The Importance of Being Dino

Will you look at this beautiful bastard. Just look at him. Makes you feel better when you do, right? That's Dean all over. That's what he does without doing anything, what he does without actually even breathing anymore, come to think of it. Dead, he's still just that good. Never had a care, not him. Problems weren't his to ponder or possess. Never wanted you to have any, either. You were his pally--everybody was, whether he knew them or not. For instance, just the other day his grandkid Alex Martin told me, "For the first 15 years of my life, I thought my name was Pally." About which what's not to like? He was crazy, too. Frank Sinatra said so, which made it true. "My friend Mr. Dean Martin," Sinatra said, "if he was in a casket, he would sit up and get funny, this guy. I'm serious." (Sinatra's problem was he was always serious. Said Dean, simple as could be, "Frank takes things seriously. I don't.") Dean saw things funny, famously. "How did all these people get in my room?" he'd ask onstage, gazing through drooped lids at those who came to love him so nice. To be in Dean's room, well, that was all you ever wanted--real easylike, metaphysical, very comfortable place, plenty warm, transcendent, cool, not too exciting (Sinatra was all about the exciting ring-a-ding whatever the hell it was), always sexy, always fun, just right. "I was loose as a deuce; I was as light as a kite," he sang with some pretty little French broad 50 years ago on a record called "Relax-Ay-Voo." You probably heard it, sounding timeless as air, in a Microsoft commercial not so long ago, since this is the ultimate object of modern life, to relax-ay-voo, what with the world forever going to hell and all, which is why we can never get too far away from Dean's room, no matter how dead he is.

"Am I in town?" he often asked anyone within earshot, sublime existentialist that he was. (Always and no matter where this occurred, the answer would be in the affirmative, in case you were wondering.) Conversely, however, and all the more so with each passing year, wherever you are, so too is Dean. Just as he did four decades ago, he has slipped out from under the (retro) rubric of Rat Pack nihilism--of ephemeral cocktail consulship with leader Sinatra and the great Sammy Davis Jr. and, in minor chords, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop--and stepped forth into a sleek ubiquity all his own. (He never much went for crowds, anyway.) So here now is a plethora of Dean, singing all over movie and television soundtracks--The Sopranos, Swingers, Goodfellas, L.A. Confidential, Donnie Brasco, The West Wing, The Mexican, Return to Me, Payback, Panic, Made, Mickey Blue Eyes, Vegas Vacation, Babe: Pig in the City, A Bronx Tale, Home Alone 3, Lost and Found, Striptease, Reindeer Games, Moonstruck--how many italics do you want, because I could go on for a while. And there he is, sending glissandos unending across the glib commerce of Ragú, Nissan, Heineken, Audi, Kodak, Peugeot and Marriott--just for starters. Last June Capitol released a remastered 30-hit compilation, Dino: The Essential Dean Martin ("He was the coolest dude I'd ever seen, period," Stevie Van Zandt declares in the liner notes), which debuted at number 28 on the Billboard Top 100, was the fifth most downloaded album that week on iTunes and became his first gold record in 30 years. Differently than Sinatra (he of the bipolar genius and swaggering empowerment), Dean provides smooth, winking succor to generations anew: "I love him so much," a bright 20-something female comedy professional wrote me in an e-mail, after letting on that Dean, bare-chested and with guitar, acts as her PC screen saver. "I can think of no better way to spend the day than sitting with Dean Martin. He epitomizes cool, easy fun."

Well, yeah.

