Dealer With A Hot Hand

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: DINO

AUTHOR: NICK TOSCHES

PUBLISHER: DOUBLEDAY; 572 PAGES; $24

THE BOTTOM LINE: Smooth and sexy, uncaring and unknowable, Dean Martin was the showman America deserved.

He sang like Bing Crosby. More important, he looked like Crosby sang: dark, romantic, utterly at ease. Those seductive glissandi and buh-buh-buh-boos made him a housewife's heart murmur and the ideal straight man for a crew-cut ba- ba-baboon, Jerry Lewis -- "the organ grinder and the monkey," they were called. In the early '50s the duo owned movies, TV, nightclubs, stage shows, and the singer had hit records (That's Amore, Memories Are Made of This) on the side. When they split up in 1956, he segued smoothly into leading-man roles. He Rat-Packed and six-packed, patenting the image of the blotto bon vivant. In 1964 he bumped the Beatles off the top of the charts with Everybody Loves Somebody, then wandered through his own hit variety show for nine seasons.

Dean Martin did what he wanted -- drink, screw around, play golf, make a bundle -- with little effort and on his own terms. The son of Italian immigrants, Dino Crocetti learned fast the American genius for appropriation. He swiped somebody else's voice, altered his name twice and his nose once, sold 105% of himself to early investors. He took plenty from everyone and didn't give back much but a kind of low-level radiance. He was a gambler, yes, but even more a dealer; it was the trade he plied as a youth in Ohio gambling joints and later, for fun, in the casinos where he headlined. The hands are fast, the eyes dead. I deal the cards, you play 'em. I control your destiny and I don't give a damn.

In its way, Martin's is an exemplary American story: how to succeed without really caring. And America loved the ease with which he held an audience, even if he held it in contempt. But is this an exemplary life? Is Dino worthy of Nick Tosches' big, reckless new book?

Biography usually quests for an existence that makes a difference. Dean's specialty was indifference. He did decent work in a few good movies (Some Came Running, Rio Bravo), but passed through others with slight effect, like the gentle baritone rumbling of a distressed stomach. His TV show was flash encircling stupor: the Golddigger chorines did their cooch; the cue-card girl had the script written on her bare midriff. And in the middle, so laid-back as to be supine, was Dino -- on the cutting edge of lumpen-American mediocrity.

This is just what Tosches, author of a fine biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, sees as crucial in Martin's life: that he was the signal showman of an America that was "fulfilling its destiny as the chrome-crowned glory of post- literate, polyvinyl civilization." Dino was what we wanted and deserved. With the cool of a crooner and the leer of a rocker, he straddled two pop eras. He took the styles others created and filtered them, through the screen door of his nonchalance, for a Middle America avid to be hip.

Just about everybody liked Martin -- including directors and fellow actors and, surprisingly, Lewis, who played goony child to Martin's mellow macho man -- but, as Dino warned a TV producer, "nobody gets to know me." Even Martin's most expert appraiser, his long-suffering wife Jeannie, says he's an enigma. "He's either the most complex man imaginable or the simplest," she tells Tosches. "There's either nothing under there or too much."

! Tosches goes with "nothing." He admires Martin's languid scorn for producers and gangsters and fans -- for those who would hustle or intimidate him or win the love they forlornly hoped was inside him. For Dino, Tosches writes, "there could be no happiness but in waving away the world; none but in being apart, unthinking, unfeeling." The Italians call it lontananza. Distance.

Naturalmente, Dino didn't talk to Tosches. So the author relies on the mind reading and fiction weaving that are such an important, easy part of the modern biographer's technique. Yet Tosches' high-wired prose -- he's a cogent social historian on an eloquent rant, Tom Wolfe married to Screamin' Jay Hawkins -- is an ideal instrument for defining the incestuous connection of gangsters and entertainers and the lure of money, whiskey and gals in Hollywood.

Still, no one filled or fulfilled Dean; as Jeannie Martin notes, "He was always content in a void." Eventually the drunk act ceased to be an act; he was not Dino as in vino but Dino as in wino. Now, at 75, he is a Dino-saur, eating alone each night in restaurants. His chilling apathy is the only bodyguard he needs. And his only company is the knowledge that he filled a vacuum in popular culture with the more seductive void of his personality. Memories, and memorable biographies, are made of this.