She found the letter on a Tuesday morning in 1995, buried inside a box of things she had been avoiding for 5 years. It was in a plain white envelope, no letterhead, no fanfare. Her name was written on the front in handwriting she recognized immediately, the same loose, unhurried cursive she had seen on birthday cards and backstage notes for 30 years.
She sat down on the floor of her hallway, still in her robe, and held it in both hands for a long time before she opened it. By the time she finished reading, she was weeping so completely that she couldn’t have said where grief ended and relief began. Because the letter did not defend Dean Martin. It did not argue.
It did not explain away what had happened at Sammy’s funeral 5 years earlier with the cool logic of a man trying to win a point. It simply told the truth. And the truth, after 5 years of silence between them, was more than Alto Davis had known how to hope for. This is the story of a friendship so deep it survived death and an accusation so painful it nearly didn’t.
To understand what happened at Forest Lawn Memorial Park on May 18th, 1990, you need to understand what Sammy Davis Jr. meant to the men who loved him. And you need to understand that none of them loved him more completely, more quietly, or more privately than Dean Martin. The public story of the Rat Pack was always Frank Sinatra’s story.
Frank was the sun and the others orbited him. That was the myth anyway. And like most myths, it contained just enough truth to obscure the more complicated reality underneath. The reality was that Dean and Sammy had something between them that existed entirely outside of Frank’s gravity.
They had found each other early before the fame had calcified into legend. And what they had recognized in each other was something specific and rare. They were both performers who had arrived at greatness by refusing to perform offstage. In a world of men who never stopped being on, Dean and Sammy were the two who could sit together in a quiet room and simply be.
Sammy had grown up carrying a weight that Dean could only partially understand. The weight of being a black man in an industry and a country that tolerated his talent while barely tolerating his presence. He had been refused entry to hotels where he was the headline act. He had been told to enter through the back. He had converted to Judaism and been mocked by two communities simultaneously for the audacity of the choice.
He had survived a car accident that took his left eye, returned to the stage on one good eye, and the kind of courage that doesn’t have a name, and performed with such ferocity that people forgot to feel sorry for him, which was precisely what he intended. He had married a white Swedish actress named May Britt at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in more than half the United States and had received death threats in the mail for weeks afterward.
Through all of it, through every indignity and every danger and every moment when the world reminded him of exactly how conditional its welcome was, Sammy Davis Jr. kept performing, kept laughing, kept giving everything he had to rooms full of people who he sometimes had reason to mistrust. Dean understood the performance of resilience better than most.
He had spent his entire career perfecting an act of effortlessness that concealed how hard he worked and how much he felt. He knew what it cost a man to stand in front of strangers night after night and make it look like nothing. He knew the loneliness behind the ease. And in Sammy, who paid that cost at a rate Dean could barely calculate, he found a man he genuinely admired in the way that only one craftsman can admire another.
They did not talk about their friendship much. Dean was constitutionally opposed to public sentiment. Sammy was more open, more willing to name what he felt. But he understood that Dean expressed love differently through presence, through loyalty, through the particular quality of attention he gave when he was in a room with you.
They had been brothers in the truest sense, which is to say in the sense that requires no announcement. When Sammy died on May 16th, 1990 of throat cancer, Dean Martin lost something that he did not have the language to describe and would not have described publicly, even if he had. He had watched his friend deteriorate over the previous year.
The big voice going thin and ragged, the small, compact body shrinking further into itself, the extraordinary vitality that had always made Sammy seemed like a man twice his size quietly extinguishing. He had visited when he could. He had called. He had done what men of his generation did, which was to show up and say very little and let the showing up speak for itself.
When the end came, it did not surprise him. But the things that don’t surprise us are not the things that failed to break us. The funeral was 2 days later on May 18th. Forest Long Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills, a place that had already claimed too many of their people. The chapel was full of faces from another era.
Men and women who had built the entertainment industry with their hands and their voices and their willingness to go on night after night in rooms that smelled of cigarettes and old dreams. Frank Sinatra was there, devastated and trying not to show it in the way that Frank never could quite manage. Liza Minnelli was there.
Michael Jackson, who had loved Sammy with the particular intensity of a young performer who recognized a legend. Jesse Jackson, who delivered a eulogy that made the room weep openly, and Dean was there, dressed in black, still handsome at 72, in the way that certain men are handsome as stone, his handsome, worn, and enduring and indifferent to time.
He sat in the pew and stared at the casket and did not cry, which was not because he didn’t feel it, but because Dean Martin had never in his adult life cried in public, and he was not going to start at the funeral of the man who would have been the first to understand why. What happened after the service was where everything went wrong.