Said Dean, "You gotta have fun, right? If not, you might as well lay down and let 'em throw dirt on you." And so it was that his cab came--he more or less called for it himself--a few hours before dawn nine Christmases ago. (Christmas With Dino, by the way, is Capitol's newest remastered collection, now in stores everywhere!) He was 78 and ready for the big relax-ay-voo so as to doze eternally, in his tuxedo with red pocket hanky and shiny black boots, shelved snug in a marble drawer 10 minutes from home. The forever formal wear was supposed to be some giant secret--"Nobody knows that!" his agent blurted after the interment (he forgot he'd already told me)--but who are we kidding here? "In regular clothes, I'm nobody," Dean always said, too modestly. "In a tuxedo, I'm a star." Which isn't to suggest he's overdressed for oblivion. "Dean looked more comfortable in a tux than most people do in their pajamas," notes one of his TV producers, Lee Hale, in his memoir Backstage at the Dean Martin Show. On that remarkable variety hour, the bona fide cornerstone of NBC's Must-See-TV Thursdays from 1965 to 1974, black tie wasn't optional for anyone. Dean performed even the sketches in swank midnight attire with omnipresent cigarette, making most surreal his sales clerks, doctors and barbershop loiterers. The best of those shows--sparkling music segments especially--have now been spliced into home-video bounty, as was done with a later series, the quite awful, zillion-selling Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts, offered via peppy insomniac infomercials (or at www.deanvariety.com) to a world in which men like Dean dwell no longer. "Wanna know why the show's a hit?" he once said of his variety show. "The reason is that it's the real me up there on the screen. Nothing phony. You take everybody else on TV, they're putting on an act, playin' something they aren't. But when people tune me in, they know they're getting Dean Martin."

I've got the real Dean Martin's tuxedo pants, by the way. Well, a pair of one of the hundreds he used to tug on, one leg at a time. I bought them for 80 bucks, I think, at a long-gone Santa Monica boutique called Star Wares. According to the authentication papers, somebody who worked for Shirley MacLaine brought them in (I refuse to consider the implications). His name was sewn into the waistband by the Las Vegas custom tailor Carmen-Lamola and dated October 1986 (which means Dean was 69 when he first wore them), two years after his appearance in Cannonball Run II (very sad) and less than two years before he, Sinatra and Sammy Davis embarked on the hopeless "Together Again" arena tour, which Dean quit after a week (sadder still). Never have I dared try them on (his measurements, in case you're wondering: waist 34, length 32), but a leggy blonde of my acquaintance did one memorable night, executing living-room grand pirouettes to moon-eye-pizza-pie accompaniment on the stereo. (I figured Dean wouldn't mind.) Otherwise they've stayed in the closet, except for once when I brought them (in a shopping bag) to a Rat Pack panel discussion in New York, where my friend Nick Tosches, author of the seminal, unauthorized 1992 masterwork Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, offered me $500 on the spot for them. I laughed in his face.

Dean never read Dino (it preceded his departure by three years). Legend has it he read Black Beauty at age nine, cried and swore off all books thereafter. Upon meeting anyone who ever wrote one, he'd say, "Congratulations. I read one." ("He used to love comic books," his former monkey partner Jerry Lewis has said. "I used to buy most of them for him, because he wouldn't go to the fuckin' newsstand.") Let me say this: Tosches's book, much like Tosches, is a dark, gorgeous motherfucker, in which Dean--born Dino Crocetti in hard-scrabble Steubenville, Ohio on June 7, 1917--is also a dark gorgeous motherfucker, albeit one who got extremely rich and famous. Think Kafka goes to Hollywood, with music and pasta. Tosches's Dean swirls alone in haunted breezes, a tragic menefreghista--"one who does not give a fuck," in the classic Italian--bent on enforcing, per Tosches, "the taciturn harboring close to the heart of any thought or feeling that ran too deeply; that emotional distance, that wall of lontananza between the self and the world." Well, yeah. That was Dean all over, except--according to those who loved him best--he wasn't one who did not give a fuck bitterly so much as in a fluffy, pleasant, I'm-just-gonna-go-play-golf-now-darlin' kind of way, which is a distinction that seems worth noting. Anyway, Warner Bros. bought the book for Martin Scorsese to direct and for Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas, Casino) to adapt for the screen, which he did (brilliantly, apparently). Tom Hanks was attached to star. Scorsese then decided to make Gangs of New York instead, and everything fell apart. A guy I know who read the Pileggi script says, "It was beautiful, heartbreaking. It would have been--or still will be--amazing to watch Marty make a weepy."

