What that meant for a household with growing children, the available record does not fully settle. What it suggests is that the household was often a household without its most famous resident.
The split between Martin and Lewis came in 1956, at a moment when the partnership had generated extraordinary wealth and fame and had also, apparently, generated enough private friction to become unsustainable. Several accounts point to different contributing factors. Martin reportedly felt undervalued by critics who treated the act as primarily Lewis’s vehicle. Lewis reportedly wanted to develop more pathos and emotional complexity in the material, while Martin favored straightforward comedy. Their wives reportedly had tensions of their own.
The immediate precipitating event, according to the most widely cited account, involved the filming of “The Delicate Delinquent” in 1956. Martin refused to play a policeman role in the project, reportedly saying he didn’t want to do it. Lewis’s response was that they would find someone else to do it. Martin said, in the account that has been repeated most often, “Start looking, boy.”
The team played its last engagement on July 24, 1956, at the Copacabana in New York. They did not publicly announce a split at the time; the partnership simply stopped. They would not appear together again publicly for twenty years, until Frank Sinatra arranged a surprise reunion at the 1976 MDA Telethon—a moment that generated enormous emotional response from an audience that had watched the split with something like collective grief.
Going Solo
After 1956, Jerry Lewis built a solo career that was, depending on your perspective, either the logical extension of a restless creative intelligence or a prolonged argument with critics who underestimated him—or both.