Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Made One Rule in 1949 — Nobody Outside Knew What It Was Until 1995

The rule was made in the autumn of 1949 in a dressing room at the Copa Cabana Club in New York City in the specific kind of conversation that two people have when they have known each other long enough to move past the careful calibration of early friendship into something that requires a different kind of language.

A language that is less about impression and more about actual description of how things are. Dean Martin was 32 years old and Sammy Davis Jr. was 24 and the Martin and Lewis partnership was at the beginning of its commercial peak as Sammy was performing with the Will Masten trio at the same venue on overlapping dates and the two men had been in each other’s orbit for approximately 2 years by that point aware of each other respectful of each other’s work friendly in the way of performers who share a professional ecosystem without yet having found the

specific occasion that produces genuine friendship rather rather than professional warmth. The occasion was a conversation that neither of them had planned, and that began by Sammy’s account in his autobiography as the kind of conversation that starts because two people happen to be in the same place at the same time and have nothing specific to do in the next 20 minutes.

They had been talking for approximately 40 minutes when the conversation arrived at the thing that conversations between people who are becoming genuinely close to each other always eventually arrive at which was the thing that each of them found most difficult about the life they were living and that they did not typically discuss with the people around them.

What Sammy found most difficult was something he had been managing since his early childhood in show business. a version of the same difficulty that would characterize his entire career, which was the necessity of navigating simultaneously and without error the multiple sets of expectations that the world organized around him. As a black performer in 1949 America, Sammy was required to be excellent in a way that left no room for the ordinary inconsistency of human performance because excellence was the only protection available against the systems

that were organized around finding reasons to exclude him. as a performer in the specific entertainment environment of the copa and the clubs and the circuit they both worked. He was required to be entertaining in a way that was not threatening, which required a kind of constant calibration that cost him something every day that he could not always afford to spend.

And as a person simply as a human being with his own specific set of feelings and responses and needs and vulnerabilities, he was required to manage all of this while maintaining the appearance that the management was effortless because the appearance of effortlessness was part of what the performance required. Dean heard all of this.

He did not interrupt and he did not offer solutions and he did not perform the kind of sympathetic listening that is organized around making the listener feel good about themselves for listening. He heard what Sammy was actually saying, which was that the performance of ease was the most expensive thing in his life.

And that the people closest to him, the people in his professional circle, the people he worked with and spent time with and called his friends, were people who mostly experienced only the performance and did not have access to what was underneath it. Then Dean said something that Sammy had not expected. He said that he understood this specifically, not generally, not in the way of someone offering solidarity across a divide, but in the specific way of someone describing their own experience of the same thing. Dean’s

version of the expense was different in its particulars, rooted in a different set of circumstances, but the structure of it was identical. the performance of ease. The people who experienced only the performance, the cost of maintaining the performance without anyone to whom the maintenance itself could be acknowledged.

What they arrived at in the last 10 minutes of the 40-minute conversation was a decision. The decision was framed as a rule because rules are how people formalize decisions that they want to persist beyond the conversation that produced them. And this was a decision they wanted to persist. The rule was this. Between the two of them, the performance stopped.

Whatever either of them said to the other in private was said in the language of what was actually happening rather than the language of how things were supposed to appear. They would not manage each other. They would not perform for each other. They would not require of each other the specific calibration that the rest of their professional and social world required of both of them.

What was said between them stayed between them and what was felt between them could be expressed as what it was rather than as what was convenient for it to be. This sounds simple stated as a rule. It was not simple to maintain for four decades in a world that applied constant pressure on both of them from every direction. That had specific expectations about what their friendship looked like and what it meant and how it should be displayed and discussed.

That created endless occasions on which breaking the rule would have been easier and professionally more comfortable than keeping it. The evidence for this is not in any dramatic single moment, but in the accumulated pattern of 40 years, in the specific quality of what the people closest to both of them observed about their interactions over those four decades.

What those people observed was a quality of ease that was different from the ease either man displayed in other professional and personal contexts. an ease that was not performed but simply present that did not require maintenance that was the same at 10:30 at night in a dressing room after a show as it was at 2:00 in the afternoon in a production meeting.

This quality of unperformed ease in the presence of another person is something that most people have with one or two individuals in their lives and that most people recognize immediately when they see it in others because it is the thing that most resembles the ease that children have before they learn that performance is required.