What, you might wonder, would Dean have made of such a film? It's hard to judge for certain, but I do know that once, to Sinatra, apropos of not much, he uttered the following: "If you gonna go that way, I say remember the great words of Chef Boyardee, who said, 'Get your balls out of my spaghetti!'" (All in all, Dean preferred Westerns; his own work in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, with John Wayne, remains splendiferous.) Somewhere in the troubling screenplay, however, as maybe he did in life, he reportedly explains that if you don't complain about your problems, they don't exist. (About which, again, what's not to like?) Always he stuck fast to his story. "I'm a very happy man," he'd say, and said it again, with much validity, to bellissima journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1967--the very year he released his 30th album, Happiness Is Dean Martin, and signed a record-breaking three-year, $34 million contract with NBC, which allowed him to skip all rehearsals and work only one day a week, for taping. ("God!" he told Fallaci. "I am not worth it. What do I do? I do an hour, and out of that hour I sing maybe 10 songs. The rest, I talk. And I make fun of my wife, of my children, of my mother-in-law, of myself, of my drinkin'.") Observed Fallaci, ever astutely, "Happiness for him means avoiding boring complications, then aging in a comfort earned through a success that was to him a continuous surprise." Said Dean, "You see, I'm a simple man."

Back to the real Dean, also known (in waves of maturation) as Dino Martini; the Boy with the Tall, Dark, Handsome Voice; Admiral and Second-in-Command of the Rat Pack (no commanding required--Sinatra did all of that); Dag (as in dago, this being Sinatra's private endearment for him); King Leer (he was TV's preeminent rascal); and maybe best for posterity, King of Cool (Elvis, who worshipped Dean, hung that one on him). As for his quintessence, I am keen on Tina Sinatra's privileged assessment. "The Sinatra children knew him as Uncle Dean," she writes. "He was warm and reliable, a big man with big hands, and he hugged like a bear. Though he had an air of authority, he was never intimidating--just the opposite, in fact. He loved to kid around. He approached young people at their level; he wasn't your typical patriarch." To that end, onstage he'd offer, "I have seven beautiful children. What are you applauding for? It took all of seven minutes! The three most popular phrases in my house are hello, good-bye and I'm pregnant." His first marriage produced four children (Craig, Claudia, Gail, Deana), his second another three (Dean Paul, Ricci, Gina). He and the former Jeanne Biegger, whom he married in 1949 and divorced in 1973 (to his dying day he nevertheless called her "my wife, Jeanne"), raised the full litter atop Mountain Drive in Beverly Hills, a riotous household whose slippery master made sure, at most and least, to be present for family dinnertime. ("Save me a seat!" he'd holler, happily inferring that he was ever screwing himself out of one.) Ricci and Deana Martin have each published fine, honest memoirs of life with father--That's Amore (2002) and Memories Are Made of This (2004), respectively--companion son and daughter accounts, both of which grapple with and ultimately accept sweet paternal elusiveness. Both offspring recall savoring Dean's cleated footfalls on the kitchen tile upon his return (continued on page 186)Dean Martin(continued from page 104) from daily golf games ("Dad's home!"). Per ritual, he'd go straight for the bread box, butter up a slice of white, "fold it in half and take a big bite off the end," writes Ricci, who watched raptly. "Now, that's livin', pally!" Dean would then declare, chewing the mouthful of metaphor. ("See, I'm a simple man.")

