He Wrote His Own Story –
Oct. 20, 2019 – “Recordings, movies, radio, television: He would cast his presence over them all, a mob-culture Renaissance man,” he wrote of Martin. “And he would come to know, as few ever would, how dirty the business of dreams could be.” For Mr. Tosches, Martin was a celebrity who beat the unrelenting fame machine, the one that often ground stars up and consigned them to early deaths. (Martin himself died in 1995 at 78.)
“I would describe Dean as a noble character in an ignoble racket in an ignoble age,” Mr. Tosches told The New York Times in 1992 … “Life is a racket,” he added. “Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything’s a racket.”
Mr. Tosches was born on Oct. 23, 1949, in Newark, to Nick and Muriel Ann (Wynn) Tosches.
“The things I wanted to be when I was a kid were an archaeologist, because of dinosaur bones; a garbage man, because they got to ride on the side of the trucks; and a writer,” he told The Times. “If I had become a garbage man, I could have retired by now.”
Mr. Tosches’ father owned a bar, and working there as a boy, as he often said later, provided him with the type of street-smart education that mattered. College was never a consideration; instead he held what he described to The Boston Globe in 2000 as “a bunch of strange jobs, both legitimate and illegitimate.”
