Dean Martin Was Drunk During This Live TV Appearance… Watch What Happens HT

 

Well, don’t worry. Just like I promised you, I’m only having one drink. >> Everyone thought they knew Dean Martin’s drunk act, but one TV appearance proved it wasn’t always an act. >> How’ all these people get in your room? [laughter] >> After losing his son in a plane crash, Dean started drinking heavily.

 All seriousness, I feel sorry for you people that don’t drink. I mean it cuz when you wake up in the morning, that’s as good as you’re going to feel all day. >> During this particular live show, he could barely stand. His famous charm turned into raw desperation. The producers wanted to cut to commercial, but Dean kept going.

 Tell us what we don’t know about Dean Martin. >> Let’s see. What you maybe didn’t know about him is that,  you know, that drinking bit. Yeah, >> was just a gimmick. >> What he said next left the audience in stunned silence. The smooth kuner was gone, replaced by a broken man using alcohol to numb unbearable pain.

 It was television’s most heartbreaking moment. Dino Paul Crocheti came into the world on June 7th, 1917 in a two- room apartment above a shoemaker shop in Stubenville, Ohio. His parents, Guyotano and Angela, were Italian immigrants trying to survive on barely anything.  Guyano worked 12-hour days as a barber for just $18 a week, while Angela scrubbed floors and took in laundry just to keep them from being thrown out.

There was no running water inside. They shared a toilet in the backyard with three other families. The only food they had was bread, pasta, and whatever vegetables they could grow. Dino didn’t speak a word of English until he was five. Kids at Grant Elementary mocked his accent. His older brother had to come to class with him just to translate.

 Even then, Dino felt like he didn’t belong. By 13, he couldn’t take school anymore. He left 10th grade and told his mother he needed to bring home real money. He started delivering bootleg whiskey at night across the Ohio River for0 50 cents a day. By 14, he was running numbers for local bookies, collecting bets from steel mill workers who gambled their entire paychecks.

 He shined shoes at the country club, stocked shelves, pumped gas, and delivered newspapers before sunrise. At 15, he lied about his age to work night shifts at the steel mill for $125 an hour. Every job was about survival. The work was hard. The pay was low. The exhaustion was deep. That’s why he later said easy does it became his way of life because he had already lived the hard way. He also started fighting.

 At 15, he called himself Kid Crochet and stepped into underground boxing clubs across the Ohio Valley. Between 1932 and 1936, he fought 36 matches, winning 25 and losing 11. One punch broke his nose and left it crooked for life. He couldn’t afford hand wraps, so he fought bare knuckled. His knuckles shattered and never healed right.

 In one match, a hook split his lip open. The scar never faded. He even lost feeling in parts of his mouth, which gave him that half smile people would later call charming. He joked about his record, saying, “I won all but 11, but every fight left something broken.” In 1936, during a brutal match at Stubenville Memorial Auditorium, 19-year-old Dino got hit with a rabbit punch to the temple and collapsed face first. He stopped breathing.

 It took 5 minutes to bring him back. When he woke up, he was vomiting blood and couldn’t remember his own name. He spent 3 days in the hospital with a concussion so bad the doctor warned him that one more blow to the head might kill him. The hospital bill was $470 and his family couldn’t pay it. That was it for him. No more boxing.

 From that day on, he focused on singing. By 1934, at just 17, he was singing at shady clubs in Stubenville while dealing blackjack in the back rooms. The crowds liked him. He copied Harry Mills from the Mills brothers and got paid in tips. Then came a real gig. In 1935, band leader Ernie McCay hired him for $75 a week, a huge sum during the depression.

He sang at the Walker House, at the Rex cigar store, and anywhere they’d let him crune. He kept the style smooth and calm. It was the opposite of everything he had been through, and it worked. He also had a job no one really talked about. At 17, he worked as a cruier at the Rex Cigar Store, which was really just a front for an illegal casino.

 It was run by the Skola Crime Family. He worked the roulette wheel from 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. earning $30 a week and tips, three times what he made at the mill. When gamblers lost, he’d sing to calm them down. When mob guys got angry, he stayed cool. Federal agents raided the place twice.

