Excerpt from My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir
Shirley Maclaine on Dean Martin [the second movie she did was with them – Artists and Models – Martin and Lewis were in the process of breaking up at that point, so there was much tension on the set, etc. Shirley befriended both of these guys in different ways – but she and Dean remained dear and close friends until the day he died.]
Getting to know Dean was another story [than getting to know Jerry]. The words that come to mind are those that describe a person cut off from feeling – purposefully cut off. Perhaps that was why he seemed so devil-may-care and so coolly casual. The Italians, I later learned, had a more apt word for it, menefreghista, which means “one who does not give a fuck.” Dean Martin was basically a menefreghista.
He was so witty because of the way he saw the world. If he did a routine about the President announcing a nuclear attack, the focus of his humor would be the tie the President wore or how he, Dean, couldn’t open his refrigerator door as he was listening to such a momentous speech. I remember once he called me about something, and the entire conversation was about the telephone wire he couldn’t locate under his sofa. I was in tears of laughter.