There are different accounts of the precise sequence of events, as there always are when grief and exhaustion and decades of complicated emotion are gathered in one place. What is agreed upon is this. In the crowd of mourners outside the chapel, in the slow shuffle of people offering condolences to Samm<unk>s widow, Altist Davis Dean passed through without stopping.
He moved through the crowd with his head down, his expression closed, his body language, that of a man trying to get from one place to another without being intercepted by anyone who wanted to talk about feelings. This was not unusual for Dean. This was in fact completely consistent with how he behaved in almost any public emotional context.
But Altavves saw it differently. Altivvice Davis was 44 years old and she had buried her husband 2 days after his 64th birthday. And she had spent every waking hour of the preceding year watching the most vital man she had ever known disappear by degrees. She was not in a state to extend charitable interpretations to anyone.
When she saw Dean Martin move through the mourners without pausing at her side, without taking her hands, without looking at her directly, something broke open in her that she didn’t have the capacity to contain. She said in the hearing of several people nearby that Dean’s behavior was what she should have expected. She used the word cold. She may have used stronger words.
What was reported and repeated and spread through the gathered crowd and then through the industry in the days that followed was a sharper version of her grief. the version that acquired an accusation along the way that Dean Martin had not stopped for Samm<unk>s wife at Samm<unk>s funeral. Because Dean Martin, whatever his public friendship with Sammy had appeared to be, had never truly seen a black man as an equal.
The accusation landed like a stone into still water and the rings spread outward immediately. People who had always quietly wondered about the internal dynamics of the rat pack now had a framework to apply. People who had seen what they wanted to see in Dean’s reserve now had a name for it. People who had loved Sammy and were devastated and needed somewhere to put that devastation found a target.
Within a week, the story had traveled far enough that reporters were calling Dean’s people for comment. Dean did not comment. He did not issue a statement. He did not call Altavis. He did not reach out through Frank or anyone else to offer an explanation or a defense. He simply went quiet in the way that Dean went quiet, which was so completely and so finally that it was easy to mistake for indifference.
It was not indifference. Those who were closest to Dean in the months after Samm<unk>s death described a man who was barely present. He had lost Sammy. He had now lost Alabaste, too. Or at least lost the possibility of whatever comfort their shared grief might have provided. and he had lost something harder to name.
The clean simplicity of a friendship that had asked nothing of him except to be himself. Now the friendship was a public controversy. Now it was evidence in a case he hadn’t known was being built. He didn’t know how to respond to that. Dean Martin had always operated on the principle that his actions were their own argument.
He had been Samm<unk>s friend for 30 years. He had shown up for 30 years. He had loved the man for 30 years in the particular wordless way. That was the only way he knew. The idea that he needed to now explain all of that, defend all of that, perform a grief that he was already drowning in was something he could not bring himself to do. So he didn’t. He withdrew.
He watched old westerns. He had dinner alone at his regular table at Lafamiglia and stared at the middle distance and said nothing to anyone. and the silence, as silences do when they persist long enough, began to be interpreted as confirmation. A year passed, then two, then three. Frank tried once to bring them together, suggesting that Dean call Alto that a conversation might clear the air.
Dean listened to Frank’s suggestion politely and then changed the subject. Alto, for her own part, was dealing with problems that dwarfed the question of Dean Martin’s silence. Sammy’s estate was in catastrophic financial disorder. Debt she hadn’t known existed surfaced one after another like rocks revealed by a retreating tide.
She was fighting legal battles on multiple fronts. She was struggling in ways that were both practical and profound. The way a woman struggles when the person who was the organizing principal of her entire life is simply gone. It was in the middle of all of that in 1995 on a Tuesday morning that the letter arrived. Dean had written it by hand, which was deliberate.
It was seven pages long, which was extraordinary for a man who had spent a lifetime communicating in sentences. He had written it and rewritten it, according to people who knew him then, over the course of several weeks. He had thrown out more drafts than he kept. What survived was not the version of Dean that the public knew. It was not cool.
It was not effortless. It was a man of 78 years at the very end of his strength sitting down with a piece of paper and a pen and deciding that the one thing he still owed his best friend was to tell his best friend’s wife the truth. He told her what Sammy had meant to him. Not in the general terms of public tribute, but specifically and privately with the accumulated detail of 30 years of friendship.
He told her about a night in 1962 when Sammy had called him at 2:00 in the morning from a hotel in Atlanta. shaken by something that had happened that day, something he couldn’t say on the phone and couldn’t say to Frank because Frank would have made it into a confrontation. And Dean had listened for 2 hours without saying much and at the end had simply said, “Come to Vegas.
Come tomorrow.” And Sammy had come and they had played golf and not talked about it at all. And somehow that had been exactly right. He told her things like that, quiet things, specific things, the kind of things that could not have been invented by a man who had merely tolerated Sammy Davis Jr. from a comfortable distance of polite professional courtesy.
