Los Angeles, California, March 26, 1960, 7:45 p.m. Frank Sinatra was not a man who second-guessed himself. He had built a career, a persona, and a particular kind of authority on the refusal to look backward. You made a decision, you lived with it, you moved on to the next thing. Second-guessing was for people who weren’t certain enough of their own judgment.
And Frank Sinatra was never uncertain about his judgment. But standing in the living room of his Bel Air home at 7:45 on a Sunday evening in March of 1960, watching Dean Martin and Elvis Presley occupy opposite ends of his living room with the particular quality of two weather systems that have not yet decided whether to merge or collide, Frank Sinatra began to understand that he had made a mistake.
Not a small mistake. Not the kind of mistake you could smooth over with a joke and another round of drinks. The kind of mistake that had been visible in retrospect from the moment he made it, if only he had been willing to look. He had brought these two men together, had arranged this evening, had told himself it was for the good of all concerned.
For Dean, for Elvis, for the friendship that Frank believed should exist between them, because Frank believed in the power of his own arrangements. He had told himself the meeting would go well, because Frank Sinatra’s meetings went well. They went well because Frank made them go well, because that was what Frank did. He had been wrong.
To understand how Frank arrived at this moment, you need to go back six weeks. Back to February of 1960, when Elvis Presley returned from the United States Army after two years in Germany. The return was managed with the precision of a military operation, which was appropriate given the circumstances. Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, had been preparing for this moment since the day Elvis was drafted.
He understood, with the particular clarity of a man who had built his career on understanding popular appetite, that Elvis’s return from the army was not merely a news event, it was a resurrection, a second coming, the king returning to claim his throne. The question was, what kind of king would return? Colonel Parker’s answer was elegant and shrewd.
Elvis would return not as the dangerous, gyrating, hip-swiveling figure who had scandalized parents and enchanted teenagers in 1956 and 1957. He would return as something more broadly acceptable, more adult, more crossover. He would return as the kind of entertainer that could fill not just the teenage market, but the broader American entertainment landscape.
The kind of entertainer that Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin occupied. This was the reasoning that led Colonel Parker to approach Frank Sinatra. The proposal was for a television special, Frank’s Show, Elvis as the returning star, welcomed back to civilian life and to the entertainment world by the acknowledged king of that world.
The optics were perfect, Frank Sinatra welcoming Elvis Presley, the passing of a torch that was also a coronation. Frank liked the idea for his own reasons. He had, in public, been dismissive of Elvis and of rock and roll generally, had called it “the most brutal, ugly, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear.
” He had said this in print, on the record, with the confidence of a man who expected his opinions about music to be treated as verdicts. Having Elvis on his show, welcoming him, would soften that history, would suggest generosity, would show that Frank Sinatra was large enough to embrace what he had previously dismissed.
There was also the simple fact of ratings. Elvis Presley returning from the army on Frank Sinatra’s television special would be the most watched program of the year, of several years, possibly of the decade. Frank understood audience mathematics even when he pretended not to care about them. So, the deal was made. The Timex Frank Sinatra Show.
Elvis returning, the two of them together on one stage. But, before the television special, before the cameras and the audience and the national moment, Frank had another idea. He wanted to introduce Elvis to Dean. This was the idea that would become the mistake. Before I show you exactly what happened in Frank Sinatra’s living room that night, and why bringing Dean Martin and Elvis together in the same room made Frank regret it immediately.
