Gary Lewis a Star On First Disk
NEW YORK — It’s a lot easier for interviewers nowadays, with all these second generation show biz youngsters like Gary Lewis taking over. (Indeed, youngsters in general.) You have your stet questions—with a 19-year-old you can’t talk rack jobbing, you can’t rummage his past, you can’t ask him how he handles drunks in night clubs, etc.
You meet a Gary Lewis, son of comedian Jerry Lewis ( the biggest thing to hit Paramount Pictures since Cecil B. De-Mille and the bathtub scene), and a lad whose first record, “This Diamond Ring” (with his vocal-instrumental group, the Playboys), climbed to No.1 nationally, and it’s still early enough to ask:
Question: How did the record come about?
Answer: Snuff Garrett, my A&R man at Liberty Records, met Dad and hoped to sell him on a record idea he’d had for along time. But Dad’s film schedule was too heavy, so he suggested that our group might interest Snuff. My mother acted as our agent and financed the recording session for “This Diamond Ring”.
Question: How did your group get together?
Answer: I’d had a set of drums for about five years, but I didn’t started playing them in earnest until about a year ago. I was attending the Pasadena Playhouse at the time, and pretty soon I was joined by A1Ramsay, on bass guitar; John R. West, cordavox; Dave Walker and Dave Costell, guitarists.They were all from Pasadena. We played parties and then spent a good deal of last summer performing at Disneyland.
Question: Has it been easier to make the grade having a famous and influential father?
Answer: It’s been harder, I think. Maybe he could open a door for us but then we really had to show something. People would think, oh, he’s Jerry Lewis’ son—what does he think he can do? Then we were really on our own. (The answers sound as familiar as the questions after a while.)
Question: How does your father feel about your entering show business?
Answer: He approves. My Dad gives me advice and counsel more as a father than as a performer. This makes it rather easy because when he’s home he’s “Dad” and on the screen he’s Jerry Lewis the movie star.
Question: What next?
Answer: Well, we did a movie some time ago at Universal called “Swingin’ Summer” that is just coming out. And I’m going back to the Coast now to do a cameo role in Dad’s current film, “The Family Jewels.” We’ll do part of a musical number for this sight gag bit Dad has dreamed up for us. Incidentally, Dad plays seven different people in this picture, and they all get together in one scene! We’re also doing a Dick Clark road tour and more TV.
(Gary had just done the Ed Sullivan Show” and was wondering how all the teens who had been phoning and dropping by had found out where he was staying while visiting New York. Then he remembered he had signed an autograph for a teen-age female at the Sullivan theater on the only thing he had available: a matchbook from the Americana Hotel.)
Question: Have you done any other films?
Answer: Yes, several years ago I sang “The Land of La La La” in my father’s “Rock-A-Bye Baby.”
Question: Have you studied acting?
Answer: Yes, at the Pasadena Playhouse, where I did things like “Mourning Becomes Electra.” I think they’ve helped prepare me, too.
Question: Do you want to be a comedian?
Answer: I’d have to be awfully good, or have a completely different style from my father’s. I don’t know. Everyone says my seven-year-old brother, Chris, will be the next comedian in the family. (There are six Lewis children, all boys. Gary’s the oldest.)
Question: What are your latest records?
Answer: The album, “This Diamond Ring,” and the new single, “Count Me In.”
He’s a likeable individual, flexible of slender face and body, quick to smile with a natural propensity toward clowning, resembling Jerry a few pounds ago when he first came along in those “My Friend Irma” movies but with enough embryo Gary to speak well for his future. He moves a lot in his hotel suite, from couch to chair to phone table to wall, like a kind of an itch.
The same kind of itch, perhaps, that brought the five-year-old Jerry Lewis to a borscht belt stage singing “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” Hmmm. Son Gary’s first hit was “This Diamond Ring.” Yes, times have certainly grown easier for everyone, especially now that things are looking up for Gary Lewis. END
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Information, credit and news source: Record World, April 3, 1965
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