Posted on 11/11/2004 1:20:04 PM PST by Sybeck1
I ran across this picture and well considering Frank Sinatra was a democrat, I thought Dino was too.
Are you sure about Lawford? He married into the Kennedy clan.
A lot of old Hollywooders were moved by the Camelot facade of Kennedy. Once the fairy tale myth was passed, and ideas became important, they pulled a Reagan and went pub.
But it's also true that Kennedy's rats were not the same as Carter's rats.
Dino is a personal role model of mine and I have actually patterned my own personal style after his. A cool aloofness & detatchment, and an exceedingly strong sense of privacy, and a good sense of humor about life's ups and downs (and oneself) has suited me very well. I credit Dino for that personal influence on my personality.
His politics aren't well known, I don't think. He did campaign for Jack Kennedy in 1960, but my understanding was that it was more out of loyalty to his pal Sinatra - who was much more of a Kennedy booster - rather than any strong personal political statement.
Dean was very old-world in many ways. The boozing was largely an act (though he was drinking and eating to excess late in life). It's said he knelt down before bed every day and said his prayers. He was an incredible family man - he had children with his first wife, and many children with his second wife, Jeannie, widely regarded as the true love of his life.
He had more than just a wandering eye - he loved women and had numerous flings and affairs. That's neither conservative nor liberal, I suppose.
He loved his children immensely - when his son was killed in a plane accident, Dino was never really the same and it started .
My gut tells me that he probably wasn't all that political. He probably had an old-world italian outlook on things - strong sense of family and especially loyalty, though not so much that would keep him from indulging in flings with attractive young women (he was even married to a woman in her young 20s late in his life, though it didn't last long). He probably had a live and let live attitude in a variety of things, but by the same token probably had great respect for society's traditions and conventions to a large extent.
The answer is 'I don't know what his politics were,' but my feeling is that he had what we would consider in 2004 a strong natural conservative instinct, but probably wouldn't be too overboard on any issue. I'd guess he would be a conservative leaning moderate who would probably not like flargant departures from tradition and western culture - same sex marriage, for instance.
Sinatra later in life was a Reagan man. Jerry Lewis, Dean's partner for many years, is pretty liberal, I think, as well as delusional. He recently 'confessed' to a torrid sexual affair with Marilyn Monroe, for example, which crosses well over into the delusional.
Just my gut. I don't think Dean would be a big conservative, though I am farily certain that given the focus and fixation of the highest profile liberal causes in 2004, he wouldn't be aligned very rightly with them at all, either.
Then, as now, too many uninformed people accept what the Dems say at face value without exploring the background behind the party--especially the people who contribute, mobilize for, and control the party's national leadership. For example, very few guys on the line who get the shop steward's voter guides understand how radicalized the leadership of their party--and their union--is.
Many people writing at FR are of the mistaken opinion that the Democrat party wasn't radicalized until late in the 60's. This is false. If you look at FDR's advisers, you will find a continuous thread between the Lefties, Socialists, Progressives, and fellow travelers of the 1930's and their children in the 1950's and 60's. One difference is that some (but not all) were anticommunists. The class warfare and identity politics of the Democrat party began seriously, though, with the New Deal.
One of the reasons the Dems are now talking about "talking about values" is that they realize just talking the talk is enough to keep literally millions of people on board. It has been doing so since 1932.
There's a book available that collects letters written to and by Ronald Reagan. There are several from Sinatra, and his support for the President was deep. I'll have to look and see if there's anything in there from Dean Martin.
That's just it. It would be wrong to compare a 1950's Dem to a 2004 Dem. The 60's took the Democratic Party to an unrecognizable place. Heck, even Reagan was a Democrat until the party was hijacked by the hard left.
Kirk Douglas a Republican? I dont think so, I saw him and his son Michael Douglas on TV a few years back after he had his stroke, and he didnt sound very Republican to me.
The Rat Pack campaigned for Kennedy back in 1960. If Dean was a Repub he must have knuckled under to the Chairman during the Kennedy campaign.
Just try to take away his gun....heck, his kind of Democrat then would be a solid red-stater today
He refused once to stay at Sinatras house because Sinatra was a Democrat, so the story goes. So he decided to stay at Crosby's house because he was a Republican. I could be extrapolating a bit here, but he could be a pubbie.
I just consulted the book Reagan: A Life in Letters, and there was a single entry about Mr. Martin. He and Sinatra both performed at a 1979 fundraiser for then-candidate Reagan. Reagan was writing a letter to a woman who was disappointed that high ticket prices kept her from the show. :)
It's a great picture, I have it up in my house (because my son is named Dean Reagan, after Dean Martin and Ronald Reagan, so there ya go).
The picture is from a Dean Martin celebrity roast. Reagan was the subject of one and participated in others. The two were good friends.
Lawford was a Republican? Wasn't he JFK's Brother-in-law?
And my favorite actor. I have almost his complete movie collection. I've seen them all many times, and still manage to watch a random Duke film once a week or so.
My favorite video of Dino is an old Johnny carson tape where he's dropping cigarette ashes in George Gobel's water glass when George wasn't looking
I could be extrapolating.
http://www.app.com/app/story/0,21625,1089325,00.html
"A drink never hurt nobody. You're not drunk if you can lay on the floor without holding on."
Dean Martin, the Copa Room, the Sands Hotel, 1963
The Rat Pack came undone in 1967, when Sinatra broke his contract with the Sands over a dispute about his line of credit at the casino.
Martin -- always a man with his own mind -- chose not to follow the Leader.
When Davis returned to Vegas in the late '60s following a stint in New York and London with the musical "Golden Boy," he also elected to say bye-bye to the Sands, the onetime Rat Pack headquarters.
Bishop would turn his attention to his late-night talk show, after the successful run of his sitcom, "The Joey Bishop Show."
Lawford would be ex-communicated by Sinatra after the singer was snubbed by Lawford's brother-in-law, the president, by choosing to stay at the Palm Springs home of Bing Crosby, a Republican, rather than at the compound of Sinatra, a lifelong Democrat. In the spring of 1962, JFK's brother, Robert, then the Attorney General, persuaded the president to dump Sinatra because of the singer's friendships with organized-crime figures, even though Sinatra had been asked to use his influence to secure the labor unions' endorsement in the 1960 presidential election.
President Kennedy himself would be shot dead by a Dallas sniper in 1963; besides plunging the nation into grief, the event marked the end of an age of innocence and set the stage for a new era of entertainment dominated by The Beatles and other British rock groups.
Lawford died in 1984.
Dean Martin was apolitical. He was always astute enough to know that getting involved in it was bad for business. I read in Tosches' biography "Dino" that Martin distanced himself from the Rat Pack's JFK political shenanigans, even telling Sinatra outright that his "JFK is my buddy" pretensions would amount to nothing, which they did. I was even surprised to read that Martin sold all his casino interests in the early '60s, before Kennedy was elected, because he suspected that Kennedy would conduct a shake-down, which his brother RFK eventually did. Martin walked away unscathed, while Sinatra and his Mafia partners took a financial bath under the auspices of the RFK Justice Department.
Martin was always the one with the REAL brains. Better, brighter, more multi-talented, and more shrewd businesswise, than all the rest of his temporary partners put together, including Lewis and Sinatra. This man was a titan! Definitely the "King of Cool"
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