If you love these stories about the real relationships behind old Hollywood’s biggest legends, the dinners nobody photographed, the conversations that never made the papers, the moments where three of the most famous men in America showed you exactly who they really were, subscribe to this channel right now, and turn on notifications, because we bring you the real stories, not the press releases, not the official version, the moments that happened in private rooms when the cameras were off, and people were just themselves, and hit that like button. It tells YouTube this story is worth sharing, and this one is. Now, back to Bel Air. March 26th, 1960, Frank had a plan. Dean had other ideas, and Elvis was about to understand something about one of his heroes that nobody had warned him about. Frank’s reasoning seemed sound at the time. Dean Martin was Frank’s closest friend in the
particular way that closest friendship works among men who don’t discuss feelings, through proximity, through shared experience, through the accumulated understanding of a decade of working together, drinking together, being famous together. Dean was the person Frank trusted most. Dean’s opinion of things, of people, of situations, of whether something was worth his time, carried weight with Frank in a way that few people’s opinions did, and Frank wanted Dean’s approval of Elvis. Or rather, Frank wanted Elvis to receive Dean’s approval. Wanted the introduction to go well. Wanted to be the man who brought these two together and had them shake hands and recognize each other and join the club. The informal never-named club of men Frank Sinatra considered worthy of his company. He had mentioned this plan to Dean. Had said, “I’m going to have Elvis over before the show. Come by. Meet the kid.” Dean had said, “Sure,
Frank.” Which was the answer Dean always gave Frank about things like this. The answer that meant, “I’ll be there. I’ll be polite. But I’m not making any promises about what I think of the proceedings.” Frank had interpreted this as enthusiasm. It was not enthusiasm. It was Dean Martin being Dean Martin, which Frank, who had known Dean for over a decade, should have understood.
He had then conveyed to Colonel Parker and through Parker to Elvis that Frank would like to host a small private gathering before the television taping. An informal dinner. A chance for Elvis to meet Dean Martin. To be welcomed not just on camera, but in private. In the company of men who represented the world he was entering. Elvis had agreed.
Elvis, at 25, returning from the army with a particular combination of confidence and uncertainty that defined his position, the most famous young man in America who had been out of circulation for two years and was not entirely sure what he was returning to, had been genuinely pleased. Dean Martin.
He had grown up listening to Dean Martin. Had copied Dean’s phrasing as a teenager in Memphis, sitting in front of a record player and studying how Dean made the casual sound effortless. He had been in the parlance of the time a fan, which was the second thing Frank had failed to account for.
The first problem with the evening became apparent when Dean arrived. Dean arrived at 7:15. Frank met him at the door. They had a drink. Frank explained again about Elvis, about the army, about the television special, about his hope that Dean would like the kid. Dean listened, sipped his scotch, said, “I’m sure he’s fine, Frank.
” Not, “I’m looking forward to meeting him.” Not, “From what I’ve heard, he’s impressive.” Just, “I’m sure he’s fine.” Frank should have heard this. He didn’t hear it. He was already thinking about the evening ahead, about the success it would be, about the story he would tell afterward, about the night he brought Dean and Elvis together.
Elvis arrived at 7:30. He arrived with Colonel Parker and two other men. Part of the Memphis Mafia, the group of friends and associates who traveled with Elvis everywhere. The Colonel stayed for 20 minutes, made his arrangements and assessments, and left. The two men from Memphis stayed, sitting at the far end of the room in the way that people who are not quite part of something sit, present but peripheral.
Frank made introductions. Elvis, meeting Dean Martin for the first time, did something that Dean Martin had learned to recognize and had spent his career developing techniques to manage. Elvis expressed admiration, not quietly, not with the restrained acknowledgement that passes between professionals of equal standing, with the open, unguarded enthusiasm of a young man meeting someone he had looked up to for a decade.
He told Dean that everybody loves somebody was one of his favorite recordings. He told Dean that the way Dean approached a lyric, the conversational quality, the sense that Dean was talking to you rather than singing at you had influenced how Elvis thought about his own phrasing. Dean received this information with the particular expression he reserved for compliments of this kind, the slight smile that acknowledged the words without fully accepting them, the eyes that were warm but not opened, the sense of a man who appreciated what was being said but did not intend to be moved by it. “Appreciate that,” Dean said. He did not ask Elvis about the army. He did not ask about Germany, about what Elvis had done there, about whether the experience had changed him. He did not ask about the upcoming television special, about what Elvis planned to do with his career, about the music Elvis had been thinking about during two years away from recording. He said, “Appreciate
that.” And then he turned slightly and said something to Frank about the Scotch, a small observation about the brand Frank was serving, and the conversation between Dean and Elvis, such as it had been, ended. Elvis stood there for a moment, a man accustomed, even at 25, to rooms orienting toward him, accustomed to the social gravity that fame creates, standing in Frank Sinatra’s living room with Dean Martin’s back at a slight angle to him, and the conversation moving on.
