Dean Martin: King of Cool“Sammy and Dino,” You Must Remember This

Abstract

When one thinks of coolness in the middle of the twentieth century or of Sammy Davis Jr.’s relationship with an Italian American artist, the name that always pops up is, perhaps inevitably, Frank Sinatra. These associations seem to find agreement in both mainstream and academic cultures. The former is well documented, as even a cursory Google search would confirm. As for the latter, suffice it to mention Joel Dinerstein's 2018 study The Origin of Cool in Postwar America, which devotes an entire chapter to the “Chairman of the Board,” but barely touches upon another of the Board's members, Dean Martin. The relationship between Sinatra and Davis is also very well documented. I myself am guilty as charged, having devoted half of the closing chapter of In the Name of the Mother (2017), my study of the interplay between African American and Italian American cultures, to a close reading of that duo's live performance of the classic tune “Me and My Shadow.” However, both Tom Donohue's documentary Dean Martin: King of Cool and Karina Longworth's podcast season “Sammy and Dino,” from her You Must Remember This podcast dedicated to Hollywood, propose the Steubenville, Ohio, native Dino Crocetti as the one artist who embodied the idea of the cool more than anyone else in America. Likewise, Donohue and Longworth consider Martin the Italian American artist most aligned with Sammy Davis Jr. While Longworth relies entirely on her and her collaborators’ research, starting with Nick Toshes's foundational biography of Martin, Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1999), and Davis's own autobiographies, Yes, I Can: The Autobiography of Sammy Davis Jr. (1965) and Sammy: An Autobiography (2001), Donahue recruited for his film an all-star team of directors, actors, musicians, academics, and journalists, including Peter Bogdanovich, Alec Baldwin, Jon Hamm, RZA, Gerald Early, Norman Lear, Scott Lewis, and Martin's daughter Deanna. In this way, the documentary and the podcast complement each other, albeit indirectly, offering a thorough and informative picture of the artistic and biographical trajectories of these two artists and their significance in American cultural history of the post–World War II era and well into the 1970s. Indeed, taken together, these two works seem to me to raise the possibility of envisioning Martin's and Davis's cool as something inherently connected to their ethnic and racial identities and, consequently, as a symbolic form of anti-capitalism played out within the rigid political economy of the social and cultural context they lived in.Dean Martin: King of Cool comprises five different sections dedicated to Martin's formative years, his relationship with Jerry Lewis, his second marriage to Jeanne Biegger, the Vegas years with the Rat Pack, and, finally, his decade-long TV run. The last of these perhaps testifies to the enduring value of his artistry more than anything else, especially if one considers the political context of those years, from the Vietnam War and race riots to student protests, feminism, and the election and subsequent fall of Richard Nixon. The essential question that the documentary tries to address is, what was Martin's “Rosebud,” the term the documentary employs. What was it that really drove him, Donohue asks, especially considering his artistic eclecticism? Martin, in fact, could do it all and do it well, even masterfully. Yet, when the documentarian asks this question at the beginning of the film, none of the above-mentioned persons speaking in the picture can provide an answer. They are all caught off guard for a brief moment, pause, and cannot answer. For the next two hours, then, Donohue skillfully interrogates them on a variety of Martin's artistic and personal aspects to find out the answer, beginning with a definition of cool, which is intended as “a sense of mystery,” a detachment, what the Italians refer to as menefreghismo, as Alec Baldwin and others suggest, thus directly intertwining it to Martin's ethnicity. I think that Gerald Early says it better when he argues that Martin's cool did signify detachment, but what made him special was that while being detached, he was in control of things and people at once, while maintaining decorum and respect, two more traits that are constitutive of the culture and the world of the Italian immigrants of Martin's generation.This seems to me a very precise way to define Martin's cool. The documentary maps the sociocultural landscape and the subtext, so to speak, of this definition as well as Martin's embodiment of it, beginning with the crucial status as an outsider in his midwestern hometown. The Black rapper RZA, who spent several years in Steubenville as a young man, reminds the viewers how early twentieth-century Steubenville epitomized life in a working-class town, where the factory was the center of most, if not all, its inhabitants’ daily lives, as it certainly was for the Italian immigrants. Additionally, Early says, Martin's first language was Italian, or at least that version of Italian that his Abruzzesi parents and uncles spoke. Indeed, his first wife, Betty McDonald, taught him to pronounce English properly. It is not a coincidence, Early continues, that like many members of other ostracized groups in American life, such as Jews, African Americans, and Latinos, Martin as a young man started boxing, one of the avenues of self-affirmation for male working-class ethnics. Neither is it a coincidence that as a teenager he was already bootlegging liquor and working as a croupier and blackjack dealer in a speakeasy. These jobs he found, unsurprisingly, more attractive and financially rewarding than the steel mill, where he also worked, however briefly. Given Italians’ proximity to African Americans in Steubenville, and Martin's daily exposure and interaction with Black students in high school, during his boxing “career,” and in the illegal casinos that both Italians and African Americans operated in Steubenville, it is no