ilovedinomartin: Missin' DMP & Keepin' the Dino-Ball Rollin'!

Hey there, pals.
I wanted to stop by & let all know that I have still not heard ANYTHIN' from our one & only DMP.
I'm very concerned...but stayin' Dino-positive, pallies...that he is OK & WILL be returnin' to us soon!
I'm gonna give somethin' a try here, my friends. I've found several unfinished posts of our fearless Dino-diggin' leader that I'm gonna get into shape & share them with youse. Mostly articles 'bout Dino's 99th birthday.
The one i'm goin' to attempt to post now...seems to have been for the day after & was completed by DMP!
I'm very excited to share this last blog with ALL his pals!
Hopes I can figure out how! Haha!!
Bare with me, my friends!
See youse Sunday.
This one's for you, pallie.

Dino represents the hipster who loved to party, drink, smoke and have a good time.

Hey pallies, likes there are so so many great great postin's in huge honor of our Dino's 99th anniversary of his descent to earth, likes we hardly know where to start in our Dino-postin', but today we are powerfully pumped to share a remarkably reverent reflection from the blog tagged "THE OTTO FILES." In checkin' back over previous posts, we have stopped by this pad a couple of times in 2015 for other Dino-remembrances that you can locate HERE and also HERE.

This "Otto" dude is truly a deep deep devotee of our most beloved Dino and his June 7, 2016 post tagged "DEAN MARTIN AT 99" in indeed incredibly more proof positive of how much he "gets Martin." His wonderfully wise words of intense insight into the life, times, and teachin's of our Dino are beau-ti-ful to behold and his 10---count -em----10 vid clips, most from the Dino-show give his readers much pleasure in Dino-viewin'.

We salute the pallie who swankly scribes for "THE OTTO FILES"....probably Otto, and salute him for his remarkable written word skills as well as his powerfully perfect perspective on our one and only Dino....sure to draw many many of his readership into a deeper devotion to our one and only Dino. Dino-awed, DMP

DEAN MARTIN AT 99 JUNE 7, 2016

Today would have been Dean Martin’s 99th birthday. Next year, at this time, we’ll be celebrating his centennial. It’s quite remarkable how popular Dean Martin remains in today’s culture, more than two decades after his passing.

Martin’s enduring legacy is both impressive and ironic. He endures in the culture as a symbol of the cool swinger. Dino represents the hipster who loved to party, drink, smoke and have a good time. In our more enlightened society the practice of drinking to excess, smoking with impunity and living a life of partying without limits or consequences is viewed through a clinical lens of disease or addiction. Dean and his Rat Pack contemporaries represent of simpler time of “ignorant bliss.” But here’s the kicker – Dean wasn’t nearly the raucous party animal he made out to be. Don’t get me wrong, he was no Perry Como but he wasn’t as wild as his pal Frank Sinatra either.

When Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis ended their partnership in 1956, the show biz world was stunned. Hollywood luminaries intervened to try to convince them to stay together. It is impossible for young people today to imagine just how big “Martin & Lewis” were in our culture. However, after their impending breakup was announced, those who had a soft spot for the handsome singer, who was increasingly getting edged out of the spotlight by his ego-crazed partner, were concerned for Dino’s future. It was generally believed that Jerry Lewis would go on to greater fame and fortune while his partner would fall flat on his face. Lewis had convinced their fans and friends what he himself had come to believe, that Jerry Lewis was the real talent in the duo.

Upon their breakup, Dean’s first solo motion picture was a piece salaciously entitled “Ten Thousand Bedrooms.” Unfortunately, the movie was not nearly as enticing as the title. It was a flop, only encouraging the belief of some in the business that Dean without Jerry was a wet firecracker. But Dino was no novice to show business. By the time of his split with Lewis, Dean Martin had been singing for his supper for nearly 20 years.

He hired a talented comedy writer named Ed Simmons to help him craft a nightclub act. Dean knew he needed “a hook.” Like so many in show biz, Dean loved the nightclub comic Joe E. Lewis. He thought that he could pull off a “drunk persona” like Joe E. had thrived on for decades. Simmons wrote him some material in that vein. Once out on stage, and with the security of the written material, Simmons said Dean seamlessly began to ad-lib his own ideas into the material he’d written. The act was a success and he would forever be thought of as “Drunky Dean.”

