Remembering Las Vegas Legend Dean Martin on the Anniversary of His Death

Posted on: December 25, 2024, 01:25h. 

Last updated on: December 25, 2024, 02:32h.

Corey Levitan Read More

Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Restaurants, Las Vegas Myths.

December 25th isn’t only Christmas. It’s also the day, 29 years ago, that the world lost Las Vegas icon Dean Martin.

Martin, who came to fame playing the straight man to cutup Jerry Lewis in one of the most successful comedy duos of all time, had enough of the act by 1954.

Though Martin & Lewis were still cooking on stage and in the movies, their offstage relationship had iced over. Lewis had made it clear that there was no room in the act for Martin to be anything but his less-talented sidekick.

When Martin quit in 1956, Lewis assumed he would be lost without him. But Martin had other talented friends in show business. While he was still trying to make it as a lounge singer in 1944, the former Dino Crocetti from Steubenville, Ohio first crossed paths with Frank Sinatra.

Not  the Rat Pack

Martin became more famous than ever singing tunes and slinging insults at the Sands in Las Vegas with Ol’ Blues Eyes and his other showbiz friends, Sammy Davis Jr., comedian Joey Bishop and actor Peter Lawford. They called themselves the Clan and later, the Summit. (Never once did they perform as the Rat Pack, by the way.)

The Summit changed Las Vegas forever, recasting it as Hollywood’s weekend playground. The group managed to film 1960’s “Ocean’s 11” while performing twice a night. (In the film’s final scene, the characters they play walk past the Sands marquee listing their actual names.)

The Summit found Martin boxed into another pigeonhole, but it was one of his own making. He enjoyed playing the loveable drunk. It’s a schtick he learned from comedian Joe E. Lewis, while both performed at the Havana-Madrid nightclub in New York City.

Martin — whom Sinatra joked was so tan because “he found a bar with a skylight” — went as far as getting the California DMV to issue him the vanity plate “DRUNKY.”

In reality, though, that glass of scotch in Martin’s hands on stage was more likely than not to be apple juice, and he was the first to leave every after-hours Summit party.

You Alone (Solo Tu)

By 1965, Martin left the Summit. Officially, it was to launch his own Hollywood-based TV variety series. “The Dean Martin Show” allowed him to reach a broader audience with his singing and comedy.

Unofficially, he was burned out from the toll that all the traveling and partying took on his second marriage, to Jeanne Biegger. Also, he felt that Sinatra had become, like Lewis, just another dominant personality he had to play second fiddle to.

Unlike Lewis, however, Martin and Sinatra remained lifelong friends — no doubt because Martin didn’t wait until the blood went bad to leave.

Other than two divorces, Martin’s life and solo career sailed relatively smoothly until March 21, 1987.

That’s when Dino Martin — a tennis pro, fighter pilot, rock musician, and the fifth of Dean’s eight beloved children — died in a plane crash while flying a routine training mission near Mount San Gorgonio over the California desert. He was 35.

Sinatra stuck by his old pal’s side throughout the four-day search and inevitable bad news. A decade earlier, Sinatra had lost his mother, eerily, to a plane crash near Mount San Gorgonio.

A Kick in the Head

Martin was never the same afterward. To those around him, he seemed depressed, defeated and unmotivated. Somehow, Sinatra convinced him to try healing his grief by hitting the road again, less than a year after Dino’s death.

He was the only person alive who could have.

On March 13, 1988, Sinatra, Martin and Davis began a reunion tour of 29 American arenas called “Together Again.” But ultimately, Sinatra’s plan to cheer Martin up failed.

At 70, Martin wasn’t only dealing with depression but kidney issues. After only four shows, he left the tour and was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in LA.

The tour went on without him, with Liza Minnelli eventually attempting to fill the unfillable void.

In 1993, Martin, a lifelong smoker, was diagnosed with the lung cancer that eventually did him in. Against his family’s wishes, he refused the surgery doctors prescribed to prolong his life. He died of acute respiratory failure at his Beverly Hills home on Christmas Day, 1995. He was 78.

At 7 p.m. that night, the lights of the Sands, Flamingo, Stardust, Dunes, Tropicana, Caesars Palace and Desert Inn were all dimmed in Martin’s memory.