BEFORE DINO KNEW MY NAME
Chapter One — Pretty Baby
Long before I ever stood backstage with Dean Martin, I knew his voice. I was a kid at St. Anthony High School in Long Beach when Dino was already part of the soundtrack of my life. My mother surprised me one day with his album Pretty Baby. I played those 33 RPM records until it seemed I might wear the grooves completely smooth. Back then Dean Martin belonged to another universe. Hollywood. Las Vegas. Movies. Television. I belonged to Long Beach. A decade later I would be standing only a few feet from him on The Dean Martin Show. Whenever I think about that journey, I think first about my mother. She bought the record. She couldn't possibly have known where it would lead. Neither could I.Sometimes the smallest gifts become the first page of a much larger story.
The Dean Martin Show Chapter Two
"BEFORE DINO KNEW MY NAME"
College, journalism, ambition and a phone call from my SAE pal John Roland eventually carried me to NBC in Burbank. NBC was a city within a city: studios, control rooms, wardrobe departments, artists’ entrances and Pages racing everywhere. Behind dressing-room doors were famous Hollywood stars. Becoming an NBC Page gave me the key to that world. The first Dean Martin Show I worked felt like a dream. While the other Pages supervised the audience outside, I finagled my way through the double doors of Studio 4. Inside dancers rehearsed, Les Brown’s musicians warmed up, stagehands moved scenery, the cue-card man arranged Dean’s lines, and producer-director Greg Garrison tried to impose order. In the middle of it all stood Dean—completely untouched by the commotion. I was about to witness what "Prime Time" really meant. His first guest, Eddie Fisher, stood beside me. Dean looked over, tossed out a mischievous ethnic wisecrack, about Fishers ethnicity, and the audience roared. It was my first taste of what the next two seasons would be like. "Let’s have a vino for Dino!"
The Dean Martin Show Chapter Three
"BEFORE DINO KNEW MY NAME"
The Dream
La Famiglia was nearly empty that night in 1985. The last waiters moved softly between the tables, resetting silver and folding napkins with the quiet efficiency of people who had watched legends come and go. In the corner booth, the candles burned low. Dean Martin leaned back in that easy, familiar way of his, lifting a glass of real Jack Daniel’s—the amber catching the light the way the world never quite believed he did. I had always heard he ate alone here. The Late great Whitey Littlefield once told me as much, over beers. Sinatra had trusted him the Budweiser distributorship in Long Beach. “If you’d known,” Whitey said, “you could’ve sat down with him.” I never did. So sometimes I dream it instead. In the dream we stay late. The restaurant empties around us. I ask about the old show—the one that felt less like television and more like a long, loose party that somehow made it onto the air. Dean’s eyes warm. He starts talking about the guest stars, the friends, the unforgettable characters who drifted through those gold-curtained stages. The memories rise the way the liquor does in the glass: slow, golden, and still somehow bright after all these years. Two men, years apart, sharing a table at La Famiglia the way old friends do. Outside, Beverly Hills keeps its secrets. Inside, the candles keep flickering, and Dean keeps talking.
