Dean Martin at 105

Supposedly it was Elvis Presley who first anointed Dean Martin with the sobriquet “King of Cool.” The way Martin’s daughter, Deana, tells the story, she went to visit her father on the Paramount Pictures lot circa 1960 when they met Presley, who let her know in no uncertain terms, “I may be the king of rock and roll, but your daddy is the King of Cool.” Hence the title of a 2021 documentary, “Dean Martin, King of Cool.” “Cool” is heard here even more times than the F-word in a Martin Scorsese gangster movie. Apparently everyone thinks Dino was cool, including contemporary musicians who appear in the feature, like Josh Homme and RZA; I’ve never heard of them, but I’ll take director Tom Donahue’s word that they’re cool enough to tell us that Dean Martin was cool. (I’m in the movie, too, wearing a bright red blazer and bow-tie deliberately chosen as the antithesis of cool.) The picture starts out very surface-y, which is probably how its subject would have wanted it, but it achieves greater depth as it progresses. Then, near the end of its 110 minutes, it eventually gets beneath the surface coolness.In the more than 25 years since his death, any discussion of Dean Martin has been greatly informed by Nick Tosches’s 1992 biography, “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams.” It’s a well-researched, thoroughly considered account that is so far the only serious full-length study of Dino Crocetti, born in Steubenville, Ohio, in June 1917. Tosches makes his point on every page that Dean Martin just didn’t care about anything — not music, not movies, not his own performances nor anybody else’s — except his golf game and occasionally his family. This explains why he and his long term “pally” and frequent performing partner, Frank Sinatra, were so drawn to each other. It was the attraction of opposites: Sinatra, as we know, cared deeply about everything. Tosches was the first to apply the term menefreghista to Martin, which he translates from the Italian as, basically, “he who does not give a darn.” It’s a word that’s heard in the Martin canon almost as much as “cool” and much quoted in the documentary.Yet I wonder. Martin’s life is framed by his collaborations, including 10 years with Jerry Lewis that were eventually followed by five more with what we now call The Rat Pack. However, his greatest and most rewarding work was, no secret, the nine years he spent at the center of what might be the greatest variety show in the history of TV. More than movies or recording, television was Martin’s natural medium, and he was incredibly funny, tuneful, charming, and, more than is generally admitted, moving and poignant every single week for roughly 250 episodes. This is something that even God-like colossi such as Sinatra and Judy Garland were ever able to do, though they both made valiant efforts.In both his singing and his comedy, Martin was a master of spontaneity — more so than Lewis or Sinatra. He possessed a great jazz musician’s gift for improvisation and for creating something surprising, original, and meaningful in the moment. He didn’t share Sinatra’s reverence for what we’ve since defined as The Great American Songbook; in fact, he sounded just as good at Country & Western hits and sunshine pop singles as he did on show tunes. He had an impressive capacity to take any song at face value and elevate it into something special. If anyone asked, he usually answered that his biggest influence was Bing Crosby — as he told the veteran vocalist on TV in 1959, “all the young Italians try to sing like you.” He told his producer, Greg Garrison, that his favorite singer was Harry Mills of the Mills Brothers, and every time that trio appeared on his NBC series it was a memorable occasion. However, both historian and show-biz rabbi Bruce Charet and I independently arrived at the conclusion that Dean Martin was Al Jolson’s greatest male heir — and the Jolson influence is inescapable in virtually all of the uptempo songs that he used to begin “The Dean Martin Show” for its nine seasons.Martin sang several times each episode in duets and medleys with his guests, but usually only gave himself two solos each week. The first was the Jolson-style uptempo at the beginning, right after he slid down the firepole or vaulted down the stairs at stage left. The other solo was embedded in what we call the “music room” sequences, which have become my all-time favorite moments in the Martin ouevre. They all follow the same format: Dean bounces into the music room set and lands solidly on top of the grand piano being played by his accompanist of many years, Ken Lane. (As a composer, Lane wrote Martin’s signature song, “Everybody Loves Somebody.”) Martin then makes a few jokes at Lane’s expense, such as, “He’s the only guy who brought a camera into a topless bar and took a picture of the chef.” These are followed by two or three quick parodies of standard songs that usually interject an alcoholic or sexual reference into familiar lyrics, a comic trope invented by entertainer Joe E. Lewis, the spiritual father of the Rat Pack. Next, Martin proceeds to the closet door adjacent to the book shelf, and some surprise guest or gag emerges. This seems to be sincere: Martin didn’t know if he would find Lucille Ball, Leo Durocher, or Ronald Reagan when he opened the door.Then, when Dean makes his way to the couch, that’s when the real magic starts to happen. After roughly four minutes of charmingly dumb jokes, he has opened us up emotionally with laughter. Now he lets us have it between the eyes and right in the heart. Here’s where he sings his only “serious” love song of the night; for maybe 90 to 120 seconds, he stops kidding around and really sings the song, anything from the Crosby anthem “Pennies From Heaven” to Cole Porter’s “True Love” to a classic country song like “Born to Lose.” In less than a heartbeat, he’s taken us from the silliest moment in the program to the most profoundly moving. Martin’s “couch songs” are the singer’s apogee, his zenith, those performances that establish him as an interpreter to be compared with Jolson, Crosby, and Sinatra, not to mention Hank Williams and George Jones. He sings these songs slowly and deliberately, as if he means every word. If you ever want to hear a heartbreak in musical form, just listen to his version of Kris Kristofferson’s “For The Good Times,” sung on the couch in a 1971 episode. This is hardly the performance of an artist who does not give a whatever. It wasn’t so much that Dean Martin was cool all the time, whatever that may mean, but that he knew when to put his real soul into a song and when just to have fun with it. The documentary “King of Cool” eventually and indirectly comes to this point as well. Most of the final act is wisely given to Deana Martin, who shares with us the unflinching and unsparing details of the final years of her father’s life. By the last few minutes, we’re all in tears. Far from being the whole story, the coolness was barely the beginning, and maybe Dino Crocetti played the ultimate joke by getting us to think that’s all there was.

Dean Martin at 105

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