Jerry Lewis

MDA Walks Alone

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

They miss you Jerry.

Last year at this time, the hot news was how the Muscular Dystrophy Association had unceremoniously dumped Jerry Lewis from the organization’s annual Labor Day telethon, it highest profile event and the centerpiece of its fundraising efforts for medical research. The telethon, shortened and without Jerry’s bombast and bathos, went forward, and MDA announced that it had brought in  $61 million, 4 percent more than 2011 when Lewis was still around. I was skeptical.  The MDA had violated core ethics rules that apply all organizations: Never cut yourself off from your roots. Honor your founders. Pay your debts. Keep peace with your past.  An organization that is estranged from its past heroes is estranged from itself.

I wrote, while designating the MDA an Ethics Dunce: Continue reading →

Labor Day Ethics Dunce: The Muscular Dystrophy Association

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Jerry Lewis earned the right to say good-bye on his terms--even if they were the wrong ones.

Nobody expected it to be easy for the Muscular Dystrophy Association to part ways with Jerry Lewis, who gave everything he had to building the organization over nearly six decades. Now 85, Lewis, a famously difficult talent with an outsize ego even by show-business standards, was bound to insist that he be allowed to all but drop dead at his post, mid-Labor Day telethon. In recent years, that seemed a real possibility, as Jerry’s health and age made him more a figure of pity and curiosity than a viable host.

Nonetheless, Jerry Lewis has raised, by the MDA’s own calculations, about $2,5 billion dollars, beginning when Eisenhower was president and TV was a novelty. The organization owes him, well, everything. They certainly owed him the opportunity to exit on his own terms, even if it was too late, even if it was self-indulgent on his part, and even if, though this is highly unlikely, it cost the organization more in lost contributions than kicking him to the curb will. Continue reading →

Pat Summitt, Failing a Great Leader’s Toughest Test

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Be like Lou, Pat...so the next diminished leader can be like you.

Pat Summitt, the legendary University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach who has won more games than any other college coach ever, men’s or women’s, received test results from the Mayo Clinic at the end of May that confirmed early-onset Alzheimer’s type dementia.  The irreversible brain disease is now at work destroying the 59-year-old Summitt’s abilities of recall and cognition, and as it is for the other estimated 5 million Americans with the disabling disease, the prognosis is grim.

Everyone in the Tennessee and sports community as well as the media and all of us who have seen loved ones suffer with the disease are rallying behind Summitt, who is one of the toughest, smartest, most determined figures in sports. But Coach Summitt has decided that her symptoms are not yet severe enough to force her into retirement, and she intends to stay at the helm of the Tennessee women’s basketball team at least three more years.

It is the wrong decision. It is a selfish and unethical decision. The question is whether anyone will have the courage to try to convince Summitt that she has a duty to the team, the school, her own legacy and basic principles of ethics to change course and do the right thing. Quit. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Jerry Lewis

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Great comedians are usually, as Sid Caesar once memorably told Larry King, “miserable sons of bitches,” and few fit that description better than Jerry Lewis. As a result, he also stands as a classic example of how not-so-nice people can still do wonderful, heroic deeds. In Lewis’s case, the deed is the  Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon. Lewis has announced that because of his failing health and advanced age (he is 86), the 2011 version will be his final telethon, and the show itself is being drastically scaled back from over 20 hours in its heyday to about 6 hours. The decline of his Labor Day telethon tradition is as good a time as ever to give Lewis—arrogant, loutish, egomaniacal, tough old bastard that he is—his due. Jerry Lewis is an Ethics Hero. There’s just no way getting around it.

For decades I thought that Jerry Lewis’s involvement with MDA was a stunt cooked up by his publicist during his decline in popularity, to ensure that he would have public visibility after studios stopped offering him movie roles. That was wrong: Lewis started doing telethons for muscular dystrophy in 1952, when his stardom was just blooming and he was still teamed with Dean Martin. his fundraising for medical research began as a series of local broadcasts and went national in 1966. By then Lewis’s career was indeed on the wane (his last hit movie had been “The Nutty Professor” in 1963), but the telethon had already been a constant in his life for 14 years. Jerry wasn’t doing it for himself. He really was doing it for “the kids.” Continue reading →