SINGER SLASH COMEDIAN Joe E. Lewis, left, and Frank Sinatra trade chairs on the Paramount set of The Joker Is Wild in 1956.

PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

The dulcet tones and bawdy stage banter of singer Joe E. Lewis provided the perfect cocktail for the Chicago speakeasy set. During Prohibition, Lewis packed lounges all over the city, catching the attention of Machine Gun Jack McGurn, manager of the Green Mill and Al Capone’s favorite hit man.

In 1927, McGurn supplied Lewis with a steady singing gig to the lucrative tune of $650 a week. Lewis delivered, entertaining the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson. The arrangement went south when the New Rendezvous Café on Clark and Diversey (now a Days Inn) offered Lewis $1,000 a week and a cut of the cover charge. When Lewis didn’t renew his standing contract with the Green Mill, McGurn told him he wouldn’t survive opening night at the New Rendezvous.

Although Lewis’s first night at the Rendezvous went off without a hit(ch), McGurn followed up shortly thereafter. One morning he and his henchmen barged into Lewis’s hotel room, pistol-whipped him, cut out a piece of his tongue and carved his throat from ear to ear. When a blood-drenched Lewis stumbled into the hallway, the maid first thought he had covered himself in fake blood as a joke.

Lewis never regained his singing voice, but he gradually learned to speak without impediment and recovered from the deep depression that follows being tortured, disfigured and left for dead. In the ’40s, he reinvented himself as a stand-up comedian on the vaudeville circuit. He launched his career into the stratosphere with one-liners about gambling and alcoholism. (“I always wake up at the crack of ice”; “You’re not drunk enough if you can still lie on the floor without holding on.”) In the ’50s and ’60s, he went from clubs to USO tours to frequent radio, television and film appearances while also regularly headlining in Vegas clubs.

Lewis’s flamboyant career became the subject of a best-selling 1955 biography, The Joker Is Wild, by journalist and screenwriter Art Cohn. Frank Sinatra snapped up the movie rights and acted as both producer and star of the 1957 film of the same name, which won an Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Although the mafia tried to off him, Lewis maintained close friendships with mafiosi all his life. In a rumor that Lewis may have started himself, Al Capone was reportedly so fond of the singer that he gave him $10,000 to help him recover and restart his career. Perhaps Lewis summed up the hazy truth behind his story best: “You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough.”