Someone on Facebook posted this photo of Jerry Lewis and Artie Forrest, probably in Vegas, probably there for Jerry's annual Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. Artie was at least the director and often the producer of that ritual year after year.
Arthur Forrest also may have held the world record for the most hours or live and quasi-live television directed by anybody. He was a lovely man who had done just about everything you could do in TV and nothing bothered him. If in the middle of a live telecast, the studio had been attacked by Godzilla, Artie would have calmly handled the crisis, getting everyone to safety while all the time making sure he got a good shot of the towering monster as he crushed the sets under his feet.
To direct for Jerry all those years, you had to have that skill set.
Seeing that photo got me thinking of one of those "might have been" episodes of my life that didn't happen. I had worked with Artie on a number of shows and one year, he asked me to be a writer — I think maybe the only writer — on that year's telethon. It meant about three weeks in L.A. writing intros and speeches for Jerry and then about a week in Las Vegas for rehearsals and the actual live telecast. The money offered was, at it so often is, in that "Barely Acceptable" category and that was not a surprise. He said everyone was working for minimums since, after all, the more they paid us, the less went to help Jerry's Kids.
If anyone else had told me that, I would have called Bandini on them. I'd worked one day on another telethon and the folks running it could not disguise — almost bragged, in fact — how much of what was being collected went into their pockets. But this was Arthur Forrest…as honest and straight-talking as anyone I'd encountered in the teevee biz. I instantly decided that if I did it, it wouldn't be for the money but for the experience. And ten seconds later, I decided I wouldn't do it at all, at least that year.
I'd worked with Jerry and I knew he was like that Milton Bradley Time Bomb game I'd played as a kid: You knew it was going to go off. You just didn't know when — or in Jerry's case, about what. I also had other work to do those weeks and wasn't sure if I could juggle both. A live show has all sorts of "This has to be written right this minute" situations and I couldn't be sure how many of those I might encounter.
There were a few other reasons not to do it but the ones in the above paragraph were enough. I told Artie no but said, "Maybe next year?" He said he'd ask me again and then he didn't. I don't recall why. Maybe he didn't produce the telethon the following year.
In any case, I watched much of the telethon I didn't work on and kind of regretted my decision. There were guest stars it would have been fun (or at least interesting) to be around. There were some Special Musical Material spots — songs written for the show — that were the kind of thing I liked to do. I kept thinking of spontaneous jokes I wished I could teleport onto Jerry's cue cards. I really felt like I'd made the wrong decision.
Then a week or two after, I had dinner with a lady I knew who'd worked on the telethon as a Production Assistant. I asked her how Jerry was and she started telling me stories about yelling and fighting and making impossible demands and what the guy who took the job I declined went through…and I decided I'd made the right decision. That show was a lot more fun to watch than it would have been to work on.
And, speaking of telethons…
