These shelves of fame only shamed me as I pondered on how my personal plans for stardom had gone awry. I had everything riding on that one commercial I did for Planter’s, ‘Everybody Loves a Nut Campaign.’ I was convinced that the image of my short, chubby body, pushing the limits of pink and aqua polka dot spandex, alongside an old-time accordion player who pumped away at Take Me Out To The Ballgame, while I tapped my little heart out on a large sheet of bubble wrap doing our rendition of pop music, would be my ticket out of servitude.
How did I know that spot would only run during baseball season and only on cable at that? When I complained about my plight to my good friend George, a more successful actor/writer than me, he loaned me rent money for the second time in six months and reminded me that this would be the last time. As he signed the check he looked up, winked, and said, “Cheer up, honey, one day you’ll be as famous as the ‘Where’s the Beef?’ lady and you’ll be able to pay me back.”
Even though I knew George meant well, the thought of waiting until my eighties to finally attain fame and fortune and then croak shortly afterwards was not exactly uplifting.
So with all my reality checks bouncing, a day job was my only solution. Was I doomed to dusting the forty gold records and ironing the forty pairs of silk pajamas until I’d made it big one day? I didn’t relish the idea of being a maid, but it beat being the cliché, actress/waitress. After all, I wasn’t just any ordinary maid, I was Dean Martin’s maid, the Dean of Martin and Lewis, the Dean of When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a big Pizza Pie, that’s –a— my Deano. It had caché in Hollywood and I was sure I’d find a way to work it.
The good news was that Dean never had company and, for that matter, rarely left his wing of the house, so the house never got very dirty. He’d ask me to hold his calls and wink at me as he said, “Dear, tell them I’m golfing.”
We were kindred souls, both Italian Americans and great lovers of the nap. So with Dean in bed all day I had the run of the house. If I had ironing to do, I’d just drag the board into the living room in front of the giant TV screen that offered every premium channel. It was important for an actress to research her craft. Another fringe benefit was that I got to bring in my personal laundry and other projects while on the job.
The only other employees on the premises were the two security guards, off-duty cops who rotated their twelve hour shifts. The guards would never say a word, but I’m sure they were a bit suspicious of me as I’d come through the garage entrance with my very large loads of laundry. If I had been a bit more ambitious, I could have made extra dough taking in my neighbor’s laundry too, but I didn’t want to push it. It was bad enough that on some days I’d come to work dressed as the maid, and then midday I’d run out frantically to squeeze in a quickie commercial audition, dressed as a waitress, a nurse, a gypsy, a glitzy tap dancer in a sparkly corset, or my favorite opera character, Brunhilde.
And if this job didn’t get me anywhere in Hollywood, at least it carried great weight back home in New Jersey. I told my mother that I was hired to cook for Dean. It sounded better than maid or housekeeper. It wasn’t a complete lie, because one of my duties was to make Dean a scrambled egg sandwich on white bread every morning after I served his coffee.
Like any good mother, my mother loved to embellish her children’s accomplishments. She’d brag about my culinary skills and how much Dean loved my “sauce!” As far as Mom was concerned, she thought working for Dean was the biggest break I’d ever get in Hollywood.
My workday started at 8 a.m. After putting the fresh grounds into Mr. Coffee and filling the water tank, I’d wait for Dean to buzz on the intercom. As soon as I heard the buzzer, I’d flip on Mister Coffee and ready his tray with the morning paper and then carry it into where he lay in bed. I was expected to always address him as Mr. Martin, as per his manager Mort’s instructions. To my “Good morning, Mr. Martin,” he would always reply, “Good morning, dear.” I just loved the way he called me “dear.” I really got a kick out of being that close to him and was always impressed with how handsome he still looked in his late seventies. It was all I could do to keep myself from crawling into bed with him. To me he was like a god, and a sweet one at that, the poster boy for ample bed rest and prescription medication. He even looked good without his teeth, which on some mornings remained in the tumbler at his bedside. Since Dean rarely left his room except for his evening dinner outings, I was instructed to use this morning coffee and paper delivery constructively. Like a cocktail waitress, I would discreetly dump the ash trays and wipe up around his end tables, then change the trash liner, pick up dirty laundry or day-old papers, and hang up the freshly-ironed silk pajamas. I was told Dean owned forty pairs, one for every one of the millions he was worth.
