from the book
"KING OF COMEDY:
THE LIFE AND ART OF JERRY JEWIS"

Besides his charity work, and besides passing the benefit of his experience on to a new generation
of directors, there was another way Jerry hoped to do something important beyond all the
entertainment he'd offered the world over the years.  He wanted to make a film on an important
theme -- and he had had his eyes on a particular project for some years.  In 1966, during the
production of Way ... Way Out, his longtime sound engineer Jim Wright signed on as co-producer
of a film based on a script by publicity flack Joan O'Brien and TV critic Charles Denton.  The film,
known as The Day the Clown Cried, would tell the fictional story of a dislikeable, unsuccessful
(and gentile) German circus clown named Karl Schmidt who was sent to Auschwitz for satirizing
Hitler and was subsequently used by his Nazi captors to lead unsuspecting Jewish children
into the gas chamber.  Under the aegis of producer Paul Mart, the film would be directed
that spring in Europe by Loel Minardi.

Like many people in Hollywood, Jerry had heard tell of this remarkable story, which O'Brien had
conceived about five years earlier when she ws thinking and reading about the Holocaust while
simultaneously doing publicity work for Emmett Kelly.  It had an obvious mix of horror, pathos,
and drama, and it drew the attention of several important talents over the years, Milton Berle,
Dick Van Dyke, and Joseph Schildkraut among them.  But none of these performers had been
able to pull a film together, and the thing seemed destined never to be made,
a legendary "great unproduced screenplay".

In the spring of 1971, when Jerry was playing at the Olympia Theatre, he was visited by Belgian
producer Nathan Wachsberger, who had imported European films into the U.S. in the 1930s, been a
partner of George Jessel's in a production company, and made many unexceptional films in Europe.
Wachsberger had an option on O'Brien's script, and he wanted Jerry to star and direct.  "I have
made a deal with Joan," Jerry recalled Wachsberger announcing.  "We absolutely agree that you
are the only one who can play Helmut exactly as she envisioned him."  (Significantly, in Jerry's
memory, Wachsberger uses not the name O'Brien gave her protagonist -- Karl Schmidt --
but the name Jerry imposed upon the character when he rewrote the script --- Helmut Doork.)
 Jerry had nothing even in the pipeline back in Hollywood.  He agreed to look the material over.

His initial response to the proposal, he recalled, was fear.  "The thought of portraying Helmut still
scared the hell out of me," he wrote in his autobiography.  But Wachsberger laid it out for him as a
rare combination of a sweet deal and an important project:  French and Swedish financing, the
resources of Europa Studios (the very lot where Ingmar Bergman worked), a cast of fine European
actors.  Jerry finally relented.  By August 1, Variety was reporting that Jerry Lewis Productions
and Wachsberger had agreed to do the film together with a start-up date set sometime later that year.

It turned out to be an optimistic plan.  Jerry wanted to rewrite O'Brien's script, and he still had
obligations to Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas to fulfill before the year ran out.  (His three-year
deal with the casino, calling for him to appear four weeks a year, was winding down, but he
renewed it that winter, stipulating that for 1972 he preferred to work his obligation off
in a single month to give him time to make the film.)

In February 1972 he and his new publicist, Fred Skidmore, flew to Stockholm to see to pre-
productions chores.  They went to Germany and Poland to visit the sites of concentration
camps.  And they went to Paris, where Jerry shot some material for the film while performing
with the Bouglione Cirque d'Hiver and saw to his theatre business.
(France's first Jerry Lewis Cinema opened in March 1972).

On April 5, shooting of the film proper began in Stockholm.  To prepare for his role, Jerry,
who'd been putting on weight in the past few years, lost thirty-five pounds on a grapefruit diet.
Joining him in the cast were Swedish actors Harriet Andersson (longtime collaborator of the
great Bergman), Ulf Palme, and Sven Lindberg, along with Jerry's French admirer, comedian
Pierre Etaix.  Press releases were distributed.  Hollywood trade papers carried announcements.

But something was fishy.  Although his $1.5 million film was in production, Nathan Wachsberger
was nowhere in sight.  After two weeks of filming, Jerry began to get troubling reports of the
financial condition of the project.  Suppliers hadn't been paid for film and other equipment. Crew
members and performers had been issued rubber checks.  Wachsberger remained in the south
of France, taking Jerry's frantic phone calls and assuring him that the money was forthcoming.

