Being Groped by Him Again Wasn t Something She Was Looking Forward to Spanish
She'd never been summoned by a costar like that before—but then she'd never worked with Jerry Lewis. Apparently, it was how he did things.
Karen Sharpe had already held her own onscreen with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne and won a Gilded Globe for the airplane-disaster movie The High and the Mighty when she was cast in 1964's The Disorderly Orderly. The role, the beloved interest to Lewis's typically zany buffoon, hadn't initially appealed to her. It was a comedy, and she preferred drama. It had likewise been fabricated clear she wasn't permitted to be funny contrary the flick's notoriously insecure leading human.
But Sharpe had recently taken a year-and-a-one-half-long hiatus from Hollywood—she'd gone to San Antonio to settle her father'south estate after his death—and returned to a town that seemed to take forgotten near her. When Lewis offered her the role, he even sweetened the deal, tripling her bacon and guaranteeing that Edith Head, the costume designer behind Grace Kelly'southward and Audrey Hepburn'southward iconic looks, would create her wardrobe. "It was an offer I shouldn't and couldn't decline," says Sharpe, now 87.
Lewis had the power to make these promises. About a decade earlier, he'd split from Dean Martin later their singing and comedy duo rocketed both to a post–Earth War II superstardom on par with Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Critics (and Lewis himself) believed the hyperactive comedian—not Martin'due south straight-human being crooner—was the real talent. Lewis, who had been the putzy kid blood brother to Martin'south debonair gentleman, felt he had outgrown his partner. Lewis's ego expanded fifty-fifty more in 1959 when, at age 33, he signed a seven-year contract with Paramount for a base of operations of $10 meg—the largest contract of its kind betwixt a studio and performer at the fourth dimension. He could hire whomever he pleased.
And Lewis was prolific—in bed (even arriving at the studio early to fit in "a little hump" before work, he later told GQ); in conception (he had 6 sons with his and then wife, Patti, all of whom he left out of his estimated $fifty million manor); and in films (The Disorderly Orderly was Lewis's 16th motion picture at Paramount in just eight years as a solo deed). Past 1959 his movies (solo and with Martin) had brought in $100 one thousand thousand for Paramount at a time when tickets price less than lxx cents. He was and so untouchable that Paramount's head of production, Barney Balaban, had said, "If Jerry wants to burn down the studio, I'll give him the friction match!"
All this to say that when Lewis summoned Sharpe to set to see what his leading lady looked similar in costume, Sharpe might have been surprised—Lewis's longtime collaborator Frank Tashlin was actually the manager—only it would have been reckless to say no.
The moving picture was beingness filmed in a mammoth Beverly Hills mansion, which was large enough to look similar a hospital (no thing the chandeliers). Sharpe reported to Lewis'due south office and, with a wardrobe mistress standing nearby, began modeling her costumes while Lewis requested diverse nips and tucks. When Sharpe was downwardly to her final costume, Lewis picked upward a walkie-talkie and excused the guards outside his office.
And so Lewis "started moving in on me," recalls Sharpe. "He grabbed me. He began to fondle me. He unzipped his pants. Quite frankly, I was dumbstruck."
Sharpe protested. "I put my manus up and said, 'Look a infinitesimal. I don't know if this is a requirement for your leading ladies, just this is something I don't do,' " she says. "I could see that he was furious. I got the feeling that that never really happened to him."
She tried to politely dismiss the assail without insulting the star. She fifty-fifty offered to quit, concerned it would exist awkward to moving picture scenes every bit romantic partners. But the contract had been signed, Lewis said. The costumes were made. And she was due dorsum for filming in three days.
When Sharpe returned to Greystone Mansion on her start engagement, a crew member was waiting with a bulletin: According to Sharpe, the entire production, save for the director and assistant director, had been told they could not speak to Sharpe. "If anyone speaks to you lot…nosotros'll exist fined," the crew member explained apologetically. "I wanted to let you know…. Only I tin't even speak to you."
The punishment went farther: Earlier her showtime scene, Sharpe learned that Lewis would not rehearse with her. She could work with Lewis's stand-in, simply when the lead arrived, he refused to interact with or acknowledge Sharpe unless the camera was rolling. "That happened through the whole picture," she says. "He never worked with me. He never spoke to me. The showtime take of what we did together was what went on moving picture. And that was what everyone was going to see."
