Dean and Me: A Love Story (3 page)

How’d they get rid of the numbers?

Who could have thought—as we stood in that alley with the smells from the kitchen, the cats going up and down, the one folding chair between us—who could have thought that in four and a half hours, we would have changed the face of American show business? Certainly not us.

Restless, we walked around to the club’s main entrance and went inside for a drink. The 500 Club’s bar was huge, running from the front of the house all the way back to the maître d’s desk at the entry to the showroom. In order to sit down, you had to grease some palms. Once again, the bills came out of Dean’s pocket, and we sat.

“Give me a Chivas Regal, water back,” Dean told the bartender.

What the hell is that,
I wondered—
a dog?
Meanwhile, the bartender was looking at me, waiting. I finally decided . . . here goes nothing. “Give me the same, Coke back,” I said.

Dean watched me as I got the drink. I picked up the Coke first.

“Have you ever done this before?” he asked.

“Done?” I said, sipping my Coke.

“Imbibing. Boozing. Drinking. Ever do it before?”

“Well, not exactly. . . . Well, on Passover. . . .”

Dean smiled and said, “Okay, just take it easy.”

A half hour to showtime. We went outside the showroom, and I showed Dean where we were supposed to dress. He put his hands on his hips. “It
is
a fuckin’ folding chair!” he said.

I paced back and forth for a few minutes, then walked into the showroom to see what was up. My heart sank. It was worse than it had been the other night, when I’d played to seven people. Now there were six. I decided not to tell Dean. I walked over to the lighting guy and said, “Please keep the brights down—we’d be better off not seeing who we’re playing to!”

I ran back to our folding chair and got my blue suit on. Dean was sitting on the chair, napping. I had to wake him to remind him that once I went on, he had only seventeen minutes to get ready.

I was the opening act. I went out and did my pantomimicry, and came off to polite applause from the audience, which had now swelled to maybe eleven people. (As usual, there were two or three customers doubled over with laughter; the rest smiled now and then.) Dean went on next. He did his four numbers—I remember “Where or When,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “I’ve Got the Sun in the Morning (and the Moon at Night),” and “Oh, Marie.”

I stood in the wings, mesmerized, as he performed. He really was an amazing singer, warm and direct, with a way around a romantic tune that got to women where they lived. But the funny thing was, Dean didn’t seem to understand his own power. Some part of him was always standing back, making fun of what he did. He wasn’t yet at the point where he would stop a number to make a wisecrack (and very often, get lost in the process—that’s where the drunk act eventually came in handy), but occasionally you could see in his eyes, as he sang, that he just couldn’t take the song seriously. And he had a way of making little self-deprecating remarks between songs, almost under his breath, remarks that if you listened—and I sure did—were killer-funny. But they were throwaway, as much of his singing itself was. There was something about how ridiculously handsome Dean was—about the way he could practically get away with just standing there and being admired— that made trying hard seem almost laughable to him.

Impressed by him but slightly confused by his attitude, the small audience gave him a reasonably warm hand. Jayne Manners, our headliner, closed the show in her inimitable fashion. Unlike Dean, she made sure the people understood exactly what her act was about. She spelled it right out for them: Big boobs—funny. A big-breasted blonde singing badly—funny. A big-breasted blonde making off-color remarks—that’s entertainment!

Back at our folding chair, Dean and I were starving—between rehearsing and worrying, neither of us had eaten a bite since that morning. The 500 Club had what they called a runner: a Jewish kid named Morris. So Dean and I slipped Morris a couple of bucks and sent him out to score us some of the food that’s killed more of my people than Hitler: hot pastrami on rye, don’t trim the fat.

But as Morris walked out, Skinny and Wolfie stalked in. A double visit did not seem like a good sign, and the look in both men’s eyes wasn’t promising.

“Where’s the funny shit?” Skinny asked.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“The funny shit you said the two of you were gonna do together— where is it?”

All the while, Wolfie is glaring at us like we’d propositioned his sister. I looked at Skinny. I looked at Dean. (Dean looked puzzled.) I cleared my throat. “Ah, actually, we were just going to discuss that, Mr. D’Amato. And Mr. Wolf,” I added weakly.

This time it was Wolfie who spoke up. “You better,” he grunted.

