The MDA Telethon and the Public Father
For more than forty years, the most consistent public image of Jerry Lewis was the man on the Labor Day Telethon: a man who spent his Labor Day weekends not resting but working, asking viewers to call in donations for children with muscular dystrophy, performing and hosting and sustaining an event that ran, in its marathon format, well into the following morning.
The telethon raised significant money. The Muscular Dystrophy Association’s fundraising over the decades of Lewis’s involvement amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars in total, a figure that translates into research funding, equipment programs, and summer camps for children with the disease. Lewis himself received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2009 in recognition of this work.
The public performance of fatherhood to children who were not his own was central to his late public image. The MDA children who appeared on the telethon were often referred to, in coverage of the era, as “Jerry’s Kids”—a phrase that Lewis used and that became a shorthand for his charitable identity.
The irony of that phrase, in light of what the 2012 will revealed, is evident enough that it requires no underlining. Lewis’s public identity was as a man who cared about children—sick children, children in need, children who needed a champion. His private document revealed that the children he had fathered did not occupy the same place in his formal intentions.