Martin was content to let his fame fade out. Nick Tosches, the author of the brilliantly perceptive 1992 biography “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams,” believed it was one of his most honorable traits. “Dean beat out death,” Tosches said in 1992. “He’s one of the few people that stopped before death stopped him.”
It’s no accident that Dean was the straight man in one of this century’s most wildly popular comedy teams. Back in the days of Martin and Lewis, from 1946 to 1956, it was Jerry who jumped around and screamed and bawled and made ridiculous faces; Dean just stood there, looking bemused. Even after he went solo, he never tried to make the world think he was doing more than he was doing. He didn’t steal scenes, even though he lent a solid, secure presence to films ranging from Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” to the Rat Pack’s “Ocean’s 11.” He didn’t go in much for close-ups. He called himself a crooner, even though that label demoted him a notch or two below singer in terms of talent and expertise. He styled himself as a boozer, with an arsenal of punch lines like, “I drink moderately. In fact I’ve got a case of moderately at the house.” All these things make Dean easier to take lightly. He was just a crooner, just a straight man. He was just an Italian-American kid from Steubenville, Ohio, who dumped his real name, Dino Paul Crocetti. He was just a TV and movie star, and one who played a drunk at that.
But just because Martin never begged for recognition doesn’t mean he didn’t deserve it. Martin should have known how much we love him. He should have known that even today we fall down laughing at some of those Martin and Lewis kinescope skits (now on video), like the one where they’re broke and hungry so they audition for a talent agency as a ventriloquist act, with Jerry playing the dummy and Dean yanking him around like a saw-dust-stuffed doll. He should know that we love it in “Rio Bravo” when he smacks John Wayne, because who else in America had the huevos to do that? We love how irreverently he behaved at the Rat Pack tour press conference. “We’re happy to be doing this thing,” he offered. “What the hell.” We love that in 1964, he got so sick of hearing his 12-year-old kid talk about the Beatles that he said, “I’m gonna knock your little pallies off the charts.” And he did, with his No. 1 hit “Everybody Loves Somebody.”
Most of all, we love the way he sang. We love his velvety vibrato, his dapper phrasings, his tuxedoed finesse. We love the dark shadow of sensuality that flitted through his voice, lending a hint of menace to what other crooners might have tossed off as sweet pop nothings. Dean never underestimated himself when he sang. He knew exactly what to do in order to seduce us and shay us. “Return to me,” he sang in a 1958 hit. “Oh my dear, I’m so lonely.” Those simple words weren’t enough, so in the last verse he translated them into Italian. Ritorna a me / Cara mia, ti amo. It’s a call we couldn’t refuse.