The rule was never discussed publicly. Neither Dean nor Sammy ever gave an interview in which they described it because describing it would have required a level of disclosure about the private territory of their friendship that the rule itself made off limits. When journalists asked either of them about what made their friendship different from their other friendships, both of them gave the specific kind of general warm answer that was the public version of their connection, speaking about mutual respect and professional admiration and the shared experiences of

decades in the same entertainment world. Neither of them said what the friendship actually was because that was covered by the rule. The closest Dean ever came to indicating that the rule existed was in the days after Sammy died in May 1990. He was asked by a journalist about what Sammy had meant to him.

And he said something that the journalist included in the piece they were writing without apparently understanding what it meant, which was that Sammy was the only person he had ever known who never asked him to be anything other than what he was. This sentence read carefully is the rule described from the outside. It says that the performance had never been required that the expectation had never been imposed.

It says in the language available to Dean in a public context in May 1990 what he could not say directly which was that for 40 years there had been one person in his life with whom the rule held and that person was now gone and the space the rule had occupied was now a different kind of space. After Dean died in December 1995, Tracy Davis was managing her father’s estate and the various personal materials that Sammy had accumulated over a lifetime.

Among those materials was a box that contained correspondence and personal documents dating back to the late 1940s. And in the box was a single index card handwritten in Samm<unk>s handwriting that contained a list. The list was titled in Samm<unk>s hand the one rule. It contained one item. The item described the rule in Samm<unk>s own words written at some point in the four decades of their friendship.

The date on the card is not clearly legible. The rule was described as it had been agreed between them. The performance stopped. Tracy has said that she held the card for a long time after she found it. She said she had known from observation over the years that something in her father’s relationship with Dean was different from his relationship with other people.

But she had not known what it was or whether it had been named. The card named it. The card told her that the thing she had observed without being able to name was the product of a specific decision made in the autumn of 1949 in a dressing room at the Copa Cabana Club in New York. and that the decision had lasted until one of them was no longer alive to keep it.

She said the card was the most important thing she found in the box. She said she has kept it. The specific texture of what keeping the rule looked like across 40 years is something that can only be reconstructed from the peripheral evidence, from what the people who were adjacent to the friendship observed and described because the rule itself precluded any direct account from either of the people who kept it.

What those people observed was a set of patterns that were consistent across the entire span of the friendship and that distinguished the Dean and Sammy relationship from both men’s other relationships in ways that were visible without being explainable to most of the people watching. The most frequently noted pattern was what happened in rooms that contained both of them and other people.

Both men were extraordinary social performers. Dean through his specific quality of relaxed ease. Sammy through his specific quality of focused full presence engagement with whoever he was talking to in rooms that contained other people alongside Dean and Sammy. Both of these performances were fully operational.

But in moments when Dean and Sammy were briefly alone in corridors between scenes, in the few seconds before a show, in the back of cars during Ratpack film productions, the performances stopped. And what replaced them was something that the people who witnessed these moments described consistently as a different quality of presence.

Quieter, more direct, more resembling the ease of two people who are comfortable enough together to not need to do anything. Peter Lofford, who spent considerable time in the social orbit of the Rat Pack and who was perceptive about the interpersonal dynamics within it, despite his own complicated relationship with those dynamics, said in an interview conducted in the 1980s, that the thing that most distinguished Dean and Sammy’s friendship from the other friendships within the group was that neither of them ever seemed to need the

other to perform. He did not know about the rule. He was describing what he observed without having the explanation for it. This was the specific visible consequence of the rule. The absence of the need for performance in each other’s presence. Most close friendships contain at least some performance. The performance of being the person your friend knows you as, which is itself a version of you, but not the unedited version.

The rule had removed this requirement, and the removal of it produced the quality that observers noticed without being able to name. The rule also produced something less visible but equally significant, which was the specific quality of what each of them could say to the other that they could not say to anyone else. The evidence for this is thinner because the content of those conversations was the thing most thoroughly protected by the rule.

But it appears in fragments in both men’s accounts of their own lives, in the occasional reference in Sam’s writing to conversations with Dean as the source of clarity on something he had been unable to resolve with anyone else. in the occasional comment in interviews where Dean asked about Sammy said something that was slightly more specific than his usual general warmth and that seemed to be quoting a shared understanding rather than performing a friendship.

