Dean and Me: A Love Story Read Online Free PDF

over the following ten years, he would tell me and very few others. No, he wasn’t a drunk or a buffoon, as many thought. He was as sharp as a shit-house rat, and he understood every move he ever made (and every move everybody else made). But he loved playacting. That’s how he became the actor he was in films like
Some Came Running
and
Rio Bravo
. I learned a great shtick from Dean early on: If you make believe you’ve had a few, or you look like you’ve misplaced your wallet, usually people will stay away. And he did it like a champ. . . .One hour to showtime, we’re waiting in the alley outside the club, and my stomach is doing the aria from Figaro. Dean shows such nerves . . . as he yawns and lights up another Camel.

    How’d they get rid of the numbers?
    Who could have thought—as we stood in that alley with the smells from the kitchen, the cats going up and down, the one folding chair between us—who could have thought that in four and a half hours, we would have changed the face of American show business? Certainly not us.
    Restless, we walked around to the club’s main entrance and went inside for a drink. The 500 Club’s bar was huge, running from the front of the house all the way back to the maître d’s desk at the entry to the showroom. In order to sit down, you had to grease some palms. Once again, the bills came out of Dean’s pocket, and we sat.
    “Give me a Chivas Regal, water back,” Dean told the bartender.
    What the hell is that,
I wondered—
a dog?
Meanwhile, the bartender was looking at me, waiting. I finally decided . . . here goes nothing. “Give me the same, Coke back,” I said.
    Dean watched me as I got the drink. I picked up the Coke first.
    “Have you ever done this before?” he asked.
    “Done?” I said, sipping my Coke.
    “Imbibing. Boozing. Drinking. Ever do it before?”
    “Well, not exactly. . . . Well, on Passover. . . .”
    Dean smiled and said, “Okay, just take it easy.”
    A half hour to showtime. We went outside the showroom, and I showed Dean where we were supposed to dress. He put his hands on his hips. “It
is
a fuckin’ folding chair!” he said.
    I paced back and forth for a few minutes, then walked into the showroom to see what was up. My heart sank. It was worse than it had been the other night, when I’d played to seven people. Now there were six. I decided not to tell Dean. I walked over to the lighting guy and said, “Please keep the brights down—we’d be better off not seeing who we’re playing to!”
    I ran back to our folding chair and got my blue suit on. Dean was sitting on the chair, napping. I had to wake him to remind him that once I went on, he had only seventeen minutes to get ready.
    I was the opening act. I went out and did my pantomimicry, and came off to polite applause from the audience, which had now swelled to maybe eleven people. (As usual, there were two or three customers doubled over with laughter; the rest smiled now and then.) Dean went on next. He did his four numbers—I remember “Where or When,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “I’ve Got the Sun in the Morning (and the Moon at Night),” and “Oh, Marie.”
    I stood in the wings, mesmerized, as he performed. He really was an amazing singer, warm and direct, with a way around a romantic tune that got to women where they lived. But the funny thing was, Dean didn’t seem to understand his own power. Some part of him was always standing back, making fun of what he did. He wasn’t yet at the point where he would stop a number to make a wisecrack (and very often, get lost in the process—that’s where the drunk act eventually came in handy), but occasionally you could see in his eyes, as he sang, that he just couldn’t take the song seriously. And he had a way of making little self-deprecating remarks between songs, almost under his breath, remarks that if you listened—and I sure did—were killer-funny. But they were throwaway, as much of his singing itself was. There