A Critic Destroyed Dean Martin in Public — The Letter Dean Wrote Three Days Later Changed Everything

A Critic Destroyed Dean Martin in Public — The Letter Dean Wrote Three Days Later Changed Everything

Los Angeles, California. February 14th, 1967. 8:52  p.m. Arthur Crane was 3 minutes into his remarks when he said the word. The word was fraud. He used it with the specific precision of a man who had chosen it in advance and was deploying it with the full awareness of its weight and of the room in which he was deploying it.

 He was standing at the podium of the Beverly Hilton Hotel’s main ballroom, where the Television Press Association was holding its annual dinner. And the 200 people seated at the white tablecloth tables before him included most of the people who wrote about American television professionally, most of the people who made American television professionally, and one person who, by the accounting of Arthur Crane’s prepared remarks, represented everything that was wrong with what American television had become.

 That person was seated at table seven. Arthur Crane was 45 years old. He was the senior television critic for the Los Angeles Examiner, a position he had held for 11 years and that he had understood across those 11 years to carry a specific obligation. The obligation to say the true thing about the medium, even when the medium and the people who produced it and the people who watched it did not want to hear the true thing.

The true thing, as Arthur Crane had assembled it across the second year of the Dean Martin Variety Show’s run, was this. The show was a fraud, not a fraud in the legal sense, not dishonest in any provable way. A fraud in the deeper sense, the cultural sense. The ease that Dean Martin projected on the screen, the nonchalance, the half-prepared songs, the glass in his hand, the amused detachment from everything the variety format was doing around him.

 This was not ease, it was the performance of ease. The drinking was a character. The lack of preparation was a choice, which meant it was as prepared as anything else on the show. The whole construction was a carefully manufactured product designed to appear as though it had not been manufactured.

 And the audience, 40 million people on Thursday nights, the largest television audience in America, was receiving a performance of spontaneity and being told it was the real thing. This, Arthur Crane had decided, required saying in public. And Dean Martin was in the room. Before I tell you what happened in the 48 hours after Arthur Crane said the word fraud into a microphone in front of 200 people with Dean Martin seated at table seven.

And why what Dean Martin did has surprised everyone who has heard the story in the 50 years since. If you have ever been called something in public that was partially true and entirely wrong, subscribe to this channel right now. This is what we do here. And hit that like button for the response that arrived three days later in an envelope at the Los Angeles Examiner addressed to Arthur Crane, signed not with a famous name but with a nickname that belonged to a boy from Steubenville, Ohio.

 Now, back to the Beverly Hilton, February 14th, 1967. Arthur Crane is at the podium and the word has been said. The Television Press Association annual dinner was, in 1967, the closest thing the television industry had to a formal reckoning with itself. It was not the Emmy Awards, which were about celebrating what the industry had done.

 It was a gathering of the people whose professional function was to examine what the industry had done and say, in print, what they thought about it. Critics, feature writers, television editors from newspapers across the country, people who had spent the past 12 months watching American television and forming opinions about it and publishing those opinions and then coming to this room once a year to sit with the people they wrote about and hear from someone at the podium about the state of things.

 Arthur Crane had been asked to give this year’s keynote. He had spent three weeks writing it. The three weeks produced something that was by the standard of television criticism in 1967 unusually pointed, a direct argument that the medium was retreating from the promise of its early years, that the industry had discovered that ease and spectacle and the comfortable pleasures of unchallenging entertainment produced better ratings than ambition and that the most commercially successful show on American television was the most

complete expression of this retreat. He had written around Dean Martin’s name for most of the draft. He had used it initially as an example. The show, the ratings, the cultural implications of 40 million people choosing this on Thursday nights. But as the draft developed, the name had become central rather than peripheral and by the final version the argument had become inescapably about a specific man rather than a general trend.

 He had known Dean Martin would be in the room. He had decided to give the remarks anyway. This was not courage, exactly. It was the specific determination of a man who had written the thing and believed the thing and had been asked to say the thing in public and who understood that changing the thing because the subject of the thing was going to be in the room would be the specific variety of dishonesty that critics should not practice.

