Snake America 101
Snake is a monthly (?) email newsletter covering vintage clothing and furniture. This week, the auctioning off of Jerry Lewis' estate.
NEW T-SHIRTS ARE FOR SALE
Live Auctioneers is a not great website from a product perspective but is great for old ephemera and furniture. It has a troubling amount of Nazi paraphernalia. It's also a digital middle man for auction houses, and one auction house -- Julien's? -- was selling off a few weeks ago what was left of the estate of Jerry Lewis, the director and sometimes actor who was best known for playing a mailman in Hardly Working (USA 1980). There was so much good stuff in these auctions. Lewis owned a lot of guns (72) and 11 Cartier watches. Lewis owned a lot of Louis Vuitton luggage and some of it was for sale, too. Only 31 of his Vuitton trunks and suitcases were for sale. There's a great photo in one of the auctions of him riding a trolley with more. He also had either Halliburton or Rimowa suitcases, the metal kind with stickers on them, I think Halliburton since they're not ridged. It's crazy that Halliburton's fraudulent accounting is no worse morally than Rimowa's collaboration with Supreme. But that's how it is now. Lewis' sundries were complemented by some legitimately outstanding and important auctions: scripts from his films, some marked up, notes from The Nutty Professor (USA 1963), things like that. Very important items. James Joyce said he wanted to keep "the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant." Lewis' scripts here have to at least be worth a solid election cycle of work. Also for sale were bank cards, checks and a concealed weapons permit for the state of Nevada for sale. The concealed weapons permit was the first item available for auction and I missed it because I was working.
(not auction pic)
Jerry Lewis' Ruger, $1500: I keep thinking about the scene in Death Wish 3 (USA 1985) where The Giggler dies. The Giggler is so named because he giggles when he commits petty crimes around New York. Before he dies there's a long (20-second) tracking shot of Charles Bronson's architect character's gun. It's such a languorous and thought-out scene and the camera hangs out on the gun, dwelling on it with either love or perversion, similar to how Tarantino's camera takes a break and pauses whenever Uma Thurman is on screen. Death Wish 3 is really better shot than anything new I saw in theaters this year. I've been enjoying watching well-regarded movies this winter and spring. They pass the time and some are funny. The chestnut that they love Jerry Lewis in France but America thinks he's a shithead is true and the analogy is simple. Imagine Death Wish 3 was funny and that it was better-directed -- that the whole movie was as good as the camera's drawn-out meditation on Bronson's gun. Now imagine instead of the film tacitly supporting fascism and white male rage it instead picked apart the poorly-defined and arbitrary roles forced upon the working man, and indeed everyone he comes across, both at work and at play. Now imagine those themes of artifice and shame and dehumanization were spread across 20 movies, each quite well shot and plotted out, all funny, and that Charles Bronson's character, instead of gunning down minorities instead falls off trellises as he attempts to fall in love and/or improve his station in life. And that every time he falls off a trellis the audience -- indeed, everyone in his world -- sees (and feels) exactly why this fall hurts, and why he had to get on the trellis. He's just up there looking for love -- he's not trying to kill the laughing man for stealing his camera. Those are Jerry Lewis' films and that's why he's a genius.
Poker set and ice bucket, $1,750: I bet if they advertised this deck of cards with poker chips as a deck of Louis Vuitton cards, and not Lewis' poker set it'd have sold for more money than it did. I went to a Martin and Lewis film festival in LA at the New Beverly with my parents and sister a few Christmases ago because my dad wanted to go, and we walked out after the second movie because my dad said the movie wasn't as funny as he remembered when he saw it in theaters when he was a kid.
Goyard valise/trunk, $7,000: I'm not a big Goyard guy but the photos of Lewis with all his luggage in the Air France terminal are worth poring over, and one of the photos is not in this auction but it's the first luggage lot. There's an interview out there where Jerry Lewis mentions the exact day he began feeling chronic pain in his back. I bet he mentioned that date in a lot of interviews. Lewis was an imperious guy and didn't seem like fun to hang out with. But that attention to detail is why he was such a good director.
Concealed Weapon permit, Nevada, $500: I am really upset still that this was the first lot. I was doing something important and missed the start of the auction, and missed this lot, and couldn't bid, and didn't win. More realistically I am upset the lot sold for $500, which is too much to pay for anyone's concealed weapons permit, even the greatest comedic director of the 1960s. I consoled myself by winning an Uppercut poster on eBay the next afternoon for exactly $10. It has not made the pain go away in the least.
Louis Vuitton 1998 World Cup Soccer Ball and Book, $2,000: I think this is one of the best collectible items I have ever seen. Louis Vuitton made a collectible soccer ball for the 1998 World Cup, which was in France, where the company is from. It's a nice leather ball in the Louis brown with gold with the World Cup logo too and the ball comes with leather straps, untreated, the kind children use for their one schoolbook in movies made before 1970 and the kind youth soccer coaches use to carry around a half-dozen soccer balls to the field. There's a coffee table book too, photos of celebrities, dignitaries and socialites with their respective balls, and it appears Lewis was in the process of eating his. He's on a boat and has a stupid look on his face. I completely understand why people don't think he's funny. There's nothing funny about this picture.
The 1998 French team was really so amazing. They won it at home but weren't from there: lots of players represented recent waves of immigration to France and also the country's footprint abroad, with guys from Ghana, Senegal, Guadeloupe, French Guiana... Many came up in the French national soccer system as youths but some didn't and seven were playing for Italian clubs at the time. The coach said he spent more time in Italy than in France. The leader of the National Front party there, Jean-Marie Le Pen said during the tournament he didn't think the team was really French and that it was artificial to just bring guys from abroad and call them French. When you see the world through a racist lens you just say whatever, huh? Then the team won the whole thing. Zinedine Zidane, one of the greatest names outside a Thomas Pynchon novel, played on that team and had an impeccable front hairline of a perfect V above his eyebrows. The crown of his head was perfectly bald and shone in the sun and as he aged he cut his hair shorter and shorter and eventually his hairline and bald spot both went away. News stories about sports can occasionally be politically naive when reporting on teams from blighted regions who have won important games. How much do teams' victories mean to those regions, and how is that measured? Was the French team's win a victory for multiculturalism? Maybe. But Le Pen ran for office again and made it to the presidential runoff in the next federal election. World Cups come around every four years, just like elections. Sport's positive effects are real, but hard to measure, and if they are out there they don't last long enough and can't really override actual structural problems. It might just be there's nothing to be done about the old people at the top and that we all have to wait until they die out to get ours. But this was 20 years ago and we're still waiting.
Thanks for reading. Shirts are FOR SALE NOW.
Snake
(1) is there any other kind?