She’d never been summoned by a costar like that before—but then she’d never worked with Jerry Lewis. Apparently, it was how he did things.
Karen Sharpe had already held her own onscreen with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne and won a Golden Globe for the airplane-disaster movie The High and the Mighty when she was cast in 1964’s The Disorderly Orderly. The role, the love interest to Lewis’s typically zany buffoon, hadn’t initially appealed to her. It was a comedy, and she preferred drama. It had also been made clear she wasn’t permitted to be funny opposite the film’s notoriously insecure leading man.
But Sharpe had recently taken a year-and-a-half-long hiatus from Hollywood—she’d gone to San Antonio to settle her father’s estate after his death—and returned to a town that seemed to have forgotten about her. When Lewis offered her the role, he even sweetened the deal, tripling her salary and guaranteeing that Edith Head, the costume designer behind Grace Kelly’s and Audrey Hepburn’s iconic looks, would create her wardrobe. “It was an offer I shouldn’t and couldn’t refuse,” says Sharpe, now 87.
Lewis had the power to make these promises. About a decade earlier, he’d split from Dean Martin after their singing and comedy duo rocketed both to a post–World War II superstardom on par with Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Critics (and Lewis himself) believed the hyperactive comedian—not Martin’s straight-man crooner—was the real talent. Lewis, who had been the putzy kid brother to Martin’s debonair gentleman, felt he had outgrown his partner. Lewis’s ego expanded even more in 1959 when, at age 33, he signed a seven-year contract with Paramount for a base of $10 million—the largest contract of its kind between a studio and performer at the time. He could hire whomever he pleased.
And 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 (The Disorderly Orderly was Lewis’s 16th film at Paramount in just eight years as a solo act). By 1959 his movies (solo and with Martin) had brought in $100 million for Paramount at a time when tickets cost less than 70 cents. He was so untouchable that Paramount’s head of production, Barney Balaban, had said, “If Jerry wants to burn down the studio, I’ll give him the match!”
All this to say that when Lewis summoned Sharpe to set to see what his leading lady looked like in costume, Sharpe might have been surprised—Lewis’s longtime collaborator Frank Tashlin was actually the director—but it would have been reckless to say no.
The movie was being filmed in a mammoth Beverly Hills mansion, which was large enough to look like a hospital (no matter the chandeliers). Sharpe reported to Lewis’s office and, with a wardrobe mistress standing nearby, began modeling her costumes while Lewis requested various nips and tucks. When Sharpe was down to her final costume, Lewis picked up a walkie-talkie and excused the guards outside his office.
Then Lewis “started moving in on me,” recalls Sharpe. “He grabbed me. He began to fondle me. He unzipped his pants. Quite frankly, I was dumbstruck.”
Sharpe protested. “I put my hand up and said, ‘Wait a minute. I don’t know if this is a requirement for your leading ladies, but this is something I don’t do,’ ” she says. “I could see that he was furious. I got the feeling that that never really happened to him.”
She tried to politely dismiss the assault without insulting the star. She even offered to quit, concerned it would be awkward to film scenes as romantic partners. But the contract had been signed, Lewis said. The costumes were made. And she was due back for filming in three days.
When Sharpe returned to Greystone Mansion on her start date, a crew member was waiting with a message: According to Sharpe, the entire production, save for the director and assistant director, had been told they could not speak to Sharpe. “If anyone speaks to you…we’ll be fined,” the crew member explained apologetically. “I wanted to let you know…. But I can’t even speak to you.”
The punishment went further: Before her first scene, Sharpe learned that Lewis would not rehearse with her. She could work with Lewis’s stand-in, but when the lead arrived, he refused to interact with or acknowledge Sharpe unless the camera was rolling. “That happened through the whole film,” she says. “He never worked with me. He never spoke to me. The first take of what we did together was what went on film. And that was what everyone was going to see.”
