At the age of nineteen, I thought I might want to be a writer. So, I bought a portable typewriter and an instruction book and learned to type. It took about a week to accomplish that, but I had no idea how to go about learning to write. And so I did something I thought at the time was pathetic, silly and hopeless, and it certainly was lonely: I started typing out pages of writers I admired, Steinbeck and Dos Passos chief among them. Pages and pages of it, all the while thinking this was pretty dumb, merely hero-worshipful. Shameful, even.

Now when on occasion I do seminars with writers' classes in universities, I urge the young people to do exactly that. Copy your models slavishly, as painters in earlier times were taught to copy the works of their teachers, thereby absorbing their brush techniques, color usage, and all the rest. If you type out the work of your heroes, you absorb into your very blood their rhythms, their sentence structures, their punctuation styles, their sonorities, their diction.

It is the same with singing. Indeed, I suspect all art begins with imitation. Even speech itself begins with imitation. Some of these thoughts passed through my mind recently when I was re-examining the career and work of Bobby Darin.

In early 1960 I spent several days with Darin in St. Louis, hanging with him all day, having lunch and dinner with him, attending his rehearsals. He was cocky, a very brash young man—he was then twenty-four.

Bobby was born Walden Robert Cassotto in the Bronx, on May 14, 1936, and, as you can tell from the name, he is in that extraordinary group of American Italian singers who have contributed more to American music than anyone seems to have noticed, a group that includes Frank Sinatra, Russ Columbo and Perry Como.

Bobby got his name off the neon sign of a Chinese restaurant. The first three letters of the word "mandarin" were burned out. Whether or not it was to escape an Italian identity, we may never know. But there was something else he may have been trying to escape.

Bobby had a painful childhood. When he was a boy he had rheumatic fever, which left him with damage to the heart. He knew when he was eight that his life expectancy was short: he heard a doctor discussing it with a member of his family. He had, according to Roger Kellaway, a ferocious desire to live not one or two but all of his dreams in a lifetime he expected to be quite short, and he just about pulled it off. He wanted to be a singer, an actor, a guitarist, a songwriter, and he became all of them with varying degrees of success.

He attended Hunter College in New York for a time, playing drums in a school group and studying drama, but soon signed with Decca Records in 1956, when he was twenty, and then with Atco in 1957. The following year, when he was twenty-two, he had his first big hit with a song of his own, a humorous rock 'n' roll novelty called "Splish Splash." Thus his career was moving much faster than that of Sinatra before him. He had several more rock hits before recording "Mack the Knife" in 1959. The recording was a huge hit, followed by another that year: "Beyond the Sea." Departing from his rock 'n' roll image, Darin did both tunes at a medium tempo in a thumb-snapping Sinatra style.

This, remember, was not long before the arrival of the Beatles, the proliferation of rock groups, and the ingenious and only-too-successful campaign of the record industry publicists to define the most meretricious trash as an art form. What raised the evebrows of older folk, including me (I was a senescent thirty-two years old) was that a denizen of rock should actually turn out to have some talent. Darin wasn't the first to attempt the transition. Tommy Sands actually sang rather well. And in later years performers from the rock and pop and country worlds would essay the "standards," among them Carly Simon and Willie Nelson. But Darin was good at the "good" material, the quality songs. Very good. No doubt the professionals thought Darin was the man who could lead the kids back to music. That was always their hype: that the rock 'n' roll fans would develop a taste for the better things, which is like arguing that the young exposed only to Spiderman would through these readings progress to Shakespeare and Kipling. If we have learned anything in the culture of the last forth or so years it is that exposure to junk leads to a permanent taste for junk, and young fans of the young rock groups were still following them around at the end of the century, when both tans and performers had grown grizzled.

Darin accepted this fact; "I contend that it takes the kids to put you on top," he told me, "and the same kids as grownups to keep you there."

Yet Bobby was different.

"I have friends in this business from Frankie Avalon and Fabian to Sammy Davis.Jr.," Bobby said to me in St. Louis. "I can get something from any of them. You can learn from anybody, even if it's only what not to do. Fabian and all of them knew from the start that I wanted to progress beyond the rock 'n' roll phase. I've been preparing for this all my life."

This was shortly after a review in The New York Times that said, "On records, the most striking instance of the renaissance of showmanship can be found in the work of Bobby Darin, not only because he is a young singer with all the assurance, projection, and casual craftiness of an old pro, but—what is most remarkable— because he gained his first popularity in the rock 'n' roll scramble."