coincidence that along with his parents’ Italian music, the music of Black artists was his biggest musical influence. This was true especially of his fellow Ohioans, the spectacularly popular Mills Brothers, the first African American artists to have their own show on a national network radio station and a number one hit on the Billboard singles chart with “Paper Doll” in 1943. No wonder, then, that Martin made a point to sing this same song along with the group itself to pay tribute to the heroes of his youth decades later on an episode of The Dean Martin Show.The documentary recognizes that it is these experiences and these artistic crossovers and encounters, which are based on reciprocal love and respect and not given to minstrelsy, that are the source of Martin's artistry and genius. Unfortunately, however, Donohue does not do enough to foreground the issue of Martin's relationship to Black culture and Black singing especially. Neither does he give enough space to the most crucial woman in Dean's life, his mother, the one who stubbornly supported the artistic ambitions of her high-school-drop-out son. What Donahue does instead is focus on the other key encounters of Martin's artistic life, beginning, of course, with Jerry Lewis, followed by Jeanne Biegger, as well as Sinatra, which was the meeting that eventually ushered in the Rat Pack period. Wisely, given the amount of ink spent on the Lewis and Martin relationship, beginning with Lewis's 2005 memoir Dean and Me, the film does not spend much time on the duo aside from showing how they learned their craft by “working the stages” of countless nightclubs and arguing that Lewis allowed Martin to put down his guard and be less self-protective. The next Martin influence was Jeanne Biegger, who married the singer in 1949 and helped raise the children he had had with Betty (who turned to alcohol at a very early stage of their marriage) and subsequently bore him three children. Biegger gave him the stability and the family life to which he was naturally and culturally drawn, allowing him to do his best work on the big screen and in the recording studio. After Lewis broke up the company, in fact, many doubted that Martin had the talent to survive the aftermath. Yet he proved everybody wrong, first with his role in Edward Dmytryk's 1958 The Young Lions, alongside Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, and then the following year in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo with John Wayne and Ricky Nelson. At about the same time, he recorded some of his best music and had some of his greatest hits, starting with a cover of Domenico Modugno's classic “Nel blu dipinto di blu,” renamed “Volare,” as well as other Italian songs, including a collection titled Dino: Italian Love Songs. In other words, going back to one of the roots of what I called the Italian American “invisible Blackness” is what allowed him to regain artistic authenticity and, according to several guests in the documentary, reenergized him.Being Italian American and speaking Italian as his first language, Early says, is also what kept Martin suspicious of pop culture and politics. While he was entirely invested in the Rat Pack, which RZA points out, despite all its limitations helped move the culture forward, he never bought into the alignment with and vicinity to JFK that Sinatra engaged in and pushed for. When Martin found out that Kennedy had excluded Sammy Davis Jr. from the presidential inauguration ceremony despite Davis's efforts to get him elected, Martin, unlike Sinatra and many other stars who had supported the president, refused to go. His refusal, however, was not solely a stand against the president's politically calculated tolerance of Southern Democrat's racism, although it was that also. It was part of who Martin was, of his cool. Or, to quote Early, he did not go because “he did not accept bullshit.” And he did not accept bullshit because he was what Early calls a “hip person.” And a hip person, the scholar reminds us, “has no race problem with other people.”The combination of this form of independence and showmanship is also what kept Martin popular at a time when many of the entertainers from his era started to either fade off or lose their way. Martin's success was at its peak in the years from 1965 to 1974 when he hosted The Dean Martin Show on NBC, which rated in the top ten shows almost every year. However, his success did not coincide with happiness in his private life. On the contrary, the latter had begun a downward trajectory already at the beginning of the 1970s, beginning with the divorce from Jeannie, serious bouts with depression, addiction to pills, and other health issues. The death of his son Dean Paul Martin in 1987 in an airplane crash during a training flight for the California National Guard was almost the final blow. What saved him and gave him a few more years of decent life, the documentary argues in closing, was his “Rosebud,” what truly drove him: his ethnic identity and the commitment to family that this identity entailed for him. He recreated the kinship of his Italian family and environment in everything he did: Jerry was his brother; the Rat Pack and the neighborhood he grew up in were his tribe; the Italian songs he recorded were his beloved parents; and his style was the reflection of his mother's artisanship as a seamstress.What the documentary leaves out was the business side of the entertainment industry, which Karena Longworth's podcast covers in detail. Her podcast's goal, regardless of the topic, is to unveil secrets and unspoken facts as well as the infrastructure of what made shows possible and movies accessible to viewers. We might call it an infrastructure of visibility. The framework of all the nine episodes of “Sammy and Dino” is the idea that both artists lived in the shadow of Sinatra and that all of them together lived in the age of WASP power. I am not altogether sure Martin was in Sinatra's shadow. But there is no question that they all had to deal with the power of whiteness for most of