 He gave the remarks. At table seven, Dean Martin was eating when the remarks began. He had come to the dinner with Phil Barker and two members of his television production team. He had not been told specifically that he was the subject of the keynote. He had been told that Crane was speaking, which was information that carried implications that anyone in the room could calculate because Arthur Crane’s position on the Dean Martin Variety Show had been expressed in print across the previous year with the specific consistent clarity of someone who had

made up his mind and was not going to unmake it. He had come anyway. This was his own decision. Phil had raised the question of whether the dinner was the right event given Crane’s anticipated remarks and Dean had said he had accepted the invitation and he would go. Phil had made the note in the small notebook he carried and had not raised the question again.

 When the remarks began, Dean set down his fork. He did not fold his arms. He did not look at his plate. He did not develop the expression of a man managing the reception of something unpleasant. He looked at the podium. He listened. Crane’s remarks were precise. They were built on specific examples, episodes he had watched, moments he had analyzed, the architecture of the show’s apparent effortlessness.

 He made the argument that the appearance of not trying was itself a form of trying, that the glass in Dean Martin’s hand was a prop rather than a drink, that the half-remembered lyrics were a rehearsed effect rather than an authentic moment. He made the case for fraud with the specific careful construction of a man who had thought about it for 3 weeks and was deploying it in the room most likely to receive it as credible.

 He used the word several times, fraud, the performance of spontaneity, manufactured ease. The 200 people in the ballroom were doing what 200 people do when something unexpected is happening at a podium, the specific divided attention of people who are watching the speaker and watching table seven simultaneously, reading both without being able to read either completely.

 Dean Martin sat at table seven and listened. His expression across the full 12 minutes of the remarks did not change in any way that could be measured. He listened to the end. When Crane finished and the room produced the specific complicated applause of people who have heard something and are not entirely certain what they think of it.

 Dean Martin put his fork back on the plate and resumed eating. The dinner continued. The formal program moved on. Other people spoke. The room reorganized itself from the formal posture of an audience toward the informal posture of an industry gathering at the end of its official portion and the white tablecloth tables became the sites of the conversations that actually constituted the event.

Phil Barker was watching table seven and watching Arthur Crane’s table simultaneously. Crane was standing near the podium talking to the Television Press Association’s president when he became aware that someone had come to stand beside him. He turned. Dean Martin was standing beside him. This required on Crane’s part a very rapid reorganization of what he had prepared for this moment because what he had prepared for was the specific variety of confrontation that public criticism of famous people generally produced, the

defensive anger, the publicist intervention, the exit from the building. He had not prepared for Dean Martin standing beside him with the expression of someone who has just had an unremarkable conversation and is ready for the next one. Dean said, “Good remarks.” Crane said nothing for a moment.

 Dean said, “I want to ask you something.” Crane waited. “Have you ever talked to anyone who watches the show?” Dean said, “About why they watch.” Crane said that he had some sense of what the audience received from the show. Dean said, “Not what they receive, why they watch. The specific reason, their own words.

 Crane said that audience research was not the province of a critic. Dean looked at him. “No,” Dean said, “I know it isn’t.” He said it without irony, without implication, simply a statement of fact that audience research was not the province of a critic and that Dean knew this. “I think,” Dean said, “that would be an interesting conversation to have with the people who watch.

 I think you might find something surprising in it.” Crane said something about the show’s cultural implications being separable from its audience’s reasons for watching. Dean nodded. “Probably,” he said, “that’s probably right.” He said good night. He walked back to table seven. Phil Barker, watching from a distance, noted in the small notebook the time at which Dean had gone to speak to Crane and the time at which he returned to the table.

The conversation had lasted 4 minutes. The letter arrived at the Los Angeles Examiner on February 17th. It was addressed to Arthur Crane by name on plain white paper in handwriting that was clearly personal rather than dictated. There was no return address on the envelope. Inside were two pages. Crane would describe the experience of reading the letter many times over the following decades in different contexts and with different degrees of willingness.

What he described consistently was the specific quality of surprise. Not the surprise of content, but the surprise of register. The letter was not what he had expected from the man he had called a fraud 3 days earlier in a ballroom in front of 200 people. He expected, at best, a formal response drafted by someone in public relations.