He recovered quickly. Elvis Presley had been famous since he was 20 years old and had learned things about maintaining dignity in difficult social moments. He turned to one of his men and said something that produced a laugh. He accepted a drink from one of Frank’s people. He moved toward the window, which had a view of the lit-up Bel Air hillside, and stood there with his drink and his easy posture, and looked out at the view.
Frank watched this and felt, for the first time, the specific quality of anxiety that comes when you have organized something and the organizing is going wrong. He crossed to Dean. “Talk to the kid, Frank said quietly, in the register of old friends, the shorthand of men who communicate most efficiently in whispers and brief sentences. Dean looked at Frank.
I did talk to him. You said four words. I said five. Appreciate that. Good scotch, Frank. Dean is fine, Frank. He seems like a nice kid. What do you want from me? Just talk to him. Dean looked across the room at Elvis. Elvis, by the window, had been joined by one of his men and was talking in the easy, relaxed way of someone whose social situation has resolved itself by default. He looked comfortable.
He looked like a man who was fine. He’s fine, Dean said again. You’re the one who’s not fine. Relax. Frank could not relax. He moved across the room to Elvis. Everything good? Frank asked. Great party, Frank. Really appreciate the invitation. I wanted you and Dean to have a chance to Oh, sure.
Elvis was polite. Completely, professionally polite. The politeness of a man who has understood a social situation and decided to be gracious about it. He seems great. Frank stood between his two guests, between Elvis at the window and Dean at the bar, and felt the particular loneliness of a man whose arrangement is not arranging.
The dinner, when it happened, was better. Frank’s dinners were always better than whatever preceded them because Frank’s staff understood food the way Frank understood music. And there was something about the act of sitting down together, of the shared discipline of a meal, that organized even reluctant social situations into something workable.
Dean was not unpleasant at dinner. He was never unpleasant. He was funny in the way that he was always funny. The dry comment, the perfectly timed observation, the joke that arrived from an unexpected angle and was gone before you fully understood what had made it funny. He was engaged with Frank and with Jilly Rizzo and with the others at the table. With Elvis he was polite.
There was a conversation at dinner that illustrated the evening exactly. Elvis mentioned a song he was considering recording, a ballad, something in the mode of the Italian-American vocal tradition that he had always admired, the tradition that Dean and Frank and Tony Bennett represented.
He described what he was looking for. The quality of restraint that made that tradition powerful, the way it used silence as much as sound. Dean listened to this and then said, “You want to talk to Nelson Riddle. He understands that better than anybody.” It was useful information. It was generous in its way.
Nelson Riddle was the arranger who had done Frank’s Capitol recordings, who understood exactly the architectural quality of restraint that Elvis was describing. But it was also a deflection. Elvis had been talking about music in a way that was clearly an opening, an invitation to deeper conversation, to the exchange of perspectives between two men who had thought seriously about the same craft from different angles.
And Dean had heard the opening and responded to it by pointing towards someone else. Elvis heard this, too. He thanked Dean for the suggestion. He did not pursue the conversation further. Frank, sitting at the head of the table, was watching all of this with a growing certainty that the evening was not going to produce what he had imagined, was not going to produce a friendship, was not going to produce a story he could tell about the night he brought Dean and Elvis together.
After dinner they moved back to the living room. Frank put on music, instrumentals, the kind of thing that creates atmosphere without demanding attention. Elvis and his men had a conversation about something Frank couldn’t hear from across the room. Dean sat with a scotch and looked comfortable, which he was because Dean was always comfortable when nothing was being required of him.