their careers, especially during their formative and their most successful years. Thematically speaking, the podcast focuses on race, masculinity, and the American Dream and their interplay with organized crime, enterprise, and what she calls “porous capitalism.” Longworth illustrates how “underground power easily flows into the corporate power structure,” which explains why Sammy and Dino “had the career they had because of the Mafia.” By this, she's stating the simple truth that in postwar America organized crime ran a good chunk of the entertainment industry as well as sports like boxing. Davis and Martin knew the mob had the power and navigated that context as best as they could, especially Martin, who, unlike Davis and Sinatra, managed to never get close to any of the bosses.In the first three episodes, Longworth focuses on the upbringing of the two entertainers. While she does not fail to remind her listeners that Martin “died a white man” and that unlike him Davis could never escape the color of his skin, she paints a very good picture of the racism against the Italians that Martin faced and internalized for the rest of his life. Her view is that such racism, while still present, is buried so deep that it no longer matters. But it did matter at Martin's birth and well into his career. Longworth reminds the listeners of the proximity of Italians to Black people and their willingness to intermingle and do business with them. When she talks about the importance of the legendary Skinny D'Amato and the 500 Club in Atlantic City for Martin's and Davis's career, she explains how while Vegas was segregated officially, Atlantic City was not because the Italian mob had put Black captains in the precincts to control the vote. Perhaps more important, she reminds us how such intermingling tied the two groups in the popular imagination. Additionally, she contextualizes the racial question in the 1950s, when producers wanted to make interracial movies but had to deal with the political and social hysteria propelled by Senator McCarthy, not exactly a supporter of racial integration. In this regard, listeners will find of special interest episode 4, which Longworth dedicates entirely to Davis, his financial debt with mobsters, his friendship with Sam Giancana, and his Broadway plays Mr. Wonderful and Anna Lucasta, the latter the Depression-era Polish play first produced by the all-Black cast of the American Negro Theatre. Martin too achieved artistic independence from his longtime partner Jerry. Rather than overtly focusing on the duo's relationship, however, the podcast's creator and narrator makes the point that Martin's 1950s movies questioned the materialism that had begun to take over American life while at the same time they epitomized post–World War II masculinity.Davis, on the other hand, was never able to achieve such a seemingly cold-hearted detachment and turn it to his advantage. Partly this was due to his color, which naturally was a deep factor in his own relationship with masculinity and show business. It was one thing for an Italian like Martin, or, for that matter, a white southerner like Elvis Presley, to assert masculinity on a stage, perhaps through artistic forms that were inspired or highly indebted to Black culture and even to use that masculinity to introduce Black actors and performers or bring some form of Black culture to white audiences. It was a whole different thing to have a Black man to do the same, let alone to cross the racial line with a white woman in the public sphere, as Davis did when the news came out that he was having a relationship with Kim Novak and, afterward, when he married Swedish actress May Britt; this was a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in thirty-one states. Asserting masculinity in order to navigate the white world (something perhaps best exemplified by the previously mentioned Rio Bravo along with the epitome of white Anglo-Saxon masculinity, John Wayne) was available to Martin but was not an option for Davis. Partly, it was Davis's lack of experience outside show business that impacted his social consciousness, in the sense that while he dealt with racism daily, he had literally grown up in the entertainment business and knew hardly anything else. Partly it was his character, his craving for being accepted by white people to the point that, according to Henry Belafonte, he “constantly demeaned himself.” In fact, he begrudgingly accepted the invitation to march at Selma. Yet, in his first biography, Yes, I Can, he did address race head-on and thereafter increasingly talked about and tried to act upon issues of race. But the podcast suggests that he lacked the ability to navigate politics or the detachment and acumen that Martin had. In the early 1970s, Davis naively aligned himself with Nixon. As a result, when he appeared at Reverend Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH, his fellow African Americans booed him. To his credit, he reminded them that no matter their politics, nobody could take away from him the fact that he was a Black person.In the end, Longworth tells us, the two functioned as halves of a whole. Martin knew this all too well. Perhaps that is why in May 1990 he was the first to go to Davis's home after the final show celebrating his old friend's life, which ended shortly thereafter when Davis surrendered to throat cancer. There, in the intimacy of a home, where Martin could be his true self, he let go of his masculinity, of his detachment, of his menefreghismo, of his cool. He hugged Davis and cried. Five years later, on Christmas Day, it was his time to surrender, this time to lung cancer. A few months after, The Sands, the Las Vegas building that immortalized many of these two artists’ performances, literally a concrete symbol of their achievements and failures as well as of the epoch and culture that they both helped shape, was demolished. It was replaced with The Venetian, the symbol of late capitalism and corporate America, where entertainment is no longer art and performers are no longer cool.