Dean and Me: A Love Story (22 page)

I won’t kid you—the breakup was still much on my mind. I missed Dean like hell. But action is a great pain reliever: When you’ve got a lot going on, there’s only so much time you can devote to introspection. The public, however, still didn’t want to let go. And so when
Look
magazine came and interviewed me in January, I tried to be as thoughtful and honest as possible: about myself, about Dean, and about the two of us.

“As early as 1949, things began to be different,” I said in the piece. “Dean divorced Betty and married his second wife, Jeanne, and suddenly our families weren’t friendly anymore. As time went on, I grew to believe that Dean wasn’t the strong, self-reliant character I thought he was, but, if anything, felt even more insecure than I. We both discovered that we were completely different in temperament and in our outlook. I don’t blame Dean ... it probably developed out of his tough childhood—but he was never as warm and outgoing as I hoped he’d be.”

That was definitely the hurt talking. I didn’t feel I was being unfair, but Dean hit the roof. Apparently, my mentioning Jeannie had set him off. “Jerry was jealous of Jeanne,” he told a reporter. And: “I respect other wives. I could talk about Patti and Jerry knows it, but I wouldn’t.”

If my hurt could talk, so could Dean’s. At the end of January, a new NBC TV show featured live coverage of a party at the Beverly Hilton. Dean was there, he’d had a couple of drinks, and the enterprising interviewer, seeing an opportunity to further stir things up between us, ambushed him. Dean finally vented some of his own feelings, saying some not very complimentary things about me and my artistic aspirations, and the press—having set him up for the fall—hit him hard for it afterward.

And then
Ten Thousand Bedrooms
came out.

The critics really killed Dean this time, and none more enthusiastically than his old nemesis at the
New York Times
, Bosley Crowther. “More than a couple of vacancies are clearly apparent in this musical film,” he wrote. “One is the emptiness alongside of Dean Martin, who plays the lead without his old partner, Jerry Lewis, and that’s some emptiness indeed. Mr. Martin is a personable actor with a nice enough singing voice, but he’s just another nice-looking crooner without his comical pal. Together the two made a mutually complementary team. Apart, Mr. Martin is a fellow with little humor and a modicum of charm.”

On one hand, this was just one more nasty critic giving Dean the same crap the critics always had given him, but this time Crowther was trying to finish Dean off. And unfortunately, he was right about the movie itself, which simply wasn’t very good.

So 1957, the year Dean turned forty, was a tough one for him. They loved him at the Copa Room at the Sands, where he’d just signed a five-year contract. He would always have a home in Vegas. But that was only a few weeks out of the year. He had to let the rest of the country know who Dean Martin really was.

Still, I want to tell you something about who Dean really was. One night while he was on stage at a club in Pittsburgh, a rowdy fan yelled out something derogatory about me and Dean stopped the show. “Sir,” he said, “I want you to know that even though we’ve broken up, I have the greatest respect for Jerry.”

It put that audience in the palm of his hand. Almost fifty years later, it puts me in the palm of his hand, too. There he was, getting slammed by the critics—and still taking the high road.

That July I played ten nights, as a single, at the 500 Club. Skinny D’Amato’s financial woes had worsened, and I wanted to do what I could for him. (Frank and Sammy, too, would both step in and help him out that summer.) But there I was again: July in Atlantic City—except that this time I was alone. It was a strange feeling. And strangest of all was how small and seedy Skinny’s club looked to me now that I’d had a taste of the best. It seemed frozen in the past. But I kept my head in the right place, played my ten nights, and moved on.

I was on a kind of furious tear, a single-minded quest to become the King of Show Business, and over the next decade, to the degree that I succeeded, it was at great cost to myself and those close to me.

Then, at the end of 1957, Dean’s solo career began to turn around. He would succeed beyond his wildest dreams.

Ed Simmons, who with Norman Lear had cowritten
The Colgate
Comedy Hour
for us, had always been a big believer in Dean’s comic skills. Now that Simmons and Lear had broken up themselves, Ed was looking for a new gig. So he went to Dean and offered to write some material for his nightclub act.

