Sunday, August 20, 2017

Jerry Lewis

You have to pronounce the name the way they did in the Mountains--Zhehree Lews--at joints that don't exist any more like Brown's, where the theater was named after him and after he became really famous, he would come back and do a weekend for the owners. Brown's was the kind of place where a woman screaming from the pool to be saved from drowning was hard to notice because there was a loud mambo band playing next to the pool.

Many of the critics never "got" his kind of comedy. It was a time when we still had high culture, and then what Dwight Macdonald called midcult or kitsch. I'm not sure Jerry Lewis was even up to the level of kitsch. All he was was--incredibly funny. He was the most natural clown I ever saw perform. I'm old enough to recall how great he and Dean Martin were on the Colgate Comedy Hour in the early 50s. There hasn't been a team like them since. 

My dad used to go to the Las Vegas MD telethon every Labor Day. We would tease him about it but Jerry Lewis raised billions for the charity even if this was clearly the most offensive of a species--the telethon--that is so offensive it has disappeared from our world. I did get to the stage where going to Jerry Lewis movies was a non-starter because he was too much to take in such a big dose. 

He was best in limited amounts. This was tough to find because he did not respect limits. He always was over the top. He even showed he could be a "real actor" in his later years, when he played the Johnny Carson part in The King of Comedy with Robert DeNiro. I did enjoy the headline when he played the Devil in Damn Yankees on stage: "Jerry Lewis Goes Legitimate".

The French were the ones who "got" him the most. They appreciated his being the perfect clown. Ed Wynn was known as the Perfect Fool, but it really was Jerry Lewis. From his first appearance with his vaudevillian parents in 1931, he knew how to get a laugh. I recall him on some TV show doing a takeoff on Jose Greco, the great flamenco dance star. He's clicking his feet all over the stage, screaming, "My feet! My feet! This hurts!"

He will be missed, not so much for the telethon or for some of the awful pictures, but for his character, who anticipated all the "dumb and dumber" stuff. His secret was probably not very hard to discern: he always knew how to be funny.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

The Architect Who Endures

On the way to a group weekend outing (our running-walking group) at Nemacolin in Laurel Highlands in Western Pennsylvania, we headed first to see two of Frank Lloyd Wright's great houses--the renowned Fallingwater and the nearby but somewhat less famed Kentuck Knob.

Fallingwater was a fantastic idea that Wright managed to execute when in his prime; Kentuck Knob was a modification of his later-career emphasis on usonian houses: very practical, affordable designs. One of the guides did mention that Wright was not very attentive to cost in terms of charging the client but he did expand Kentuck Knob's original design to suit the owner's wishes. The changes were all good because his "low-priced" house was very tight and almost tiny--some of the hallways and bedrooms are still very narrow or small.

Fallingwater of course is the house you've seen pictures of that hangs out over a cascading stream. Except for the one big room on the first level, none of the rooms is huge but the terraces outside each are wonderful and expansive. I did observe that there are plenty of stone stairs in the narrow passages--Wright believed in compression (the hallways) opening up into expansive rooms or areas.

Much of his work is similar in all his designs--he designed his own furniture to fit into the houses and his horizontal designs are still artistically sound and attractive. It was interesting to learn that he did change his ideas--the flat roof he used in his Prairie style houses evolved to the slanted roof of Kentuck Knob, which solved the continuous problems his clients encountered with the flat roof that usually leaked.

I've seen many of his houses in Oak Park and Riverside, Illinois, from the outside, and his Unity Temple there, as well as the synagogue in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, where my aunt, uncle, and cousins resided nearby. I remember people saying that his synagogue design was too small. His Guggenheim Museum at 89th St. and Fifth Ave. in New York is a triumph. I also toured his western headquarters, Taliesin West near Scottsdale, Arizona.

He did have a huge ego, much like Ayn Rand's Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, who supposedly was modeled after him. He often had lower doorways and ceilings because he was a short man. But his designs had a wonderful style that was his own, especially the use of stone and horizontal patterns in the many Prairie-style homes he saw built. There's clearly good reason why we go out of our way to see his buildings and tour their insides as well. It is a rare chance to see what a true artist accomplished.