Word: dino
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ANYONE EVER CARE LESS about being in show business than Dean Martin? Singing, acting, hosting a TV program, headlining in Las Vegas--these were just things people paid Dino to do when he wasn't on the links. His old partner Jerry Lewis said that in preparing for their '50s TV show, "we had this great arrangement: he played golf and I worked." There, and in movies, and on the long-running Dean Martin Show, the drill was the same. He would show up when the camera had to roll. Rehearsal was for wimps. To practice meant you cared...
...start, he was a traditional crooner who learned intonation from Crosby and salesmanship from Jolson. Yet there was a hint in his gestures (eyes closed in ecstasy, arms stretched out imploringly) that he was parodying the very idea of crooner; he was a mellow modernist. You could also peg Dino as an anachronism, a Joe E. Lewis saloon-lush type, the party animal in a tux. Or maybe he was the first slacker, elevating sloth to a Zen art. The stupefaction he radiated on his TV show--the Golddiggers dancing around him as wildly as Jer used to, Dean standing...
...Dino Paul Crocetti stumbled into eminence. Born in Steubenville, Ohio, he left school in the 10th grade, boxed for a while, dealt cards at the local gaming houses, sang a little. His progress was slow until he met Lewis, then just 20. "I was in love with him immediately," Lewis said in a 1992 TV retrospective of their partnership. What Lewis saw in Martin was the first sexpot straight man, a perfect complement to Jer's goony girly-boy. The two clicked immediately...
After that, Dino coasted. He became a Southerner on record, with countrified hits like Everybody Loves Somebody and Houston, and a Westerner onscreen--he loved to sit on a horse and ride to Nogales, or nowhere. Perhaps nowhere was his chosen destination. To Nick Tosches, his biographer, Martin was a nihilist hero. Instead of seeing mankind surrounded by a void, Tosches argued, Dino found the void within himself, and called it home...
...slightest change in conditions. That, according to some experts, could explain why the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. According to this notion, the popular theory that the cause was a comet crash is only half right: the comet did crash, but its effect was to destabilize dino behavior, rendering the creatures unable to compete with mammals, those hairy little animals with big ambitions. This is just the sort of behavioral disruption (induced by disease rather than a comet impact) that leads to a disintegration of the dino social structure in The Lost World. It gives the book...