 He escaped through the back  alley both times. On slow nights, he’d sing with dance bands under the name Dino Martini. The mix of charm and danger stayed with him forever. In 1938, broke and living in a grimy New York apartment with fellow singer Sunonny King, the two came up with a wild idea.

 They held bare knuckle boxing matches in their living room, charging 50  cents per person. People packed in to watch them fight until one of them fell. The first time, Dino knocked Sunny out cold and they made $12. They kept it going three to four times a week until the walls were stained with blood and the landlord kicked them out. They were hungry.

 They were desperate. They were surviving any way they could. In 1940, a big change came. Cleveland band leader Sammy Watkins offered him $200 a week to tour. But there was a catch. Watkins said the name Dino Crocheti was too ethnic, so they changed it. From that day on, he was Dean Martin. The name was American.

 It opened doors. From 1940 to 1943, Dean toured ballrooms across the Midwest. His voice was smooth, his style was effortless, and people remembered the name. In 1941, he married Betty Macdonald in Cleveland. They had four children. Craig in 1942, Claudia in 1944, Gail in 1945, and Diana in 1948.

 But while Betty stayed home, Dean toured nonstop. He missed birthdays, first steps, and holidays. The marriage couldn’t survive the distance. They divorced in 1949, just before Dean’s world exploded. In 1942, his past almost came back to crush him. Police raided a gambling joint in Cleveland and arrested him with a group of dealers and performers.

 He was facing serious charges. But a few days later, the case was quietly dropped. Some say his old bootlegging connections helped. Dean didn’t hide the arrest. He leaned into it. He used it to build a mystique. The kuner with a shady past. The smooth guy who’d seen the dark side and smiled. Anyway, in 1943, he was drafted into the army, but lasted only 14 months before getting medically discharged for a hernia.

 That twist of fate changed everything. While other men went off to war, Dean stayed behind and became a star. He started performing at the Rio Bomba Room in New York for $500 a night. He got his own radio show in 1944, Songs by Dean Martin on Wayo.  And in 1946, Diamond Records gave him a recording contract.

 The singles didn’t become hits, but his voice reached thousands, and that set up the moment that would change comedy forever. On July 25th, 1946, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis stepped on stage together at the 500 Club in Atlantic City. A canceled act had left a hole in the schedule. Dean was making $150 a week. Jerry about the same.

 They decided to improvise. Dean sang. Jerry made faces. The crowd lost it. Within days, they were earning $1,000 a week. By September, it was $5,000 at the Copa Cabana. Hollywood called, NBC called, Paramount offered them $50,000 per film. In 1949, My Friend  Irma hit theaters and made $3 million. They weren’t even the leads, but they stole the whole movie.

 From 1949 to 1956, Martin and Lewis made 16 films, earning Paramount over $50 million. Every release was a hit. their live shows sold out. At the Paramount Theater in New York, 4,000 fans stood outside waiting to get in. Dean made people laugh. He sang That’s Amore in the Caddy, and it hit number two on the Billboard charts for 10 weeks in 1953.

2 million copies sold. He earned his first gold record at 36. That song became his signature. But something cracked. Jerry got bigger, louder, more controlling. Dean started feeling like a sidekick. By 1952, they were earning over $1 million each per year. Their variety show, The Colgate Comedy Hour, made $40,000 an episode, but the tension grew.

 During one show in Las Vegas in 1954, Jerry accused Dean of stealing attention. Dean walked away. Jerry grabbed his shoulder and punched him in the mouth. Dean needed stitches. They still performed the next night. By 1956, it was over. On July 24th, they told the world they were splitting. Their last film, Hollywood or Bust, made $3 million. Then they were gone.

 The team that had ruled comedy for a decade, vanished in one quiet press release. When Dean Martin walked away from Jerry Lewis in 1956, most people thought he  was finished. For 10 years, he had been the laid-back straight man to Jerry’s chaos. Their split was loud, messy, and public. And everyone assumed Jerry would rise while Dean faded. But Dean didn’t fade.

Just months before the breakup, he quietly recorded a song at Capital  Records called Memories Are Made of This. It had backing vocals from the Easy Riders and was wrapped in a smooth charm only Dean could deliver. The single hit number one in January 1955 and stayed there for five straight weeks.

