‍Double act: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis shot to fame

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‍IN THE mid-1940s a zany and broke comedian met a struggling and handsome crooner, and they fell in love. Their chemistry together was so powerful it would take them on a journey to super stardom.

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‍“But their brotherly love for each other ended in friction and despair and broke both their hearts, the British and American Press reported.

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‍ Dino Crocetti, who became Dean Martin, and Joseph Levitch, later Jerry Lewis, teamed up as a double act and their success was meteoric. They became the highest-paid comedy duo in show business, skyrocketing from $200 a week to $20 million a year, starring in nightclubs, on radio, TV and in movies.

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‍ They often slept in the same bed and their on-stage physical closeness, including surprise kisses on the lips, was so intense that newspapers questioned if they were secret lovers.

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‍ Dean would sweep Jerry up in his arms like a baby, and they would pat each other on the cheeks, staring into each other’s eyes.

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‍ Jerry said: “The thing about a truly handsome guy like Dean, who also happens to be truly masculine, is that he is a man’s man — that’s as magnetic to other men as it is to women. That’s what I want to be like, you think. Maybe if I hang around with him, some of that’ll rub off on me.”

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‍They were inseparable. The London Guardian reported: “Lewis found an older-brother figure in Dean, and Dean found the ‘missing piece’ for his act.

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‍ They kept their closeness secret for as long as they could. But eventually their platonic love affair leaked out. For behind the scenes were rows and sometimes violence. Lewis, an only child, was reported to have a ‘ballooning’ ego.

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‍ As their fame grew, he tried to control the act, and treated other lesser stars poorly, including Dean who began to resent playing stooge to his partner and felt undervalued, said the showbiz writers.

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‍ He also didn’t like Jerry snapping at the orchestra. Tensions grew to breaking point because they were ‘too close’. They hurt each other deeply inside in rows like married couples often do.

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‍ I tracked down some of their early acts on YouTube and the sheer magic of their partnership was clear to see. They were totally in tune with each other, and I could clearly see that when they looked at each other, that their friendship was deep.

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‍ Dean, the straight guy would start to sing, and Jerry would do tricky tap dances constantly falling over, jumping on the orchestra’s piano top and falling off behind him.

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‍ They were the original Morecambe and Wise. But with lots more magnet magic. And Dean, unlike Ernie, had a silvery voice that would sell millions of records.

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‍ Jerry, said the Hollywood Press, became “difficult and tyrannical” with script writers and started to give himself the best lines. Dean was angry and began to look for other showbiz roles.

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‍ Dean once famously lashed out at his partner in public: “You’re nothing to me but a fucking dollar sign to me!” he shouted.

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‍ After reading reports that the couple were having problems and might even split up, Groucho Marx wrote to Jerry. He said: “Being part of a team myself and having experienced similar problems with my brothers, I urge you to sit down with Dean and talk things out.”

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‍It was too late. By the time they finished their last movie, Hollywood or Bust, they had stopped speaking to each other. Their partnership was officially ended on their 19th anniversary on July 25, 1956. They didn’t speak to each other again for 20 years.

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‍Both went on to forge successful new careers—Dean as a movie and television star, recording artist, and nightclub luminary with the Rat Pack.

‍ Jerry as the groundbreaking writer, producer, director, and star of a series of hugely successful movie comedies. Their parting upset the public, and they were both left with broken hearts, even though they never admitted it. They carried that sadness for the rest of their lives.

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‍ In his biography Dean & Me, Jerry makes a convincing case for Dean as one of the great — and most underrated — comic talents of his era.

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‍ “The vast majority of comedians with good rhythm use beats — small hesitations, often with some comic business or other — to set up their jokes,” he wrote. “Dean didn’t use beats. I was in the presence of magic.”

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‍ The book reveals the depth of love they felt for each other and drove reviewers to declare: “It is truly a love to last for all time.”

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‍ After 20 years silence, Frank Sinatra orchestrated a surprise on-air reunion during Jerry’s telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association in 1976. He brought Dean out from the wings, and they embraced on camera and shared a few minutes of friendly banter. Dean kissed Jerry on the cheek and the audience clapped. From then on, they spoke to each other nearly every day.

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‍ They were fully reconciled at the funeral of Martin's son in 1987 and remained friends until Dean's death in 1995. But they never appeared in an act together again.

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‍END OF THE ROAD FOR BANKER WHO WANTED TO BE A LITTLE NAPOLEON

‍BANKER Henry Fauntleroy was so rich by the year 1821, he bought a mansion in the style of a Grecian villa in Brighton and built a grand billiard room, modelled on Napoleon’s tent, in his garden overlooking the sea.