I can’t recall a day when he was not pleasant. Dean was so easygoing and if he did have a particular need, he’d ask me in the manner of a humble servant rather than a king. He was rarely chatty but every once in a while he’d open up and say more than just, “Good morning, dear.” Once I came in while he was watching a Cary Grant movie. When I commented on how much I loved Cary, his eyes got misty and he told me that he and Cary had been really close friends. He repeated more than once that Cary was a real gentleman. I thought, wasn’t that code for queer? And then he went on about how much he missed him. It led me to wonder if Dean was trying to come out to me. Those moments were fuel to keep me going and made the job worthwhile. I always wished I had known him in his prime, but at this time of his life he suffered deep depression from the loss of his son who had died in a plane crash. He only left the house to work once a month in Vegas. He never had visitors except for his daughter Deana, who would come by to drop off his favorite food, “pasta e fagiloli” or, as we say in Southern Italian dialect, pasta fazool; hence the lyric, “When your love seems to drool just like pasta fazool, that’s amore.” On only one occasion I met his wife Jeanie, who had a separate residence in the neighborhood.
Dean only went out in the evenings, almost always alone for dinner at the Hamburger Hamlet or La Familia. That’s when I had to do the hard work. From the moment he pulled one of his cars, the Rolls Royce or the Mercedes, out of the driveway, I’d rush in like a beat-the-clock contestant, because in less than two hours I had to change his linens, vacuum the carpet, clean all the surfaces, dust his room, scour the double sinks, scrub the toilet, polish the marble, wash the floors, and Windex the mirrors. On the weekends I’d have a little more time, when he’d have dinner at Jeanie’s house with the family. The rest of the time he stayed in bed. But nonetheless, there I was, a poor struggling actress/maid, hanging out with a legend in his bedroom.
Of course, my job fueled my mother’s fantasies too. She’d pump me for every detail. She’d say, “What’d ya cook for Dean?” and I’d make up recipes to make her friends mouths water. And she’d ask me if I ever met his wife Jeanie.
“She’s the second wife, right?”
“Yes, Mom, she’s the one Dean divorced to marry his third wife but then divorced her and re-married Jeanie.” Then of course she’d want to know why she and Dean didn’t live together if they were married again.
Sometimes I felt like a paid informer giving my mother all the dirt, but I knew it brightened the lives of the poor widows at Leisure Village. They really lapped up the story about Dean and Cary. Of course, in my mother’s re-telling it, Dean blubbered in my arms like a baby.
And then there was the time when I got to meet Sammy Davis Jr., right around the time the second coming of the Rat Pack, which was getting ready to go out on tour. Frank had gathered the old boys together to recapture the glory days of their first infamous Rat Pack tour. I didn’t meet Sammy at Dean’s house, but actually ran into him outside my dance class while I was cooling off in the parking lot in between routines. I walked smack dab into him. When I said hello and told him I worked for Dean, he opened his arms wide and gave me a very warm hug. I just couldn’t believe how sweet he was. I think he liked me instantly because we were almo
st the same height. He happened to be rehearsing for the movie Tap, with Gregory Hines, in the studio next door. If that wasn’t grand enough, Sammy followed me back into my class and had me introduce him to my teacher, Hama. All the other dancers in the class were impressed that I knew Sammy Davis Jr.
Not long after that event, Dean left home to go on the second U.S. tour with the aging Rat Pack. Less than two weeks into it, the media reported that Dean Martin had taken sick and had to quit, and was replaced by Liza Minnelli. When Dean came home, I told him I was sorry to hear he was sick and asked if he needed anything special. He responded with, “Yeah, I was sick alright, I was sick of Frank, but thanks for your concern, dear.” He then winked, retired to his room, and reminded me to hold his calls and tell everyone he was golfing.