Frank tried once more. He positioned himself near both of them at the nexus of two conversations and said something that was addressed to both. A comment about the music business, about the television landscape, about how things were changing and what that meant for performers like them. Dean responded briefly, turned the comment into a small joke, moved on.
Elvis responded thoughtfully. Talked about what he’d observed from Germany about how American popular culture looked from the outside. It was an interesting observation. Frank engaged with it. For 5 minutes, Frank and Elvis had a real conversation about music and culture and the particular American quality of Las Vegas as an entertainment ecosystem.
Dean listened, did not contribute. When there was a natural pause, said he needed another drink and went to the bar. Elvis watched Dean go. There was something in his face at that moment, something that Frank saw and that he would think about afterward. Not hurt. Elvis was too experienced with fame and with people to be easily hurt.
Not confusion. He understood what was happening. It was something more like acknowledgement. An acknowledgement that the meeting he had hoped for, the real meeting, the one where two men who had both spent their lives thinking about how to make music connect with people, sat down and talked about it, was not going to happen, not tonight, not with this particular man in this particular mood.
At 10:30, Elvis said he needed to get going. He had an early call the next day. He thanked Frank with the warmth that Elvis Presley always brought to gratitude. The specific quality of genuine feeling that never entirely left him, regardless of what the social situation had been. He shook Dean’s hand. Dean shook back. “Good meeting you.” Elvis said. “Likewise.” Dean said.
Elvis left. Frank stood in the hallway after seeing Elvis to the door. Stood there for a moment in the particular quiet that falls after a thing you expected to be more has turned out to be less. Dean appeared beside him. “Good kid.” Dean said. Frank turned. “Good kid. He’ll be fine.
He knows what he’s doing. Did you have to be so” Frank searched for the word “so what?” Frank didn’t finish the sentence because he didn’t have a word for what Dean had been. Dean had not been rude, had not been dismissive, had not done anything that could be pointed to and characterized as a failure of hospitality or of common courtesy.
He had just been present without being available, there without being there. “He was looking for something from you.” Frank said. “I know.” Dean said. “And you didn’t give it.” “No.” “Why?” Dean was quiet for a moment. Held his Scotch glass, looked at it. “Frank, that kid is going to be fine.
He doesn’t need anything from me. He needs to go back out there and be Elvis Presley and figure out what that means now that he’s 25 instead of 20 and has 2 years of real life in him. He doesn’t need me to tell him he’s talented. He knows he’s talented. He doesn’t need me to approve of him.” Dean looked at Frank.
“What good would my approval do him?” “He admires you.” “I know. That’s the thing, Frank. When someone admires you the way he admires me or the way he thinks he admires me because he admires an idea more than the person, giving them what they’re looking for doesn’t help them. It just confirms the idea and the idea isn’t real.
” “What idea?” “That there’s a club that if you get the approval of the right people, you’re in. That Dean Martin’s blessing means something for what Elvis Presley does with his voice in a recording studio. Dean shook his head slightly. It doesn’t. The only thing that matters is whether what he does connects with people, and that has nothing to do with me.
Frank looked at Dean. He understood what Dean was saying. He even in some part of himself agreed with it, but he was also irritated by it because the part Frank didn’t agree with was the premise that his arrangements didn’t matter. That bringing people together, which Frank did, which was one of the things Frank did best, was merely the exercise of an ego that needed things to go a certain way.
You could have just talked to him, Frank said. It wouldn’t have killed you. I did talk to him. Properly. Like you meant it. Dean looked at Frank with the expression he sometimes wore when Frank said something that Dean considered slightly obtuse, not unkindly. Just the expression of a man looking at a gap between what someone has said and what he understands.
Frank, Dean said, you wanted me to perform friendship I don’t feel yet. I can’t do that. I don’t know that kid. He seems fine. Maybe someday we’ll have a real conversation, but not tonight in your living room because you decided tonight was the night. Frank was quiet. You set up a situation, Dean continued, and you expected everybody to behave the way the situation required.