"Really, his mystique is intangible," Deana Martin told me. "He was just bigger than life and like no one you've ever met before. He made people feel comfortable because he was so comfortable with himself. He liked to be alone, but he was never lonely." Possessed of gorgeous indifference, he kept to a path of his own quiet design. Jeanne once noted, with no small sigh of resignation, "He has made a pattern of his future, and he follows it stubbornly, with a total lack of curiosity. What he sincerely cares for, after his work, is golf. Golf is his real, honest love." Thus he would lie to Sinatra, "I've got a girl in my room," to excuse himself from requisite nocturnal Rat Pack revelries. Sinatra knew he was lying and let him go. Dag loved to find sleep early, nursing his six handicap for the morning links ("He likes golf-ball thumpin' like I like humpin'--to each his own!" Sinatra sang of him at a Friars roast). Then there is that most cherished of Dean anecdotes, whose variations are countless. To Fallaci he told it this way: "Three years ago Jeanne and I had a party on our anniversary here at home. At midnight I went upstairs and called the police. I said, 'I'm a neighbor of the Martins. Will you tell 'em to hold that band down?' So they came and stopped the band, and Jeanne came runnin'. 'Hey, Dino, the cops are here. Some neighbor wants to stop the party.' And I said, 'Too bad.'" Which was to say, fun is fun, baby, but bedtime is bedtime.

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"You know, sometimes I think I give off a scent or something, arouses the female," he informed Montgomery Clift in The Young Lions (1958), his first real picture after busting up with Jerry Lewis. (Dean winningly portrayed a reluctant playboy draftee who kills Marlon Brando, a very likable Nazi.) For the record, his scent was Fabergé's Woodhue (now defunct), diluted with a few drops of water. Notwithstanding, he drew swoons as effortlessly as he managed all else. "I don't need money," he noted as a boy singer on the make. "I'm good-looking." He knew where his gifts shined. Onstage, he'd forever tug at his thick black hair: "I want people to know that it's mine," he told his daughter Gail. Throughout his life he carried a split lower lip scarred from boxing, curling it into myriad smiles of debonair devastation. "This guy had 14 shades of a smile," marvels his longtime TV producer, Greg Garrison. "It took me 35 years to figure them all out, and I'm still not totally sure." While he dallied his share (legendarily, with Rita Hayworth, June Allyson and Petula Clark), in truth, women were not his thrill. "The truth is I bore the hell out of Dean," said the radiant Jeanne in 1968. "Most women do. He's not a ladies' man. He's a man's man, and I like that about him." Dean's logic, which you may take for the ages, was: "Men are down-to-earth and more honest, and I can get a repartee with them, have fun. Women instead are crazy, crazy, crazy, and they're flighty, and they are always lookin' for somethin', and they always tell you how good they are. I don't wanna know how good they are." Therein lay his particular genius as an entertainer: "You know, more men want to see me than girls," he once explained. "You know why? I never sing to the girl. I figure that some guy is paying the bill, and here I am singing to his girl, then he's going to get threatened. I don't flirt with the girls like Wayne Newton does. I sing over their heads. This way, the guy comes back with his girl. Or maybe he comes back with a different girl." Dean smiled here, in case you were wondering.

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"Do you know that I spill more than he drinks?" Sinatra liked to say. "That's an actuality." Famously, Dean's license plate read Drunky, but he relished being a lightweight who fooled the world. After bolting from Lewis--Martin and Lewis, please note, were merely considered the biggest act in the history of show business (look for Jerry's memoir Dean and Me: A Love Story in bookstores next year)--he invented a new public persona to leaven his workload and stay funny. "Everybody loves a drunk," he said, which rang true enough back then. Thus, he openly copped from the great saloon comic Joe E. Lewis: "You're not drunk if you can lay on the floor without holdin' on." The laughs were huge, conspiratorial. "I feel sorry for people who don't drink," he'd maunder with glass in hand, "because when they wake up in the morning that's as good as they're gonna feel all day." But onstage it was mostly apple juice. "And here's the topper," he once revealed. "I hate apple juice."

