It’s often said the best way to get someone’s attention is to play hard to get. Act like you don’t care. Dean Martin understood. With a casualness bordering on indifference, Martin seemed to be using that very strategy.
But was it a sham or was he being genuine? Only Dino knew. Whatever the truth, the coolest hipster of the booze generation endeared himself to weekly TV audiences for nearly a decade.
The Dean Martin Show Debuted in 1965
On Sept. 16, 1965, Dean Martin ambled onstage and opened the debuting variety series with his hit from the year before, Everybody Loves Somebody. But Martin stopped singing after a few bars, explaining in that trademark Southern Ohio drawl, “No point in singing the whole song; you might not buy the record.”
Audiences loved it.
As biographer Nick Tosches observed, “His uncaring manner and good-natured boorishness endeared him to the millions who were sick of sincerity, relevance and pseudo-sophistication. Dean was a man whose success and fortune no man begrudged him. He seemed somehow kindred, one of them but blessed beyond them by the Fates.” (Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams,” by Nick Tosches, Delta Books, New York, 1992, p. 373)
The NBC series, which cemented the entertainer’s easygoing public image, is viewable again in a new trio of DVD sets released Tues, May 24, 2011 from NBC Universal Consumer Products and TIME-LIFE. The new releases follow a lengthy legal tug-of-copyright-war between NBCUniversal, infomercial king Guthy-Renker and the show’s original producer-director, Greg Garrison, who died in 2005.
Bob Hope, John Wayne, Other Iconic Figures Featured in New DVD Releases
The three new The Best of the Dean Martin Variety Show releases include, respectively, a single-DVD release, a double-disc set and a deluxe six-disc package. Together, they present a window to a very different TV era.
Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, variety was still a vibrant TV genre dominated by Carol Burnett and Martin. Dino’s show allowed the star an easy paycheck and the chance to hang with those he idolized growing up as a barber’s son in Steubenville, Ohio. They included Bob Hope, John Wayne (Martin fanatically loved westerns) Orson Welles, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum, Duke Ellington, George Burns, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee and the Andrews Sisters.
The “younger,” theoretically “hipper” generation was meant to be represented by Woody Allen (then segueing from standup and TV work to filmmaker), Michael Landon, Jonathan Winters, Rodney Dangerfield, Glen Campbell, Engelbert Humperdinck and Petula Clark, among many others.
Youth Counterculture Never Reflected on The Dean Martin Show
Of course, the show never really attempted to reflect the significant changes then reshaping America. The counterculture never made it onto the Martin show; Dino hosting Bob Dylan or the Byrds might have made for surreal television, but such bookings were unthinkable at the time.
For 264 episodes through Apr. 5, 1974, Martin played to the hilt his affable, devil-may-care drunk and unapologetic womanizer (“I think I’m gonna go to the couch…”). His on-camera spontaneity was genuine; the show was built around Martin’s demand he never rehearse and that he simply show up on tape day to wing it.
Remarkably, that meant the star was never involved in run-throughs with guest stars or staff. Dean's fractured delivery reflected the fact he was reading cue cards for the first time.
"Drunk" Dino Was Actually Sipping Apple Juice
The architect of this seat-of-the-pants television was producer-director Greg Garrison, who accepted Martin’s disinterest in preparation. Garrison had been with NBC since 1951, working on such TV classics on Your Show of Shows and The Milton Berle Show. His rapport with Martin, wrote biographer Tosches, “was tremendous, and Garrison had to admit that Dean’s way of doing the show, which could have been pulled off by no one else, somehow worked.” (Dino, p. 372)
And while a wet bar was part of the set, no one watching realized that Martin, playing the amiable “drunk,” actually was drinking apple juice on camera. But the real Dean Martin – the one who remained emotionally hidden from the world (“No one gets to know me” he once famously told a television producer) – kept his own counsel for a lifetime.
Instead, Dino’s lackadaisical public persona was built on booze generation gags, warbled ballads and hilariously flubbed comedy sketches. And that was the key to Dean Martin’s long NBC run: He didn’t seem to care about any of it.
Playing hard to get made Martin easy to take – and that much more intriguing as an icon of cool.
Each DVD in the new releases runs more than two hours. There are complete (although edited) episodes, musical performances, sketches and new, nostalgic interviews with Martin Show guest stars Florence Henderson, Jonathan Winters, Phyllis Diller and Dean’s daughter, Gail Martin Downey.
Barry M. Grey - Barry M. Grey is a non-fiction TV writer-producer in Los Angeles whose love of classic film borders on the dangerously obsessive.
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