His meaning couldn’t have been clearer. Skinny was the good cop, the nice guy, the guy who’d bend over backwards to make everyone happy. Wolfie wasn’t. The word on the Boardwalk was that Irvin Wolf had some serious muscle behind him and didn’t hesitate to use it. He didn’t say the words “cement overshoes”—he didn’t have to.

Meanwhile, I was shaking in my Florsheims. The fact is, when I’d told Skinny about the funny stuff Dean and I did together, funny stuff had been the last thing on my mind. Staying employed was the first thing on my mind, with the side benefit of getting a gig for (and seeing) Dean.

Who, now that Skinny and Wolfie had stalked back out, was looking askance at me. “What in Christ’s name did you sell them?” Dean asked.

The words came out in a rush. “I knew you had no gig, they asked me to suggest someone, I suggested you, and they said no, not another singer, so I said, ‘But we do things together.’”

“Why did you do that?” Dean asked.

“Because I wanted you to be here and work and be a friend and pay half of a double room, and I was lonely,” I said.

“Get a dog!” Dean said.

Just then, Skinny leaned back through the door, making me jump. “P.S.—I suggest you guys get something going for the next show,” he said. “I suggest this only because I told a number of my best customers, who will be here for the next show, that you fellas did other shit besides crooning and miming. Capeesh?”

“Yes sir, Mr. D’Amato,” I said.

No pressure!

As Skinny turned to leave, he almost collided with Morris the runner. I took the greasy brown bag and told Morris to keep the change. He gave the fourteen cents in his hand a fishy look, shook his head, and left. Dean and I were alone, with two hours until the midnight show.

I opened the bag, took a pastrami sandwich, and held one out to Dean. “Hungry?” I said.

He grabbed the sandwich. “Gimme that!” he barked. “Of course I’m hungry—hungry and scared shitless. What the hell are we gonna do here?”

“Relax,” I said around a mouthful of pastrami and rye. “I have a plan.”

While Dean watched, I took a makeup pencil from my table, ripped the greasy bag open to make a flat sheet, and began to write, avoiding the grease spots.

I wrote “Filler.”

I wrote “Busboy.”

I wrote “That Old Gang of Mine.”

I wrote “Italian Lumberjack.”

I wrote “April Showers.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Dean asked.

“Okay,” I told him. “This is material. I’m writing down bits I remember from my dad, from burlesque, from all over. ‘Filler’ is how we get from your intro to the Busboy bit, which I think you remember. . . .”

“What’s that say?” he asked, pointing at the bag. “What’s the— what’s that say? The Italian Lumberjack?”

“A variation on a theme,” I explained. “Whatever we do, I’m the kid and you’re the big brother. I’m the busboy, you’re the captain. You’re the organ-grinder, I’m the monkey. You’re the playboy, I’m the putz. Follow?”

He was smiling. “Sure, putz,” he said. Smiling.

“In the Italian Lumberjack, you’re the lumberjack,” I told him.

He grinned. “Naturally.”

“And I’m the kid brother. I say, ‘What do you do for a living?’ You say, in a nice, old-country accent, ‘I cut down the trees.’”

He gave it a whirl in his best Italian accent. “I cut-a down the trees.”

I pitched my voice up a couple of octaves so I sounded maybe eight, nine years old. “Yeah? And what do you do after that?”

Dean narrowed his eyes menacingly at me. “Then ... then I cut ’em up,” he said.

“Bingo!” I told him. “We’re on fire!”

Dean, eating, looked at me as though he knew we’d be OK. I liked that.

Okay: twelve midnight, that night.

The joint is jammed, maybe twenty-four people. My God, they must have been giving something away. Anyway, the orchestra plays its timid overture—the orchestra being the aforementioned piano, trumpet, bass, and drums. Once they started playing, it didn’t take long to realize they sounded just like a piano, trumpet, bass, and drums.

And I was on. I did my seventeen minutes of miming to recordings, and heard what sounded like some applause. They also could have been calling for a waiter.

Then Dean came on.

He took center stage and sang Song One: “Oh, Marie.” Nice! Then he began Song Two: “Pennies from Heaven.”

I’d combed my hair straight and parted it dead center, put on my street jacket, and sat at one of the ringside tables. As Dean finished the number, I caught his eye and nodded at him. Don’t do anything yet was what that nod was saying. He read me, started to introduce his next song.

“I got a special request,” he told the audience. “But I’m gonna sing anyhow.”

A couple of laughs from out in the dark.

