By all accounts he was a thoroughly unpleasant, vindictive, awful man. He did donate to charities and all that and was supposedly decent to his own family, but outside of that he was apparently a piece of shit. A lot of people of his generation/scene covered for him a lot.
It's funny too because the day his death was announced I remember seeing a lot of posts all over social media from people who all told basically the same story: "Yeah when I met him he was a total asshole to me and I overheard him say insanely racist/sexist shit, but WE MUST SEPARATE THE ART FROM THE ARTIST!"

Yeah...the.uh... 'art.'

Oh yeah, that's right, I forgot. We're living in the time where if anyone ever said or did something politically incorrect we're supposed to disregard everything else they ever did and pretend they never existed. I keep forgetting that new rule.

NPR didn't call him a shithead but did mention that he was self-absorbed and couldn't handle criticism, increasingly so as he aged. Also a couple stories about him being nice to people who weren't his family.

Seems like he was a human being of his generation. No saint but not some evil characature either.

The Jerry Lewis Theaters were devised as a way to give Jerry Lewis absolute control over his movies. They were single screen theaters that were, in theory, efficient enough to be operated by a husband and wife team with no additional staff, and hustled to middle class retirees as a turnkey investment. The problem was twofold: a) the audience consisted almost entirely of children, so maintenance and janitorial costs were extraordinarily high, and b) not even the kids wanted to see a steady stream of exclusively Jerry Lewis movies. The investors found they couldn't turn a profit, forced to hire additional staff, and the theater managers went over Jerry's head and started showing Disney films and (later) horror double features. Jerry Lewis couldn't even show his own movies in his own theater chain, pulled his name from the set-up, and most of the theaters closed, becoming urban blight. A few reopened under independent names and were eventually subsumed when Video came in. The Jerry Lewis Theater in Seattle operated as a converted video store for a few decades and eventually became Enumclaw Video and Pawn.

DQL, remember that shitheaded comment next time we're praising a video about Mel Brooks, George Carlin, John Cena, and Icc Cube.