When Jerry Lewis died last month, the comedy king left behind a massive fortune from his 70-year career in the entertainment industry. But Lewis didn’t leave any part of his estate to his sons. The Blast provided a copy of Jerry Lewis’ Last Will and Testament, which reveals the funnyman cut all six children he had with his first wife Patti Palmer out of his will.
According to Jerry Lewis’ will, which was executed in 2012, the longtime host of Muscular Dystrophy Association’s annual telethon stated that his six sons and their descendants would get no benefits from his estate:
“I have intentionally excluded Gary Lewis, Ronald Lewis, Anthony Joseph Lewis, Christopher Joseph Lewis, Scott Anthony Lewis, and Joseph Christopher Lewis and their descendants as beneficiaries of my estate, it being my intention that they shall receive no benefits hereunder.”
According to People , Jerry Lewis was married to Patti Palmer for 36 years, from 1944 to 1980, but after their divorce, he married Las Vegas dancer SanDee “Sam” Pitnick in 1983. Lewis’ massive estate will be left to his widow, with his adopted 25-year-old daughter, Danielle, second in line to his fortune. Lewis and Pitnick adopted Danielle in 1992 when she was a baby. Danielle went on to work as her father’s manager.
Jerry Lewis did not speak often about an estrangement from his sons. In 2004, his oldest son Gary, a successful musician and leader of the ’60s pop-rock group Gary Lewis and the Playboys, joined him at the MDA Telethon where they horsed around onstage after greeting each other with a kiss.
Sadly, in 2009, Jerry’s youngest son, Joseph, died of a drug overdose. There have long been rumors that Jerry’s son Gary blamed their father for abandoning Joseph when he struggled with drug addiction. In 2014, Jerry Lewis talked to the Hollywood Reporter about his complicated relationship with his youngest son who died at age 45.
“To this day I don’t understand it because it’s unfair — not unfair to me, but unfair to him,” Lewis told THR .
“That he went that way made the unfairness stupidity. But he was my son and he’s gone, and there’s not a lot I can do about that. I beat myself a thousand times. Sam will come to me and say, ‘Are we beating ourselves again?’ I will say, ‘A little bit.’ [She’ll say]: ‘You had nothing to do with that. You sent him out into the world when he was 25. You sent what you thought was a perfect human being. What he did with his time away from you is what the end result showed.’ But I’ll tell you this: You don’t get over that.”
Jerry Lewis also revealed that he has worked “under the most painful conditions any man has ever felt in his life,” but added, “When I walk out on that stage, the pain goes away.”
While Jerry Lewis seems to have had complicated relationships with at least some of his six sons, his daughter Danielle Lewis was reportedly by his side when he passed away of natural causes at age 91.
[Featured Image by Kevin Winter/Getty Images]