Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [101]
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