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Dino From Steubenville: How Dean Martin Made Being Italian Look Effortless
The barber’s son from an Ohio steel town boxed as “Kid Crochet,” dealt cards in a back-room casino and sang as “Dino Martini” before becoming the coolest man in America. Unlike Sinatra, he never stopped singing in Italian. In the summer of 1964, the Beatles owned America. “A Hard Day’s Night” sat at the top of the charts, and nothing seemed able to move it. Then a 47-year-old crooner from Steubenville, Ohio, did. Dean Martin’s “Everybody Loves Somebody” knocked the Beatles out of the No. 1 spot, a small, sweet revenge for every grown-up who wasn’t ready to give pop music to the kids just yet. It was a typical Dean Martin move: unhurried, a little amused, and impossible to argue with. For decades he made everything look easy, from the songs to the jokes to the drink in his hand. But the ease was hard-won, and it started with a barber’s son from a mill town. Dino Crocetti He was born Dino Paul Crocetti on June 7, 1917, in Steubenville, a steel town on the Ohio River. His father, Gaetano Crocetti, was a barber from Montesilvano, a town on the Adriatic coast in the province of Pescara, in Abruzzo. His mother, Angela Barra, was born in Ohio to a family with roots near Bergamo, in northern Italy. Dino grew up in a town full of immigrant mill workers. He didn’t follow a straight path. At 15 he boxed as a welterweight under the name “Kid Crochet,” and later joked that he “won all but 11” of his 12 fights. He worked as a stock boy in a tobacco shop that hid an illegal casino in the back, and soon he was working the tables as a croupier. All the while, he was singing with local bands. His first stage name was “Dino Martini,” a nod to the Italian opera tenor Nino Martini. In late 1940, Cleveland bandleader Sammy Watkins suggested something simpler: Dean Martin. Martin and Lewis In 1944, at a hotel in New York, Martin met a manic young comic named Jerry Lewis. On July 24, 1946, they debuted as a team at Atlantic City’s 500 Club. The pairing, Martin the smooth straight man and Lewis the human cartoon, became one of the biggest acts in show business, with hit movies, a radio show and early television. The partnership ended in 1956, 10 years to the day after it began. Many people assumed Martin would fade without Lewis. Instead, he got bigger. He became a serious film actor in movies like “Rio Bravo,” a pillar of the Rat Pack alongside Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., and the host of “The Dean Martin Show,” which ran on NBC from 1965 to 1974. “Martin made being Italian American look like the most natural, most enviable thing in the world.” That’s amore What set Martin apart from many of his peers was how openly he wore his heritage. While Sinatra mostly scrubbed the old country out of his singing, Martin leaned in. “That’s Amore” became one of the most famous songs of the 1950s, and his recording of “Volare” reached No. 15 in the United States and No. 2 in Britain. Italian phrases slipped into his performances, and on his variety show he was known to toss in a few off-color Italian jokes that only some of the audience understood. Italian-speaking viewers did not always find them as funny as he did. In a mid-century America where Italian Americans were often typecast as gangsters or laborers, Martin offered another image entirely: relaxed, funny, elegant and in on the joke. He made being Italian American look like the most natural, most enviable thing in the world. The quiet sadness Behind the easy grin there was real grief. On March 21, 1987, his son Dean Paul Martin, a pilot with the California Air National Guard, was killed when his F-4 Phantom jet crashed. The loss was devastating for the family. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1993 and declined surgery. He died at his Beverly Hills home on Dec. 25, 1995, at 78. Still swinging Martin’s voice never really went away. His Christmas records return every December, “That’s Amore” is still the soundtrack to a thousand pizzerias, and a whole generation discovered him through movies and TV that borrowed his cool. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009, and he has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for film, recording and television. His hometowns remember him, too. Steubenville renamed a stretch of Ohio Route 7 Dean Martin Boulevard and painted his face on a downtown mural. And in Montesilvano, the Abruzzo town his father left behind, the convention center bears his name: the Pala Dean Martin. Not bad for a barber’s kid who once sang as Dino Martini.