Sharpe could have talked to her manager, but what was he going to do? She knew firsthand how quickly the industry could forget an actor and feared further retribution for behaving “problematically” according to the era’s antiquated standards. So onscreen she played nice toward the man punishing her, stoically stomaching his shtick. In a scene set at an Italian restaurant, Sharpe watches Lewis spiral a forkful of spaghetti until it’s wrapped around his entire arm and then listens as he attempts to teach her a lesson: “Respect and admiration, those you have to earn.” She was called to set on days she was not filming—but obliged with a smile, reading in her solitary confinement, eating alone in the commissary, and sneaking onto the nearby set of Stanley Kramer’s Ship of Fools to watch her idol, Vivien Leigh. (Kramer noticed her; they were later married for 35 years, until his death.)
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.”
That’s when Sharpe finally snapped: “Jerry, bullshit. Is that your excuse for bad behavior—that you’re sick and people are supposed to excuse that? Well, I don’t excuse that. It was the most unprofessional leading man/leading lady relationship I’ve ever had in my 20 years as an actor. Just think how much better we could have been if you’d been professional and cooperated.”
She had one final thought.
“You ever think about playing a heavy—a real son of a bitch?” asked Sharpe. “Because you’re really good at that. People wouldn’t believe it, but we both know that’s who you really are.”
Maybe audiences mistook Lewis for the pratfalling fool he played onscreen—all crossed eyes, broad jokes, and desperate attention-vying. But many in Hollywood knew he was cantankerous, difficult, and cruel—an insecure egomaniac with an all-consuming sex drive. “I’m a selfish man,” admitted Lewis in one interview. He expanded on the theme in 2006’s Dean and Me: A Love Story: “When fame and money come all at once, even the strongest men will get their heads turned around. I had plenty of strengths, but avoiding temptation was not one of them.” Lewis had a reputation, like many before and after him, that rippled through the industry. But because of his moneymaking potential and his philanthropy—not to mention Hollywood’s history of corrupt morals and misogyny—his behavior was ignored.
Several years ago, Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering began investigating Old Hollywood’s long history of abuse. The pair have covered alleged sexual abuse in the church (Twist of Faith), on college campuses (The Hunting Ground), in the military (The Invisible War), and, most recently, alongside cocreator Amy Herdy, within one brutally divided family (Allen v. Farrow). Around 2017, they began interviewing actors—collecting devastating stories, many of which were shared for the first time. Some of the most explosive accusations involved Jerry Lewis. The filmmakers brought their interviews to Vanity Fair, wanting the women’s stories to be heard. Speaking about Hope Holiday, the 91-year-old actor from Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, Dick says, “I remember Hope saying she thought she would take these stories to her grave. She never thought anyone would be interested. She never thought there’d be a safe space to tell them.” (Ziering and Dick also made a short film with some of the women’s stories which can be seen above.)
People have reported and acted against Hollywood sexual harassment and abuse since 1937, when movie extra Patricia Douglas became the first woman to take on a studio for sexual assault; she claimed she was raped by an MGM salesman after boarding a bus, along with other aspiring starlets who were told they’d be filming on location, only to be deposited at a sales convention as party favors. After filing a lawsuit, her name was smeared by studio fixers, her address leaked to the press, and her case dismissed. (The district attorney had been accused of taking MGM bribes.) Generations of women kept quiet about sexual assault and harassment in part because neither they nor the society they lived in had even a vocabulary for it. Longtime star Loretta Young did not realize she had been date-raped by Clark Gable in 1935 until she heard the phrase on CNN 63 years later and asked friends to explain it to her. Once she was clear on the meaning, she said, “That’s what happened with me and Clark.”
The women Ziering spoke to describe an era and town where aggressive sexual overtures and abuse were “so ingrained that it was not even something you questioned. This was the state of the industry. It was just something you figured out how to navigate.”
“They were expected to accept being assaulted and to just deal with it themselves,” adds Dick, explaining that Hollywood even helped normalize the idea of trading sexual favors for parts by referencing it in film and TV. “The casting couch has been treated as a joke for a long time, which is a form of acceptance that sends a message that there’s nothing wrong with it and there’s no reason to be upset about it or report it. Of course it’s very traumatic. And I think that kind of terminology is also used in the way of seeing them as disposable.”