Bobby was in love with show business. He told me, "It's not the singing. It's being a performer and being accepted."

I did not know then about his vanished father and the sordid past of his familial relationships. That comment makes much sense in the light of these facts.

Bobby told me that his father died of pneumonia shortly before his birth in 1936, and his mother struggled to raise him. "We were poor, on-relief type Bronx people," he said. "Besides my mom, who's dead now, there was my sister. She married a wonderful guy who was good to me. Now that I can help out, I do."

When he was in his early thirties, the story unraveled. He had always believed his mother was Polly Cassotto, who had been a show-girl known as Paula Walden, and that his father was her husband, a man named Saverio Cassotto, nicknamed "Big Sam Curley," reputed to be a low-level associate of Mafia leader Frank Costello. Cassotto died in prison, and the family went on relief. Nina, the girl he thought was his sister, married a truck driver and refrigerator repairman named Charlie Maffia, who held down two jobs to help the family.

Bobby learned that Nina was his mother and Polly Cassotto, whom he thought was his mother, was actually his grandmother. The revelation was shattering to him, according to associates such as the late Bobby Scott, who at one time was his music director. "My whole life has been a lie," Bobby said when he learned the truth. It certainly didn't help establish a central sense of identity.

I caught up with him at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis, where he had just broken the house record set by Martin and Lewis. Bobby's ambition was blinding, and he made no gee-whiz ah-shucks attempt to hide it. "I want to be in the Number One slot," he said, ''I guess the polls are of primary importance to me. Showing up in the Down Beat poll last December was the greatest thing that's happened to me." And he was winning a lot of awards at the time. "I want the respect of the trade. You must have that. If you can create excitement in both the trade and the public, you've got something. These things are the emotional compensation for the work I'm doing. Don't let guts who poo-poo the polls kid you. Anybody that's alive cares whether he's accepted."

His style at that point entailed a number of unreconciled elements: a lot of Sinatra, a little Tony Bennett, a little Bing Crosby, and the influence of the rock 'n' roll world from which he was emerging. He did not have Sinatra's polish: Sinatra was then forty-two, Darin twenty-four. Sinatra had been a professional singer for twenty-one years, Darin had been singing for four. But what struck me during those days was his willingness to learn, and the rapidity with which he could do it. He asked me— believe it or not—what I thought of his show, and being the ever-tactful that I am, I told him. I said that it lacked control. I said that a performer should hold something of himself in reserve, not throw it all at the audience from the very moment of coming on stage. I said he should give himself room and time to build.

To my amazement, the next night he did exactly that. He began in a very subdued manner, and then kept building to a strong peak at the end. "You see?" he said, with a grin, afterwards. "I tried it. You know, I've learned something."

Amazing. And he was wonderful to watch. He had about him something of the best French chansonniers, like Yves Montand and Henri Salvador. I told him that, too, and he was very pleased. He said he wanted to be known as the singer who moved like a dancer, and he had already achieved it: a loose throwaway kind of agility, with little shuffles and side-steps, all of it directly out of vaudeville. He was very, very graceful.

Bobby was very clear about his stylistic influences. "There are only three singers who move me emotionally: Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, and Ray Charles. If I want to be lullabied, I listen to Peggy Lee, I don't care what the tempo is. That's the boss lady. If I want to think about lost love—or any kind of love, for that matter—I listen to Frank. If I want to be thrown into a primitive, wild kind of emotional involvement, I listen to Ray Charles. I can't think of anything else I want satisfied. These three people are the Rock of Gibraltar. Make that four singers I like. I'm a Crosby fan. 'I'm an Old Cowhand'? I was listening to that at five. And Sammy Davis has taught me a lot, in terms of how to generate excitement.

"It is Sinatra as a person more than Sinatra as a singer that has influenced me. His outlook on the business and his attitude to performance are the important things. My approach to singing is not the same. Sinatra has a clipped speech. I'm a slurrer. But let's face it, he's the boss. Another thing I admire is the fact that he's done all the great tunes. But I have a theory that his phrasing is accidental."

And I have a theory that Darin was wrong.

"I've been accused of comparing myself to Sinatra, in terms ot career climbing. Certain people have said I was out to beat him out. First, I never said this, the press said it. Second, to me, Frank Sinatra is the greatest living lyric interpreter, and that ends the admiration. My idol is the step beyond the great image of today. In other words, it's an indefinite goal.

