“The Secretary of Liquor”

(JOHN F. KENNEDY’S INFORMAL APPOINTMENT OF DEAN MARTIN TO HIS CABINET) What the fuck did they want, these men who needed the company of others to make a life, as he needed a woman to make babies? —Dino, nick tosches I always plays to de common folk. — dean martin 1 It was casting time for The Young Lions. Brando wouldn’t hesitate given this chance to dye his hair white and do a German accent. And while no one would hire Monty Clift after his facially disfiguring car-wreck, Brando convinced the studio that the other, slightly older, kid from Omaha was the right man. No one could play a more sensitive-tough than Monty, like the artist-bugler-boxer Prewitt mistaken for the enemy, gunned down by his own men in the Pearl Harbor dawn; or the way, as the seraphic cowboy Matt Dunson, he got a rise out of his demented empire builder father, John Wayne, by kicking over a tin cup, sloshing the coffee into the dust to show his disgust. Clift knew that Lions director Edward Dmytryk was searching for someone to play a key supporting role—as Frank Sinatra had in From Here To Eternity—yet he was stunned to hear it was “Jerry Lewis’s partner in shlock.” Clift softened, nauseated when he saw Martin’s competition pander to the crowd on Broadway. Lucky for Monty that he let it go: the two men not only became friends; it was Dean who put the man with the wired-jaw to bed when he had the chloral hydrate and alcohol wobblies. Ignorant of Brando’s intervention on his behalf, Monty told Dean that Marlon’s fifty takes per scene were getting on his nerves more and more and he vowed to walk off the set if he tried ONE MORE TIME to have his German soldier die with arms spread wide to “echo the crucifixion.” Clift, wasted with self-recrimination at forty-five. Martin, an actor for whom one run through a scene almost always sufficed. Dean got a chuckle out of Monty with his response. “It should be awful good with so many takes.” Then the future flashed before him. “I guess there are directors who want us to do the same scene over and over again too.” “Sure, lots. Some of the best.” “I guess I got spoiled. Jerry and I got to where we pretty much called the shots.” And then—without any foreknowledge that he’d be doing his only two other serious roles in the next two years and be subject to directorial rule on the sets of Some Came Running and Rio Bravo— he vowed in the future to set up his golf net before shooting started on a picture. Dean appeared to float, perfection never an aspiration: that he was already as well known for his insouciance and drunk persona as for his singing and acting doesn’t mean he was so well-defended that he didn’t feel any pressure about working with such aces as Brando and Clift. He didn’t have to stretch to play a would-be draft dodger, Michael Whiteacre: “a likeable coward like myself,” a screenwriter in Shaw’s novel, a singer in the movie. The army doctor feeds Dean his first line in Lions as if his future were visible in the instant: art and life exquisitely commingled. Doctor: “For a man your age and in your profession you’re in excellent health. How do you manage it?” Martin doesn’t hesitate: “Clean liquor.” But sauntering through this role didn’t mean everything was swell: he felt so out-of-place on location in France he gave up the offer of a choice part in The Guns of Navarone because it meant going back to Europe. In his middle years, he ambled through the role of “Matt Helm” in another toneless Bondian takeoff, and when Columbia wanted to shoot Murderers’ Row on location in Cannes, Dino set the studio straight: “fuck no, just build some fake Riviera sets.” 2 A diffident crooner, he needed a stooge. License to fuck around on stage. After his split with Jerry, Dino’s drunk persona grew into a ghostly partner, and by the time he had his own TV show the public was so saturated with his presence, many conflated the persona and the person. When he landed the drunk’s key role in Rio Bravo, he turned to Brando for help, “what should I do?” Brando told him what to think about. The more inscrutable the subject the more this spectre stands out in relief. Part of Martin’s appeal was that no one knew him. It wasn’t a mask; his detachment was who he was. He showed up, his spirit remained elsewhere. His wives and children found him unknowable. It wasn’t personal. When the Martins entertained, the guests carried on while Dino disappeared into his room to watch westerns on TV, alone. It wasn’t personal. When the producer of “The Colgate Comedy Hour” suggested they have lunch to get to know one another, Dino set him straight: “No one gets to know me.” Martin was a man no one came close to knowing. What does it mean, to know someone? 3 Why ask such questions at all after Socrates beguiled us out of answers and set us on the inexhaustible path...dialectics? Don’t you think I haven’t wondered if I haven’t strayed from my true path as I find myself tracking the trajectory of such non-exemplary lives? You’re thinking it’s a trick, and will not answer, but before you judge my dissolute subject— who like the money but thought all the attention was a joke because “a singer is nothing”— as a derelict choice, consider how philosophy, while striving to become more concrete continues to recoil before the problem of other minds. And it is said that Monsieur Sartre turned paler than his martini, when Raymond Aron challenged the Husserlians, at the Bec de Gaz in Montparnasse, to make philosophy out of a cocktail glass. 4 There’s something about everyone no one can know. There was no question of Dino taking orders and being bossed around was out of bounds: penalty shot incurred for the perpetrator, who was, this time, the imperious Billy Wilder whose streak of hits was breaking fast. Dino as always was doing his job, which was to literally play himself in Kiss Me, Stupid