–Chas
Rating: 3 / 5

She said he was a good man but not a good father. His first four chldren were left homeless after he left their mother. All while he lived the high life in Hollywood.

He and his new wife finally took them in after their mother became hopelessly alcholic. The searing pain Betty, Dean’s first wife, suffered is palpable throughout this tale.

Then eventually he left his second wife and all seven children for a third wife. For a while he didn’t want anything to do with his children — until the third wife and her child (from a previous marriage) left him. Deana was cut out of a family because his second wife, Jeanne, who had taken his previous children in when Deana was nine, virtually ceased communications with the oldest four kids after Dean left but continued to nourish relationships with her own three grown children from Dean.

Still, Deana and siblings had money (from him) to live the way they wanted but no relationship. Or just enough relationship to satisfy his needs. He acted like family was the most important thing until he wanted instant gratification from outside the marriage.

It is a most bizarre way to live — to grow up with all the material riches one can imagine and bereft of any source of a constant unconditional love at the same time. Deana had plenty of friends around. Naturally all that money brought people with it and those people diverted Deana’s attention from the emptiness and lack of love her father and sometimes mother provided. Amazing that someone could live that way and not know how warped it is; how much is missing.

Jeanne, Dean’s second wife, with all her beauty was cheated on as well; lived an empty existence inside that relationship with Dean Martin. All that beauty she was gifted with and she ended up using it to destroy Dean’s family. And then got what she gave when other women helped destroy her family with him. The devastation will be felt for generations of families Dean Martin left behind.

And his buddy, Jerry Lewis supported Dean’s self and family destruction. See Lewis’s book “Dean and Me: A Love Story”. They say they love women. Come on. What they love is instant self gratification at the expense of destroying their wives and children’s lives. That’s amore, America.
Rating: 4 / 5