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in history — not of star-crossed lovers but of a comedy team. MARTIN & LEWIS Premiering in 1953, The Caddy was the 10th of 17 movies that the team of Martin and Lewis made over their 10 remarkable years together. Their act had started on stage seven years earlier, based — like many comedy acts — on the premise that the duo made an unlikely pair. Martin, nearly 10 years Lewis’ senior, was the child of Italian immigrants from Steubenville, Ohio. He quit school in 10th grade during the Depression. Before he began singing professionally, he worked in a steel mill, dealt cards, ran whiskey and fought as a welterweight boxer. The gangly, rubber-faced Lewis was the New Jersey son of vaudeville performers. Like Martin, he came from an immigrant family, and like Martin, part of his process of Americanization included adopting a new stage name. (Martin was born Dino Paul Crocetti; Lewis was Joseph Levitch.) When they met, Lewis’ act was mainly performing funny lip-synching routines to popular records. They struck up a friend- ship and started goofing around at each other’s shows — Lewis might show up dressed like a busboy during Martin’s act, dropping dishes everywhere. Their first date as an actual comedy team was in Atlantic City in the summer of 1946. It didn’t take long for the performers to click. The manic nightclub show found an audience with a post-war America looking to let its hair down and order another round. Martin played the straight man; comic bits often revolved around Lewis conducting the orchestra behind Martin, making grotesque faces behind the debonair older crooner. Lewis would later say, “I thought, my God, there hasn’t been a comedy team where one is a handsome man and the other a monkey.” Martin and Lewis next helped to pioneer comedy on television when they took a cleaned-up version of their act to Ed Sulli- van’s first show, Toast of the Town , in 1948. They made their first movie the following year. It was a remarkable merging of two great currents in American entertainment: Italian-inflected popular music and Jewish comedy. Martin embodied what writer Mark Rotella, in his affectionate book Amore: The Story of Italian American Song , identified as la sprezzatura , a centuries- old Italian practice of making hard work look easy. Martin, drink in hand (on stage it was usually apple juice), nonchalantly crooning about love and pizza, was pure

la sprezzatura. And for the 10 years they were together, it was Lewis’ job to litter Martin’s path with banana peels, while slipping on many of them himself. Accounts differ on just how “That’s Amore” came to Dean Martin. “We just gave him a song to sing, he’d look it over and start to sing,” one Capitol Records executive told Dean Martin biographer Michael Freedland. But years after Dean Martin’s death, Jerry Lewis took credit for

appeared, newspapers announced that “Pizza popularity in America is at an all-time high!” — in part due to returning soldiers hungry for the food they’d enjoyed while stationed in Italy. The other dish referenced in Warren and Brooks’ song — pasta e fagioli or “pasta fazool” — might have been chosen for the rhyme with “drool,” but the meal would also play a special part in Dean Martin’s own family. His daughter, Deana

the idea, saying he’d noticed his partner was getting restless in the act, and he thought a hit song might help. “So I went to the great Harry Warren, the Oscar- winning writer of such songs as ‘42nd Street,’ ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby’ and ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo,’ and his lyricist Jack Brooks, and paid them $30,000 out of my own pocket,” Lewis wrote in his autobiography. “I didn’t want Dean to know I hired them, and I never told him. But I knew that Harry Warren could write hits, and I said to Harry, ‘I want a hit for Dean.’ And he wrote one.” Although Brooks, born in Liverpool, is credited as lyricist, it seems more than likely that Warren was responsible for some of the song’s evocations of Italian food and romance. Growing up in Brooklyn as Salvatore Antonio Guaragna (his father was an Italian bootmaker), Warren would have been served pizza long before much of America discov- ered the dish. By the time “That’s Amore”

Martin, recalled in her memoir how her grandmother taught her to make Dean’s favorite: “I remember vividly her taking me into the kitchen and tying an apron around me,” she wrote. “‘I’m going to teach you something very special, Deana — your father’s favorite dish, which was given to me by my grandmother,’ she told me. ‘I’m not going to write it down. You’ll have to remember it and the secret ingre- dient, and you must not tell anyone, not even your sisters. One day, when I’m gone, you can make it for your Dad and you will make him very happy.’” Despite this family culinary connection — and despite “That’s Amore” becoming his first million-selling record — Dean Martin didn’t care much for the song, at least at first. Maybe the jokey references to his Italian heritage rubbed him the wrong way — after all, this was a kid whose first language was Italian, and who was beaten up by other kids in school for his halting English. But joking about such

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