Jerry Lewis thought he had reached the height of his career the night he played the Palladium in London before a VIP-filled audience that included the royal family.
At the end of his one-man, 21/2-hour performance, everyone, including Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, gave Lewis a standing ovation."Well, it doesn't get any better that," the comedian boasted to his father, Danny Levitch, after the show.
"It does if you play Broadway," said Levitch, an old-time vaudeville entertainer.
Lewis tells the story when explaining why he still gets "a rush of adrenaline every night at 8" when the curtain goes up on the touring production of the Broadway musical "Damn Yankees."
Lewis has been playing Applegate, or the devil, in the revival of the classic, 40-year-old show for nearly two years now.
Everything else he has done in a 65-year career - movies, nightclubs, television, benefits - is "eclipsed" by the thrill of starring in a Broadway show, Lewis said.
"I walk out on that stage, and it's like the parting of the Red Sea. This was something my dad told me about but couldn't expound on."
Lewis talked to a small group of reporters in his hotel here prior to the opening of "Damn Yankees" in the Kennedy Center's 2,000-seat Opera House.
It was his 44th press conference in the 42nd city he has played since joining the "Damn Yankees" cast. The night before, he had played the devil in the show for the 634th time.
Asked if he looked forward to 1,000 performances, Lewis said: "A thousand is nothing."
Lewis, in fact, is under contract to play in "Damn Yankees" - in the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan and perhaps elsewhere - until the year 2000. And promoters talk of a movie after that, when Lewis will be 74 or 75.
The legendary performer was 69 when he joined the Broadway cast of "Damn Yankees" a year after the show opened in Broadway's Marquis Theater.
It was the first time Lewis - at times the highest-paid performer in movies, nightclubs and television - had ever worked in a Broadway show.
He took the role, made it his own and increased the life expectancy of the production threefold.
Lewis plays Applegate in the first act with remarkable restraint for a comic known for his frenetic, mugging, pratfall style. But in the second act he gives the audience what they came for with his prolonged solo rendition of "Those Were the Good Old Days."
Lewis builds the number into an old-time vaudeville act, in the tradition of his vaudevillian parents, as he twirls and purposely drops a dozen or more canes, tells well-timed jokes and polishes off a little soft shoe. All with the supreme confidence of a legendary showman.
Lewis' overnight success as a Broadway star at this stage of his life has made him a role model for senior citizens, and he dispenses advice eagerly on how to stay in shape.
"Think young, keep a positive point of view, stay active, enjoy your life and never, never retire," he said emphatically. "If you retire at 50 you will decompose, you will be in a walker, you will dissipate your life."
Lewis himself has suffered through a number of health problems. He had open-heart surgery in 1983 and a bout with prostate cancer in 1992. In the 1970s and early '80s, he became addicted to Percodan, which he used to ease pain from a bleeding ulcer. But he has long since beaten this addiction.
Today, Lewis looks like a healthy man of 55 or so. He works out on a treadmill every day and "tries to avoid junk food," he said.
Although he is sometimes in pain "because of all those pratfalls I did for 65 years," Lewis says that doing eight shows a week is a piece of cake. "Dean (Martin) and I used to as many as 56 shows in one week!"
The Kennedy Center was a midway stop on the second national tour of "Damn Yankees." This continues until August 1997, when Lewis will take time out to prepare for his annual Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethon.
"I will do this until I can't breathe," he said of the fund-raising show.
Lewis will take "Damn Yankees" on a third national tour from September 1997 to August 1998, and then head overseas.
The performer's wife, SanDee, and their adopted daughter, Danielle, always accompany him. "They are with me as my limbs are," he said.
Lewis has five sons from his first marriage and several grandchildren.
But he still comes across as the mischievous eternal kid, a role he has played so often over the years.
That, he reasoned, is why he is so successful as Applegate. "After all," he said, "I've been playing the devil all my life."