Frank Sinatra understood that the friendship was specific in ways that his own friendships with both men were not, though he would not have described it in those terms. What Frank observed across decades of being in the same professional world as Dean and Sammy was that both men were inaccessible in a particular way to the people around them.

That there was a territory in both of them that their public ease obscured and that their closest professional relationships did not reach and that the territory in Dean and the territory in Sammy apparently had access to each other. He observed this without resentment and without fully understanding it because the thing it was describing was something that Frank’s own way of being in the world made difficult to understand from the inside.

The closest Frank came to articulating what he observed was in a conversation with Sammy that Sammy quoted in his autobiography in which Frank had said that Dean was the only person he had ever known who made Sammy seem relaxed rather than performing relaxation. This was an accurate description of what the rule produced, observed from the outside by someone whose observational intelligence was considerable and whose access to what was actually happening was by the nature of the rule necessarily limited.

Samm<unk>s response to Frank’s observation was not recorded in the autobiography, which is consistent with the rule. Whatever Sammy said, if he said anything, stayed between him and the moment. And the moment was in 1967, which meant there were still 23 years of the rule to go. The rule lasted from autumn 1949 until May 16th, 1990, the day Sammy Davis Jr. died.

For those 40 years and 7 months, it was never broken and never renegotiated and never discussed with anyone outside the two people it covered. It existed in a specific form of mutual understanding that is the most durable form any agreement between two people can take. The form where the agreement doesn’t need to be remembered because it has become the nature of the relationship, indistinguishable from who the two people are to each other.

When Sammy died, Dean kept the rule one more time by describing it in the only language available to him in a public context. The language that said everything without saying the thing itself. Sammy was the only person he had ever known who never asked him to be anything other than what he was. And Tracy found the card and the card said what the rule was and she has kept it.

which means the rule still exists in a box in the handwriting of the person who wrote it down because he wanted to make sure that something so important to two people had somewhere in the world a form that would outlast both of them. If this story, the 40 minutes in 1949, the rule, the four decades of keeping it, and the card Tracy found in 1995 moved something in you.

Subscribe and hit that like button. Share this with someone who is the one person in your life with whom the performance stops. Do you have someone like this? Let us know in the comments and ring that notification bell because the next story is already waiting and some of them will find you at exactly the right moment.

Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Made One Rule in 1949 — Nobody Outside Knew What It Was Until 1995

The rule was made in the autumn of 1949 in a dressing room at the Copa Cabana Club in New York City in the specific kind of conversation that two people have when they have known each other long enough to move past the careful calibration of early friendship into something that requires a different kind of language.

A language that is less about impression and more about actual description of how things are. Dean Martin was 32 years old and Sammy Davis Jr. was 24 and the Martin and Lewis partnership was at the beginning of its commercial peak as Sammy was performing with the Will Masten trio at the same venue on overlapping dates and the two men had been in each other’s orbit for approximately 2 years by that point aware of each other respectful of each other’s work friendly in the way of performers who share a professional ecosystem without yet having found the

specific occasion that produces genuine friendship rather rather than professional warmth. The occasion was a conversation that neither of them had planned, and that began by Sammy’s account in his autobiography as the kind of conversation that starts because two people happen to be in the same place at the same time and have nothing specific to do in the next 20 minutes.

They had been talking for approximately 40 minutes when the conversation arrived at the thing that conversations between people who are becoming genuinely close to each other always eventually arrive at which was the thing that each of them found most difficult about the life they were living and that they did not typically discuss with the people around them.

What Sammy found most difficult was something he had been managing since his early childhood in show business. a version of the same difficulty that would characterize his entire career, which was the necessity of navigating simultaneously and without error the multiple sets of expectations that the world organized around him. As a black performer in 1949 America, Sammy was required to be excellent in a way that left no room for the ordinary inconsistency of human performance because excellence was the only protection available against the systems

that were organized around finding reasons to exclude him. as a performer in the specific entertainment environment of the copa and the clubs and the circuit they both worked. He was required to be entertaining in a way that was not threatening, which required a kind of constant calibration that cost him something every day that he could not always afford to spend.

And as a person simply as a human being with his own specific set of feelings and responses and needs and vulnerabilities, he was required to manage all of this while maintaining the appearance that the management was effortless because the appearance of effortlessness was part of what the performance required. Dean heard all of this.

He did not interrupt and he did not offer solutions and he did not perform the kind of sympathetic listening that is organized around making the listener feel good about themselves for listening. He heard what Sammy was actually saying, which was that the performance of ease was the most expensive thing in his life.