 By the end of the year, it had sold over 3 million copies. Dean made $100,000 in royalties from that one song alone, enough to buy his freedom and prove he didn’t need comedy to succeed. He kept building. In 1954, Sway showed he could bring a Latin rhythm into his lazy draw and still land in the top 10. Then came Inamarata in 1955, reaching number eight.

 He wasn’t belting like Sinatra or cruning like Crosby. He was doing something softer. By 1957, his album Dream with Dean sealed the deal. It sold over 500,000 copies. The arrangements were soft, the pacing slow, the delivery effortless. He wasn’t just singing  songs, he was sipping them. That relaxed sound became his brand. He wasn’t fighting for notes.

 He was making it look easy. And in lounges, in Vegas, in supper clubs from New York to Chicago, people leaned in to hear every word. Then in 1962,  Frank Sinatra offered him something bigger, his own seat at the table. Sinatra had just started Reprise Records and invited Dean to join.

 Dean’s first album there was French style, filled with playful covers of songs like Seibon. Reprise gave Dean full control over what he recorded, how it sounded, and who arranged it. By 1965, he had over 40 albums and 20 top 40 singles. His deal with Reprise was worth $1 million over 5 years. The money was big, but the freedom was bigger.

 He wasn’t Sinatra’s backup. He was his own man. In 1957, Dean headlined the Copa Cabana in New York and made $10,000 a week. That was more than Sinatra. That was more than almost anyone. And yet every night he had to sing That’s Amore. It was the song everyone knew him for. It paid him up to $50,000 per show when he included it. But he hated it.

 He hated the fake Italian lyrics.  He hated the cartoon image it gave him. He called it a joke. But he sang it anyway over 1,000 times because that song paid  for everything. for the golf, for the houses, for the life where he could choose the songs he actually loved. In August 1964, when Beetle Mania was at its peak, Dean did something unthinkable.

Everybody loves somebody. Knocked a hard day’s night off the number one spot. He only held it for a week, but that week was everything. The Beatles had ruled the charts for five weeks straight. No one saw it coming. Dean recorded the song with the Ken Lane trio and it sold over a million copies.

 It gave him his first gold record. When people asked him how it felt to beat the Beatles, Dean just smiled and said they just took a coffee break. But the cool couldn’t hide everything. In 1958, the IRS came knocking. Dean had hidden about $250,000 in foreign royalties and Swiss accounts. He got hit with a $100,000 fine, plus back taxes and penalties.

 The headlines weren’t kind, but Dean didn’t panic. He launched Dino brand cigarettes in 1959. The packaging had his silhouette. They were marketed as premium smokes, tapping into the very image that got him in trouble. He took the scandal and made it into a brand. Only Dean could do that. Then came the acting.

 In 1959,  Howard Hawks cast him in Rio Bravo as Dude, a broken down drunk deputy trying to climb out of a bottle. It was the first time Dean wasn’t playing a singer or a joke. He filmed it in old Tucson studios on scaledown sets. He sweated,  he trembled, he bled, and critics finally took him seriously. The British Film Institute called it the moment Dean Martin stopped being cool and started being human.

 The film was so good it was preserved by the National Film Registry in 2014. Then came Oceans 11 in 1960. It was shot at night in Las Vegas. During the day, Dean and the Rat Pack performed two shows. Then after midnight, they filmed. No one slept. They adlibbed entire scenes. Shirley Mlan even stole one of Dean’s nightclub lines for a drunken punchline.

 The whole thing felt like a party caught on camera. Over at the Sands Hotel,  they were making history. It was called the summit. For 3 weeks in January 1960, they packed the Copa Room with 34,000 people. Dean made it all look easy, but Joey Bishop knew the truth. Dean went home early while the others drank.

 He wanted to wake up for golf, not parties. He kept the act going in Who Was That Lady? He played a TV writer in a CIA mixup comedy. The film with Tony Curtis and Janet Lee earned Dean a Golden Globe nomination. In Kiss Me Stupid, he played a lounge singer named Dino trying to bed a housewife.

 The Catholic Legion of Decency condemned the film outright. United Artists released it through a side label just to avoid the backlash. But Dean didn’t care. He never apologized. He just kept working. In Marriage on the Rocks in 1965, he played Sinatra’s best friend in a messy marriage plot. It was their last film together for 20 years.

