This interview, written by Fred Robbins, appeared in the June 1968 issue of
Photoplay Magazine.
Fred: A year ago Bobby, you told me you wouldn't go back to nightclubs.
What made you change your mind?
Bobby: Well, you wake up one morning and discover you shouldn't have been
sleeping all that time. You have to do what your heart tells you. My heart told me to quit, so I quit.
My heart told me to wake up, so I woke up. Now I'm doing movies, TV, records and clubs. I've learned
that everyday is a new day, a whole new attack to meet head on. I feel that the change that has been
occurring in me over the past two or three years is now coming to fruition. I can now tell you what I
really want to do and how to go about doing it.
Fred: What do you want to do?
Bobby: I've decided I want to do the kind of picture that lets the personality
come through, as opposed to the actor. I've gotten some nice acting assignments, believe me, but what I
don't have is a type. I want the kind of role that when people leave the theater they say, "That's Bobby
Darin" and the next time they go they'll see the same kind of individual. After all, I'm thirty going
on thirty-one.
Fred: What about musically?
Bobby: I'd like to fuse acting and music. Make it one.
Fred: What do you think of the way music has gone since 1958 and your song
"Splish Splash?"
Bobby: I don't think it's changed that much in terms of mass appeal. There
are some awfully potent lyrics being heard today against a good danceable beat. That's what's going to
be for a long time to come. The bad material will always be bad; the good will stick around.
Fred: Isn't it amazing that a seventy-year-old man, Charlie Chaplin, wrote
a song in his newest film The Countess from Hong Kong?
Bobby: No, it's not amazing. Age has nothing to do with genius. He didn't
write that song to become popular. He wrote it to please himself and his taste is so marvelously consistent
it could only be popular.
Fred: What's the biggest change that's come over you?
Bobby: I don't look now to the ways in which I can please an audience. I look
to please me and out of my pleasure, maybe the audience can get some pleasure, too.
Fred: Are you mellowing?
Bobby: I don't know what that means. I'm calmer, I've got a lot of pressures off
my head. I'm a free uncaged animal and -- look out!
Fred: What did that?
Bobby: Just life -- on a day to day basis. Marriage, a child, a divorce. All
those things. It makes great men of some; mediocre or poor men of others. I don't know which category I
fall into as yet.
Fred: What brought you through your breakup with Sandra Dee?
Bobby: The truth. That's really what got me through it. My conception of the
truth. My needs in terms of owning up to what I am and what it is I must do. It's a one-time shot, this life,
and you don't get any second chances -- so I would like to meet it at those terms, so that at the point of
epitaph a statement will have been made. And no matter how you judge the statement, it is a lot better than
making no statement at all.
Fred: Have you had any trouble adjusting to being a bachelor again?
Bobby: Wow, no! My eyes are hurting a bit but other than that, no trouble at
all -- none at all.
