The Ghost of Jerry Lewis:
Sammy Petrillo’s Life in the Shadows of Stardom
Sammy Petrillo was onstage at a dingy Pittsburgh comedy club in 1991, his wiry frame hunched over a microphone, when he let slip a truth that defined his life: “I was Jerry Lewis before Jerry Lewis knew what hit him.” The crowd laughed, but the line carried a sting. For decades, Petrillo had been the knockoff king of comedy—a man who turned an uncanny resemblance to one of America’s biggest stars into a career that was equal parts triumph and tragedy. He died in 2009, at 74, a footnote in showbiz history, but his story is a kaleidoscope of ambition, imitation, and the relentless churn of an industry that chews up talent and spits it out. This is the tale of Sammy Petrillo: the Bronx kid who became a mirror to a legend, only to find the reflection didn’t last.
Born Sam Patrello on October 24, 1934, in a gritty corner of the Bronx, Petrillo was steeped in show business before he could tie his shoes. His mother, Anne Jackowitz Patrello, doubled for Hollywood songstress Alice Faye, while his father, Abraham “Skelly” Patrello, hoofed it as a comic and dancer in the Catskills—a proving ground for Jewish entertainers in the prewar years. By age six, Sammy was joining his dad onstage, a pint-sized performer in a housing project at 143rd Street and Morris Avenue. He later attended Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts, where a fateful haircut sparked his destiny. “The guy cut my hair and started to laugh,” Petrillo recalled in a 1992 interview. The barber saw Jerry Lewis in the mirror—a gangly, wild-eyed kid with a mop of dark hair—and Sammy saw a ticket to the big time.
The 1950s were a golden age for comedy duos, and no pair shone brighter than Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Their slapstick-meets-crooning act dominated nightclubs, films, and TV screens, making Lewis’s manic energy a cultural touchstone. Enter Sammy Petrillo, who, in his late teens, turned his resemblance to Lewis into a full-blown impersonation. It wasn’t just the looks—the nasal whine, the flailing limbs, the rubber-faced shtick—it was the audacity. Petrillo caught Lewis’s eye one day on 53rd Street in New York, as Lewis later recounted on Today in 1982: “I brought him out to Hollywood to work on a sketch with Dean and me.” But Petrillo didn’t stay a protégé. He teamed up with Duke Mitchell, a gravel-voiced singer with a Martin-esque swagger, and the duo hit the nightclub circuit, mimicking the originals with a twist: for their finale, Petrillo played Martin, and Mitchell played Lewis, flipping the script to roars of laughter.
Their big break—or break-in—came in 1952 with Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, a Poverty Row flick so absurd it’s now a cult classic. Shot in nine days on a shoestring budget, the film starred Petrillo and Mitchell as two hapless entertainers crash-landing on a jungle island, where an aging Bela Lugosi (post-Dracula, pre-Ed Wood) turns Mitchell into a gorilla. Cheeta, the Tarzan chimp, even made a cameo. Critics panned it—Variety called it “a cheapjack farce”—but audiences couldn’t look away. Petrillo’s Lewis impression was uncanny, down to the spastic yelps, and the film’s sheer weirdness made it a B-movie oddity. Yet it also marked the beginning of a rift with Lewis, one that would shape Petrillo’s life as much as his mimicry had shaped his career.
The relationship between Jerry Lewis and Sammy Petrillo began with a spark of curiosity, even camaraderie. That chance meeting on 53rd Street wasn’t just a fluke; it was a moment of recognition. Lewis, then 26 and riding high with Martin, saw in Petrillo a distorted reflection—someone who could ape his every twitch with eerie precision. In 1951, he invited the 17-year-old to Hollywood, putting him on The Colgate Comedy Hour for a sketch. “I thought he was a riot,” Lewis wrote in his 1982 memoir Jerry Lewis in Person. “A kid doing me better than I did me.” For a fleeting moment, Petrillo was part of the inner circle, a novelty act Lewis could parade out for laughs. But the warmth didn’t last. Petrillo’s ambition—to build a career on Lewis’s blueprint—crossed a line from flattery to threat, and Lewis’s ego, as vast as his talent, wouldn’t brook a rival.
The turning point came with Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. Lewis had initially given Petrillo and Mitchell his blessing, even posing for photos with them in Los Angeles, as a 1952 Photoplay article documented. But when the film hit theaters, Lewis’s tune changed. He saw not a tribute but a theft—a low-rent parody that mocked his carefully crafted persona. “I felt violated,” he told The Hollywood Reporter years later, in 1977. “They took my act and ran it through the gutter.” Lewis’s legal team fired off cease-and-desist letters, and though no lawsuit materialized, the pressure was real. Petrillo, in a 1991 Pittsburgh interview, remembered a phone call from Lewis himself: “He said, ‘Sammy, you’re killing me out there. Lay off.’ I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” The call was less a plea than a warning, and it drove a wedge between them that never healed.
For Petrillo, the fallout was personal. He idolized Lewis—his act was born from admiration, not malice—but the rejection stung. In a rare 1992 audio interview unearthed from a Pittsburgh radio archive, he admitted, “Jerry was my hero, and then he was my ghost. I couldn’t shake him.” Lewis, meanwhile, doubled down. He banned Petrillo from his orbit, reportedly blackballing him from major studios and TV networks. Dean Martin, ever the peacemaker, stayed neutral, but Lewis’s clout was enough. By 1953, Petrillo and Mitchell’s act was faltering, their bookings dwindling under the unspoken blacklist. “Jerry didn’t just sue us—he erased us,” Mitchell later told a friend, a claim Petrillo echoed in his own telling. The interpersonal rift wasn’t just professional; it was a betrayal of trust, a mentor turning on his mimic with a ferocity that left scars.
