The Bottle Dean Martin Was Holding Was Fake — What He Said Changed Dean Martin’s Life D
The summer of 1958 arrived in Tucson the way it always did, without asking permission. Tommy Reese was 22 years old and had been on set for 23 days. His job was simple enough. Every morning before the crew arrived, before the cameras came out of their cases, before Howard Hawks had his first cup of coffee, Tommy filled the bottles.
He had a system. First, he rinsed each one with water, then he brewed the tea, dark, almost black, stronger than anyone would actually drink. Then he added the caramel coloring, a few drops at a time, holding the bottle up to the single window in the prop depot to check the color against the reference.
Too light and it photographed wrong. Too dark and it looked like molasses. The reference was a real bottle of Jack Daniel’s. It sat on the corner of the shelf, untouched. Tommy looked at it every morning. He never picked it up. By the time he was done, the fake bottles looked exactly right. That was the job. Make something look like what it isn’t, and do it well enough that nobody notices.
He had been doing it for 23 days and nobody had noticed. That meant he was doing it correctly. The depot was a metal roof building at the back edge of the location. In June, even before the sun was fully up, the air inside was already warm and close, carrying the smell of tea and caramel and something older underneath.
The dry smell of props that had been used in other pictures on other sets, carrying traces of other mornings that nobody remembered anymore. Tommy worked alone in that smell every day. He didn’t mind it. The morning of the fourth week was a Tuesday. He came in at 5:30, same as every other day. He set his things down, turned on the work light, and reached for the first bottle.
That’s when he saw that someone had left the depot door open, and that someone was standing inside. Dean Martin was at the far end of the shelf, his back to the door, holding one of the prop bottles in both hands. He wasn’t drinking from it. He wasn’t doing anything with it. He was just holding it, looking out the small window at whatever there was to see at 5:40 in the morning in the Arizona desert. Tommy stopped moving.
Martin didn’t turn around. He may not have heard him come in, or he may have heard and decided it didn’t matter. Either way, he stood there for another 30 seconds. Then he set the bottle down very carefully, as if the weight of it were significant, and walked out without saying a word.
Tommy stood in the empty depot for a moment, then he finished filling the bottles. Rio Bravo had been shooting for 3 weeks when the cracks started showing up. Not in the picture, in the mornings. Martin’s character, Dude, was a drunk. Not the romantic kind of drunk that movies usually allowed. The kind that can’t quite hold himself together, that shows up to things unshaved and slightly off-center, that needs to be carried by the people around him before he can find his own footing again. Hawks had cast Martin on purpose. Everybody on set knew what the purpose was, and nobody said it out loud. The problem was that Martin knew it, too. By the fourth week, he was getting through scenes fine until the pressure came, and then something would slip. A line he’d rehearsed a hundred times in his trailer would come out sideways. His timing, usually as natural as breathing, would stutter. Hawks called five takes on a single scene one morning, then six, then he stopped calling takes and just looked
at Martin. That silence was worse than anything he could have said. Tommy watched all of this from behind the prop table. He wasn’t supposed to be watching. He was supposed to be managing the bottles. John Wayne was in that scene, too, but not in a way that made you look at him. He was there the way a load-bearing wall is there.
Necessary, present, not calling attention to itself. He sat in his position and waited through each take without any visible response to what was happening around him. When Hawks called cut, Wayne didn’t look at Martin. He didn’t look away from him either. He just waited. Tommy noticed that. He wasn’t sure what to do with it.
Before we go on, if you’ve never subscribed to this channel, we’re still under 1,000 subscribers and just getting started. A subscribe from your phone takes 5 seconds and it’s the only way the next story finds you. After the sixth take, Hawks said, “Take five.” in the voice he used when he meant something longer than 5 minutes.
Martin stood up and walked off set. Wayne stood up, too, but he didn’t go in the same direction. He went toward the back of the location, toward the depot. Tommy was restocking the prop table when he heard the door. He assumed it was one of the other assistants. Then he heard the footsteps, that particular unhurried weight, and he looked up.
Wayne walked past the prop table without stopping and went to the back corner of the depot. He stood there for a moment looking at the shelf, at the bottles. Then Martin came in. Tommy had not expected that. He turned back to his table and made himself busy with something that didn’t require him to look up.
The two men didn’t say much, or if they did, they said it quietly enough that the words didn’t reach the other end of the depot. What Tommy could hear was tone, not language. Wayne’s voice flat and slow, the way it always was. Martin’s voice starting at a different pitch and gradually coming down to meet it.
