The Billion-Dollar Man Turns 25

The figures roll off his tongue like the lyrics of a well-remembered song. His 1989 muscular dystrophy telethon, Jerry Lewis is saying, raised exactly $42,737,219 in pledges. With corporate contributions, which he does not include in the pledges, the grand total was nearly $100 million. Over the whole life of the telethons, the grand, grand total in 1989 surpassed one billion dollars.

Notoriously, medical telethon pledges are said to be inflated and collections difficult. Jim Brown of the Muscular Dystrophy Assn.’s Los Angeles office says the MDA does not break out the gross and net figures (“We don’t like to tip our hand to our competitors”) but that the collection figure is very high. In 1977, he says, MDA actually collected 103% of the pledge total.

An executive at one Los Angeles medical charity said the other day that whatever the exact figures, Lewis’ MD telethon is far and away the most successful of them all.

This year’s Labor Day telethon will again be carried by 213 stations here and in Canada. The show is seen by something like 120 million viewers--putting it, Lewis says, just below the Super Bowl and the Miss America pageant in audience size.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the national telethon, although it was 41 years ago, in 1949, that Lewis actually did his first telethon. It was on a single station in New York City; one of the corporate sponsors was a hamburger stand, and the show reached just beyond the city to the suburbs of Connecticut and New Jersey. He raised, as Lewis remembers it, perhaps $200,000.

“At that time,” Lewis said the other day in the office of his home not far from the Strip in Las Vegas, “MDA (the Muscular Dystrophy Assn.) had $1,700 in the bank. That was it. You want a measure of growth? Last year we spent $1.7 million just on postage and printed materials.”

The association had begun in a small office opened by the late Paul Cohn, himself dystrophic. Exactly why Lewis chose to devote so much of his life to the cause of MD specifically is, he says, a secret that he has protected from the very beginning. “I’ve told my associates that when they say the story could really help the cause, I would tell it. But until then, sorry.”

There are 250 MD clinics financed by the association and six Jerry Lewis Research Institutes, as well as a large program of research grants decided by a board of advisers. A cure for the disease is still maddeningly elusive but, Lewis says, the life expectancy of a child with muscular dystrophy has grown from a matter of months to between 10 and 12 years on average.

In the early days, says Lewis, “The telethon and the association were 20% of my life and work was 80%. Now it’s the other way around, 80% telethon and 20% work. I put two or three hours a day at least, 365 days a year, into the association. It’s the most important thing I do. I mean to beat it. I took it on like a boxer takes on an adversary.”

The telethon grew slowly at first, then bloomed. By 1965 there were only five stations, but the next year there were 80 and in 1967 there were 150 stations. The pre-production meetings on the show begin in February and include discussions about what went right or wrong on the previous telethon. At midyear, Lewis brings 150 general managers of participating stations to the La Costa resort for briefing sessions. In mid-August, Lewis invites all 213 local emcees to Los Angeles for a rundown on the current show--stars, timing, what Lewis will do, what he expects the locals to do.

The association itself has announced that this year’s guests will range from Dolly Parton and Burt Lancaster to Jack Lemmon and Ronald Reagan, Vanna White and Oprah Winfrey, plus other starry surprises. But Lewis argues, “The stars of my show are the kids. I don’t care what you surround the kids with, nothing’s ever comparable to the kids themselves. People may not remember who was on the show, but they remember the kids.”

There are reportedly a million Americans, including adults, suffering from the 40 neuromuscular diseases that come under the umbrella of the MDA. The latest, and the most dismaying to watch, is ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. “I was away three weeks and went back to see one of my kids who had ALS, and I thought I was in the wrong house. You can’t believe the degeneration.

“And you think I acted in films, this is where you really have to do an acting job. The one thing the kids don’t want is for you to be saddened by what’s happened to them. There’s something about neuromuscular disease that gives them tremendous sensitivity, insight into other people.”

Despite the telethon’s phenomenal success over the years, it has not been without slings and arrows for Lewis: charges that it is just a colossal ego trip for him or, more seriously, that he gets paid for what he does. The charges, vigorously denied, drive him crazy.

“I would fight to the death anyone who challenges why I do it,” Lewis says. “What I get for what I do can’t be measured in dollars. It’s a dream, an obsession.” His work has brought gifts of a kind, but they were unsought. He received the French Legion of Honor and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize.(Musician Bob Geldof was also nominated for a Nobel Prize for organizing the rock concerts for African famine relief.) “I’m the only entertainer in history to be nominated,” Lewis says. “My staff kids me, ‘Yeah, but you didn’t win.’ I say, ‘Yeah, but I did get nominated.’ ”

A curious point is that he never remembers a verbal question about being paid, and he never had a letter asking the question until the day after Richard Nixon resigned as President. It was a “say it ain’t so, Joe” query from a suddenly suspicious private citizen, and it wasn’t so, he says. “August 7, 1974,” Lewis recalls. “I keep the letter in a vault. It’s historic.” It was as if the soiling of the President had rendered suspect everything else in American life.

The real rewards of his commitment to the muscular dystrophy cause, Lewis says, are the letters from parents, the children’s hands that grasp his when he visits them at home or in hospitals, the elongation of young lives, the inching steps toward a cure.

“People say it’s all sentiment. But I don’t see it that way. I see kids living 10 to 12 years instead of a year or less.”

Of each dollar Lewis raises, 83 cents goes to research or to child care, 17 cents for administrative costs--a ratio significantly better than in many other major charities. “I hear from other charities who ask how do we do it,” he says. “I say that in 1984 it was only 13 cents for administration. I’m proud that we’ve only lost four cents to inflation.”

Lewis continues to play Vegas four times a year (“I still have to make a living”). He does one-nighters here and abroad. He is also completing negotiations for “The Nutty Professor II,” which he will direct and star in.

Filmmaking remains his first love. “It’s true that there’s no satisfaction like being on stage at Bally’s and having 1,700 people give you a standing ovation. I suppose people have a hard time understanding that there’s anything close to it. Or conducting the Chicago Pops or entertaining a big crowd at Berkeley. But being behind the camera when everything’s cooking, that’s the epitome of satisfaction. You’ve got your act together and it works. . . . Everything else is a piece of cake.”

In June of 1989, Lewis flew from Florida, where he was preparing to work in a film, back to Las Vegas long enough to make a surprise appearance. “How the hell long are you gonna stay on?” Lewis yelled from the wings in his familiar croak. Then he pushed on stage a cart containing a large birthday cake for his old partner, Dean Martin. Martin appeared to be genuinely startled and touched.

It is, Lewis calculated the other day, exactly 44 years since Martin and Lewis teamed up, and 34 years since they split up to pursue their separate careers. “Where did a lifetime go?” he muses. He is now 64 and it is 59 years, Lewis further calculates, since he first went in front of an audience and tried to make them laugh.

Martin and Lewis had gone quite separate ways until Martin’s son, Dino, was killed in a plane crash. “Then we talked on the phone more than we’d talked in the whole 10 years we were together,” Lewis says.

When the act broke up, Lewis got possession of the 32 brilliantly slapstick “Martin and Lewis Colgate Comedy Hours” they did from 1950 to 1954, and he has just leased them to the Comedy Channel.

Lewis is anxious to get back to filmmaking. He finds it ironic and baffling that the modest price “Nutty Professor II” will cost is these days as much a deterrent as a selling point. The idea is that it is necessary to spend more on production to match and justify the high costs of distribution and advertising. The original “Nutty Professor” in 1963 grossed $19 million domestically, Lewis says. “Doesn’t sound like much now, but it cost less than a million. And the average ticket price was 30 cents. I wouldn’t know how to make a $50 million film.”

Seven years ago Lewis had open heart surgery, a double bypass just in the nick of time. “Technically I was dead for 17 seconds. Believe me,” he says of what he remembers of the death experience, “Judy Garland isn’t there. It isn’t beautiful. It’s bleak.”

The trauma changed his life. No more cigarettes. He had been lighting up four or more packs a day. No more spirits; a glass of wine or two a day on doctor’s orders, and he has become a connoisseur of the good reds. He gets eight hours sleep a night, “not two, which I used to think I could get along on.”

Above all, Lewis says, he has learned to de-stress himself. “I allow myself only five minutes of stress at a time, maximum. I can’t stand incompetence and I used to be wildly impatient. Now if a clerk in a store is goofing up, instead of blowing my stack, I say, ‘What the hell, so it’s another 10 minutes.’ We were having a staff meeting the other day and we got into an argument. After a while, Joe Stabile, my manager, looked at his watch and said, ‘Hey, Jer, it’s five minutes.’ I said, ‘Right. Let’s move on.’ If I’ve got an ugly situation, I face it right away and then dismiss it. I don’t hold it.”

The brush with death forced him in effect to reconstitute his mind-set and everything from his diet to his whole view of living. “I’m so grateful to have a second chance; I’m trying to do everything right. Everybody should get a second chance.”