{"id":515,"date":"2022-07-03T01:39:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-03T01:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drmirkin.com\/2017\/08\/27\/jerry-lewis-lifelong-comedy-and-pain\/"},"modified":"2022-07-05T00:36:26","modified_gmt":"2022-07-05T00:36:26","slug":"jerry-lewis-lifelong-comedy-and-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/?p=515","title":{"rendered":"Jerry Lewis: A Life of Comedy and Pain"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"JerryJerry Lewis, the fabulously successful comedian, actor and director who starred in movies, television, nightclubs and the Broadway stage, died at age 91 at his home in Las Vegas. His manager and family said that he “passed peacefully at home of natural causes with his loving family at his side”, but the probable cause was \u201cheart failure\u201d after a life of many factors associated with heart damage. It is unusual for a person with such a heart-damaging lifestyle to live more than half of his 91 years.\u00a0 Over the years, his heart was damaged by:
\n\u2022 three documented heart attacks, starting at age 34
\n\u2022 probably several undocumented heart attacks
\n\u2022 heart attack treatments with stents that can increase risk<\/a> for other heart attacks
\n\u2022 a long history of smoking
\n\u2022 working in smoke-filled performance venues
\n\u2022 drinking excess alcohol
\n\u2022 eating a diet high in meat, fried foods, sugar-added foods and drinks
\n\u2022 addiction to pain-killing drugs
\n\u2022 diabetes
\n\u2022 pulmonary fibrosis and its treatment with prednisone
\n\u2022 obesity
\n\u2022 prostate cancer and some of its treatments
\n\u2022 depression
\n\u2022 a history of multiple bleeding episodes
\nI think that his heart eventually became too weak to pump blood to his brain, so he stopped breathing and died.<\/div>\n
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Remarkable Career that Began at Age Five<\/strong><\/div>\n
His real name was Joseph Levitch and he was born \u00a0in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, to Russian Jewish parents. His father was a vaudeville entertainer and his mother was a piano player for a radio station. He started performing at age five with his parents in the Catskill resorts in upstate New York. He dropped out of Irvington High School in the tenth grade.<\/div>\n
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In the late 1940s, at age 20, he and Dean Martin formed the team of Martin and Lewis, with Martin singing while Lewis primarily made everyone laugh. A year after they began performing together, they were earning $30,000 a week at the Copacabana. \u00a0The team broke up in 1956 and Mr. Lewis went on to a successful solo career, eventually writing, producing and directing his own films.<\/div>\n
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He was married twice: first at age 18 to Patti Palmer, a singer; and at age 56 to SanDee Pitnick, a Las Vegas dancer. \u00a0In his later years he was perhaps best known for raising more than $2.5 billion for the Muscular Dystrophy Association through his annual Labor Day telethon that he hosted for almost 60 years until 2011.<\/div>\n
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