Despite the fairy-tale appearance of the romance, though, they had to endure one another’s considerable faults. Bacall got into the habit of checking up on him whenever he was with other women—taking a phone call from her while his latest conquest listened along in his hotel room, he made a big show of his impatience, answering, “Yes, Captain. Yes, General. Yes, Boss.” In exchange, she was subject to Frank’s moodiness. His swings between indulgent companionability and icy remove rattled her, especially, as she noted later, since she had previously “been married to a grown-up.”
But her will was no match for his; like many of Sinatra’s women, she was eager to do anything to please him. She even went so far as to give up her home on Maplewood Drive, in part because of the painful memories the place harbored for her, in part because, as she later told her son, “I don’t think Frank was comfortable in that house. The ghost of your father was always there and I knew that Frank would feel better if I moved.”
Her sacrifices and persistence paid off: In March 1958, after another of his sullen absences, he popped back onto the scene and proposed marriage. She accepted, agreeing to his desire to keep their intentions private for a while. Frank went off to a club date at the Fontainebleau; Bacall stayed in L.A. and kept denying rumors whenever reporters—even buddies like Joe Hyams and Richard Gehman—got snoopy. But she couldn’t keep from blabbing to gossipy little Swifty Lazar, who spilled the beans to Louella Parsons, who made national headlines with it, which drove Frank into a fit.
“Why did you do it?” Frank harangued Bacall from Miami. “I haven’t been able to leave my room for days—the press are everywhere. We’ll have to lay low for a while, not see each other for a while.”
Chastened, even in her innocence, Bacall did as she was told—and Frank never tried to contact her again. “He behaved like a complete shit,” she later said. “He was too cowardly to tell the truth—that it was just too much for him, that he found he couldn’t handle it.”
But there might have been a bigger truth: Maybe Frank had realized that he didn’t have to marry Bogie’s widow to become the actor’s true heir and King of the Rat Pack. Maybe he realized that he could simply up and start a brand-new Rat Pack of his own.
By at least one account, it was Dean’s idea: The story goes that he had just rescued his career with his eye-opening work on The Young Lions, and he was sharking for a new project. In the summer of ’58, he and his wife attended the premiere of Kings Go Forth, Frank’s latest picture, and he walked over to Frank like he was pissed about something.
“You bum!”
Frank played along: “What’ve I done now?”
“You’re hunting for a man for your next picture who smokes, drinks, and can talk real southern. You’re looking at him.”
“Well, whattaya know …”
Cute. And there might even be some truth to it, but the likely scenario is somewhat less colorful. For starters, if it had happened, it would’ve marked the first time in his life that Dean Martin went out of his way to further his career; indeed, one of the reasons for the dissolution of Martin and Lewis was that Jerry’s overweening ambition struck Dean as degrading. More than that, the story assumes that Frank, who was forever throwing his chums roles in his movies (he once slated his squeeze Gloria Vanderbilt for a role in the western Johnny Concho, an inspiration lost to cinematic history when their love affair hit the rocks), hadn’t already considered Dean for a role that he was practically born to play. In fact, it ignores altogether just how close Dean and Frank, a couple of olives off the same tree, had recently become.
For their first couple decades in the business, they hadn’t palled around much, even though they’d been crossing paths since the war. Dean’s big ticket to New York came when he followed Frank into the Riobamba nightclub; they shared a record label; they had appeared together on TV a few times; but they were no more a two-act than, say, Perry Como and Vic Damone.
Recently, though, that had begun to change. A couple of years earlier, Dean took in a Judy Garland show in Long Beach in Frank’s company (Sammy and Bogey were also there), and they all popped onstage with the star for an impromptu number. After that, Frank appeared on a couple of Dean’s NBC specials—on one, they sang a duet of “Jailhouse Rock”!—and Dean returned the favor when Frank began his catastrophic series on ABC.
Frank had grown to feel something fraternal for Dean. He would always be the first mate, a brother.
But it hadn’t always been that way.
“The dago’s lousy, but the little jew is great”: thus Frank on Martin and Lewis, circa 1948, when the new singing-comedy act was tearing the roof off Frank Costello’s Copacabana and quickly becoming the hottest thing in showbiz.
In a sense, it was an entirely apt critique. Martin and Lewis, one of the greatest two-man acts in history, was really Jerry Lewis’s vehicle. Dean, the tall, handsome, crooning straight man, was more or less along for the ride. And when the ride ended, when Martin and Lewis devolved into an ugly spitting contest and finally broke apart, “the little jew” went on to solo success, just as everyone predicted, while “the dago” initially floundered.
It wasn’t that Dean didn’t have the chops. He had a charming voice in the Crosby mood—a stylish singer, if never a real artist. He cut a great figure in a tux, golf clothes, even overalls: real movie star looks. And he was funny, with a gift for whimsical one-liners and a canny, low-key delivery that were completely wasted in the years he spent alongside the spotlight-hogging Jerry.
But he seemingly didn’t have the drive to go it alone. He was ten years older than Jerry and struggling under an absurd burden of debt when the two teamed up and launched their rocket to the moon. For all his gifts, he’d never, as a solo, gone anywhere useful. And for all the success that he eventually enjoyed, it seemed like the only reason he’d ever gotten anywhere at all in the world was that he’d been somehow blessed to thrive in it. He didn’t have to work, he didn’t have to sweat, he didn’t have to think; he just had to show up and get paid—his whole life long.
Consider: Dean never wanted to get his hands dirty, so he learned how to deal cards and how to sing, and he made a living at it; he was too sanguine to chase women, so they threw themselves at him; he didn’t have the fire in the belly to make himself a showbiz star, so he met a couple of wildly ambitious guys—Jerry and Frank—who dragged him along.
It was even luck that Dean was born in America—his father’s bad luck, that is, to have been born in Abruzzi, a wind-scored plain south of Rome, dotted with cave-riddled mountains. Abruzzi spit forth disconsolate young men and women and exiled them to the New World, where they choked slums and factories. Steubenville, Ohio, where Dean’s people turned up, was filled with steelworks that swallowed up Italian and Greek immigrants like so much coke.
After seeing the infernal wreckage of his older brothers, who’d emigrated before him, Gaetano Crocetti, Dean’s father, decided that selling his soul to a foundry wasn’t for him. He chose instead one of the few respectable blue-collar jobs open to a young Italian immigrant, apprenticing himself to a barber. With his name anglicized (he became Guy Crocetti, pronouncing his last name Crowsetti) and his future assured, he was able to woo and wed Angela Barra, an orphan girl from the neighborhood with a bit of barbed wire in her makeup. They were kids when they married, but by June 1917, just three years later, Guy had his own barbershop, the couple had a one-year-old boy, and Angela produced another son. Born prematurely, he wasn’t christened until the fall: Dino.
The Crocetti boys were raised among a healthy tribe of relatives and neighbors. They had a comfortable home, plush Christmases, plenty to eat; there were no riches, exactly, but nor were there rags. Guy was naturally easygoing—a good barber. He sat genially among the other men, sipping wine, eating tangerines and nuts,