And that the people closest to him, the people in his professional circle, the people he worked with and spent time with and called his friends, were people who mostly experienced only the performance and did not have access to what was underneath it. Then Dean said something that Sammy had not expected. He said that he understood this specifically, not generally, not in the way of someone offering solidarity across a divide, but in the specific way of someone describing their own experience of the same thing. Dean’s

version of the expense was different in its particulars, rooted in a different set of circumstances, but the structure of it was identical. the performance of ease. The people who experienced only the performance, the cost of maintaining the performance without anyone to whom the maintenance itself could be acknowledged.

What they arrived at in the last 10 minutes of the 40-minute conversation was a decision. The decision was framed as a rule because rules are how people formalize decisions that they want to persist beyond the conversation that produced them. And this was a decision they wanted to persist. The rule was this. Between the two of them, the performance stopped.

Whatever either of them said to the other in private was said in the language of what was actually happening rather than the language of how things were supposed to appear. They would not manage each other. They would not perform for each other. They would not require of each other the specific calibration that the rest of their professional and social world required of both of them.

What was said between them stayed between them and what was felt between them could be expressed as what it was rather than as what was convenient for it to be. This sounds simple stated as a rule. It was not simple to maintain for four decades in a world that applied constant pressure on both of them from every direction. That had specific expectations about what their friendship looked like and what it meant and how it should be displayed and discussed.

That created endless occasions on which breaking the rule would have been easier and professionally more comfortable than keeping it. The evidence for this is not in any dramatic single moment, but in the accumulated pattern of 40 years, in the specific quality of what the people closest to both of them observed about their interactions over those four decades.

What those people observed was a quality of ease that was different from the ease either man displayed in other professional and personal contexts. an ease that was not performed but simply present that did not require maintenance that was the same at 10:30 at night in a dressing room after a show as it was at 2:00 in the afternoon in a production meeting.

This quality of unperformed ease in the presence of another person is something that most people have with one or two individuals in their lives and that most people recognize immediately when they see it in others because it is the thing that most resembles the ease that children have before they learn that performance is required.

The rule was never discussed publicly. Neither Dean nor Sammy ever gave an interview in which they described it because describing it would have required a level of disclosure about the private territory of their friendship that the rule itself made off limits. When journalists asked either of them about what made their friendship different from their other friendships, both of them gave the specific kind of general warm answer that was the public version of their connection, speaking about mutual respect and professional admiration and the shared experiences of

decades in the same entertainment world. Neither of them said what the friendship actually was because that was covered by the rule. The closest Dean ever came to indicating that the rule existed was in the days after Sammy died in May 1990. He was asked by a journalist about what Sammy had meant to him.

And he said something that the journalist included in the piece they were writing without apparently understanding what it meant, which was that Sammy was the only person he had ever known who never asked him to be anything other than what he was. This sentence read carefully is the rule described from the outside. It says that the performance had never been required that the expectation had never been imposed.

It says in the language available to Dean in a public context in May 1990 what he could not say directly which was that for 40 years there had been one person in his life with whom the rule held and that person was now gone and the space the rule had occupied was now a different kind of space. After Dean died in December 1995, Tracy Davis was managing her father’s estate and the various personal materials that Sammy had accumulated over a lifetime.

Among those materials was a box that contained correspondence and personal documents dating back to the late 1940s. And in the box was a single index card handwritten in Samm<unk>s handwriting that contained a list. The list was titled in Samm<unk>s hand the one rule. It contained one item. The item described the rule in Samm<unk>s own words written at some point in the four decades of their friendship.

The date on the card is not clearly legible. The rule was described as it had been agreed between them. The performance stopped. Tracy has said that she held the card for a long time after she found it. She said she had known from observation over the years that something in her father’s relationship with Dean was different from his relationship with other people.

But she had not known what it was or whether it had been named. The card named it. The card told her that the thing she had observed without being able to name was the product of a specific decision made in the autumn of 1949 in a dressing room at the Copa Cabana Club in New York. and that the decision had lasted until one of them was no longer alive to keep it.

She said the card was the most important thing she found in the box. She said she has kept it. The specific texture of what keeping the rule looked like across 40 years is something that can only be reconstructed from the peripheral evidence, from what the people who were adjacent to the friendship observed and described because the rule itself precluded any direct account from either of the people who kept it.