The irony of Dean’s success as the drunken, self-deprecating comic/singer is two pronged. First of all, while Dean was certainly a drinker in good standing, many times on stage he had nothing more lethal that apple juice in his glass. It had the same hue of Scotch and worked well to wet your whistle while singing. Years later when NBC signed Dean to an extremely lucrative contract, Dean quipped, “Do you think NBC would pay millions of dollars to a drunk?”

In the most successful years of his career, 1950s – 1970s, Dean kept a pretty routine schedule. Up at dawn, breakfast alone before the family woke up, out to the gold course for 9-27 holes of golf (depending on his work schedule) and then home for dinner with the family, perhaps watch a western on TV (Dean loved westerns) and in bed by 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. so he could wake up early the next morning and do it all over again. That’s not to say he never went out or went to parties. He did what he had to do but his wife Jeannie was far more interested in the social scene than Dean was.

Dean was essentially an insulated personality. He was not, by nature, a gregarious social butterfly. He abhorred small talk. He once told his children, “It’s not the chit I mind so much as it is the chat.” His daughter Deana fashioned a poignant portrait of her famous dad in her 2004 memoir, “Memories Are Made Of This.” In one passage, Deana writes, “He was surprisingly tactile. He touched people, hugged them, squeezed their shoulders, and allowed them to touch him in return. With his relaxed manner, he had the ability to set people immediately at ease. He was undoubtedly a complicated man, a Gemini with two distinct facets to his personality, and sometimes he would say or do hurtful things without realizing it. There must have been a mass of emotions going on beneath the surface that we didn’t know about, but Dad never revealed them. Instead, he made it his business to present the image of a sweet guy who was everybody’s pallie. Shirley MacLaine said of Dad, ‘he was nice to everyone, he just didn’t want nice to go on too long.'”

An interesting sidebar is the realization that Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra were such complete opposites. Sinatra was a guy who seemed to not only thrive within a group but one who seemed to need “the group.” Whether it was because he needed to be a leader or he just hated to be alone, he was always creating a party atmosphere around him. Dean just wanted to be left alone. And yet, I believe their affection for each other during the heyday of the 1960s was genuine.

The other irony I alluded to above was the longer that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were together, the more Jerry felt he needed to prove to everyone that he could do everything. His insecurity even drove him to try to prove to people that he, too, was a singer. He was not. It is painful and embarrassing today to watch any of the old clips with him trying to sing along with, or better than, his partner. Could he sing harmony like a great old vaudeville showman? Yes. Was his voice and style polished enough to record an album of vocal selections as he did in the late 1950s? No. But the cruel joke was that his partner was every bit as funny, if not funnier, than he was! Jerry Lewis was a clown and a great one. But Dean Martin was a comedian. In fact, as years went by, it seemed Dean enjoyed making people laugh more than he enjoyed singing.

In the end, Dean’s years without Jerry were more successful than Jerry’s years without Dean. Jerry had about a decade run of successful motion pictures without Dean but he failed more than once in creating a TV career and he certainly didn’t sustain any kind of recording career. Dean, on the other hand, found success in films, recordings, nightclubs and TV, especially TV. One of Jerry’s complaints about his partner was that he didn’t like to work too hard and that was a justifiable complaint. Dean Martin was not burdened by the same sense of ambition, drive and need to be in control that Jerry Lewis and Frank Sinatra both displayed. Therefore, when it was learned that Dean was going to do a weekly network variety show with minimal work and rehearsal, disaster was predicted. Nevertheless, Dean pulled it off brilliantly. The more goofs he made, the more people felt like Dean had been thrown in front of the cameras without having any idea of what was going on, the more the audience loved it.

Dean Martin’s legacy as “The King of Cool” continues to enchant new fans 20 years after his departure from the world stage. The King may be dead, but long may he reign!

I’ve posted this one before but it never gets old.