Dean’s first reaction was “I’m just gonna sing.” But Ed told him, bluntly, that everyone already knew him as a singer, and it wasn’t enough— that image, by itself, fixed him in the past. Just another nice-looking crooner.... To really make his career take off, Ed insisted, Dean needed to continue being funny on stage.

Then Dean had a stroke of genius. Everyone knew he was going through a tough time—why not have a little fun with it? In our act, he’d often used a glass of apple juice as a prop, pretending it was Scotch. He’d also taught me the trick of keeping anyone who annoyed you at bay by making believe you’ve had a few. Suddenly, he put two and two together and came up with the shtick that would work for him till the end of his life: He would play a drunk on stage. “Write me some stuff like that,” he told Simmons.

Simmons wrote it, Dean lent it his brilliance, and it was a smash hit. Dean went from being someone people liked to see at the Sands to being someone they
had
to see, everywhere. His nightclub bookings took off.

But then something even more important happened. In the after-math of the breakup, Lew Wasserman and Herman Citron at MCA had decided to put all their efforts into making sure that, despite the word on the street, Dean wouldn’t fail.
Ten Thousand Bedrooms
had largely been their doing, and they felt terrible about it. Now Citron had an idea about how to make Dean a serious movie star.

A couple of years earlier, Frank Sinatra’s career had been in the dumper, too—and then he played Private Maggio in
From Here to Eternity
and won an Oscar. Now, in the summer of ’57, a new World War II movie,
The Young Lions
, starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, was about to start shooting in Europe. There was a third major role in it—a devil-may-care former draft-dodger—that Citron felt was tailor-made for Dean.

There was only one problem: Tony Randall had already been signed to play the part.

Citron pled his case to the producer, and the producer brought the idea to Clift—who, as the box-office megastar of the moment, had creative control over the project. All Montgomery Clift knew about Dean was that he had been the straight man of Martin and Lewis. “Good God, no!” he reportedly said.

Legend has it that Clift then went to see the latest Tony Randall movie, a light comedy, and decided that Tony had a brilliant future—in light comedy.
The Young Lions
was a very serious picture. Clift decided to give Dean a shot.

The role would pay less than Dean was earning for a week at the Sands. What’s more, he was petrified at the thought of acting next to the great Brando and Clift. In the meantime, there had already been tension between the two hypersensitive Method actors. But then magic happened: When Dean flew to the film’s location in France, his sense of humor and easygoing personality charmed his temperamental costars. Marlon and Monty recognized what a natural Dean was as an actor and fell all over themselves trying to charm him right back. The end result was that the three of them wound up getting along—well, like a charm. The tension between Clift and Brando evaporated, both did some of their best work, and Dean—helped by Clift’s coaching—found depths in his acting that he’d never imagined.

The Young Lions
was a critical smash when it premiered in the spring of 1958, but most notable was Dean’s emergence as a brand-new acting talent. “It’s inevitable,” Variety said of Dean, “that his performance...will be likened with what
From Here to Eternity
did for Sinatra.”

Take that, Bosley Crowther!

The Young Lions
went on to become one of the biggest hits of the 1950s, and Dean’s success in it gave him a whole new public image—as an actor to be reckoned with and a multitalented superstar.

He had also never stopped recording, though without a major hit. Maybe he just needed to get out of 1957. In January 1958, Dean recorded a new song called “Return to Me.” In early April, the same week that
The
Young Lions
opened, the song hit the
Billboard
charts, where it would remain for five months, rising as high as No. 4. In July, he would record another hit, “Volare.”

When Dean opened at the Beachcomber in Miami that spring,
Billboard
wrote, “If there’s any doubt that Dean Martin can make it as a single, cast the doubt aside.”

The word on the street had shifted a hundred and eighty degrees: Dean Martin had a big, big future. And a big present. His first NBC special aired in late 1957, and the next year he was all over the small screen. Along with all his other successes, he was at the beginning of a brilliant TV career, one that would last for over a quarter of a century.

We had both made it—but only after causing each other a world of hurt.

Dean’s association with Frank Sinatra, the partnership that would lead to the formation of the Rat Pack, began toward the end of 1958, when Frank called Dean and asked him to costar with him and Shirley MacLaine in a new movie called Some Came Running.

