The Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon became the other major public dimension of his later career. Lewis began hosting the Labor Day weekend broadcast in 1966 and continued doing so for more than four decades. The telethon raised hundreds of millions of dollars for MDA research over that period and made Lewis one of the most visible charitable figures in American entertainment. He was, in that role, warmly referred to as a benefactor of children—a framing that would acquire complicated resonance given what the 2012 will revealed about his biological children.
He retired as telethon host in 2011 and as MDA national chairman shortly after that. In 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had awarded him the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, recognizing his work for the association.
He starred in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” in 1982, in a rare dramatic role, playing a television host named Jerry Langford who becomes the target of an obsessive fan. The performance drew strong reviews and suggested a range that his comic persona had sometimes obscured.
In 1995 he made his Broadway debut in “Damn Yankees,” playing the devil, which received mixed reviews but demonstrated a continued appetite for new forms. He kept working into his eighties, appearing in films and television projects and accepting honors.
Throughout all of this, the first household—the one with Patti Palmer and the six boys—had receded from public view.
Patti Palmer and the First Household
Patti Palmer was born Esther Calonico in 1924 and had a career as a band singer before she married Jerry Lewis in 1944. She was twenty years old; he was eighteen. Both were already working in show business, and the marriage was, in that sense, a union of people who understood the rhythms and demands of the profession.