In the 1950s, the fan magazine Picturegoer published an exposé on casting couch practices. “This is the most depressing story we have ever written,” the reporters wrote. “For weeks, we have made our investigations…we have built up a dossier of information, which, we believe, is an ugly scar on the glamorous face of show business.” No one noticed the story. In 1953, Marilyn Monroe herself wrote an essay for Motion Picture and Television Magazine titled “The Wolves I Have Known,” in which she wrote frankly about Hollywood predators: “I met them all. Phoniness and failure were all over them. Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as near to the movies as you get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes—an overcrowded brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses.”
Decades later, the studio system is gone but, as #MeToo proved, justice can still be elusive. Bill Cosby, the first high-profile star to be convicted of sexual assault, has already been released from prison after his conviction was overturned; Roman Polanski is still making movies; and Harvey Weinstein was brought down only after decades of rumors by a cavalcade of more than 80 women. The allegations against Lewis are both devastating—he’s said to have terrorized and traumatized women, thwarting their paths and potential in the process—and devastatingly common. These accusations aren’t actionable; Lewis died in 2017, lauded in The New York Times as “a defining figure of American entertainment.” But these women’s stories, spanning from 1960 to 1968, illuminate how one man ran rampant at Paramount.
Renée Taylor was a comic in New York in the 1960s when she met Lewis on The Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar. Lewis complimented the Bronx-born performer and told her to look him up if she made it to Hollywood. She flew to L.A. that night and camped out at Paramount. When Lewis arrived at the studio, Taylor was waiting—and asked Lewis for a part in his new film, which happened to be 1961’s The Errand Boy. When Lewis said he didn’t have a part available, Taylor replied, “I’ve seen your movies. Tear out four pages and write new ones.”
Lewis handed her a script so she could rip the pages out herself and got the fearless 28-year-old a meeting with the Paramount brass. Any high the comic was riding, however, was punctured by the executives’ first question: “Are you one of Jerry’s girls?”
Taylor, now 88, recalls trying to explain, “ ‘No, no. He saw me on television and he wrote this part for me.’ Of course they didn’t believe me. They said, ‘Well, how big is your pussy? Jerry has a salami and will use it on a girl.’ They thought it was very funny and were boasting. I thought it was so gross. It was hard to laugh at Jerry’s jokes after that.” Ultimately, Taylor, who went on to be an actor and Oscar-nominated writer, adds, “It actually was a good thing that the executives boasted about him because it gave me warning to be on my guard. I tend to be too trusting.”
Holiday had every reason to trust Lewis. She met the comedian through her father, a theater executive in New York, when she was 13 and considered Lewis “family.” The year after Holiday’s breakthrough in Billy Wilder’s film The Apartment, Lewis offered her a part in The Ladies Man, a 1961 movie cowritten by Lewis that required him to be surrounded by young, beautiful costars. “The first day we were working, he said, ‘Can you come to the dressing room afterward? I want to discuss what we’re going to shoot tomorrow,’ ” Holiday says. “I go into this garish dressing room with red wallpaper and gold furniture…and I sit down and he presses a button, locks me in the dressing room with him. Then he starts to talk to me: ‘Y’know, you could be very attractive but you wear pants all the time. I have never seen you in a skirt. You have nice legs and you’ve got good boobs.’ Then he starts to talk to me about sex.”
Sick to her stomach, Holiday told Lewis that her boyfriend was waiting outside. But that didn’t stop Lewis. “He starts to talk dirty to me and as he’s talking, the pants open, and the ugly thing came out and he starts to jerk off,” Holiday says. “I was frightened…. I just sat there and I wanted to leave so badly.”
The following day on set, the script called for Holiday’s character to slap Lewis’s. “I hit him so hard that I spun around. And I didn’t mean to,” says Holiday. After a beat, she admits, “Maybe down deep I did. But he walked off the set and sulked for an hour. He said I did it on purpose.” Production halted because Lewis, in addition to being the star, was also directing. “He finally came back and didn’t talk to me,” says the actor. “He never spoke to me again.”
