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was fake; the vodka bottles were filled with water and the whiskey bottles with apple juice. The real stuff came out only after the show, and although Frank joked, “I spill more than Dean drinks,” I sometimes saw the two of them in a stupor. Dean was such a sweet guy and so handsome. He worked all the time so he wasn’t the greatest father, but then I think Frank wasn’t either, although both would have killed for their kids. They carried a lot of Catholic guilt about being absent parents, especially Dean, who had so many kids to feel guilty about. One night he invited Frank home to dinner after a show, but when they got there his wife, Jeanne, was sitting at the table with four children from Dean’s first marriage and three from his second, so every chair was taken. Dean turned to Frank and said, “Well, I guess I fucked myself out of a seat.”

As Dean got older and wasn’t feeling well much of the time, he began to drink more, sitting home alone watching Jeopardy! and old Westerns on TV. He had a bad back from years of playing golf and terrible problems with his teeth from all the sugar he consumed—which was a lot. To ease both conditions, he began to rely on pain pills coupled with booze, and the combination took its toll. Around that time, he also started to get sensitive about his age. I was sitting next to Perry Como one night at a birthday dinner for Dean in Washington, D.C., when Perry asked the birthday boy how old he was. Dean said a number and Perry looked surprised. Leaning over, he said to me in a stage whisper, “I can remember when we were all the same age.”

Then when Dean’s son Dino was killed, in March 1987, he went into a terminal decline. Dino, a thirty-five-year-old military pilot, died when his Phantom fighter jet crashed into Mount San Gorgonio during a blizzard. Frank had mentored a teenage Dino during a successful spell as a pop musician, and we’d both been guests at his wedding to the ice skater Dorothy Hamill, so it felt personal to us too. Just as when Dolly had disappeared in the same area, there were several days when no one knew what had happened and no wreckage could be found. Then came the news—the shocking realization that a loved one had died, and in a horrible way. Dean sank into the deepest despair. At the age of seventy, he closed in on himself; some would say he never recovered. Frank called Dean frequently to ask if there was anything he could do, but he couldn’t reach his friend.

With Sammy on the rails because of spiraling debts, Frank finally decided to do something that could help his two pals and proposed a reunion of the three of them doing what they did best. Frank hoped that the twenty-nine-date Together Again Tour, launched at Chasen’s restaurant in December of that year, would pay off Sammy’s crippling tax bills, distract Dean from his grief, and give Frank a chance to have some fun again with the two men he considered brothers. From the start, though, there were problems. Interrupting Frank at the press announcement, Dean asked, “Why don’t we find a good bar instead?”

After lackluster gigs in Oakland, Vancouver, and Seattle, Frank accused Dean of not “stepping up.” It was the only time I ever saw Frank being unkind to his “pallie,” although I think it was tough love. What he was really upset about was that it was no longer like the good old days. By the time they got to Chicago, Frank told Dean, “You’re just not holding up your part of the show, Dag!” He then complained to Dean’s manager, Mort Viner.

“Screw this!” Dean said, and went to his room. Late that night he called Kirk Kerkorian and asked him to send a plane. Then he packed up and walked off the tour. We woke in the morning to find him gone. Claiming a flare-up from an established kidney problem, he flew home and admitted himself to a hospital. Before too long, though, Dean went back to what he knew and liked—performing solo in Vegas, where he told his audience, “Frank sent me a kidney. I don’t know whose it was.”

Frank was deeply disappointed in Dean but determined that the show should go on. He sat down with Sammy