As Dean sang the first few notes of “Where or When”—that nice, quiet, romantic tune—I suddenly banged my table as hard as I could. The china and silverware danced. “Waiter!” I yelled in my Idiot voice. “Where’s my Chateaubriand for two, for Chrissakes?”

Dean stopped the band. “Hold it,” he said. And to me: “Hey, I’m tryin’ to make a living up here.”

“Doing that?! Hah-hah-huh-huh!”

“You think it’s easy?” he asked me.

“It’s a piece of cake—you’re stealing the money!” I yelled.

He motioned me to come up to the stage. I looked around—me?— then stood and went up there. Did some shtick with squinting into the lights. Got a laugh, did it some more. Dean went over to the piano, took some sheet music, handed it to me.

“You sing it,” he said.

“Me?”

“You.”

I looked at the sheet, the piano went into the intro, I opened my mouth—and out came Yiddish. Double-talk. “Vay-meen o soy needle rachmon-eetz. . . .” Dean gave me a look. The laughs were coming stronger now.

“Oh, I only sing in Jewish,” I said. “Is that okay?”

“Jewish?” he said. I nodded. “I’m Italian,” Dean said. “You’re Jewish?”

I nodded again, with the Idiot face. Dean was smiling. The people were laughing. Hard. Christ, what a sweet sound! More intoxicating than any booze. “Someone told me you had your nose fixed,” I said in my nine-year-old voice.

“Yeah,” Dean said, pointing to his cheek. “It used to be here.”

This got a roar of laughter. And I blinked. Something had happened in that instant, something only I had seen, and it was giving me goose bumps. Dean’s ad lib had been not just fast but instantaneous. I’d already been in the business long enough to know how incredibly rare that was. Over the next sixty years, I would come to understand it better and better. The vast majority of comedians with good rhythm use beats—small hesitations, often with some comic business or other—to set up their jokes. Dean didn’t use beats.

I was in the presence of magic.

I can’t tell you what this looks like to somebody whose life is predicated on rhythm. Once we became a team, after we’d been together four or five years, there would be shows where I’d look at Dean and go, “Holy fuck.” It was like being in a lab, watching this magnificent experiment come to life. Nobody, I swear, ever had it in his bones like Dean had. My dad used to agree with me. Danny Lewis worked with straight men all through his career. Good ones. But nobody could touch Dean.

George Burns saw us at the Sands in the mid-fifties, and said to me over dinner one night, “He’s the greatest straight man I’ve ever seen.”

George Burns! Who lived through all the two-acts—Smith and Dale. Olsen and Johnson. Gallagher and Shean.

Not to mention Burns and Allen.

George used to tell the classic self-deprecating joke about straight men—namely, that all you really had to do to hold up your end was repeat what the comic said. If the comic says, “I lost my shoes,” you say, “You lost your shoes?” George joked, “It’s terrible, because I was at the beach, and there was a kid in the water yelling ‘help-help-help,’ and I yelled ‘help-help-help?’ And by the time I got to him, he drowned.”

George was so much better than that, of course. And George thought that Dean was the greatest of them all.

Who knew this on July 24, 1946?

July 25, actually—midnight had passed, and we had the twenty-four audience members of the second show at the 500 Club in the palm of our hands. The people roared as I ran over tables in my busboy jacket, smashing dishes and snipping neckties with a scissors. Our pastrami-bag cue sheet sat on the piano where we’d left it, just in case, but we’d abandoned our plan long before. We were in some different territory, some previously unexplored zone—way out on a limb, streaked with stardust. By the time I glanced at my Timex, I realized we’d been on for close to an hour and a half.

And they still wanted more.

By the time we finally were able to get off, we’d been on for over two hours. And this time, it was just Skinny who ducked into our dressing room—the Wolf had stayed away from our door. Skinny was all smiles.

“Now, that’s what I call lightning in a bottle!” he said. It was the first time I’d heard the expression. It wouldn’t be the last. “How come you guys didn’t tell me what you could do together?” Skinny asked.

“Because,” I answered, “we didn’t know it ourselves.”

Atlantic City had a split personality in those days. On the beach side of the Boardwalk, it was all family sun and fun. The inland side was all grown-up pleasures, 24/7. But AC, on both sides of the Boardwalk, was a tightly knit place, the type of place where, if anything out of the ordinary happened, word got around fast.