 He expected, perhaps, a pointed rebuttal of the fraud argument, a defense of the show’s construction, an enumeration of its intentional elements and their purpose. What arrived was neither of these. The letter began with a question, not Dean Martin’s question from the ballroom, a different question, a larger one.

The question was, what does a man owe the people who worked all day? Not what television owes them, not what the entertainment industry owes them, what a man owes them. The specific human transaction, the exchange between a person on the stage and the people in the chairs. Dean wrote about his father. Gaetano Crocetti had been a barber in Steubenville, Ohio for 30 years.

 He had stood at the chair for 10 hours a day, six days a week, cutting hair and talking to the men who came in and who were, in the main, men who worked the mills and the shops and the streets of a small Ohio city and who came to the barber’s chair as one of the few places in their days where someone would talk to them without wanting something from them.

 Dean wrote about what his father came home like at the end of those 10-hour days. He wrote about what the radio offered in the evenings in the house on South Sixth Street in the specific years when radio was what television became. He wrote about what his father listened to and what his father’s face looked like when he listened to it.

 He wrote, “He didn’t want to be challenged at 9:00 at night. He had been challenged since 6:00 in the morning. What he wanted was to sit in his chair and feel like the world was not entirely against him for 30 minutes. That’s what the radio was. That’s what I think about on Thursday nights.

” He did not defend the glass in his hand. He did not address the fraud argument directly. He wrote around it from a different angle, asking a different question than the one Crane had asked. He wrote, “You asked whether the ease is real. I’ll tell you, some of it isn’t. You were right about that, but I’d ask you to consider whether ease that is given to people who need it is worth less because it took effort to produce.

 My father, the barber, made the men in his chair feel comfortable. That took 30 years of practice. No one called it a fraud. The letter was signed, Dino. Crane did not publish the letter. He kept it in a folder in his desk at the Los Angeles Examiner for 11 years. He kept it through three moves and two desk changes and the eventual departure from the Examiner and the beginning of a second career as a television historian.

He kept it through the conversations he had with colleagues about Dean Martin and the show and the Thursday night audience. He kept it through the reviews he continued to write which did not change substantially in their assessment of the show’s cultural position but which changed in some quality that readers might not have been able to identify in their tone.

 In 1978, a researcher working on a study of American television criticism asked Crane for an interview and in the interview asked him whether there had been any encounters with subjects of his criticism that had stayed with him. Crane told the researcher about the letter. The researcher asked if he could see it.

 Crane retrieved it from the folder. The researcher read it. He said, “This changes the argument.” Crane said, “Yes.” The researcher said, “Why didn’t you publish it?” Crane thought about this for a moment. “Because he sent it privately.” Crane said, “He wrote it to me not to the readers, not to the audience.

 He wrote it to me specifically in response to what I said and I thought” he paused “I thought that what he had done was answer me in the only register I had not been operating in. I had been operating in the public register. Everything I wrote, everything I said at the dinner was for the readers, for the industry, for the room. He answered in the private register and it seemed wrong to pull his private register into my public one.

 He paused again. Also, Crane said, “I wasn’t sure what publishing it would do for me that keeping it wouldn’t do better.” The researcher asked what keeping it had done for him. Crane looked at the letter on the desk between them. He said, “It reminded me of what I had left out of the fraud argument.

 I had left out the barber. I had left out his father standing at the chair for 10 hours and coming home and needing the radio. I had made an argument about cultural quality that forgot to ask about what quality meant to the person in the chair.” He was quiet for a moment. “He didn’t write back to defend himself,” Crane said.

 “He wrote back to show me what I had missed. Those are different things. A defense is about the person being criticized. What he sent was about the person doing the criticizing.” He looked at the letter. “He was right,” Crane said. “I had missed it.” The letter is in an archive at the University of Southern California’s television history collection.

 It arrived there in 1989 when Crane donated his professional papers. The archivist who processed the collection noted it in the finding guide with a brief description. Correspondence from D. Martin, February 1967, two pages, holograph. People who have read it in the archive report the same specific quality that Crane described in the 1978 interview.