 Around that time, Dean’s personal life was shifting, too. His first marriage to Betty Macdonald had ended in 1949 after 9 years and four kids. He married Jean Beager that same year, just weeks after the divorce was final. They had three more children, Dean Paul Jr., Richie, and Gina. The marriage lasted 24 years, but not without cracks.

 Jean stayed faithful even after Dean’s public affairs. When they divorced in 1973, she never remarried. By the mid60s,  Dean was one of the richest entertainers alive. Back in 1951 with Jerry Lewis, they were already earning $1 million a year, more than $123 million today. But Dean wanted more than money. He wanted control.

 In 1965,  he launched the Dean Martin Show on NBC. It ran for nine seasons. By 1967, it was one of the top 10 shows on TV. NBC paid him 34 million for a three-year renewal. His contract let him skip rehearsals. He just showed up, smiled, and made it work. Apple Juice stood in for whiskey. His slurred words became part of the charm.

 People believed he was always drunk, but he wasn’t. He was acting. Richie Martin later said he used alcohol as a prop. In 1973, Dean retoled the show into the Dean Martin Comedy Hour and launched the Celebrity Roasts. The first one was Bob Hope. Then came Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, and dozens more. They taped at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

 But on November 21st, 1980, a fire tore through the hotel and killed 85 people. Production stopped for years. Dean came back to finish his contract, but the spark was gone. That same decade, Dean finally reunited with Jerry Lewis. It was Labor Day 1976 during the muscular distrophe tellathon. Frank Sinatra made it happen.

 Over 85 million people watched. It had been 20 years since they last spoke. Jerry cried. Dean smiled. Backstage. They talked quietly. Jerry apologized. Dean forgave him. Some say they spoke daily after that. Others say they didn’t. No one knows for sure. But for one night, they were a team again.

 In February 1966, Dean Martin walked into the spotlight as a retired spy named Matt Helm. And just like that, the world forgot he’d ever been part of a comedy duo. The Silencers wasn’t supposed to be this big. It was supposed to be a fun little spoof to ride the coattails of James Bond, but when it hit theaters, it pulled in $16.

3 million and made Dean the star of his own spy franchise. People loved how relaxed he was, surrounded by women like Stella Stevens and Sid Charice, cracking jokes while saving the world. It was also smooth that Colombia Pictures didn’t wait. They launched the sequel just 10 months later. Murderers Row came out in December 1966 and landed as the 11th highest grossing film of the year.

 Dean kept going. The Ambushers followed in 1967 and The Wrecking Crew in 1968 with Sharon Tate lighting up the screen in what many said was the best performance of her life. Bruce Lee trained her personally. The moves, the timing, the strength. He taught her everything. But six months after the film hit theaters on August 9th, 1969, Sharon was murdered in her home by the Manson family.

 Dean was shattered. He didn’t just lose a co-star. He lost someone he had laughed with, rehearsed with,  someone whose life had just begun. He refused to shoot the fifth Matt Helm movie. The Ravagers was already announced, already  in the works. Dean walked away. Colia Pictures punished him by freezing his profit share from Murderers Row, but he didn’t budge.

 That was the end of Matt Helm. Two years later, he stepped back into something bigger. Airport came out in 1970 and became a global sensation. made on a $10 million budget. It earned 128 million and overtook Spartacus as Universal’s biggest hit. Helen Hayes won an Oscar and the film got nine nominations, including best picture. Dean wasn’t done yet.

 In 1971, he starred in Something Big, playing a reckless outlaw who kidnaps a woman just to trade her for a gatling gun. It was wild and loud and filmed down in Durango, Mexico. It was also the last time Dean would take the lead in a major movie. He was done chasing headlines. The pressure, the hours, the grind. He traded it all for television specials and fast, easy cameos that paid well and didn’t ask much.

 Throughout the 1970s, Dean found new life on TV. The Dean Martin Show shifted in 1973 into something looser, something funnier, a weekly roast. It started with Bob Hope and didn’t stop for a decade. 54 celebrities got roasted week after week, mostly from the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. It was easy. It was light. It was Dean’s pace.