Frank and I had been friendly for years. We had great esteem for each other, but at the same time we never let it get too formal. I called him “Wop”; he called me “Jew.” (When Frank won the Oscar for
From
Here to Eternity
in 1954, I wrestled him to the ground, in full view of the photographers outside the theater, and kissed him smack on the lips.)

With Dean and Frank, of course, it was very different. They admired each other enormously, but Dean had always kept him at the same slight distance he kept everybody. When Dean and I broke up, though, I think Frank decided that Dean needed some extra attention, and he actively sought Dean out.

I wasn’t in on the phone conversation, but I can imagine roughly how it went. “Hey, drunkard,” Frank would have said. (That was, and would remain, his nickname for Dean.) “How’s your bird?”

“Hey, pally. What’s up?”

“How’d you like to do a picture with Shirley and me?”

“Sure—why not?”

And that’s probably how Dean got to costar with Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine in Some Came Running, the critical and box-office success about postwar, small-town America, based on the James Jones novel. Dean played Bama Dillert, a dying professional gambler—and a drunk. The role was tailor-made for him, but I noticed an interesting thing: Dean’s Southern accent. He first had exaggerated his drawl for our act—it was partly an affectation, but it worked well with his stage role. In
Some Came Running
, though, he sounded as if he really did come from Alabama. It was perfect for him and for the movie.

Early the next year, along with John Wayne, Dean started shooting
Rio Bravo
, a Western directed by the great Howard Hawks. A Western, starring Wayne and Martin, and directed by Hawks. As I said before, Dean was now in movie heaven. As a drunken coward named Dude, he did his strongest acting ever—and got pretty damn good reviews, too.

But something else happened in early ’59 that kicked Dean’s personal and professional life into a whole new gear. Back in the mid-fifties, Frank had spent a lot of time hanging around with Humphrey Bogart, his wife Lauren Bacall, and a group of the couple’s drinking buddies informally known as the Holmby Hills Rat Pack. (Dean and I had both been friends with Bogie and Betty Bacall, too, but I was never a drinker and Dean was never a joiner.) Besides Bogie, Betty, and Frank, the group included Judy Garland and Sid Luft, David Niven, Jimmy Van Heusen, and several others.

Frank idolized Bogie, and he was crushed when Bogart died of lung cancer in 1957. But Frank still loved the idea of the Rat Pack: He liked to drink, and he liked to hold court. Not long after Bogie’s death, Frank started his own group: It included Van Heusen (who wrote some of Frank’s greatest hits, like “Come Fly With Me” and “Love and Marriage”), Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, and Shirley MacLaine. At first they called themselves the Clan, but that sounded a little too much like that other clan, the one that begins with a K, so they finally settled, as a tribute to Bogie, on the Rat Pack.

At first they all just drank and played cards. Sometimes they went out and raised a little hell. But Frank was having so much fun—these were his bachelor years—that he wanted to try and bring some of it to the stage. And meanwhile, he was courting Dean.

Dean hadn’t changed. He still wasn’t about to join any groups, and he still liked to turn in early at night. But he admired Frank, and after doing
Some Came Running
, Dean knew they worked well together. In early January, Frank conducted the orchestra for Dean’s new album,
Sleep
Warm
, and at the end of the month, the two of them performed together for the first time at the Sands.

A remarkable thing happened when Dean and Frank got on stage together. Among friends, Frank was a funny guy, a great talker and story-teller, but in the past, he’d never been able to convey his humor to his audiences. For most of his professional life, he had done no more than announce the title and the writer of his next song. Eventually, he might add, “Rodgers and Hart—two nice men that I met, and they would love the way you people reacted to their song.”

Frank admired many things about Dean, but one of the biggest was Dean’s ability to ad lib on stage. That drawl, that perfect timing—it struck Frank with the same kind of awe that Dean felt for Frank’s phrasing with a song. Performing together felt like a perfect career move. And what happened the instant Dean and Frank stepped onto the stage at the Sands was that they did a version of Martin and Lewis, with Dean assuming my old role—the cutup, the wise guy (less physical, of course)—and Frank playing the straight man.