Wachsberger had very good reason to keep his distance.  He may or may not have had the
money, but he definitely didn't have the rights to O'Brien's material.  His option on the script
had expired.  Wachsberger had paid O'Brien a five-thousand-dollar initial fee, but she never
received the fifty thousand dollars due her before production began.  As a result, Jerry and
his company were in Sweden filming something that wasn't legally theirs to make.
And O'Brien told a reporter years later that she was certain Jerry was aware of it.
"Jerry knew the option had expired," she said, "but he decided to go ahead."

In the face of intransigence from his producer, and with a great deal of time, energy,
publicity, and passion already invested in the film, Jerry paid out of his own pocket for
expenses that Wachsberger ought to have incurred.  It was an abysmal circumstance,
and he couldn't hide his anxieties from his colleagues.  Lindberg, who played a Nazi
in the film, recalled how agitated Jerry was throughout the shoot.  "It was clear
he was not in good order those months here in Sweden," he said.

And, in fact, Jerry -- torn by his anxiety about the state of the production, by the possibility
of losing all of the money he was investigating in the film, and by the very emotions that the
project and his role called up in him -- could barely stand the strain.  As on his first self-
directed films, he pushed himself to his physical limits to see the thing through.  "I almost had
a heart attack," he told a New York Times reporter months later.  "Maybe I'd have survived.
 Just.  But if that picture had been left incomplete, it would have very nearly killed me."
(Indeed, given his perpetual nerve pain and his drug habits, it might well have.)

At one point, he revealed afterward, he actually closed down the production because of
Wachsberger's failure to perform his duties as producer.  Nevertheless, he persevered,
bleeding his own bank account in the process.  As he explained soon afterward, he turned the
stress of his situation into a benefit.  "The suffering, the hell I went through with Wachsberger
had one advantage," he said.  "I put all the pain on the screen.  If it had been my first picture,
the suffering would have destroyed me.  But I have the experience to know how to use suffering."

Ultimately, he said, he poured his entire soul into the film in a way he never had before. The
experience of shooting the climactic scene struck him as one of the transcendent moments
of his life:  "I was terrified of directing the last scene.  I had been 113 days on the picture,
with only three hours of sleep a night.  I had been without my family.  I was exhausted, beaten.
 When I thought of doing that scene, I was paralyzed;  I couldn't move. I stood there in my
clown's costume, with the cameras ready.  Suddenly the children were all around me, unasked,
undirected, and they clung to my arms and legs, theylooked up at me so trustingly.   I felt love
pouring out of me.  I thought, "This is what my whole life has been leading up to."  I thought what
the clown thought.  I forgot about trying to direct.  I had the cameras turn and  I began to walk,
with the children clinging to me, singing, into the gas ovens.  And the door closed behind us."

In June, when production finally wrapped, Jerry told Swedish reporters that Wachsberger, who
he claimed never showed up on the set or made himself available for consultation, had failed to
make good on his financial obligations.  Wachsberger retailiated by instructing his London lawyers
to sue Jerry for breach of contract, claiming that he had all he needed to finish the film without Jerry.

Through the following winter and spring, Jerry edited the movie, taking cans of film on the road with
him and working long hours in Los Angeles with Rusty Wiles.  He still had no way of knowing if the
film would be released, and his frustration and bitterness were obvious.  He drank beers in the
editing room, and he snapped at Wiles when he said that people who'd seen a rough cut of one
sequence felt it was a bit too long.  "Everybody's an expert," Jerry barked.  "There's a fucking
genius at every screening.  Where were they when the empty pages were in the typewriter?
 Where were they when we were freezing in fucking Sweden, shooting the film?  Too long?
 Jesus Christ!  ... It was the same thing with the dance sequence in The Patsy.  And I told them
then that they should just wait till it was fucking finished before they go telling me what's wrong
with it.  Just wait till I'm ready. I don't know who the fuck asked for their opinion anyway."

He saved his special wrath, though, for a young Swedish extra who made the mistake of turning
her eyes toward the camera during a shot that had been exceedingly difficult to capture.
 "There she is," he snarled at Wiles showed him the footage.  "There's the little cunt.
 Same little cunt who tried to rape us before.  Watch her eyes.  There.  See it?  Following the
fucking camera ... the sneaky little bitch.  Vamping for the camera.  She pulled that same
thing in another sequence, remember?  I told her to keep her fucking eyes to the front. That it
wasn't a beauty pageant ... There's no room for Shirley Temple in a concentration camp."

