Dean and Me_ A Love Story - Jerry Lewis [5]
And I never said a word.
The truth is, funny sentences were always running through my brain: I thought funny. But I was ashamed of what would come out if I spoke—that nasal kid’s voice. So I was funny on stage, but I was only part funny: I was still looking for the missing piece.
Room 1412 at the Belmont Plaza Hotel was more like a cubicle than a room—there was a bed, a couch, a chest of drawers, and . . . that was it. You couldn’t go to the john without bruising your shin. Sonny and I were visiting with Dean, who was fresh from a not-so-hot date.
“She had a roommate,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Where the hell can a fella get laid in peace and quiet in this damn town?”
He poured himself a Scotch to calm down, then gave us a look. “You’re not gonna let me drink this all by myself, are you?”
Hot cocoa was about the strongest thing I’d had at that point in my life, but I gamely accepted a bathroom tumbler half-filled with what smelled like cleaning fluid. I even pretended to take a sip or two as Dean put some 78s on his record player and the three of us proceeded to get into an all-night bull session. To the sounds of Billie Holiday, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong, we sat and shot the breeze till all hours—or, I should say, one of us did. After Sonny nodded off, I just sat in awe as Dean held forth.
The time of night and a glass or two of Scotch had put him in a philosophical mood, and he proceeded to tell me the story of how Dino Crocetti had emerged from Steubenville, Ohio, and become Dean Martin. It all sounded like a fairy tale to me: the rough-and-tumble Ohio River town full of steel mills, speakeasies, and whorehouses. The close-knit Italian family, his father the barber giving shaves and haircuts all day at a quarter apiece while his mother made pots of spaghetti and meatballs for all the relatives. Dino dropping out of school (“That wasn’t for me,” he said) and going to work in a foundry, then quickly realizing he wasn’t cut out for factory work. He ran liquor for a bootlegger ; he fought as a professional boxer called Kid Crochet. He dealt blackjack and poker in the biggest of Steubenville’s many illegal casinos, the back of the Rex Cigar store. He quit boxing before that face got ruined. And he sang.
“I just had it in me,” Dean said simply. Wherever there was a chance to use his pipes—at a bar, a party, or just cruising down the street with his gang—he didn’t have to be persuaded. Before long, his reputation got around and a bandleader from Cleveland, named Sammy Watkins, hired him. And then an amazing thing happened: Frank Sinatra canceled a gig at the Riobamba nightclub in New York, and the Music Corporation of America, MCA, whose man in Cleveland liked Dean’s act, hired him to come east and fill in. He’d been Manhattan-based ever since.
He’d already drunk a fifth.
It sounded like a fairy tale, but then I wondered: What was he doing in this shoe box of a hotel room? Like me, Dean had made it to the big town but not the big time. From traveling the circuit, I was all too aware of how long the odds were against really making it. You had to really want it, for one thing. I wanted it so badly it affected my breathing. But I wasn’t so sure about this guy.
And as dazzled as I was by him, I could see there was still a lot of Steubenville in Dean. Those red-and-white patent leather shoes he was wearing, for example—pimp shoes! And from time to time, I noticed, his speech lapsed into deze-dem-and-dose accents—partly his Italian-immigrant heritage (he spoke no English till age five, he told me), with a touch of Southern from West Virginia, right across the river from Steubenville. I noticed those big hands of his again, hands that had carried steel, fought in a ring, dealt cards. Life was tough, and this guy, great-looking as he was, knew it.
“They call me the Boy with the Tall, Dark, and Handsome Voice,” he said with a smile that was half proud,