Jerry’s Kids: It’s a Pity but It Works

Sometime around the 17th hour of the Jerry Lewis telethon, I tuned in. I was looking for signs of pity.

“Pity,” as you perhaps know, is the crime of which the telethon stood accused. Over the weekend, a group of former poster kids for the Muscular Dystrophy Assn. took to the streets to demand that Lewis be yanked from the telethon because he uses pity to solicit money.

This was intriguing. Jerry Lewis had committed a new offense. He was not just politically incorrect, he was emotionally incorrect.

Over the years, charity leaders have been accused of many sins, from running away with the donation box to living high on the hog. But the pity thing was something new.

In effect, Lewis was charged with a crime of the heart. It implied that he had lost his usefulness to the muscular dystrophy cause because his attitudes had grown dated. The marchers talked much about his frequent use of the words cripple and cursed .

Clearly, these accusations stung. So threatened was Lewis by the anti-pity committee that he opened the telethon with a denial of their charges. “Please,” he said to the marchers, “I’m begging for survival.”

You had to be impressed by the power of the pity thing. So while others went to the beach on Labor Day, I sat in the gloom of my den, scrutinizing the Lewis telethon for moral error.

If you’ve never watched the telethon, I would recommend it. You will be witnessing one of the last artifacts of the 1950s. It is a show that could have been produced by the Godfather, with one Vegas lounge singer following another.

And as to the central question: Yes, pity is everywhere in this show. The Jerry Lewis telethon is a universe constructed entirely of pity. Between the lounge acts come appearances by the sufferering victims and someone cries on camera about every three minutes.

This year’s national poster kid, Drew Johnson, is shown at home on videotape. Drew’s dad appears on the tape and soon he is crying. Then Drew’s mom cries. The camera shifts to Drew, who looks cleareyed at the viewers and says, “I love you.”

Then Lewis sings a tribute to the late Sammy Davis Jr., who made many appearances on the telethon. Lewis gets halfway through the first song before he breaks down.

Next, we switch to the Los Angeles poster kid, who appears onstage dressed in black tie and seated in his kid-sized wheelchair. He is asked to demonstrate the mobility of his chair. Smiling, he does a wheelie. The camera pans to members of the audience, who all are shedding tears.

But if you watch long enough, you will begin to realize that something phenomenal is taking place. The pity is translating into money, big buckets of money. Every hour, the telethon’s tote board shows another $5 million in donations. By the 18th hour, the total has reached $39 million.

And that’s just the little folks. The corporate contributions are tallied separately. Every few minutes, a corporate vice president walks onto the stage with a check for Lewis. Harley-Davidson forks over $2.1 million. Anheuser Busch follows with $5.2 million. A national group of firefighters produces $8.5 million.

So, sure enough, it turns out Jerry Lewis is emotionally incorrect. It’s my guess that his telethon has outlasted all others for the very reason that it learned to trade in pity more efficiently than the others.

The question is this: As long as the emotional currency translates into the real currency of cash, who cares? Before it was all over, the final tote board had hit $45,071,857, and the corporate contributions just about matched that. Figure roughly $80 million for the day’s work.

That’s a chunk. Let’s ask this last question of the marchers who would like to see Lewis drummed out of the telethon: Just who is going to keep this cash machine going? Who is going to stand on that stage for 21 1/2 hours, maintain emotional correctness, never indulge in cashable pity, and still pull in $80 million for muscular dystrophy?

Sean Penn? Sinead O’Connor? Yes, perhaps Sinead would commit herself to the next 10 years.

Or maybe you’re thinking of something else. Perhaps the idea is to forgo the telethon altogether and sacrifice the $80 million. The Muscular Dystrophy Assn., in its poverty, could take comfort in the thought that the pity quotient had not been exceeded.

A few less wheelchairs, a little less research, what the hey. At least Jerry Lewis would be gone, the embarrassment finally ended, the unbearable pity thing banished forever.