That’s not how it works with people. Frank didn’t respond, but he was thinking about the evening from the beginning, running it back through the filter of what Dean had just said, and finding, with the particular irritation of a man who has been told something true he didn’t want to hear, that Dean was right. He had set up a situation.
He had expected it to work because he had arranged it, at the center of it were actual people and not the characters Frank had cast them as in his arrangement. I thought you’d like him, Frank said finally, more quietly. The concession in his voice barely audible. “I might,” Dean said, “in time. Give it time.
” He finished his scotch, said good night, left. Frank stood in his living room alone. The staff was cleaning up. The evening was over. In 2 weeks they would tape the television special and it would go exactly as planned because the special was a professional arrangement with marks and cameras and a script and professional arrangements worked.
This one, the informal dinner, the introduction, the hope that chemistry would happen on demand, had not worked. In the days following, Frank received word from Colonel Parker that Elvis had enjoyed the evening very much and was looking forward to the television special. This was the kind of communication that Parker was expert at.
The message that said what it needed to say without saying anything of substance. Elvis enjoyed the evening. Whether Elvis had gotten what he came for was another question and one that Parker’s message did not address. The television special taped at the Fontainebleau in Miami in late March and broadcast on May 12th, 1960 was a triumph.
12 million households watched. Elvis and Frank sang together, traded jokes, performed their exchange with the professional ease of two performers who knew what was required of them. The scene in which Elvis sang a verse of Frank’s Witchcraft while Frank sang a verse of Elvis’ Love Me Tender became one of the most replayed moments in American television history.
Dean was not part of the television special. Frank had not asked him. After the dinner, he understood without discussion that Dean’s inclusion would have introduced an element that the special, which was a carefully controlled professional event, did not need. Dean’s presence on the special would have required Dean to perform enthusiasm for Elvis on camera that Dean had declined to perform in private.
And Dean performing inauthentically on camera was something that anyone who knew Dean well would have been able to see. So, Frank did the special without him. And the special was everything it was supposed to be. But, the dinner stayed with Frank. The image of Elvis at the window with his drink, having understood that the meeting he’d hoped for wasn’t happening, and deciding to be gracious about it.
The image of Dean at the bar, comfortable, polite, declining to be what the evening required. And the conversation in the hallway afterward, which Frank thought about more than he expected to. You set up a situation, you expected everybody to behave the way the situation required. Frank had spent his whole life doing exactly that.
Had spent his whole life being the man in the room who decided what the room would be, who would be in it, how things would go. And mostly it worked. It worked because Frank was usually right about what rooms needed and who should be in them and how things should go. He had good judgment, and he had authority, and he had the particular force of personality that made other people willing to be organized by him.
But, occasionally, rarely, but occasionally, it didn’t work because the people in the room were people and not elements in an arrangement. Because chemistry between human beings doesn’t operate on the same schedule as Frank Sinatra’s plans, he would never describe the evening as something he regretted.
Frank Sinatra did not use the word regret easily or often. But, if you had asked him in the weeks and months following whether the dinner had gone as he intended, he would have paused before answering. And in the pause would have been the acknowledgement that no, it had not gone as he intended. And in the acknowledgement would have been something that was close enough to regret that the distinction was mainly semantic.
