Fifty Years Ago Today: Dean Martin on TV

Nearly twenty years after his passing - Christmas Day 1995 to be exact, I remember it well  - Dean Martin is an even bigger cultural icon than he was in the last years of his life. It was easy to dismiss his casual style as one of little effort, but whether it cam naturally to him or he simply made it look easy, it's that image of the singer born Dino Paul Crocetti in 1917 in Steubenville, Ohio that is forever etched into our minds. And Dean wanted it that way.

In 1965, the reinvention of Dean Martin was almost complete. After splitting with longtime partner Jerry Lewis, to who he had been a singing straight man, Dean created an image of the lovable lush, the drunken life of the party wherever he showed up. Joining the Rat Pack with hard-partying buddy Frank Sinatra added to that image. And in 1964, when Dean knocked the Beatles off the #1 spot with "Everybody Loves Somebody," a song which became his signature, the whole world spun around and took notice. Indeed, they were in the presence of greatness, something you didn't have to tell Dean's #1 fan: Elvis Presley, who dyed his hair black and got a great suntan to look like his idol. (No Dean = No Elvis. No Elvis = no...everything else!)

Then in the fall of '65, Dean's own show premiered in living color on NBC. In the first few minutes, you can see that all Dean had to do was take the party in front of the RCA cameras in Burbank and off he went. At first he didn't want to do it: when NBC came calling, he gave them an outrageous figure to meet in order to obtain his services. They wanted him so badly, they didn't even blink. Soon, his persona eclipsed even Jerry's success in every realm.

And this is what NBC and the world got from the get-go: