'Where's Jerry Lewis when you need the man? Where's Jerry Lewis when no one gives a damn?"
This is the Frogs (on their CD My Daughter the Broad), lamenting all the days one must wait until the star's Labour Day Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon, in a state, as the singers declare, of "wheelchair blues."
This Labour Day, Lewis apparently went over the edge, according to The National Enquirer, which ran a feature story this week about his "meltdown" and "bizarre behaviour." By the telethon's end, it reports, "everyone was left wondering: What's wrong with Jerry?"
News and opinion sites have also started to attack the 81-year-old comedian because of his extemporized, shocking remarks. Of Merv Griffin's death, Lewis said, "He deserved to die" (because he did not have his prostate cancer treated); of a cameraman's family, he said, "Oh, your family has come to see you. You remember Bart, your oldest son; Jesse, the illiterate fag ..."
He is also reported to have snapped at Ed McMahon, but let's not split hairs here: Johnny Carson made a career of being, understandably, vexed by the same irritant.
In fact, Lewis is rumoured to be overmedicated because of a series of debilitating heath problems, and even though he stopped himself in mid-word, the damage is done.
Never mind that the "wobbling" man raised a record $64-million for the Muscular Dystrophy Association and has been working this telethon for more than 40 years. He used a distasteful pejorative and should be fired.
As one commentator observed, "Anything less might be seen as hypocritical and racist and we wouldn't want that, now would we?" It is sad and ridiculous that Lewis would hector a cameraman's son, even if he had his own perverse reasons, and I would be happy never to hear the now-commonplace word "faggot" ever again. Not from the average teenager, film or Dan Savage for that matter.
The day after the telethon, Lewis apologized for making the comment, but his sashay into dementia is more worrisome: This is no country for old men, and if the comic is on his way out, a series of sickening humiliations are soon to follow.
Because feminists have long studied women as discursive objects, they have been able to situate the aging female in society and culture, and examine the ways in which she is regarded and perceived.
Men never did find a movement of their own, and many would argue that they don't need one, as they are the oppressors, because they age with impunity and so on.
But do they?
When Frank Sinatra was very old and ill, the media delighted in mocking and mortifying him: At his first and last appearance at the Grammys, the show cut him off as he slowly spoke of his love for his wife: Too slow, old man! And when he began to fumble onstage, the tabloids, amused, recounted his son's decision to make him stop performing after he interpreted the line "Love was just a dance away" as "Love was just a pair of pants away." I would have paid the earth to hear him sing whatever he chose, but he was embarrassing people, and we don't want that, do we?
Similarly, when Bob Hope was near death, photographs of him, peering through red, blind eyes, were circulated like freak-show posters; Milton Berle conversely had to suffer RuPaul publicly snapping at him that he "wore diapers."
The same is true for the countless old men the tabloids have propped up over the years with the unchanging headline, "I just want to die!" And why not? Infirmity, in men and women (who can forget the cruel photographs of Rita Hayworth in the agony of Alzheimer's, published in Hollywood Babylon II?) disgusts us, and a few, wise elders who knew this, like Garbo or Johnny Carson, carved their own floe and sailed away from our vicious scrutiny. Again, we have the critical skills to apprehend why and how sick and elderly women are loathed, but we lack the ability even to empathize about what it is to lose one's masculinity.
Jerry Lewis's reputation has been destroyed, in truth, by his work with the MDA: A comic virtuoso, whose work as a teacher forwarded, among others, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, his career has become reduced to two bites: that dreadful played-to-death bit about the French correctly calling him a genius and his tenure at the microphone on the stage, as the Frogs sing, "with a crippled baboon."
This is what aging does to us, publicly or otherwise: It takes everything away, like a cozening thief, and makes us as small as our bodies and our will.
Jerry Lewis has been working on a film about the Holocaust for most of his life, called The Day the Clown Cried. Rumoured to be a sort of Third Reich Patch Adams, the film concludes with his character, the clown, leading children to the gas chamber and ultimately joining them.
It sounds terrible, it may be brilliant - we will never know. Lewis has guarded this film more jealously than Salinger hoards his unpublished Glass family stories.
In Lewis's biography, by Shawn Levy, he is quoted as fervently wanting to believe he is still loved.
He is not. Or he is, by the few who understand what it is to be laughed at; by the few who understand the distinction between the artist and his work.
Dylan Thomas may have died a repulsive death, after a stretch at the White Horse Tavern (where DT burgers are still sold), but he also urged his father - and all old men - to "rage" and not "go gently" into the night; even though this night must seem better than days spent in abject deterioration, hearing only execration from that "sad height."