"He's supposedly mad at me. I've never met the man, but he's supposedly mad at me. He came up with what I think is one of the greatest single lines of all time. After all the recent things in the press, somebody asked him, 'What do you think of Bobby Darin?' And Sinatra said,"I sing in saloons. Bobby Darin does my prom dates.' I was so gassed by the line when I saw it. All I can say is that I'm only too happy to play his prom dates."

And there was a pause. "Until graduation."

It was impossible not to like him.

"Movies is where I want to go," Bobby told me, "no question of that But I want the right roles. We've looked at twenty or twenty-five scripts, and I've turned them all down, I don't want to do an exploitation picture. I want to do drama, light comedy, the whole range. And some day I want an Academy Award. The motion picture business is still the most glamorous, glorious, stimulating, exciting end of the business . Sammy Davis told me that before he did Anna Lucasta, he could walk down the street and maybe two people would want his autograph. Now he is constantly sought after. That's why I want the picture business."

Bobby broke into film acting in 1961 with a comedy called Come September, directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida. Also in the cast was Sandra Dee, whose real name is Alexandra Zuck (and you'd change it too if it were yours). Darin married her that same year; and that was the same year that I spent those several days with him in St. Louis.

Bobby said he wanted not only to write songs, but to compose classical music, "music of a serious nature," he said affecting a haughty English accent to show he was kidding. But he wasn't kidding.

If you listen to his recordings of standards from the time of "Mack the Knife" in 1958 through about 1961, you can hear the conscious search for self. In "I Found a New Baby," recorded in February, I960, you hear what he meant when he said he was a slurrer: it comes out not "baby" but "bavy." And his oo's are too round. This very conscious kind of enunciation is similar to some of the mannerisms of Sinatra.

The arrangements on some of his hits, including "Mack the Knife" and "Beyond the Sea" are by Richard Wess, and they're pretty "limp," as I heard one musician describe them. And there are some peculiar choices of material. Some songs are gender-specific: they work only for a man or for a woman. He recorded "Black Coffee," which is a very much a woman's song. He does it remarkably like Peggy Lee, from whose recording he unquestionably learned it. He even attempts, in French, a Piaf tune, "Milord," and to do it he affects her tough whorehouse mannerisms. Again, the performance is a conspicuous imitation. He was floundering in that period. He really doesn't know who he is. His imitations of his sources are obvious.

But then, in August of 1960, he recorded a duet with Johnny Mercer, a song called 'Two of a Kind," which they co-wrote. It is charming, and some of Darin's affectations seem to drop away.

A few months later, on March 22, 1961, his sense of identity seemed stronger.

Darin had been recording for Atco, and when he moved to Capitol, the company assigned Billy May to him for a time. The charts are (as one might expect) marvelous, even on a so-so tune Darin wrote, "As Long As I'm Singing." But on "Oh Look At Me Now," "A Nightingale Song" and "The Party's Over," you hear what I have come to perceive as the real Bobby Darin. It's sort of Sinatra, to be sure (and which among us can plead not-guilty to that?), but it's his own now. It's internalized, it's unconscious. He sings beautifully in tune, the affectations are gone, and I am forced to the speculation that the encounter with my friend John H. Mercer had a lasting beneficial effect.

Darin was at his best with good arrangers and tunes, including "The Shadow of Your Smile" (great tune, dumb lyric, which Johnny Mercer hated; he said it sounded like it was about a girl with a mustache) and "Don't Rain On My Parade," both with charts by Shorty Rogers, recorded in 1966. Bobby's last album for Capitol was Venice Blue. The title song was mine, more precisely one of the adaptations of Charles Aznavour songs that I wrote for Charles' one-man Broadway show of that period. I don't care for the song, I don't like my lyric for it, and I didn't like Darin's performance, which I barely remember; I don't even have the album.

After that, Darin lost his way again. He embarked on a period of folk and country songs, some of which are on the fourth of the Rhino CDs. His marriage with Sandra Dee ended. He grew a mustache. He recorded songs by Hank Williams and Bob Dylan. If I want to hear Hank Williams material, I'll listen to Hank Williams doing it, not some boy from the Bronx. His admirers see this expansion into yet another area as proof of his versatility; I see it as redolent of his need for popularity and uncertainty about who he was.

Bobby once told his manager, "Steve, when I get up in the morning, you know what I see? I see a short, ugly, double-chinned, paunchy, balding guy. But when I got out that door I'm Clark Gable. Nobody knows how I feel."

It was all an act, then.

Bobby never got to write his "serious" music. For that matter, he never got to be forty. He died on December 20,1973. He was thirty-seven.

For all his pretense of assurance, it seems to me that Bobby Darin never really knew how good he was.

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