Beloved by motion pictures audiences as a pratfall-prone, goofy presence onscreen, Hollywood icon Jerry Lewis was a sex-crazed predator who harassed and sexually abused his co-stars, a number of girls declare in a brand new report.
The explosive allegations are featured in a Vanity Fair story and accompanying quick documentary by Oscar-nominated filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, who interviewed the actresses as half of a bigger challenge about misogyny and abuse in the leisure trade.
Actress Karen Sharpe, now 87, recounted how she refused to offer in to an alleged assault by Lewis, who died in 2017 at age 91 – and he retaliated by making her an on-set pariah.
Sharpe mentioned that whereas on the set of the 1964 movie The Disorderly Orderly, Lewis cornered her in a dressing room.
“He grabbed me. He began to fondle me. He unzipped his pants. Quite frankly, I was dumbstruck,” Sharpe instructed Vanity Fair.
Sharpe mentioned she was then subjected to Lewis’ notorious merciless streak when he instructed all the forged and crew to not communicate to her throughout the shoot.
When she confirmed up for work a couple of days later, she was met by a crew member who mentioned that solely the director and assistant director have been allowed to work together together with her.
“If anyone speaks to you…we’ll be fined,” the crew member instructed her, in accordance with Vanity Fair. “I wanted to let you know…. But I can’t even speak to you.”
Jerry Lewis in The Disorderly Orderly (1964)
Then there was Hope Holiday, who had identified Lewis since she was 13 as a buddy of her father’s and thought-about him “family,” as she instructed Vanity Fair. When he provided her a component in the 1961 comedy The Ladies Man, she jumped on the probability. But the expertise went bitter fairly rapidly.
“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 told Vanity Fair.
She described going into a “garish” dressing room, upon which Lewis pressed a button and locked the door. Then he began speaking to her about intercourse.
“He starts to talk dirty to me and as he’s talking, the pants open…I was frightened…. I just sat there and I wanted to leave so badly,” she mentioned.
The ache remains to be evident on the ladies’s faces, even many years later, in the quick movie by Ziering and Dick, who additionally made Allen Vs. Farrow, the acclaimed HBO docuseries chronicling actress Mia Farrow’s allegations that her then-lover Woody Allen sexually abused her younger daughter.
“It made me very depressed, and I didn’t want to date,” mentioned Holiday, now 91, on digicam about Lewis’ alleged assault.
“It wasn’t good,” she continued.
It was all a part of the tradition of Hollywood on the time, mentioned the filmmakers, who additionally interviewed actresses together with Lanie Kazan, Anna Maria Alberghetti and Jill St. John about Lewis’ undesirable come-ons.
“They were expected to accept being assaulted and to just deal with it themselves,” Dick instructed Vanity Fair.
“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.” – New York Daily News/Tribune News Service
