Dean Martin: Matt Helm, or the Real Manchurian Candidate?
Yes, as always, we ask the important questions ’round here.
Dean Martin has appeared twice in recent weeks on James Lileks’ Bleat, and both occurrences represent the dueling nadirs of postwar pop culture. Back in late November, Lileks featured stills from Dean Martin’s craptacular Celebrity Roasts from the mid-1970s. As I wrote back in my link, this was the last redoubt of my parents’ idols, after the New Left conquered Hollywood at the end of the previous decade.
But the handwriting was already on the wall, even before the left had won the war.
This week, Lileks featured stills from Deano’s 1968 hour-long Christmas “Special,” and on the previous day, wrote a great set-up to how the swank postwar Rat Pack era had sunk to such a cavernous depth:
It’s quite the artifact – an intersection of the waning culture and the new Hip, Vibrant, With-It culture that was seeping into everything. It’s mesmerizing and horrible. 1968 may have been the worst year between WW2 and 2001. Judging from this short 48-minute account of attitudes, styles, musical selections, design, clothing, and general tone, you might think that the culture was utterly exhausted, so incapable of doing anything but beaming treacle into the slack faces of middle-aged men and women pasted to their La-Z-Boys, huddling indoor against the winter wind and the shrieks of the dying society, that there was no way back.
We survived. Things got better.
Well, at least for a time. (True story: I read Lileks’ post featuring Deano’s Christmas Special on my Android tablet on the treadmill at the gym while listening to Peter Gabriel’s Security album on headphones. I almost fell off the machine the moment I was struck by the cognitive dissonance of those two never-the-Fairlight-shall-meet cultures colliding inside my cranium.)
Sociologists are still sifting through the evidence of how the collapse of postwar pop culture occurred after the death of JFK, but here’s one possible timeline that explains Dean’s central role. In 1964, Dean presented the nascent Rolling Stones to an American culture that was still digesting what it thought about the well-scrubbed, suit and tie wearing Beatles. The Stones, spurred on by manager Andrew Loog Oldham, were at the height of their anti-Beatle phase, inspiring such lines as ”Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?” and “The Beatles just wanted to hold your hand — the Rolling Stones wanted to rape and pillage your town.”
But the music industry quickly went all-in supporting the Beatles, Stones and similar groups. Shortly after the Beatles’ American debut, as Mark Steyn has written, Dean’s contemporary Nat “King” Cole saw the handwriting on the wall — or more precisely heard it; not through the grapevine, but through his telephone receiver. He “called up his record company, whose coffers he had enriched for many years, and hung up in disgust when the receptionist answered: ‘Capitol Records, home of the Beatles.’”
Clearly, Martin saw the future as well — and was not happy:
The haunting fear of what was to come lies all over Dean’s 1968 Christmas Special. The fulcrum that ties that show with his mid-seventies Roasts was 1970′s Airport, in which Deano played the pilot of the film’s Boeing 707, which was nearly blown out of the air by an angry bomber. Which means that Dean also inspired the seventies’ run of disaster films, featuring Earthquakes, Towering Infernos, sinking Poseidons, and an omnipresent Shelly Winters. These films would be fueled by (and would add fire to) the notion that America was in serious decline during that awful decade of Vietnam, Watergate, the Arab Oil Embargo, Iranian Hostage Crisis and polyester.
All of which forces us to reach our conclusion about Martin, and contemplating it is not an easy statement to make about a beloved cultural icon. But considering the amount of damage the man unwittingly inflicted upon the culture, isn’t obvious that the real Manchurian Candidate wasn’t Laurence Harvey, but the enemy agent who spent years infiltrating the Rat Pack, and eventually passing himself off as Sinatra’s closet friend, before wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting nation?
Too much, you might ask? Well, consider this: I haven’t even mentioned Jerry Lewis until now.
Another lesson that the wisdom of contemporary experts is 99% useless:
When they split, the consensus was that Dean Martin would fade away while Lewis, obviously the showy “talented” one, would prosper.
In fact, the French to the contrary, Lewis made a bunch of movies of Elvis-level awfulness; he only great film, The Nutty Professor, acknowledges the loss of Martin by bringing him back in the form of the Professor’s alternative lounge lizard persona.)
Dean Martin garnered good reviews for his film work, on the other hand, and the public loved him in the efforts above, like the roasts. Looking back, those roasts are shamelessly politically incorrect by our standards; modern day “transgressive” comedians should be humbled by the sight of old men with combovers in cheap tuxedos being more daring than they are today.
Lewis’ transparent attempts to sanctify himself on the backs of crippled children hasn’t endeared him to everyone.
People may not listen to Dean’s music anymore except ironically in a Martin Scorcese soundtrack kind of way. But they still think of him far more positively than they do Martin.
It turns out that the much derided talent agent who rejected their double act was onto something when he said, “I like the wop, but who’s the monkey?”
Anyhow, let’s hope that biopic with Tom Hanks playing Dino has finally been shelved.
The irony of course is that even before they appeared with Dean, the Stones were perfectly willing to be co-opted by the prevailing culture for the right price. It’s just they when it came to the American market especially, it was more lucrative to pretend in the wake of JFK’s assassination that you were rebelling against the system. With the glut of Boomers moving into the spending years, there arose an entire marketing strategy that was pinned on telling the youth culture of the day how special it was, as much as the “Everybody gets a trophy” self-esteem efforts of today.
Hard to resist that sort of cultural tidal wave (let alone the political aspects of both the far left and the Kennedy clan with their media backers trying to co-opt the movement in the 1965-69 period for their own purposes), and if you were not of that demo, and were trying to remain relevant, the results of trying to mix the two were cringe-worthy 99 percent of the time (for another take on how the formerly hip/cutting edge types of the 50s humiliated themselves by 1968, find a copy of Otto Preminger’s “Skidoo”. Otto may have scandalized Boston with his storyline in “The Moon Is Blue” almost two decades earlier, but he and his cast would have been far better off if this movie was banned not just in Boston, but everywhere.
In 1962, the Rat Pack regarded themselves as ultra-hip, cool, happening, ring-a-ding-ding kinda cats.
That’s why they were so flummoxed by the British Invasion. In just two years, Dino, Frank and Friends went from cool guys to embarrassing old farts! They didn’t know what hit them! At first, they tried to sneer at rock and roll, which just made them look silly. Later, they tried to embrace the fashions and mannerisms of the rockers they’d been sneering at (remember Sammy Davis Jr. in his Nehru jackets?), which only made them look sillier.
What are you saying? That The Beatles and Rolling Stones aren’t good? Of course, they are.
Dean and Frankie didn’t like them because they were brought up to like something different. That’s normal.
And although rock bands took over popular culture, Dean and Frank weren’t forgotten. Dean still had a very successful show and Frank was back on top by the 80s with his never-ending retirement tours. Springsteen sang Angel Eyes for him on a TV salute.
So, I’m not sure what you’re saying. Or, really, what you’re saying is wrong.
Ed,
There is a full espoide of the Hollywood Palace with Don Adams as a guest host which he does a quick interview with Janis Joplin after her set. Talk about when two worlds collide. It seems that Don Adams is trying to grasp or wrap his head around what Janis Joplin was interjecting into the culture. Agent 87 was a bumbling fool in a super agent TV parody but he served in WW II and represented the old guard culture with Dean Martin, Bob Newhart, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and John Wayne. They would not go gentle into that good night. Even though they are gone, their work still remains popular and emulated by others.
Agent 86 not 87, oops.
This Donald Hamilton fan will never forgive Dean Martin. Ever.