About a year into lying around Dean’s house, passed out on the couch after polishing off the contents of chocolates in his mini bar, I was inspired to re-work my one woman show, The Last Dance of the Couch Potatoes. The next day I came into work, passed the guard in the garage carrying about ten yards of chicken wire rolled up under my arm, and asked if I could borrow the tool box on the shelf. I took full advantage of the pool area and used it to construct my prop for the show poster. As Dean snoozed, I worked feverishly, turning the chicken wire and Dean’s old newspapers into a giant papier mache potato costume. One day the guard got curious and came in back to see what I was up to. He assumed that I was of an ethnic minority that might build a coop to raise chickens by the pool. By the time I finished the potato suit, it was so heavy and cumbersome that I was afraid to move it out of the house. I waited until Dean was due to go to Vegas for his monthly gig and I arranged for the poster shoot to happen in Dean’s living room in front of the big screen TV. It was the perfect location. All I had to do was figure out how to sneak a photographer past the guard in the garage.
I felt like Lucy trying to break in to John Wayne’s house in one of her harebrained schemes with Ethel. I got one of my back-up singers to take the photo and told the guard she was a girl I was interviewing as a sub. Once we set up the lights, she and I carried the potato costume into the house and she helped me into it. I used Dean’s serving tray as a prop and piled it high with multi-colored bags of junk food. With the strobe flashing, I posed like a high-paid fashion model, assuming many different poses.
The actual image used for the couch potato poster was from the very last shot. With me standing on the couch, my photographer/back up girl set the automatic timer to allow her to jump into the frame. Posing as my servant, she held up the tray of junk food as I jumped on the couch for joy. Right in the middle of this shot, Dean came home unexpectedly with Mort, his manager. They had cancelled the Vegas gig because he wasn’t feeling well. Dean, unruffled, passed me with his usual greeting, “Good afternoon, dear,” and went straight to bed, leaving his manager to his job.
It wasn’t long after that when I got my notice. I was being replaced by one of Dean’s ex-housekeepers, an elderly lady who wanted her job back now that her husband had retired. Mort the manager explained that Mr. Martin preferred to have two older, stable people in his employ. Besides, they were getting two people for the price of one.
Less than a year later, my mother and her friends sent their regrets when they read in The National Enquirer that Dean Martin had died. I was not invited to the funeral, but I still have and cherish the letter of recommendation that Dean asked his manager to write for me on his personal stationary, with the cocktail glass in the top left corner. It reads, “From the Desk of Dean Martin, To Whom It May Concern,”…
Chapter 5
High Times in the Low Life
I believed in that self-help book, Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow, but I’m still waiting. If I had a nickel for every compliment I ever got, I would be a millionaire. I love praise and good reviews; who wouldn’t? But my God-given gifts haven’t always paid the rent. On the other hand, my struggle to climb the ladder to make it in this dog-eat-dog world wasn’t all bad. There have been many perks on this bumpy road less traveled and I have had fabulous friends and times that even folks in high places would envy. What is success anyway?
I have a successful friend in the music business I met when I was twenty-one and he was only sixteen. It was 1966 and I had been away from home for over a year. Eddy was playing drums in a pop music duo at the Scheppes’ Pizza Parlor, where my mother waited tables back in Paterson, New Jersey. That year I had allowed my mom to lure me back from California by telling me her doctors suspected she had a heart condition. Since I was in between jobs and apartments, I spent my last dime to buy a plane ticket, and as soon as I got back to New Jersey, she announced the good news: her heart condition proved to be only a bad case of gas. But by then I was stuck in New Jersey, living at my parents’ home until I could earn enough money to move back to my adventures in Hollywood.