Sharpe could have talked to her manager, but what was he going to do? She knew firsthand how quickly the manufacture could forget an player and feared further retribution for behaving "problematically" co-ordinate to the era'southward antiquated standards. So onscreen she played nice toward the man punishing her, stoically stomaching his shtick. In a scene gear up at an Italian eatery, Sharpe watches Lewis screw a forkful of spaghetti until information technology'south wrapped effectually his entire arm and and then listens every bit he attempts to teach her a lesson: "Respect and admiration, those y'all have to earn." She was called to attack days she was not filming—but obliged with a grinning, reading in her solitary solitude, eating alone in the commissary, and sneaking onto the nearby set of Stanley Kramer's Transport of Fools to lookout man her idol, Vivien Leigh. (Kramer noticed her; they were afterward married for 35 years, until his death.)
On her final day of production, Sharpe was leaving her dressing room when she bumped into Lewis. She thanked him for the pay heighten and her beautiful costumes. Lewis interrupted her to say she was "a hell of a daughter." So he confessed, "I honestly don't know how yous came to work every day." He offered an caption: "You encounter, I'thou ill."
That's when Sharpe finally snapped: "Jerry, bullshit. Is that your excuse for bad beliefs—that you're sick and people are supposed to excuse that? Well, I don't excuse that. It was the virtually unprofessional leading human being/leading lady human relationship I've always had in my 20 years as an thespian. Just recall how much amend we could have been if you'd been professional person and cooperated."
She had one final thought.
"You e'er recall about playing a heavy—a real son of a bowwow?" asked Sharpe. "Because you're really good at that. People wouldn't believe information technology, only nosotros both know that'southward who you really are."
Maybe audiences mistook Lewis for the pratfalling fool he played onscreen—all crossed optics, wide jokes, and drastic attention-vying. Simply many in Hollywood knew he was cantankerous, difficult, and cruel—an insecure egomaniac with an all-consuming sex activity bulldoze. "I'm a selfish human being," admitted Lewis in one interview. He expanded on the theme in 2006's Dean and Me: A Dear Story: "When fame and money come all at once, fifty-fifty the strongest men will get their heads turned effectually. I had enough of strengths, but fugitive temptation was not one of them." Lewis had a reputation, like many earlier and later him, that rippled through the industry. But because of his moneymaking potential and his philanthropy—not to mention Hollywood's history of decadent morals and misogyny—his behavior was ignored.
Several years ago, Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering began investigating Former Hollywood's long history of abuse. The pair accept covered declared sexual corruption in the church (Twist of Religion), on college campuses (The Hunting Ground), in the armed forces (The Invisible War), and, most recently, alongside cocreator Amy Herdy, inside one brutally divided family (Allen five. Farrow). Around 2017, they began interviewing actors—collecting devastating stories, many of which were shared for the first time. Some of the most explosive accusations involved Jerry Lewis. The filmmakers brought their interviews to Vanity Off-white, wanting the women's stories to be heard. Speaking nigh Promise Holiday, the 91-year-old actor from Billy Wilder's The Flat, Dick says, "I remember Hope proverb she thought she would take these stories to her grave. She never idea anyone would be interested. She never thought in that location'd be a safe space to tell them." (Ziering and Dick besides fabricated a curt film with some of the women'south stories which can exist seen above.)
People have reported and acted against Hollywood sexual harassment and abuse since 1937, when pic actress Patricia Douglas became the first woman to take on a studio for sexual set on; she claimed she was raped by an MGM salesman after boarding a motorbus, along with other aspiring starlets who were told they'd be filming on location, only to be deposited at a sales convention as party favors. Afterwards filing a lawsuit, her proper noun was smeared by studio fixers, her accost leaked to the press, and her example dismissed. (The commune attorney had been accused of taking MGM bribes.) Generations of women kept quiet near sexual attack and harassment in office because neither they nor the guild they lived in had even a vocabulary for it. Longtime star Loretta Young did not realize she had been engagement-raped by Clark Gable in 1935 until she heard the phrase on CNN 63 years later and asked friends to explain it to her. In one case she was articulate on the significant, she said, "That's what happened with me and Clark."
The women Ziering spoke to depict an era and boondocks where aggressive sexual overtures and abuse were "so ingrained that it was not even something you questioned. This was the land of the industry. Information technology was simply something you figured out how to navigate."
"They were expected to accept being assaulted and to just deal with it themselves," adds Dick, explaining that Hollywood fifty-fifty helped normalize the idea of trading sexual favors for parts by referencing it in movie and Idiot box. "The casting couch has been treated as a joke for a long time, which is a form of acceptance that sends a message that there'due south zilch wrong with information technology and there's no reason to be upset nearly it or report it. Of course it's very traumatic. And I recollect that kind of terminology is also used in the fashion of seeing them as disposable."
