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things was a mainstay of the act. Martin never explained his reasons, whatever they were. Two performances of “That’s Amore” just a few months apart offer perhaps the best indication of Martin’s conflicted reaction to the song and the role it played in the history of Martin and Lewis. The first broadcast was in late 1953, when “That’s Amore” was just hitting the charts. Martin is the picture of la sprezzatura, smiling easily and gesturing to his audience as if he’s a maitre’d at the world’s coolest Italian cafe. At the end of that song, he calls Lewis out to the stage. “You know what you’re going to do for me now,” Martin tells Lewis. “You’re going to conduct the band.” Lewis dances around in excitement. “What number, Dean?” he asks eagerly. “Do you happen to know what kind of number it is?” Martin asks, just as eagerly. “No.” “Italian.” “It figures." Martin then launches into the Tony Martin hit recording “There’s No Tomorrow,” based on the 19th-century Neapolitan song “O Sole Mio,” with Lewis creating chaos behind him, landing with a crash in the orchestra’s woodwinds, then getting back up to cry out, “Get your pizzas here!” By song’s end, the two partners collapse in each other’s arms, the fitting end of a letter-perfect routine. Things are not so harmonious the following year on the same program. After presenting Martin with a gold record for “That’s Amore,” Lewis bursts in

unannounced while Martin is performing the song. “You can stop warming up now,” Lewis squeaks. The bit soon goes off the rails. While Martin sings, Lewis waves stacks of cash at the camera operators so they will wheel their rigs right up into Martin’s face. By the end, Martin is pinned by a circle of cameras with Lewis on top of him, slapping him in the head and shouting, “I’ve conquered him! All mine!” “You’re overacting, Jerry!” shouts Martin at one point, breaking character with momentary fury as Lewis grabs his thick hair and boxes him in the ears. It would be two years before the final dissolution of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’ lucrative comedy partnership — as well as their friendship — but the dynamics behind the breakup were all starkly visible and right on stage, played out for a televi- sion audience as Martin tried to sing about the moon and Napoli. MOONSTRUCK For the next 40 years, Dean Martin contin- ued to perform “That’s Amore” as one of his signature songs. In 1988, Frank Sinatra, hoping to revive Martin’s spirits following a tragic plane crash that killed Martin’s son, launched a “Together Again” tour. Martin only performed six shows before quitting the tour, but he always closed his sets with “That’s Amore.” At the show in Oakland, California, he introduced the song with a joke: “Here’s a song that started me and I hope it don’t finish me.” “That’s Amore” would also enjoy a varied life beyond Dean Martin, including in movies. Most prominently, the song opened the 1987 comedy Moonstruck ,

establishing the movie’s setting in an Italian-American community in Brooklyn Heights, New York. “That’s Amore” also showed up in the Disney movie Enchanted , where it was used, not surprisingly, in a pizza parlor scene. Perhaps the most unexpected appearance was in Alfred Hitchock’s 1954 voyeuristic thriller Rear Window , where it can be heard while Jimmy Stewart gazes into the window of neighboring newlyweds. The self-parody that is baked into “That’s Amore” can be heard in other versions, from a typically frantic, circa- 1950s Spike Jones performance to a polka version warbled by John C. Reilly in the 2007 comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story . It has been a particular favorite in the animated television show The Simpsons , where it’s been sung by a gondola operator as well as by Homer Simpson himself, while playing “chair gondola” in his workplace. Dean Martin’s original version shows up in a memorable show-opening “couch gag” about Homer Simpson’s undying love for his own couch. In her memoir, Deana Martin describes the most unforgettable performance of her father’s hit song. In 2002, the state of Ohio declared that Dean Martin’s birthday, June 7, should be “Dean Martin Day.” When the resolution came to the state’s House of Representatives, lyrics were passed around the chambers. After the bill passed, the entire body stood up, and voices joined to sing of the old country, of pizza pie and pasta fazool, and of the Italian ways of love.

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