It was during that year that I bonded with Eddy and his singer/guitar playing buddy Phil. The musical duo was like New Jersey’s version of The Beatles minus two. Phil was almost eighteen and had classic blond Tab Hunter good looks, but I was more drawn to the sixteen-year-old Eddy, who was wise for his age. I could see his star quality behind the mop top hair that covered his cuteness as his head bobbed to the beat of his drums. He resembled a younger Paul McCartney. When Mom introduced me to the lads at the pizza parlor, they both noticed I flaunted an “I Love Pot” button pinned to my jeans jacket. When I had left New Jersey in 1965 to move to L.A., I had not yet ever smoked pot, and didn’t know anyone else who did either. Ed and Phil instantly became my new best friends and we spent many an evening after their pizza parlor gig, hanging out in their car, listening to The Doors and other great music of the times while getting high. They even invited me to parties at Phil’s parents’ home, where I got high in the basement with their school friends.
Their company made that year almost bearable while I worked at an excruciatingly boring job as a file clerk at the Fisher Chemical Company on Route 20 in Fairlawn. I spent most of my time hidden away in the back warehouse with hundreds of tall file drawers. I was supposed to file huge stacks of important scientific documents. It’s hard to remember those days when big companies did not have computers. After only weeks of the tedium, I began to carry an extra large purse to work and stuff it full of files, and then dump them in the trash on my lunch hour and then again after work. They never caught me at that, but I did finally get fired for baking banana peels in the chemists’ oven, and I also was accused of selling drugs to my coworkers on my lunch hour. My supervisor assumed the joints I rolled with “mellow yellow” were illegal, and he said if I didn’t leave the premises immediately, he would report me to the police. I knew I could not be arrested for selling or smoking banana peels, but nonetheless I took this as a sign from the Universe to get my ass back to Los Angeles, where I could resume the life of a junior college student majoring in Theater Arts by day and a part time topless dancer by night. I took my meager savings and supplemented the rest of what I needed to rent an apartment in L.A. by stealing expensive silk dresses from Gimbles in the Paramus Mall and then returning the shoplifted items for a cash refund. But that story is for my next book, Petty Crimes and Other High Times of a Counter Culture Diva.
Back in Los Angeles, a few months later, I heard a knock on my door. When I opened the door to my courtyard, there stood Phil and Eddy, covered in the dirt of the 3000-mile road trip cross country. I had no idea they were even coming to visit, let alone planning on moving in with me for a spell. At this juncture of our lives, all of us were floundering. Phil had notions of hitting it big as a troubadour in Hollywood without any connections or know-how, and Eddy was just looking for adventure. Although I was studying acting at Los Angeles City College, I was doing much more acting out and the only stages I could be seen performing on were those on the bar tops of scummy topless clubs. Phil, who had just turned eighteen, had managed to graduate but Eddy, still underage, had dropped out in his senior year to tag along with him.
The boys took turns sleeping on my couch and floor and hung around my one-bedroom pad glued to a big bong. Our main staple was pot and popcorn, and they managed to burn every one of my three pots and pans, popping their dinner each night. For a few months they shared my home and my unconventional life and friends. During their stay, I introduced the lads to a whole community of black gay friends I had grown very close to in my first year in Los Angeles, and I took them on several adventures with this crew that included a lot of drugs, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues. Phil’s only complaint was that he had to fend off the ruthless come-ons from Leon, a hefty queen with a super Afro who had difficulty taking no for an answer.
During the few months they lived with me, I had my own unwanted suitor, an African-American garbage collector named Ernest, who worked for the sanitation department. He picked me up like some L.A. trash in his garbage truck one day while I was hitch-hiking. I wasn’t at all interested in him, but when he asked for my number I felt bad not giving it to him. I didn’t want to think of myself as elitist or privileged white trash. When he called, I accepted a date because he offered to take me to see Nina Simone in a small jazz club in Baldwin Hill, an upscale black neighborhood. By the end of the night he had gotten so drunk he forced himself on me and I allowed him to date rape me just to get the date over with.
Blow Jobs: A Guide to Making it in Show Business, or Not!: A 'How Not To' by The Counter Culture Diva Page 4