 In the middle of this second wave of fame, something unexpected happened. On April 25th, 1973, right after divorcing Johnny Beager, Dean married Katherine Horn. She was 23. He was 57. They met through a friend at a Beverly Hills hair salon. The wedding was held in Dean’s Bair home and later moved to the Beverly Hills Hotel. He adopted her daughter Sasha.

Tried to make it work, but it lasted only 3 years. On November 10th, 1976, they quietly divorced. His personal life was never simple. He had eight children from three marriages, and his bond with his son Dean Paul Martin ran deep. Dino Jr., as the world called him, was born on November 17th, 1951. And in 1979, he made headlines by starring in the movie Players with Ali McGra.

 He even got nominated for a Golden Globe. But acting wasn’t his only passion. On November 5th, 1980,  he joined the Air Force. He trained as a fighter pilot and earned his way into the California Air National Guard. People who flew with him said he was one of the best, calm, sharp, in control. Dean was proud, not because his son was famous, but because he was decent, honest, good.

 But on March 21st, 1987, everything collapsed. Dino took off from March Air Force Base in an F4C Phantom Jet for a routine flight. A snowstorm came in fast. Visibility vanished. Radar showed the plane at 19300 ft. Seconds later, it dropped 4,000 ft and slammed into Mount San Gorgonio at 400 mph. Dino and his weapons officer, Ramon Ortiz, died on impact.

 It took six days to find the wreckage. Dean never recovered. His show persona, that boozy swagger, had always been just apple juice in a glass. But after Dino’s death, it wasn’t an act anymore. He started drinking for real. He canceled shows. He disappeared. His heart broke and never healed. A year later, in March 1988, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

 invited Dean to join them on tour. They called  it Together Again. It kicked off in Oakland to Fortune 5500 fans, but Dean only lasted a week. He couldn’t do it. The crowds, the travel, the laughter. It felt hollow. He left the tour. Publicly, they said he was sick. Privately, it was grief.

 His replacement, Liza Minnelli, stepped in and the show was renamed The Ultimate Event. But Dean was gone. The drinking got worse. His health crumbled. He had emphyma from six decades  of smoking. By the early 1990s, he barely left the house. In 1993, doctors told him he had lung cancer. The tumors were spreading.

 They urged him to get surgery on his kidneys and liver. It could buy him time, maybe even years. But Dean refused. He didn’t want surgery. He didn’t want chemo. He had already made peace with death. Friends begged. Sinatra begged. But Dean just kept saying the same thing. I’m just waiting to die. He quit smoking that year, but it was too late.

 His body had already given up. He stayed home, stayed quiet. When people visited, he smiled politely. But he didn’t fight. On December 25th, 1995, at 3:30 in the morning, Dean Martin died in his Beverly Hills home from acute respiratory failure. He was 78 years old. The Las Vegas strip dimmed its lights in his honor. Sinatra called him a brother.

Jerry Lewis, who had once been closer to Dean than anyone in the world, was on tour when he got the news and broke down crying. Dean’s funeral was held privately at Goodshipeperd Catholic Church. Around 200 people came. >> This is after Dean died. You said, you went to his Dean’s  funeral and you spoke at Dean’s funeral.

 And after he passed away, you said, “I lost my partner and best friend, the man who made me the man I am today.” >> Gregory Peek, Tony Bennett, Jerry Lewis stood up and told the world what the press had never  said right. That Dean was more than cool. He was kind. He was strong. And he never needed to prove it.

 After his death, stories surfaced about how smart he really was. Everyone had thought Dean Martin just drifted through life, drinking hand, jokes on queue. But then they found out about the Las Vegas  real estate empire. Land he bought for $150,000 in the 1960s sold for over $12 million in the 1990s. His estate was valued at $30 million.

His Beverly Hills mansion, bought for $120,000, was later worth nearly $28 million. His daughter, Dena, cried when she realized how carefully he had built it all. Dean had played the long game quietly without fanfare. And that apple juice thing, it was true. Jerry Lewis finally confirmed it.

 All those years on TV, people thought he was sloshed. But most nights, it was just juice. He pretended to be drunk to get a laugh, to let others loosen up. But the real Dean was always a few steps ahead.