Here's what you know about Jerry Lewis:
He's the telethon host who sweats, cries and pleads nearly non-stop each Labor Day weekend for "his kids" with muscular dystrophy.He's the goofy comic actor whose shrieks and pratfalls are legend in a screen career spanning more than 40 years.
He's the serious, dramatic player critically praised for roles in the defunct CBS series "Wiseguy" and Martin Scorsese's "King of Comedy."
He's the guy the French have called a genius.
Here's what you don't know about Jerry Lewis:
He's the Imelda Marcos of socks.
Sweat socks. White ones. Wigwams. Sometimes all cotton, sometimes blends. Never wears the same pair twice. Pays retail.
"I don't drink, gamble, stick it up my nose. But I love to wear two or three brand-new pair of sweat socks every day," Lewis confessed recently, in an interview at the Turnberry Isle Yacht and Country Club, where he and second wife, Sam, recently bought a three-bedroom condo. He was in Miami following an engagement on the Sovereign of the Seas. He says he loves working ships because it gets him away from the phone.
But back to socks.
"They only cost $2, $2.50. Then they go to the orphanage or the boys' home. For the last 40 years, I wear them once, then they get shipped out. Max, I go through 1,000 pairs a year. That's $3,000. Big deal."
Oh, but it is. Wait until the National Enquirer gets hold of this one.
The sweat sock dependency was just one of several revelations Lewis shared in the interview.
Another involved fish.
"Halibut," Lewis declared. "It has two eyes on one side of its head."
It's also in the working title of his new movie, "Arrowtooth Halibut." Directed by 1985 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize winner Emir Kusturica, a Yugoslavian, it's set in a Tucson Cadillac dealership.
Lewis stars as the dealer. Johnny Depp is his nephew. Faye Dunaway is the older woman in Depp's life. Both men end up married to supermodel Paulina Poritzkova, sequentially. And for the first time in his career, Lewis dies on screen.
Lewis declined to explain the relationship of halibut to luxury cars and the Arizona desert. He did say this about the movie: "It's off the wall," which shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
In some 50 films, Lewis has spent very little time ON the wall. His collection of loons and shlemeils has helped define slapstick humor for the past half-century. And at 65, he's not through yet.
Next summer, he plans to start production on "Nutty Professor II" in Miami.
The original "Nutty Professor" was a fractured variation on the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde theme. Professor Julius Kelp, a beaver-toothed chemistry nerd in white socks and high-waters, transforms himself into Buddy Love, a patent leather-haired lounge lizard, by way of a secret formula cooked up in the lab.
Stella, a curvaceous, Barbie-Doll blond student, is fascinated by Love but ultimately - and quite improbably - falls for Julius. In the update, the two have produced a daughter who, unfortunately, looks exactly like her father.
"Same teeth, same glasses, same hair. She's 18 and hasn't had a date. The only thing that's touched her body is her clothes."
Here his voice escalates to the professor's dweeby tone. "When she speaks in the very voice that he speaks in, she says, `Father, I realize we all make mistakes, but look at this beauty you made,' and she takes him to look in the mirror."
Needless to say, the daughter metamorphoses into a knockout. Lewis sees Kim Basinger, maybe Kelly LeBrock, in the role. And he hopes to sign Stella Stevens, the original Stella, for a reprise.
Film critic David Denby - New York Magazine, Premiere - calls the original the best film of 1963. That year, "Tom Jones" beat out "Lilies of the Field," "Cleopatra," "How the West Was Won" and "America, America" for the best-picture Oscar, the year of "Hud" and "The L-Shaped Room."
Denby, in the winter 1991 issue of Premiere: "He is noisy, infantile, depressing, yes, but in this movie, Jerry Lewis is borderline brilliant." In a recent phone interview Denby added, "A few sequences were as carefully worked out and intricate as some of (Buster) Keaton's and Chaplin's."
This is news to Lewis, New Jersey-born son of Borscht Belt vaudevillians, and he's clearly pleased to hear it. He may have been one of Hollywood's top money makers in the '50s and '60s, but U.S. critics have, for the most part, scorned his antic comedies as hopelessly sophomoric.
In Europe, though, it's another matter.
"As always, when Americans have someone good, they don't appreciate him, like Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe or Raymond Chandler," famed French director Jean-Luc Godard says in the June 17 Newsweek. "Jerry Lewis is very amateuristic but also very professional. There is a lot of the unconscious to be seen in his work, as in all the great artists."
