Actors who worked on films with Jerry Lewis accuse him of sexual assault and sexual harassment in a film and article published this week.
Lewis is the subject of a Vanity Fair mini documentary called “Through a Glass Darkly” from Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick, the filmmakers behind HBO’s “Allen v. Farrow,” and a story from Ziering, Dick and Julie Miller.
Lewis, a Newark, N.J., native and renowned comedian, actor and director, started his career as one half of a comedy duo with Dean Martin in the 1950s. He went on to find great success in comedy films including “The Nutty Professor” (1963) and “The Bellboy” (1960). He was 91 when he died in 2017.
Karen Sharpe — later known as Karen Kramer — who had won a Golden Globe for “The High and the Mighty” (1954) and worked with Hollywood leading men including John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, accepted an offer to work as the leading lady on Lewis’ 1964 film “The Disorderly Orderly.”
After Lewis took an interest in her wardrobe in the movie, he asked her to meet with him, then began to fondle her, she says.
“He was all over me,” Sharpe, 87, tells the filmmakers.
“I said, ‘I don’t know what you think, but I don’t do this,’” Sharpe says. “I got the feeling that that had never really happened to him very much ... I could see that he was furious.”
She suggested that she resign because it would be awkward to work with Lewis. Sharpe says Lewis told her it was too late and that she had already signed a contract. Lewis had her punished, she says, making it so no one was allowed to speak to her on set.
“He wanted to win in whatever way he could win,” Sharpe says. “Win the girl, win the moment, put me in my place to let him know, ‘I’m the boss here, you’ll do as I say, and if you don’t, this is how I punish you.’”
Later, she says Lewis acknowledged his behavior as they wrapped the movie, telling her “I honestly don’t know how you came to work every day ... You see, I’m sick.”
Sharpe says she told Lewis off, and let him know the experience had been “the most unprofessional leading man/leading lady relationship I’ve ever had in my 20 years as an actor.”
Actor Hope Holiday knew Lewis since she was 13, as a friend of her father, and considered him family.
When she worked with Lewis on the film “The Ladies Man” (1961), which he also directed, she says he asked her to come to his dressing room on the first day. As she sat down in the dressing room, he pressed a button that locked the door, she says, and began praising her body, telling her she should wear skirts instead of pants. She says she told Lewis that her boyfriend was waiting outside, but he wasn’t deterred.
“Next thing I know, he’s unzipping his pants,” Holiday, 91, tells the filmmakers.
She says he proceeded to masturbate in front of her.
Holiday says she was afraid of what would happen if she said something, because she was under contract with Lewis and Paramount. The incident caused depression and discouraged her from dating, she says.
The Vanity Fair story goes on to share stories from other entertainment industry talents about Lewis, including Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated writer and actor Renée Taylor (”The Nanny”). Taylor, then working as a comedian, met Lewis when she was on “The Tonight Show” in the ’60s. He told her he’d like to meet with her if she came to Hollywood. She did just that and asked for a part in his 1961 film “The Errand Boy,” which he co-wrote and directed.
When Lewis arranged for Taylor to meet with Paramount executives, she was asked if she was “one of Jerry’s girls.” Taylor, 88, says they didn’t believe that Lewis would have been impressed by her talent and proceeded to make lewd comments about her.
“I thought it was so gross,” she says. “It was hard to laugh at Jerry’s jokes after that.”
Before his death, Lewis had been criticized for his comments on women in comedy.
“A woman doing comedy doesn’t offend me but sets me back a bit,” Lewis said when Martin Short asked him about Lucille Ball in 2000. “I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.”
At the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, Lewis again said that seeing women in comedy bothered him.
“I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator,” he said. “I just can’t do that.”
Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.
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