By naming him, and by extending the exclusion to his descendants, the will ensured that no one in Joseph’s line could claim an inheritance.
Gary Lewis’s public comments after Joseph’s death were made before the will became public. He did not know in 2009 what the will said. What he said in 2009 was a reaction to loss and to what he understood as the conditions that had contributed to his brother’s death. The connection between those conditions and the broader family history was one that Gary drew explicitly.
“Jerry Lewis was a mean and evil person,” Gary said. “He was never loving and caring toward me or my brothers.”
That statement is Gary’s account. It is evidence of what Gary believed and what Gary felt. It is not a verdict on every moment in the household or a complete account of every interaction. It is the perspective of a man who had watched his youngest brother die and who had, by that point, spent years understanding his family history in terms that the public image of his father—the humanitarian, the comic genius, the beloved figure of the French intellectual establishment—did not reflect.
Patti Palmer After the Divorce
Patti Palmer—the woman who had been Jerry Lewis’s wife for nearly four decades, who had raised six sons largely through the demanding years of his career peak—largely stepped out of public view after the divorce.
This was not unusual. The entertainment industry tends to forget about the first wives of famous men, particularly when those men have moved on to visible new relationships. Patti Palmer had been a performer in her own right, a band singer who had given up or scaled back a career when her husband’s career consumed the available space in their shared life. After the marriage ended, she did not reemerge as a public figure.