In the 1950s, the fan magazine Picturegoer published an exposé on casting couch practices. "This is the nigh depressing story we have e'er written," the reporters wrote. "For weeks, we have made our investigations…we have congenital up a dossier of data, which, we believe, is an ugly scar on the glamorous face of show business." No one noticed the story. In 1953, Marilyn Monroe herself wrote an essay for Motion Flick and Television Magazine titled "The Wolves I Have Known," in which she wrote frankly almost Hollywood predators: "I met them all. Phoniness and failure were all over them. Some were vicious and kleptomaniacal. But they were as near to the movies as you get. So yous saturday with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes—an overcrowded brothel, a merry-become-round with beds for horses."
Decades later, the studio arrangement is gone but, as #MeToo proved, justice tin nonetheless be elusive. Bill Cosby, the first high-profile star to be convicted of sexual assault, has already been released from prison after his confidence was overturned; Roman Polanski is still making movies; and Harvey Weinstein was brought down just after decades of rumors past a cavalcade of more than than 80 women. The allegations confronting Lewis are both devastating—he'due south said to have terrorized and traumatized women, thwarting their paths and potential in the process—and devastatingly mutual. These accusations aren't actionable; Lewis died in 2017, lauded in The New York Times as "a defining figure of American entertainment." But these women'due south stories, spanning from 1960 to 1968, illuminate how i man ran rampant at Paramount.
Renée Taylor was a comic in New York in the 1960s when she met Lewis on The This evening Prove Starring Jack Paar. Lewis complimented the Bronx-built-in performer and told her to look him upwards if she fabricated it to Hollywood. She flew to L.A. that night and camped out at Paramount. When Lewis arrived at the studio, Taylor was waiting—and asked Lewis for a part in his new film, which happened to be 1961's The Errand Boy. When Lewis said he didn't accept a part bachelor, Taylor replied, "I've seen your movies. Tear out four pages and write new ones."
Lewis handed her a script then she could rip the pages out herself and got the fearless 28-year-one-time a meeting with the Paramount brass. Any high the comic was riding, however, was punctured by the executives' beginning question: "Are you one of Jerry's girls?"
Taylor, now 88, recalls trying to explicate, " 'No, no. He saw me on boob tube and he wrote this part for me.' Of form they didn't believe me. They said, 'Well, how large is your pussy? Jerry has a salami and will use it on a girl.' They thought information technology was very funny and were boasting. I thought it was and so gross. It was hard to laugh at Jerry's jokes later on that." Ultimately, Taylor, who went on to exist an actor and Oscar-nominated author, adds, "It really was a expert thing that the executives boasted about him because it gave me alert to be on my guard. I tend to exist too trusting."
Holiday had every reason to trust Lewis. She met the comedian through her father, a theater executive in New York, when she was 13 and considered Lewis "family." The year after Vacation'due south breakthrough in Billy Wilder's moving picture The Apartment, Lewis offered her a part in The Ladies Man, a 1961 moving picture cowritten by Lewis that required him to be surrounded by young, beautiful costars. "The first 24-hour interval we were working, he said, 'Tin you lot come to the dressing room subsequently? I want to discuss what we're going to shoot tomorrow,' " Vacation says. "I go into this garish dressing room with cherry wallpaper and aureate piece of furniture…and I sit down and he presses a button, locks me in the dressing room with him. Then he starts to talk to me: 'Y'know, you could exist very attractive merely y'all article of clothing pants all the fourth dimension. I accept never seen you in a skirt. You have nice legs and you've got good boobs.' Then he starts to talk to me about sexual practice."
Sick to her stomach, Holiday told Lewis that her beau was waiting outside. But that didn't stop Lewis. "He starts to talk dirty to me and as he's talking, the pants open, and the ugly thing came out and he starts to jerk off," Holiday says. "I was frightened…. I just saturday there and I wanted to leave and then badly."
The following twenty-four hours on prepare, the script called for Holiday'southward character to slap Lewis's. "I hit him and then difficult that I spun effectually. And I didn't hateful to," says Holiday. After a shell, she admits, "Maybe downwardly deep I did. Simply he walked off the fix and sulked for an hour. He said I did it on purpose." Production halted considering Lewis, in addition to being the star, was also directing. "He finally came back and didn't talk to me," says the actor. "He never spoke to me over again."