He had brought Elvis and Dean together, and what had happened was not what he planned. What happened was Dean being Dean, which was always what happened, which was the thing about Dean that Frank both understood completely and was perpetually surprised by. Dean’s refusal to perform what he didn’t feel, his insistence on being exactly who he was regardless of the social architecture around him, his inability or refusal, the difference was difficult to determine, to inhabit a role that Frank or anyone else had written for him. Frank had wanted Dean to be the older established entertainer welcoming the new talent, generous and warm and affirming. It was a good role, a noble role even. Frank himself would have played it well. Dean had not played it. Dean had been Dean, present, polite, unhelpful, and in being Dean had perhaps been more honest than the role would have permitted because the truth of that
evening, the truth that Frank’s arrangement was designed to paper over, was that Dean Martin and Elvis Presley did not know each other, had nothing in common except fame and music, which is actually a great deal to have in common but is not the same as friendship. And the suggestion through careful arrangement and warm lighting and good Scotch that they were or could be something other than strangers was exactly the kind of performance that Dean Martin had declined to give since he was young enough to understand that performing inauthenticity cost him something he was not willing to pay. The television special aired was a success. Elvis’s return was everything Colonel Parker had planned for. Frank’s show was what it was supposed to be, and in a Bel Air home in March of 1960, a dinner had happened that went differently than anyone intended, >> [snorts] >> that revealed something about three men, about Frank’s need to arrange, about Dean’s refusal to be arranged, about Elvis’s dignity in the face of being
seen and not fully received. Three things Frank Sinatra would spend a long time thinking about, and only one of them was a mistake. The other two were just truth showing up in the living room, regardless of whether he’d invited it. Years later in the 1970s, someone asked Frank about Elvis.
The question was about music, about whether Frank had revised his earlier dismissal of rock and roll, given what it had become. Frank said something unexpected. He said that Elvis had become something he hadn’t anticipated. That there was a quality to Elvis’s later work, the more stripped-down recordings, the quieter moments, that reminded him of the vocal tradition he had spent his own career in.
The restraint, the willingness to let silence do its work. He said, “I was wrong about him. I was wrong about that whole thing early on.” He did not mention the dinner, did not mention Dean, did not characterize the evening in any terms that would have made it a story. But whoever was listening to Frank say he had been wrong about Elvis knew that Frank Sinatra saying he had been wrong about something was itself a significant event.
Significant enough that it stood on its own without context. Dean hearing this second-hand, as he heard most things second-hand, through the particular network of Vegas and Hollywood information that moved between people who had been in the business long enough, said nothing about it.
Because Dean was the one person in this story who had never been wrong about anything. Not because he had no opinions, but because his opinions were so carefully calibrated to what he actually knew and felt that they rarely required revision. He hadn’t disliked Elvis. He hadn’t liked him. He had met a young man he didn’t know in a room arranged by someone else to produce a specific outcome, and he had declined to produce it. That was all.
Whether Elvis and Dean ever had the real conversation that the dinner failed to produce, the conversation Elvis had been looking for about music and phrasing and the particular quality of restraint that moves people is not recorded anywhere. It may have happened. It may not have. The record is silent on the question.
What the record preserves is the dinner. March 26th, 1960, Bel Air, Frank’s house, two men at opposite ends of a room, Frank in the middle watching his arrangement fail to arrange and in the hallway afterward. You set up a situation. You expected everybody to behave the way the situation required, which is the thing Frank Sinatra for all his genius could never fully accept.
That people are not situations. That you can arrange a room but not what happens in it. That the most powerful man in any gathering is still powerless in the face of who two people actually are to each other. He had brought Elvis and Dean together and what happened next was simply the truth of who they were, which is what always happens eventually, regardless of who arranged the room.
There was a postscript to the evening that Frank only learned about weeks later through the particular channels by which information moved in the world he inhabited. One of Elvis’s men had given an account of the dinner to someone connected to Colonel Parker’s office. Not a public account. Not anything that was intended to circulate.
Just the kind of informal debriefing that happened in Elvis’s world after events of significance. The account, as it reached Frank, was brief. Elvis had told his men in the car afterward that Dean Martin was exactly what he expected. When pressed on what that meant, Elvis had said, “A man who worked very hard to get to a place where he didn’t have to try anymore.
You can see it in everything he does. The ease isn’t natural. It’s earned and he guards it.” Frank turned this over in his mind when he heard it. The ease isn’t natural. It’s earned. And he guards it. It was, Frank thought, the most accurate description of Dean Martin he had ever heard. More accurate than most of the things that had been written about Dean by people who had known him for decades.
More precise than Frank himself would have been able to produce. Because Frank was too close to Dean to see him with that kind of clarity. And it had come from a 25-year-old in the back of a car after a dinner at which Dean had said perhaps 30 words to him. Frank found himself revising his assessment of Elvis Presley.