"No one has ever seen me drunk," he said at his height of fame. I know I never did some 25 years later when I discovered that he drank and ate alone nightly at a Beverly Hills Italian joint called La Famiglia, which eventually closed and forced him a few blocks away to another one called Da Vinci. Like clockwork he was delivered by seven in his white Rolls-Royce and seated at his booth near the bar, where his records quietly played on the sound system. Sometimes he would softly sing along with himself--"God didn't make little green apples." Once in a while Jeanne and his actor grandson Alex Martin (Josie and the Pussycats, Can't Hardly Wait), son of Dean Paul, would join him--for drinks only. Dean preferred to eat alone. Alex remembers a knowing look exchanged by his grand-parents one night as the music crooned on. "What?" he asked them. Said Dean, gesturing toward the air, "There was a key change there, pally. I went up a big octave." (Alex, by the way, got his grand-father's latest hit collection off iTunes, "legally.") Such was Dean's life in the homestretch, which arrived when Alex's father, the actor turned pilot, flew his Phantom fighter jet into a mountain on March 21, 1987. Dean, who despised flying and had barely overcome a mortal fear of elevators, began his own death march that same day. "He was never the same," says, well, everyone. Performing was kept to a bare minimum. Sinatra drove him nuts during the goddamn 1988 Rat Pack tour (launched mainly to cheer up Dag), pretending they were all still young gods. Dean went home after a week (pissing off Sinatra royally) and gave up Vegas altogether three years later--but not before Madonna and Sandra Bernhard, whoever the hell they were, went one night to see him. By then, golf was no more--too many aches and pains--so all that remained for him to do, quite happily, was spend days in bed watching television (any cowboy show would do) and nights at the restaurant, where he shook the hands of the nice folks who still remembered him. (Always he stood if a woman approached.) Usually he would smile and wave to the paparazzi who came to capture his withering shell, once so immaculate and proud. "He knew the game," writes Ricci, who stifled his own outrage. "That was Dad. Take your pictures."

Anyway, I went to see him dozens of times during those last years--oddly, just to make sure he was okay. (In the old days, I might add, Elvis would drive past Dean's house late at night to savor mere proximity to his hero.) Sometimes I took friends who knew his greatness, one being Dean's eternal number one fan, Regis Philbin, who was there the evening of O.J. Simpson's Bronco chase; Dean watched the drama unfold on the bar TV along with everyone else. "It was like going to see the Eiffel Tower," acknowledges Joe Mantegna, who played Dean beautifully in the bad HBO film The Rat Pack and saw him once at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset, Dean's Sunday haunt. "You got ease from just looking at him." There was, in fact, something noble and heroic about him no matter how enfeebled he became. Toward the end, he brought his teeth in the pocket of his navy Members Only wind-breaker. Meticulously, he would measure three spoonfuls of club soda to mix into his J&B scotch ("It stands for Just Booze," he used to shrug). The process was unhurried and lovely. Normally I gave him a brief "How are you, sir?" and let him be. The last time I saw him was the night after I'd gone to the Shrine Auditorium for Sinatra's 80th birthday extravaganza, where Springsteen, Dylan and others serenaded the cantankerous leader. I told Dean that Frank clearly hated it. He smirked. ("Whenever he talked about Frank," says Alex Martin, "he would have a smirk.") I also told him, for whatever it was worth, that everybody still knew he was the cool one. "Thanks, pal," he said and gave me his giant paw. He quit going to the restaurant a couple of weeks later--quit eating all but entirely, I learned. Days later he was gone. "He did absolutely what he wanted to do, and he went the way he wanted to," his agent Mort Viner told me at the time. "He went to sleep on Christmas Eve, and that was it."

Long before, at another Beverly Hills restaurant, he'd stepped outside after dinner with his family and given the parking valet the stubs for their two cars. "We always had to have two cars, because there were so many of us," his daughter Gail told me. "So we were waiting and waiting, and the valet couldn't find Dad's car. Dad waited a little longer, then walked across the street to the Jaguar dealership and bought a new one. He said, 'Jeanne, bring them home.' And off he drove." Apparently, wherever he performed, he pinned to the dressing room wall a cartoon someone once clipped for him in which one grunt office worker says to another, "When I die, I want to come back as Dean Martin." Same goes for me, pally. At least I have his pants.

"Dean Martin was my brother--not through blood but through choice," said Sinatra. "We were there for each other. He has been like the air I breathe."

"It's the real me up there on the screen. Nothing phony. Everybody else on TV, they're putting on an act."