The experience fabricated Vacation depressed and eventually hostile. One evening afterwards wrapping her scenes for the day, she borrowed a mink to go to the premiere of the Paul Newman film Exodus. She was excitedly heading off set when her director announced a schedule change: At that place was suddenly another scene for her to shoot. Holiday couldn't mute herself anymore. "Who do you have to fuck to get off this picture?" she cracked, in a line arguably better than any in the motion picture.
Holiday'south friends suggested reporting Lewis to the Screen Actors Guild but she was scared he would have farther action, even cutting her from the picture show completely: "He was very big at Paramount. I was under contract to him and to Paramount, and I didn't desire to shake the boat. Y'know, I figured I'll just keep my rima oris shut."
In 1963, Jill St. John starred with Frank Sinatra in Come Blow Your Horn, a comedic role that would earn her a Golden Globe nomination. Subsequently, she was song in interviews nearly wanting to exist taken seriously as a comedic actor. Be careful what you wish for. That aforementioned yr, the time to come Bond girl appeared in Who's Minding the Store?, playing Lewis's randy love interest—a adult female so overcome with passion for the comic that (subsequently making him a abode-cooked meal in full makeup and a figure-hugging ensemble) she demands sex activity ("Exist fresh with me now, Norman"), makes out with him, tells him "Yous take such sexy lips," and begins to undress him.
Today, St. John chooses not to speak ill of the dead—merely she's not going to lie for them either. While not addressing sexual harassment specifically, she writes in a statement to Vanity Fair, "Comedy has always been my favorite medium. I was thrilled to exist cast opposite Lewis…. Like many, I considered him a comedy genius. Nevertheless practice. Unfortunately, 1 should not misfile the creative person with the man. Making the film was an extremely unhappy and disappointing feel. Rather than detail my previous bitterness about filming with someone no longer on this planet, and who cannot rebut, I prefer to say that a good fourth dimension was not had by all."
Connie Stevens, who starred with Lewis in 1958'southward Rock-a-Bye Baby and 1966's Manner…Way Out, has pleasant memories of her time with the comedian—but caught glimpses of his dark streak likewise. "If y'all didn't get for his joke or if y'all didn't reply to him, he could be cruel," says the player, who recalls female crew members on fix suddenly quitting. "I had heard that he was pretty crude on females. He wasn't on me. Consequently, I was the just actress at his funeral."
Anna Maria Alberghetti, a soprano prodigy turned Tony-winning actor, recalls hearing that Lewis's wife, Patti, had to be announced every time she arrived at Paramount. "Why would a wife have to be announced?" she wondered. She figured information technology out pretty speedily. Alberghetti says Lewis came on to her while taping the 1959 TV special The Jazz Vocalizer, but she brushed information technology off. She agreed to reunite with him for 1960's Cinderfella, even though she had to commute to Los Angeles from Las Vegas, where she was headlining multiple shows a calendar week. This time effectually, Lewis was more ambitious. He called meetings later filming had wrapped for the day and dismissed everyone but her. Exhausted, she had to fend off his advances. "He tried very hard," she says. "He came on to me constantly. I would say to him, 'Jerry, I'g seeing someone…. You've got the wrong chick.' " Alberghetti emerged unscathed. She suspects it'southward because by the time she met Lewis, she had already established herself as a star, having performed at Carnegie Hall and costarred with Bing Crosby. "If this had been my starting time pause in the concern, I probably wouldn't take had a choice," she says. "There information technology is."
Lainie Kazan had encountered years of sexual harassment and uncomfortable behavior from men when the actor-vocalizer first met Lewis. She never experienced the depths of Lewis's cruelty, but his mental attitude toward women was apparently nonetheless. In the late '60s, Lewis knocked on Kazan's hotel-room door when she was performing at the Fremont in Las Vegas. "He asked my manager and my boyfriend to leave, and—like schmoes—they left the room and me with him," says Kazan. "I was very intimidated." The pair sabbatum in awkward silence until Lewis spoke upwards: " 'You e'er think of getting your nose fixed?' " Kazan's middle sank. "No," she told him. " 'I think people kind of like my nose. I never thought of fixing it.' He said, 'And you should lose a couple of pounds.' That's a large bugaboo because I look at pictures and I was then thin…. I had a big breast and people thought I was big."
"He really came on to me, only he [likewise] wanted me to feel like gravel," Kazan continues. "He wanted me to feel less than…. Then he said, 'You know, I had a dream about you last night and that's why I'm here. I want you to star in my movie.' "
The motion-picture show function never manifested, and the but result of the meeting, in Kazan's eyes, was her feeling of violation fifty-fifty though Lewis hadn't laid a finger on her: "I felt that I had been naked."