The experience made Holiday depressed and eventually hostile. One evening after wrapping her scenes for the day, she borrowed a mink to go to the premiere of the Paul Newman film Exodus. She was excitedly heading off set when her director announced a schedule change: There was suddenly another scene for her to shoot. Holiday couldn’t mute herself anymore. “Who do you have to fuck to get off this picture?” she cracked, in a line arguably better than any in the film.
Holiday’s friends suggested reporting Lewis to the Screen Actors Guild but she was scared he would take further action, even cutting her from the film completely: “He was very big at Paramount. I was under contract to him and to Paramount, and I didn’t want to shake the boat. Y’know, I figured I’ll just keep my mouth shut.”
In 1963, Jill St. John starred with Frank Sinatra in Come Blow Your Horn, a comedic role that would earn her a Golden Globe nomination. Afterward, she was vocal in interviews about wanting to be taken seriously as a comedic actor. Be careful what you wish for. That same year, the future Bond girl appeared in Who’s Minding the Store?, playing Lewis’s randy love interest—a woman so overcome with passion for the comic that (after making him a home-cooked meal in full makeup and a figure-hugging ensemble) she demands sex (“Be fresh with me now, Norman”), makes out with him, tells him “You have such sexy lips,” and begins to undress him.
Today, St. John chooses not to speak ill of the dead—but she’s not going to lie for them either. While not addressing sexual harassment specifically, she writes in a statement to Vanity Fair, “Comedy has always been my favorite medium. I was thrilled to be cast opposite Lewis…. Like many, I considered him a comedy genius. Still do. Unfortunately, one should not confuse the artist with the man. Making the film was an extremely unhappy and disappointing experience. Rather than detail my previous bitterness about filming with someone no longer on this planet, and who cannot rebut, I prefer to say that a good time was not had by all.”
Connie Stevens, who starred with Lewis in 1958’s Rock-a-Bye Baby and 1966’s Way…Way Out, has pleasant memories of her time with the comedian—but caught glimpses of his dark streak too. “If you didn’t go for his joke or if you didn’t respond to him, he could be cruel,” says the actor, who recalls female crew members on set suddenly quitting. “I had heard that he was pretty rough on females. He wasn’t on me. Consequently, I was the only actress at his funeral.”
Anna Maria Alberghetti, a soprano prodigy turned Tony-winning actor, recalls hearing that Lewis’s wife, Patti, had to be announced every time she arrived at Paramount. “Why would a wife have to be announced?” she wondered. She figured it out pretty quickly. Alberghetti says Lewis came on to her while taping the 1959 TV special The Jazz Singer, but she brushed it off. She agreed to reunite with him for 1960’s Cinderfella, even though she had to commute to Los Angeles from Las Vegas, where she was headlining multiple shows a week. This time around, Lewis was more aggressive. He called meetings after filming had wrapped for the day and dismissed everyone but her. Exhausted, she had to fend off his advances. “He tried very hard,” she says. “He came on to me constantly. I would say to him, ‘Jerry, I’m seeing someone…. You’ve got the wrong chick.’ ” Alberghetti emerged unscathed. She suspects it’s because by the time she met Lewis, she had already established herself as a star, having performed at Carnegie Hall and costarred with Bing Crosby. “If this had been my first break in the business, I probably wouldn’t have had a choice,” she says. “There it is.”
Lainie Kazan had encountered years of sexual harassment and uncomfortable behavior from men when the actor-singer first met Lewis. She never experienced the depths of Lewis’s cruelty, but his attitude toward women was plain nonetheless. In the late ’60s, Lewis knocked on Kazan’s hotel-room door when she was performing at the Fremont in Las Vegas. “He asked my manager and my boyfriend to leave, and—like schmoes—they left the room and me with him,” says Kazan. “I was very intimidated.” The pair sat in awkward silence until Lewis spoke up: “ ‘You ever think of getting your nose fixed?’ ” Kazan’s heart sank. “No,” she told him. “ ‘I think people kind of like my nose. I never thought of fixing it.’ He said, ‘And you should lose a couple of pounds.’ That’s a big bugaboo because I look at pictures and I was so thin…. I had a big chest and people thought I was large.”