 The surprise of register. The surprise of finding in the two-page handwritten letter signed with a nickname a man thinking carefully about something that the 40 million people who watched him on Thursday nights would never have been given reason to suspect he thought about. The barber, the chair, the 10-hour days, the radio at 9:00.

 What a man owes the people who worked all day. The question that Arthur Crane had not asked. The question that Dino Crocetti from Steubenville, Ohio had been asking every Thursday night for 2 years without saying it, without explaining it, without giving the audience any reason to think the glass in his hand was anything other than a glass in his hand.

That, Arthur Crane would say when anyone asked him about the letter in the years after it became known, was the thing that still surprised him. Not the letter, not the intelligence in it, or the argument, or the image of the barber’s chair. The fact that Dean Martin had been asking that question all along, and that the asking of it had produced something that looked, from the outside, exactly like a fraud, and that the fraud, understood correctly, was the most honest thing in the room on Thursday nights. That is the whole of

That is what still surprises, even now, even after everything. The barber, the chair, what a man owes the people who worked all day. That was always the whole of it. That was always Dean Martin. There is one more thing that belongs in this accounting. In 1983, Arthur Crane gave a lecture at UCLA on the history of American television criticism. He was 61 years old.

 He was not the television critic he had been in 1967, the years had done what years did to fixed positions, which was complicate them without necessarily overturning them. He still believed what he had said at the Beverly Hilton dinner. He still believed the show was constructed. He still believed the ease was produced rather than spontaneous, but he had added something to the argument in the 16 years since the letter arrived.

 At the lecture, a graduate student asked him about the Dean Martin letter. It had become known in the television history community, had been cited in several papers, and the student had read the archival description. Crane paused before answering. He said, “I gave a speech in 1967 calling Dean Martin a fraud.

 I called the ease manufactured, the persona artificial, the whole thing a deliberate construction designed to appear undeliberate. I believed all of that. I still believe most of it. He paused. What I didn’t account for, what the letter showed me I hadn’t accounted for, was the intention behind the construction. I had identified what the thing was.

 I hadn’t asked why it was that. He looked at the lecture hall. His father was a barber, Crane said. He stood at the chair for 10 hours a day, and his son became the most watched man on American television. And his son’s theory of what that meant was, my father comes home after 10 hours and needs something at 9:00. What I do is that thing. That’s the job. He paused again.

I called that a fraud, Crane said. I called the ease manufactured, and it was. It took 40 years of practice to manufacture it. But the purpose of the manufacturing was not to deceive 40 million people. The purpose was to give 40 million people something at 9:00 when they needed it. He looked at the graduate student.

 The surprising thing, Crane said, is not that he answered me. The surprising thing is how he answered. He didn’t defend himself. He didn’t argue with the fraud accusation. He showed me the barber. He showed me the chair. He showed me the 10:00 day and the 9:00 radio. He was quiet. He showed me what I had forgotten to ask about, Crane said, and I was a critic.

 Asking was supposed to be my whole job. He looked at his papers. The letter is at USC now, he said. Anyone can read it. I’d encourage it. Not because it changes what Dean Martin’s show was. It doesn’t change what the show was. It changes what the show was for. The graduate student thanked him. Crane nodded. He signed it Dino.

 Crane said, “Not Dean Martin, Dino. The name from before the name.” He paused one final time. “That’s what I still think about. He wrote the letter as Dino, not the performer, not the fraud, the barber’s son from Steubenville who thought about what a man owes the people who worked all day.” He set down his papers. The lecture ended. “The letter is at USC.

 Anyone can read it. It says what it has always said, ‘What a man owes the people who worked all day.’ Dino Crocetti from Steubenville knew the answer. He had known it since he was old enough to watch his father come home from the chair. He just took 40 years and a television show to say it out loud, and he said it in a letter to a man who called him a fraud, who kept the letter for 11 years before he told anyone about it because he understood, as the years passed, that the letter was the truest thing in his desk. That is the whole of

That is still the whole of it. That is what still surprises.”