Over the years, their paths diverged, but the tension lingered. Lewis never publicly acknowledged Petrillo again, save for a curt dismissal in a 1980s interview: “He was a kid with a gimmick—nothing more.” Petrillo, for his part, oscillated between defiance and deference. In the 1970s, he toyed with reviving the Lewis act, only to back off, wary of reigniting the feud. By the 1990s, he’d softened, telling a reporter, “I don’t blame Jerry—he had to protect his throne.” When Lewis died in 2017, Petrillo was long gone, but his widow, Suzie Perkovic, offered a cryptic tribute on X: “Sammy loved him, even when Jerry didn’t love back.” Their relationship, brief but seismic, was a dance of mirrors—one man’s rise amplifying the other’s fall, a bond forged in laughter and broken by pride.
Petrillo’s career after Brooklyn Gorilla was a slow fade. He popped up on TV—The Colgate Comedy Hour, Four Star Revue, Texaco Star Theater—and claimed to have starred in a short-lived series, The Sammy Petrillo Show, where Tiny Tim once guested. But the gigs dried up. Lewis’s shadow loomed large, and the industry had little room for a copycat when the original was still king. Petrillo tried solo acts, dabbling in nudie films like Doris Wishman’s Shangri-La (1961) and Keyholes Are for Peeping (1972), where he played multiple roles in threadbare comedies. He even wrote a treatment, My Daddy Was a Monster, which he insisted inspired The Munsters, though evidence is thin. By the late 1970s, he reconnected with Mitchell in California, distributing the latter’s gritty Massacre Mafia Style (1974), but Mitchell’s death in 1981 left Petrillo adrift again.
Then came Pittsburgh—a city that didn’t care about Hollywood’s blacklist. In the late 1980s, Petrillo settled there, opening The Nut House, a family-friendly comedy club that became a launchpad for young talent. Richard Pryor and Dennis Miller, the latter a Pittsburgh native, honed their craft under his wing. “Sammy was a genius… in Pittsburgh,” a local comic once quipped, and it stuck. He wasn’t just a relic; he was a mentor, a survivor who’d traded Tinseltown for Steel City. The Nut House thrived into the 1990s, a testament to Petrillo’s grit, even as his past faded into obscurity. “I was accepted without any tarnishment on my character,” he told a reporter in 1991, reflecting on a life spent straddling fame and infamy.
Petrillo’s personal life was as colorful as his career. In the 1980s, he met Suzie Perkovic, a comedian who performed as Suzie Fiore. They became partners in life and onstage, billing themselves as Suzie & Sammy for over a decade. Their act—part vaudeville, part stand-up—kept Petrillo in the game, a throwback to his Catskills roots. He also dabbled in the fringes, emceeing shows with porn stars like Georgina Spelvin, a gig that raised eyebrows but paid the bills. By 1997, he surfaced in the documentary Bela Lugosi: Hollywood’s Dracula, offering wry commentary on his brush with the horror icon. Yet behind the laughs was a man wrestling with his legacy—someone who’d been a punchline too long to forget it.
The end came quietly. On August 15, 2009, Petrillo died of colon cancer at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville, New York, aged 74. He’d been living in Tuckahoe, a stone’s throw from his Bronx birthplace, buried at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla. Obituaries were sparse, but those who knew him mourned a character who’d defied the odds. “Sammy didn’t just imitate Jerry—he lived a life Jerry couldn’t,” Dennis Miller said in a tribute. His death closed a chapter on an era when comedy was raw, unpolished, and fiercely competitive—a time when a kid from the projects could ride a haircut to the edge of stardom.
What drove Sammy Petrillo? Ambition, sure, but also a kind of stubborn defiance. He didn’t invent the wheel; he spun someone else’s and made it his own. In a 1992 interview, he hinted at the cost: “I turned down Late Night with David Letterman because I didn’t want to surprise Jerry—I’d had enough of that.” It was a rare moment of restraint from a man who’d built a career on boldness. His impersonation of Lewis wasn’t just mimicry; it was a challenge to the system, a middle finger to originality in an industry that thrived on repetition. He paid for it, but he never stopped performing.
Culturally, Petrillo’s story is a lens on the 1950s—a decade of conformity spiked with rebellion. Martin and Lewis embodied postwar optimism, but Petrillo and Mitchell were the flip side: scrappy, low-budget, and unapologetic. Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla is a time capsule of that tension, a film so bad it’s brilliant, preserved by fans who see in it the chaos of a fading vaudeville world. Petrillo’s later mentorship of Pryor and Miller ties him to comedy’s evolution, from pratfalls to provocation. He wasn’t a pioneer, but he was a bridge—a link between eras that’s easy to overlook.
Today, Petrillo’s legacy is niche but enduring. On social media, film buffs trade clips of Brooklyn Gorilla, marveling at his Lewis-lite antics. “Sammy was the B-side to Jerry’s A-side,” one user posted last month, a sentiment that captures his place in history. His name pops up in trivia nights, his face in grainy YouTube uploads. He’s not a household name, but he doesn’t need to be. Sammy Petrillo lived on the margins, and that’s where he thrived—proof that even a shadow can cast a light of its own.
So here’s to Sammy: the almost-was, the nearly-ran, the kid who took a haircut and turned it into a life. He didn’t topple Jerry Lewis, but he danced around him, a jester in a king’s court. His story isn’t one of triumph or failure—it’s both, tangled in a messy, beautiful knot. In an age of polished icons, Petrillo was gloriously unpolished, a reminder that fame isn’t the only measure of a life well-lived. Somewhere, in a smoky Pittsburgh club or a forgotten jungle set, he’s still out there, mugging for the crowd, daring us to laugh.