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Just about everybody liked Martin -- including directors and fellow actors and, surprisingly, Lewis, who played goony child to Martin's mellow macho man -- but, as Dino warned a TV producer, "nobody gets to know me." Even Martin's most expert appraiser, his long-suffering wife Jeannie, says he's an enigma. "He's either the most complex man imaginable or the simplest," she tells Tosches. "There's either nothing under there or too much."
! Tosches goes with "nothing." He admires Martin's languid scorn for producers and gangsters and fans -- for those who would hustle or intimidate him or win the love they forlornly hoped was inside him. For Dino, Tosches writes, "there could be no happiness but in waving away the world; none but in being apart, unthinking, unfeeling." The Italians call it lontananza. Distance.
Naturalmente, Dino didn't talk to Tosches. So the author relies on the mind reading and fiction weaving that are such an important, easy part of the modern biographer's technique. Yet Tosches' high-wired prose -- he's a cogent social historian on an eloquent rant, Tom Wolfe married to Screamin' Jay Hawkins -- is an ideal instrument for defining the incestuous connection of gangsters and entertainers and the lure of money, whiskey and gals in Hollywood.
Still, no one filled or fulfilled Dean; as Jeannie Martin notes, "He was always content in a void." Eventually the drunk act ceased to be an act; he was not Dino as in vino but Dino as in wino. Now, at 75, he is a Dino-saur, eating alone each night in restaurants. His chilling apathy is the only bodyguard he needs. And his only company is the knowledge that he filled a vacuum in popular culture with the more seductive void of his personality. Memories, and memorable biographies, are made of this.