Then quiet. Martin left first. A few minutes later, Wayne walked back past the prop table. He stopped. He picked up one of the filled bottles, turned it in his hands, looked at the color through the glass the way Tommy looked at it every morning. Then he set it back down. “Son,” he said, “tomorrow morning, the real bottle. Put it next to the others.
” Tommy looked at him. “The one on the shelf,” Wayne said, “just leave it there.” Then he walked out. Tommy sat with that for a long time after the set went quiet. What Wayne had asked wasn’t complicated. Put the real bottle on the prop table alongside the fake ones. Don’t explain it. Don’t announce it.
But Tommy knew what it meant in practice. If the wrong person noticed, he’d have to account for it. Every prop on a studio set was documented, listed, approved. A real bottle of whiskey sitting out on a working set wasn’t something you explained away easily. He thought about it until the depot was dark and the location was empty and the Arizona night had cooled everything down to something bearable.
Then he stayed late and he prepared for the next morning. The following day the prop table had two bottles sitting side by side. One was filled with cold tea and four drops of caramel coloring. One was not. The labels were identical. From 10 ft away, from 30 ft away, through a camera lens, there was no difference between them.
The only way you would know was if you picked one up. Martin picked up the right one. Tommy didn’t know if that was luck or something else. The first take of the morning was clean. Hawks didn’t say anything specific. He just called the next set up. On a Howard Hawks set, that was what good looked like.
Wayne was already in position. He didn’t look at the prop table. He didn’t look at Tommy. He sat in his chair and drank his coffee from the same chipped cup he’d been using for 3 weeks. Tommy put the second bottle back on the shelf at the end of the day and locked the depot. The next morning he put it out again.
And the morning after that, nobody ever said anything about it. Not Hawks, not anyone from the studio. Tommy did not know whether Wayne had said something to someone or whether he’d simply calculated that nobody would look closely enough to notice. He never asked. Rio Bravo finished its Tucson location work in September.
The crew packed out the way film crews always do, fast, thorough, leaving no trace that they’d ever been there except for the marks on the floor where the camera had been. Tommy loaded the prop bottles into their crates and carried them to the truck. He packed the fake ones first. Then he wrapped the real bottle in brown paper and set it carefully in the corner of the crate separate from the others.
He didn’t know why he did that. It just seemed like the right way to handle it. Dean Martin’s career in the years after Rio Bravo moved in a direction that surprised people who thought they already knew what he was. The early 60s, the run of pictures, the particular ease that started showing up on screen.
An ease that looked effortless because something in him had settled into its proper position and stayed there. He never talked about the Tucson shoot in any specific way. In 1983, an interviewer asked him what he considered the turning point in his career. Martin thought about it for a moment and said, “Rio Bravo showed me what I was working with.
” The interviewer understood this to mean the film’s quality. Martin didn’t correct him. Wayne never mentioned Tommy or the depot or the bottle in any interview that has since been found. He had done a great many things on a great many sets and he did not generally discuss the small ones. There is no record of this anywhere.
No production notes, no memos, no letters, just a prop assistant who remembered it 30 years later and couldn’t entirely explain why it had stayed with him so clearly when so many other things had not. Tommy Reese retired from the industry in 1991. He had run prop departments on 64 pictures. When younger assistants asked him what the most important part of the job was, he always said the same thing.
“Know the difference between what reads as real and what actually is.” Most of them thought he was talking about the work. One morning in 1989, a student intern picked up a prop bottle from the table and asked if it was real. Tommy took it from him and held it up to the light. “Some of them are,” he said.
“And sometimes the only person on the whole set who knows which is which is the one whose hands it goes through every morning.” He set it back down. “Make sure you’re that person.” The real Jack Daniel’s bottle from that Tucson depot is not in any archive or collection that anyone knows of. It may have been thrown out.
It may have made it into some other crate on some other production. It may be sitting in someone’s basement with no record of where it came from. What stayed was simpler than a bottle. A man noticed what was real and what wasn’t. He said a few sentences about it to a 22-year-old who had no reason to expect them.
He walked out of a room and didn’t look back. And somewhere in the distance between a fake bottle and a real one, a distance of exactly 1 in on a prop table in the Arizona heat, something shifted that didn’t shift back. If you enjoyed spending this time here, I’d be grateful if you’d consider subscribing.
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