Jerry Lewis · Janet Malcolm
Facts; truths.
the true crime that's worth your time
Vanity Fair’s “Jerry Lewis’s Costars Speak Out” is, unsurprisingly, infuriating. (CW for sexual assault.) The directors of Allen v. Farrow have put together a multimedia piece for VF about the “comedy icon”’s harassment and assault of more than one co-star, including a nine-minute documentary featuring the testimony of Lewis co-stars Karen Sharpe and Hope Holiday. Actor and producer Holiday, who talks about another rape she survived at the hands of a man in her acting class who got her address from a handout, has a DGAF flair that reminds me of the late great Doris Belack, and I would watch a whole feature just about her, telling stories on mid-century Hollywood — there’s nothing quite like an old SoCal dame wearing five figures’ worth of jewelry and dropping f-bombs — but of course you only have about 20 seconds to appreciate Holiday’s innate radness before the criminal misogyny of Lewis and the business that enabled him make you feel ill. Like, “Lewis had a ‘Lauer button’ on his dressing-room door” ill. Once again you’re reminded how many women like Holiday got crumpled up and tossed by the Lewises of Hollywood…how the answer to “whatever happened to” a young woman on the verge is probably something like this.
I’ve had zero use for Lewis since his grand pronunciamento about female comics (the…first one), and while I’ve really enjoyed watching him in projects that subvert his farcically harmless image, I did not get the impression that The King Of Comedy was “acting,” so much. In other words, I went into the VF piece assuming he was a controlling, ungenerous philanderer…
Lewis was prolific—in bed (even arriving at the studio early to fit in “a little hump” before work, he later told GQ); in conception (he had six sons with his then wife, Patti, all of whom he left out of his estimated $50 million estate); and in films[.]
…with the dated atomic-age ideas about comedy and sexual politics you’d expect from a rich guy born in 1926. That Lewis was also a predator didn’t occur to me — that the stories may not have come out before because Lewis may have outlived many of his potential accusers.
The other subject of the mini-doc, Karen Sharpe, went a different route, but still paid a price. When Lewis started grabbing on her, Sharpe was like, “I don’t know who you think you’re dealing with, but: no,” which naturally infuriated Lewis. When she offered to withdraw from The Disorderly Orderly because of the awkwardness she thought sure would ensue, Lewis snapped that it was too late, then gave her the silent treatment unless the camera was rolling — and obligated everyone else on the set to do it too.
On her final day of production, Sharpe was leaving her dressing room when she bumped into Lewis. She thanked him for the pay raise and her beautiful costumes. Lewis interrupted her to say she was “a hell of a girl.” Then he confessed, “I honestly don’t know how you came to work every day.” He offered an explanation: “You see, I’m sick.”
Sharpe didn’t let him get by with that, and I’m just trying to imagine the titanium ovaries it took to tell him he was full of shit and unprofessional and then suggest he find a sideline playing bad guys. I wouldn’t have had them at that age; I still might not.
The piece goes on to talk about Julie Miller, Amy Ziering, and Kirby Dick’s gathering of stories starting in 2017; aging actors realizing that what happened to them on dates with, say, Clark Gable was not harmless, or just the cost of doing business in the industry; studio execs assuming a female comic had slept with Lewis to get the meeting they were now using to talk about Lewis’s big dick; Lewis being a shithead to national treasure Lainie Kazan…on and on it goes. It’s ugly, it’s really nothing new, and it’s important and well built, so if you can, give it a read. — SDB
The crime
Times reviewer Margaret Talbot did a better job explaining what Sheila McGough is alleged to have done, and on whose alleged behalf, than I can hope to, so take it away, Talbsie:
When she wrote to [Janet] Malcolm, in the winter of 1996, McGough … had been disbarred and had served two years in prison for what the prosecutors called an ''escrow scam'' in which, they said, she had colluded with one of her clients, a genial, indefatigable con man named Bob Bailes. (The precise charges hinged on a complicated and rather dull scheme involving the purchase of dubious insurance companies. Suffice it to say that McGough at one point agreed to hold in her own bank account a large sum of money Bailes told her belonged to him, but that, strictly or even loosely speaking, did not.)