What those people observed was a set of patterns that were consistent across the entire span of the friendship and that distinguished the Dean and Sammy relationship from both men’s other relationships in ways that were visible without being explainable to most of the people watching. The most frequently noted pattern was what happened in rooms that contained both of them and other people.

Both men were extraordinary social performers. Dean through his specific quality of relaxed ease. Sammy through his specific quality of focused full presence engagement with whoever he was talking to in rooms that contained other people alongside Dean and Sammy. Both of these performances were fully operational.

But in moments when Dean and Sammy were briefly alone in corridors between scenes, in the few seconds before a show, in the back of cars during Ratpack film productions, the performances stopped. And what replaced them was something that the people who witnessed these moments described consistently as a different quality of presence.

Quieter, more direct, more resembling the ease of two people who are comfortable enough together to not need to do anything. Peter Lofford, who spent considerable time in the social orbit of the Rat Pack and who was perceptive about the interpersonal dynamics within it, despite his own complicated relationship with those dynamics, said in an interview conducted in the 1980s, that the thing that most distinguished Dean and Sammy’s friendship from the other friendships within the group was that neither of them ever seemed to need the

other to perform. He did not know about the rule. He was describing what he observed without having the explanation for it. This was the specific visible consequence of the rule. The absence of the need for performance in each other’s presence. Most close friendships contain at least some performance. The performance of being the person your friend knows you as, which is itself a version of you, but not the unedited version.

The rule had removed this requirement, and the removal of it produced the quality that observers noticed without being able to name. The rule also produced something less visible but equally significant, which was the specific quality of what each of them could say to the other that they could not say to anyone else. The evidence for this is thinner because the content of those conversations was the thing most thoroughly protected by the rule.

But it appears in fragments in both men’s accounts of their own lives, in the occasional reference in Sam’s writing to conversations with Dean as the source of clarity on something he had been unable to resolve with anyone else. in the occasional comment in interviews where Dean asked about Sammy said something that was slightly more specific than his usual general warmth and that seemed to be quoting a shared understanding rather than performing a friendship.

Frank Sinatra understood that the friendship was specific in ways that his own friendships with both men were not, though he would not have described it in those terms. What Frank observed across decades of being in the same professional world as Dean and Sammy was that both men were inaccessible in a particular way to the people around them.

That there was a territory in both of them that their public ease obscured and that their closest professional relationships did not reach and that the territory in Dean and the territory in Sammy apparently had access to each other. He observed this without resentment and without fully understanding it because the thing it was describing was something that Frank’s own way of being in the world made difficult to understand from the inside.

The closest Frank came to articulating what he observed was in a conversation with Sammy that Sammy quoted in his autobiography in which Frank had said that Dean was the only person he had ever known who made Sammy seem relaxed rather than performing relaxation. This was an accurate description of what the rule produced, observed from the outside by someone whose observational intelligence was considerable and whose access to what was actually happening was by the nature of the rule necessarily limited.

Samm<unk>s response to Frank’s observation was not recorded in the autobiography, which is consistent with the rule. Whatever Sammy said, if he said anything, stayed between him and the moment. And the moment was in 1967, which meant there were still 23 years of the rule to go. The rule lasted from autumn 1949 until May 16th, 1990, the day Sammy Davis Jr. died.

For those 40 years and 7 months, it was never broken and never renegotiated and never discussed with anyone outside the two people it covered. It existed in a specific form of mutual understanding that is the most durable form any agreement between two people can take. The form where the agreement doesn’t need to be remembered because it has become the nature of the relationship, indistinguishable from who the two people are to each other.

When Sammy died, Dean kept the rule one more time by describing it in the only language available to him in a public context. The language that said everything without saying the thing itself. Sammy was the only person he had ever known who never asked him to be anything other than what he was. And Tracy found the card and the card said what the rule was and she has kept it.

which means the rule still exists in a box in the handwriting of the person who wrote it down because he wanted to make sure that something so important to two people had somewhere in the world a form that would outlast both of them. If this story, the 40 minutes in 1949, the rule, the four decades of keeping it, and the card Tracy found in 1995 moved something in you.

Subscribe and hit that like button. Share this with someone who is the one person in your life with whom the performance stops. Do you have someone like this? Let us know in the comments and ring that notification bell because the next story is already waiting and some of them will find you at exactly the right moment.