Entertainment

For Dad, ‘Amore’ and more

By Beverly Hills standards, Deana Martin had a perfectly normal childhood. She sang Christmas carols with Rosemary Clooney, Judy Garland attended her school play and “Uncle Frank” Sinatra gave her her first singing lesson. But then, when you’re Dean Martin’s little girl, that’s normal.

She’ll be singing “That’s Amore” and more of her dad’s hit songs — and that of his fellow Rat Packers Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. — in “Deana Sings Dino,” running tonight through Saturday at Feinstein’s.

Don’t be surprised if you hear echoes of him — even before she sings, à la Natalie and Nat King Cole-style, a duet with a recording of her late father singing “True Love.”

“I have a certain amount of his style,” says the 63-year-old. “I have a lot of his mannerisms. I don’t imitate him, but I guess it’s just in the blood.

“I asked my father if I should take singing lessons,” she continues. “He said, ‘No, not unless you want to sound like everybody else in the choir.’ ”

Instead, she turned to Sinatra.

“He told me it was all about the breath,” she says. “He said, ‘I can tell even before a note comes out if I’m going to be on pitch or not.’

“I asked him, ‘Does my dad do that?’ and he said, ‘No, your father has no idea what he’s doing. He just does it.’ ”

What Martin also did was create a distinctive public persona: that of the suave, swinging, womanizing drunk.

It was all an act, she says, just like Jack Benny’s infamously feigned stinginess.

“He was a good actor, and that was his gimmick, along with the cigarettes,” she says. “Well, the cigarettes were real, I’m sorry to say.”

Unlike his Brat Pack “pallies,” Martin was a homebody, his daughter says. When he and her mother divorced, Martin won custody of Deana and her siblings.

“He was home every night for dinner,” she reports. “He’d like to go to sleep early every night and, if he wasn’t making a movie, he’d get up and play golf.”

Although she had a hit single, “Girl of the Month Club,” when she was a teenager, Martin originally wanted to be an actress. She performed onstage and in several movies, and when she did sing, it was mostly country, folk and rock.

She didn’t reconnect with her dad’s music until she attended “Dean Martin Day” at his hometown of Steubenville, Ohio. Soon after, she wrote a best-selling memoir, “Memories Are Made of This,” titled after her father’s first hit song.

That memoir is being made into a movie, to be directed by Joe Mantegna, who played Martin in the HBO movie “The Rat Pack.”

Jennifer Love Hewitt will play Deana, a bit of casting Martin accidentally arranged herself.

“I was performing at Feinstein’s last year, talking about the movie, and told the audience that I’d love for Jennifer Love Hewitt to play me,” she says. “All of a sudden I heard, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’ It was Jennifer. I had no idea she was there.”

It’ll be somewhat harder to find an actor to play her iconic father. She’d like Johnny Depp — “He’s got the hairline,” she laughs — although George Clooney and Harry Connick Jr. have also been suggested.

“It has to be the perfect person who has all the qualities that my dad had,” she says. “And we haven’t found that yet. But I’m sure someone’s out there!”