The story
Lord knows anyone who’s spent more than ten minutes with Best Evidence knows my issues with Janet Malcolm, the late and often great author of The Journalist and the Murderer who died late last year. Said issues, boiled down as far as I dare: Malcolm was content to let readers see her as a reporter, bound as such ethically, when in fact her preoccupation (again, per Talbot)
has again and again returned to one theme: the vexed relationship between objective truth and the narrative truth we impose on it. Stories -- those told by journalists and biographers, lawyers and witnesses, analysts and patients -- are always a violation of objective truth, even if they contain no overt lies. And yet we are dependent on them, because the raw truth -- what really happened -- is messy, incoherent, unsatisfying, often boring.
This is a useful distillation of The Crime Of Sheila McGough — and of Malcolm’s career, in some ways, which often looked and read (genuinely, if sometimes misguidedly, and other times willfully oblivious to the concepts like the Heisenberg principle) like repeated trips to a crossroads between truth and facts. We’ve seen so many true-crime properties trying to get narrative and literal justice to take hands; I wouldn’t say Malcolm was trying for that, but rather for pointing out that they couldn’t, or that one of those hands is a foot, or something. She wrote about the differences, the distances between, and may have felt that that existed outside (or above, based on her attitude in later years) the need for the expected documentation.
And so Sheila McGough is everything that annoys me about TJatM, but flipped to reflect light. Here, Malcolm reports the story out, almost to a fault, traveling all around to talk to case figures, but also reporting on her irritation with her subject, on her own impatience with the intransigence of objective truth — and when she applies her attentions to a crime story about a fraud, it’s much easier to appreciate the value of what she does. Because she’s…doing what we try to do, here. She’s talking about the value of story in a trial environment. She’s talking about whose stories take precedence and prevail. She’s several hundred yards up in the ether, granted, more focused on etymology than epidemiology and on sides of the aisle than race or gender…but the conclusions she draws still apply.
And my God, can she write. This is, perhaps, the most frustrating aspect of Malcolm as a true-crime “figure” for me: that what she could do on the sentence level in the space of three pages is the best I can hope for in a calendar year all put together, but that she seemed unwilling to commit herself to certain rigors of “journalism” so that she might leave herself room to better and more loftily perform…on the sentence level. Malcolm’s nutshelling of the “art” in “con artist,” her description of the McGough family’s Chihuahua “trembl[ing] in remembered outrage” after strangers walked past the house, the way a fellow attorney’s take on McGough’s relationship with her signature client is rendered (full names, a la “Jordan Catalano” in My So-Called Life)…it’s not just envy I feel, although it’s that too. It’s rue. Malcolm, this calm and particular recorder of “pastries smeared with glutinous fruit”; of “the exaggerated freshness — like an overcleaned painting — that is characteristic of many elderly American women”; of “Muzak played with a kind of satiric extra-chipperness, as if somehow sensing it had found its true audience: no one,” could never quite get past recording to reporting.
The Crime Of Sheila McGough is worth your time (and won’t take much; it’s short). The case itself isn’t per se terribly compelling, but Malcolm lays out the issues in play easily and without (too much, for her) condescension, then slides into her wheelhouse: chronicling the view, from a rented car paid for by a magazine, of the service roads that divide the facts of true-crime cases from their best stories. And because McGough herself is a frustrating and opaque figure to Malcolm, the Oz behind a curtain of transcripts and rationalizations, watching Malcolm trying to dissect McGough to her essence is, in some strange way, gratifying. In the context of a true-crime case that I knew little about, that doesn’t involve a man’s terrifying lethal reaction to the needs of his family and that Malcolm (therefore?) chose to confront in all its detail, her descriptions of “deliberately colorless” appeals attorneys and the amiable ugliness of American strip malls land as artistry, versus a review of the play for Mrs. Lincoln. Although of course the vanishing line between those two concepts is where Malcolm got her mail all along. — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: Get those air purifiers set up…it’s Eve’s budget-doc clean-out!
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