“He really came on to me, but he [also] wanted me to feel like gravel,” Kazan continues. “He wanted me to feel less than…. Then he said, ‘You know, I had a dream about you last night and that’s why I’m here. I want you to star in my movie.’ ”
The film role never manifested, and the only result of the meeting, in Kazan’s eyes, was her feeling of violation even though Lewis hadn’t laid a finger on her: “I felt that I had been naked.”
About a decade after the Vegas encounter, Kazan’s agent received a request from Lewis that she cohost his MDA telethon from the East Coast, a full 3,000 miles from the comedian, who would be hosting on the West. Kazan gamely agreed, and when it came time to go on live to sing her first number, “Fever,” the performer waited for her introduction. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Lewis said, then paused for dramatic effect, “Lainie Kazan and her cantaloupes.”
“I could cry thinking about it,” says Kazan. “I tripped up the stairs, fell on my knee. I still went on and did the song, because I’m a professional, but I was humiliated…. He always made me feel less than me.”
Fast-forward six decades, and the social evolution that came along with them, to the spring of 2014, when Lewis was onstage at a Friars roast attempting to humiliate another female performer. He was in his 80s at the time but still bragging to interviewers about the “spectacular sex life” he’d enjoyed during his peak years “when I’m fucking everyone in Hollywood.” The roast proved that Lewis’s jokes had not aged well. After Amy Schumer performed, Lewis rose to give her a hug—only to then try to mime having sex with her onstage. “He came up and we hugged each other, and then he started pushing me back, trying to lay me down on the stage,” Schumer later told GQ. “I buckled down and used my knees to stay in place, and he was in my ear saying, ‘Lay down.’ I whispered ‘no’ in his ear. Even after I said no, he was still trying. I had to use my core to stay up—he’s a strong motherfucker.”
Schumer wrestled free. “I’m not going to be the girl who gets fucked after her set,” she said. “Sorry, Jerry Lewis.”
Lewis may be gone—when he died, many, including Jimmy Kimmel, toasted him as a “humanitarian”—but his memory is not a blessing for the women he harassed. “Who wants to take the innocence away from young girls and make themselves feel important by crushing them?” asks Kazan, genuinely bewildered. “I was such a sweet girl.”
Kazan was so unmoored by the constant objectification and unwelcome advances that she gained weight (i.e., invisibility) and began playing Jewish, Italian, and Greek mothers, like she did in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. “I’ve been to therapy, I’ve been to analysis…but it doesn’t go away,” she says. “It’s always there. It’s like, ‘Prove to me that you’re just a nice guy. Say something that makes me understand you’re not going to attack me.’ ” Kazan has begun teaching at UCLA and, at 81, feels fulfilled—her intelligence seen, respected, and accepted by her students. “I [finally] recognized that it was okay to be strong, to be dynamic, to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be all those things and own it,” she says. “It took me like 60 years…. I’m so proud of the women today. If only I had the balls to do that, but it wasn’t appropriate. It wasn’t the way women behaved.”
Holiday sees real progress thanks to the #MeToo movement as well: “These guys have no choice. It’ll be the end of their careers if they keep up this nonsense. Now women feel they have a place, and if we keep fighting and open our mouths and let them have what they deserve, then we’ve got a chance. We won’t be treated like secondhand nothings.”
Back in the ’60s, Holiday had what was then a distressingly commonplace sort of run-in with a then well-known actor that says a lot about men’s mindset at the time. It was Passover, she remembers. The actor left her in his sitting room so he could “pray” but returned promptly in a short silk robe and chased her around the room. When he finally registered her protests, he called a cab to pick her up and even gave her a gift—one that suggested he was a guy after Lewis’s heart. It was an autographed photo of himself.
This article has been updated.
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