No Foolin’ Jerry Lewis Has To Restrain His Idiotic Ways In His First Broadway Role, ‘Damn Yankees’

So 50 million Frenchmen can be right.

Jerry Lewis is huge. Jerry is back. Do not doubt the second coming of Jerry.

Jim Carrey does Jerry. So, too, Urkel. Pee-wee did Jerry. White socks do not lie. Once too cool, Eddie Murphy is pumped to geek. He’s doing a remake of Jerry’s masterpiece, “The Nutty Professor.” Steve Martin tried to out-jerk Jerry, but then, really, who can?

And what is Jerry doing? Jerry is tangling with the devil in “Damn Yankees.” At age 69, he’s in heaven. It’s his Broadway theatrical debut, and he’s planning to be at the Marquis Theatre through August.

“My whole persona,” Jerry Lewis says, “has been injected with happy juice.”

The reviews? Swell. Except that the critics, once the enemy, want more Jerry, the inner Jerry, the 9-year-old Jerry who delighted the world. Wrote one admirer: “Go on, Jer, let her rip.” And this, from the New York Times.

Lewis sits in his grand, scarlet-carpeted dressing suite with those famous elastic legs, a torso 30 pounds thinner than it was at the last musculardystrophy telethon, and - of course - white socks. Who knows how many thousands of white socks have embraced those feet?

Lewis looks young. He’s always looked young. And he looks good, especially for a man who has had open-heart surgery and prostate cancer and was once dead for 18 seconds.

The surprise, and slight disappointment, is the hair. Lewis’ hair has long been given to tonsorial tantrums. In his youth, it was short and stupid. Later, it became a grease slick, an oil spill, the Valdez of Vitalis, too Vegas for Vegas, Lewis’ hometown. Today, it is calm, well-behaved, wet only from water.

Alas, it could be anyone’s hair.

A genius in France, an icon in Europe, Lewis the comic and director and writer and producer has waited a long time for critical respect on native ground.

“There’s never been an in-between,” he says of his audience. “You will either find Jerry Lewis fanatics, crazy nuts over him, or other Jerry Lewis fanatics that say, ‘Not while I’m eating.”’

Lewis often speaks of himself in the third person. He also speaks of himself as being two people. Which, in many ways, he has always been.

“Most performers have an A-B-C chart” of audience responses, he explains. “A is they love them. C is they hate him. B is acceptable or adequate or less-than-indifferent. I don’t have no B. I got A and C: He’s either wonderful, or he’s terrible, or I hate him, or I love.”

Recently, the A crowd has been growing. Jim Carrey makes no secret of his awe. In “Dumb and Dumber,” he appropriated much of the idiotmaster’s best stuff, the stupid hair, the goofy teeth.

“I think he’s brilliant,” says Lewis of Carrey, whom he has yet to meet. “What a compliment. What a great compliment. The fact that the American public is enjoying that kind of nonsense again, I think it’s wonderful. And he’s marvelous. He’s the best visual performer I’ve seen in probably the last 40 years.”

How can Lewis begrudge Carrey? So Carrey makes millions; Lewis always did. He and Dean Martin minted the stuff. Legend has it that they once asked to be paid in cash, then rolled around in a carpet of green, like true kings of comedy.

“I’ve been told that I’m being paid more money than anyone ever received on Broadway,” Lewis says of his Manhattan run, which began March 12. His salary, Newsweek reports, is at least $40,000 a week, plus a percentage of the box office. And he’s committed to this show for 2 years: After a pause for his Labor Day telethon, he’ll go on the road for a year in this country, then to London and possibly - but, of course - Paris, le centre de Jerryism.

Lewis was long known as one of show biz’s angriest men. But all of that has changed; there isn’t anything left to make him mad. The historical feud with Martin is now patched up.

Lewis has landed respectable work - the role of Jerry Langford in Martin Scorsese’s “King of Comedy.” Langford was like Johnny Carson’s evil twin; it was Robert DeNiro who got to goof. Of that performance, Scorsese once said: “Jerry is so naturally exuberant that the less emotion he shows on screen, the more he’s acting.” Now, he’s appearing in “Funny Bones,” directed by Peter Chelsom, who made the well-regarded “Hear My Song.” The movie opened to great reviews here and in Los Angeles last weekend, and is about to jump on the film-festival circuit.

Lewis has calmed down. He’s remarried and the addition of his 3-year-old daughter - Dani, named for Lewis’ late father - has been an elixir. Lewis has five sons from his first marriage.

The eternal crown prince has grown up. “My attitude is better,” Lewis says in the dressing room, a virtual shrine to Dani. “I’m much more tolerant. I’m much more patient. When wisdom develops in the autumn of your life, it’s amazing the stuff that comes on the dinner.”

This was his destiny, the only capstone to his career he ever envisioned. He was not satisfied with France’s Legion of Honor or a 1977 nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize - made by then-U.S. Rep. Les Aspin for Lewis’ musculardystrophy telethons, which have raised more than $1 billion.

Kresge’s once stood three blocks from where he sits, Eden in Lewis’ memory. It was at the dime store that Lewis’ father, Danny Levitch, a songplugger and later a song-and-dance man, met Rae, a piano player, over “I wanna go where you go - do what you do.” The sheet music to that song hangs today in their son’s dressing room.

Levitch was a champion of tough-love. “He was very hard with his love, and he was very strong,” Lewis says. All he ever wanted for his boy was a theatrical run on Broadway. All the success and all the movies, which grossed $800 million worldwide, did not matter. Lewis played a command performance before Queen Elizabeth and got a standing ovation from her when everyone knows that the queen never stands for anyone.

“Well,” Lewis told his father after the performance, “it doesn’t get any better than that, Dad.”

“Well,” his father countered, “it will if you play Broadway.”

The old man is gone now. “But I can hear my father, every night that I walk on that stage,” Lewis says. “I can hear him giggling, ‘Now you got it. Now you got it.”’

Like old buildings, politicians and prostitutes, Lewis has lasted long enough to get respect, and he’s earned it by staying true to the act.

He takes a sip of tea. “I know full well what longevity means. That means you’re very fortunate and you’re very lucky. And if you work at it, you can have it for as long as you want. You take it for granted, and one morning you’re going to get up, and it ain’t going to be there.”

Lewis was called “Id” at high school in northern New Jersey, short for “idiot.” The Idiot made him famous and rich and a legend. And he works hard to nurture the Idiot, and make sure he knows his place.

Is it hard to play the devil, play it straight, and not let the more famous Jerry rip?

“It’s something you just have to keep in mind, because I could break that fourth wall every five minutes and do Jerry, but that’s wrong. That’s not what I’m supposed to do,” he says. “Now there are places where my mischief and the devil are wonderful together, and the audience loves it. But I have to edit and pull the reins on Jerry because he’s very abrasive. He can be very, very caustic and very, very dangerous to the project. I can’t allow him to get out there and be Jerry.”

Get out there and be Jerry.

“Well, it is another person,” he says. “I’m the one who sat at the typewriter. I’m the guy that sat and wrote for him. He made me my living. I keep him 9 years old.”

Time’s up. Lewis gets up out of his chair, pulls his knife-creased jeans down over his white socks. He goes off to prepare for another night on Broadway, living out his father’s dream, that is now his.