Not his assessment of the music. His assessment of the man. The capacity for observation. The willingness to see something true about a person even when that person had not offered you warmth. Frank thought about this in the context of Dean. About the years of Dean working his way up from Steubenville. The years of Dean and Jerry Lewis.
The years of learning how to stand still in a room and have the room come to you rather than chasing the room. The years of making relaxation look effortless until the relaxation became, to the outside eye, indistinguishable from genuine ease. But it was not the same thing. It had been built deliberately, carefully out of the raw material of a working-class Ohio Italian kid who understood very early that the world would not automatically make room for him.
And who had decided that the best way to make appear not to need it. Elvis had seen this in one evening. From across the room. Without a real conversation. That was talent of a different kind. Not musical. Perceptual. The talent of seeing people accurately. Which was part of what made Elvis so effective as a performer.
Not just the voice. Not just the physicality. But the quality of perceiving what people actually were. Which is the foundation of empathy. Which is the foundation of connection. Dean, meanwhile, had not revised his assessment of Elvis because Dean’s assessment had not been wrong and did not require revision.
He had said the kid was fine. The kid was fine. He would continue to be fine. Dean was not in the business of being surprised by people turning out to be what they appeared to be. But there was one moment in the weeks following the dinner that is worth noting. Dean was at a recording session, his own session, for Reprise, the label Frank had founded and invited Dean to record for, another one of Frank’s arrangements, this one a good one.
They were working on something up-tempo that wasn’t quite coming together. And during a break, Dean had wandered to the piano where the session pianist, a man named Eddie Kay who had been playing sessions in Hollywood for 15 years, was noodling through something. “What’s that?” Dean asked. Eddie said it was something from a session he’d done the previous week, an Elvis session, one of the songs being considered for the first post-army album. He played a few bars.
Dean listened, stood there and listened with the particular quality of attention he gave to music that was doing something interesting, which was a different quality of attention from the one he gave to social situations, warmer, more open, more willing to be moved. He didn’t say anything when Eddie stopped playing.
He went back to the session, but at the end of the day, Dean mentioned the fragment from Elvis’s session. Said, “Whoever arranged that understood something.” That was all, nothing further about Elvis, nothing about the dinner, about Frank’s arrangement, about the evening that hadn’t gone as planned. But whoever arranged that understood something was, from Dean Martin, a significant statement, a statement that acknowledged, in Dean’s precise and non-effusive way, that the person at the center of those recording sessions was doing his work with genuine skill. It wasn’t friendship, wasn’t even the beginning of friendship. It was something smaller and more honest than that. It was one craftsman acknowledging in private to a piano player during a session break that another craftsman was worth noticing, which was perhaps closer to real respect than anything that might have happened in Frank’s living room. Frank never knew about this moment. The session pianist didn’t think to mention
it and there was no reason he would have. It was not a dramatic event. It was just a man listening to a piano and saying something brief and accurate, but it was the exchange between Dean and Elvis that the dinner had failed to produce. Not between them directly, not with the orchestration that Frank had arranged.
Just two people at one remove through the medium of music finding the common ground that the social situation had not permitted. Frank would have appreciated the irony. Would have appreciated it and been irritated by it simultaneously, which was the appropriate response to Dean being Dean. The arrangement that Frank made had produced nothing he intended and the thing he had been trying to produce had happened anyway quietly in a recording studio without him, which was, all things considered, very much how Dean Martin operated and very much why Frank Sinatra, for all his genius at arranging the world, could never fully arrange Dean Martin. You could put Dean in a room. You could choose the room, the lighting, the company, the occasion, but Dean would be Dean in that room. Exactly Dean. Neither more nor less than what he actually was and sometimes that was everything you needed and sometimes, as Frank discovered on the evening of March
26th, 1960, it was not quite what you had planned. Both things were true. That was Dean. That had always been Dean. That would always be Dean.
