more than seeing him on our 12-inch black and white RCA, the "Colgate Comedy Hour" with Dean. There was no one funnier to an 8-year-old and, maybe, I equally flipped for Sammy Davis because, early in his career, he did an impression of Jerry.
Not a normal child, at age 12, I wore a three-piece suit, carried an attache case and had my own "client list."
Once or twice a month, I cut school and either hung out with the black disc jockeys at WHAT radio station, three buses from my home, or hopped the subway and went downtown, visiting the magnificent hotels such as the Bellevue Stratford.
I befriended the doormen. "Anybody famous staying here?" I asked — and was immediately given a list with room numbers.
I went to their rooms and knocked on their doors and was invited in by Sophie Tucker, Bob Cummings, Susan Strasberg, Edward Albee, Robert Preston, Sam Levene and a new, young singer from San Francisco named Johnny Mathis.
It was Mathis who, while signing a photo, warned, "You have to promise me you won't do this anymore. I believe it's very dangerous for a little boy." And this was 1957! Mathis was a class act then and now.
So when William Morris moved me to California and agent Fred Apollo told me that Lewis was coming into the office with his manager Joe Stabile. I was excited to meet him. I was that little boy again.
What was amazing about Jerry Lewis in the late '70s was that he was and had been for 20 years, an immediately recognizable, international superstar, and yet a contemporary of Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, Edward G. Robinson, Fred McMurray, Jimmy Stewart, up through Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman and the current crop. And, yet, while they aged and their looks changed or were diminished, Jerry in his early '50's looked exactly as he always did.
Other than his yearly Labor Day MD telethon, and possibly a week or so in Vegas, he didn't appear to be working.
I called around to the networks. Contrary to misapprehension about his work ethic, Lewis' features were always under budget and each cost less than a million.
TV movies were moving up to two million at the time. Why couldn't Jerry develop, produce and star in an original network TV movie? I called Joe Stabile and told him my idea.
He said he would set a meeting when we had something firm. Of the three networks, CBS encouraged further discussion. Bill Self offered "If the story works, we'll do it."
I went downstairs to Dennis Doty and told him of my plan. He laughed and said, "Sure, set it up. Let's go visit Jerry. And then, as I left his office, he screamed "LAAAAADEEEEE …"
We met early the next week in Lewis' Century City office. He had been teaching at UCLA (the most feverishly desired course on campus) and was very professorial. "It's about time they came on board. But why not? I happen to have the perfect idea."
Jerry called it "The Tour Guide" — it was about a kid who was a tour guide on the world's cheapest airline.
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While there was a detailed treatment written, I have no memory of the beats of the picture. But it was that crazy kid in the sky and throughout Europe. Jerry as a French guy, a Japanese guy, a Russian, a spy and a dancer. Thrown in were an assortment of nutty characters complementing Lewis.
When we visited the network to discuss, and Jerry and I were taking a cigarette break (he smoked the world's most horrific French cigarette, Gaulois), I dared to suggest "you're surrounded by these billionaires, why can't you bring them into a Jerry theatrical feature?"
No, he declared, he would never mix the MD donors to financing his work. I also told him I wrote him when I was a child. He said, "You should have told me you would wind up at William Morris."
Jerry didn't want to write the script and approved a Norman Lear half-hour favorite, Rick Mittleman, to do it.
As Rick was writing, CBS got nervous and requested that we bring Lewis to another entity to backstop the movie, to be "at risk."
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They recommended MTM and Jozak, two companies that had never agreed to pay a Morris package fee.
I had to find out for myself and went to Grant Tinker with the deal.
A man named Mel Blumenthal was running the business end of MTM and it was a resounding no.
Jozak, a wildly successful supplier of quality TV movies, was headquartered at Paramount and was the partnership of Gerald Abrams and Jerry Isenberg. They were major Lewis fans and treated him as a visiting God when he toured their offices.
When told of Paramount's aversion to the agency fee, they committed to resolving it — they wanted this movie.
I'll never forget the drive to the Paramount gate.
Lewis had picked me up in his blue Rolls-Royce, and he got emotional when he approached the guard as he hadn't been on the lot for a decade.
"Where's Hal Wallis' office?" The guard directed the way. Lewis left the car in front as we walked into what had been Hal Wallis' office 10 years before.
Ironically, Wallis' former assistant manned the desk. They both screamed in recogition and kisses. "Where's Hal?" "Don't know, haven't worked for him for many years. I believe he has an office on Sunset now. Jerry, you look wonderful."
A month or so awaiting Mittleman's first draft, Jerry called from Florida to advise that he was no longer interested in doing the "Tour Guide" or any other movie for network television.
He had indeed discussed a new feature that would be financed by one of his major charity donors, and he wanted me to go to CBS and get him out of the deal.
I reluctantly ended "The Tour Guide's" development. CBS was not happy and refused to pay Mittleman more than he had already been paid. The agency had to come up with the rest of his fee.
Somewhere in a Bekins storage facility there exists a script called "The Tour Guide." Who knows? Jim Carrey (Kevin James, Will Ferrell, Mike Myers) could sure use something truly funny for a change.