And then he told her about the funeral. He told her that he had seen her across the crowd outside the chapel. He told her that he had started toward her and then stopped because he had looked at her face at the specific quality of devastation on it and understood that if he reached her and she took his hands and looked at him directly, he was going to come apart in a way he had never come apart in public in his entire life.
He told her that he had made a calculation in that moment that he was not proud of. He had chosen his own composure over her need. He had told himself that there were 50 other people who could hold her hands and say the right things, that she didn’t need his particular grief added to hers, that he would reach out properly when he had collected himself.
And then he hadn’t, and then the weeks had passed, and the accusation had hardened into fact, and the space between them had become so wide, he hadn’t known how to cross it. He told her he was sorry, not the reflexive sorry of a man trying to end a dispute, the other kind, the kind that cost something. He told her that Sammy had talked about her constantly in the last years.
That when you asked Sammy how he was doing genuinely, privately, the answer was almost always some version of Altivise, that she had been the ground under his feet in a life that had never had much solid ground. Dean told her that Sammy had said once, sitting in Dean’s living room on a Sunday afternoon with the television on and neither of them watching it, that the thing he was most proud of in his entire life was not the performances, not the awards, not the movies, or the records or the standing ovations.
It was that he had managed to become someone that a woman like Alavase had chosen to love. Dean wrote that he had thought about that moment every day since Sammy died. He told her that he was not well, that the emphyma had progressed to a point where he understood he did not have much time.
He told her that he had things he could not leave unsaid and that she was at the top of that list. He asked her not to respond if she didn’t want to. He said he understood if she couldn’t forgive him and that he wasn’t writing to ask for forgiveness. He was writing because Sammy had deserved better than Dean’s silence and Altavisa deserved better and the only thing left in his power to give them was the truth.
He signed it simply, “Dean.” All the essay sat on the floor of her hallway and read it twice. Then she sat there for a long time without moving while the morning light shifted around her and the letter rested in her lap. She had spent 5 years building a case against Dean Martin’s coldness, and it had been a useful case.
The way that anger is always useful when it gives you something to feel besides the bottomless particular sorrow of the thing you’re actually feeling. The letter did not dismantle the anger. It did something more unsettling. It explained it. It showed her a man who was not cold, but who was so constitutionally incapable of public vulnerability that he had allowed a silence to become a wound rather than expose himself in the one moment when exposure was what the situation required.
It showed her a man who had loved her husband and failed to show it in the right way at the right time and had spent 5 years unable to bridge that failure. She recognized it. She had known Dean Martin for decades. She had watched him be exactly this way, about exactly this kind of thing, for as long as she had known him.
The recognition did not erase the hurt, but it changed its shape. She wrote back. Her reply was shorter than his letter, just two pages, but it said the things that needed saying. She told him she had been wrong to say what she said publicly. She told him she had known somewhere underneath the grief and the fury that she was wrong and that she had been too exhausted and too broken to care about being wrong at the time.
She told him that she missed Sammy in a way that had no bottom to it and that the missing got stranger and not easier as the years passed. She told him that the detail about Sammy saying she was his greatest pride had destroyed her completely and that she would carry it for the rest of her life.
She told him she was glad he had written. Dean Martin died on Christmas Day 1995, 7 months after the letter. He died at home quietly. In the manner of a man who had made his peace with the things that required it, ought Davis held his letter for the rest of her life. She showed it to people rarely and carefully, understanding that it was the kind of document that could easily be misread, that its meaning was inseparable from the 30 years that preceded it, and the particular silences that had made it necessary. What it proved in the end was
not that D. Martin was a perfect friend or a perfect man. It proved something more specific and more human. had proved that he had known in the last year of his life what he owed, and that knowing it, he had done the harder thing, which was to say it plainly, without the protection of cool, without the armor of distance, with nothing between him and the truth, but seven handwritten pages, and the diminishing time he had left to fill them. Sammy Davis Jr.
had once said that Dean Martin was the only man he knew who was exactly the same person in private as he was in public. He had meant it as a compliment. He had meant that Dean’s ease was genuine, that his warmth was real, that the man you got in a quiet room was the same man who walked out on stage every night.
The letter to Altivise proved something else that Sammy had known, and that the rest of the world had consistently missed. Behind the ease and the warmth and the unshakable cool, there was a man capable of extraordinary tenderness. He just needed, as some men do, to find the right moment to show it. He found it, and in finding it, he honored his friend in the most Dean Martin way possible.
Not on a stage, not in front of a crowd, in a plain white envelope with his name written on the front, delivered quietly to the woman his best friend had loved most. That was how Dean Martin said goodbye and it was