Increasingly, it seemed that all of the work he was putting into assembling the film would go
for naught.  Neither he nor Wachsberger had the clout or money to pull the frayed situation
together.  Europa Studios, claiming it was owed more than six hundred thousand dollars by
the production, held on to the negative, although Jerry kept the negatives of the final three
scenes (along with duplicates of much of Europa's holdings) as protection against the film's
being released without his cooperation.  "I took the last three shooting days," he remembered.
"I hold those negatives, the last three days.  So they have incomplete work there."  O'Brien
and her co-writer, Denton, for their parts, refused to sell the rights to their property anew
to Wachsberger or Jerry in the wake of the production, even after Jerry pleaded with them
personally upon his return to the States and showed them scenes from the film.

Much as he may have thought he could win sympathy for his case by showing O'Brien and
Denton his footage, the gesture might actually have turned the writers forever against him. "It
was a disaster," O'Brien said of the film years later.  "Just talking about it makes me very
emotional."   Jerry had changed more than just the name of her lead character.  He had turned
him from a mediocre clown into a gifted one, from a gentile to a Jew (Subcin: This is incorrect.
He is not a Jew in the rewritten script), and from a bastard into a hero, from "an egoistical clown,"
according to Jim Wright, who also saw a rough cut of the film, to "an Emmett Kelly, a very sad
clown."  The original story was a tale of horror, conceit, and finally, enlightenment and self-
sacrifice.   Jerry had turned it into a sentimental, Chaplinesque representation of his own
confused sense of himself, his art, his charity work, and his persecution at the hands of critics.
Furthermore, he had used the clown theme as an occasion to work into the film some of the silent
routines he had been performing in Europe -- clown material like the stuff he did on L'uomo d'oro.
 And, to the writers' chagrin, he had a characteristically relaxed attitude toward details:
"In one  scene," bemoaned Denton, "Jerry is lying in his bunk wearing a pair of brand-new
shoes after theoretically having been in a concentration camp for four or five years."

Others to whom Jerry showed his rough cut over the years held similar opinions of what they saw.
"I just remember rage," said Joshua White, director of the 1979 MDA telethon.  "He played
this rage because that's what he was filled with then.  He never really commits to the character.
He's always just Jerry. He's supposed to be this schlump, but he's got this slicked-back hair."

Comedian Harry Shearer, a longtime Lewis observer and a friend of White's who has allowed by
Jerry to view the rough cut, summed up the experience:  "The closest I can come to describing
the effect is if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz.
You'd just think, 'My God, wait a minute!  It's not funny, and it's not good, and somebody's
trying too hard in the wrong direction to convey this strongly held feeling.' "

Despite the webs of financing and litigation that kept the film under wraps, it refused to die
completely.  In 1980, when Jerry's next film, Hardly Working, proved a hit in West Germany
and France, Europa Films announced plans to shop the negative of The Day the Clown Cried to
European concerns who would finish and distribute it.  At the time, O'Brien reiterated her claim
that the film was made without any legal rights and could never be released.  "I'm so sick and
tired of stories being circulated regarding the Stockholm fiasco," she said, "that I felt it was time
to again state the facts, facts which everyone, including Lewis and the people at Europa Studios,
are well aware of."

Later that year, Jim Wright told the Hollywood trade press that he was still developing a script
of the story, with Richard Burton in mind for the lead.  Nothing happened.  In 1991 producers
Tex Rudloff (one of Wright's original partners) and Michael Barclay announced they would
make a version of The Day the Clown Cried in the Soviet Union as a joint production with the
Russian company Lenfilm.  Again, no film resulted.  The following year, yet another plan
called for Robin Williams to star and Jeremy Kagan (who'd recently made The Chosen)
to direct.  Yet again, nothing more was heard of the project.  In 1994 Barclay was talking
about a William Hurt version.  But it seemed no likelier than any of his previous efforts.

For his part, Jerry never surrendered the hope that he could see the project through.
Writing about the film in 1982, he said, "I'm still hoping to get the litigation cleared
away so I can go back to Stockholm and shoot three or four more scenes."  In 1984
he spoke of finishing the film -- and of making The Nutty Professor II.

Eventually, The Day the Clown Cried became a sore point with him; interviewers who poked
too closely at the topic could find themselves subjected to withering retorts.  A pair of Cahiers
du Cinema interviewers who went to speak with him in 1993 wrote that they'd been cautioned
in advance against mentioning the film.

Just as he had sworn to himself that he would someday see a cure for muscular dystrophy,
he swore he would live to see the release of The Day the Clown Cried:  "One way or another,
I'll get it done.  The picture must be seen, and if by no one else, at least by every kid in the
world who's only heard there was such a thing as the Holocaust."

He no doubt meant what he said, even if he was unconciously paraphrasing the
famous malapropism of Samuel Goldwyn:  "I don't care if it doesn't make a nickel.
I just want every man, woman, and child in America to see it!"

BACK TO:

 THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED