American icon Dean Martin was an embodiment of cool, from the highballs he drank to the fast-paced crowd he kept up with as part of the legendary Rat Pack. Dean Martin, born Dino Paul Crocetti in 1917 in Steubenville, Ohio, was the son of Italian immigrants who spoke only Italian until age five. Already a rebel at 16, Martin dropped out of school to work in the steel mills before becoming a boxer known as Kid Crochet and delivering bootleg liquor. By the time bandleader Sammy Watkins hired him, Martin had dropped the "i" from the name he christened himself, Dean Martini, had a nose job, and modeled his act after legendary crooner Bing Crosby. Martin became a fixture in the New York club circuit but entertained only moderate success until releasing his first single, "Which Way Did My Heart Go?" around the same time he met and began performing with comedian Jerry Lewis. The duo became wildly popular and released their film debut My Friend Irma, which catapulted them into stardom throughout the early 1950s.When Lewis and Martin parted ways in 1956, critics did not predict a thriving solo career for Dean Martin, but he proved them wrong with the success of the 1958 drama The Young Lions alongside Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando and the NBC color special The Dean Martin Show. The elusive celebrity was part of the Rat Pack along with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. by the late 1950s and began to exhibit the now-famous traits of the Pack such as drinking, smoking, spending and exerting power over the industry and even politics. The early 1960s ushered a new age, from the Beatles to Vietnam, that pushed most of the Rat Pack out of the limelight, yet Martin managed to make hits with single "Everybody Loves Somebody" and NBC weekly variety series "The Dean Martin Show." The following two decades saw Martin's health failing and star dimming; Martin's son Dean Paul was killed in a tragic airplane crash that the legend never recovered from, and Martin spent the years up to his 1995 Christmas Day death in solitude.