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‍He was, in his mind, Napoleon reincarnated, newspaper reports claimed. After all, everyone said he looked like Napoleon. But he was soon to meet his Waterloo.

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‍ And amazingly, the end was to come in London’s Newgate Jail, courtesy of one of his neighbours, hangman James Botting, who lived around the corner in the seaside town. They were finally to meet at the end of a rope in London.

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‍Botting was England’s official executioner at the time, and no one liked him. Not after The Times, with a circulation of 10,000, reported that he used a short rope, so that ‘the drop’ did not break the condemned person’s neck, instead he or she struggled to breathe and was strangulated in agony. And that was to be the fate the ‘Little Emperor’ of the banking world, Fauntleroy.

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‍Life had started well for Fauntleroy who followed his father into the banking business. He joined the family firm of Marsh, Stracey, Fauntleroy and Graham, in Berners Street, London and became a senior partner after his father’s death. The free spending banker was popular in London and Brighton and began to spend his money on wine, women and song.

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‍But it was a small bank and it ran into trouble after several businesses which owed it money went bankrupt, a partner retired with a big pay-off, and the Bank of England refused to keep extending its credit.

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‍So, Fauntleroy forged his clients’ signatures to embezzle funds which he used to pay his debts and finance extra marital affairs. He was finally found guilty of fraud and sentenced to hang.

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‍ The scandal of his crime made nationwide news in the popular press, much of it favourable to his case and 13,000 people signed a petition to demand his reprieve from execution. Despite the petition Fauntleroy was hanged outside Newgate before a crowd of up to 100,000 Londoners on November 30, 1824. He was 40 years old.

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‍Newspapers ran two woodcut illustrations, one a depiction of the Newgate gallows, the other showing Fauntleroy in the condemned cell, his wife and child weeping at his knee. Reporters told how he was despatched from this world by Botting who used his favourite short rope.

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‍Public hangings were a popular form of entertainment for the crowd and opened a door for cheap printers and street vendors to 'turn a penny’ by selling accounts of the crimes, trials and dying speeches of criminals as souvenirs.

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‍The hatred for Botting, who executed 175 convicts in his career, grew worse.

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‍ On October 1, 1837, he fell out of his wheelchair in the street in Hove and lay on the ground, unable to move. People walked by but no one helped. He died on the pavement, aged 53.

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‍DIARY OF SORROW HELPS DYING JOURNALIST LOVE BEING ALIVE

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‍“I WISH I was as clever as that!” These were the words of H.G.Wells when he was asked if he wrote the Diary of Barbellion, a masterpiece penned by an ex-journalist dying of multiple sclerosis.

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‍After the diary was finished Barbellion said: “No man dare remain alive after writing such a book!”

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‍ His scrawled final diary entry was: “Self-disgust!”

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‍Ravaged by multiple sclerosis at just 28, that was all he could manage, before his hand was too unsteady to go on. He had been recording his daily life and the encroachment of death – since his first entry when he was 15.

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‍ Barbellion was the pen name of Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion. The writer was really Bruce Frederick Cummings and he called his work: ‘The Journal of a Disappointed Man.’ It was published to wide acclaim in 1919, but it is sadly little known nowadays and has been hailed as a bible for the medical profession and those suffering from the disease.

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‍ H G Wells wrote in a newspaper review: “A thread of unpremeditated and exquisite beauty runs through the story this diary tells.”

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‍ The diary explores the blackness of the disease, and the toll it takes. “As I become more static and moribund, my words become more active and aggressive, roaring by daytime and glowing phosphorescent at night, threatening to blow up from spontaneous combustion like diseased gunpowder,” the writer says.

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‍ “Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone told me. Well, life itself is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk.

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‍ “The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit.

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‍ “I have discovered I am a fly, that we are all flies, that nothing matters. It’s a great load off my life, for I don’t mind being such a micro-organism — to me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe — such a great universe, so grand a scheme of things.

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‍ “Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible and eternal, so that come what may to my Soul, my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part I shall still have some sort of a finger in the Pie.”

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‍ Barbellion died four years later, but not before publication of his journal, on which event he commented: “My horizon has cleared, my thoughts are tinged with sweetness, and I am content.”

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‍ The Journal of a Disappointed Man had four reprints within a year; and demand was so great it republished as a pocket classic in 1984, raising public awareness of multiple sclerosis and led to the birth of the MS Society.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍14 December 2025

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