Melville? Poe? LEWIS?
"The French are not hearing the words," Denby theorized. "They don't hear the whining and the cheap jokes. Translating it is probably impossible. But physical comedy always travels well."
Mel Helitzer, who teaches a humor course at the University of Ohio, says there's another secret to Lewis' popularity.
"Someone once said we can be young once, but with humor, we can be immature forever. (Lewis has) done that . . . He's one step up from being a clown. He identifies with the irresponsibility of being a child."
On the subject of critics, Lewis identifies with the words of the late movie mogul Sam Goldwyn: "Don't let the critics bother you. Don't even ignore them."
Lewis has a reputation as a snappish, temperamental boor given to profanity and excesses of the ego. But on this afternoon, he is relaxed, cordial, alternately serious and playful.
He peeled down the neck of his royal-blue golf shirt to reveal both his open-heart surgery scar and the gold Star of David his grandmother gave him for his bar mitzvah, now embedded in a gold cross. The image carries over to links in a gold bracelet.
"I happen to believe this (unity of faiths) will fix everything. It's the answer."
He spoke affectionately of former partner Dean Martin - the highly successful team broke up in 1956 after 10 years - about his work on behalf of the Muscular Dystrophy Association and his upcoming projects, including a Broadway-bound version of "Sugar Babies II," with Chita Rivera and Rip Taylor. The show will start rehearsing in California this summer.
He also joked about how Sam keeps him humble.
"`Shmuck!"' he bellows, imitating his wife, "`You wanna have dinner?' Reduced to a washrag. She calls me Charlie Movie Star."
Sam is the former Sandra Pitnick, 40, a longtime Miamian who once danced with the Harkness Ballet.
"I have a black belt in shopping," she said, explaining that she plans to decorate the new condo herself.
The couple, married in 1983 at the Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne, live in Las Vegas. This will be their East Coast pied-a-terre.
Lewis looks remarkably fit for an ex-chain smoker at retirement age who had his ticker retooled less than a decade ago. His wife says it's a strain to keep up with him, and he claims he's "thrilled" to finally be going gray.
"Sam says, `What the hell are you so happy about?' I said, `I want to look like Douglas Fairbanks Jr."'
Lewis said he had ballooned to 202 pounds but is back down to 176, thanks to a daily regimen of three miles on the treadmill, 150 situps, and SlimFast, the liquid diet. He's one of the company's new spokesmen, both here and in France. How it will go over in the land of Bordeaux and pate, he's not sure.
"The French will be saying, `Yeah, sure, we're gonna give up chateaubriand for your milkshakes!"'
In 1982, Lewis published an autobiography titled "Jerry Lewis In Person." It is a chatty volume that ranges all over the lot. So does this day's interview.
- On today's comics: "I don't think Pee-wee Herman is funny at all. He's a freak. . . . When I say freak, I mean it's an oddity that happened to work for about an hour.
"You'll see Billy Crystal and Robin Williams and Steve Martin for many years. And I got news for you: Chevy Chase is, in his style, a marvelous comic performer.
"With Andrew Dice Clay . . . the shock of what he does permeates the air in that audience that night. But if you see that audience a second time, you'll see no returnees. He doesn't bother me as much as the comic who stands perfectly still for 15 minutes then goes through what I call cerebral combat: `If you get this, you will laugh, if you have the intelligence that I have. . . . ' That's not entertainment.
"There's an audience for . . . the guys who stand up and do this, but they're not going to be there long. Twice around, then they'll be at Florsheim's, and that's sad.
"There's nothing wrong with the likes of Victor Borge, who does some things that are strictly cerebral. It's magic because he's so brilliant, but he still knows to fall off the stool. He knows not to get so cerebral that he forgets the greatest laugh is a pie in the face."
-On the Academy Awards: "I've never done the kind of work that would have had me think about that. "King of Comedy" (in which Lewis played a Johnny Carsonesque talk-show host kidnapped by crazed fans) was good work, but certainly not for an Academy Award.
"I'd like the academy, because of the love of my profession, to have a category for comedy. I'm not even talking about myself. There are geniuses out there, great comic minds like Steve Martin and Jonathan Winters, who are not even given the courtesy of a call.
"What bothers me about the academy is they're ignoring a category that not only made the industry what it is but keeps it thriving."
-On his family: I have six sons and seven grandchildren: five girls, two boys. My oldest granddaughter, Sara Jane, is 24.