Dean And Me: A Love Story - Hardcover

For ten years Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were the most successful show business act in history. The handsome crooner from Ohio and the skinny monkey from New Jersey were an unlikely pair, both destined for mediocre careers as nightclub entertainers before teaming up. But the moment they got together something clicked - something miraculous. Audiences saw it at once, and a new kind of comedy was born.

In this by turns hilarious and moving memoir, Jerry Lewis recounts with crystal clarity, and in his own unique, wise-cracking voice, every step of his troubled fifty-year friendship with Dean Martin. Starting one spring afternoon in 1945 when the two first met on a street corner in New York, Dean And Me takes us through their anarchic, improvised early performances in the mob owned nightclubs of Atlantic City, and through the giddy days of stardom, when it seemed the money, women and prank filled, high-rolling lifestyle would last for ever. On July 24th 1956, however, Dean and Jerry split, and the two men weren’t to speak to one another for twenty years. In the intervening years both men had triumphant individual careers – Martin as a movie star and singer (and charter member of the Rat Pack); Lewis as the groundbreaking writer, producer, director and star of a string of Hollywood comedies. They met for the last time when in 1990, Jerry ran into Dean, by then a broken and haunted old man.

This is a candid and intimate memoir by one the few surviving Hollywood legends. Lewis is a wonderful raconteur and his tales capture the glamour of the era, the excitement of the duo’s budding career, and the slow, sad erosion of the fun that followed.