About a decade later the Vegas see, Kazan's agent received a request from Lewis that she cohost his MDA telethon from the Eastward Coast, a total iii,000 miles from the comedian, who would be hosting on the West. Kazan gamely agreed, and when information technology came time to go on live to sing her first number, "Fever," the performer waited for her introduction. "Ladies and gentlemen," Lewis said, and so paused for dramatic effect, "Lainie Kazan and her cantaloupes."
"I could cry thinking about information technology," says Kazan. "I tripped upward the stairs, fell on my knee. I still went on and did the vocal, considering I'chiliad a professional, just I was humiliated…. He always fabricated me experience less than me."
Fast-forrad six decades, and the social development that came along with them, to the spring of 2014, when Lewis was onstage at a Friars roast attempting to humiliate another female performer. He was in his 80s at the time merely still bragging to interviewers about the "spectacular sex life" he'd enjoyed during his elevation years "when I'm fucking everyone in Hollywood." The roast proved that Lewis's jokes had not anile well. After Amy Schumer performed, Lewis rose to requite her a hug—only to so attempt to mime having sex with her onstage. "He came up and nosotros hugged each other, and then he started pushing me back, trying to lay me down on the stage," Schumer subsequently told GQ. "I buckled down and used my knees to stay in place, and he was in my ear maxim, 'Lay downward.' I whispered 'no' in his ear. Fifty-fifty afterwards I said no, he was all the same trying. I had to employ my core to stay upward—he's a strong motherfucker."
Schumer wrestled free. "I'thousand not going to be the daughter who gets fucked after her set," she said. "Sad, Jerry Lewis."
Lewis may be gone—when he died, many, including Jimmy Kimmel, toasted him as a "humanitarian"—but his retentivity is not a blessing for the women he harassed. "Who wants to have the innocence abroad from young girls and make themselves feel important by burdensome them?" asks Kazan, genuinely bewildered. "I was such a sweet girl."
Kazan was and then unmoored by the constant objectification and unwelcome advances that she gained weight (i.eastward., invisibility) and began playing Jewish, Italian, and Greek mothers, like she did in My Big Fatty Greek Wedding. "I've been to therapy, I've been to analysis…only it doesn't go away," she says. "It's always there. It's like, 'Prove to me that you're only a overnice guy. Say something that makes me understand you lot're non going to assault me.' " Kazan has begun educational activity at UCLA and, at 81, feels fulfilled—her intelligence seen, respected, and accepted past her students. "I [finally] recognized that it was okay to be potent, to be dynamic, to be beautiful, to exist sexy, to be all those things and own it," she says. "It took me like sixty years…. I'1000 then proud of the women today. If only I had the balls to do that, just it wasn't appropriate. It wasn't the mode women behaved."
Vacation sees existent progress thanks to the #MeToo move as well: "These guys take no pick. It'll be the end of their careers if they keep upwardly this nonsense. Now women feel they have a identify, and if we keep fighting and open our mouths and let them have what they deserve, and so we've got a chance. We won't be treated like secondhand nothings."
Back in the '60s, Holiday had what was then a distressingly commonplace sort of run-in with a then well-known player that says a lot about men's mindset at the time. It was Passover, she remembers. The actor left her in his sitting room so he could "pray" just returned promptly in a short silk robe and chased her around the room. When he finally registered her protests, he chosen a cab to pick her up and even gave her a gift—one that suggested he was a guy after Lewis's heart. It was an autographed photo of himself.
This commodity has been updated.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Vanity Fair's Hollywood Issue 2022: Meet the Full Portfolio Featuring Nicole Kidman, Kristen Stewart, and More
— Amazon's Lord of the Rings Series Rises: Inside The Rings of Power
— Renée Zellweger Is Unrecognizable as a Midwestern Murdering Mom
— Oscar Nominations: The Biggest Snubs and Surprises
— Oprah Winfrey Reveals the Glorious New Color Purple Bandage
— Beware the Tinder Swindler, a Real-Life Dating-App Villain
— Due west. Kamau Bong Is Terrified for People to Run across His Bill Cosby Docuseries
— The Creative person, the Madonna, and the Last Known Portrait of Jeffrey Epstein
— From the Annal: Within Pecker Cosby'due south 12-Year Battle of Denials, Doubts, and Legal Machinations
— Sign up for the "HWD Daily" newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage—plus a special weekly edition of "Awards Insider."
Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/jerry-lewis-sexual-assault-harassment-investigation
0 Response to "Being Groped by Him Again Wasn t Something She Was Looking Forward to Spanish"
Post a Comment