From Kevin Greenlee comes this…
I bring a perhaps unique perspective to the Jerry Lewis Telethon. After laughing at its excesses for many years, I had a daughter who was diagnosed with a form of M.D. As it turns out, I was a carrier of the condition and have gone on to develop it myself. Since then, the people at MDA have been a tremendous help to my family, in ways large and small. Hopefully, Jerry's fans won't let their displeasure at his ouster stop them from making a generous donation to a truly worthy charity.
Jerry tends to be a divisive figure among families in my situation. No one denies he's done a tremendous amount of good but he's done much of it in less than ideal ways. People with M.D. (even adults like myself) are referred to as his "kids" and our lives in general are portrayed in the most pathetic possible fashion. Surely you can understand why many people would not much relish having their lives held up for a nation's pity in such degrading and infantilizing ways.
Perhaps I'm mistaken but I suspect that the increasing chorus of complaints about that sort of thing from within the MDA community likely paid a key role in convincing the folks who run things that it was time for him to go.
I'm guessing it was a minor factor but a factor, nonetheless. Hey, I have a story that I should probably stick in here…
In 1981 (I think it was), I had to turn down the chance to be a writer or maybe the writer of Jerry's telethon. A director I'd worked with, Artie Forrest, was producing and directing the telethon and he made the offer, then arranged for me to meet with some official — I forget his title — within the MDA organization. There had recently been some unfortunate (for the telethon) press reports of folks with M.D. who felt as you did; that perhaps funds could be raised without making them all into sad little poster people. My job, if I could juggle another commitment so I could work on the telethon, would include trying to balance two competing concerns. One was the dignity of those living with M.D. The other was a mawkish sales pitch that the telethon organizers had learned was effective in making the phones ring. I gather that in any situation where the two matters clashed, the latter would always trump the former.
That scared me off a bit from working on the show…though the reason I ultimately didn't do it was that I couldn't move that other commitment. Another thing that scared me was Jerry. I'd worked with him a few months earlier and when I mentioned that to the MDA fellow, he asked, "How'd the two of you get along?" I said, "Well enough, especially after he realized that I could name every one of his movies. But he did strike me as rather — shall we say? — thin-skinned."
The MDA official corrected me. He said, "Jerry is not thin-skinned. He's no-skinned. He does all this material ridiculing other people and then he gives interviews where he attacks people he's mad at. But if you tell him you don't like his tie, he acts like you kicked him in the stomach." We talked a bit about how that might have impacted, for ill but also sometimes for good, his performing…and also how he kept making news with controversies and too-candid remarks.
Anyway, I didn't do the telethon and I'm still kinda sorry. Despite the meager pay and the near-certainty that Jerry and I would have had ugly moments, I still respect the hell out of his career and the efforts he's put into raising all that cash. And I would have liked to see if I could have found a way to make the sales pitch without depicting folks with M.D. in a degrading light. I don't for a minute think I could have managed it but it would have been interesting to try.