Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams Book

Only a handful of showbiz biographers can lay claim to posessing the literary acumen of writers like Michael Holroyd and Peter Ackroyd. Nick Tosches is one of these writers, and his unauthorized biography of Dean Martin stands as a testament to his genius. Several inimitable sequences in which Tosches adopts his subject's perspective (most of which are regrettably unsuitable for quotation here) make the book a real standout. Dino is a fascinating portrait of a man who had it all--money, fame, women--and didn't give a damn about any of it and suggests that, even as he wallowed in the excesses of Hollywood and the Rat Pack, Martin stayed critically aloof from that world, albeit often in a booze-and-pill-addled haze. He got into showbiz precisely because it required so little effort of him: "I can't stand an actor or actress who tells me acting is hard work," he once said. "It's easy work. Anyone who says it is hard never had to stand on his feet all day dealing blackjack." Nobody could impress Martin. While Frank Sinatra would do anything just to hang out with reputed Mafioso, the Mob would have to make special trips to ask Martin in person to play a show at one of their casinos. Tosches' portrait, written only a few years before Martin's death in 1996, depicts its subject as nothing so much as a Zen master without the spiritual anchor; after sampling everything that life had to offer and finding it lacking, Martin spent the last years of his life waiting to die in virtual seclusion.Read More

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  • Product Description

    This biography of the 'fifties superstar Dean Martin takes an irreverent inside look at American entertainment from the 1930s to the 1980s. It examines the underworld secrets, the hidden regions of the American dream racket and the despair of a man driven into his own shadow by fame. There is also material on Sinatra, Monroe, Jerry Lewis, and the Hollywood / White House connection. By the author of "Hellfire", a biography of Jerry Lee Lewis.

  • 0436532026
  • 9780436532023
  • Nick Tosches
  • 9 November 1992
  • Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 404
  • 1st Edition
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