A Sweet Evening for AFI Award-Winner Lemmon

For a celebratory Hollywood evening to mean anything, several elements are necessary. One has to do with mixing generations. There needs to be a kind of Hollywood time warp. At the Beverly Hilton Thursday the American Film Institute gave Jack Lemmon its 16th Life Achievement Award--and for a moment the Hollywood clock stopped. Imagine Steve Martin doing a Billy Wilder impression, then telling a Jack Lemmon story--and, in the process, hilariously bridging three generations.

“One night in 1959, I was dining alone at Chasen’s,” Martin deadpanned. “I saw Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Billy Wilder coming toward me. And I thought, ‘Oh, God, not those guys again!’ I mean, they’d already done ‘Some Like It Hot.’ I said to Jack, ‘So what’s your next picture?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s about a married couple who get sloshed from making batches of tapioca pudding. It’s called “The Days of Wine and Roses and Tapioca Pudding.” ’ So I said off the top of my head, ‘Lose the tapioca pudding.’ ”

The crowd of 1,100 got the joke--and the second commandment of a true Hollywood evening was met: Thou Shalt Not Bore. At no point in the four-hour evening did anything get boring. As Lemmon put it in a speech, “My career has been full of remarkable coincidences that have nothing to do with me.”

Example: Roddy McDowall who was two tables from the star dais stood up and looked directly into Lemmon’s eyes: “The summer I was 17,” McDowall began, “I was assistant carpenter at a playhouse where my mother worked--and you auditioned for the part of an English boy. They couldn’t find anyone English. This was a two-line part. And when you did it, my mother said, ‘At last! A genuine English boy!’ . . . Well, Jack, if my mother thought you were English--then this evening was inevitable!”

Lemmon’s response to McDowall: “That was the Marblehead Players, and I have to tell you something: Three times prior to that job, I was fired. And not one of the parts had more than five lines. I was right on the brink of going into my father’s business when in stepped Roddy McDowall’s mother . . . that’s what I mean about coincidence.”

There were no bit players in the International Ballroom. In the creative-business mix: Johnny Carson, Lew Wasserman, Lucille Ball, Marvin Davis, Michael Douglas, Norman Lear, Nick Nolte, Sherry Lansing, Aaron Spelling, Sally Field, Mike Medavoy, Anjelica Huston, James Stewart; writers Neil Simon, Steve Shagan and Garson Kanin; directors Blake Edwards, Norman Jewison, Arthur Hiller, John Badham and Herbert Ross.

Lemmon is the first institute honoree whose career began in the ‘50s, but the film clips seemed to be timeless (if not endless--CBS will telecast an edited version of the evening later this season): Lemmon as Romantic Hero--dueting with Judy Holliday, wooing Marilyn Monroe--followed moments of Lemmon as Urban Neurotic--saving Shirley MacLaine from suicide, trying unsuccessfully to rescue Lee Remick from the bottle. Perfectly chosen were the moments from Lemmon’s quintessential role as the overwrought garment manufacturer in “Save The Tiger” (“Don’t sell me America!”).

Just as the tributes verged on maudlin, son Chris Lemmon sat at an upright piano and accompanied Shirley MacLaine’s version of Gershwin’s “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” (“We made ‘The Apartment,’ and oh my throbbing heart went . . . Could it be? Weren’t we? Lovers back in 1643?”) MacLaine, in thigh-high gold brocade and showgirl legs, revealed that “Jack and I were a screen couple, but we never kissed.” Whereupon the room lit up with film clips of Lemmon kissing everyone from Kim Novak to Julie Andrews (the evening’s host) to Robby Benson.

“A man walks into Carnegie Deli,” said Lemmon’s best friend Walter Matthau (who along with his wife, Carol, and the Billy Wilders shared the dais). “And he says, ‘Can I have a fried shrimp sandwich and a chocolate frappe?’ . . . I just want you to know what kind of man we are honoring tonight. . . . In the seventh week of shooting ‘The Fortune Cookie,’ I had a heart attack. And at 3:30 in the morning, I called Jack. Because I needed money to pay a bookie. And he showed up in 10 minutes. He always shows up in 10 minutes. . . . Billy Wilder says an actor does one or two things, and he’s emptied his shelves. But Jack is Macy’s and Gimbel’s and Bloomingdale’s. He’s as good as a hypochondriac as he is in women’s clothes.”

Lemmon, when he addressed the audience, was equally humorous: “I asked (institute co-chairman) George Stevens Jr., ‘How many films are you using clips from?’ And when he said 24, I thought, ‘I’ve done 44 films. If George uses the other 20, I’ll be up there speaking to no one.’ ”

Instead, Lemmon got the night’s only standing ovation.