Dean Martin

Dean Martin was born Dino Paul Crocetti on June 7, 1917, in Steubenville, Ohio, a steel and mill town on the Ohio River. His father, Gaetano Crocetti, was a barber who had emigrated from the Abruzzo region of Italy, and Italian was the language of the household. The boy spoke little English before starting school, an experience that left him sensitive about his accent for years afterward ^[1][2].

School held limited appeal. He left Steubenville High School in the tenth grade and took whatever work the town offered: bootleg liquor deliveries, a spell in a steel mill, and shifts dealing blackjack in the illegal gambling rooms that flourished in Steubenville during the 1930s. For a time he boxed as a welterweight under the name Kid Crochet, earning small purses and a permanently altered nose ^[2].

Singing paid better and hurt less. He began performing with local dance bands, at first billed as Dino Martini, a nod to the popular tenor Nino Martini. By the early 1940s, working clubs in Ohio and the East, he had smoothed the name into Dean Martin and was developing the easy, conversational vocal style, influenced by Bing Crosby, that would carry the rest of his career ^[1][3].

Anyone asking who was Dean Martin before 1946 would have found a competent but unremarkable club singer. That changed in July of that year at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where Martin and a young comic named Jerry Lewis, who had appeared on some of the same bills, began performing together. Their act threw out the script: Lewis heckled, mugged and wrecked the room while Martin sang, played the exasperated straight man and traded ad-libs. Audiences responded immediately ^[3][4].

Within two years Martin and Lewis were the highest-paid act in American nightclubs, and Hollywood followed. Producer Hal Wallis signed them at Paramount, and their first film, My Friend Irma, appeared in 1949. Sixteen movies together followed, among them At War with the Army, The Caddy (which introduced the song That's Amore) and Artists and Models, along with radio work and frequent television appearances on The Colgate Comedy Hour ^[4][5].

The partnership made both men rich and famous, but it also confined Martin to the role of romantic crooner while critics credited Lewis with the comedy. Friction grew through the mid-1950s, and the two dissolved the act in July 1956, ten years almost to the day after their Atlantic City debut. They barely spoke for the next twenty years, until Frank Sinatra engineered a surprise on-air reunion during Lewis's 1976 muscular dystrophy telethon ^[3][4].

Many in the industry expected Martin to fade once the team split. Instead he rebuilt himself with deliberate care. He had already scored solo record hits, including Memories Are Made of This, which reached number one on the American charts in 1956. On screen, he took a decisive gamble by accepting a modest salary to play a dramatic role in The Young Lions (1958) alongside Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, proving he could act without a partner ^[1][5].

Strong performances followed in Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958) with Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine, and in Howard Hawks's western Rio Bravo (1959), where his portrayal of Dude, an alcoholic deputy trying to recover his self-respect, drew some of the best reviews of his career. Through the 1960s he alternated dramas, westerns and comedies, produced films through his own Claude Productions, and starred as the tongue-in-cheek secret agent Matt Helm in a profitable four-film series beginning with The Silencers in 1966 ^[1][5].

His recording career kept pace. After moving to Sinatra's Reprise label, Martin recorded Everybody Loves Somebody in 1964. The single climbed to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in August of that year, displacing the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night at the height of the British Invasion, a Dean Martin fact he relished for the rest of his life. The song became his signature and the theme of his television show ^[2][6].

By 1960 Martin belonged to the loose circle of performers around Frank Sinatra that the press called the Rat Pack, with Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop. Their overlapping engagements at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, filled with songs, insults and apparent improvisation, became the defining nightclub attraction of the era, and the group filmed Ocean's 11 in the city in 1960, followed by Sergeants 3 and Robin and the 7 Hoods ^[2][6].

Television brought Martin his widest audience. The Dean Martin Show premiered on NBC in September 1965 and ran until 1974. Martin famously negotiated a contract that required his presence only on taping day, skipping rehearsals entirely; the resulting looseness, with flubbed cues left in and the host wandering amiably through sketches, became the program's charm. He performed beside an ever-present bar cart, cultivating a tipsy persona that, by most accounts of colleagues, was largely an act built around glasses of apple juice ^[4][6].

When the weekly series ended, the format shifted into The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, a run of specials broadcast from 1974 to 1984 in which comedians and public figures traded scripted insults over a dais. The roasts kept Martin on national television into his sixties and drew consistently large audiences ^[6].

Martin married three times. His first marriage, to Elizabeth Anne McDonald in 1941, produced four children and ended in divorce in 1949. That same year he married Jeanne Biegger, a former Orange Bowl queen from Florida; they had three children and remained married until 1973, staying close even after the divorce. A third marriage, to Catherine Hawn in 1973, lasted three years ^[2][7].

Away from the stage he guarded his privacy and his routines. Golf was his consuming pastime, and friends described a man far more solitary than his convivial image suggested, one who preferred an early dinner and a western on television to the parties associated with his name. Biographer Nick Tosches portrayed him as fundamentally detached, a performer who gave audiences everything on stage and kept the rest to himself ^[2].

The hardest blow of his later life came on March 21, 1987, when his son Dean Paul Martin, an actor and captain in the California Air National Guard, was killed when his F-4 Phantom jet crashed into Mount San Gorgonio in California during a training flight. Friends and family said Martin never fully recovered from the loss, and his public appearances grew rare afterward ^[2][7].

Martin worked steadily through the 1970s and early 1980s, headlining in Las Vegas, appearing in films such as Airport (1970) and The Cannonball Run (1981), and recording occasionally. In 1988 he joined Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. for a heavily publicized Together Again reunion tour, but he withdrew after a handful of dates, reportedly weary of touring and still grieving his son ^[2][7].

His health declined in the early 1990s. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in September 1993 after decades of heavy smoking and declined surgery. Martin died of acute respiratory failure at his Beverly Hills home early on Christmas morning, December 25, 1995, at the age of 78. The lights along the Las Vegas Strip were dimmed in his honor, a gesture the city reserves for its most significant performers ^[7].

Any full Dean Martin biography has to account for an unusual breadth of achievement: a chart-topping recording artist, a box-office film star in comedy, drama and westerns, half of the most successful comedy team of its time, and the host of one of television's longest-running variety shows. Few American entertainers succeeded at that level in so many forms. Among Dean Martin achievements, admirers usually point first to Rio Bravo, the 1964 triumph of Everybody Loves Somebody, and the nine-season NBC series ^[1][5].

His singing has proved remarkably durable. Recordings such as That's Amore, Sway, Ain't That a Kick in the Head and his version of the winter standard Let It Snow remain fixtures of film soundtracks, advertising and holiday playlists decades after his death, introducing his voice to listeners born long after his final performances ^[1][6].

Steubenville, Ohio, remembers its most famous son with an annual Dean Martin Festival held each June around his birthday, and his hometown has marked his legacy with signage and murals. Critics continue to debate how much craft lay beneath the apparent effortlessness, which was, in a sense, his point: Martin worked hard to make everything look easy, and the ease is what endures ^[2][7].