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New podcast about Sammy and Dino!

http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes

Yesterday I listened to the brilliant first episode of the new season of You Must Remember This podcast, which is all about Sammy Davis Jnr and Dean Martin! It was fantastic, please listen. Here’s the blurb:

‘This season, we look at the movies, music and lives of Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin. Singers, actors, TV stars and nightclub performers, Davis and Martin became rich and famous selling versions of mid-20th-century hipness as the biggest stars in the Rat Pack who weren’t Frank Sinatra. The standard-setter for masculine cool in the second half of the twentieth century -- as well as a nexus where Hollywood power, political power and mafia power came together -- the Rat Pack feels uniquely uncool today. As its mystique recedes, it’s the perfect time to begin to unpack its allure, and take a cold hard look at the art it produced.

But Sammy and Dino were both more than the Rat Pack, and examining their lives and careers in tandem reveals tons, about the evolution of racial attitudes from the beginning of the 20th century -- when Italians and Italian-Americans like Dean were widely considered to be non-white; about how Hollywood responded to, and influenced, changing ideas about masculinity and “the man” from World War II to Vietnam and beyond; and above all, about the differences and similarities between mainstream capitalism and underground criminal economies, which is laid bare by the intersection of the music industry and the mafia.

Today, we’ll talk about Sammy and Dino’s childhoods and early years as entertainers -- years which formed their talent, their stage personas, and taught them their first lessons in the racket that was, and is, the music business. Both grew up in marginalized communities where they learned an ethos of success based on hustle. We’ll track both Dean and Sammy to major coming-of-age moments in the middle of World War II. Coming up in industrial Ohio as both a card dealer and a nightclub singer, Dean learns how and why the house always wins. As a child, Sammy joins his father’s touring dance act, and eventually becomes the main attraction -- before the war forces him to encounter racism at a level he’d never experienced before.’’

#sammy davis jnr #dean martin #frank sinatra #martin and lewis #jerry lewis #he's not in it yet but he's coming up #you must remember this #it was so good you guys #I think there will be 8 episodes altogether

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“You don’t meet the people you love, you recognize them.”

― Anna Gavalda, “Life, Only Better” , trans. Tina Kover

“You and I know each other in our bones”

― Kurt Vonnegut, from a letter to Nanny Vonnegut 

“but everyone had this patina

  of slightly bruised longing, this shimmer of

  I think I knew you when we were children,

  this look of I’ve loved you ever since you

were born

  and probably longer than that”

― Paul Hostovsky, from “Everyone was Beautiful,” Dear Truth (Main Street Rag, 2009)

“He’s been here in my heart before I even knew him. Understand? He’s always been here. Always.”

― Sandra Cisneros , from Woman at Hollering Creek: Stories; “Never Marry a Mexican,”

“You came into my life–not as one comes to visit…but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps…”

— Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to Véra Slonim (1923), Letters to Véra

“I love you. I feel as though we were never strangers, you and I, not even for a moment.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, from a letter to Mathilde Trampedach

“Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place.”

— Robert Brault

“Here when I say “I never want to be without you,”

somewhere else I am saying

“I never want to be without you again.” And when I touch you

in each of the places we meet in all of the lives we are,

it’s with hands that are dying and resurrected.

When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,

in each place and forever.

— Bob Hicok, Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

“She said that she had been searching for my eyes in the crowd because she felt as if she were talking to my heart.”

— Audre Lorde, from “Zami: A New Spelling of my Name,” published c. 1982

“Who knows? perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening…”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from You who never arrived (tr. by Stephen Mitchell); Uncollected Poems: 1913–1918

#i lost my friend #and i always thought i would know when he left #because I recognised him when he arrived

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guy with a pocket knife whose only job at your work is to offer you his pocket knife when you are having trouble breaking down cardboard boxes

#good grief #this brought back unbelievably vivid memories #of every bookshop i ever worked in

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A sunny day in Bryant Park, 1940s.

Photo: Walker Evans via National Gallery of Art

#new york #1940s #imagine earliest days M&L sitting here #on a sunny day #sharing a sandwich #both fighting every instinct #to tip the other backwards into the fountain #martin and lewis #but not really #but maybe

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#this is so gorgeous

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#look at these humans #shirley maclaine #dean martin #i would hold hands with either of them #and i don’t care who knows it

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What a brilliant find! I had seen the script before but never the video. It‘s wonderful.

Also, the newsreel has exactly the same date as Jerry’s melancholy telegram to his parents.

The boys in 1951 showing how to properly get off a plane with your partner & pal.

Full video here, as well as the funny script news that goes with it. I wonder about the girl tho.

#martin and lewis #newsreel #telegram #1951 #dean looking very fond of helen o’connell there #oh to be able to lipread

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Dean Martin: In the Spotlight (2021)

We're doing something special! Stop by today as we review the new documentary: Dean Martin: In the Spotlight Stop by Ticklish Business all next week as we spotlight the joy that is Dean Martin across the site and our Patreon. @TCM #TCMParty

There are certain performers who are like a fine wine. They might age, time might pass, but each time they come across the screen, there’s that magic. There’s something special about them. In truth, I can’t remember the first time I saw Dean Martin. He’s an icon, a legend and above all, he’s him. He’s the ‘King of Cool’. This is a common feeling among many. So, how does one jump into doing a…

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#well this is exciting #dean martin

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#ha #there it is! #martin and lewis #the boy singer well into his thirties #god love him

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#the top one is my favourite! #it’s my absolute favourite #so lovely to see it in colour #what are they thinking there? #martin and lewis

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Jerry putting air in <his boyfriend’s> Dean’s tires. 🥰

#martin and lewis #does that bicycle say #‘dean martin: boy singer’? #I think it do

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Another intriguing thing from The Sands’ archive! The top page here refers to The Sands 4th anniversary party, headlined by Danny Thomas, Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis. It’s not a guest list, but it is a list of people to whom invitations were sent - it was quite exciting to find Dean on there! (The highlighting on both pages is mine).

There are lots of different ways of looking at it, of course, but it does imply that in December of 1956 it seemed at least reasonable to invite Dean to an event Jerry was headlining. 

The second page is funny because, oh look! Who would have thought it? Dean has failed to rsvp :D The event was quite well documented and I’ve never seen anything to suggest that he showed up, so I don’t think for a moment that he was there. But knowing he was invited is quite something.

#martin and lewis #dean martin #jerry lewis #las vegas #1956 #imagine that landing on the martin doormat #sands 4th anniversary

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Jerry in heaven: hoiked aloft by Mickey Hargitay as Jayne Mansfield looks on. This is at The Sands 4th anniversary party, December 1956.

#jerry lewis #a happy boy #the sands #las vegas #december 1956

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freudian slip

i’m sure it was totally, completely a random and accidental choice to make his father-in-law an italian barber. for sure. positive. there’s no doubt in my mind.

um, did i mention dean’s father was an italian barber? no really, it’s just a coincidence. really. i swear.

and, they sing an italian love song. no. it doesn’t mean ANYTHING, knock it off!

#oh man #I love it #jerry lewis #and his nice Italian husband

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September 16th, 1957, newspaper unknown.

#jerry lewis #only a jerk like me can do that! #last winter in Miami beach #1957

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Jerry defeats Jack Entratter.

#jerry lewis #jack entratter #the sands #jerry's oral fixation strikes again

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Jack Entratter defeats Dean.

#dean martin #jack entratter #the sands #1963 I think